The US, famous for not focusing counter-terrorism efforts on left-wing groups before Trump.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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I mean they didn't? People here are being super flippant but the FBI and such focused entire teams to reactionary extremists in the 90s and making an example out of anyone who defied state power too far from the mainstream consensus in the afterglow of what they saw as the final vanquishing of communism. There was always an undercurrent of anti-communism and sure they still infiltrated communist meetings and book clubs but they didn't try to bring the hammer down like they did during the red scare and took it as a given they were at the end of history and they could more or less ignore communists who didn't get into direct violence because they were a dying, debunked breed.
Being flippant about how much more serious they can get and what they can do is frankly dangerous.
They're talking of financial sanctions. We have to assume they have or could in the near future obtain even partial members lists for DSA and PSL and they could at any moment not only seize the funds from those orgs but slap sanctions that kick every last member they can identify into poverty unable to bank, be employed, use airlines, get public assistance, etc. Basically unpersoning. The system of sanctions didn't exist back in the 1950s. With the aid of computers and their mass integration into all levels of society its practical to do things that would have been impossible in the 1960s. Its more effective as a means of intimidation than throwing rocks at windows or shooting stray bullets through walls then speeding away because it actually ruins your life and those of your family and makes people and businesses afraid to even touch you for fear of the secondary sanctions and investigations falling on them. And this is all very low effort per person compared to the human effort they had to expend back in the day to follow, spy on, intimidate, harass, and disrupt communists. It's a turn-key solution that once up and running can just be turned away from with minimal maintenance.
As the contradictions of capital heighten, as China's rise becomes undeniable, as the rot of the imperial core and the stripping of copper from the walls continues they know communism is a growing danger compared to the 90s or 2000s.
The FBI literally broke into people's houses and shot them up.
For instance: black panthers.
commenter was talking about since the 90s, which I think was pretty insightful
Okay.
But I think the FBI not shooting up bookclubs is not insightful.
There were simply fewer and worse organized leftist groups - so the FBI not having visibly more action doesn't mean that they've changed in behaviour.
Yeah, they focused less on Leftist groups in the 90s because they had already destroyed all of the major leftist groups, not because they just chose to ignore them.
That's not what the comment said to begin with
You mean Darkcalling's comment? If I meant this as a rebuttal of what they were saying, I would've commented replying to them.
I was just trying to add to the conversation 
Being flippant about how much more serious they can get and what they can do is frankly dangerous.
This is a problem that comes up kind of often on Hexbear and I agree that it's dangerous. I recently got a comment from a since-deleted account saying that basically there's no worry about the US freefalling into genuine, unrestrained fascist takeover because the US is already fascist so it can't get much worse. There's no distinction between individuals who are personally fascists having substantial political power versus the actual shape and operation of the state being fascist, nor a distinction between supporting fascist states abroad versus actually acting as one domestically, nor between when peaceful protesters getting shot in the street on camera is national news for weeks versus it hardly even making the news.
If one insists on framing these things in moral terms, I can agree that in that sense they are equivalent as in, the people doing one are as bad as the people doing the other and generally the people doing the one also want to do the other but just aren't necessarily capable of it quite yet, but there are a lot of practical differences between them that are much more important if we want to do anything other than sit around like Dante writing about which circle of Hell each of our enemies belong in.
These kids have never seen war. The closest thing they've ever seen to a fascist death squad was in Far Cry 5. They don't know what it's like to have a list of family members to call to make sure they're still alive. They don't know how it feels when half of them aren't. They don't know how bad it can actually be.
I'm not about to take that tact personally because I haven't seen war either, and I've known people who were murdered but I've never lived in a situation like you described. I think honestly it's a failing more basic than not having experience because it shows a strange lack of engagement with what you can very easily read about, what has been portrayed in movies and documentaries (however lacking we can rightly say it is), and what you can hear from survivors of those situations in interviews that are also easy to find.
But of course most of the people here are westerners who have received at least a tiny bit of exposure to these things, like stories about Nazi Germany (which, again, we can say is distorted in various ways* but that has no bearing on more basic reality of the state of siege and genocide minorities and dissidents lived under), so maybe my first explanation isn't enough.
I have two other ideas: One, a perennial issue on this website, as in probably most online-only leftist spaces, is that people sometimes just sort of say what sounds to an uninformed audience like the most progressive, the most "radical" thing you can say even if it's reactionary or just nonsensical, and this idea that America is already at the most internally fascist it can get because some major portions of the population do live in situations similar to what you described (some migrant communities, for instance) strikes me as being partly a product of this tendency toward empty rhetoric disconnected from the world or coherent political theory. Two, as I sort of got at with my cutesy Dante comment, people like trying to look at things in moral terms at the expense of other ways of looking at them, so while they can make a fine argument that (conceding for the sake of argument moral arguments can be true or false) the people in charge are largely as bad as the Nazis and the rest are "useful idiots," I'm not really trying to contradict them on that, but whatever moral status you want to give the ruling class is really not that important compared to the reality on the ground and the ways that these depraved ghouls haven't massacred people but inevitably will if they aren't stopped.
*Because someone will wonder what I mean by this, I mean that there are a range of distortions about the Nazis that obscure the real class character of fascism. People act like Hitler won his election and that he cast a spell to mind control the German people, but simultaneously that basically the entire Nazi agenda was executed by the SS and the Nazi Party with everyone else held at gunpoint, but this obscures that there were real contingents of petite-bourgeois and bourgeois support (along with the wider military, cops, etc.) acting on pre-existing class interests and bigotries that was not enough to win the election but was enough to help the broader fascist movement terrorize and maintain power over Germany. I know that you know this, it's just for others reading who might not.
