The New Dark Age

The U.S.’ designation of U.K.-based activist collective Palestine Action as a global terrorist group is part of a wider project, concocted by far-right pro-Israel strategist Sebastian Gorka, to criminalize left-wing or pro-Palestine dissent against Trump’s rule. MintPress exposes this plan.

The Man Behind It All

The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it was placing Palestine Action on its list of global terrorist groups, as part of what it called a “broader U.S. government effort to address the threat of transnational far-left terrorism.”

The designation is one of the first clear signs that the Trump administration is making good on its promise to reorient its domestic and international strategy towards clamping down on what Secretary of State Marco Rubio described as “far-left terror” groups.

The policy shift was summed up in an ominous 16-page White House document published in May, titled “United States Counterterrorism Strategy.” The policy document was reportedly written by Trump’s counter-terrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, who stated he was pouring his “life’s work” into making it a “blueprint” for American strategy.

“Currently,” the document claims, “we face three major types of terror groups: narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists, [and] violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.”

It is, however, the third group that the report appears most concerned with, noting that, “we recognize that a new type of domestic terrorism has emerged, driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.” “Our national CT [counterterrorism] activities,” it concludes, will “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

A former British military intelligence operative, the London-born Gorka has built a wide following among the global alt-right community. He was a controversial pick for Trump’s team, even in conservative circles. Described in Esquire magazine as the most “ridiculous” character in an “endless parade of whackadoos, smackbrains, rockheads, fanatics, lunatics, and general shit-for-brains” following Trump, he has openly flirted with fascism and Nazism, and is considered among the most hardline Islamophobes in the administration.

He was previously fired from his position in the FBI because of his extreme anti-Muslim rhetoric. Yet this sort of speech is creeping its way into official counterterrorism policy when the White House document advises that Europe can only remain strong if it has “honest conversations about Islamism.”

It also states that their priority is to track and crush the supposed “new and evolving alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance.” For the White House, Palestine Action, which blends leftism and pro-Palestine agitation, fits this niche perfectly.

Founded in 2020, Palestine Action is a direct action group that attempts to end global complicity in Israeli war crimes by taking direct action against Israeli weapons plants operating in the United Kingdom, occupying their factories and destroying their machinery and inventory. They have proven highly effective, costing Israeli manufacturer, Elbit Systems billions of dollars in damages and lost contracts.

At times, the White House document reads like a far-right manifesto, and even claims that Christians are “the most persecuted people on Earth.”

Like many in Trump’s inner circle, Gorka made a name for himself not as an administrator, but as a media anchor, becoming a popular pro-Trump radio host. This has led to many suggesting he is dangerously underqualified for his position, including his former PhD advisor who stated that he would not consider Gorka an expert in terrorism.

His appointment as deputy assistant to the President of the United States was therefore quite the surprise, not least to Gorka himself, who, just a few years previously, was in the political wilderness, selling fish oil pills to make ends meet.

A deeply Christian man, he is among Israel’s loudest and most passionate advocates in Washington D.C. He has strongly supported its post-October 7 assault on Gaza, and had previously condemned liberal American Jews for their supposed insufficient loyalty towards the Jewish State. On Iran, he is a hardliner, strongly supporting Trump’s campaign against Tehran, and describing, in his typical style, critics of the war as “testicularly challenged” individuals who take a “low-T approach to threats to the United States.”

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that an administration spearheaded by him would take a very dim view of Palestine Action.

Part of a Wider Plan

This summer, the Trump/Rubio State Department has attempted to concoct links between leftist activists on the one hand, and Latin American narcoterrorists and Islamic terrorists on the other. It recently claimed that the George Floyd Protests were secretly driven by a covert Cuban influence campaign, and that American Antifa collectives are connected to Hamas and Iran’s IRGC.

Gorka’s document has been widely interpreted as the administration’s blueprint and legal justification for a crackdown on civil liberties and political opponents, and curtailing the right to oppose Trump’s rule.

Quite apart from the numerous spelling and grammatical errors, there are a number of serious flaws with the thesis. Firstly, the only example of “far-left terrorism” it cites is the assassination of Charlie Kirk by “a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” But the alleged attacker came from a Utah Republican family and was fascinated by Hitler, Nazism, and Christian nationalism. Thus, his motives and ideology were mixed, at best.

Moreover, left-wing terror in the United States pales into comparison to that of the right-wing attacks, the leading cause of political deaths. The White House, however, is completely uninterested in pursuing those cases, and does not mention the violence from the political right at all, possibly because it draws its most militant support from precisely those ranks.

