Rev Left Radio - The New Red Scare: Trump's War on the American Left

Episode Date: August 7, 2026

In this episode, Alyson and Breht examine the Trump administration's emerging campaign against what it calls "far-left terrorism." We begin with NSPM-7, the presidential directive encouraging federal agencies to investigate not only alleged political violence, but the organizations, funders, media networks, and ideological communities surrounding it. We then look at two distinct examples of this framework in practice: the sweeping Prairieland prosecutions in Texas, where defendants received extraordinarily severe terrorism-related sentences, and the separate crackdown in Minnesota following anti-ICE mobilizations and political unrest. From there, we analyze Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller's international counterterrorism summit, the effort to redirect the machinery of the War on Terror toward the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist left, and the State Department's Cuba document, which portrays socialism, anti-imperialism, Palestine solidarity, and antifascism as parts of a foreign-influenced revolutionary network. Finally, we ask whether the United States has entered a new Red Scare, what may come next, and how left-wing individuals, media outlets, and organizations can protect themselves without abandoning their political work.   Check out our new merch designs and support the show HERE Learn more here: https://revleftradio.com/ Check out Unlearning Capitalism for more political educational resources

everybody welcome back to red menace all right on today's episode alison and i figured that it would be useful for many reasons i think to explore what we're kind of tentatively calling the newest iteration of the red scare anybody that has a grasp on on you know even a tentative grasp on american history will understand that there have been periods throughout american history particularly in the 20th century uh in the rise of after the bolshevik revolution World War I, World War II, then into the 50s, there have been these iterations where the United States government turns on in different but extremely aggressive ways, the socialist, communist, anarchist movement, the Red Skares and the persecutions of the IWW. People will be familiar several decades later of McCarthyism. And what we're entering now, I think can be reasonably called a new iteration of a Red Scare by,

increasingly flailing, although incredibly aggressive, cruel, violent, and unconstitutional Trump regime, that they are now turning towards this new version of a Red Scare and internationalizing it as all Red Skares to some extent have been, tying domestic, quote-unquote, subversives to international networks of, you know, communism, socialism, anarchism, anything that threatens the system. So there's a couple different iterations of this. There's actual prosecutions of actual activists that we're going to talk about. There is the NSPM 7, which is like sort of this architecture that they put out as like a basically a policy document about the left. There's this weird convention that Miller and Blanche and Rubio held where they

articulated, you know, in real time in front of an audience, their ideology of this new red scare. So we're going to go through a lot of those details, just kind of explained the basics of the NSPM 7. We're going to discuss the Prairieland case, the Minnesota prosecutions. We're going to talk about the counterterror summit, play a clip from Rubio and Miller, a particularly grotesque one out of many grotesque moments from that summit. Then we're going to talk about the Cuba document. All these things came out kind of around a similar time. Some of them go a little bit further back in time, but they're all interlocking. They're all obviously part of a singular broad attack on the American left. And then at the end, we'll talk about whether or not

this is a new red scare, what the consequences of that be, why they're doing it now. And, you know, ways that we can keep ourselves reasonably safe without doing what they want us to do, which is like, shut the fuck up and go away. And, you know, they really want this to have a chilling effect. They want people to be scared. And, um, and we're going to get into that. And, you know, lots of organizations like when they're going through a like an objective list of the organizations and the media outlets that they're targeting um it's like so like so many of rev left guests are on there you know you you have like i mean from the ds a to the black alliance for peace breakthrough news um all of these figures are are having pressure put on them or or at least being

explicitly mentioned um and so we're very very much within the the milieu that they're targeting although, of course, they haven't mentioned us or our projects explicitly, but certainly we fall under the umbrella of what they're trying to attack. So we're going to get into that and hopefully, you know, just give people some direction, give people some objective analysis of what's actually happening and hopefully some useful ideas on just how to stay safe again without falling into the chilling effect and being quiet because at the end of the day, I just want to iterate up front. This is a historically and popular government.

Um, one thing they do not have that perhaps previous red scares did have was a mass base of popular support for, for the assault. It wasn't the entire society, but it was enough of society that they could justify it. And they kind of lack that in an interesting way, uh, now. And we saw those previous red scares fizzle out in various ways. So I'm wondering how this one will fizzle out or what is leading up to. So we'll get into all of that. Um, but first I think it's, it's important as I toss it over to Allison to

just kind of lay out exactly what this rescare consists of objectively. So, Alison, you want to take it? Yeah. So there's a couple parts to this. I think Brett mentioned like sort of the big picture, but at the moment we're seeing a pretty intense amount of federal scrutiny towards groups that would, you know, varyingly be understood as left-wing groups in the United States. And I think to start to think about how it is that this is being constructed and sort of some of the legal basis for it, looking at NSPM 7 is kind of a useful starting framing. So that's the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, I believe is what that stands for, which was released by Trump on September 25th, 2025. And as I talk about NSPM 7, I do want to try to be very careful here, because there's a lot of

stuff in NSPM 7 that sounds very new and is getting talked about as rather exceptional. But I think when you look at some of the more concrete legal analysis of NSPM 7, the thing that you see again and again is that it's actually really building on existing legal frameworks within the war on terror that go all the way back to Bush and that frankly were strengthened by Obama and Biden as well. So I want to say that up top because I think it's important for us to understand that what's happening now is it completely unprecedented. Rather, an existing framework that has been established for federal repression is sort of being retooled and pointed in a different direction. And I think that's helpful for thinking about what it is that the government is trying to do here and sort of what the scope of it is. So all of that said, broadly, NSPM 7 declares Antifa to be a domestic terrorist organization. Now, one of the difficulties with this is that it is quite ambiguous what this means from a legal perspective. There is no domestic terror registry in the United States. There's no law that's been created that establishes that. And while, you know, domestic act,

can end up on terror watch lists in the United States, the idea that a purely domestic organization can itself be a domestic terror organization really has no legal basis. This is why, going all the way back to Bush, anti-terror statutes in the United States really do focus primarily on what we call FTOs, or foreign terror organizations. And immediately after the signing of an SPM 7, actually, you can see that the Trump administration declared multiple European anti-fascist groups to be. foreign terror organizations. So they're still orienting towards that.

But despite that lack of a legal framework, NSPM 7 does say that, you know, the federal government conceptualizes Antifa to be a domestic terror organization. Again, those on the left are probably familiar with the fact that Antifa does not represent a singular organization. It's really more of a label applied to a whole bunch of rather independent groups who sometimes have overlapping tactics and strategies in opposition to fascism. but the federal government is speaking about it as if it is a discrete organization. So N.SPM 7 makes that declaration, and it basically says that there are a number of

characteristics that the federal government needs to be looking for in political actors in order to determine whether or not they are potential domestic terror threats. That involves anti-Zionist positions, what they call anti-American, anti-Christian, and radical pro-transgender values. There's this long list that is included in this memorandum of who they are. are focused on. And again, from a strictly legal perspective, all of those are opinions which are protected by the First Amendment, but something being protected by the First Amendment doesn't mean that it can't be used in some degree or another as a pretext for an investigation into something more broad. And so really, the kind of meat of NSPM 7 is actually a set of directives for the FBI,

for the IRS, and for joint terror task forces to use those indicators as a basis for investigations into crimes being committed by left-wing groups. So a little bit of context is that NSPM 7 explicitly calls out the use of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, which requires you to register as a spokesperson of a foreign agent if you are speaking on behalf and at the direction of a foreign government. This has been used against left-wing groups in the past. If you remember the weird Blackhammer cult at all, this was actually used against them. They were charged as being unregistered agents for Russia.

So there is some precedent for using this to target kind of fringier left-wing groups, and it has some basis there. So that's a part of it. There's also a discussion in an SPM 7 about using the IRS to go financially after left-wing groups, who they are alleging have engaged in various financial crimes. And then on top of that, there's an emphasis on joint terror task forces. Joint terror task forces are a sort of phenomena that comes out of the war on terror, are where the FBI works with local law enforcement agencies to do domestic terror assessment

and investigations and potentially prosecutions as well. And so those are being told that they need to focus on this domestic threat. So again, NSPM 7 kind of lays out some of what the legal strategy is here that the federal government is taking on. I think an important thing to note, though, again, is that it's not creating a new law around domestic terror. It's rather trying to use these existing laws like FARA or even trying to tie domestic groups to international FTOs so that they can be charged with material support for terror.

