SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
political violence
Broadening Assault on the Left, Trump Designates EU Anti-Fascist Groups as ‘Foreign Terrorist Organizations’
Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein warns that the designation opens up US citizens to government surveillance, asset seizure, and material support charges.
Nov 14, 2025
President Donald Trump's State Department on Thursday broadened his efforts to use "terrorism" to crush his enemies on the left, designating four European groups as "foreign terrorist organizations" based on their alleged connections to the vaguely defined network of leftist agitators known as "antifa," short for "anti-fascist."
Following the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in September, Trump turned his attention toward waging a war on left-wing protest groups and liberal nonprofits, describing them as part of a vast, interconnected web that was fomenting "terrorism," primarily through First Amendment-protected speech.
As part of that effort, Trump formally designated "antifa" as a "domestic terrorist organization," even though it is not a formal group with any structure, but rather, a loose confederation of individuals all expressing an amorphous political belief. Civil rights advocates warned that the vague nature of the designation could be extended to bring terrorism charges against anyone who describes the Trump administration's actions as fascist or authoritarian.
Shortly after, Trump also signed a little-reported national security order, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which mandated a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Some of the indicators of potential violence, the memo said, were “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity," "extremism on migration, race, and gender," and "hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.“
Referencing NSPM-7 explicitly, the State Department on Thursday spread that crusade against the left overseas, slapping four German, Greek, and Italian anarchist groups with the label of "foreign terrorist organization" (FTO). The same designation has been given to groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, and al-Shabaab.
The groups targeted were Antifa Ost in Germany; the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI) in Italy; Armed Proletarian Justice in Greece; and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, also in Greece.
The State Department said:
The designation of Antifa Ost and other violent Antifa groups supports President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, an initiative to disrupt self-described ‘anti-fascism’ networks, entities, and organizations that use political violence and terroristic acts to undermine democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental liberties.
Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas.
Each of the accused groups has had members charged with or convicted of violence, often against Neo-Nazis or adjacent far-right causes. But while they are more organized than America's anti-fascist movement, they are still broad-based and diffuse.
Mirroring what studies have shown in the US, the far-right is responsible for the overwhelming bulk of political violence in the European Union. A 2024 study by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) found that across Europe, the far-right was responsible for 85% of the violent targeted incidents they tracked.
Though Greece was one exception, where far-left violence was more prevalent than far-right violence, Mary Bossis, an emeritus professor of international security at Piraeus University in Athens, told The Guardian that Greece's anti-fascist movement has little to do with it.
"It is highly exaggerated to say that the antifa movement in Greece employs terror tactics," she said. "They even run in elections and have never shown any sign of violence.”
While most social movements have some violent adherents, Bossis said, "that does not mean, as in the case of antifa, that the whole movement is either violent or supportive of terrorism. In fact, it is very much not the case… Standing against fascism does not make someone a terrorist.”
As Mark Bray, a Rutgers University professor who teaches a course on the history of antifascism, pointed out in The Guardian, Antifa Ost is the only one of the four groups designated by Trump that self-identifies as anti-fascist.
“The others are revolutionary groups,” he said. “This shows how the Trump administration is trying to lump all revolutionary and radical groups together under the label ‘antifa’. By establishing the (alleged) existence of foreign antifa groups, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for declaring American antifa groups (and all that they deem to be ‘antifa’) to be affiliated with these supposed foreign terrorist groups.”
Ken Klippenstein, an independent investigative journalist who has warned about NSPM-7 since its release, noted that this marks the first time that an entity in any of these three European countries has ever been slapped with the label of an FTO.
"The move seems an attempt to make people accustomed to white Westerners being treated as terrorists," he wrote Thursday. "That, after all, is the goal of Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7."
While there is no law on the books to back Trump's designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, there is such a designation for foreign terrorist groups.
Being designated as a member of a foreign terrorist organization can subject one to significant sanctions, including having assets in American banks frozen, being unable to enter the country, or being prosecuted for "material support."
