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from the lies-the-trump-administration-told-you dept

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to believe: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement called antifa threatens the democratic world. At the event, allies were asked to mobilize against that enemy despite nations like the Netherlands and Germany politely noting to their host that they cannot find evidence of any such group.

Some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa at interagency meetings because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.

As a terrorism scholar who spent a decade running the State Department office that designates terrorist organizations, I understand their confusion. The threat the administration describes does not exist in the form the administration describes it.

Antifa is not a group

As I and others have written before, antifa is not a group. It is a movement and an ideology, a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it amounts to scattered local collectives like Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.

There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.

Groups like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and have a documented chain of command. Antifa does not. You cannot decapitate a movement with no head, and you cannot sanction an organization that does not exist.

As such, the Trump administration created one.

Trump administration targets antifa

The construction project began on Sept. 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government.” It directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.

Two problems are immediately apparent. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups. It’s a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons.

Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI’s past leadership has described as an ideology. Trump’s executive order asserts an antifa enterprise into existence and then declares war on it.

Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented the order through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converts the fiction into machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. The memorandum instructs banks to file suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government’s financial intelligence unit.

That means the government’s financial surveillance apparatus, built to trace al-Qaida’s money in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is being pointed at Americans that the administration considers left-wing.

The memorandum likewise directs the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute and disrupt entities and individuals. That harnesses a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state and local agencies.

The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 gives away the administration’s true intent. It identifies the markers of this supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.

Those are not indicators of terrorism. They are political positions.

State Department targets groups overseas

The foreign component of the campaign arrived in November 2025. That’s when the State Department designated four European groups – one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece – as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The State Department-designated groups are real. And some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings.

But as I have noted, the designations are very peculiar. These groups have committed vandalism and harmed people, but not one of the four has carried out an attack that led to any fatalities.

German leaders have said the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.

As the former head of the State Department’s office that recommended to the secretary of state which groups to designate, I’ve been involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations. The bar was never this low. That’s because the Foreign Terrorist Organization list loses its meaning, and its deterrent power, when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.

The foreign nexus

That brings us back to the State Department’s ministerial. The sequence of events leading up to it matter:

Invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the story. Each step launders the previous one.

Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement. That is the point of the exercise, and U.S allies like the Netherlands have explained how antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws.

Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses. I don’t believe that using them against an ideology, one defined by opposition to fascism, makes America safer. I believe it tells every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world’s leading counterterrorism power can no longer tell the difference between a threat and an opponent.

Implications of the ministerial meeting

This is not just an issue of semantics and rhetoric – each action by the Trump administration against a strawman enemy creates risks. And the push to internationalize the antifa threat could have dire consequences at home.

First, if the State Department leaves the July 16 meeting with pliable allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it will embolden the administration to point to a supposed global conspiracy of the far left.

That path leads to a State Department foreign terrorist designation. Such a designation means Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and quite possibly find themselves rounded up for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. This would be more dangerous than Trump’s earlier executive order.

Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government gains cover to shut down protests under the guise of exposing global left-wing plotting.

Third, it could justify the revival of projects like the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, resurrecting the surveillance, infiltration and disruption of lawful political activity that the bureau was supposed to have abandoned after the abuses of the 1970s.

Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit lays bare a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration’s willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends.

That divergence is the real hazard, far more than any phantom left-wing terrorism group, because European counterterrorism leans so heavily on U.S. intelligence. As such, transatlantic counterterrorism cooperation could be in for turbulent times.

Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, there is no version that will make Americans safer.

I believe one result is certain: Genuine threats – from groups with leaders, actual funding and malicious intent – will get less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted to take action against antifa.

Jason M. Blazakis is Professor of Practice and Director of Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College

Filed Under: antifa, donald trump, fear mongering, marco rubio, terrorism

• Intel shared rare x86 chip design access with a brand-new startup
• RosaicLabs can now build custom processors using licensed Atom architecture
• Intel shifted its low-power strategy from Atom towards newer E-Core designs

Intel has given RosaicLabs access to part of its Atom processor technology in a rare move involving the company’s x86 intellectual property.

