Showing posts with label fascism. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

After "Political Terrorism" Event, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups

After "Political Terrorism" Event, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups |

Rubio report on Cuban "subversion" names Zohran Mamdani, Hasan Piker, Ben Cohen + orgs like DSA and Amazon Labor Union

Ken Klippenstein July 21 2026

Marco Rubio leads “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism” summit last week

A new State Department report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States” is a virtual government blacklist against left-wing Americans and groups. Linked to last week’s Rubio-led summit on “political terrorism,” the report is unusually candid about the government’s targets.

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report says.

As for who these supposed American agents of Cuba are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” was released this morning.

Cuba Report

44.6MB ∙ PDF file

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An entire section of the report — numbering over three pages long — is dedicated to the Democratic Socialists of America.

“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist Radicalism,” the report says. “This represents a significant advance for the Cuban influence operation: Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States.”

Though the report concedes that “DSA was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government” and that it has “organic ideological commitments,” it insists that “None of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network.”

Instead, the report points to the group’s delegations to Cuba as evidence of Cuban influence.

“For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X/Twitter linking to the report.

Whatever you think of DSA, it is hardly fringe. It claims as members prominent politicians like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has helped to nominate dozens of politicians like him to office in recent years. Senator Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist — having himself popularized the term — as do Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who are card carrying members (as well as Mamdani).

The Cuba report follows last week’s Rubio-led international summit on “political terrorism.” That summit, as I reported, introduced the new term “Far-Left Terrorism” (abbreviated “FLT”), a term it never really defined.

A White House press release summarizing the event said that “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Speaking at the summit, Rubio vowed that further new terrorist designations for left-wing groups would be coming “soon.”

Jeremy Lewin, the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, linked last week’s political terrorism summit to today’s Cuba report, saying on X: “For seven decades, the Cuban regime has been behind both the ideological underpinnings of third worldism and subversive organizing structures of the new radical left political terrorists that @SecRubio called out with clarity last week.”

But virtually all the summit could do to substantiate the supposed scourge of political terrorism was to focus on groups that are almost comically dated — like the 70’s era Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weather Underground. The summit was vague about what are the equivalent groups today.

Today’s Cuba report, however, “names names,” in an obvious attempt to stigmatize American citizens who are very much politically active today.

In some cases these are even sitting politicians, from congresswoman Maxine Waters to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

I read the 100-page report and counted references to at least 43 contemporary American groups and individuals, which the report identifies as follows:

