Author: alaskaadmin

The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to believe: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement called antifa threatens the democratic world. At the event, allies were asked to mobilize against that enemy despite nations like the Netherlands and Germany politely noting to their host that they cannot find evidence of any such group.

Some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa at interagency meetings because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.

As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.

Antifa is not a group

As I and others have written before, antifa is not a group. It is a movement and an ideology, a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it amounts to scattered local collectives like Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.

There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.

Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.

As such, the Trump administration created one.

Trump administration targets antifa

The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.

Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.

Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.

Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.

That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.

The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.

The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.

State Department targets groups overseas

The foreign component of the campaign arrived in November 2025. That’s when the State Department designated four European groups – one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The State Department-designated groups are real. And some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings.

But as I have noted, the designations are very peculiar. These groups have committed vandalism and harmed people, but not one of the four has carried out an attack that led to any fatalities.

German leaders have said the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.

As the former head of the State Department’s office that recommended to the secretary of state which groups to designate, I’ve been involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations. The bar was never this low. That’s because the Foreign Terrorist Organization list loses its meaning, and its deterrent power, when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.

The foreign nexus

That brings us back to the State Department’s ministerial. The sequence of events leading up to it matter:

Invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the story. Each step launders the previous one.

Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement. That is the point of the exercise, and U.S allies like the Netherlands have explained how antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws.

Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses. I don’t believe that using them against an ideology, one defined by opposition to fascism, makes America safer. I believe it tells every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world’s leading counterterrorism power can no longer tell the difference between a threat and an opponent.

Implications of the ministerial meeting

This is not just an issue of semantics and rhetoric – each action by the Trump administration against a strawman enemy creates risks. And the push to internationalize the antifa threat could have dire consequences at home.

First, if the State Department leaves the July 16 meeting with pliable allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it will embolden the administration to point to a supposed global conspiracy of the far left.

That path leads to a State Department foreign terrorist designation. Such a designation means Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and quite possibly find themselves rounded up for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. This would be more dangerous than Trump’s earlier executive order.

Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government gains cover to shut down protests under the guise of exposing global left-wing plotting.

Third, it could justify the revival of projects like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, resurrecting the surveillance, infiltration and disruption of lawful political activity that the bureau was supposed to have abandoned after the abuses of the 1970s.

Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit lays bare a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration’s willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends.

That divergence is the real hazard, far more than any phantom left-wing terrorism group, because European counterterrorism leans so heavily on U.S. intelligence. As such, transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation could be in for turbulent times.

Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, there is no version that will make Americans safer.

I believe one result is certain: Genuine threats – from groups with leaders, actual funding and malicious intent – will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to take action against antifa.

Jason M. Blazakis is running as a Democrat for county commissioner in Hunterdon County, New Jersey.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

When people think about criminal justice punishment, they might picture a prison cell or a crew picking up roadside trash to fulfill community service hours.

But for millions of Americans, another penalty quietly follows them for years after they have served their time: debt.

Known as legal financial obligations, or criminal justice debt, these penalties encompass a range of economic sanctions. They can include court costs, fines, fees and restitution payments imposed during criminal proceedings.

Legal financial obligations have become a routine feature of punishment across the United States. They are justified as a way to hold people accountable, reduce incarceration and help fund the criminal justice system itself.

We are a team of researchers and criminal justice policy evaluators who want to better understand when these fines and fees are assessed and the impact they have on individuals and communities.

Our analysis of more than a decade of court data from Philadelphia suggests that these financial penalties are not evenly distributed across the city.

Instead, they are heavily concentrated in Black and Latino neighborhoods – places already facing the highest crime and victimization rates, significant economic hardship and the repercussions of entrenched, historical discrimination.

Lasting consequences of legal debt

Previous research has shown that court debt can have lasting consequences. People burdened by legal debt are more likely to experience ongoing involvement with the justice system, including probation violations and reincarceration.

Financial obligations can also make it harder to find and keep employment and afford transportation, food and housing.

