• Politicizing Federal Troops in U.S. Mirrors Use of Military in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s

    In his second term as president, Donald Trump has deployed U.S. military forces in rarely used roles in domestic law enforcement. As a political scientist who studies civil-military relations, I recognize the fundamental problems of militarizing domestic law enforcement, which the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits. With Trump’s continued militarization of law enforcement, the United States is entering largely uncharted waters. But in other countries, including Chile and Argentina, this is familiar territory.

  • Quote of the Day

    “[Antifa] is essentially a kind of coalition politics of all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists and more independent radicals,” says historian Mark Bray.
    “Sometimes I compare it to feminism. There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group,” he said.
    “Insofar as terrorism is setting off explosives and killing people, that’s not what these groups ever do,” Bray said.

    — Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, quoted in the Washington Post, 22 September 2025

  • Is Antifa a Terrorist Organization?

    The question of whether Antifa qualifies as a terrorist organization has been the subject of intense political, legal, and academic debate in the United States and abroad. President Trump’s 22 September designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is problematic on legal and operational grounds.

  • Argument: Deal with Antifa Without Designating Them

    In an Editorial, the editors of the conservative National Review argue that “We’ve seen before what happens when there is an over-insistence by political leaders on supposed domestic political threats —you get cock-up investigations and confusing plots where it is unclear whether FBI agents and informers are investigating actual domestic terrorists, or merely seducing and entrapping people into plans mostly hatched by the agents and informers.”

  • Politically Motivated Terrorist Killings in the US: Answering the Critics

    My recent posts about politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States revealed surprising findings. There are a few politically motivated killings. If we examine politically motivated terrorist killings perpetrated by domestic terrorists (thus excluding the 9/11 attacks, which were perpetrated by foreign terrorists), the left-right political distribution of murders skews decisively right, even in recent years, but the numbers are minuscule.

  • Right-Wing Extremist Violence Is More Frequent and More Deadly Than Left-Wing Violence − What the Data Shows

    After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump and members of his administration claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the U.S. But all research on the subject conclusively shows that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and that right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.

  • The Toxic Legacy of 9/11…and How to End It

    Restoring the Bill of Rights to its proper shape and place in our civic life would be one way to honor those killed on 9/11 and in the wars that followed.

  • “This Will Not End Here”: A Scholar Explains Why Charlie Kirk’s Killing Could Embolden Political Violence

    “Political assassinations come in waves. We see that not only in the United States but other countries. I’ve looked at political assassinations in many democracies, and one of the things I see in a fairly consistent manner is that political assassinations create a process of escalation that encourages others on the extreme political spectrum to feel the need to retaliate. And that is my main concern,” says University of Massachusetts Lowell scholar Arie Perliger, who studies political violence and assassinations.

  • Are Political Assassinations on the Rise? A Criminologist Weighs in on the Shooting Death of Charlie Kirk

    James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist, says there has been a rise in politically motivated killings, attempted killings and partisan threats —even though the overall fatalities remains a small number.

  • The President Should Not Have a License to Kill

    The administration claims that the “war” on drugs justifies extrajudicial killing. But redefining civilian drug criminals as “combatants” gives away the reality: the government just militarized what was a low-level criminal law enforcement incident outside the United States. Once we consider the victims’ alleged illegal actions, we can see that the government committed the most egregious crime here.

  • Governors Split Over Mobilizing National Guard as Trump Seeks More Troops

    Republican governors want National Guard members to help ICE, in addition to deploying to Washington.

  • Raised for the Reich: White Supremacists Are Recruiting Teens for On-the-Ground Action

    White supremacists have a long history of trying to recruit youths to join their movement as a means of filling their ranks and maintaining relevancy. The ubiquity of social media in young people’s lives means that today there are many opportunities for white supremacists to reach youths with their content and recruit them to their cause.

  • Standing Around in Washington, D.C.

    What, exactly, is the National Guard really doing in Washington, D.C.? Benjamin Wittes writes in Lawfare that they just stand around. “This deployment isn’t really about doing anything. It’s not going to do anything about D.C.’s crime problem, though I’m sure the president will make up whatever numbers he needs to claim otherwise.” The answer is: “It’s a way of showing who owns whom. And doing it over nothing, for no reason other than that the president can do it, shows who’s boss in a way that doing it for a reason never could.”

  • Tehran’s Homeland Option: Terror Pathways for Iran to Strike in the United States

    The 12-day Iran war may be over, but the threat of Iranian reprisal attacks now looms large, and will for the foreseeable future.In addition to attacking U.S. targets around the world, Iranian operatives or their agents could also attempt to carry out attacks inside the United States, leveraging what U.S. counterterrorism officials have describe as a “homeland option” developed over years.

  • Active Clubs Aare White Supremacy’s New, Dangerous Frontier

    Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.