From “The Free Thought Project”
A new counterterrorism strategy for 2026 released by the Trump administration on Wednesday continues to ramp up despotic rhetoric targeting political adversaries and any Americans opposed to authoritarianism.
On Wednesday, May 5th, the Trump administration via the White House released the updated parameters for the Counterterrorism Strategy of 2026 (CTS). As per usual, it effectively serves as a declaration of violence on behalf of the state against any whom it deems a threat, as well as twisting rhetoric to justify the specific targeting of the political adversaries of the current regime, or those they find deemed to be undesirable.
This is par for the course for the American empire, predating Trump by decades, yet with every successive administration the goal posts are moved further away from any semblance of liberty or justice, instead using the ambiguous umbrella term of “national security” to justify egregious expansions of unchecked power and excesses of abuse.
This year is no different, and the positions outlined in the recent strategy continue a dangerous escalation of despotism effectively making millions of Americans potential targets.
For one, the first page concludes with the ominous warning (emphasis ours):
Our new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy is a return to common sense and Peace through Strength. As I said after our first successful counterterrorism mission, just days after I was sworn back in office – if you hurt Americans, or are planning to hurt Americans, “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”
Of course this blatant death threat should be taken in context with the administration’s previous actions, the fact that it has shown no hesitation or remorse to kill American citizens itself, such as with the public executions of nonviolent peaceful protesters the likes of Renee Nicole Good and Alexander Pretti. Both of whom were murdered in cold blood by ICE agents amid the rogue agency’s wave of terror throughout US cities.
Despite both of these individuals being unarmed and nonviolent until being accosted by aggressive federal agents, the administration would go on to posthumously declare them to be domestic terrorists to justify their deaths post mortem.
The annual CTS continues the decades old tradition of using the Global War on Terror and manufactured threats such as al-Qaeda and ISIS as well as Iran, collectivly referred to as “legacy islamic terrorists”, to rationalize the US’s imperial platitudes. This, despite Washington actively supporting an al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist regime in Syria, while ironically lambasting what it characterizes as “the failed “forever war” policies of prior Republican administrations, the empowerment of terror-sponsoring regimes like Iran under Democrat administrations, and a past unwillingness to challenge Islamist ideologies head on.” ― That is despite the past 20 years of brutal obliteration and occupation in the Middle East under the guise of fighting “terrorist groups” who were in reality created and funded by US intelligence amid the American empire’s global destablization efforts.
In the same vein, the 2026 strategy aims to maintain and intensify the failed war on drugs. Repeating many of the same false assertions favoring the drug war promulgated by administration’s past, while simultaneously brazenly claiming domination over an entire hemisphere, making reference to “a modern Monroe Doctrine” while invoking the illegal kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ― Effectively corroborating some of our previous reports of the modern colonialist ambitions of this presidency.
Domestically, however, is where much of the danger truly lurks. While continuing to propagate the same imperialist narratives abroad is bad enough, the administration seeks to turn the war on terror inward.
It is no secret that the technofascist regime which has embedded itself into the US government with technocrats at the helm and Trump as its figurehead has already shown a deep disdain for much of the American populace.
The President has taken no qualms with referring to large swaths of the citizenry opposed to his totalitarian ideology as “the enemy within”.
Previous reports have documented the creation of expansive watch lists that label millions of Americans as potential extremists, and the creation of a new political pre-crime center in the FBI dedicated to targeting such individuals in accordance with National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) which effectively denotes anyone with political beliefs outside of MAGA fundamentalism as being a potential terrorist.
The new counterterrorism strategy emphasizes this point further. Alongside so-called narcoterrorists, transnational gangs, and legacy Islamist terrorists: “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists”.
Some with a simplistic view of sociopolitical complexities may look at that and say “good, those violent commies need to be locked up”. That entirely misses the point. Context and nuance is key.
First and foremost, targeting anarchists is a direct assault against the purest form of liberty. Despite the term “anarchy” and “anarchism” being deliberately and misleadingly conflated with chaos and lawlessness by statists who wish to demonize the only valid counter ideology to the monopolistic violence of statism, anarchism as a political philosophy is primarily nonviolent, promoting the abolition of the state and the freedom of all peoples.
Anarchist Emma Goldman defined anarchism thusly in her 1910 work Anarchism: What It Really Stands For ―
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.
We at The Free Thought Project are unapologetically avidly anarchist and agorist in our beliefs. Just that statement in and of itself can have us, and any who agree with those sentiments, labeled as extremists.
Secondly, the targeting of so-called anti fascists carries with it its own malignant intent. One should have the discernment to be able to differentiate between the black-bloc agitators who refer to themselves as “Antifa” and broader anti-fascist ideology.