An Extraordinary Ban

Palestine Action is now sanctioned and will be treated as akin to organizations like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. “Far-left extremists, their fronts, and their enablers should be on notice: We will bring the full weight of our economic tools to bear,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; “Political terrorism has no place in our society, and we will continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.”

The group, which describes itself as a “direct action movement committed to ending global complicity with Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime” was controversially placed on the United Kingdom’s terrorist list last year (possibly due to pressure from President Trump himself). The designation is currently being debated in the U.K.’s Supreme Court as in February, the High Court ruled that the prescription was unlawful and a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Why a small British group would be considered a threat to the United States was explained in an official press release that noted: “Palestine Action has promoted its violent, criminal, and terrorist acts on social media, encouraging the use of similar tactics internationally, including within the United States and along the U.S.-Mexican border.”

The organization gained notoriety for its direct action technique of occupying military bases and Israeli-owned weapons plants in the U.K. and damaging the machinery in order to disrupt the flow of arms to Israel.

The group’s co-founder, Huda Ammori, was horrified by the designation. “As a Palestinian and Iraqi, the fact the country which destroyed both my homelands is calling me a terrorist, is beyond hypocritical. Trump is the antithesis to everything Palestine Action stands for,” she wrote on Twitter.

Destroying Democracy For Israel

The Trump administration’s actions builds on the United Kingdom’s decision last year to ban Palestine Action and designate it a terror group. Since then, it has imprisoned members and arrested over 3,000 individuals for supporting the group. An inordinate number of these arrests have been of retirees. Images of an 83-year-old priest and a blind, wheelchair-bound 63-year-old man behind led away by police, merely for holding signs, have gone viral around the world. Those convicted of supporting Palestine Action face up to 14 years in prison under the new laws.

The U.K.’s actions have drawn sharp criticism from human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the latter of whom wrote that, “by equating direct action protest with terrorism, the government is treating dissent as a security threat.” Successive British governments have had to deal with enormous pro-Palestine demonstrations. In both November 2023 and March 2026, an estimated one million people marched on the streets of London to support Palestinian liberation.

There is some evidence that the U.K.’s decision to treat Palestine Action so harshly was influenced by Donald Trump personally. After the group vandalized the Trump Turnberry golf course in Scotland, Trump phoned Prime Minister Keir Starmer to discuss a response. Trump also publicly called for a “harsh” response to the “terrorists” who did “serious damage” to his property, directly echoing the specific wording of the Terrorism Act – a fact that Declassified UK suggested may have been a deliberate attempt to justify the upcoming ruling.

Today, it was announced that the group’s action spray-painting the walls of the Turnberry clubhouse would be treated by police as an “act of terrorism,” with Ammori herself wondering aloud if Trump’s anger was the reason for its proscription.

Cracking Down on Dissent in America

In the wake of the genocidal Israeli assault of Gaza, universities across the United States saw unprecedented waves of strikes, protests, demonstrations. College campuses across 45 of the 50 states saw major actions, with at least 10% of all college students in the United States estimated to have participated in the overwhelmingly peaceful action.

The response from authorities was overwhelming: thousands were arrested, charged, fined, lost their degrees, or even deported. A MintPress News investigation found that Israeli and pro-Israel billionaire benefactors of the universities were pressuring the institutions to crack heads.

Trump has cracked down on a wide range of dissent across America, identifying groups such as Antifa, pro-abortion rights network, Jane’s Revenge, and those opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), U.S. Border Patrol, and the construction of the giant “Cop City” training center in Georgia as dangerous extremists who must be suppressed.

His administration is also expecting massive, nationwide anti-A.I. riots in the coming years, as the technology destroys communities and industries. Ironically, as another MintPress News investigation found, the government is using A.I. to create a massive security dragnet in order to identify potential hotspots and troublemakers before they happen.

The Trump administration’s labeling of Palestine Action as a terror group, then, should be seen in the wider context of a far-right administration intent on criminalizing protest, opposition, and organizing against its increasingly authoritarian rule. Counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka has found a willing ally in Trump. And given that both major parties remain committed to supporting Israel’s expansionist aims, there will be little official pushback to the designation. With an emboldened Trump and an increasingly disjointed economy offering Americans very little, it is likely that we will see more actions such as this one. Palestine Action will likely not be the last group added to the growing list.