As President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, gear up for a governmentwide attack on anti-fascist protesters and other political opponents, historians and those who have been on the receiving end of government-backed attacks on the left say that the administration’s efforts rely on fear and complicity.
Aaron Leonard, the author of multiple books documenting the lengths that the United States government has gone to suppress leftist political movements throughout its history, including “Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism” and “Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on American Maoists,” explained that the federal government maintained a decades-long effort to monitor and dismantle leftist movements in the United States, ranging from anarchists to the Communist Party USA.
The most notorious of these, COINTELPRO, a counterintelligence program targeting communists that ran from 1956 until 1971, saw the FBI target a variety of political organizations. Most notable was the investigation into the U.S. Communist Party over its alleged pro-Soviet stance and opposition to the American government. The program also saw federal law enforcement target anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, feminist groups, New Left organizations and even some rightist organizations, like the Ku Klux Klan.
“It was kind of like low-level counterinsurgency against anybody who stood up against the U.S. government,” Leonard said.
The program was also connected to the killings of some of its targets, like Fred Hampton, the former Chicago Black Panther Party leader killed in a police raid on his apartment. An investigation by Jeffrey Haas, an attorney and activist, concluded that the FBI had conspired to assassinate Hampton.
While much of the FBI’s internal counterintelligence apparatus was exposed during the Church Committee hearings in 1975, Leonard drew parallels between the current administration’s war on the left and efforts from the 20th century, noting how the “Alien Enemies Act,” — recently been invoked to attack immigrants — was used to go after communists in the 1920s.
“Meanwhile, the MAGA shock troops have set their sights on the political opposition. Elise Stefanik, the MAGA congresswoman from New York, has called New York City’s mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a ‘raging antisemitic communist,’” Leonard said. “The FBI in the 1960s was clipping any files about anti-semitism in the Soviet Union and trying to popularize that in the U.S. because the CPUSA had a fairly large cohort of Jewish Americans.”
Leonard also took note of the shift in language coming from the administration, specifically in how they have begun to call their political opponents “terrorists,” rather than Trump’s previous preferred term, the “radical left.”
“I think it’s a qualitative leap between calling somebody a radical leftist and a terrorist. You’re a terrorist. They can be executed summarily. That’s kind of the logic of it,” Leonard said.
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In Leonard’s assessment, the best way to handle a push from the government to suppress the left is to show vocal opposition to the government’s efforts and not just their attacks on the left, but also their attacks on immigrants and even interference with media, as seen in the situation with comedian Jimmy Kimmel.
“People need to stand together and find ways to express opposition in ways that conform to standing laws, but they do need to push back,” Leonard said.
Conor Gallagher, who worked with Leonard on multiple projects, noted in an interview that the current efforts at repression lack the “subtlety and sophistication” of historic counterintelligence efforts, like those undertaken by the former director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover.
“You see all these ICE agents walking around with masks, the whole point is the idea of being able to hide their identity. But for Hoover, the whole point is that you didn’t even know there were the people doing these sorts of things. The idea is that all this was done behind closed doors,” Gallagher said.
Gallagher also identified a dynamic at play in historical anti-left government actions, in which the government violates the law in its actions and, in turn, their targets break the law in response. This then becomes grounds for government action against the targets.
“You see this a lot, especially people who were mourning and coming to the defense of Kirk after his assassination. So many people are talking about what is right and moral, and how you don’t talk about people like this, and it’s wrong to say these things. And these are people who were doing the exact same thing a week before. I think we could point out that being hypocritical, but I’m not even sure they realize their hypocrisy,” Gallagher said.
In an environment where the government is looking to crack down on dissenters, it’s important to remember that most of the country opposes the administration’s efforts, Gallagher argued.
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“There is a basis to push back and defeat this, because it’s such a large swath of population, it’s so unpopular. If you actually think about the majority of the country doesn’t want what the government is doing,” he said.
Gallagher argued that people facing an authoritarian government should not comply with the administration’s edicts and efforts.
Scott Crow, a political organizer and activist who has been on the receiving end of both government surveillance and the anti-antifascist movement’s rage over the past two decades, shared a similar sentiment.
“It is a 100% bluff. It just creates another bogeyman for them to fire up their base. Because really, when Stephen Miller says that s**t, he’s talking to a very limited amount of people in the United States. He’s not talking to the majority of people in the United States,” Crow said.
In the early to mid-2000s, he ran in the same circles as the notorious anarchist-turned-FBI informant Brandon Darby, who now works as a conservative pundit. According to Crow, Darby was the fifth informant that the government had sent after him at that point.
Crow, however, emphasized that in moments like these, the government relies on fear to ensure that the population complies with their edicts. Crow said that, when push comes to shove, the government doesn’t have the resources, the political capital nor the competency to actually enact their ideological agenda by force. This is demonstrated by the fact that Trump is sending the National Guard to one city at a time and by how ICE targets members of society who are following the law and showing up at immigration court, rather than the criminals the administration claims they are targeting.
“They don’t have the resources, time, money and people to do this stuff and so, and I’m even gonna go out on a limb and say that even now, because of DOGE and the stupidity that’s the federal government right now, that they even have less resources,” Crow said.
Crow also encouraged people to protest the administration and resist the authoritarian takeover of the government and their attempts to reshape society in their image.
“Do the thing. Whatever people are doing, don’t stop doing it. Just resist,” Crow said. “That’s what I would say. Don’t believe the hype. If you think that these actions can make a change or be helpful or alleviate suffering, then take those actions. Just know that they’re going to try to make the consequences harder.”
