It seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. They know they’re losing their grip. They know that they are vastly outnumbered. They are afraid.
The ghost of J. Edgar Hoover emanates from the Congressional Cemetery in Washington. (Smallbones/Wikimedia)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin’s Newsletter
Listen to Tim Foley read this article.
The Trump administration has announced a renewed crusade against “far-left terrorism,” which sounds okay if you don’t know that the word “terrorism” only ever means “behavior which goes against the agendas of the western empire.”
The United States has for example placed sanctions on U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese for calling attention to Israeli atrocities in Gaza, justifying the move by claiming the human rights expert has “expressed support for terrorism”. In the U.K., police have been arresting people on terrorism charges just for holding signs which say “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action”.
The designation has nothing to do with actual acts of terrorism as the average westerner conceives of that notion. In 2024 the US government removed its $10 million bounty on former Al Qaeda leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (AKA Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) because he facilitated Washington’s regime change agendas in Syria, where he is now the sitting president. You can literally be a leader in the most notorious terrorist network on earth and still see that designation disappear into thin air as soon as you start assisting the geostrategic ambitions of the empire.
The US has signalled that it will refocus its so-called counterterrorism efforts on repressing leftwing groups.
In a speech to officials from more than 60 countries on Thursday, secretary of state Marco Rubio said “far-left terror” had been overlooked for too long.
It comes as… pic.twitter.com/hXQ5PZRfX7
— Novara Media (@novaramedia) July 17, 2026
The White House announced on Thursday that it has launched “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism,” under which “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”
Journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that according to leaked documents from Marco Rubio’s State Department, groups to be targeted under the new marching orders will include “violent far-left and anarchist networks and other violent extremist actors,” as well as “violent pro-Iranian and antisemitic networks” and “militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements.”
The move is premised on a White House memo known as NSPM-7, a directive that critics have been warning about for months due to its dangerously authoritarian implications and lack of congressional approval. In the words of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, NSPM-7 “directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”
This line strongly echoes the language of a 1967 F.B.I. memo describing the goals of the J Edgar Hoover program COINTELPRO to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations and groupings.”
Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism – under President Trump’s leadership this @FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate… pic.twitter.com/AIn0aX29Hl
— FBI Director Kash Patel (@FBIDirectorKash) July 16, 2026
Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted covert operations under COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert Black civil rights groups, the Communist Party USA, Vietnam War protester organizations, and feminist groups with the goal of stomping out all meaningful leftward political movement in the United States.
The feds never fully stopped running such programs of course — groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter were known to have been targeted by police surveillance and infiltration. But it’s clear the rightists in the White House are aiming for something far more aggressive, and FBI Director Kash Patel sounds super stoked about the chance to become a 21st century J. Edgar Hoover.
“Secretary Rubio hosted the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism — under President Trump’s leadership this FBI has been proud to support this important work through National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) 7, focusing federal law enforcement to investigate and disrupt organizations engaging in political violence and terrorism,” Patel said on Twitter regarding the latest escalation.
What other U.S. officials had to say, according to the White House release:
- Secretary of State Rubio exposed the longstanding, willful blindness to left-wing violence: “Our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream.”
- Secretary Rubio warned that left-wing terrorism has surged to levels not seen in decades: “Today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades… Americans have seen what those numbers mean.”
- Secretary Rubio detailed the transnational nature of the threat:“Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training, materials, and target information through shared encrypted channels — moving through underground networks of safe houses, and finance and sustain their operations through transnational funds.”
- Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent announced powerful tools to combat illicit funding: “At President Trump’s direction, Treasury is expanding its efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance. We are examining where tax-exempt status has been exploited, where charitable entities have become financial conduits for foreign influence activity…”
- Secretary Bessent vowed to dismantle the financial infrastructure sustaining left-wing terrorism: “We will identify illicit funding, however artfully it is concealed. We will dismantle the networks that sustain political terrorism, however respectable their fronts may be. We will pursue those who enable political violence, however distant their jurisdictions.”
- Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller made clear there must be no retreat:“One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pre-textual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence… When the leftist — who does not believe in freedom, who does not believe in civil rights, who does not believe in any ordinary notion of justice — protests that we are violating his rights, understand the he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him. We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”
- Miller outlined the historic actions already taken by the Trump Administration: “Here in the United States, we have taken the necessary and essential action formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security and the survival of our republican form of government.”
So it seems the United States is looking at a reinvigorated COINTELPRO for the 2020s, this time with police drones and AI-assisted mass surveillance. As Americans become more and more hostile toward US warmongering, more and more fed up with the state of Israel, more and more convinced that their government doesn’t care about them, and more and more discontented with what unbridled capitalism is doing to their bank accounts, their society, and their world, their rulers are responding with the iron fist of tyranny.
And what makes all this especially threatening is that you know whatever measures they roll out while the Republicans are running things will remain in place when the Democrats are in power, because as we have discussed here many times before, it is the Democratic Party’s job to prevent leftward movement in the United States. This will be one of those many, many times the Republicans did something evil and the Democrats just quietly kept it running in the background to protect the interests of the capitalist empire. Because that is their job.
But the fact that this is happening in the first place should inspire hope, not despair. The empire managers aren’t ramping up authoritarianism because it’s easy and fun; they’re doing it because they need to. They know they’re losing their grip, and they know that they are vastly outnumbered by the ordinary human beings who just want a better world for their children.
They are afraid. And they are afraid because they are losing.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from Caitlin’s Newsletter and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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