Trump's crackdown on the left is coming [View all]

Trump’s crackdown on the left has decades of precedent
The Justice Department's plans to target leftist organizations is taking alarming shape

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published December 21, 2025 9:15AM (EST)


(Salon) 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.

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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.

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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. .................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/21/trumps-crackdown-on-the-left-has-decades-of-precedent/