Analysis
Trump’s ‘New McCarthyism’ is worse than the original
The executive order designating Antifa as a terrorist organization is a political act whose vast implications must be fully understood. This applies to Italy and Europe as well.
U.S. President Trump is considering invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in American cities, while Vice President J.D. Vance claims Chicago has a murder rate comparable to the worst cities of the developing world. In reality, the rate of violent crime has fallen over the last two years, and it has fallen at an unprecedented pace in America’s largest cities, including Chicago. The four cities with the highest murder rates are all in states run by Republicans.
A month after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there is no evidence that any “radical left” organizations were involved. Nevertheless, a few days ago, U.S. Interior Secretary Kristi Noem compared Antifa to Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS. Based on a blatant narrative distortion, intimidation and complacent silence, the executive order designating Antifa as a terrorist organization is a political act whose vast implications must be fully understood.
This applies to Italy and Europe as well. Orbán’s government in Hungary has announced measures against Antifa, while similar motions have been filed in the Dutch and European parliaments. In the U.S., this has given rise to cancelling campaigns, undercover investigations and sanctions in academia, as well as a broader attack on those who monitor violent extremism. The leader of the Proud Boys, pardoned by Trump after being convicted for the assault on Capitol Hill, publicly asked: “Who’s ready to go hunt Antifa? I know a couple.” As if that weren’t enough, Trump has signed a security memorandum targeting groups or individuals who “foment political violence” even before it occurs.
The media debate on violence often sinks to cartoonish depths. In the case of Kirk, the right-wing press has been obsessed over finding a “trans roommate” for the killer, while in American religious-right circles, there has been a persistent focus on an alleged wave of violent transgender activism. This remains a baseless claim: of 4,193 mass shooting incidents since 2018, only four have involved a transgender perpetrator.
There is no shortage of accessible data for making sense of political violence in the U.S. Research from the most reputable centers, like CSIS and START, unequivocally shows that right-wing extremism is overwhelmingly dominant in the statistics. Analyzing 18 different datasets, Alex Nowrasteh concluded that from January 1975 to the present, 3,597 people have been killed in terrorist attacks in the U.S. (0.35% of all homicides). Of these, only 79 (2%) have been killed in the last five years. Excluding 9/11, right-wing terrorism – motivated by white supremacist, anti-abortion or incel ideologies – is the leading category, with 391 murders (11% of the total). Left-wing terrorism – including Black nationalism, “anti-police sentiment,” and animal rights or environmental extremism – has caused 65 deaths, about 2% of the total.
Faced with this data, the Department of Homeland Security concluded well before the Kirk murder that racially or ethnically motivated violent individuals, particularly white supremacists, represent the most persistent and lethal domestic threat. The Homeland Threat Assessment 2025 continues to identify the main risk vector as isolated individuals and small cells, a profile historically prevalent on the far right. This applies to Thomas Jacob Sandford, the former Marine who recently killed four Mormons in a church in Michigan; a photo of him in a pro-Trump t-shirt and other indicators place him close to the conservative right. As even the conservative Cato Institute headlined: “Trump Calls for a Crackdown on the Radical Left, but Most Political Violence Comes From the Right.”
In mid-September, the Trump administration canceled a National Institute of Justice study showing that domestic terrorists are often right-wing. Slowly, the media has begun to bend to the White House narrative. The influential outlet Axios, for example, recently ran the headline “Left-wing terror plots hit 30-year high,” with misleading graphs and omitting the fact that, compared to 112 deaths attributable to the right in the last decade, those attributable to the far left number just 13.
Meanwhile, Trump claims he has the power to secretly declare war on anyone he considers an enemy, adding that the U.S. is in a state of “non-international armed conflict” and that people killed at his orders, for example in the Caribbean Sea, are “unlawful combatants.” In 2025 alone, he has issued 18 “terrorist organization” designations, compared to an average of two in previous years.
Faced with this nebulous, phantom enemy in today’s United States – in the midst of a constitutional crisis and attacks on universities and cities – it is difficult not to agree with what Sylvie Laurent wrote in Le Monde: McCarthyism was a “minor version of what is happening today.” But if there is one illusion that liberals perpetuate, it is believing that the right is chasing a complete delusion. Our ability to collect and publicly discuss the data on violence (all of it, including that on anti-Semitism) must be defended. The fate of researchers, activists and democracy itself is at stake.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-nuovo-maccartismo-di-trump-e-anche-peggio-delloriginale on 2025-10-15