With Iran War Lost, Trump Seeks to Start One at Home.

This essay appeared in the July 23, 2026 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

Marco Rubio, the earnest neocon, “viceroy” of Venezuela and, for what it’s worth, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, has stumbled upon yet another portfolio as he seeks to build his standing among the MAGA base heading into the upcoming presidential election.

On July 16, Rubio announced a new war on political speech and dissent—one that formally began last September when the Trump administration published the already infamous National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) in the Federal Register, which came days after Trump signed an executive order designating “Antifa” a domestic terror organization.

Already, eight Americans have been charged and sentenced as part of the undemocratic scheme to undermine civil liberties and conflate speech with violence—what the online right during the Biden administration vented was the biggest threat to democracy in generations.

The previous laments from self-professed free speech warriors stand as one of the most elaborate cons in recent political history.

Whether any of their alleged grievances had merit is almost irrelevant at this point. The right is so unapologetically anti-speech (and therefore anti-American) that they’re now organizing conferences with international leaders to normalize the lie and attempt to legitimize their war on speech by giving the obsequious corporate media no choice but to traffic these false claims.

For Rubio, the timing of the spectacle, billed as an international conference exposing an amorphous and supposedly oft-ignored network of violent leftist insurrectionists, is curious given the calamity that is the war with Iran. One would think the country’s chief diplomat and security czar would have his hands full with an all-out war, but alas, the idiocracy has Kushner and Witkoff to deal with that.

In just weeks, the so-called Memorandum of Understanding, the precursor to a broader “peace” deal, has collapsed amid a wave of attacks from both Iran and the United States.

Americans are dying on bases in the Middle East, Trump’s war choice is predictably morphing into a broader conflagration—now including the Houthis in Yemen, not to mention Iran’s attacks on U.S, bases in Jordan, killing three American soldiers—and the fragile global energy market is on the verge of a historic crisis, yet Rubio is busy waging war on Trump’s political enemies and issuing reports about the long reach of communism in Cuba.

As the unconstitutional war with Iran spirals, the administration is betting that by indiscriminately tossing Red meat at Trump’s base, it will buoy them amid the lost Iran Strait of Hormuz War.

Whether the Rubio summit was hastily organized is unclear. But you need only read or listen to establishment MAGA’s 2028 favorite’s speech to understand that the torrent of leftist terror claims is laughable.

The clearest tell? Rubio struggled to cite even one specific modern-day terror-related incident during his winding speech, attempting to thread “left” political violence across continents together to suggest that such terror spans decades and knows no borders.

“And here in America we remember,” Rubio said, painstakingly trying to provide corroborating evidence. “We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.”

Indeed, callbacks to incidents from more than a half-century ago are not evidence of an organized leftist terror plot today.

Surely, Rubio had an ace in his sleeve, right?

“And today, we face a new wave of this old evil,” Rubio said, trying to link American leftists with those in Europe. “Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Rubio was (conveniently) playing fast and loose with the data.

While he was right about the “left-wing” violence surge in Germany, the “majority of crimes were committed by right-wing and far-right perpetrators, which once again demonstrates that the greatest danger currently stems from far-right extremism,” according to Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, following the release of the political ideology crimes report on June 9.

Swing and miss there, too.

Well, what about the assassination attempts on Trump, Luigi Mangione, and the guy who allegedly killed Charlie Kirk?

• In the case of Thomas Crooks, who terrifyingly came within millimeters of striking Trump with his rifle from an adjacent rooftop, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said the agency found no evidence linking the alleged gunman to a specific ideology.
• Mangione himself raged at the healthcare industry, a sentiment that transcends political affiliation.
• As for Tyler Robinson, accused of assassinating Kirk, his case has been bogged down in preliminary hearings and he has yet to even enter a formal plea. Law enforcement did release alleged texts he shared with his roommate and romantic partner in which Robinson, allegedly referring to Kirk, said: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Stephen Miller, who never misses an opportunity to display the characteristics of a raging fascist, didn’t do the administration any favors at Rubio’s summit. His most theatrical contribution included insulting protesters on the left (“to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person”) and referencing alleged assaults of ICE agents, which the DOJ can’t even successfully prosecute.

The presidential memo known as NSPM-7 is the clearest policy document we have of the administration’s effort to conflate left political speech with violence.

Published last September, it claims what’s happening today is the “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” To combat this imagined force, the memo—itself a direct attack on our collective civil liberties—calls for a “new law enforcement strategy,” as if we have any acronyms left to spare.

What Trump characterizes as “violent” is dangerously broad, and effectively criminalizes any and all opposition to the president and his administration. These include “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and such views as “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

“Both the order and the memo are ungrounded in fact and law,” the Brennan Center for Justice wrote shortly after the memo was published.

Notably, before Trump 2.0, the FBI had resisted designating groups such as antifa as “domestic terror organizations,” as doing so is viewed as an infringement on the First Amendment. “[B]elonging to an ideological group in and of itself is not a crime in the United States. Further, as previously stated, antifa is a decentralized movement, and law enforcement designation of antifa as a singular group may prove to be difficult,” the Congressional Research Service said in 2020.

Similar concerns were raised during the prosecution of Dylann Storm Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine church members at a historic Black church in South Carolina in 2015. As the Brennan Center noted at the time: “Because terrorism is inherently a political crime, extending material support would allow the government to assign the label to groups with unpopular beliefs. Provided the opportunity, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover would no doubt have been delighted to designate as terrorist the civil rights groups and anti-war protesters he so detested.”

“The implications of applying this construct in the context of antifa or anti-fascism are enormous: Buying a sandwich for an activist, allowing a protester to crash on your couch, or briefly lending a computer to print pamphlets critical of government policy could all potentially be considered material support,” the organization said last year.

And so the war has begun. It’s one meant to weaponize every facet of the government to not only eliminate Trump’s political opponents but make political thought and expression illegal. This from the administration that has tried to rewire everyone’s brains to think the Jan. 6 riots were an ordinary protest.

Oh, speaking of right-wing extremism. Prior to codifying NSPM-7 and announcing the left-wing terror designation, the Trump administration just so happened to delete a study that found right-wing terror outpaced all other attacks in the United States in recent years.

“A recent threat assessment by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security concluded that domestic violent extremists are an acute threat and highlighted a probability that COVID-19 pandemic-related stressors, long-standing ideological grievances related to immigration, and narratives surrounding electoral fraud will continue to serve as a justification for violent actions,” the deleted report stated.

Nothing to see here—just imaginary threats from sea to shining sea.

Image Source

• The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.