Much of this research has focused on individual outcomes. Our study asked a different question: Where do these people live, and how are the debts distributed across the city?

If legal debt is concentrated geographically, its effects may extend beyond individuals and their immediate family or support network. It can contribute to broader patterns of neighborhood-level disadvantage.

Mapping debt across Philadelphia

We analyzed addresses linked to nearly 200,000 felony court cases involving defendants sentenced in Philadelphia between 2010 and 2020.

Pennsylvania law mandates various court costs and fees, and it permits judges to impose a range of additional economic sanctions. This means a criminal sentence generally leads to at least some legal financial obligations, though the amount and requirements can vary meaningfully.

Using geographic information systems and spatial analysis techniques, our team mapped where Philadelphians who were assessed these financial penalties lived. We compared those locations with measures of income, crime and victimization.

The results revealed clear geographic patterns.

Neighborhoods in North Philadelphia and parts of West Philadelphia emerged as major hot spots for criminal justice debt. Kensington, Fairhill, Hunting Park and Nicetown showed particularly high concentrations.

These are also neighborhoods, particularly Kensington, widely recognized for their persistent poverty and economic distress.

A burden concentrated in disadvantaged communities

Our study found that ZIP codes with the highest rates of legal financial obligations shared several key characteristics. They had lower median household incomes, higher rates of shootings and arrests, and larger proportions of Black and Latino residents compared to the city’s average.

By contrast, neighborhoods with the lowest rates of legal financial obligations tended to have substantially higher incomes, lower crime rates and larger white populations. Most of these areas are in Center City.

When we examined the data on an even smaller geographic scale – census block groups – the relationship became even clearer. Even when accounting for population size, those areas with the highest concentrations of legal financial obligations were also more likely to have lower incomes and higher rates of violent crime and shootings. Statistical analyses confirmed that these patterns were unlikely to be random.

More than a personal punishment

A growing body of research shows that criminal justice policies often concentrate their effects in specific communities. For example, researchers have identified “million-dollar blocks,” where governments spend enormous sums incarcerating residents from a single city block. Others have shown that aggressive policing practices disproportionately affect disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Our data suggests that legal financial obligations may work in much the same way. Court debt accumulates in neighborhoods that already struggle with poverty, violence and limited economic opportunities.

Even in treatment-oriented diversion programs in Philadelphia, our internal data shows that average total debt can range from US$500 to $800 and increase substantially if restitution is ordered. While any single penalty may not seem like that much, their accumulation across the justice process can be substantial.

As residents pay fines and fees, money is extracted from the communities that can least afford the loss. People who owe these criminal justice debts may rely on borrowing money from friends and family members. Some use their mortgages or property as collateral to pay the debt. This can put them at risk for foreclosure if payments are missed.

If court debt is concentrated in disadvantaged neighborhoods, policies that focus solely on individuals’ repayment may overlook broader impacts on the community’s housing stability, transportation and health.

Some advocates have proposed eliminating many fines and fees altogether, or redirecting the revenue toward communities most affected by criminal justice involvement.

We believe policymakers should consider reforms, such as finely tuned ability-to-pay assessments, reduced reliance on monetary sanctions and greater transparency in how fines and fees are imposed and collected.

While our study shows where legal financial obligations were imposed, it does not show how much money was assessed or how much remains unpaid. It also cannot determine whether legal financial obligations directly cause neighborhood disadvantage. It only shows that they are concentrated in places where disadvantage is already severe.

Regardless, the research highlights an often overlooked dimension of criminal justice policy. Court debt – and punishment generally – is typically viewed as an individual responsibility. Yet when thousands of cases are mapped across a city, a different picture emerges: one in which economic sanctions become a neighborhood-level burden.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Jordan Hyatt receives funding from Arnold Ventures and the City of Philadelphia.

Clare Strange receives funding from the National Institute of Justice. She is affiliated with the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.

Nathan Link receives funding from Arnold Ventures.

Brian Lawton receives funding from Arnold Ventures.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation