The New Dark Age

The House Ways and Means Committee subpoenaed The People’s Forum on July 21, ordering the New York organizing center to turn over its internal communications, membership records and finances by Aug. 7. Two other anti-imperialist groups, BreakThrough News and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, were served the same day.

The committee calls it a tax inquiry into the groups’ funding. It marks an escalation in something far larger — a coordinated drive by the Trump administration to brand the socialist, antiwar and anti-racist movements as terrorists, and to name, one by one, the people it means to persecute.

The enemies list came first. On July 20 the State Department released a 100-page report, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” that ties nearly every current of the left in the United States to Havana. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Cuba the “leading sponsor of radical leftism.” The report reaches back for its model without embarrassment, crediting the McCarthy-era purges and prosecutions of the 1950s with breaking the Communist Party and the militant labor movement of that time.

Then the roster. The report names at least 43 people and organizations. Among them are the mayors of New York and Los Angeles, Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass; members of Congress including Maxine Waters, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley; the Amazon Labor Union and its founder, Christian Smalls; journalists Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker; and organizations across the movement — the Democratic Socialists of America, CODEPINK, the National Lawyers Guild, the Venceremos Brigade, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, the National Network on Cuba and Black Lives Matter.

The “evidence” against them is that they hold the wrong politics. A delegation to Cuba, a word of solidarity with a political prisoner, opposition to the blockade — these are what the report offers as proof of foreign control. It even concedes that DSA grew from “organic ideological commitments” and was not built by the Cuban government, then brands the group an instrument of Havana anyway. This is guilt by association, the method of the witch-hunt, dressed in the language of national security.

The report did not appear on its own. On July 16 Rubio gathered officials from 66 countries at the State Department for what he called a meeting on the resurgence of political terrorism. There he coined a new category, “Far-Left Terrorism,” and a White House statement promised that far-left politics would now be met with “the same seriousness and ferocity” the government reserves for jihadist attacks. Rubio said new terrorist designations for left-wing groups were coming. FBI Director Kash Patel and White House aide Stephen Miller sat in the audience.

The campaign is built on fabrication. Rubio told the gathering that 93% of terrorist attacks in the West between 1970 and 1980 were the work of the far left. Rubio offered no evidence for the figure or any explanation of how he dreamed it up. To prove the danger today, he had to reach back to the Weather Underground, an organization defunct for half a century.

He said the 2020 uprising after the police killing of George Floyd nearly brought the country to its knees; the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project found that about 94% of those demonstrations were peaceful. He called for Antifa to be designated a global terrorist network — though no organization or network called Antifa exists. Antifa means anti-fascist; the word names a political position, not a group. The FBI itself says it investigates violent acts rather than beliefs.

Rubio claimed Iran and Cuba direct the world’s left — folding the antiwar movement into the U.S. war on Iran — while, as Reuters reported, presenting no evidence at all.

The rhetoric drops the pretense of law. Rubio called the radical left “the rebellion of the worst against the best” and declared that “the time has come to crush this evil once and for all.” The words echo Mussolini, who preached the “immutable” inequality of human beings. Rubio’s language casts a whole political camp as an enemy to be destroyed.

One ambitious secretary of state did not invent this. It is what a ruling class reaches for when its system is in trouble. Its war on Iran has gone badly, its blockade of Cuba stands exposed before the world, and the movements against war, against ICE and against the genocide in Gaza have put millions into the streets. Unable to answer them politically, the billionaire class turns to purges and terrorist labels — the machinery of political repression used by fascist governments to criminalize and crush opposition.

The People’s Forum has rejected the subpoena and is preparing a legal challenge. “We will not be silenced,” said Manolo De Los Santos, the group’s executive director. “We will continue to defend our constitutional rights and expose the political nature of this witch-hunt.” Founded as a home for working-class education and solidarity with the peoples of the Global South, the center is assembling a legal team and calling on all who value democratic rights to sign its open letter against the subpoena and support its defense at peoplesforum.org.

The McCarthy purge was broken in the end by those who refused to name names and by a movement that closed ranks around its targets. A witch-hunt survives only by isolation, picking off its targets one by one. The government has named at least 43. The task before the workers’ movement is to see that not one of them stands alone — and to meet the attack on any one as an attack on all.

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