And in that sense, it's really building on a framework that kind of began to develop under the Bush administration, which was leveraged and used by Obama as well, and which has quite a bit of continuity with existing sort of counterterror and domestic repression in the U.S. What's kind of novel about NSPM 7 is that it's taking that existing infrastructure, which had primarily been pointed at Muslim communities in the United States and redirecting it and pointing it towards the domestic left. I think an open question in my mind is how much NSPM 7 is going to be used to kind of break with legal norms versus continue prosecutions under existing terror legal norms. We'll have to wait and see what that looks like. But big picture, this is sort of the

initial salvo that the government put out for what this kind of new domestic repression is going to look like. And maybe talking about that a little bit can help us understand some of the terrain for what's going on here. Yeah, and I think the core thing that it does practically is that it's sort of pointing federal, you know, law agencies towards this now new, not new, but emphasized political group, this new enemy category. And it's saying, focus your resources on this. A lot of how it'll actually play out and already is playing out is like subpoena.

and audits for certain organizations, certain media outlets, and they're really interested in, well, first, they have to, like, it's bullshit, but they're basically, the premise is left-wing violence is a real problem, right? And Antifa is like this boogeyman for the right and this very little understood organization by the right, but it's a perfect stand-in for radical left terrorism or whatever. So once they've established that, even amongst themselves or to their base, their constituency, and the power they have in the government, they say, There is such a thing as left-wing violence, which, as we all know, objectively pales in comparison over decades to right-wing terrorist violence. That's actually the real problem. There is left-wing political violence. We need to redirect resources and federal powers to investigating the networks, institutions, funding mechanisms, media ecosystems, etc., that lead to this political violence. So it's very funny because during like the Biden years and very over the last 10 years, there's this idea of scotac, what is it called? Stochastic. Scotastic terrorism.

And it's often applied to like, you know, right wing figures, hyping up, scapegoats and then people going out and attacking innocent and powerless communities. They're kind of taking that premise and saying that left wing violence is a result of these broader ecosystems. And therefore, to stop so-called left-wing extremist violence, we need to. look into disrupt and audits or subpoena, infiltrate, whatever, the broader networks. And those broader networks, there's no actual objective connection to international funding mechanisms or, you know, media ecosystems of like popular left-wing media figures calling for violence or anything like that. It doesn't exist.

But the boogeyman is already there. And now because they have all this power in the federal government, they can take that entire apparatus and aim it sort of at their, at their political enemy. So, you know, to be a Marxist or a socialist or a communist is not in and of itself a crime, but to be involved in that broader ecosystem, well, at the very least, you know, increasingly likely to get you monitored, looked at, have some sort of federal investigations going in the case of like breakthrough news and a few others. They're slipping in my mind. I meant to remember them and write them down. But, you know, they're, they are being audited, as I said, and subpoenaed, not only for

their financial records, because they're trying to tie financial efforts to international, so-called terrorist organizations, but they're also interested in like, you know, who are you interviewing? You know, breakthrough news was part of that Abby Martin interview of Diaz Canal, which we'll talk about when we get to the Cuba document, but it is this attempt to be like, you know, you've interviewed this person associated with this organization that. this fascist U.S. government calls a terrorist organization, you know, therefore, you know, you might be in some hot water. And even if they never actually come to prosecutions, right, even if breakthrough news is never legally charged with anything, the fact that they're now

under scrutiny, under pressure, having to turn over tax documents, having to turn over internal communications between them, each other, their guests, etc. Already is a chilling effect. Already takes, ironically, taxpayer funding. resources that all of our labor contributes to to now take this weaponry of the federal government and turn it against us, right? The people that actually, you know, make profits for these companies and actually pay taxes to this fucking shitty government. So it's just, it's disgusting.

And of course, the whole premise, as these motherfuckers commit genocide and bomb little girl schools in Iran and just slaughter people and take away health care and open up public land to private extraction, all, you know, accelerate global. climate change, just hurting people everywhere, a part of the Epstein fucking, you know, human trafficking ring and then covering up for the Epstein files. These are people that literally, you know, murder children. And their crimes are known around the world. And they are trying to say, the real criminals, the real murderous psychopaths are the people that want, you know, a better just world. And we'll get into that later because Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller,

I'm going to play the clip from them where they try to explain what motivates us. And they never once mentioned deteriorating economic conditions or, you know, people's moral repulsion at an ongoing genocide that's live streamed onto our phones or genuine moral disagreement with the way our government uses our tax dollars or, you know, operates in our name around the world. I'm not going to spoil it. We'll get to what their actual diagnosis is. But there's just this complete fever dream separation.

from what we actually care about and what actually motivates us and then this insane fascist idea of what they think actually motivates us and it's, I think, very telling about who these people are ultimately. So that's just one layer. Of course, the NSPM was put out a bit ago. Many of us will remember, you know, the things that they tell federal agencies to look out for as like anti-capitalism, anti-Christian, anybody that says something disdainful of traditional moral Americans that go to church, gender and environmental extremism, incredibly

broad categories that they can apply to basically anybody to the left of the administration itself. You know, at least you'll fall into one of those categories. If you support feminism, you're a gender extremist, right? If you oppose data centers, you're an environmental extremist. If you have criticisms of the affordability crisis or the way our economy structures, you're an anti-capitalist extremist. these are wide nets and the last thing I'll say before I toss it back over to Allison is as always yes they're explicitly saying Marxist, communist socialist anarchist, but we also know that the the range of how they view things are so wide that of course it's going to encapsulate just regular fucking liberals, regular progressives as well.

And I also don't think it's a coincidence that this comes at a time when not only is this regime historically, genuinely historically, in an unprecedented way, unpopular, but it's also at the same time where there is this affordability crisis that's starting to have not only protest movements and mass movements, which we've seen for many years, but actually now starting to puncture through to the electoral terrain with the victories of DSA candidates. And no matter what your analysis and critique of the DSA is or are, we understand that to the fascist mind, to the reactionary mind, it's all one major threat. And the midterms coming up and the surgeon of DSA-backed candidates, this is also one layer of the reasoning behind why they're doing this. And we can get more into that later. I also want

to quickly mention individuals like Fergie Chambers, who I don't know, and I've had no connections with, but I'm familiar with his presence in the broader milieu, being in trying to be extradited from Spain on charges. of funding terrorist organizations. And as far as I can understand, it's just funneling his being the heir to the Cox fortune, funneling some of that money into humanitarian efforts in Palestine. I don't know all the details,

but clearly it's a scapegoat for a broader attack on individuals and organizations. And then Kalawash, who we've interviewed on guerrilla history before, who now I believe is based out of Iran. she is also put up by these people as an individual example of left-wing crazy extremism. Has she committed any crime? Has either of these people hurt anybody? Have they robbed anybody? Have they assaulted anybody?

Absolutely fucking not. They've done no crimes while the people charging them of crimes are some of the biggest criminals in modern American and in human history. So there's just that layer of grotesquery that's there. And no matter what you feel about individual figures or, individual organizations. I think one of the things that I want to echo throughout this conversation is it's utterly crucial that we put down our differences and have each other's backs. If we start splitting and turning on each other, if we start saying, yeah, fuck that guy or I don't like that

organization, go ahead. That historically has proven to weaken all of us and it's, and it's just not the time to do so. Liberals in particular, you're not safe. So even though their first attempt, their first lashing out is explicitly more radical left-wing organizations, you know, they're coming for you too. And if you try to cut off your left wing and say, yeah, go after them. Those actually are the extremists. You'll be, you'll be next. You know, first they came for the communist. It still echoes true. So, you know, if any liberals out there are actually listening to a podcast like this, you know, don't become complacent in that way. Yeah. No, I think that's really important to say. And I think that that need for like some level of like tactical unity right now is going to

pretty crucial. I think a couple thoughts before I transition us to talk about some of the cases that are emerging out of this is one thing I do want to say briefly is that I think, right, you're really right to call out that even if the investigations that are being open with these groups never progressed to trial or formal prosecution, I think people underestimate how much just an investigation alone can really fuck things up, right? Like, the investigatory power of the federal government is huge. And I think one of the things, I've said this in the past, I'm really going to encourage people to do this again, is to really research the history of the use of grand juries against the left and to look up the history of grand jury resistance in the United States. One of the most powerful

non-prosecutorial tools that the federal government has is the grand jury system. And a grand jury, just briefly, is basically before there is even an indictment. A grand jury is a body which decides whether or not an indictment should be served to a given potential defendant. And grand juries have subpoena power. And one of the things that kind of sucks about grand juries is that if you are summoned before a grand jury via subpoena, because you are not yet being charged because it is pre-trial, you are not protected by the Fifth Amendment in terms of your ability to refuse to testify, which means that when people are summoned in front of grand juries, if you refuse to testify, you can be held in contempt of court and jailed until you are willing to testify because you are

not yet actually under, you know, being prosecuted. therefore you do not have the same constitutional protections. Additionally, in front of grand juries, you do not get a lawyer in the room with you while you are being questioned, again, because it is not technically a criminal proceeding. Historically, these have been a really big part of how the federal government has made probes and gotten information. And there is a long history of leftists in this country very valiantly refusing to testify in front of grand juries that I think is worth looking at, because again, this is one of these tools where even if it never gets to prosecution, there are ways that you can still be jailed. And that is important, I think,

to be realistic about and to understand the tools that NSPM could have even aside from prosecution. I think it's really worth thinking about how broad those federal government powers are. Absolutely. Well, let's keep going with the objective sort of analysis of what they've actually put out there. Let's see. What's next on the agenda? The Prairie Land case and the Minnesota prosecutions. Yeah. So let me jump into these. So up front, I will say I'm not going to go extremely in depth into the details of these cases. If you want, like, actually, I think a very good summary of the events around Prairie Land. Truadon just did an episode on this that I think ends up giving a pretty good, like, play-by-play breakdown of the events that led to the Prairyland case.