It should be clarified also that ‘Antifa” is not an organization with formal structure or hierarchy as is often claimed, but rather a decentralized movement of loose networks of groups and individuals. Surely, while these riotous provocateurs who themselves act like fascists deserve to be condemned, it should be recognized that they do not exclusively represent the entirety of an ideology.
Broader anti-fascist ideology is self evidently opposed to fascistic political tendencies, which are authoritarian in nature and can take many forms. For example, as thoroughly detailed in our recent article titled Palantir Manifesto Shows Clear Convergence of Technofascism With Technocracy, it is undeniable that the agendas pursued by Palantir are fascist in nature. Being opposed to this makes one anti fascist by default.
Similarly, during the Covid scamdemic, much of the lockdown and vaccine mandate measures pursued by the Trump administration and subsequent Biden administration were also fascistic in nature. The irony being that many on the left including some who would self identify as anti-fascist unapologetically supported these measures.
For anyone whose family members bravely fought the Nazi regime during World War II, those relatives would be rightly considered anti fascist, at least to an extent, notwithstanding the glaring contradiction of fighting Nazism abroad only to return home to a nation segregated under Jim Crow and fraught with racial violence.
As Chris Hedges elaborated some months ago, the gravest threat by the Trump administration’s attempts to criminalize anti fascist ideology is that the approach taken is so ambiguous, the language so vague, the applications so broad in scope applied to what is otherwise an amorphous movement, that any and all political dissidents can fall under its umbrella and thus be labeled as domestic extremists.
Investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein expanded upon these sentiments further in his own recent reporting on the new counter terrorism strategy, specifically warning of its embedded pre-crime elements.
As Klippenstein writes,
“Counterterrorism” itself is a propaganda term, sanitizing the actual practice: pre-crime, which aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs. (I’ve written about the Bureau’s pre-crime push at length.) The Strategy doesn’t bother hiding it. It promises to “Identify terror actors and plots before they happen” and to use “law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
He goes on to highlight the ways in which alleged opposition to radical Islam is being weaponized, particularly by proponents of Zionism, to crack down on pro Palestinian activism, with attempts by federal authorities to invent a conspiratorial alignment between the “radical left” and “jihadists” now referred to as the “Red-Green Alliance”. Additionally, he outlines the ways in which the murder of right wing political activist Charlie Kirk is being weaponized to facilitate the targeting of the transgender community via perpetuating the oft repeated lie of “rampant transgender violence”.
Klippenstein writes,
The new National Strategy uniquely identifies “radically pro-transgender ideologies” as terrorists, adding yet another threat group to the federal government’s targeting.
As I reported last year, the FBI in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder was preparing a war on what it considers transgender “extremism,” based on my sources. That report was subject to endless fact-checks asking how I knew this — something I can’t answer without burning my sources — and whether I was spreading panic in the transgender community. The counterterrorism strategy affirms my reporting, explicitly pointing to “the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies” as part of its justification for the new targeting.
Mr. Klippenstein’s report can (and should) be read in full here.
The 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy ignores the existence of right wing terrorism entirely, despite statistically being the most prevalent.
LGBTQ Nation, an independent news outlet covering political developments that affect the queer community, reports:
A 2024 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan research institution, found that right-wing extremists carried out 152 domestic attacks (killing 112 people) over the past decade, compared to 82 deaths from Islamic extremist attacks and 35 attacks (and 13 deaths) attributed to left-wing extremists.
In September 2025, the Justice Department deleted a study from its website that showed right-wing violent extremism was outpacing all other types of domestic terrorism. The Trump administration has cut funding for programs designed to counter violent extremism, specifically those focusing on white supremacist ideology, and recently filed a flimsy lawsuit against the anti-extremist organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Former workers with the Department of Homeland Security have also accused the administration of ignoring their warnings about the rise of domestic right-wing violence.
At this point it is quite clear that this administration aims to target anyone with a belief system outside of its rigid fundamentalist far right ideology. This encompasses millions of Americans who reject the totalitarianism of the MAGA cult, as well as the false left-right paradigm and the cult of statism more broadly.
This is not the first time and will likely not be the last that an administration will utilize excessive overreach to deem its opponents as extremists in an attempt to criminalize dissent. This was done under the administrations of Biden, Obama, Bush junior, Clinton, Bush senior, Reagan, and so on. It is the exact kind of authoritarian tactics we can expect by continuing to play pendulum politics.
We’re all targets now. And as we have reiterated before, as bad as the current regime is the situation will not be made better by handing over the reins of power to a different regime. The power must be taken away completely. Exit and build, abolish the state, power to the people.
Oops, was that too much of an “anarchist” thing to say? Guess I’m on a watchlist now, too. Oh well, after all, isn’t everyone?