Okay, but this was the norm for the 20th century. Kids these days will experience a return to the norm, not something new. There are people sitting in federal prisons right now with life sentences that were handed down in the name of fighting the left.
We have to assume they have or could in the near future obtain even partial members lists for DSA and PSL and...
Local PD have made targeted arrests in my area on PSL lead organizers as in they knew who was who when they went to grab them. It's been all intimidation charges that get thrown out but it's been incredibly disruptive and expensive. There's also Zionist groups like Betar and Canary mission that spend all their time researching and doxxing student protestors to hit them with copy paste lawsuits. Shout-out to ACLU lawyers btw. But they definitely can get knowledge on people that are in these groups and are actively saying they will target them.
So yea not really looking forward to this
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kick every last member they can identify into poverty unable to bank, be employed, use airlines, get public assistance, etc
"The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose." - James Baldwin
in the 90s
That was kind of my point. Targeting the left is the historical norm, it was only in the brief "End of History" window after the decline and destruction of the USSR that the US started to focus mostly on far right terrorist organizations. Even then, once the so-called "war on terror" started, they stopped focusing on the Klan and turned their focus on average Muslims.
The US is returning to tradition by turning its focus on the left once again.
The Jakarta Method is coming home
I watched the whole stream. It was pretty gross. It has Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller. The whole thing is like "Left wingers want to hurt people because they're jealous of how cool and awesome the right wing is. Therefore the US has to preemptively use the violence of the state to stop them."
I'm not really sure why this conference happened or what the impact is.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
And they told me I was crazy for digging a couple of punji pits in my driveway
I like how they're banned by the geneva conventions LOL.
Yeah we're gonna spray your entire country with cancer causing agent orange and white phosphorous, but how DARE you use sharp stick traps against us!
You're crazy for digging so few of them.
I gotta be able to ride my bike places
Gotta build a sick ramp to launch over em
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
well yeah, because this right wing idiotic terror group already runs the country. poorly.
And the Proud Boys all became ICE agents.
The speech happened this morning like 2 or 3 hours ago. Ken Klippenstein published an article yesterday about the conference. The article seems to say that Rubio will run for President in 2028. The article features a photo from 2016 of Marco Rubio sitting on a comically large chair; the perspective makes it look like Marco is small.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-rubios-wmd-scandal-is-far-left
Trump is evil. Rubio is evil and motivated (to raze Latin America and erase his origins).
I hope admins re-scrutinize the security and privacy posture in regards to the running of this website. The environment has changed. There's a shift in the wind and this is more than the usual stale Republican party rambling and smacking fists into desks about commies in front of cameras.
Friendly reminder that anything you post online can be traced to you if a state decides to put the resources toward it.
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They are so scared
I don't understand, is there actually some really underground group that is almost ready to form a vanguard party or something? They're really going all in on targeting the left, but I don't think anywhere in the west has a strong enough leftist movement to warrant it.
Is this just Capital's usual collapse into fascism when under threat, just that this time the threat is the internal contradictions (and climate change)?
It's just a way to upgrade charges for people arrested at protests. Oh, you're a member of the DSA? 30 year minimum.
I don’t think it is about socialists per se but merely an excuse to consolidate power. As is tradition. Remember that MAGA folks literally think Biden is a communist.
I know the rank and file hogs do, but surely the guys who regularly ate lunch and laughed together at child murder with Biden know he isn't one.
Pretty much that and also because we have the incompetent fascists freaking out with the incompetent capitalists as the most smallest of socialist demands are being somewhat made by folks like Mamdani. Their actual true fear is the Dems being subverted by the DSA and then more hardliner socialist take the stage within public discourse (i.e. their own version of the overton window but things shifting left).
It's red scare shit, it's not based in reality. They're just looking for any excuse to criminalize left wing perspectives, same as it ever was. Far from the first time the US government has some it
we are not in red scare 3 for no reason, this strikes me as doomer undialectical handwaving. they are doing this because they see communism as more of a threat than they did 20 years ago. which it is. there is a material reason for this trajectory, it's not random
I don't mean for it today come across that way, I largely agree with your perspective. I think its more to do with the powers that be sensing a normalization of anti capitalist and anti imperialist rhetoric, a change in the tide as the material conditions become harder to ignore, than to do with some specific development like an underground party becoming the vanguard or doing anything that could be construed as "terrorism." But I realize I didn't say all that in my comment haha, it was what I was thinking when writing it though
There doesn't need to be a vanguard party for there to be a threat of violence... With more people becoming anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists every day, for better or for worse we'll get more adventurists like Luigi and Tyler. While that's unlikely to threaten the system as a whole, it's clear that Kirk’s assassination hit very close to home for them - they're not just afraid of the system being threatened, they fear for their own lives.
we are mostly in agreement then:)
The reason is that Imperialism is collapsing.
The crackdown on "the left" at home is part of the same process being imposed on Latin America: the capital is trying to strengthen its grip on the "home turf" in order to prepare for an all out war with China.
I don't understand, is there actually some really underground group that is almost ready to form a vanguard party or something?
People will go underground once it's required to do so
They're copying the french and are just going to double down on "islamoleftism" that way they can both racialize leftism and attack muslims even more with impunity.
What a neat thing that has never happened before.
Okay little Marco the peepee baby lmao I’m sure everyone in the other state departments take you seriously and thinks you’re tough :)
Barko Rube can go jump in a pit 
sure. But was it every actually in question? Of course not.
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