And so I would recommend listening to that. But broadly, Prairiland is a trial that took place in Texas in the wake of a noise demonstration, which occurred outside of an ice facility. Now, exactly what happened at that demonstration is a little bit complicated. We know that fireworks were launched. We know that gunshots were fired at some point. And again, the federal government has essentially alleged that there was an Antifa cell engaged in an ambush against ICE agents and an attack on ICE agents there. In actuality, when you start to look at the facts around the case,

it is very clear that the people who were there had varying levels of connection to each other. I think many did not even understand the possibility that. that firearms would be present. There was not some conspiracy or ideological planning, which took place ahead of time. There were pretty loose connections related to that. And the defendant who has been convicted in relation to the shooting has said that the shot, you know, has put forward to defense, you know, questioning whether or not the shot was fired in the first place. And also putting forth that it would be self-defense if it was because federal officers and police drew guns first. Again, I don't want to get into the details of the exact.

Act events that took place. The important thing about Prairie Land is that Prairie Land's the entire prosecution has been built around this idea of an Antifa cell and an Antifa conspiracy and has specifically cited NSPM 7 as sort of the basis for the prosecution. So this really is one of the first cases of putting teeth to a lot of what has been done there. And in this case, again, what we saw, I think was a massive overreach of the federal government. People who were not even present were prosecuted. People who left way before the shooting even took place as soon as they were told to disperse by police officers were prosecuted. And if you've seen much news about the Prairieland case, you probably know that people who were present and even some people who

were not were given up from 30 to 70 years sentences, these just absolutely absurd sentences. The judge in the case was very extremely biased in favor of the government, according to pretty much all accounts there. And the sentence, judge in the case who was actually separate than the trial judge explicitly stated that the long sentences were meant to send a message to people who share an ideology with the defendants. So you could not be much more clear about sort of the red scare aspect to the Prairie Land case. The Prairie Land case obviously very horrific. These are absurdly long sentences for what people were charged with.

One person got 30 years for moving a box of zines out of their car. Like literally, this is the kind of overcharging that we are talking about. It is absolutely absurd. And a couple of the things that are interesting in the Prairieland case, obviously, is that it, you know, appears there was a good bit of government judge shopping to get the case in front of judges who would give them the result that they want, which is always a concern with these federal cases where they have a fair bit of leeway about where they're going to make the prosecution happen exactly.

The court was closed off to the public much of the time, which reduced the ability for supporters of the defendants to be able to get there. And we also saw some pretty terrifying stuff in terms of government surveillance with Prairie land. In the case of Prairie Land, we actually discovered that signal, while it itself has pretty okay security, if you do not, or if you have message previews turned on, the content of those message previews was being stored in your iPhone's history, even if the message themselves was encrypted. And so they were actually able to get signal message information as a part of that prosecution. I think that's going to be one of the key lessons here is that even secure tools are not

often as secure as people think they are, and we really saw that in the Prairieland case. The other case that I think is important to think about here is an emerging case that is happening right now in Minnesota with the prosecution of several activists, even a professor, and I believe there might be a couple journalists in this, who were involved in sort of anti-ice organizing in Minnesota. They are being charged specifically with attempts to obstruct and disrupt federal law enforcement, and the government has again made arguments that they are Antifa or have ties to Antifa and has access to some signal chats in this case. How they got access to those is not quite clear. But we are again seeing this kind of pretty intense federal crackdown happening

here against people who mobilized in Minnesota to try to protect their communities from ICE kidnappings. And I think what is very clear is that these are both kind of early attempts of the government to do the types of prosecution that NSPM 7 points to. In both cases, again, it's not like any new law is being invented, but the idea of Antifa as a discrete domestic terror organization is being invoked as a justification for a broader conspiracy charge and conspiracy framework. And I suspect this is broadly what we are going to see. Since the government doesn't quite have the ability to actually say Antifa is a domestic terror organization, again, because there is no registry for that, they're going to say, well, this ideological affinity with Antifa is the basis on which conspiracy

can be added into these charges. We see it in both of these cases. I think that is probably the move that we will continue to see. And I think both these cases obviously need to be looked at closely to understand what these prosecutions look like. The other thing that I'll say that I think makes it worth highlighting is that we need pretty intense solidarity mobilizations with the defendants in both of these cases. The Prairieland cases will be making appeals. Those appeals will probably take years. Hopefully those can go somewhere, but we need continued support and outrage around this so that we, you know, these people hopefully are not facing 70 years in federal prison. In addition, the Minnesota case, which does not yet have convictions, obviously need similar

support. And I think these point to the need for broader support structures on the left for people facing this kind of repression. So if NSPM 7 sort of set the kind of playbook that's going to be used, these are sort of the two cases, I think, that show in actuality what that looks like moving forward. And I would encourage our listeners to go look into the details and study both of them. They've gotten quite a bit of mainstream news coverage, actually, which I think is fairly positive in reality and needs to kind of be pushed forward so that everyone, even sort of mainstream normie liberals, know what is happening here and ideally are quite enraged about it. I think we really need to push these issues. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm working on episodes for both for both cases. to some extent, trying to do our tiny part to continue to follow these cases and get the word out

and hopefully create an episode that maybe you could hand to, you know, liberal friends or liberal aunts that could inform them about what's happening as well and get more people on board with pushing back. But as you said, in the Prairieland case, there are appeals and there's genuine, deep, legal ground for these appeals to succeed. But as you say, sometimes it is just the process itself that is the punishment. So even if some of these people do get radically reduced sentences, ultimately, they'll have, by that time, their lives not totally ruined, but totally fucked in a lot of ways, at least in the interim. But there's organizations, I looked up some of the organizations, Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Texas Civil Rights Project, National Lawyers Guild,

Abolitionist Law Center, and several others. These are more legally based organizations that are part of this appeal process with varying degrees of success, based on. on, you know, some of the people's actual, like, you know, one person was just like in an Emma Goldman book club. And, you know, one person just moved some zines. And they're getting decades in prison. And for, you know, so there is some pushback there. There's organized legal resistance. There's appeals. That's important. And having those things follow through, having us continue, us, I'm meaning the broad left, continue to follow, show solidarity in whatever ways that we can. and to any extent that we operate on the electoral terrain as a terrain of struggle,

any candidate that wants to be associated at all with progressivism or the DSA also need to do what they can if they get to positions of power within the House or the Senate to focus on this stuff, to push back on this stuff, to use their power to bring in the bully pulpit of that power, to bring more light to these cases and help from above as we help from the bottom up. And one thing is for damn sure, organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and the ACLU and a lot of these other organizations or anybody in the milieu that is a lawyer, these things are going to become incredibly important because a lot of these struggles will take place on the legal front. So much of these policy documents are setting a foundation for these types of prosecutions. And so, you know, insofar as we have organized resistance on the legal terrain, as well as on the street terrain, as an organizational terrain, as well as on the electoral terrain, those things I think all need to play their role in this broader ecosystem to get these people out and to fight back against the straight up fascist crackdown on their perceived political enemies. I also looked up, because I mentioned earlier, some of the organizations I couldn't remember off the top of my head.

I think it's important that we actually named them. the Republican-led House Ways and Means Committee issued subpoenas to Breakthrough News, the People's Forum, and Tri-Continental, the Institute for Social Research, I think that's associated with Vijay Prashad and comrades like that doing like anti-imperialist analysis and stuff like that. People's Forum is more of organization and breakthrough news as more of a media outlet. So they're just being subpoenaed for their financial and communications stuff. The House investigation has focused on answer coalition, PSL, Party for Socialism and Liberation, stuff like that.

