How Counterterrorism Turned on Americans
The machinery built after 9/11 has found a new mission
Twenty-five years after September 11, most Americans would probably assume the country’s counterterrorism apparatus is used mainly to stop foreign terrorists. They would be wrong.
The Trump administration’s new counterterrorism strategy, released in May, names Antifa — the loosely organized, leaderless, “anti-fascist” protest movement with no formal membership or command structure — as a threat. Federal attention is in general directed toward leftist anti-government activists and protest movements, and to what officials describe simply as “ideological” threats inside the United States. Meanwhile, the government’s long-standing category for racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism, or REMVE, has been dropped.
It would be easy to read this as one more partisan reshuffling of priorities. Presidents always reorder threat lists according to their priorities, and emphasizing domestic threats isn’t unprecedented. Bush-era counterterrorism was built around dismantling al-Qaeda’s hierarchy and hardening the homeland against another mass-casualty attack. Obama’s DHS kept that foreign-threat focus but added a prevention layer — the 2011 strategy on countering violent extremism, built around community partnerships, aimed at stopping radicalization before it turned violent. Biden’s domestic terrorism strategy — the first ever, released in 2021 — named white-supremacist and anti-government violence as the top domestic threats.
What’s different now is how domestic terrorism is being defined, and how loose the definition is.
It is true, and worth saying plainly, that the strategy overwhelmingly targets people, movements, and causes associated with the left. That’s a consistent theme of Trump’s rhetoric, and the strategy reflects it. But the bigger story is what makes that targeting possible in the first place: the administration is taking a legal and institutional framework built to stop political violence and using it instead to attack political, cultural, and ideological movements it opposes. Today those movements are mostly on the left. There’s no reason a future president couldn’t use the same tools against the right.
Same architecture, new mission
After 9/11, the United States built an enormous, durable national security apparatus. The Patriot Act, passed six weeks after the attacks, expanded the government’s surveillance, wiretapping, and financial-monitoring powers to investigate and preempt terrorism. The Department of Homeland Security consolidated dozens of agencies under one roof. The National Counterterrorism Center fused intelligence across agencies, and FBI joint terrorism task forces formed the domestic investigative backbone. Around all of it grew a web of international intelligence-sharing agreements.
None of that disappeared when bin Laden was killed, or when ISIS lost its territory, or when one administration gave way to the next. It’s all still there, fully staffed, fully funded, fully legal.
What can change from administration to administration is what it’s used for. Over most of the past two decades, that answer was relatively stable, even across party lines: organized violence, operational plots, foreign terrorist organizations, and — after January 6 — domestic violent extremism, with a particular emphasis on the far right. Since 2019, the FBI and the DHS have repeatedly told Congress that white-supremacist violence is the most persistent and lethal domestic terrorism threat. This was the same period when the term “REMVE” was formalized, with agencies moving to track a wave of white-supremacist mass-casualty attacks from Pittsburgh to El Paso.
The new strategy breaks with that, by essentially writing REMVE out of the federal threat picture even as it devotes sustained attention to Antifa and to what it calls “radically pro-transgender ideology” — a term the document uses but never defines.
Terrorism becomes a cultural category
Traditional counterterrorism policy has generally drawn a line between people who hold radical beliefs and people who organize or commit violence. The tools of the field were built with that distinction in mind: statutes criminalizing material support for terrorism, designation of foreign terrorist organizations, and surveillance keyed to intent and operational capability, not to ideology alone.
The new strategy blurs that line by weaponizing the culture war: it names “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist” as a priority threat category, placed in close proximity to — sometimes in the same sentences as — al-Qaeda and ISIS. Increasingly, domestic political fights are narrated with a vocabulary once reserved for terrorism and foreign threats — security, radicalization, extremism, threats from within — but without the documented violence that has historically justified that vocabulary.
That language doesn’t stay confined to political speeches: it helps decide which networks intelligence analysts are told to map, whose members get flagged for surveillance, and which groups eventually face FBI investigation or material-support charges — the same legal tools used to prosecute support for foreign terrorist organizations.