Adely, Suzanne: The president of the National Lawyers Guild who participated in the Nuestra América Convoy and who, the report notes, praised Venezuela’s 2024 elections.
Amazon Labor Union: A labor union founded by Christian Smalls that participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.
Antifa: A decentralized group of self-described “Anti-fascist” political activists
Assata’s Daughters: A Chicago-based Black Lives Matter abolitionist offshoot that trains young activists in the radical spirit of Assata Shakur.
Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees (AIPAC):A California-based umbrella nonprofit that funds left-wing media and delegations to Cuba and Venezuela.
Bass, Karen: The current Mayor of Los Angeles and former Congresswoman who was a Venceremos Brigade organizer in the 1970s.
Benjamin, Medea (Susan Benjamin): A co-founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange who previously lived in Cuba and frequently organizes solidarity efforts for the regime.
Black Alliance for Peace: An activist group that maps U.S. military bases and police training facilities as targets for radical agitation.
Black Lives Matter (BLM) (including Global Network Foundation, Grassroots, and at School): A sprawling racial justice network whose leaders and offshoots express solidarity with the Cuban regime and radical figures like Assata Shakur.
Boudin, Chesa: The former District Attorney of San Francisco and son of Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin.
changingFrequencies: A Black Queer Feminist-led abolitionist project aiming to disrupt waht it calls the “Medical Industrial Complex”.
Claudia Jones School: A Washington, D.C.-based organizing collective that conducts popular education and pro-Cuba lobbying.
Code Pink: Women for Peace: A left-wing protest group that describes itself as anti-war and organizes solidarity delegations to Cuba.
Cohen, Ben: The co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s who attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.
de la Cruz, Claudia: The co-founder of the People’s Forum, IFCO executive director, and 2024 presidential candidate for the Party for Socialism and Liberation.
De Los Santos, Manolo: The co-founder and head of the People’s Forum who the report says maintains deep relationships with Cuban regime elites.
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): A major socialist political organization that formally advocates for the Cuban regime and organizes official delegations to the island.
Ensler, Eve (V): A prominent playwright who attended the wedding of Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.
Equality for Flatbush: A Brooklyn-based Black Lives Matter abolitionist group fighting gentrification, police, and ICE.
Evans, Jodie: The co-founder of Code Pink who married billionaire Neville Roy Singham and heavily praises anti-American foreign states.
Floyd, George: A man whose 2020 death sparked nationwide uprisings that were celebrated and supported by the Cuban regime.
Garza, Alicia: The co-founder of Black Lives Matter who credited Assata Shakur as a key influence in her organizing work.
Goodman, Amy: The host of Democracy Now! who the report notes attended the wedding of leftist billionaire Neville Roy Singham and Jodie Evans.
Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees: An activist group led by Black women that organizes to defend Black migrants and stop deportations.
Hirsi, Isra: A campus activist and daughter of Ilhan Omar who was suspended from Barnard College for organizing anti-Israel encampments before traveling to Cuba.
IFCO / Pastors for Peace: An ecumenical foundation that organizes aid caravans to leftist regimes and serves as a fiscal sponsor for numerous radical U.S. groups.
Larudee, Paul: A U.S. citizen based in San Francisco who serves as the North American coordinator for the pro-Iranian “Resistance Axis” coalition Al-Tajammu.
Mamdani, Zohran: Mayor of New York
National Lawyers Guild (NLG): An association of radical lawyers that provides legal defense and “legal observers” for various left-wing groups
National Network on Cuba (NNOC): A coalition of over 60 American groups dedicated to lobbying for the Cuban regime and coordinating nationwide direct actions.
Omar, Ilhan: A Democratic Congresswoman and mother of campus activist Isra Hirsi.
Party for Socialism and Liberation: A leftist political party that fielded a 2024 presidential candidate and conducts protests.
People’s Forum, The: An activist hub for anti-ICE and pro-Cuban agitation.
Piker, Hasan: A streamer and left-wing political commentator who, the report notes, traveled to Cuba to film a documentary and participated in the Nuestra América Convoy.
Pressley, Ayanna: A Democratic Congresswoman who, the report notes, publicly praised convicted murderer Assata Shakur upon her death.
Singham, Neville Roy: A Shanghai-based American technology magnate who funds a massive global network of far-left activist groups.
Smalls, Christian: The founder of the Amazon Labor Union who participated in the 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba.
Thousand Currents: A progressive nonprofit that served as the fiscal sponsor for the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation.
Villaraigosa, Antonio: A former Mayor of Los Angeles and Speaker of the California Assembly who was a Venceremos Brigade alumnus.
Viva Palestina US: The American branch of an international network that, the report notes, previously provided convoys and funds to Hamas.
Waters, Maxine: A Democratic Congresswoman who, the report notes, once wrote a letter urging Fidel Castro not to extradite fugitive Assata Shakur.
Wilson, Diane: A co-founder of the anti-war protest group Code Pink.
Witness for Peace Solidarity Collective: An organization that runs recurring U.S. solidarity delegations to Cuba.

Guilt by association at its finest. But what exactly are they guilty of?

What the report shows isn’t that any of these people are knowingly taking directions from a foreign power — only that they disagree with the U.S. government on Cuba policy (or at most, agree with Cuba).

Their views can be wrong — aggressively, offensively wrong even — but it’s their goddamn right as Americans to hold them.

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Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Trump Summons "Poltergeist" to Go After Opponents

Out: Iran diplomacy. In: diplomatic summit for rooting out left-wing "political terrorism"

Ken Klippenstein July 14, 2026

Secretary of State Rubio whispers to Trump at a White House roundtable on “Antifa” | Getty

Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be hosting a big diplomatic summit in Washington on Thursday — not about the Iran war, but about “political terrorism.”

Sterile as that may sound, it’s a resurrection of an obscure Nixon-era term pointed squarely at the political left and recruiting foreign governments to assist its war on domestic political opponents. As a U.S. diplomatic cable leaked to me puts it, all of this is about combatting “far-left terrorism.”

To the extent that media have noticed the summit at all, they’ve focused onthe confusion and wariness among some of the over 60 countries invited; but the significance of the term has been completely overlooked. Put simply, it’s a more powerful attack on protest, free speech and the Democratic Party than Trump’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist group or NSPM-7.

The summit is called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.” Unlike familiar organized terrorist groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, “political terrorism” refers to domestic opposition, here and abroad.

If you’ve never heard the term, it’s because the Trump administration has up to now never used it. In fact, this is the first time it’s been used by the federal government in decades.

“This summit is a vital first step in countering rising political violence worldwide, including far-left terrorism, through international collaboration,” a U.S. diplomatic cable dated July 13 says.

“Political terrorism” is a term first adopted by the Nixon administration for its war on “subversives,” carried out in the darkest days of the Vietnam war and a period of intense public protest. Sometimes referred to as “COINTELPRO” (an acronym for Counterintelligence Program), it was a series of covert and illegal actions by the FBI from 1956 through the early seventies that aimed to surveil, infiltrate, entrap and undermine leftist political organizations, everything from civil rights and anti-war groups to the Black Panthers.