The DSA has been named, so we're going to get to the Cuba report in a bit. But the exact organization is named in the Cuba report include the DSA, the People's Forum, the National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, Communist Party USA, national network on Cuba, Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, all of these figures. individuals, they're not necessarily being charged with anything or targeted, but have been named in these broader processes include Hassan Piker, Amy Goodman, Chris Smalls, Zoran, Momdani, Ben Cohen, Karen Bass, and others. So that's just some of the, some of the milieu, some of the people, individuals, organizations, media outlets that are explicitly being talked about in the context of this new Red Scare. And regardless of how you feel about any one of these people or these organizations, again, I think Allison and I are a united front when it comes to this fascist government. You know, we have to have each other's back despite our disagreements. Those disagreements will always be there. We can still struggle over them. But the moment people start going to prison, the moment people start having their lives ruined

because of just being in the milieu that you and I and everybody listening are in, that is a cause for nothing but solidarity. And we have to learn from the past when that solidarity has been broken. You know, it only serves the interest of the common enemy of all of us. And really increasingly the common enemy of life on fucking earth, the way that not just this administration, but this whole government explicitly, this administration, though, treats the biosphere, treats endangered animals, treats children in West Asia, children here. It is an all-out assault on life and human dignity. And that is no time for needless petty sectarianism, to say the least. Yeah. No, I'm in strong agreement there.

think it's very important that this is denounced, kind of regardless of which left-wing groups they're going after. I think there are obviously some pretty huge concerns here for how wide it could spread, and it's very necessary for us to push back. I think the other thing that you mentioned that, like, we had talked about in our previous episode on the DSA, too, is that I do want to say, like, for those on the broader left who are interested in electoralism, like, making the electeds who you are trying to get into power talk about this, making them condemn it, making them use their position to push back against this is like pretty much like the lowest bar in my mind. That is what you need to be doing and pushing. And I do think like credit to some of the DSA people who I

think have really acknowledged the necessity of that. But it's pretty important because I think in reality, regardless of like my conception of like a lot of these DSA candidates and whether or not they are socialist, uh, the federal government sure fucking thinks they are. Right. And them winning and getting these advances I think is very much a part of what is actually leading to the crackdown. And I think, you know, in the last sort of like two weeks, we've seen this kind of pretty intense media focus on DSA. We've seen Fox News have DSA folks on. They were kind of asking one of the DSA leaders, Megan, about like the DSA platform. Do you really want to abolish this, abolish that, like going through the list?

And there's a pretty big frenzy. I think it was like two days ago, Bill Maher did a bit talking about the Marxist Unity Group, which is kind of fucking insane. Look it up. actually. Like this is a big thing in the news and in the media right now that I think is laying the foundation. And so for those who are pushing in that electoral terrain, I think like really making sure that part of your electoral push is getting these elected officials to use their positions to fight against this repression is really crucial. That's kind of one of the key things that I want hit upon. Yeah. And that I think is going to be really, again, like for me, that's the low bar you

need to hit. Absolutely. And, and, you know, there's many reasons for this. We're going to to sprinkle them in throughout the conversation. Of course, one of them is just this dramatic turn on the American left against Israel. That's the layer of it. It's not the entire explanatory apparatus. It's not the whole thing. There's many other reasons while they're doing this. We can get into more as the conversation continues.

But certainly this crackdown has this internationalist element. In the case of, like, Fergie Chambers is already connecting it to humanitarian relief for Palestine. And so, you know, we can't. And this is a deeply insanely Zion. administration through and through all the major figures within it are hardcore Zionists. They've participated in one degree or another in the actual genocide of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in historic Palestine, occupied Palestine. So this is another escalation in part against anti-Zionism on the left more broadly.

And so we can't lose sight of that either. But now I think, unless you have anything else to say, Allison, we can move to the the counterterror summit. Yeah, one last thing that I want to say, I think specifically on that last point, is this is where I do kind of want to emphasize like the continuity a little bit, right? Like going after Fergie Chambers for bringing money to relief organizations and saying that that is somehow support for terror and this extradition, this does again play into this more longstanding kind of repression that has happened around Palestine, right?

And so I think like the big case that people might have some familiarity with. and I think we have talked about before is the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, right? Which happened under Bush, where the U.S. government basically found that, like, it did not matter if this charity did not know that money was ending up in the hands of groups designated as FTOs after they sent it to Palestine. The fact that it ended up there at all was a basis for a material support for terror charge. So again, like, there's this, like, very intense continuity here that I think is very important to point out, because a lot of this does talk. about this as like kind of a unique break in terms of the development of American fascism. And in some ways there is, you know, rupture alongside that continuity. But a lot of it is building on the historical Islamophobic and Zionist foundations of the war on terror already. And I do think like when we think

about like the Fergie Chambers case especially, drawing those parallels is really important because this isn't strictly speaking new. And this actually really does go back decades at this point. And it's important to understand that continuity and how central that kind of kind of like Zionist anti-terror framework has become in U.S. federal repression and U.S. federal policy generally. Absolutely. Now, going to this counterterrorism summit where Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller were really the main speakers and Scott Besson also got up and spoke as well, this, I think, what the part

of the puzzle that this fills is the internationalization of the NSPM 7. So the NSPM 7 is fundamentally a domestic. focused sort of document where it's talking about far left extremists domestically, etc. This summit is an attempt to internationalize it and to say that the domestic left in the United States is actually a node in a global network of terrorism. And that network, including the left in the United States, right, dissidents in the United States is now eligible to be included, in fact, is being included in the broader counterterrorism. You know, force internationally.

And it's, again, to speak on the Palestine issue, there's an explicit connection between two major threats to Western civilization, what they call jihadist terrorism, Islamism, by which they mean, you know, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Ansar al-A, anybody that is fighting for self-determination and emancipation from occupation or standing up against U.S. imperialism in West Asia are already documented, anybody that is anti-Zionist in that context, of course, are already and have long been designated terrorist organizations. And now this counterterror summit is an attempt to take that and glue it together with the international left and to try to say that these two groups are actually working in tandem, which is a core fear of Zionism more broadly,

that the left is working with the the Islamic extremists. The left extremists and the Islamic extremists are coming together. And there, of course, has been genuine solidarity rooted in like moral principles in anti-imperialism and a belief in self-determination between those around the world who are opposed to imperialism and opposed to colonialism and those that are in specifically West Asia fighting for their own self-determination, fighting against brutal occupation. And so, of course, those two things have come together, and there have been, you know, various forms of soft solidarity between those groups. And we see somebody like Abdul Al-Said running as a DSA-ad adjacent candidate in Michigan front and centering the Palestine issue in tandem with a broader sort of democratic, socialist economic project that he wants to pursue. So this is really scaring. There's no other way to put it, the ruling class. And whether it's liberal Bill Maher or it's, you know, fucking psycho-fascist Stephen Miller,

they're the ruling class, their interests are aligned with the ruling class, and they have a deep interest as ideological Zionists and also as incredibly rich and powerful millionaires. In Miller's case, politically powerful. In Mar's case, you know, just a multimillionaire piece of shit, to tie these two groups together and to defame them. And there's an all-out assault doing precisely that. The big thing from Rubio, I believe this is like they're kind of working together here. Rubio is, I'm going to play a clip here in a second, but broadly, Rubio is supplying a sort of geo-political frame to this. He's saying that the threat, quote unquote, is international, that it's organized, that is foreign influenced.

And then Miller comes in and kind of supplies an ideological framework that we on the left, which you're about to hear in a second, is a fund. Not only are we deceptive and manipulative, but we're hostile to civilization itself. We're hostile to everything true and good and beautiful, which you'll hear explicitly here in a second. But the logic of it kind of results in this. When the left protests repression, right? That just proves that they're hiding something. When lawyers invoke constitutional rights, literal civil liberties, Stephen Miller spent some time attacking civil liberties as like that when the left claims their civil liberties are being impinged upon that it's actually a form of manipulation.

