Key Points
The U.S. State Department, under Secretary Marco Rubio, introduced a new designation called “Far-Left Terrorism” (FLT) at a July 2025 international summit, then released a report naming at least 43 Americans — including elected officials, journalists, and activists — as alleged vehicles of Cuban influence.
The named individuals and organizations, among them New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, and Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen, are not accused of crimes but of activities such as traveling to Cuba or writing letters. Critics draw comparisons to McCarthyism, noting the report itself references 1950s blacklists approvingly.
The real danger to national security is Far-Left terrorism, or FLT. People like Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, are on the “Blacklist” from Marco Rubio and the State Department.
It took the State Department five days to go from inventing a new kind of terrorist to publishing a list of Americans who supposedly qualify.
On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio opened a summit of more than 60 nations in Washington called the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.
According to internal State Department documents leaked to investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein, the event’s centerpiece was a brand-new label: “Far-Left Terrorism,” or FLT — a tidy three-letter acronym for a threat the government never actually defines.
Four days later, the other shoe dropped.
On July 20, the State Department released a 100-page report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism” that names at least 43 living Americans and organizations as vehicles of Cuban influence.
Sitting mayors. Members of Congress. Journalists. A labor union. The guy who co-founded Ben & Jerry’s.
If that reads like a blacklist, you’re not being paranoid. By Klippenstein’s account, the report itself approvingly cites the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s — and notes how effectively they destroyed the Communist Party USA (even though they have an official website).
The Trump administration isn’t hiding the playbook. It’s footnoting it.
Just an observation: Rubio looks like he has aged 10 years since he joined the Trump administration.
A War On a Word Nobody Can Define
Klippenstein, who obtained the summit’s internal talking points before the event, reports that the Far-Left terrorism framework lumps together “anti-tech,” pro-Iranian, antisemitic, anarchist, and eco-activist movements into one supposedly coordinated global menace.
The evidence offered for this modern scourge?
Mostly groups from the 1970s, like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army — organizations that stopped existing before most of today’s activists were born.
The summit also launched a new visa restriction policy.
It doesn’t just target people who commit violence. It reaches anyone tied to “economic sabotage including against public and private property” — language loose enough, as Klippenstein points out, to cover a broken window or a boycott.
Under this policy, a foreign national who supports the wrong protest movement could be barred from the country.
That’s not counterterrorism. It’s ideological border screening.
A White House press release celebrating the summit promised that far-Left extremism would now be treated with the ferocity the world reserves for jihadist terrorism.
Read that again: the U.S. government just announced it will treat domestic political opposition like al-Qaeda.
Klippenstein calls FLT this generation’s WMD (“Weapons of Mass Destruction:” the threat government officials used to justify the war in Iraq) — a manufactured threat, stamped with an official acronym, marched out to justify whatever comes next.
The comparison lands harder when you look at who’s running the operation.
The summit roster Klippenstein obtained includes:
- A former Breitbart writer and Michele Bachmann staffer who spent years at a think tank devoted to warning about the dangers of Islam
- A bureau official who frames counterterrorism as a defense of global Christianity
- A former Republican National Committee opposition researcher.
This isn’t a national security team. It’s a culture-war casting call.
Then They Named Names
The Cuba report is where the abstraction becomes personal.
According to Klippenstein’s count, it identifies at least 43 contemporary American people and groups, including:
- New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani
- Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass
- Reps. Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley
- Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman
- Streamer Hasan Piker
- Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s
- Democratic Socialists of America
- Amazon Labor Union and its founder Christian Smalls
- National Lawyers Guild
- Code Pink
- Multiple Black Lives Matter organizations.
Their alleged offenses are worth thinking about for a moment, because none of them are crimes.
Traveling to Cuba on a delegation. Praising the wrong person. Writing a letter. Attending a wedding — that one appears repeatedly.
The report even concedes, in Klippenstein’s reading, that DSA wasn’t shaped by direct Cuban government influence, then spends three pages implying the opposite anyway.
Rubio promoted the report on X by casting Cuba as the decades-long sponsor of American radicalism — which conveniently transforms every American Leftist into a suspected foreign asset.
Could they be any more obvious in their attempt to develop a pretext for war with Cuba? Trump said it was “next” after the war in Iran.
But this is also terrifying after several ICE protesters who did not engage in violence, were labeled “Antifa terrorists” and were each sentenced to 50+years in prison.
This is guilt by association, the signature move of McCarthyism. The government isn’t accusing these people of taking orders from Havana.
It’s accusing them of holding opinions the administration dislikes — and wrapping that accusation in the language of terrorism and subversion so that consequences can follow later.
Why This Should Scare You Even If Your Name Isn’t On the List
Blacklists don’t work by prosecuting everyone on them.
They work by making everyone near them afraid. The union member who skips the rally. The student who deletes the post. The green-card holder who quietly drops out of the mutual aid group because “economic sabotage” is now a visa category and nobody knows where the line is.
That chilling effect is the point — and it lands hardest on immigrants, organizers, and communities already living under the weight of this administration’s enforcement machinery.
Rubio spent the summit vowing that more terrorist designations for Left-wing groups are coming “soon.”
Believe him. The infrastructure is now built: a scary acronym, a visa weapon, a list of names, and a summit’s worth of international partners nodding along.
The only thing missing is the next target.
Every person on that list has the right to be wrong, loudly, in public.
That’s not a loophole in American democracy. It is American democracy.
And a government that needs to invent a terrorism category to silence ice cream makers, mayors, and podcast hosts isn’t fighting extremism. It’s practicing it.
For those who weren’t yet ready to call the Trump administration a fascist regime:
Are you ready now?
