Trump’s Red Scare

The Trump administration is reviving the McCarthy Era with unhinged attacks on the left as communist and praise for past government witch hunts and blacklists

Key Takeaways

• The Trump administration is using McCarthy-era tactics to paint the political left as terrorists. A State Department ministerial cited outdated 1970s far-left violence, despite research showing the far-right remains the deadlier threat, and misattributing recent attacks (the Trump shootings, the Annunciation school shooting) to left-wing extremism.
• The administration is attacking First Amendment-protected activities of groups and individuals it disagrees with. Stephen Miller goes further and called protesters “not normal” and “deformed,” language rooted in eugenicist traditions that effectively invites profiling of queer, gender-nonconforming, and countercultural communities overrepresented in left-wing movements.
• A State Department report on Cuba reframes protected speech as foreign subversion: It ties Black civil rights history and modern groups (National Network on Cuba, Democratic Socialists of America, and the National Lawyers Guild) to Cuban influence, casting protests and aid convoys as extremism, while openly praising McCarthy-era blacklists as a model that worked to fight “communism.”

Representatives from around 60 countries gathered in a Washington, D.C. conference room at the Department of State to hear America’s Secretary of State speak on the threat of rising far-left “political terrorism.” His evidence was a little outdated: violent acts committed in the 1970s by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades, and Revolutionary Organization 17 November.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this conference must have happened in 1975, but it didn’t. This gathering of experts and intelligence analysts happened this year. On July 16, the State Department held the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” borrowing a Nixon-era phrase that was used to describe “New Left” 1970s organizations like those Marco Rubio mentioned in his speech.

This ministerial comes at a time when the Trump administration seems increasingly focused on depicting its political opposition as “communist.” In late June, after multiple individuals affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) defeated more centrist democratic incumbents in New York primary elections, a Reuters analysis found Trump significantly increased his mentions of communism. In a two-week period following the primaries, Trump invoked communism 81 times in public comments. The Red Scare is back in vogue.

The Trump administration’s recent actions appear to be a McCarthyesque attack on ideas they don’t like or their perceived enemies by painting them as communists or terrorists. As ridiculous as these references to 1970s-era militant movements are, the attacks are no joke and invoke the worst memories from the blacklists and McCarthy era. They are intended to instill fear among the administration’s opponents and potentially have immense consequences for everyday Americans who seek to exercise their rights to free speech and association.

The Ministerial

The ministerial was the latest attempt by the administration to convince other nations to join their efforts to fight what it describes as rising far-left political violence (the evidence is thin, and the far right remains the biggest terrorism threat, according to most research). Speakers at the event included Rubio, Homeland Security Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. Other administration officials, including Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel and Secretary of the Department of Education Linda McMahon, attended the conference to participate in the closed round-table discussions.

During Rubio’s speech, he stated that there has been an “extraordinary ideological prejudice” in the way that think tanks, journalists, and academia look at political violence and extremism. In a horribly messy analogy, Rubio went on to say that there is an “unspoken understanding” among this community that “A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group” is an evil act, but “a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary” is a “tragic excess of idealism.” Rubio then pointed to the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis as an example of “left-wing violence” that was “excused.” It should be noted there were no bombs at these protests, though there was property destruction, and the killings that did occur were perpetrated by far-right activists and extremists. Rubio left out extensive evidence that the BLM protests were overwhelmingly peaceful.

All forms of political violence pose a threat to democracy, but there is also a fundamental difference between the violence from the far right and the far left. According to a report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), left-wing violence, unlike militant Islamist violence and far-right violence, tends to avoid mass-casualty targets. It is more often narrowly targeted, and more likely to engage in property destruction and arson, not murder. Oddly, given CSIS makes it clear the far left is far, far less deadly than the far right, the Trump administration keeps citing the report, which showed a small increase in left-wing terrorist incidents, to bolster its campaign.