So that when lawyers invoke constitutional or civil rights, you know, that is now viewed as obstruction. So we're hiding something. Our invocation of constitutional rights and civil liberties is a manipulation tactic that is just an act of obstruction. And when journalists or independent media outlets challenge their narrative, this makes them part of the broader enabling ecosystem. So you have lawyers and journalists and the left more broadly all part of this international terrorist organization. And so what the, again, what the NSPM 7 did domestically, this takes and internationalizes it, connects it with already existing, you know, recognized in the West and in the U.S. as terrorist organization, connects the domestic left with those foreign

terrorist organizations, which now builds up a, and even even more, you know, broad and robust in their view, legal framework to attack the left as a genuine transnational security threat, right? So I think that's the fundamental move being made here, but I have a clip I'm going to play. It's about three minutes long. It's a little clip from Rubio and a little clip from Miller. And if nothing else, it just emphasizes, as I was telling Allison, before we started recording, that these are total fascist fucking. worms and freaks and their disgusting sort of attempt to psychoanalyze us is like this insane projection of their own, you know, insanities and neuroticisms and, you know, the fascist fever

dream, which I think, maybe not in this clip, but maybe so. Rubio actually anticipates. He says, you know, what we're doing here labeling the domestic left is this international terrorist organization. It's not actually a fascist fever dream. It's actually. It's actually. true. So he's already kind of anticipating what shows a glimmer, perhaps, of self-awareness, but who knows. So I'm going to click play here and, yeah, just listen to it and we'll discuss it. This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build,

who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialists or communist or anarchist but the fundamental character is always the same it's always the same it is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice liberation an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. And here's Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller. The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy,

by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids. It goes to church every Sunday. and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet, and they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering. It's not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations, and you see any photograph of those who were assembled, to be blunt,

not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one, looks normal. They're all deformed in some way in their rebrand. appearance in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that? Why, if you look at two photographs and you see a normal American street, you see an Antifa protest, why do the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation

of their inner hatred. all right before i say anything alison what's your what's your immediate thoughts on that yeah this clip is wild um you know there's so much going on here i think like there are sort of like three layers that i think you can look at and i'll maybe work backwards i mean with like miller what's really interesting right is like miller is trying to do this like i think very classic fascist framing of like the leftist or the communist as like this dysgenic ugly disgusting phenotype, right? I actually think like this physiognomy kind of idea that comes up in here really like does gesture back to classic fascist depictions of leftists and like the Judeo-Bolshevik

figure as like the shriveled anti-Semitic caricature of the Jewish communist, right? Like he's so explicitly drawing on historical fascist kind of imagery in his sort of, you know, evoking this idea of what the leftist looks like. And I think like, It's pretty shocking, actually, to hear it done that explicitly. I also think your average American, unfortunately, is too historically illiterate to draw those connections. And so I think it's necessary for us to try to draw those because they are definitely there. And I think that is, you know, quite, quite scary, actually, to hear that invoked. The other thing is I think, like, this whole clip from Miller is doing two things.

It's like defining the leftist, and then it's like defining the American, right? in kind of contrast to each other. And, you know, I was telling you ahead of this, ahead of this, Brett, but, like, it's really funny that I think Miller invokes this idea of, like, the perfect American family that goes to church, which is, like, a kind of caricature of, like, the ideal system that excludes Stephen Miller because he's Jewish and doesn't go to church, right?

There's this very bizarre, I think, like, almost like assimilationist self-hatred in Miller that you see there. If we want to psychologize in reverse, I think you could definitely do some really interesting stuff there. But again, like this very Christian nationalist idea of what the ideal citizen looks like is being invoked here. And then I think across Miller and Rubio, like, there's sort of what I just think is a sort of like crass and Nietzscheism, right? Like very much this attempt to like read the left as caught up in like Nietzschean Rizantamant and basically like denial of life and hatred for life and a purely like nihilistic urge to tear things apart. And this is definitely like a niche in read that fascists have done historically of communists and of the left generally.

And so I think obviously, again, there's like continuity with fascist history here. And like at the end of the day, like arguing with the psychologization that fascists are trying to do is kind of like a losing game, I think. But I also do just think anyone who actually organizes, anyone who actually does work on what one would call the left could tell you that like it is way too hard and difficult work to do it purely out of spite and nihilism, right? No matter how much I hate the ruling class for their actions and for the things that they have done, that would not be sufficient for me to spend my time doing the kind of organizing work that I do. It is a simple fact that the thing that keeps me going as an organizer is the beautiful moments where communities come together. They win fights. Neighbors affirm their love and care for each other. They understand themselves as part of a bigger thing where they claim physical space.

They hold parties. They have these kind of celebrations in relation to the struggle. it really is the positive vision of life that is the only thing that could make this worthwhile, I think. And in that sense, I think, you know, there's an incredible reverse psychology going on with these fascists, these fascists who want to take a country like Cuba, this beautiful project that has been premised on the idea of a fundamental human dignity and tear it down

and turn it back into a mob-controlled island with likely some form of slavery, right? The real nihilism, the real hatred for life, the real kind of desire to create, crush and the real resentment is purely in Miller and Rubio's own psychological framework, I think. And this is always what is so fascinating about fascism is fascism wants to project itself as this big, strong, life-affirming thing. And at the end of the day, it's kind of like a sniveling little shit. That's like it's actual psychology. And I think you see that very clearly as they try to

project that outward onto others. Even just the tone that they take here rinks at Rzantamont itself. And so, as is always the case, I think it is the fascists who Nietzsche would be. most disappointed with here, perhaps. Yeah, I'm just going to talk my petty shit for a second here. When I, you're a sniveling little shit. That is Stephen Miller. When you look at Stephen Miller, do you think beautiful and good and true? Is he some Adonis figure?

No, he's a gerbils type, wretched little fucking creature that I could fucking bench press for reps. He is not some overarching big, masculine man that he thinks of, that he thinks himself to be. they talk about building civilization. What has Stephen Miller built? What has Marco Rubio built? They've built for themselves very successfully, sadly, these snaky, self-serving little shitty careers in a historically unpopular fucking fascist government

where their main thing that they do is cause suffering and pain on innocent people that don't have as much political power as they do. And he explicitly said, Antifa, they're weak people who, inflict pain and suffering out of their weakness? What the fuck do you do? What does Lindsay Graham do? What does Donald Trump do? What does Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio do? Their whole fucking life project is really can be boiled down to inflicting pain and suffering on people with less power than them and less resources than them

out of their own neurotic inner weaknesses. They don't build anything. They don't create anything. They haven't innovated anything. You know, they've attached themselves to this like little barnacles or parasites to this grotesque fascist fucking movement in the U.S. that even, you know, the vast majority of Americans fucking detest and hate and spit on. And when Stephen Miller gets up there and shows his face to people, most people recoil. When they start hearing what he has to say, they recoil.

They cringe because he's a disgusting fucking human being. And so, you know, this whole attempt to tell us what our motivations are. The smartest, most thoughtful, most loving people, in some cases, the coolest and the hottest. modest people that I've ever met have been people that are dedicated to trying to create a better world for others that are sacrificing their time and their energy to try to build up a future for other people, even a future that they themselves might not inhabit. You know, there's actually a desire to build. It is obstructed. It is prevented by this apparatus of imperial and colonial and

capitalist slaughter and extraction. But actually, we do want to build. We want to build a better world where people are emancipated from, from arbitrary forms of suffering and oppression and exploitation. So, I mean, this whole thing is grotesque. There is something that is always projecting wildly in the fascist imagination. So much of what they indict on others is their own inner wretchedness.

Like, what is the inner life of Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio? What, what wonderful contributions spiritually or even materially have they contributed to any other than themselves. This whole Trump administration is this self-serving apparatus that chews and spits out other people for its own enrichment and its own power for its own sake. So, you know, always the fascist is talking about Western decline.

Always the fascist is fixated on themselves as these Atlas that shrugged, right? These builders of, and they don't do anything. And in fact, their presence on the global stage, their presence in political power, is the fucking decline of Western civilization that they themselves protest against so much and project onto others. We don't have the power. We're not leading this fucking society. We're not leading the West. You are and it's decaying and becoming decrepit under your oversight according to your ideology. And so there is just this grotesquery. I had to play it. I had to talk a little petty shit as well. But yeah, I think when most normal people hear these assholes talk like that, the hypocrisy is

is evident and just the repulsive recoiling from who these people are to their core and what they're saying, I think, is palpable for most normal people. Speaking of normal people, normal families, I think most people are turned off by this. You have to be ideologically distorted

by being in right-wing echo chambers to listen to this and think that's fucking cool, man. Yeah, I actually think your average American just isn't a weird Nietzschean, actually. That's kind of unique to some. on the far right and the far left perhaps. Absolutely. Yeah, so I don't know.

There's not a lot of substance there, but I just wanted to play that to give you just a little insight. When you're, you know, a lot of people listening, you know, you're looking over, you have partner, you have kids, you have comrades, you're in organizations with. Does anything they say match up with the reality of the people in your life, the people who believe what you believe, the people who are struggling alongside you, fighting for tenants rights, organizing tenants against slum lords, doing mutual aid work, Does any of that resonate with the people that you know and love in your community that are doing those sorts of things?

