• ADL Split Marks FBI Shift Away from Targeting Right-Wing Violence, Scholars Say

    FBI director Kash Patel last week announced that the FBI would end its working relationship with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Scholars told Axios that the FBI’s split with the ADL is but the latest piece of evidence that under Trump administration the FBI is less interested or invested in investigating hate groups and right-wing domestic terrorism, focusing instead on investigating what it deems left-wing violence.

  • Trump’s Deployment of the National Guard to Fight Crime Blurs the Legal Distinction Between the Police and the Military

    The deployment of National Guard troops for routine crime fighting in cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, and Chicago, and the proposed deployment of those troops to Baltimore, highlights the erosion of both practical and philosophical constraints on the president and the vast federal power the president wields.

  • History is repeating itself at the FBI as Agents Resist a Director’s Political Agenda

    President Trump has installed loyalists to head the DOJ and FBI – loyalists who are determined to use the organizations they lead to advance the president’s political interests. In the past 50 years, the FBI has had only one other director as overtly – if not as unabashedly — political as Kash Patel: L. Patrick Gray, who served for a year under President Richard Nixon. Gray was held accountable after he tried to help Nixon end the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Whether Kash Patel has more staying power is unclear.

  • Making a Scarecrow of the Law: A Former Agent’s Reaction to Recent Events at the FBI

    FBI Director Kash Patel’s ongoing campaign of political purges at the FBI leads former FBI agent Michael Feinberg to lament the assault on the Bureau’s integrity, professionalism, and political impartiality. He writes that “Right now there is some new agent trainee at Quantico, going through her paces at the FBI Academy, who will never know the honor of serving a Bureau unblemished by the taint of political weaponization. Her loss is something worth noting, and it is certainly something worth mourning.”

  • Protecting the Public from the Risk of Political Violence

    The nation’s strength lies in its ability to confront political violence not with despair, but with resolve and unity. Americans overwhelmingly reject political violence by a ratio of millions to one. Remaining vigilant, supporting one another, and refusing to succumb to online rage and despair can ensure that acts of violence do not define America’s future.

  • Trump’s Targeting of “Enemies” Like James Comey Echoes FBI’s Dark History of Mass Surveillance, Dirty Tricks, and Perversion of Justice Under J. Edgar Hoover

    As a candidate last year, Donald Trump promised retribution against his perceived enemies. As president, he is doing that. His campaign of vengeance will be helped by the FBI, the independence of which has been sacrificed by Director Kash Patel, who has, essentially, made the bureau an arm of the White House. It marks the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year reign as FBI director that the FBI has been used to target people perceived to be political enemies.

  • One Detainee Dead, Two Critically Wounded After Shooting at Dallas ICE Facility

    Officials said the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and no ICE personnel were among the victims. FBI Director Kash Patel said an anti-ICE message was found on an unspent shell casing.

  • 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.