Under the premise that the past presages the future, Rubio warned that the violence from left-wing groups in the 1970s, both in the United States and abroad, is now a precursor to “a new wave of this old evil.” Rubio’s comparison is largely an exaggeration; the truth is that today’s far-left movements do not resemble the meticulously organized and centralized groups from this era. The same CSIS report cited by the administration says that far-left perpetrators almost always operate as loosely affiliated networks or as lone attackers.

The incidents Rubio pointed to in his speech, the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump and the 2025 shooting at Annunciation Catholic School, were committed by people who even the FBI and local police have stated acted alone. The examples cited are also not far-left attacks. The first attempt on Trump’s life had no discernible motivation, and the second was motivated by an incoherent smattering of political issues. The Annunciation Catholic School shooter left behind extensive video and written journals that showed an individual who was deeply entrenched in online communities that glorify mass shooters and violence. The shooter also referenced multiple previous far-right terrorists, including Anders Breivik, Brenton Tarrant, and Peyton Gendron.

After Rubio, Miller took the stage. In a speech that can best be described as bone-chilling, Miller aimed at the “ideology” he believes is an “enem[y] of civilization.” Miller made clear that the administration will not just target violent actors within the far left, but that they intend, or at least Miller seems willing, to target the ideas and opinions held by many law-abiding Americans.

Miller, bizarrely, described individuals who participate in protests as “not normal” and “deformed in some way.” He said that people should “trust their instincts” and “know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.” This rhetoric draws on a long, well-documented tradition of authoritarian and eugenicist movements that have equated physical “deviance” (piercings, tattoos, hair color, gender nonconformity) with criminality, degeneracy, or subhuman status, using pseudo-scientific language of “normalcy” to dehumanize political opponents and justify state violence against them.

Miller is effectively encouraging profiling of anyone who visibly deviates from a narrow, unstated standard of what he thinks a “normal” person looks like. Conveniently, his view of what is “not normal” maps directly onto queer, gender-nonconforming, and countercultural communities disproportionately represented in left-wing protest movements. Earlier in the speech, Miller said the president was giving them authority to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” these alleged “political terrorists” operating in the country.

Bessent was the last to speak, describing the existing mechanisms in the United States for combating terrorist financing as it relates to the State Department’s terrorist designations. Notably, Bessent was the only speaker who mentioned respecting the “constitutional rights” of all Americans. He further said that the Treasury would act based on “suspected unlawful conduct by these terror organizations, not because of their beliefs or ideologies.”

After the ministerial, Ambassador Gregory LoGerfo provided a briefing on the results from the ministerial to the Washington Foreign Press Center at the State Department. Journalist Lotte Mejlhede from TV 2 Denmark asked the Ambassador, “What is your focus on right-wing political terrorism in this regard?” He responded that the administration is “postured” to “address political terrorism wherever it comes from.”

That is not exactly true. GPAHE’s research shows the Trump administration has systematically dismantled key federal programs, personnel, and funding dedicated to combating far-right extremism, gutting efforts across the Department of Justice, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and other agencies.

GPAHE’s investigations also detail the appointment of officials to this administration with documented ties to extremist movements or conspiracy theories and demonstrate that counterterrorism resources have been redirected away from the country’s deadliest domestic extremist threat and toward political opponents, leaving vulnerable communities with fewer protections as far-right violence continues to pose a national security risk.

The Cuba Report

Following the ministerial, the State Department released a 100-page report titled, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The report appears to be a justification for the Trump administration’s long-rumored plan to invade the island, on the pretense that they have been operating a massive influence campaign that has become ingrained into American politics and leftist identity.

The report spends significant time discussing what it views as Cuba’s connection to the 1960s black power movement in the United States. The document attributes the movement to an effort from the Cuban government to align Black Americans with Cubans against “the common enemy of white America.” The report goes so far as to call Robert Williams, an author and civil rights leader, an “early iteration of the Castro governments’ protracted effort to organize the black minority as internal revolutionary agents.” The language in the report removes agency from many of these activists and paints their actions as directed by Cuban influence and not as a reaction to racist violence in the United States.