Absolutely fucking not. Right. No, totally. And I think, like, the only other thing to mention on the summit is that I do think, you know, the thing aside from their comments and they're psychologizing that you're correct about, that you talked about before the clip, and that might transition us nicely into the Cuba thing, is they are trying to spin this idea that even purely domestic actors in the United States are part of a broader international phenomenon, right? that's very clearly the move that they are trying to make. And I think under Trump, we've seen this like pretty intense pivot towards like an international fascist alliance, basically. That has looked like working with Orban in Hungary, for example, but also I think more

directly and closer to home, that's looked like the establishment of the shield of the Americas under Trump in which all of these right-wing fascist governments across Latin America are being brought directly into cooperation with the U.S. There are, I think, very clear parallels to Operation Condor. There is the recent election in Peru in which Bujamori won and immediately declared a state of exception and a state of emergency, very similar to her father when he fought against the Shining Path there. There really is this return to kind of a Cold War-style anti-communist, fascist international.

And that is, I think, intrinsically tied up with the domestic repression and with the idea that domestic left wing groups are a part of an international sort of body of communist or anti-imperialist organizing in some way. And I think the Cuba doc that we'll get to next really lays out the most coherent attempts that they've made at telling that conspiracy. Yeah. And I think, you know, there is this problem they have, which is like these people they want to destroy, they want to strangle, they want to annihilate. There is, there are a growing number of people, including lots of young people coming up in this society who are. on the side of the Palestinians who recognize the humanity of the Cubans and not only that,

but who spread that around in their own social circles on social media, within organizations, within independent media. We are bringing objective analysis to these things with a human fucking heart. We refuse to dehumanize the people that imperialism wants to destroy and colonialism wants to steal the land of and destroy. And that is a problem for their broader project. So they need to attack the very idea that their, enemies are human and this this speech itself is dehumanizing us they're turning us into these

cretness angry resentful jealous little freaks that only lash out violently and only have the political ideology that we do because we are sort of subhuman in the you know we hate humanity we hate everything beautiful and good and true and that we're fundamentally driven by envy and resentment and jealousy which again goes harkens back to nietzsche and beyond um you know the the slave morality and all of this bullshit. But it is fundamentally an attempt to dehumanize us. And I just have to ask before we move on to Cuba, okay, we're jealous. Who are we jealous of?

People listening, are you jealous of Stephen Miller? Do you wish you were Marco Rubio? Right. Do you wish you were Trump or any of Trump's fucking kids? Do you wish you were Mark Andreessen or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman? Who exactly are we jealous of? What do we want? Do I want to have the lives of any of them?

If you said you could switch, you could switch lives right now. Jealous little lefty with any of the great men of history. Would you switch lives with any of them? Fuck no. Me being put into the body and mind of Stephen Miller would be hell. Would be like satanic torture. I would do anything to not have that fate in any of these figures. I don't look on them with jealousy.

I don't want billions of dollars. You know, I don't want to have insane personal power over others. I don't want any of that. I want my family, my community, and humanity at large to live a decent, dignified life where we have autonomy and freedom and democratic input into the economy and the political system and that my kids and my kids' kids' kids and your kids' kids can live in a biosphere that is stable, that is harmonious, that is overflowing with life, and that the resources of this planet are put to increasing the quality of life for all human beings. The reason we care about Cubans and Palestinians

and Venezuelans and Iranians is not because we're jealous, resentful little Cretans, it's because we're fucking human beings and we have hearts that beat in our fucking chest and we see ourselves in the other. And we do not say, I just want mine and fuck everybody else. We see other human beings genuinely

as our brothers and our sisters, as our siblings on this planet and animals themselves, the biosphere itself, as family, and we want to protect. We are fundamentally motivated on the whole by a need to love and protect and create a better future for all living creatures, all sentient beings on this planet.

They don't feel that way. So they can't imagine other people actually do. On some level, they can't imagine feeling like that towards other people. And so they look at us and they say they care about those people. There's no way. It must be something else. It must be jealousy. It must be these other things.

It must be envy. Anne Randi and Nietzsche and bullshit. No, really, you just can't conceptualize giving a fuck about somebody that's not you and yours. You don't look at a Palestinian mother and feel that heartbreak. They literally don't. You could put Stephen Miller fucking clockwork orange style in front of a projector and show him human suffering in Cuba and Iran and Palestine. And his heart rate won't fucking beat up because he's a fucking sociopath. And all these people are.

So I just wanted to make that point because jealousy is not only a core argument of what they're saying, but is a longstanding ideological argument within the right for literally centuries. No, absolutely. Well, yeah, we can go, we can go to the Cuba document because I think this is just another layer of what's already been happening here. Yeah, so let me dive into this for us. So on top of all this, and again, I think like what we're moving towards here is them making this kind of international conspiracy framework a little more concrete. This document was released by the State Department. Margar Rubio released it with a statement like, the American people deserve to know the influence that Cuba has had on the United States.

And go read this document. It's about 100 pages. You should probably read it. It's probably worth looking into it's a fascinating insight into how they are conceptualizing things. Fascinatingly, I think this document rules on whether or not Castro was a revisionist, which is kind of a wild coming from the State Department. There's some really interesting stuff in there that you should wrestle with. And you can actually kind of also see some of the leftist histories of domestic left-wing movements

that the feds are reading to inform some of this. So a very fascinating read. But this document does a couple things. I think most importantly, it traces this history of the development of communism in Cuba and tries to basically argue that, like, Cuban communism has taken a unique form that is distinct from its Soviet communism. And that really has, like, this third worldist orientation towards it. And that Cuba has essentially sought to internationalize a sort of third worldist communism. And as part of its framework, it basically tries to argue starting pretty far back and moving up

through the new left and then into modern day American politics, that domestic communist groups in the United States are essentially foreign influence operations by Cuba and that basically any sort of far left ideology in the U.S. is being exported from Cuba and then adopted here. Interestingly, the only group that they really don't accuse of being directly controlled by Cuba is the DSA who they're like, oh, even worse, the DSA just organically landed on it. But this is kind of the broader framework. And again, really trying to paint this idea that like the very reason there's a left in the U.S. at all is purely because of human influence. And the idea that Americans themselves could land in terms of leftist ideas is impossible,

has to be conspiratorial. And the ending paragraph basically says, like, the children of the West have been taught by the, you know, Cubans to hate their inheritance, right? that's kind of the idea that is being invoked here. And, you know, the Cuba document has a couple really scary things like Brett mentioned earlier. It names a lot of people by name. It names one of the Benigeri guy, Ben Cohen is on there. Names Hassan, many others. It names the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass.

Again, pretty broad, not just talking about far left figures, but progressives. And even Bass, I would call a centrist Democrat, honestly. So a very broad brush there. But I think the overall goal of this document is, again, to try to try to provide some cohesion to this idea of like a left-wing international that now they are proposing Cuba is really at the core of. And this sort of embrace of the far right of the term third worldism to describe what they are fighting against. I think you see in this document very clearly. They basically are conceptualizing Islamism and communism and anti-imperialism as part of like

this broader, it's almost like an Islamobolshevik sort of conspiracy. that is being put forth here with Cuba now as like the state that they are trying to pin as the sort of basis of all of this. And so in terms of like why this matters, I mean, the thing that I really want to emphasize is that again, NSPM 7 is limited in what it can do because the domestic frameworks don't exist. But NSPM 7 does already tell the federal government to prosecute under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. They already have access to material support terror charges for supporting FTOs. And so I think all of this attempt to set up the idea that domestic groups are fundamentally an extension of the Cuban state is really also trying to set the stage for legal

prosecution that can use some of these more foreign focused laws as a basis for domestic repression. And so I think, again, like, this is a very strange document. It provides this like sprawling history of the new left. Again, it kind of calls the Cuban's revisionists in a fascinating way. like it clearly has in, you know, taken in some left-wing literature about some of these questions actually and integrated it into its analysis. But mostly, I think, is about setting the stage for, again, the use of those laws that really are designed to be focused on foreign groups to be turned domestically. And that's kind of the main reason that I think it's worth wrestling with. And I think, again, stressing this continuity thing, a lot of this domestic repression that we're seeing right here isn't about creating new legal frameworks, but is about retooling. Bush and Obama era legal frameworks towards domestic repression. And this might be the sort of

like conspiratorial meta-narrative that they are invoking in order to justify that. Absolutely. Let me put this out there. You mentioned how the sweeping history of, of the left, these individual figures, the intra-left politics of revisionism within Cuba and the accusation, I would argue that this is probably, possibly, I would bet money an AI-generated document. I don't think anybody in the Trump and Minutes. has that good of a grasp on the history of left-wing movements and the ideologies. I just genuinely do not think that you could create anybody in that milieu to come out and write that out and to actually have that understanding. It's not necessarily impressive, but it has these nuances of analysis and

this historical sweep that I don't think anybody in the Trump administration genuinely is capable of. And anybody in that milieu to write this document, maybe they went and hired a couple of professors with conservative sympathies or something to hammer this out. But I would just say if gunned to my head I had to make a bet, I would say this is largely or completely AI generated. What do you think about that? Yeah, you have to wonder, right? It does seem like if AI was used here,

they fed several texts to it, basically, that come from leftist sources. Exactly. So that's neither here nor there, but, you know, it serves the same purpose in the end no matter what. Yeah. But, okay, Allison said all the main objective things you need to know. I'm just going to do a little analysis.

