The Trump administration convened a meeting against the supposed transnational threat of “Radical Left terrorism” at the State Department Thursday, with 67 countries represented. Most of the European countries were invited, but sent only low-level delegations, joined by officials from Israel and selected Trump allies in Latin America and East Asia. Brazil and Mexico, the two largest countries in Latin America, stayed away.

The remarks of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and White House counterterrorism chief Stephen Miller gave a glimpse of the anticommunist hysteria and fear of popular opposition that dominates the administration. Miller, in particular, characterized left-wing opposition to capitalism as a biological deformation that had to be rooted out, a formulation that is a hallmark of fascism.

Rubio began the proceedings by noting that Western counterterrrorism efforts since 2001 had focused on Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups, but he claimed, “Our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream.”

He then proceeded to give a potted history of alleged left-wing violence in America and around the world, although he spent most of his time in the 1970s, referring to the Weathermen in the United States, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Tupamaros and Monteneros in South America.

Avoiding any discussion of such terrorist attacks as the Oklahoma City bombing, in which fascist Timothy McVeigh killed 189 people, he jumped ahead to the protests which followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, when he claimed “criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees.”

Needless to say, there was no mention of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 by a mob of fascist Trump supporters, invited by the president to Washington to try to block the congressional certification of his defeat in the 2020 elections.

Rubio’s perspective is rooted in the strident anticommunism of the fascist Cuban exile milieu of south Florida. He declared, “They can call themselves anti-capitalists or anti-imperialists or communists or anarchists or Marxist, 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 …  And the world communism envisions is a world without God.” 

He noted that the State Department had designated four left-wing groups in Europe as terrorists last November (two in Greece, one each in Germany and Italy). He said more such designations would be announced soon, and that the German government would host the next “workshop” of the anti-left campaign.

If Rubio laid out the ideological basis of the campaign, Stephen Miller spelled out its dictatorial implications. “One of the hallmarks of left-wing violence and terrorism is its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties,” he claimed. “This is the tactic that the left always uses to try to protect itself from facing criminal punishment. It is essential that we are wise enough and strong enough to understand that these appeals must fall on deaf ears when the leftist … protests that we are violating his rights.”

He continued with this threat: “We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.”

This would require overturning such basic legal procedures as the right to a jury trial. Miller continued:

And at the same time we have to understand there’s a real threat, that those who are not themselves terrorists but who support left-wing violence will create the conditions that allow that violence to go on without any meaningful inhibition. So to be specific, we’ve seen some of our nation’s cities in America like like Washington, D.C. and New York City, something—again, it’s an American term, but it’s known as jury nullification. This is when a person is obviously guilty of a crime, but the juror, because they’re ideologically sympathetic to the perpetrator, will not sentence them to the crime which they’ve obviously committed…

...[I]ndividuals who are part of left-wing organizations who’ve committed assaults against ICE officers or federal law enforcement, who have been brought to court, where clear evidence has been presented against them, that the jury has refused to convict for purely political reasons.

All these threats paled, however, in comparison to Miller’s embrace of one of the central tropes of Nazi ideology, the recasting of socialists and antifascists not as citizens with opposing politics but as a physically marked, degenerate element whose very appearance proves their unfitness to exist. He said: 

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 appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that? Why? If you look at two photographs and you see a normal American in the street and 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.

Miller does not say his opponents hold wrong ideas. He says their bodies are physically “deformed” and “scarred.” Political opposition is thereby recoded as a visible biological and physical condition—something written on the body, legible in appearance, dress and mannerism.

No significant American political figure has ever spoken in such a fashion. It is language that betrays Miller’s indoctrination in the ideology of the Third Reich. Even more so than Trump, who was reported by his first wife to keep a book of Hitler’s speeches in his nightstand, Miller has absorbed and spits out the ravings of Josef Goebbels and Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Sturmer.

The target here is not a handful of misguided anarchists—if in fact Antifa actually exists, which is debatable—it is the vast majority of working-class Americans: the millions who participated in the “No Kings” protests, the largest in American history; the majority who tell opinion polls that America is on the wrong track, that Trump’s performance in office is dismal, that they oppose the war in Iran and the war against immigrants.

This summit, and the fascist diatribes that began it, took place only a few weeks after the victory in Democratic primaries in New York and Colorado of candidates calling themselves socialists, who unseated entrenched incumbents because those who went to the polls wanted to elect socialists, even if the candidates of the Democratic Socialists of America are not genuine opponents of the capitalist system, and offer reform policies far less ambitious than those of capitalist politicians like Franklin Roosevelt and even Lyndon Johnson.

The “far-left terrorism” construct is the ideological instrument for criminalizing the growing movement of the working class against war and capitalism, and the State Department conference is an attempt to erect a fascistic international to suppress it.