The government has used accusations of terrorism to go much farther, including carrying out extrajudicial assassinations of targets. Over the past two months, the Trump administration has bombed over a dozen boats in the Caribbean using the unsubstantiated justification that their passengers are "narco-terrorists" shipping drugs for cartels, which the administration has also designated as FTOs. The attacks have killed at least 76 people.
Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested last month that the Trump administration planned to use the "same approach" to antifa as it has with cartels, leading many to fear that might include assassinations.
Mehdi Hasan, the founder of the media outlet Zeteo, said the designation of these groups as terrorist organizations was "super bad for US citizens, especially on the left of the spectrum," because it "gives this authoritarian administration potentially the power to surveil and go after US citizens on spurious 'funding of FTO' grounds."
The State Department noted in a fact sheet on the designations that it is also seeking to target those in the US accused of supporting these groups.
"US persons are generally prohibited from conducting business with sanctioned persons. It is also a crime to knowingly provide material support or resources to those designated, or to attempt or conspire to do so," the memo said. "Persons that engage in certain transactions or activities with those designated today may expose themselves to sanctions risk. Notably, engaging in certain transactions with them entails risk of secondary sanctions pursuant to counterterrorism authorities."
Klippenstein said that while Trump's "domestic terrorist" designation was limited, "with an FTO designation, the gloves come off," opening Americans up to "FISA surveillance, seizure of financial assets, [and] material support charges."
Keep ReadingShow Less
We Live in an Age of Public Bullying; What Can We Do About It?
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.”
Oct 19, 2025
Professor Emeritus Roddey Reid could have retired from the University of California San Diego to a life of deserved leisure. Instead, he has just published a handbook on "Political Intimidation and Public Bullying," which is increasingly dominating government, business, and civil society.
A guest this week on my radio show and podcast, Professor Reid was followed by Professor of Law Robert Fellmeth from the University of San Diego, a leading critic of unbridled anonymous speech fostered by Silicon Valley companies to boost profits.
Reid argues, Newt Gingrich launched this political onslaught in 1994 when he took over the GOP, led the Republicans to victory and became house speaker. “To be clear,” Reid continues, “political intimidation and public bullying are forms of psychological and physical political violence… meant to injure, humiliate, isolate, coerce, and even destroy opponents and entire communities.” These interviews should spark a civic rebellion.
The political intimidation operates in both open sight—from the belligerent bully-in-chief Donald Trump, and in the shadows with serious anonymous threats to members of Congress, judges, and their families. Combined, this viciousness has meant the difference in razor-thin votes in Congress. For example, the violent-talking, unfit secretary of defense being confirmed by the Senate. Other Trump nominees, who are also staggeringly inexperienced, totally obeisant to Trump’s wrecking of America in daily violation of the Constitution and federal laws, have also squeaked through Senate confirmation votes.
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Reid is systemic and illustrative in his fast-paced book titled Confronting Political Intimidation and Bullying–privately published to make it very up to date through August 2025. In his last chapter, he conveys 13 strategies for citizens to use locally in response.
Cumulatively, this mass “callout” could descend upon Congress and state legislatures for a more systemic regulatory agenda.
Such legislative activity in Sacramento, California is already taking place to deal with the central delivery mode of such bullying—ANONYMITY—according to Professor Fellmeth. A long-time advocate of curbing the dangers of internet anonymity, including to children. Fellmeth urges a decisive ban on most anonymous assaults, leaving open some exceptions for whistleblowers and others with a need to protect their privacy and self-defense. To accomplish this selectivity has to involve regulation of the Silicon Valley profiteers and electric child molesters, led by the duplicitous Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of META. His major declared mission is to drive people from reality and live their lives in his virtual reality. A quick safeguard is to require anonymous speech to be pursued by law enforcement when it embodies physical threats and deliberate psychological torture. Naming and prosecuting the perpetrator will serve as deterrent to other potential anonymous predators.
Moreover, Fellmeth, who has written several articles on AI’s rapidly intensifying damage to youngsters, wants a regulation mandating identifying AI creations as such to forewarn the public. (See Professor Fellmeth’s article: "AI is already harming our children. Are California lawmakers going to do something?" January 30, 2025).
