Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened representatives from 66 different nations on July 16 for a “ministerial meeting” on the resurgence of “political terrorism.” The White House described the summit as the launch of “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism.” This historic occasion took the form of Rubio, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent taking turns as they said Nazi shit for an hour.
Rubio began his remarks by suggesting that the post-9/11 war on “global jihad” is the counterterrorism strategy of yesterday, in need of serious updating to address the blind spot of “extremist violence from the political left.” For too long, he said, “the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat [has been] treated as a right-wing fever dream—or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy” by the press, academia, and think tanks. Rubio should have included the Department of Justice on the list of deniers: In 2024, the DOJ’s research arm found that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.” Days after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the department scrubbed the study from its website. Then the White House made a series of attacks on left-wing political activity, including unleashing federal agencies on protestors and releasing a counterterrorism strategy which named “Narcoterrorists,” “Islamist terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists” as three major, intertwined terror threats. After this month’s summit, a White House press release promised that the left “will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
The whole exercise intends to advance the repressive norms and legal framework of the War on Terror, further collapsing any lingering notions of separate spheres of foreign and domestic politics. Left-wing extremists are portrayed as seditious, but also as foreign agents of terror whom federal police should encounter like the military has encountered millions of Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghans and Syrians. Rubio’s aim is to build on the recent successes of Donald Trump’s Axis of Evil redux—murdering people in boat strikes, kidnapping a foreign head of state, detaining and deporting pro-Palestine students, executing people in the street via anti-immigrant death squads, and sentencing ICE protestors to die in jail for being “antifa”—by expanding the dragnet even further. There’s space enough in the mesh for the pet projects of each of its agents.
For Miller, that looks like an opportunity to make significant contributions to the field of race science. In his remarks at the summit, he considered why protestors at left-wing demonstrations, motivated by their hatred and jealousy of traditional families, never look normal:
"They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms. Why is that? Why?" said Miller. "Every one of them—through the course of their life and their decisions—has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point at which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred. Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is."
No skull measurements necessary. You can tell if someone should be deported or locked up for life just by looking at them. How else do you expect to defend your civilization “with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives”? At one point, Miller suggested that “one of the hallmarks of left-wing violence” is its “appeal to civil liberties,” which “the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment.” Of course: the sinister tactic of having rights. If you wait to intervene until someone actually does something illegal, according to Miller, “you’ve already lost the battle.”
To get away with this agenda, Miller is wagering that a meaningful share of Americans agree that broad swaths of people living in this country are disposable and worthy of violence. The idea espoused by him, that these protestors are motivated by hatred and jealousy of normal people, gets things completely backward, of course. Risking brutality to stand in solidarity with your immigrant neighbors and people thousands of miles away in Palestine is a bare-minimum repudiation of harm done in your name at the very least, and an act of love at best. The acts of solidarity that repulse and bewilder him are signs that not as many people subscribe to his categories of “us” and “them” as he’d like to think.
Like Rubio and Miller, Bessent spoke in a concerned tone that suggested he wasn't sure anyone in the room actually believed anything he had to say. He said that those who think left-wing terrorism is a “fiction that does not exist” attend the sentencing of his would-be assassin. (A Massachusetts man turned himself in to U.S. Capitol Police in January 2025 after first considering killing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and/or House Speaker Mike Johnson, then settling for Bessent, and then just calling the whole thing off.) Bessent promised to use the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, established after 9/11, to “dismantle the networks that maintain political terrorism, however respectable their fronts may be.”
A week before the summit, the federal government was already doing its best to see past respectable fronts and imagine terrorist financial crimes. Fergie Chambers, communist philanthropist and heir to the Cox family fortune, was detained on July 10 on an international arrest warrant, while on a family vacation in Ibiza. The DOJ has called for the Spanish government to extradite Chambers on charges of riot, conspiracy to riot, and international money laundering in support of Hamas. Though it’s the first time the U.S. has sought the extradition of a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, a legal antecedent exists in the Bush administration successfully shutting down the largest Islamic charity in the U.S., based on the dubious allegation that it financed Hamas. Spanish law prevents extraditions for political reasons, but whether Chambers faces a trial in the U.S. will come down to more than just the facts of the case. Spain is already under threat over Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s criticism of Israel and his refusal to let the U.S. use Spain’s military bases to attack Iran.