State Department spokesman Tommy Piggot hinted at the historical significance last week.

“The resurgence of violent far-left political terrorism is not a new phenomenon — it is an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences,” Piggot said in a statement on the summit.

The administration’s obsession with left-wing terrorism was precipitated by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — a personal friend of Trump’s and many in the administration. In my reporting at the time, based on interviews with friends of the alleged gunman, Tyler Robinson, I warned that there wasn’t any evidence that the murder was a partisan act, nor that he was a leftist or even political in general.

That reporting, criticized at the time in an environment where seemingly everything was polarized into Team Red White and Blue, has now been vindicated to an extent that I did not anticipate.

Just last week, Robinson’s lover, Lance Twiggs, who is cooperating with federal prosecutors, testified that Robinson barely ever discussed politics and had never once mentioned Kirk before the shooting.

It’s an extraordinary revelation, made under the clearest penalty of perjury one can imagine, given the Trump administration’s investment in framing the killing as an act of “political terrorism.” After the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel even testified before Congress that the Bureau was investigating every other member of Robinsons’ discord chats and even the possibility of a foreign nexus. This was based on his suspicion that the killing was carried out by some kind of organized cell, a theory that promptly fell apart.

The killing was, by all appearances, just a young man with a gun, pissed off about what Charlie Kirk said about the LGBT community.

To the Trump camp, Kirk’s killing solidified their thinking that a vast conspiracy existed amongst the left to destroy the nation. Their counter to this imagined national security threat has been to link Trump’s NSPM-7 national security directive, the nihilist violent extremism label, and the executive order designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization into a larger umbrella: “political terrorism.”

Or as I call, POLTERGEIST, because the “political-terrorism” term is an attempt by the Trump administration to summon a ghost from the Nixon years.

Perhaps the only official definition of political terrorism appears in a declassified 1970 CIA intelligence report.

Cover of declassified CIA intelligence report

“Political terrorism is symbolic action, by those out of power, designed to achieve political ends through the systematic use of violence,” the report says.

It goes on to differentiate political terrorism from other forms of violence, saying:

“It is distinguished from intimidation (which emphasizes threats), mob violence (normally unplanned and uncontrolled), mass insurrection (larger in scale, later in time), and governmental terrorism (presented as law-enforcement). It may be practiced by anarchists, by nihilists, by their successors the modern totalitarians, by nationalists, and by a variety of social groups with genuine or fancied grievances.”

In 1972, responding to the Black September terrorist attack at the Munich Olympic Games, Nixon issued a formal presidential memorandum that officially institutionalized counter-political terrorism by creating a Cabinet Committee. Nixon’s 1972 mandate explicitly ordered the heads of the State Department, DOJ, CIA, FBI, Treasury and other agencies to coordinate government-wide actions to “prevent terrorism here and abroad.”

Again, not terrorism as we normally think of it, but political opposition.

In response to the memo, the State Department appointed its first-ever Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and Coordinator for Combating Terrorism. Within days, the new Special Assistant was peppering the term “political terrorism” in internal memos.

Unlike the Kirk assassination, the Munich Olympics massacre really was carried out by a terrorist group. Black September was a highly structured, centrally-commanded paramilitary with the explicit political goal of compelling the release of Palestinian political prisoners and forcing global visibility onto the Palestinian nationalist cause. It counted among its leaders the intelligence chief of the Palestinian Authority, Amin al-Hindi.

Now compare that with Tyler Robinson, an angsty 23-year-old from a Mormon family who was dating Lance (known to him as “Luna”) Twiggs and was upset enough about Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric on LBGT people to take action, allegedly.

In Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NPSM-7, the president directs the Departments of State Treasury, Justice and various other federal agencies to prioritize investigating and preempting left-wing violence. Sound familiar?

In a section examining the effectiveness of terrorism in different political environments, the CIA report from 1970 says:

“Terrorism can pose a serious challenge to free societies in which great social injustices or severe economic problems exist (e.g. Guatemala), but terrorism does not do well in free societies in which serious grievances are not widespread [redacted].”

Good thing Americans perceive no “great social injustices” today!

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Ken Klippenstein: Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

Federal prosecutor can't explain why or who Antifa is

Ken Klippenstein June 23 2026

U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen

Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens beforethey commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.

It is one of the first cases where presidential national security memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.”

Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”

And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.

In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.

The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.

Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.

Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN

SEPTEMBER 27, 2025

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’…

Read full story

Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.

That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.

U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:

“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”

“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”

NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.

In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.

Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath.

Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.”