Bullies, starting with super-bully Trump, need to “get some of their own medicine.” That means those attacked with nicknames need to counter with nicknames, rebutting phony allegations and revealing the brutal impacts of their bullying on innocent people and families in both red and blue states by the vicious and cruel Trumpsters. Otherwise, the “Big Lies” without rebuttals become soliloquies, and therefore believable to millions of people and influence millions of susceptible voters. (See our prescient and useable book Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.)
Political bullies focus on the weak, vulnerable, and powerless. You don’t see Trump going after and cutting programs servicing big-time corporate welfare kings through subsidies, handouts, giveaways, and bailouts in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
His latest vindictive cuts—some boomeranging against his own desired policies—were outlined in a recent Washington Post feature by lead reporter Hannah Natanson. His latest “firings”—suspended by a federal district judge in California–targeted services for students with disabilities, inspectors who check the defects of federal housing, and employees who help regulate hazardous waste and pollution, according to the Post. Frothing at the mouth, Trump called those fired “people that the Democrats want,” as if conservative Trump voters and their families want to breath and otherwise be exposed to dangerous pollutants. The same flailing dismissals will strike what the Post described “as vulnerable Americans–school children, low-income families, homeless people, and senior citizens.” Trump is steered by the seriously hateful Russell Vought, the White House Budget chief and preparer of the Heritage Foundation’s notorious Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s fascist dictatorship. It doesn’t matter that these and previous firings, without cause, are illegal in numerous ways. After all, didn’t Trump tell you in July 2019 that “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President”?
Here is an illustration of the institutionally insane wielding of the axe by indiscriminate haters that is hurting Trump voters and families alongside their Democratic counterparts. Trump and Vought want to layoff “workers with top secret clearance responsible for monitoring and protecting the United States from biological, chemical, and nuclear threats.” Earlier Trump and Vought drastically cut federal health scientists, safety regulators, and critical benefit dispensers in the tens of thousands.
Another instance of mindlessly cutting federal support for slammed hard-pressed community colleges, the recipient of lavish praise by Trump over the years for their job training curricula.
He is betraying Trump voters, with regular treachery! It is time for the people to say, “Donald Trump, you are fired.” (See my May 2, 2025 column: “YOU’RE FIRED!”–GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE REJECTING TRUMP)
You can listen to these interviews on radio stations in central cities or by visiting RalphNaderRadioHour.com.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Meeting Our Angry Moment With Fellowship and Laughter
What we can do is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation.
Oct 08, 2025
One strangely hot November afternoon, I waited for my elementary-school-aged kids to arrive at their bus stop. The quiet in our rural area was eerie. It captured the mood in the days after a national election that no one in my little community yet knew exactly how to respond to.
In my rush out the door, I’d grabbed my baseball cap, with the logo for my preferred presidential candidate on it, to shield my eyes from the sun’s glare.
The bus arrived and left. I collected my charges and, just as we were preparing to walk home, a tall young man leapt from the passenger seat of a battered Chevy pickup truck parked at the side of the road. He shook one sunburned finger at my hat and yelled, “Traitor! Traitor!” his face red with rage, or possibly alcohol—who knew? I gripped the pepper spray I carry in my pocket and told my kids to run home. They disappeared into the woods.
Luckily, the man scuttled back into his vehicle and drove off as soon as I looked him in the eye and sized him up. (Maybe word hadn’t yet spread that masks could do more than protect from illness. They could also let a man harass families without the moral weight of the act landing on him. How little we understood, just months ago!)
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain.
Once his truck disappeared, I walked home, rattled, not sure how to explain what had happened to my kids. But in the foyer, they explained the whole scene for me in their own satirical way.
One child shook a finger and yelled, in a mockingly deep voice, “Traitor!” Another pretended to swoon in response. “Oh no! I am so scared! What a big, brave man!” They collapsed in giggles.