Chambers’s profile as a major backer of left-wing causes has grown in recent years. After he learned that Cox Enterprises invested $10 million to fund Cop City—the 85-acre, $90 million police training facility in Georgia—he participated in and financially supported the Stop Cop City protest movement. (Cop City protestors were among the first to be charged with domestic terrorism, back in 2023.) Eventually he cut ties with his family—whom he calls the “Cox Klux Klan”—and sold his inherited stake in the company for lump sums. His initial payout was $250 million. Chambers is known for being loud and seeking attention, which he considers a political act, but also for donating over $1 million to Palestinians and pro-Palestine projects. His wife, the actress Stella Schnabel, said that includes a $250,000 donation to the Sameer Project to provide food for people in Gaza, and a $100,000 grant to the Zaynab Project, which provides mental health support to orphaned children. The Sameer Project responded to the news of Chambers’s arrest by saying that “Fergie’s donations are the reason we have a bakery that feeds thousands of people per month. His funds also helped provide meals, water and medication for displaced Palestinians. Now he’s being persecuted for this.” After years of violent arrests and immigration roundups targeting pro-Palestine political activity, donations are perhaps the safest form of support. Or, they were. If successful, the prosecution of Chambers would further erode free speech and shrink the realm of acceptable solidarity with Palestine, until it ceases to exist.
On the same day of Chambers's arrest, Fox News published a story on a federal investigation of Neville Roy Singham, another U.S. citizen known for being a Marxist financier. In the summer of 2024, when he was still just a senator, Rubio called on the DOJ to investigate Singham for funding “many far-left and pro-Hamas organizations.” He cited a New York Times article which suggested Singham might be a foreign agent acting on behalf of China, because he lives there and a number of the nonprofits he funds “echo Chinese government talking points.” Singham has donated significant sums to a number of left-wing nonprofits, including his wife Jodie Evans’s Code Pink, a New York City-based nonprofit called the People’s Forum, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the ANSWER Coalition. Other than receiving significant financial support from Singham, one thing all these nonprofits have in common is their opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The current federal investigation of Singham was launched by Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Before resigning from this position to pursue a job as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Clayton oversaw the indictment and arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on narcoterrorism charges. If Clayton is confirmed for the position, it could unblock additional surveillance tools that Democratic politicians have been holding up.
In the War on Terror redux, Miller gets to do race science and Rubio gets to do regime change in Cuba. In a lengthy report published on July 20, the State Department argues that Cuba is responsible for everything from “the George Floyd riots to the rise of antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses” to “instructing activists to target ICE detention centers.” Though unsigned, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” is clearly Rubio’s project, meant to warmonger against a country we are already strangling to death by way of sanctions and a fuel blockade which began in January. Rubio’s almost anachronistic anti-communist fixation on Cuba is what launched his political career; he constantly claimed to be the “son of exiles” who were forced to leave Cuba after Fidel Castro took power. They had actually left a few years before, during the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. Rubio’s report is filled with the same kind of deceitful bluster, as Ruaridh Nicoll pointed out in The Guardian.
Like Rubio’s remarks at the political terrorism summit, the Cuba report focuses almost entirely on the history of left-wing activism in the 20th century. The Prairieland anti-ICE protest is one of the few contemporary examples mentioned in the 100-page long document. Unlike Rubio’s summit speech, the report names names. Some are laughable, like those only included just because they attended Singham’s wedding: Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, or the author of The Vagina Monologues. But some are the targets of a real and growing government blacklist, and may soon be subject to a round of McCarthyist show trials. The House Ways and Means Committee just recently subpoenaed three nonprofits that have received funding from Singham.
Through all the naked lies and propaganda you’d expect from Rubio’s State Department, there’s the glimmer of something real in the report. “In Cuba’s telling,” it reads, “the oppressed peoples of the world – from Harlem to Hanoi – all shared one enemy. The same racist Yankee imperialism victimizing Africa, Asia, and Latin America was victimizing blacks and other minorities inside the United States.” Between the lies, the report can read as a confirmation of some of the most basic tenets of left-wing solidarity: Your struggle and their struggle originate from the same place. “In biology, one learns about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly,” wrote the Marxist historian Mike Davis in Old God, New Enigmas. “Proletarian subjectivity does not evolve by incremental steps but requires nonlinear leaps, especially by way of moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people. Even when this contradicts short-term self-interest, as in the famous cases of Lancashire cotton workers’ enthusiasm for Lincoln and later for Gandhi, such efforts not only anticipate a world beyond capitalism, they concretely advance the working class’s march toward it.”
It’s true that left-wing American political activity in recent years has been defined by the recognition that the chicken will always come home to roost. That someone would risk her life to stand with her neighbor who is being detained by ICE, or to achieve one small act of sabotage against genocide, is perhaps baffling to the likes of Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller. But perhaps it is also sincerely threatening to them. Now we're seeing the lengths they will go to sabotage this kind of solidarity.
