The so-called War on Terror was always going to become a weapon for widespread domestic political repression. Now it’s official. Edited by Zeteo Any Rage Against The Machine fan reading the Trump administration’s new national security strategy immediately recognized the parallel to COINTELPRO, the FBI’s infamous Cold War campaign to surveil, infiltrate, and disrupt the American left. After elevating “violent left-wing extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” to a central focus of U.S. counterterrorism, the strategy document, released last week, declared: “The mission of the counterterrorism structures of the U.S. Government is to identify those groups that have the intent and capability to plot attacks against Americans and then neutralize them.” Whether consciously or not, that mission statement is ominously similar to perhaps the most prominent of all COINTELPRO memos. In March 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover described the bureau’s approach to Black-liberationist leaders and organizations, whether Martin Luther King Jr. or the Black Panthers. “Through counterintelligence, it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them before they exercise their potential for violence,” Hoover wrote. Hoover’s classified memo was stolen from a Philadelphia-area FBI office and reported on by Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger in 1971. A congressional investigation known as the Church Committee later validated it and exposed additional aspects of COINTELPRO, along with other repressive domestic and foreign intelligence activities. A generation later, tens of millions of people heard singer Zack de la Rocha chant Hoover’s line on the Rage song “Wake Up.” For 25 years, the so-called War on Terror’s sweeping expansions of domestic surveillance and watchlisting placed gigantic numbers of American Muslims under permanent suspicion. It has lasted so long as to become normalized – and, as was predictable, to expand to other disfavored groups, like migrants targeted by ICE. Practically as soon as the Towers fell, War on Terror enthusiasts on the right demanded the security apparatus target left and liberal groups, starting with journalist Andrew Sullivan’s portrayal of the U.S. “decadent left” as a “fifth column“ functionally in league with al-Qaeda. Sullivan later apologized for his invective. Now it’s official policy. The world of the May 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy is a sweaty one. In it, right-wing political violence, such as the January 6 insurrection, exists only as a calumny of politicized government persecution to justify aiming counterterrorism authorities and resources at the left. Drug cartels and traffickers are defined as terrorists, not because of any campaign of political violence, but simply, as the strategy boasts, “to make available additional intelligence authorities.” Against a new grouping of “top five” jihadist entities, which, beyond al-Qaeda and ISIS, are not defined, it vows “high-intensity but short campaigns,” a standard promise of post-9/11 forever wars. Christians in Africa are “the most persecuted people on Earth.” (It was the justification for Trump’s Christmas bombing of Nigeria.) Along those lines, the strategy warns of “New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance.” Such “alliances,” which the strategy naturally does not expand upon, are another creation of the far-right imagination. To the degree that there’s a material reality buried under there somewhere, it’s inevitably going to be the growing, vocal sympathies on the left – and expanding beyond it – for Palestine, which reads to Zionists and their allies in the White House as simply an affinity for Hamas. It will also likely come to mean those who reject Trump’s disastrous war of aggression against Iran. Already this year, the Justice Department has charged anti-ICE protesters in Texas as terrorists and indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Speech will be criminalized,” warned former FBI special agent Terry Albury on a livestream we both participated in on Monday. Trump’s counterterrorism strategy builds upon a crucial document the White House issued last year, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, and reported on most assiduously by Ken Klippenstein. NSPM-7 instructed the federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) – which unite state and local police with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security – to investigate the “common threads” of domestic political violence resident in “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” The vagueness of such categories – what counts as “extremism on migration, race and gender”? – is simultaneously laughable and deadly serious. JTTFs, supercharged after 9/11, do not need a factual predicate linking a person or group to an act of violence to open an “assessment,” a low-level form of FBI investigation permits physical surveillance and infiltration. No one has any excuse not to have seen this coming. When the streets filled with protesters after the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020, Trump sicced the JTTFs on antifascists and used the Department of Homeland Security to assault and detain protesters in Portland. Both NSPM-7 and the May 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy represent a codification of those ad hoc efforts. I warned in a July 2024 Zeteo essay that something like this would happen. While the Counterterrorism Strategy represents a downshift in emphasis on jihadist groups, it by no means heralds less repression of Muslims. It adopts the once-fringe perspective that “all modern Jihadi groups… can trace their roots back to one organization: the Muslim Brotherhood,” a mechanism to justify widespread surveillance, infiltration, and sanctions on Muslims groups through association, however attenuated. The strategy explicitly promises forthcoming designations of Muslim Brotherhood entities as sanctionable Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) beyond those Trump issued in November. And while Trump’s strategy is the latest to pledge retrenchment from the Middle East – already farcical, given his Iran War – it also pledges to “continue to designate its branches across the Middle East and beyond as FTOs to crush the organization everywhere it operates.” Two decades of bipartisan legitimization of the War on Terror as an amorphous security response to an ever-expanding cohort of Muslims brought the country to this point. The expanded climate of repression represents the wages of withholding solidarity from vulnerable minorities. But the apparatus of that repression is not the same as it was 25 years ago. Now it includes AI and data mining companies that partner with ICE, like Palantir, that claim to have databases of 20 million people and whose executives sound comfortable unleashing its investigative tools on left-wingers they speak of with undisguised contempt. The framework Trump is offering, in which left-wing politics is treated as terrorism, is one he seeks to entrench within the security agencies long after he leaves office. The record of the past 25 years suggests it’s a good bet. Whether the War on Terror has now fully reconstituted COINTELPRO or whether there are a few more steps to go, only the total abolition of its authorities, institutions, and operations can preserve the prospect of freedom. |
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