This is the sort of anti-bully cosplay I’ve come to see often in recent months: Kids I know strutting around with their chests puffed out like roosters, imitating a neighborhood bully who insults immigrants. Expressions of fake awe about motorcycle gangs that pass by displaying Confederate flags and other racist symbols of the old South and revving their engines for attention. (“Wow! They are so strong and tough! I want to shake their hands!”)
As private as this mockery tends to be, lest (sadly) someone retaliate with violence, it gives us a way to express our sorrow at what is happening to the American value of peaceful coexistence, while lightening the mood. Such laughter diminishes the bullies among us, at least in our hearts. As leaders like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and comedian Jimmy Kimmel show so well, it can diminish them publicly by holding up a mirror to their bluster and overreach.
Humor as Resistance
The use of parody against authoritarian leaders is nothing new. Among my favorite models is Serbian activist Srdja Popovic’s book Blueprint for Revolution. Recounting his own experiences with the student movement that, in the 1990s, resisted then-dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Popovic explains how jokes about ruling elites can make them look less invincible, while also puncturing widespread fear. And better yet, leaders who try to suppress such humor tend to look ridiculous. For example, Serbian police arrested (so to speak) a barrel with Milosevic’s face painted on it after Popovic and his fellow activists encouraged citizens to line up and hit it with a bat.
We in the mid-Atlantic region got a taste of how such mundane gestures can goad leaders into buffoonery when then-Justice Department employee Sean Charles Dunn threw his sandwich at one of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers President Donald Trump recently deployed in Washington, DC. The Department of Justice tried to charge Dunn with assaulting a federal officer, a felony, but a grand jury declined to bring such charges against him. Whether or not Dunn actually meant to be funny, that incident reminds me of how a seemingly small act of resistance can indeed expose executive overreach.
As I walked in a September protest against President Trump’s National Guard occupation of Washington, I watched leaders of the tens of thousands of marchers hoist a banner depicting Dunn with his sandwich and felt strangely encouraged by the raucous cheering that echoed through the capital. He has, in fact, become a potent symbol of the anti-Trump resistance.
Men and Rage
I guess there’s nothing new about angry men, either—at least not in my neighborhood. My home sits in a valley, and the nearby rural highway often feels to me like a repository of white male road rage. I moved here in 2020 and, just in that first year, I watched two drivers at two different moments plow, purposefully or not, into the vehicles in front of them. In one case, the driver got out and began hurling racial slurs at the group of Latino farmworkers he had slammed into.
If you’re unlucky enough to be standing by the side of that road, you’d better believe that you could get hurt, even if it’s just by someone speeding. The battered guardrails at the valley’s nadir attest to that. Once, a cop pulled me over when I was walking home along that very road after my car broke down to warn me that I could get hurt by the reckless drivers there. Safe in my white suburban mom identity, while pointing at the dimpled metal of the rails along that stretch of road, I replied, “No kidding. Why don’t you pull more of them over instead of me?” He blushed and actually agreed before letting me go home.
What causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
And mind you, those guys on my road are anything but aberrations. Many signs these days point to a scourge of anger and despair among American men, who all too often don’t seem to have been raised to express a wide range of emotions. A Pew Research study from early 2025 found that 57% of US adults think children’s caretakers place far too little focus on teaching boys to talk about their feelings when they’re sad or upset. Less than a third said the same about girls. In another survey, at least two-thirds of parents felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, and insecurity. Nearly half of those parents also felt that boys were uncomfortable expressing feelings of love. By and large, while women and men might feel anger in similar numbers, men are significantly more likely to act out their anger using verbal or physical aggression.
Though laughter offers a wonderful way to respond to stress, it turns out that it, too, is remarkably gendered. Women are more likely to laugh in social settings, while we as a society tend to expect men to make other people laugh through jokes and humor. Right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan is a notably popular exception to such a generalization in his ability to express vulnerability and laugh at himself. An analysis by Industry Leaders Magazine argues that his largely male audience does indeed value his willingness to admit he’s been wrong and his openness to laughing at himself. As one example, in an interview with English comedian Russell Brand, Rogan poked fun at himself as a child, a kid then learning martial arts, calling himself “so weird” and laughing.