Reports from Reuters claim the agreement involves register-transfer level, or RTL, code that describes processor functions before they are converted into physical silicon during manufacturing.

As soon as I heard that Gemini Spark was now part of the Chrome browser I had to try it for myself.

Gemini Spark is an AI agent designed to take on longer-running tasks that continue in the background. It’s much smoother now thanks to an update that incorporates the platform directly into Google‘s Chrome browser. So now the AI can actually browse the web alongside you, doing its own tasks, instead of simply talking about it, even if you close your browser.

Laptop Intelligence: Google finally announced the much-talked-about project to blend Android and ChromeOS into a new, AI-driven “computing” experience earlier this year. Now, the first OEM Googlebook design has leaked ahead of the machine’s expected – and still unconfirmed – release date.

Google unveiled the Googlebook laptop in May, explaining that several OEMs would be joining in with their own take on the AI-ready machine. Thanks to Digital Citizen, we now have a closer look at the Googlebook Lenovo is building for a late-2026 release. The Lenovo Googlebook 15 carries some design choices expected to become standard across the new platform, while other hardware decisions set minimalism aside in favor of better connectivity.

The leak shows what seems to be a full press image set for Lenovo’s Googlebook 15. The PC giant has apparently built one of the very first Googlebook laptops to reach the market, a notable milestone that could help shape the early commercial fortunes of Google’s latest hardware push.

The Lenovo Googlebook 15 features some of the platform’s most distinctive design choices, starting with a Google “G” key at the bottom left of the keyboard. Much like Microsoft’s much-maligned Copilot key, the new G key is expected to serve as a shortcut to launch the Gemini chatbot.

The keyboard also includes 14 Function keys, with a dedicated accessibility key on the upper right that’s rarely seen in laptop designs. According to the leaked press images, the Lenovo Googlebook 15 comes packed with connectivity on both sides. Options include a full-sized HDMI port, a USB-C port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and what appears to be a full-sized USB-A port alongside a second USB-C port.

The leaked images provide a rendered mockup of what should be Googlebook’s UI, with a rather standard desktop offering and a status bar taken straight from a modern Android iteration. Googlebooks use Aluminium OS, a new operating system Google has been working on for a while to bridge Android app compatibility with ChromeOS’ always-on environment.

The one thing the images don’t reveal is any hint of actual hardware specifications. Google has called the Googlebook its most advanced laptop yet, built to get the most out of the Gemini chatbot, with the company framing intelligence as the new spec that matters most. As PCWorld has noted, the heavy reliance on automation and agentic AI could make Googlebooks the first wave of “anti-personal computers,” devices designed to act on a user’s intent, leaving them no longer solely in control of the machine.

The state already hosts more than 500 data centers.

On Monday, Apple briefly removed the popular messaging app Telegram from the App Store for iOS devices after a report that a user was sharing illegal content. According to both Apple and Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, the app — which has more than 1 billion users — was restored on the App Store within hours. But Durov accused Apple of overreacting to a ransom attempt in a group chat.

In a Telegram post about the incident, Durov said a member of a public group chat edited a previously posted message and added what Durov called “AI-modified illegal content” to it in an attempt to get the group chat flagged, because its admins had presumably refused to pay a ransom. Instead, Apple removed the app from the Apple App Store entirely until the user was banned. Apple confirmed in an email to CNET that Telegram remained available in the separate Mac App Store and that users who already had Telegram downloaded were not affected.

“We briefly removed Telegram from the App Store after our review found content that violates our strict guidelines prohibiting child sexual abuse material,” Apple said in a statement. “The app was subsequently restored after the developer promptly removed the content and banned the user who posted it.”

Apple did not immediately respond to questions about why the Mac version of Telegram remained available for download while the mobile version was removed.

A representative for Telegram declined to comment directly, instead pointing to Durov’s post.

Telegram warns other app developers

Durov said that the extortionist manipulated Apple into an “overreaction” that led to the app’s removal, which he said occurred without warning. That could happen, he said, to other apps that include user content.

