Marco Rubio And Stephen Miller’s Criminalization Of The Left Was Tested On Black America First

Last week was a hot mess in American politics.

Don’t get me wrong, every week in Trump’s America, some kaleidoscopic evil goes down. But last Thursday, within roughly 36 hours, four ominous messages came from the president and three of his senior officials. Taken together, it is clear that this regime is laying the groundwork for amped-up repression ahead of the midterm elections.

First up was Donald Trump appearing on prime-time television, still hauling around his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden like a ghoul dragging a rotten corpse. Six years later, he’s still blaming China, Tyrone and ’nem from Atlanta, somebody’s abuela in Arizona, voting machines gone woke, poll workers named Keisha, and the end-times moon cycle. During his address, Trump once again revived long-debunked lies about fraud so he could justify his demands for tighter voting restrictions.

Earlier that day, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller spoke at an international counterterrorism ministerial held in the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C. Representatives from 67 countries listened to the duo cast the political left as a threat to national security and civilization. After Rubio delivered the opening remarks, Miller filled up by detailing plans for a domestic crackdown under NSPM-7, which would identify, defund, arrest, and prosecute opponents classified by the Trump administration as political terrorists.

And on the eve of all this, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced a testosterone-screening program for troops aged 30 and older, supposedly to keep America’s “warfighters” operating on what he called the “leading edge of lethality,” as if what this country desperately needs is more state-sanctioned killing. 

So, we watched a seemingly coordinated rollout with Trump priming the country for another stolen-election panic, Rubio and Miller putting targets on the left, and Hegseth checking whether the troops’ bloodwork was sufficiently homicidal.

And dare I say that this entire spectacle unfolded inside a government that looks half-dead, politically anxious, and increasingly desperate to hold onto power. There’s Trump with his swollen legs, bruised hands, and sleepiness. Mitch McConnell went MIA after a fall and bout of pneumonia. His staff issued a cryptic release and proof-of-life photos, which raise more questions than answers. Then Lindsey Graham up and died. 

But the real story isn’t just that America is being governed by a gerontocracy wheezing toward the midterms. The bodies at the top may be falling, swelling, and deteriorating, but the racist, authoritarian machinery beneath them is moving along just fine. It is clear that this administration is not waiting until after another election loss to cry fraud. Instead, they’re trying to rig the terms of participation now.

That is what connects Trump’s election séance to Rubio and Miller’s rhetoric about domestic terrorism. Trump keeps feeding the public the lie that elections are stolen from him. His administration attacks the laws and institutions that protect voting rights. Then his top officials create a category of domestic enemies who can be blamed, surveilled, financially strangled, arrested, and prosecuted when people resist.

Trump supplies the conspiracy. Rubio gives the enemy a name. Miller explains how the government will come after them. And Hegseth makes sure the military will remain on the “leading edge of lethality” in case folks take to the streets. Sounds like the Palmer Raids, or McCarthyism, or COINTELPRO.

But none of this is unfamiliar to Black people. We’ve seen this whole white-supremacist authoritarian production before. Long before “the left” was branded dangerous, this government tested these methods on Black people.

Slave rebellions were called terrorism and abolitionists were treated as subversives. Black labor organizers were branded radicals. Civil rights leaders and groups, from Martin Luther King Jr. to the Black Panthers, were surveilled by the FBI as threats to national security, not because they were engaged in some vast criminal enterprise. 

Their ideas, organizing activities, and demands threatened the racial order.  And so those movements were infiltrated, their funding was disrupted, they were subjected to cooked-up plots, folks were arrested, prosecuted, and jailed as threats to public safety. The boundary between dissent and violence was erased so that racial justice movements looked criminal.

And now, here we go again. 

Just listen to how Stephen Miller’s target list includes anyone the administration deems responsible for creating “conditions” for violence. That’s pretty broad and has the potential to cover anyone from professors, journalists, pastors, nonprofits, universities, foundations, or donors connected to exposing injustices. 

That means every teacher, writer, organizer, institution, donor, or benefactor can be folded into this supposed terrorist network. And “defunding” and “debanking” means they will not only arrest and prosecute people, but cut off money, banking access, employment, and any other infrastructure that allows opposition movements to survive.

You don’t have to imprison every dissident if you can bankrupt the organizations they work for. You don’t have to censor every journalist if employers become too frightened to hire them. You don’t have to outlaw every protest if banks, donors, universities, and foundations decide supporting controversial causes is too risky.

Power doesn’t always announce itself with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. Sometimes it arrives as a compliance department. Black communities understand this better than most Americans because we’ve lived through earlier versions with our churches and organizations being infiltrated, our newspapers surveilled, our leaders wiretapped and assassinated. 

The Trump regime is using old weapons and borrowing from an older racial counterinsurgency tradition used on Black communities. The government learned how to suppress political opposition by practicing on Black communities first. But this time they’re being more open with their intentions, systematic, and using more sophisticated tools than previous generations of officials could have imagined.

That is why Miller’s distinction between “terrorists” and those who merely “support” the conditions around them is so dangerous. Black history shows how quickly that category expands. 

The warning, then, is simple: what is being announced as a war on “the left” is an expansion of tools long used against Black freedom movements. Black people are not encountering a new political technology. We are watching an old one become national policy.

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