Friday Binding: How an ideology becomes a Foreign Terrorist Organization
The through-line this week: how does an ideology become a Foreign Terrorist Organization?
Marco Rubio hosted 65 foreign delegations in Washington yesterday to name “radical leftism” a menace the world must confront together. State’s official Facebook page carried the line “poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, and liberation.” The ministerial has a name: the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. The rhetoric is the visible layer. The five picks below trace the machinery underneath.
1. Where the machinery lives
Ken Klippenstein, “Exclusive: FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.” April 6, 2026.
The FBI stood up an NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center. Its job is to flag people whose beliefs match a list — anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, opposition to traditional views on family and religion. The trigger is what people think. The center integrates intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis. Klippenstein has been on this since September, when NSPM-7 first appeared. This piece is where the architecture stops being abstract.
Read it: kenklippenstein.com — FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center
2. The language on paper
Democracy Now!, interview with Ken Klippenstein. December 8, 2025.
A leaked DOJ implementation memo defined the targets. Each criterion is a belief. “Anti-American, anti-capitalist or anti-Christian.” “Opposition to law and immigration enforcement.” Support for “radical gender ideology.” “Hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.” NSPM-7 authorized the Treasury Department to audit nonprofit taxes for foreign-financing evidence, told the FBI to review five years of past intelligence records, and set up a citizen reporting system. This transcript is where the categories get named in the government’s own words.
Read it: democracynow.org — Leaked DOJ Memo Targets “Anti-Americanism, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-Christianity”
3. The insider says the framework does not fit
NPR, “U.S. adds 4 European leftist groups to foreign terrorism list.” November 21, 2025.
Jason Blazakis ran the State Department’s FTO designation office through the Obama and first Trump administrations. He was asked whether the four European groups the State Department just designated — Antifa Ost in Germany, Informal Anarchist Federation in Italy, Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense in Greece — met the standard. His answer: “These wouldn’t really typically merit an FTO designation because they hadn’t been responsible for fatalities yet.” Ten years at the office. Naming a category error.
Read it: npr.org — U.S. adds 4 European leftist groups to foreign terrorism list
4. What the allies said
Washington Post via The Spokesman-Review, “Rubio tries to enlist other nations in antifa fight, but some allies recoil.” July 9, 2026.
European diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity: “We don’t have antifa.” Another: their “law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high-priority threat.” The Netherlands declined to co-host a May planning meeting on the same topic. Thomas Renard of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, quoted the day of the ministerial, said counterterrorism “has been completely politicised, instrumentalised,” and that right-wing terrorism has “completely disappeared from the U.S. counterterrorism strategy.” When the allies are sending junior ministers to a foreign-policy summit, the message is legible.
Read it: spokesman.com — Rubio tries to enlist other nations in antifa fight, but some allies recoil
5. The historical rhyme
Ken Klippenstein, “Leak: Rubio’s WMD Scandal Is ‘Far-Left Terrorism’.” July 15, 2026.
Klippenstein got the ministerial planning documents the day before Rubio took the podium. His line lands hardest: “A three-letter acronym for an imaginary threat that could be radioactive to a politician’s presidential ambitions. Sound familiar? It’s this generation’s WMD.” The FTO framework was built for al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas. Groups with command structures, membership rolls, operational tempo. Applied to an ideology, it becomes the pretext. That is the shape of WMD.
Read it: kenklippenstein.com — Leak: Rubio’s WMD Scandal Is “Far-Left Terrorism”
The small install: a reader’s tool from 1936
Clyde Miller and Violet Edwards published a field guide for teachers in The Clearing House in October 1936. Seven propaganda devices, meant to teach a child to read a political ad. Their list still works. Try it on the State Department’s Facebook post, three sentences long.
Name-calling. “Radical leftism.” “Poisonous.” “Ugliness.” “Menace.” Four in three sentences.
Glittering generalities. “Equality, justice, and liberation.” The words the reader is being taught to distrust.
Transfer. The State Department seal. The podium. The backdrop reading “The Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” which puts the target in the same visual frame as al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Hamas without having to name them.
Testimonial. 65 foreign delegations in the room. Attendance is the message.
Card-stacking. No mention of right-wing political violence, which the same counterterrorism data ranks higher. (Same move, one week apart: see Restoring Whose Truth? Revisited.)
Plain folks. “We must confront this menace together.” The Secretary of State speaks in the register of a neighborhood watch.
Bandwagon. The event is named Resurgence. The framing is that this is what serious countries do now, and the room is proof.
All seven, one Facebook post. Miller and Edwards wrote in the 1930s because they had watched propaganda organize whole countries. Their bet was that a small guide, learned young, keeps the machinery visible. Ninety years later, on the State Department’s own feed, every device is present and every one is working. Anyone can name them once they know the names.
(Miller and Edwards, 1936; Hobbs & McGee, 2008/2011.)
Monday
Wayne Coy’s guest essay lands Monday. He asks a definitional question: what gets called violence, and what does not. He walks through three things that happened on the same July 4 weekend. The White House Domestic Policy Council report recommending loyalty labels at Smithsonian entrances. A Black woman on a DC Metro train surrounded by masked Patriot Front marchers carrying Confederate flags. Flock Safety cameras cut down across five states, after audits showed one city’s data had been searched 7,100 times for immigration enforcement in violation of that city’s own policy. The march got a police escort. The woman got her dismissed 2024 charges spread across the internet. The camera-cutters face felony charges and, in some jurisdictions, the label “domestic terrorist.” The company that scans 150 million vehicles a day without warrant gets a contract renewal. Wayne names the pattern: the definition of violence decides which acts require accountability and which get to keep running. Same mechanism the Binding traced today. Different scale.
The through-line, restated
If ideology becomes an FTO-eligible category, what stops the next administration from designating the ideology it opposes?
That is the question the next Congress will inherit, whether or not it takes it up.
What Time Binds is Jerry W. Washington’s newsletter on how institutions repair meaning under pressure. Jerry advises leaders and organizations on aligning language, decisions, and accountability in high-stakes moments. If you’re facing one, hit reply if you’d like to talk.