As President Donald Trump prepares to deliver an address to the nation Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is readying for a separate event the same day, one independent journalist Ken Klippenstein warned had gone “completely overlooked” and posed a major threat to “free speech.”
The White House has teased that Trump’s address will highlight election "irregularities" his administration had supposedly uncovered, and experts suspect the speech to be a relitigation of the 2020 election, which the president has long claimed, falsely, was “stolen.” The same day, Rubio will be hosting a summit in Washington, D.C. focused on “political terrorism,” or as was described in a leaked government internal communication obtained by Klippenstein, “far-left terrorism.”
“To the extent that media have noticed the summit at all, they’ve focused on the confusion and wariness among some of the over 60 countries invited; but the significance of the term [far-left terrorism] has been completely overlooked,” Klippenstein wrote in a report published Tuesday on his Substack.
“Put simply, it’s a more powerful attack on protest, free speech and the Democratic Party than Trump’s designation of ‘Antifa’ as a domestic terrorist group or [Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7].”
According to the leaked communication obtained by Klippenstein, the summit is called the “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” with the phrase “political terrorism” referring to domestic actors engaged in activity labeled as terrorism. The Trump administration’s definition of terrorism has been expanded broadly in recent months in a manner critics say targets Americans exercising free speech.
The summit, coupled with the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NPSM-7, the Trump directive issued last year that “directs the Departments of State Treasury, Justice and various other federal agencies to prioritize investigating and preempting left-wing violence,” bore all the hallmarks of the Nixon administration's efforts to crackdown on rising anti-war sentiment in the early 1970s, Klippenstein argued.
Klippenstein also argued that the Trump administration’s focus on “left-wing terrorism” was sparked by the assassination last year of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, which officials weaponized, he claimed, to squash dissent.
“To the Trump camp, Kirk’s killing solidified their thinking that a vast conspiracy existed amongst the left to destroy the nation,” Klippenstein wrote.
“Their counter to this imagined national security threat has been to link Trump’s NSPM-7 national security directive, the nihilist violent extremism label, and the executive order designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization into a larger umbrella: ‘political terrorism.’”
Klippenstein continued: “Or as I call [it], POLTERGEIST, because the ‘political-terrorism’ term is an attempt by the Trump administration to summon a ghost from the Nixon years.”