“If an app used by more than a billion people can be removed from the App Store without prior warning, any app can be,” Durov wrote.

Telegram’s official X account more pointedly criticized Apple’s actions in a series of posts and replies. In one, Telegram posted, “reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” followed by an apple emoji. In another that included a link to Durov’s post, Telegram wrote, “I’m sure this stance will be applied equally to all other apps in the store, in the future, right? @Apple.”

AI + ML

The House of Zen’s new Helios racks, Venice Epycs, may dent Nvidia’s dominance — if the bubble doesn’t pop first

AMD has posted strong second quarter results and forecast even better future financials once its Helios rack systems and Instinct MI400-series GPUs reach buyers.

“In data center AI, the growing number and scale of Helios and MI450-series deployments position the [datacenter] business for significant growth in the second half of the year, with growth accelerating in 2027,” CEO Lisa Su told investors on Tuesday during the chip design company’s Q2 earnings call. “We now expect data center segment revenue to more than double year over year in 2027,” she added.

Yet, despite reporting Q2 profits surging 163 percent year-over-year on revenues of $11.5 billion, and several multi-gigawatts worth of Helios commitments from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta in the bag, Wall Street isn’t buying it.

The company’s share plunged 10.5 percent after its results announcement, before settling 8.7 percent below opening price at the time of publication.

The apparent cause for concern: AMD’s growing exposure to the AI bubble. Much of the company’s growth potential across both CPUs and GPUs is tied to AI adoption by a handful of companies that are yet to prove they can operate profitably.

On Tuesday’s earnings call, Su attempted to assuage investor fears, but in the same breath she said the quiet part out loud. 

“When we talked about the large frontier-model companies, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, they will be consuming through a number of CSPs,” Su said. “There are additional customers or lots of customers who are interested in Helios at, let’s call it, a more regular scale than gigawatt scale.”

In other words, while AMD can sell plenty of GPUs, most are sold to a handful of customers. And while other entities have AMD on their shopping lists, they don’t buy in bulk.

Microsoft, another flagship customer for AMD’s latest generation of AI picks and shoves, serves both OpenAI and Anthropic, while Meta is reportedly looking to enter the GPU cloud biz itself.

Despite this, AMD remains optimistic about its prospects over the next few quarters.

It’s not hard to see why because since the launch of its MI300-series GPUs in late 2023, AMD has established itself as the most credible alternative to Nvidia.

At its Advancing AI event in San Francisco last month, the company showcased a new rack-scale compute platform called Helios packing 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs each with 432 GB of HBM4 memory on board.

On paper, the system meets or beats the performance of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform on most metrics. The Reg explored these chips in greater detail here.

AMD is also eager to cash in on demand for CPUs to power agentic AI sandboxes, which Su anticipates will be the biggest growth driver for Epyc sales before long.

Also unveiled at Advancing AI, AMD’s Venice Epycs will offer up to 256 cores and 512 threads with support for 16 memory channels at speeds of up to 1.6 TB/s per socket.

However, the CPU market isn’t the duopoly it once was and AMD now faces its traditional foe Intel, plus new competitors such as Nvidia, Arm, Qualcomm, AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

Nonetheless Su remains bullish about AMD’s prospects.

“Whether it’s server CPU, datacenter, AI, or our embedded business, and our PC business, we see them all benefiting from the AI tailwinds,” Su said.

It seems the AI tides will lift all chips, but let’s not forget that tides rise and fall. 

In any case, while AMD’s embedded division is doing quite well with revenues topping $977 million, an increase of 19 percent over this time last year, things aren’t looking so hot for the House of Zen’s gaming and client computing divisions. While client PC sales were up 23 percent YoY to $3.1 billion during the quarter, AMD warns that the ongoing RAMpocalypse is likely to cut into PC sales over the next few quarters.

Meanwhile in gaming, the end of a console sales cycle is hitting AMD hard on semi-custom processor orders, with gaming revenue down 31 percent during the quarter to $779 million

AMD’s datacenter and AI sales teams therefore get the job of delivering the company’s Q3 forecast which calls for revenues of $13 billion plus or minus $300 million. ®