is here. The idea that like, you know, the left in the U.S. is like brainwashed into some extent or overly influenced by like this Cuban espionage media, you know, tentacle force thing that brainwashes us. Just so, so funny because I think, well, one, politics aside, any objective reading of Cuban history, regardless of your, of your partisan and ideological commitments. If you just try to take as objective of a reading as possible, the revolution was totally, utterly, completely justified as a national revolution against depression and a public dictatorship. So there's just that level. I think you're brainwashed and supporting Cuba by just understanding the fucking history and having a heart that works. But also this idea, and again,

here's this wild projection. To become a socialist, Marxist, communist, in the United States, right for the most part if you're going to be like serious as a serious educator or serious organizer or somebody that really grasps and is motivated by core values and principles think about how much work you have to do to just undo the propaganda and brainwashing of the conditioning in our society we are not lefties and marxist and communist because we were somehow fed these fucking communist lies since we were children quite the opposite we were fed cold war anti-communist shit all the way through our lives, the fact that any of us were able to overcome that and to actually educate ourselves and break out of that and become socialist or communist or Marxists is actually a

testament to the fact that we're not brainwashed by propaganda. We actually study philosophy and history and economics. We learn about the world that it actually is outside of the propaganda that assholes like this are not only inculcated with themselves, but are trying to perpetuate right now. We have to break out of that to come to these conclusive. On the other hand, to be a right-wing conservative or radical freak reactionary in the United States, there's actually a propaganda system that does that. From Peter Thiel backing up looks maxing and clavicular for his transhumanism ideas and the influence and penetration of these tech oligarchs into the Rogan sphere from Fox News,

pickling the brains of boomers across the country to the rise and the perpetuation of the manosphere. and figures like Andrew Tate, the Zionist takeover of TikTok and CBS and CNN and all. That's the algorithms, the way they're constructed, Mark Zuckerberg putting on a chain and an oversized shirt and going on Rogan after Trump was about to win the presidency to fucking, you know, say he's not woke anymore. Like that is actually the apparatus of taking young people in this society and trying desperately with billions and billions and billions of dollars and the most powerful people in this country behind it. to push people into a convenient ideological space,

which is some flavor of reactionary right-wing ideology. That is actually the brainwashing that's happening. And of course, millions and millions of people get swept up by it and get pushed over into that direction. So, again, wild projection, wild projection. But fundamentally, what is this doing? This is setting up a pretense not only for what seems like an inevitable assault on Cuba. I don't know when they'll do it.

Maybe they'll wait until after the midterms. You know, you can imagine a midterms in which there's like, you know, a blue wave. Democrats take the House and the Senate. Then the administration becomes more vociferous, more aggressive, more belligerent, launches an assault on Cuba outside of any democratic mechanism, makes the system react to it, blah, blah, blah. We can imagine a scenario like that. In whatever it unfolds, in whatever version of this story that it unfolds, if there is military action on Cuba, which is Marco Rubio's wet fucking dream, this document right here is going to

lays down the legal justificatory framework for then turning inwardly using the pretense of the assault on Cuba. We're at war with Cuba as a pretense to turn around and inflict legal, economic, you know, any sort of persecution on these left dissidents. So this document says, Cuba actually has these deep, nefarious networks within the United States. Therefore, if we go to war with Cuba, we go to war on this espionage network that is embedded within the United States. And we've seen time and time again, especially through red scares, whether it's the Cold War or it's World War I, a lot of these red scares manifest in times of international conflict where they can use the fog of war and the necessity for domestic unity. as the pretense to snap down on domestic subversives. So I think this Cuba document is nefarious precisely in that way.

It's laying another layer of explicit groundwork for if that war were to happen, if that assault on Cuba is to happen, it will immediately also and simultaneously be an assault on the domestic left that they have explicitly in many cases tied to the Cuban regime. After all, if we're at war with Russia, those that are sympathetic to Russia are a problem. If we're at war with China, those domestically who are sympathetic with China are a problem. And if we're at war with Cuba, and we've already established these actual networks that don't really, you know, technically exist, but they've laid the framework. Therefore, we can go and attack these people. This is an, this is an, this is a emergency situation.

And we're going to have to set aside some of our constitutional rights and these legal precedents and processes. And we're just going to have to lock these people up because they are actually in bed with the enemy that we're an active war against. So I would argue that that's probably what this document is mostly doing is laying the groundwork for that. Does that sound right to you, Alison? Yeah, I agree that that's very much. I think what the intention of it is. And also, I think, like, trying to build some public consensus for their general views, right? Like, the average American, even if they're not rabidly anti-communist, has this passive sense that Cuba is like a dictatorship, right? And so trying to find, you know,

know some basis for pulling in sympathy for the domestic repression, I think is the other thing, you know? And this might transition to the question we were going to kind of end on of like, are we in another red scare? For me, the question is like they clearly set the stage. I think what we've talked about here in SPM 7, Prairieland, Minnesota, this summit that they did and now the Cuba document, all of this really shows how they are setting everything up. At the same time as I've kind of emphasized over and over again, I don't think they've really broken from existing precedent, right? They're just kind of retooling what's there. But for them to go after some of the groups that they're talking about in the Cuba document on the basis of this conspiracy

probably would take a pretty big break from liberal norms, which I think is why Stephen Miller in that summit was like, oh, when the left complains about liberal norms being violated against them, you have to harden your heart and ignore them, right? Like, that is what they're set up for. And so kind of the thing that remains unclear to me and that I think we'll be watching for to see is like when that fundamental break comes. Like you said, when the state of emergency happens. And, you know, we no longer have to care about the idea of the courts or any of these other things.

And we can just let loose here. And it'll be, you know, I don't know when that will be. I think how midterms go will probably be a big part of that question. Whether or not fair midterms will be, or happen will really set the stage as well. But the government's in a complicated place, I think, because they have these massive ambitions of internal repression and of trying. to create the conditions for the spread scare and crackdown that would, I think, break with liberal norms. And they're also massively unpopular, right? Like, they actually don't have huge popular

support. And in the last decade, we've seen pretty sizable uprisings in the United States take place in response to specific government actions. And so I think they're in kind of a weird holding pattern right now where they're trying to figure out, can we make this broader rupture, can we do it or not? And again, I think this document, all of this is trying to set the stage for it. but exactly what the next step looks like is the part that remains very kind of unclear to me and that I would, you know, say those of us on the left need to be wrestling with and thinking about what are the conditions under which they try that bigger rupture from liberalism in order to justify this. Yeah, absolutely. They do have new tools. They have this AI, you know, built up surveillance state.

AI is able to go through data in a way that no human being before has ever been able to go through. So they do have that. The tech oligarchs are largely for opportunity. reasons on their side, in their pocket, you know, willing to to bend to some of their demands if needed. And that marriage between a fascist political administration and a techno- oligarchic elite is certainly what they're going to try to leverage whatever the circumstances are. But what those circumstances would be, well, we've seen an attempt at this. We've seen the ice stuff. And the ice stuff is still going on. People are still dying. Families are still being ripped apart. But their more overt, belligerent form decreased their favorability. It really,

know, it stirred up mass protest, huge movements, even a day or so of general strikes in Minneapolis, right? So there's a lot of grassroots pushback to that, which kind of sets the tempo and makes them maybe double think what they're going to do, but they're not just going to be able to launch this, right? They're not just going to be able to say, okay, now we got everything in place, push the Red Scare button and let's go hard. They're going to need some pretense. That pretense could come in different forms. Like I said, a war on Cuba, even if the U.S., and of course it would be the U.S. War of Choice and Aggression going on the offensive against Cuba and then using the fog of war,

especially in the early days when people are still trying to gather a response and people are disorganized and taken aback. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if a launch on Cuba is done just out of nowhere seemingly, there's no real buildup to it. This is the buildup and it's subtle enough that people won't be reacting to it. And the Trump administration has learned. And they did this in the second fucking term. We just go in and we go in hard.

We throw everything against the wall. We make people react. We make people respond. Maybe they claw that thing back. Maybe they're able to successfully defend against that. But we'll still get a lot of shit through. That's their modus operandi. And so if it comes to a war of aggression on Cuba, I think that they do something similar.

