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Ken Klippenstein

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7 26

After "Political Terrorism" Summit, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups

After "Political Terrorism" Summit, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups

Rubio report on Cuban subversion names Zohran Mamdani, Amy Goodman, Hasan Piker + orgs like DSA and Amazon Labor Union

Ken Klippenstein

Jul 20, 2026

a new State Department report on Cuba’s “campaign of subversion against the United States” is a virtual government blacklist against left-wing Americans and groups. Linked to last week’s Rubio-led summit on “political terrorism,” the report is unusually candid about the government’s targets.

“Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history — from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses — can be linked, in some way, shape, or form, to Cuban influence,” the report says.

As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

The 100-page report, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” was released this morning.

Cuba Report

44.6MB ∙ PDF file

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An entire section of the report — numbering over three pages long — is dedicated to the Democratic Socialists of America.

“The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) serves as a particularly potent illustration of the ideological victory of Cuba’s effort to position itself as the spiritual capital of Third Worldist Radicalism,” the report says. “This represents a significant advance for the Cuban influence operation: Havana no longer needs to rely solely on intelligence penetration or asset cultivation to exert influence over the United States.”

Though the report concedes that “DSA was not shaped by the direct and tangible influence of the Cuban government” and that it has “organic ideological commitments,” it insists that “None of that is to say that the group has no ties to the Cuban regime and its influence network.”

Instead, the report points to the group’s delegations to Cuba as evidence of Cuban influence.

“For more than six decades, the Cuban regime has been the leading sponsor of radical leftism and Third Worldism in the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a post on X/Twitter linking to the report.

Whatever you think of DSA, it is hardly fringe. It claims as members prominent politicians like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and has helped to nominate dozens of politicians like him to office in recent years. Senator Bernie Sanders identifies as a Democratic Socialist — having himself popularized the term — as do Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, who are card carrying members (as well as Mamdani).

The Cuba report follows last week’s Rubio-led international summit on “political terrorism.” That summit, as I reported, introduced the new term “Far-Left Terrorism” (abbreviated “FLT”), a term it never really defined.

A White House press release summarizing the event said that “far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

Speaking at the summit, Rubio vowed that further new terrorist designations for left-wing groups would be coming “soon.”

Jeremy Lewin, the Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, linked last week’s political terrorism summit to today’s Cuba report, saying on X: “For seven decades, the Cuban regime has been behind both the ideological underpinnings of third worldism and subversive organizing structures of the new radical left political terrorists that @SecRubio called out with clarity last week.”

But virtually all the summit could do to substantiate the supposed scourge of political terrorism was to focus on groups that are almost comically dated — like the 70’s era Symbionese Liberation Army or the Weather Underground. The summit was vague about what are the equivalent groups today.

Today’s Cuba report, however, “names names,” in an obvious attempt to stigmatize American citizens who are very much politically active today.

In some cases these are even sitting politicians, from congresswoman Maxine Waters to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

I read the 100-page report and counted references to at least 43 contemporary American groups and individuals, which the report identifies as follows:

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Guilt by association at its finest. But what exactly are they guilty of?

What the report shows isn’t that any of these people are knowingly taking directions from a foreign power — only that they disagree with the U.S. government on Cuba policy (or at most, agree with Cuba).

Their views can be wrong — aggressively, offensively wrong even — but it’s their goddamn right as Americans to express them.

Trump's DOJ Spreads Fear With ANTIFA Charges | Ken Klippenstein | TMR - YouTube

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Trump's DOJ Spreads Fear With ANTIFA Charges | Ken Klippenstein | TMR

Jun 18, 2026 The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder

Emma Vigeland welcomes Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist covering security and US politics at KlipNews, discussing the 15 anti-ICE activists indicted by the Justice Department. More from Ken: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/ Watch the Majority Report live Monday–Friday at 12pm EST on YouTube or http://www.Majority.fm To connect and organize with your local ICE rapid response team visit ICERRT.com The Congress switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can use this number to connect with either the US Senate or the House of Representatives. Send us IM messages during the live-stream with our free Majority Report App: http://majority.fm/app Subscribe to MR's daily AM Quickie newsletter: https://am-quickie.ghost.io

AN 1 26

Despite denials from a senior Trump administration official, secret watchlists of Americans are being used by federal agencies to track and categorize US citizens—especially protesters, activists, and critics of law enforcement—as “domestic terrorists,” investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Wednesday.

Klippenstein said that two senior national security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told him that there are over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are using to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and pro-Palestine protesters, antifa-affiliated individuals, and “others who are promiscuously labeled ‘domestic terrorists.’”

“I can reveal for the first time,” he wrote, “that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).”

“Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States,” Klippenstein explained. “Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.”

“There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail,” he added.

Klippenstein’s revelation seemingly flies in the face of DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin’s recent denial that the administration has a database containing the names of people accused of domestic terrorism.

“There’s just one problem: She’s lying,” wrote Klippenstein.

Many observers already thought as much, especially after a masked federal enforcer taunted an anti-ICE protester in Maine by telling her that “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

White House “border czar” Tom Homan—who was recently sent to Minnesota to oversee the anti-immigrant blitz following the departure of Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino amid outrage over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—also said this month that “we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault, we’re going to make them famous.”

Reporting Tuesday that Pretti—the nurse who was disarmed and then shot dead by federal enforcers in Minneapolis last week—was known to Trump officials after a previous encounter in which agentsbroke his rib raised further questions about government watchlists.

“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watch list to eliminate confusion, duplication, and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” a DHS attorney “intimately familiar” with the matter told Klippenstein on condition of anonymity, referring to the deadly January 2021 Capitol insurrection.

According to Klippenstein:

Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watch list of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watch list of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watch list of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade...Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports, and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.

Asked about how the Trump administration might try to legally justify these watchlists, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program director, cited President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7), which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

Levinson-Waldman also noted Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 5 memo directing federal agencies to expand the investigation and prosecution of “domestic terrorism,” including groups “aligned” with antifa, an anti-fascist ideology that does not exist as an organization.

One senior intelligence official who confirmed the existence of the watchlists warned Klippenstein: “Lists of this and that—this social media post, that video taken of someone videoing ICE, the mere attendance at a protest—gets pulsed by federal cops on the beat to check for criminality but eventually just becomes a list itself of criminality, with the cops thinking that indeed they are dealing with criminals and terrorists. Watchlists, and the whole watchlisting process, should be as transparent as possible, not the other way around.”

“If we don’t explore more why all of these secret lists exist,” the official added, there could be “even more of an environment of paranoia on the ground and more tragic killings.”

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