Trump’s crackdown on the left has decades of precedent

What happens when a government declares war on a domestic terrorist organization that doesn’t actually exist? It’s a question that completely flummoxed Michael Glasheen, the FBI’s branch and operations director, last week when he was testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., asked him where antifa, the alleged terrorist organization, was headquartered and he could only reply, “we’re building out the infrastructure right now,” an impressive non sequitur that dodged the question. 

Glasheen could not give any specifics as to how many people are involved in antifa or where they are, but he said that it was “ongoing for us to understand that…no different than al-Qaida and ISIS.” Thompson pressed him further about just who and what this alleged terrorist threat actually was, and all he could do was shrug and say “it is the most immediate violent threat we’re facing on the domestic side.” It’s not surprising that the FBI cannot give any concrete evidence. Antifa is not an organization, terrorist or otherwise. It’s simply a single concept: anti-fascism. 

As the Washington Post reported, Thursday “marked the first deadline for all the federal law enforcement agencies to ‘coordinate delivery’ of their intelligence files” to the FBI, which will be drawing up lists of “leftist networks,” Americans and foreigners to investigate. Attorney General Pam Bondi‘s order defined “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “opposition to law and immigration enforcement,” “radical gender ideology” and “hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality” as the kind of ideology requiring investigation by federal authorities. Those are elastic enough terms that it could cover at least half the population. 

This followed an executive order issued in September in which the Trump administration designated “antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization “that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law.” Any such manifesto or statement of principles doesn’t exist; this was simply an attempt to justify the targeting of left-leaning groups and critics of Donald Trump through extrajudicial powers granted to the government for use against foreign terrorist threats. 

The administration formalized this order with the issuance of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence, which the Brennan Center described as addressing

a mishmash of incidents, some of which are criminal and some of which constitute activity protected by the First Amendment. These include violence directed at public figures such as conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson; a purported 1,000 percent increase in attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; a shooting at an ICE facility; and anti-police and criminal justice protests.

Those incidents, according to the Trump administration, are part of an organized left-wing campaign to “silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” Clearly, what they are attempting to do is give themselves the power to define any political dissent as terrorism or provide material support to terrorism which, if you were to apply the same laws that govern foreign terrorism, would lead to prosecution and imprisonment. 

In previous cases when the Supreme Court sanctioned the government’s power to prosecute foreign terrorists, the justices were clear that these mechanisms could not be applied to domestic organizations, because they would clearly violate the First Amendment. But that was the Supreme Court of another era. Who knows what they would say today? 

The Trump administration’s campaign against the left is not new to American life. The government has gone after left-wing speech and organizing for more than a century, beginning with the first Red Scare in 1919-1920. Spooked by the Russian Revolution, anarchist bombings and labor unrest, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer ordered a crackdown on anything that looked like it might be radical through illegal searches and seizures, unwarranted arrests and detentions. Naturally, a lot of it was focused on immigrants, hundreds of whom were deported under suspicion of being anarchists. 

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got the country all worked up in April 1920 with a warning that communists were plotting a violent May Day rebellion; his agents conducted massive raids across the nation. After no rebellions took place, the judicial system put on the brakes, the public turned against Palmer and the scare went dormant. The unfortunate consequence was continued anti-immigrant feeling that led to the draconian Immigration Act of 1924.

The years after World War II brought a second red scare, with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and the McCarthy hearings led by the anti-communist crusader Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisc., who was of course advised by Trump’s future mentor Roy Cohn. The government once more scoured the country for radicals and traitors, trampling all over the First and Fourth Amendments, ruining lives and threatening livelihoods until the fever finally broke. 

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During that period, Hoover, still running the FBI, created COINTELPRO, a project to surveil and smear individuals and infiltrate political organizations the FBI considered subversive threats. These included anti-war protesters, the Civil Rights Movement, environmentalists, student groups and various racial and ethnic organizations among others. Unsurprisingly, all of them were left-leaning. 

By the late 1960s, the FBI was operating as a secret police force. The organization had abandoned any pretense of fealty to the rule of law, all in the name of protecting America from the alleged threat from within. The program continued until it was exposed in the press, with the Senate Church Committee conducting an investigation in 1975. 

Now another crackdown is upon us. This time, the government is targeting a phantom organization that is little more than an idea with no central organization or planning. As Reuters reported in October, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is spearheading a program to defund left leaning organizations such as Democratic donor George Soros’ “Open Society Foundations; ActBlue, the funding arm of the Democratic Party; Indivisible and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights” by claiming they are funding domestic violence. When pressed for examples, the White House “highlighted seven political protests in 2023 and 2025 that included acts of violence directed against law enforcement officials, and two incidents of vandalism at Tesla dealerships this year as well as half a dozen social media posts celebrating the damage.”

In the past, when the government embarked on one of these paranoid campaigns, public pressure managed to put an end to it once the agenda became clear. When you combine this latest plan with the administration’s violent crackdown on immigrants, the nation is about to be overwhelmed by scenes of mayhem and cruelty at the hands of federal agents. Will the people step up to stop this next chapter in domestic political repression? If past is prologue, it will happen. Unfortunately, as always, there will be a whole lot of carnage left in its wake.