They're Launching A New COINTELPRO For The 21st Century
The Trump administration has announced a renewed crusade against “far-left terrorism,” which sounds okay if you don’t know that the word “terrorism” only ever means “behavior which goes against the agendas of the western empire.”
The United States has for example placed sanctions on UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese for calling attention to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, justifying the move by claiming the human rights expert has “expressed support for terrorism”. In the UK, police have been arresting people on terrorism charges just for holding signs which say “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.
The designation has nothing to do with actual acts of terrorism as the average westerner conceives of that notion. In 2024 the US government removed its $10 million bounty on former Al Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (AKA Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) because he facilitated Washington’s regime change agendas in Syria, where he is now the sitting president. You can literally be a leader in the most notorious terrorist network on earth and still see that designation disappear into thin air as soon as you start assisting the geostrategic ambitions of the empire.
The White House announced on Thursday that it has launched “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism,” under which “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that according to leaked documents from Marco Rubio’s State Department, groups to be targeted under the new marching orders will include “violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors,” as well as “violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks” and “militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements.”
The move is premised on a White House memo known as NSPM-7, a directive that critics have been warning about for months due to its dangerously authoritarian implications and lack of congressional approval. In the words of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, NSPM-7 “directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”
This line strongly echoes the language of a 1967 FBI memo describing the goals of the J Edgar Hoover program COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings.”
Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political movement in the United States. The feds never fully stopped running such programs of course — groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter were known to have been targeted by police surveillance and infiltration. But it’s clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J Edgar Hoover.
“Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism — under President Trump’s leadership this FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate and disrupt organizations engaging in political violence and terrorism,” Patel said on Twitter regarding the latest escalation.
So it seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. As Americans become more and more hostile toward US warmongering, more and more fed up with the state of Israel, more and more convinced that their government doesn’t care about them, and more and more discontented with what unbridled capitalism is doing to their bank accounts, their society, and their world, their rulers are responding with the iron fist of tyranny.
And what makes all this especially threatening is that you know whatever measures they roll out while the Republicans are running things will remain in place when the Democrats are in power, because as we have discussed here many times before, it is the Democratic Party’s job to prevent leftward movement in the United States. This will be one of those many, many times the Republicans did something evil and the Democrats just quietly kept it running in the background to protect the interests of the capitalist empire. Because that is their job.
But the fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to. They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children.
They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing.
Keep pushing.
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The level of desperation on the part of empire managers is palpable. Control freakery run amok in the place where they love to boast that “they hate us for our freedom”.
The empire managers lost their grip a long time ago but way back when it was McCarthy and supporters coming unstuck, there was no internet, no cell phones, no social media. Just newspapers and the radio and then TV. But the media did not let us non elites know too much and many really believed what they were told. Communism was a terrible ideology. Akin to Nazism. Zionism was never mentioned. Those in power were looking after us in this country. Now, we, the people, know. We can see what they are doing. We know they are all liars and we do not matter at all to the elite except when they need workers. Now we just have to figure out how to stop them.