The old framework asked who was planning acts of political violence. The emerging one asks which movements are undermining the country — a much broader and more political standard, anchored to ideology rather than to documented conduct.
The omissions are the argument
Strategies reveal themselves as much through omission as through inclusion, and this one omits a great deal. By dropping the REMVE category, it greatly reduces discussion of white-supremacist violence, even though far-right extremists have been found responsible for 75% to 80% of domestic terrorism deaths since September 2001.
These groups have not suddenly disappeared. On the morning of July 4, as Washington prepared for the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations, several hundred masked marchers associated with Patriot Front — a white-nationalist group that grew out of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — walked through neighborhoods near the Capitol chanting slogans about reclaiming the country. It followed a familiar script: Patriot Front has staged similar uniformed, flag-waving demonstrations in cities including Nashville in 2024. This is precisely the kind of organized extremist network the REMVE category was built to track. Its continued activity is a reminder that dropping the category doesn’t mean the threat it once named has gone away — only that the government’s strategy no longer names it.
And there’s little emphasis on prevention. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, federal counter-radicalization strategy centered on grassroots intervention — engaging Muslim-American leaders, funding mentorships, and using targeted grants to insulate youths from extremist recruitment. These community-level approaches to tackling the root causes of extremism were ultimately rolled back during Trump’s first term.
There’s essentially no human rights language, and no meaningful acknowledgment of the international institutions the US helped build after 2001 — including the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund, and the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, all of which the administration withdrew from in a January 2026 presidential memorandum. These specialized institutions provided a framework for the United States and its allies to share intelligence, train foreign judiciaries, and fund community-led programs to counter violent radicalization.
Nor is the counterterrorism strategy an isolated example of the shift in emphasis — the administration has also reorganized the FBI’s priorities and restructured how the intelligence community assesses domestic threats. FBI Director Kash Patel created a new mission center focused on domestic terrorism and “politically motivated violence,” while President Trump has repeatedly called the left “the enemy from within.”
It’s true that Biden’s strategy also treated a domestic ideological current, the far right, as a security threat. The difference is that Biden’s framework was anchored to a specific, documented pattern of lethal violence that FBI and DHS analysts had tracked for years. Trump’s strategy applies similar language and tools to movements without a comparable evidentiary basis, which makes this a story about the malleability of the category itself, not just about who currently occupies it.
What allies notice
The international consequences are easy to overlook from inside a domestic political argument, but they’re real. Washington spent two decades after 9/11 building — and largely leading — a multilateral counterterrorism framework organized around human rights, the rule of law, prevention of attacks, and a shared, if imperfect, definition of the threat. That framework included the UN’s 2006 Global Counterterrorism Strategy, a UN special rapporteur dedicated to human rights in counterterrorism, and the Global Counterterrorism Forum, which the US co-founded in 2011 to promote rule-of-law-based responses to terrorism. That framework was imperfect — the Global War on Terror had its own well-documented abuses — but it operated inside a shared international vocabulary.
The new strategy doesn’t just deprioritize that vocabulary; it largely abandons it, alongside the formal US withdrawal from these bodies. If Washington no longer defines terrorism the way its European allies, the UN, and NATO partners do, cooperation doesn’t just get harder at the margins — it starts from a different premise entirely. The consequences are already visible in regions like the Sahel, where US engagement is receding just as jihadist groups are gaining ground.
What the government believes it’s protecting
Every counterterrorism strategy tells you two things: whom the government fears and what kind of country it believes it’s protecting. Read that way, this document isn’t really about Antifa, or transgender activists, or campus protests. It’s about where the administration believes danger comes from — and how far the machinery built to fight political violence can be redirected toward fighting political disagreement, whoever happens to be on the other side of it.
Twenty-five years ago, the war on terror was organized around preventing another September 11. Today, the same institutions and vocabulary are being enlisted in a different project: defining, and confronting, what the administration sees as an enemy ideology.
That may prove to be one of the more consequential — and least noticed — legacies of this national security strategy. It changes how the government treats perceived threats at home, in a way that future administrations, of either party, will find easier to repeat.
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