By Noah Rothman
Monday, April 13, 2026
The New York Times is ringing alarm bells. In a sprawling feature with no fewer than five bylines, the
paper of record revealed that the Trump administration is leaning on its
European allies to take “far-left terrorism” seriously. The Times fears
that the initiative is a thinly veiled effort by the Trump administration to
persecute its domestic political adversaries.
The Times’ and its sources’ concerns are not
entirely unfounded, but the outlet’s larger political mission — questioning the
scale, if not the very existence, of the violent left — is not well disguised.
And if it were to succeed in its advocacy, the Times would leave
Americans exposed to the violence that it refuses to recognize as violence.
At an intergovernmental conference in Ottawa last month,
State Department counterterrorism official Monica Jacobsen argued in favor of
an expansive definition of left-wing ideological violence. According to the Times,
“communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with
‘eco-extremist’ and ‘other self-identified antifascist ideologies’” are in the
administration’s crosshairs. But it was the targeting of so-called
“antifascists,” a.k.a. “antifa,” which seems to have piqued the Times consternation.
After all, Trump officials have provided “little evidence they present a dire
threat to U.S. citizens.”
That qualifier, “dire,” is performing a herculean labor.
Its inclusion is likely a reflection of the heated internal debates over the
qualifier necessary to make the sentence intellectually defensible.
The paper’s reporters link to their earlier reporting on the foreign groups that
the administration alleges are engaged in transnational terrorism. And yet,
“none are linked to anything called ‘antifa,’” the Times reported. That
claim is betrayed by the very next sentence, in which the paper identified one
of the targeted groups: the German outfit “Antifa Ost.”
That organization is alleged by the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence to have organized mob-style
attacks on the figures who fit within its expansive definition of “fascist”
actors. Likewise, Italy’s Informal
Anarchist Federation (FAI) and the International Revolutionary Front (FRI) “conduct
bombing attacks targeting government and business institutions in Europe.” The
Greek group Armed Proletarian Justice has claimed IED attacks on
governmental targets and police. Another Greek organization, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense, has engaged in similar
attacks using IEDs and mail bombs, as well as “conducted targeted killings.”
The Times’ sources fear that the Trump
administration’s push abroad is part of a concerted effort to “expand the
powers of the government to surveil, investigate, and prosecute left-wing
activists on American soil.” No one with a proper appreciation for the coercive
power of the state should summarily dismiss those concerns, as the venerable
counterterrorism expert Thomas Joscelyn declines to do. He warns that the
administration will use the tools at its disposal to frustrate Trump’s
“domestic political opponents.”
Other experts with whom the Times spoke express
their concern that the administration is spreading counterterrorism resources
too thin to confront the threat posed by ISIS and Iran. And the Times is
on solid ground when it looks askance at counterterrorism official Sebastian
Gorka’s claim that “there are no lone wolves,” if only to establish an
operational link between antifa at home and abroad. On that front, Gorka is
wrong.
But the evidence that the Times is smuggling
unfounded contentions into the discourse to preemptively neutralize the growing
evidence that a new wave of left-wing violence is upon us quickly becomes
clear.
Its reporters rely on Biden-era counterterrorism official
Ian C. Moss to advance the contention that the Trump administration’s fixation
on left-wing violence is “without much justification,” which is perhaps why left-wing violence proliferated in the Biden years. It
engages in a trite numbers game in which it attempts to claim that the efficacy
of a terrorism campaign can be measured only in the number of bodies it
produces.
Its reporters cite one of many studies — this by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) —
which claims that the radical right is a graver threat to American lives than
the radical left in “the last decade.” But as the CSIS study notes, there has
been a “dramatic decline in right-wing incidents” recently, which “has
contributed significantly to the relative increase in left-wing incidents.”
The report relies on former FBI director Chris Wray’s
Biden-era contention that “racially or ethnically motivated extremists” —
so-called RVEs, which typically capture many violent right-wing groups within
the universe of Domestic Violent Extremists (DVEs) — are the foremost domestic
terrorism threat. The Times makes no mention of often left-aligned
Anarchist Violent Extremists (AVEs), the actions of which are growing to such
an extent that there was a brief (and seemingly aborted) effort to force them
into a new category: Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs), whose violence is
not motivated by any ideological impulse at all, even if the alleged
practitioners of nihilistic violence are clearly inclined toward ideological leftism.
The numbers game is not irrelevant, but it can mislead. A
Biden-era document produced by the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education
Center (NCITE) for the Department of Homeland Security made that case.
“Many researchers consider study of AVE to be a ‘third rail,’” its authors
confess. Students of “left-wing extremism” fear “smear campaigns, loss of
professional reputation, or social isolation within academic circles,” and even
“a harmful response” from practitioners of left-wing violence. In other words,
left-wing terrorism researchers are themselves terrorized.
The Times’ blind spot demonstrates not only the
extent of this intimidation campaign but the firmly held conviction on the
center-left that property destruction, harassment, intimidation, and
large-scale civic disruption do not constitute acts of violence. Sure, the
dispatch notes, violent groups abroad, “all carried or threatened violent acts,
including planting bombs at government buildings.” But “far cry from the
violence carried out by established terrorist organizations, which often aims
for mass fatalities.” As this relates to terrorism, we’re talking about
degrees, not kind.
The report closes with a restatement of the left’s
growing apprehension. Last year, Trump “signed an executive order labeling
antifa a ‘domestic terrorist organization,’ even though there is no such
designation in federal law,” it notes accurately. On that front, these
reporters concede that Trump is expanding on precedents set by the Biden
administration. Some of those Biden-era efforts to accuse American citizens of
being potentially violent activists were nakedly opportunistic and politically motivated, but only some. The paper chides the
American right for dismissing the last administration’s concerns about
right-wing political violence, but its journalists are doing precisely the
inverse in this report.
Rebutting the Times’ reporting in the detail it
deserves would require a book-length argument. Fortunately, I will publish precisely that on May 19. I hope the Times will
consider circulating a few copies around the newsroom. They would clearly
benefit from a full accounting of the rise of left-wing terrorist violence in
the United States, the character of previous cycles of left-wing violence, and
the telltale markers of what constitutes ideologically motivated leftist
terrorism.
Far too many treat domestic political violence as though
it were a sporting event. They don their preferred colors and squabble over the
stats sheet. In so doing, they implicitly take ownership of their preferred
practitioners of political violence, who keep adding to the running tally of
victims. That is a feature of the discourse I set out to anathematize in Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in
America. If the Times reporting is any indication, publication
day cannot come soon enough.
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