On May 6, 2026, the Trump administration released its latest conspiracy-laden attack on “the left,” this time in the form of a “counterterrorism strategy". While laughably lacking in evidence or regard for laws, the “strategy” will have serious, deadly consequences. It sets our country’s counterterror apparatus and racist, anti-Muslim goals against the Global South, Europe, and all those here at home who have the nerve to demand their rights and oppose full-fledged autocracy.

In this post, I will focus on the domestic implications, although the global impacts are both frightening and impossible to fully separate, as the strategy conflates everything from domestic resistance movements to people with disfavored ideologies to drug trafficking with international terrorism.

The strategy is authored by Sebastian Gorka, a known anti-Muslim bigot whom former counterterrorism officials pan as “ill-informed” and a “huckster.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this so-called “strategy” is basically a cocktail of fearmongering and post-9/11 playbook, but on steroids. It incorporates and expands on the president’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which casts a sweeping set of dissenting views as (domestic) terrorism, plays up fears of a “new alliance” between leftists and “Islamists,” and completely ignores the documented threats of right-wing and white supremacist extremists.

This is all hauntingly familiar. For generations, federal agencies have surveilled, monitored, and targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color, using surveillance as a tool of intimidation and enforcement that deepens racial inequities instead of making people safer.

Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.

For example, the strategy promises to wield massive law enforcement, surveillance, and other counterterror powers to “map” and "neutralize" groups it describes as "anti‑American, radically pro‑transgender, and anarchist." In the post-9/11 era, the New York Police Department attempted to map all Muslims and their institutions in the Tri-State Area, for which Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C. successfully sued in 2012. We have long seen our community and sacred spaces violated by informants and oppressive surveillance.

The document also states that the US government will "[i]dentify terror actors and plots before they happen,” (emphasis added) which sounds dystopian, but is the same false logic underlying the notorious Countering Violent Extremism program that targeted American Muslims in the post-9/11 era.

In Gorka's reported comments to the press, he doubled down on targeting "ideology” and preventive policing: “We see a threat… we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals.”

These practices have caused lasting trauma and generational impact for Muslims, stifling our religious and political expression and wrecking intra-community trust. Now the government is wolfishly expanding while few seem to notice. Gorka himself said, “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”

A Sweeping........

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