When we express ourselves peaceably rather than by being accusatory, threatening, or violent, we connect with others, as Rogan shows so well (regardless of what you or I may think of his politics). And the ability to connect that he has—a trait conservative activist Charlie Kirk arguably had as well—may otherwise be in short supply among today’s male adults, especially on the political right. About a third of Americans report that they are lonely at least some of the time, though women tend to reach out more often to friends or loved ones when they feel that way. It’s probably no accident that men in this country are four times more likely than women to die by suicide.
If a certain prevalent strain of MAGA masculinity feeds on anger and hate—just look at “he who hates his political opponents” (aka our president!) and his speech at Kirk’s funeral—it’s not an easy persona to sustain. Just consider all the mourners who showed up at Kirk’s memorial service in genuine grief. Perhaps what most unnerved the Trump administration, when comedian Jimmy Kimmel flashed that clip of the president redirecting a question about Kirk’s death to the subject of his new White House ballroom, was confronting how alone he was in his indifference.
After Charlie Kirk
Given all the hostile rhetoric of Trump and his party toward their political foes, I find it easy to blame him and his followers for the uptick of political violence in this country over the past decade. After all, the vast majority of domestic extremist attacks have been perpetrated by individuals professing right-wing ideologies. Yet, as Jia Lynn Yang of the New York Times points out, this year’s spate of violence against public figures did not map as clearly onto the political spectrum as in earlier eras. Today, the attacker tends to be a “lone individual, lost in a conversation with an online void.” After all, Charlie Kirk’s shooter didn’t even vote in the last election. In a text exchange, he referred to the engravings he had made on his bullets, which included words like “catch, fascist,” as “mostly a big meme.”
While it would be reductionist to blame violence on video games and other nihilistic online spaces, it’s worth considering that the current generation of young people do, of course, spend more time online than any previous generation. If popular war games form part of their immersive environments, we as a society would do well to look more closely not just at the political leanings of shooters, but the contexts within which political violence flourishes in contemporary America.
What makes a gun feel like the solution to any political disagreement for some individuals? And if people like Kirk’s alleged killer Tyler Robinson, don’t see it as a solution, then what does it mean to shoot someone? If political assassination is a crime of despair, what series of events leads a person to such a feeling and such an act? Psychology tells us that anger makes us feel more powerful because of the adrenaline that courses through our bodies prior to acting out. But what causes a young man who, unlike Donald Trump, professes to be tired of hate to kill?
A New American Way?
I’m at a loss. And I think many of us may be. But what we can do (and by we here, I mean those of us who write stuff) is call attention to the forms of nonviolent resistance that challenge our prevalent culture of rage and alienation. The people participating in the “We Are All DC” march that I mentioned earlier held homemade signs like “DC crime wave” (with a picture of President Trump waving from the White House), played music, and sang. Though arguably comparable in size to the DC Women’s March of 2017, this demonstration warranted exactly zero articles in the New York Times. Somehow, in the age of Donald Trump, such legacy media outfits tend to prefer to amplify angry male voices rather than those of resistance, which, I think, is a genuine problem, explain it as you will.
If you think that a focus on resistance, humor, and joy is a losing path, as Kamala Harris’ “joy-based campaign” turned out to be, maybe you should remember that being with others in person does materially change the chemistry of our bodies. When we laugh or cry, especially in community, our bodies can release dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals that support empathy, communication, and a sense of hope for the future.
You might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day.
Perhaps with a greater sense of community, we would also take in more of our disturbing world and not, for instance, forget the two Minnesota lawmakers another extremist shot and killed in June or the young Black student recently found hanging from a tree in Mississippi. They received remarkably less attention than Charlie Kirk.
Unfortunately, our field of vision remains narrow indeed and, like the road I stood on that day last November, it contains a disproportionate number of angry white men. And no less unfortunately, we’re speeding down it quickly with a maniac in the driver’s seat, and it lacks the guardrails of a law-abiding Supreme Court and a constitutionally aware secretary of defense.
Unless we start talking to one another, that road seems to be leading nowhere good. In the meantime, you might try a little humor or mockery to get through the day. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular