WASHINGTON, D.C. – On July 16, the U.S. State Department gathered government officials from 66 countries for its “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” The meeting sought to increase collaboration between reactionary governments to repress the global class-conscious masses by focusing narrowly on the poorly defined threat of “far-left terrorism.”
A State Department press release about the summit states: “Today, the Trump Administration convened senior officials from governments around the world to launch an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism.” Stephen Miller, a longtime reactionary advisor to the Trump regime, stated at the conference: “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 [that] he is lying to try to persuade people who are not closely following the political scene that some injustice has perpetrated against him.” From this rhetoric, anyone seeking to exercise and defend democratic rights can be branded as a dangerous terrorist.
The U.S.’s current counterterrorism strategy under the Trump regime focuses on three threats: “narco-terrorism, Jihadi terrorism, and far-left terrorism.” While the State Department selectively uses data from 50 years ago to claim that left-wing terrorism is the main threat, recent research shows that terrorism from the right-wing is far more dangerous. A 2024 study by the National Institute of Justice, a Justice Department research agency, found that since 1990, right-wing extremists have caused 520 deaths across 227 attacks, compared to only 78 deaths from 42 left-wing attacks over the same period.
The recent “anti-Antifa” conference and the various actions against Latin America are the latest episode of the United States campaign against communists and anarchists that has extended for over a century. The U.S. uses the threat of communism as cover for its repression of political dissent, from the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and COINTELPRO, to the repression of those resisting ICE’s terror campaign and the overall agenda of fascistization today. In June, eight activists in the Prairieland case were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison; when seven more defendants were sentenced days later, the combined total across all fifteen reached 556 years, paving the way for further severe repression against the class-conscious mass movement.
Overseas, the U.S. has persistently worked to overthrow any government which steps out of line with what the U.S.’s agenda has dictated, either through direct military intervention, or through funding and arming reactionary groups. This continues to this day with Operation Southern Spear, the U.S.’s campaign against Latin America, with 221 people having been killed in strikes on suspected “drug vessels;” the extrajudicial kidnapping operation in Venezuela, which killed at least 47 Venezuelan soldiers and 32 Cubans, and the increasingly bellicose threats against Cuba.
Overall, the process of fascistization in the U.S. is accelerating. In Trump’s recent primetime television speech, he set his sights on the election system, claiming China had compromised voter data on 220 million Americans and interfered in the 2020 election to prevent him from winning a second term. He called on states to purge voter rolls and called on the Senate to pass the SAVE Act, which would disenfranchise millions of potential voters. The SAVE Act has been stalled in the Senate since March.
The summit’s rhetoric, the Prairieland sentences, the naval strikes, and the assault on voting rights all serve a single function: shielding a ruling class in crisis from the consequences of its own decline. Confronted with falling profits, stagnant wars, and a re-awakening working class at home, the U.S. state answers with criminalized dissent, disenfranchisement, and extrajudicial killing across the hemisphere. Only organized, disciplined class power, not appeals to a bourgeois democracy, can oppose this repression.