They'd launch the attack seemingly out of nowhere. And then immediately, before organizations have time to come together to form a response plan, to communicate, negotiate. It will be a simultaneous crackdown. Who knows how far. that crackdown will go. It might just make a few examples out of some, you know, some larger figures or organizations or groups, perhaps ones they've already named in this document so that they can point to the document and say, we've already been watching these people and do it like that. The midterms or the 2028 election could also be an inflection point, especially under Trump

and his delusional egoic insanity about 2020 and it was a stolen election. They're clearly setting up the possibility, especially if the polling looks bad, which it does. for the Republicans, they could easily use that as a pretense to say, we found some irregularities in the voting machines. Hugo Chavez has come back from the dead and planted Venezuelan voting, whatever the fuck they're going to do, and then use that as the pretext, right? Any sort of mass movements against AI data centers, against flock cameras, anything like that, even though those are smaller iterations of this,

they'll use this as the legal framework to then attack that. But basically, just like the Nazis kind of use the Reichstag fire and found scapegoats and then use that as the pretense to do what they already wanted to do, there's going to have to be something analogous. But again, there is, as Allison made very clear, historic. I mean, genuinely, less than Bush at the fucking peak of everybody hating the Iraq war, historic unfavorability ratings for the Trump administration. Half of his own coalition fucking hates him now. And so when you have only 30%, even in polls saying that they're kind of still on board with you, that makes everything you're going to do harder. If you had 50%, you would be in a much better position, you know, a much better position to be able to launch some of this stuff.

They don't have that. And so I think that feeds into the need for an unprecedented pretense to then do what they already wanted to do. So, you know, we got to be aware of that. I'll toss it back over to you. And maybe we can end on how people, in order. organizations can keep themselves safe after you give your thoughts on that. Yeah, you know, I think you said it all very well there that like there is going to be some sort of pretense and we don't know what it is and this is a thing to watch. And really I think

this is just like a very intense moment of heightened contradictions within the United States. Again, with the electoral success of self-described socialists on that and with this repression, with the international kind of focus on lashing out against Cuba and Venezuela and Palestine, there's a lot going on. And I think what is going to be. most important is the left needs to be paying attention to what's happening and needs to be kind of working from there. In terms of what we can do to protect ourselves, you know, I can't give legal advice on this. Obviously, I am not a lawyer in any way. But I do think that one of the things that is important is that groups really just do take basic common sense security. I think that the

Prairieland case and even the Minnesota case, the amount of information in signal chats that was part of those cases indicates that there might be reason to be more careful with as, that are encrypted than people think. And generally, I just think, like, when you're organizing, when you're doing work, it's just worth paying attention to that kind of news and being careful about what you put into writing anywhere, even for legal work, right? Maybe especially for legal work. Because a lot of what these chats come down to is not that an illegal activity took place

in the chat, but that a perfectly legal activity then gets framed as a basis for a conspiracy charge, right? And so my overall bit of advice is, like, pay attention to the legal activity. moves that are happening in the actual cases, the way conspiracy is being sort of manufactured by the prosecution, be distrustful whether or not applications are as secure as they claim they are, and just really like use common sense about things. And just remember that, again, even purely legal actions, well, maybe you can't be convicted for them, can be used evidentiarily as part of prosecutions on the basis of inflating charges and other stuff like that. I think it's

worth just thinking about. Often I find that on the left people don't actually pay a lot of attention to the cases and the legal details of the cases, and I think it's worth doing so. It's worth reading indictments when they come out. It is worth engaging with some of that minutia there, because it tells you exactly how all of this is being conceptualized. I am strongly the opinion that, like, purely on the text of the law, there's nothing to come after the left for, right? Like, just on the pure text, there's not really a basis for it, but that doesn't mean that they're not going to find ways to twist it, or at least to make prosecutions that ruin people's lives. So just be careful. And again, pay attention to.

into the details, I think. That's really the biggest piece of advice that I would have. Absolutely. Individually, you know, don't be reckless. Don't be stupid. Don't say stupid shit online. I have a personal sort of approach and always have that there is no such thing as an encrypted app. That's probably exaggerated. That's probably paranoid. I assume that anything I put on any app, on any fucking chat, on any social media can be traced back to me very easily by the government. And that's pretty much being proven. So you're not safe anywhere. Don't do stupid shit. Don't say stupid shit. Don't be reckless, be thoughtful, but also don't back down. Like we, we are not wrong. We're not committing any crimes. We're not doing anything wrong. So long as there are civil rights,

so long as there are constitutional protections, we have them at our side. Organizations, I think, absolutely need to establish relationships with, like, movement lawyers, like the National Lawyers Guild and other organizations like that that can fight on the legal terrain because I do probably think that in a crackdown, they'll go after organizations more than they'll just, nitpick individuals. Organizations cause a bigger ripple. There's more people you can bring in, etc. Um, so, you know, have transparency with your, you're above board legal, organizational work, create connections not only with movement lawyers and legal institutions and organizations, perhaps like the ACLU or people doing similar work. Unite with other organizations in your area,

even organizations whose political line you might not agree with, you know, show good faith, extend outward. It's harder to take down a lot of people. in a community who know each other, who love each other, who are organized in that way. Individually, there's also this just constant reminder that you don't need to talk. You have a constitutional right to have a lawyer. If anybody knocks on your door, any federal agent or police officer just wants to question you. Don't lie to them because they'll use the lie as the pretense that you're hiding something. Just say, I know my rights, freshen up on your individual rights, freshen up on your organizational rights.

And yeah, just know at the end of the day they want us to shut up. They want us to stop organizing. They want us to stop caring about other human beings. And we're just not going to do that. We're not going to be kowtowed by these fascist cowards and worms. You're not going to scare us into stop doing what we're doing, which is speaking our minds, educating ourselves and others, organizing around material needs in our communities. We're not doing anything wrong. And that's always going to be our big defense.

It won't protect us from everything. You know, if they want to just go totally mask off and go Nazi on everybody, there's no way that we can prevent that. but what we can control, we should. And I think we all have individual and organizational responsibilities, not to bring unnecessary heat onto us in our communities and our people, but also at the exact same time, not allow their attempt to chill us to actually work. If you shut up and you stop doing organizing work in your community

and you delete all your stuff and just say, I'm just going to recoil into my personal life, they won. That's exactly what they want you to fucking do. and you're one less person who can be in a broader milieu and a broader, you know, community of people that have each other's backs when push does come to shove. And I think a lot of these attempts to subpoena and scare people and all this stuff, they will ultimately fail. I really hope that even in the case of Minnesota and the Prairie Land case,

that the appeals do eventually get through, that they are one. Even having a blue wave in the midterms is not an end all be all by any means. But if there's enough DSA candidates, if there's just enough anti-exam, Trump sentiment backed by structural power. That's another roadblock that can be thrown up in the face of any attempt to do something extreme and use something as a pretense to crack down. So we'll have to see how it goes. But as Allison said, a lot of this is just common sense.

And at the end of the day, we know that us and our organizations, we're not doing anything wrong. Truly, if it's us versus them, we're on the right side of history. And we can take pride in that. And look at the long tradition of people that came before us, that's found themselves in similar or in many cases much, much worse situations. From Rosa Luxembourg to indigenous resistance to settler colonialism in the U.S. to the leaders of the Black Panther Party, we can go over and over again all across the

world and say that this is just what it means to try to build a better world. This is what it means to be on the liberatory left. And so we can't necessarily be taken off guard or surprised by that either. But yeah, just keep your political work lawful and public and clearly define. Don't say stupid shit. don't bring a necessary heat, don't do stupid shit. And yeah, keep doing what you're doing. Keep educating yourself.

Keep organizing and keep pushing forward because there is going to be a time where this whole fascist project of Trump and his milieu fails. Every fascist movement fails. It always hits a brick wall. It always runs out of steam. It always fails in one way or another. And Trump's time and Miller's time and Rubio's time will come in due time. But in the meantime, we have to have each other's back.

And there really does, as my final note, need to be a united front against this. That, I think, is essential. This is no time for petty sectarian politics. This is time for all of us linking arms together, even with liberals in this case, because it is a fascist threat and having each other's backs. That's more important than anything. Yeah, I think it's going to be crucial.

And I think liberals will probably let us down, but let's hope not, I guess. They always do. But some of them will be cool. Yeah. All right. Stay safe out there, folks. Love and Solidarity. I do recommend reading these documents just to fully flesh out the details of what they're doing

and have a better idea of what they're doing, especially if you're in an organization, having a meeting where you guys come together and you kind of go over these documents, talk about your organizational response. Those could be very productive things to be doing at this time, to be ready for whatever may come. Absolutely. All right. Love and solidarity. Talk to you soon.