On July 16, 2026, at a State Department ministerial attended by representatives of 67 countries on what officials called “the Resurgence of Political Terrorism,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller described the American left in the vocabulary of extermination.
Miller called leftists “enemies of civilization” and a “cancer” capable of destroying society, and urged governments to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute” people labeled political terrorists. He said supporters of left-wing causes should face persecution alongside activist groups, and that U.S. institutions had grown “soft” on left-wing ideology. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, convening the gathering, vowed to “dismantle” left-wing networks and described the left as driven by “hatred” of civilization itself.
The setting is what distinguishes this from cable-news rhetoric: a sitting deputy White House chief of staff, at an official diplomatic conference, inviting 67 governments to treat a domestic political tendency as a terrorist enemy, with “debank” and “arrest” on the menu. The same week produced its implementation: the State Department report naming Hasan Piker, Isra Hirsi, and the DSA as parts of a “Cuba-backed” network. Truthout noted the language echoes the McCarthy era; the difference is that this time the machinery, from prosecutions of protesters to visa actions, is already running (see A State Department Report Names Hasan Piker, Ilhan Omar's Daughter, and the DSA as Part of a 'Cuba-Backed' Network, Trump Amplifies a Video Demanding That 'Hardcore Communist Bastards' Like Mamdani Be Criminalized and Deported and Mahmoud Khalil Sues Rubio, Miller, and Blanche Under the 1871 KKK Act, Alleging a Public-Private Conspiracy Against Pro-Palestinian Activists).
The ministerial was a launch, not a one-off. Five days later, on July 21, Rubio publicly urged an international counterterrorism crackdown on the left, per ABC News, carrying the campaign from a single gathering into ongoing U.S. diplomacy.