The document is not only deeply racist, but also a direct attack on the free-speech and association rights of Americans. In a section called “Front Groups and Fellow Travelers,” the State Department lists several modern-day groups it claims Cuba has used to sow discontent in the American population. Their major target, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), is a coalition of U.S.-based groups that lobby for an end to the U.S. embargo and other restrictive U.S. policies against the island.

To malign the NNOC, the report points to a June 2026 document titled the “National Rapid Response Plan,” published and distributed by the group. The State Department casts the document as a call for violent action against federal infrastructure, citing selectively chosen phrases like “activation triggers” and “targets.” What the report fails to include is the context surrounding those words; the document specifically describes the types of actions these terms represent, including holding meetings, creating public art displays or conducting banner drops, protests, and distributing flyers, all of which are generally considered to be First-Amendment-protected activities.

The report also seeks to paint many other U.S.-based progressive organizations, including the National Lawyers Guild, The People’s Forum, CodePink, and the DSA, as deeply and inextricably linked to the Cuban regime. Their main evidence of this seems to be the groups’ ongoing exchange programs and aid convoys to Cuba. The latest of which, the March 2026 Nuestra América Convoy to Cuba, received widespread coverage on social media due to the participation of multiple online streamers, including the controversial progressive Hasan Piker, who livestreamed throughout the convoy.

The most significant problem with the report is its vilification of First Amendment-protected activities. Solidarity trips, aid convoys, and anti-embargo advocacy are constitutionally protected speech and association, not evidence of foreign control. By blurring compassion for Cubans into “being directed by Cuba,” the report revives a familiar Cold War tactic, effectively demonizing dissent as foreign-directed subversion.

Double-Standard, Less Safety

This type of government targeting of speech does not come without consequences. One only needs to look back a few decades to see the inevitable. It wasn’t that long ago when Joseph McCarthy hauled Americans in front of Senate committees and asked about their loyalties to the country. It was not that long ago that the FBI actively sought to undermine antiwar protesters and civil rights activists with their Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The FBI during this period frequently harassed civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and assisted in a raid that killed Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton in his bed while he slept next to his pregnant girlfriend.

The path the United States is heading down is well-trodden and always ends in tragedy. The report on Cuba doesn’t even attempt to separate itself from the dark past of the McCarthy and blacklists era and massive civil rights violations that ended with major reforms to the FBI and other government activities. Instead, it praises these tactics. In one passage, the report says that the “Soviet project” was sidelined in America because of “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions, and a slate of anti-communist laws at both the state and federal levels.” It also says the National Lawyers Guild “lost most of its members and institutional credibility amid the investigations and attacks of the anti-communist McCarthy era.”

The Trump administration has already spent much of this term building the machinery to prosecute its critics: executive orders stripping security clearances from and ordering investigations into former officials like Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs, a National Security Presidential Memorandum directing Department of Justice to build an internal architecture for prosecuting left-leaning protesters, and multiple criminal inquiries into his perceived enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James, former special counsel Jack Smith, and former FBI director James Comey. Federal prosecutors have also sought indictments against sitting members of Congress over a video urging troops to refuse illegal orders.

None of these actions required the pretext of the ministerial or a report about Cuba. Instead, those just serve as justification for the administration to dig deeper. The administration appears to be creating a framework that recasts constitutionally protected speech, protest, and association as foreign-directed extremism, making the next round of investigations and prosecutions easier to sell to the public.

The people affected won’t just be senators and high-profile administration critics; they’ll be the “predators” and “junkies” Miller warned against. The targets will be the protesters, the organizers, the aid workers, and the ordinary Americans whose politics, or appearance, or affiliations put them on the wrong side of what this administration has decided counts as “normal.” The next target could be anyone.