This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed throughcourt filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.

Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.

And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.

Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.

In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.

None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.

Trump spews and the machinery of government plods along behind. Yes Noem, Bondi, and Kash Patel can tweet as if there is both a threat and the feds are quickly responding, but Task Forces have to iron out their budget and their letterheads before they can get to the X (née Twitter) on-ramp.

Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.

Tuesday, May 12, 2026

New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson

Administration deems anti-Trump right wingers terrorists

Ken Klippenstein May 13, 2026

Republished from Ken Klippenstein on Substack

Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.

Sebastian Gorka, himself a former right-wing influencer turned National Security Council principal, has been making his rounds on conservative media, giving interviews little-noticed by major media to describe the meaning and purpose behind the President’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy (which I reported on previously).

Between grandiose monologues about his vision of a crusade to save Western civilization from “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” extremism, Gorka let slip that the administration’s war on “domestic terrorism” isn’t just aimed at the left. It targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda. While Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 clearly singles out the left with its list of so-called terrorism indicators, many of them could describe people on the right as well.

Asked by Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow if there’s any “right-wing terror” or “extremism” threat, Gorka replied by pointing to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and streamer Nick Fuentes — both of whom have become vocal critics of the Trump administration — arguing they aren’t actually conservatives anyway. Here’s the exchange:

MARLOW: “ I wanna get your thoughts on any right-wing terror … Do you regard it as a threat at all or anything that's important to be considering right now?”
GORKA: “…I'm not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I'm not sure that means you're part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they're not conservatives, what's left?”

Gorka’s charge that Carlson lauds Sharia law is, to put it lightly, ridiculous.

Here’s what Carlson actually said:

CARLSON: “But you go to a country like Japan or the Emirates or Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and you see that when people are self-confident, when they’re really pleased with what they’re doing, and they believe their system is the right system — that self-confidence results in a kind of welcoming attitude. So you'll be sitting at dinner in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and you'll say, you know, I just, I'm really kind of pro-Jesus, like I'm a Christian. They’ll be like, ‘That’s so great!’
HOST: And they don’t have the same beliefs?
CARLSON: No, they’re Muslims. It's a country governed by Sharia law! — [laughs] — I mean, and they're like, ‘That's great!’

Is Carlson naive for mistaking his Four Season’s experiences in whatever Gulf monarchy with an egalitarian society? Absolutely. But “lauding Sharia law?” Come on.

I’m an absolutist when it comes to free speech, for the right and the left (and anyone inside or outside that spectrum). Gorka as a government official has no business sticking his nose into whether people define America in the same way he does.

And let’s be real: none of this is actually about extremism. It’s about the fact that Carlson, like Fuentes, recently broke with Trump — bitterly — over the Iran War. That's the real offense. So now they’re being cast as extremist threats. But to avoid alarming conservatives, the administration can't just say that — it has to first strip them of their conservative credentials, redefine them as something foreign-affiliated and dangerous, and then go after them.

That’s how the terrorism two-step works: the Trump administration just asserts that a right-winger isn’t really a right winger and then it can say it doesn’t target right-wingers. This is literally the No True Scotsman fallacy (No Scotsman puts sugar in his tea / But Ian from Glasgow does / Well, no true Scotsman does). That, in a nutshell, is how NSPM-7 can be weaponized against the right without calling it that.

You don’t have to like Carlson or Fuentes (an avowed anti-Semite who is quite easy not to like) in order to see that. Consider, for a moment, the rhetoric that likely fueled Gorka’s freakout.

Carlson has called Trump’s Iran war “the single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president, has made in my lifetime.” He has slammed the strikes as “reprehensible and immoral,” insisting the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way” and suggesting it happened “at the behest and then the demand of Israel.”

When Trump ordered strikes on Iran, Fuentes said in a social media post: “NO WAR WITH IRAN. ISRAEL IS DRAGGING US INTO WAR. AMERICA FIRST.”

You can imagine why Fuentes feels so strongly about Israel.

Taken together, that’s the substance Gorka is trying to launder out of the “conservative movement” by redefining Carlson and Fuentes as something else: in Carlson’s case, a Sharia fan.

At this point you might be wondering why none of this has been reported — a question big mouth Gorka answers in an interview with actor-turned-media commentator Dean Caine about the National Counterterrorism Strategy. Gorka beams about how little negative coverage the media have given the Strategy, calling it “delicious.”

Gorka said:

“I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy. 50 articles were written that day about the press call. Only one of them from those putzes at Politico was even slightly negative... We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”

Here Gorka is mostly right — the media really have been asleep at the wheel on this story.

I say “mostly” because I wrote a negative story about the Strategy. I’m guessing he’ll notice this one.

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Tuesday, July 21, 2026