In April 1921, a group of Italian fascist squadristi conducted one of their then-routine attacks on leftists, targeting the Tuscan village of Foiano. Armed with weapons from a local army barracks and led by a serving military officer, the squadristi spent a happy morning in beatings and intimidation. But as they traveled back to Arezzo, they were ambushed by local communists in the village of Renzino. Three fascists, and between eight to ten of their opponents, died in the resulting melee.

The Renzino ambush became a crux of fascist propaganda. Mussolini’s Il Popolo d’Italia raged against a “ferocious ambush” executed by “cowards.” La Nazione, a Tuscan daily, described an “explosion of the most brutal forms of hatred,” with peasants “in a sort of competition to see who could act in the cruelest way.” In revenge, squadristi went on an arson and murder spree across Tuscany. Among the arrests were 107 anti-fascists and no fascists. Indeed, the non-fascist victims of those bloody days were ignored and remain ignored by today’s fascist successor parties.

The events after Renzino are worth conjuring now not because the unimaginative muse of history is prone to repetition. Clio knows better. But neither should we assume that history the second time will be farce, not tragedy again. This snapshot of blood-dappled Tuscany offers a reminder of how the Left can become a main victim of violence allegedly conducted in its own name. Those events don’t elucidate the specific tools available now to empty political space. Between times and places, the technologies of repression are mobile.

In the second Donald Trump presidency, the state’s tool kit has been evolving fast. It is dangerous complacency to assume that modes of suppression cannot change, even — as in the Italy of 1921 — shifting gears rapidly in mere weeks and months. So how might we characterize the state’s new left-oriented suppression?

To begin with, the national state is refining new, indirect ways of wielding repressive power. The American state has long shaped mainstream media, but the Federal Communications Commission chair’s recent naked flex of censorious power against a regime critic — even one as mild as Jimmy Kimmel — is new in its boldness. An increasing concentration of both old- and new-media venues in the safe hands of allies such as Larry Ellison will make such crass interventions unnecessary soon.

Media outlets are not the only instruments of narrow hegemonic power. Among its first acts, the new presidency pardoned some 1,500 people involved in the January 6 antidemocratic insurrection at the US Capitol, including Enrique Tarrio, former head of the Proud Boys, and Stewart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers. Such wide-ranging mercy — far beyond what seems to have been anticipated even by Trump’s allies — creates a ready reservoir of parastatal force. This can be tapped by the president with the implicit promise of immunity from later criminal prosecution.

New formal tools of repressive state power are no less significant. On the one hand, Trump has renewed his rumination about designating an elusive “antifa” as a terrorist organization under federal law, while his deputy has attacked the Nation magazine. Such designation would trigger an immediate asset freeze and criminalize aid to those entities as “material support.” The standard view is that the government lacks power to designate domestic entities or publications this way.

Yet this view holds excessive confidence in the limits imposed by existing law. In April 2003, the second Bush administration designated a Muslim charity, incorporated in California and then Texas, as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” (The statute at issue, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, is the same one stretched beyond breaking to accommodate Trump’s April 2025 global tariffs). The designation was upheld against a due process challenge on the ground that the charity had received thirty-one days to review information allegedly linking it to Hamas. Notably, a court upheld the designation not simply on the information shared with the charity but also on the basis of “classified information presented to the court in camera” but withheld from the charity.

Under present law, then, a domestically incorporated entity can be frozen into oblivion on the basis of evidence of alleged links to overseas groups that it is not permitted to view. In an era in which many left groups and publications engage with non-US causes and campaigns, it is not hard to see how this power could be applied to devastating effect.

The mechanics of these organizational prosecutions will also interact with the administration’s aggressive use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act against alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. While a circuit court deflected this designation as a basis for deportation for now, that case seems likely to be heard by the US Supreme Court. That body has bent an already-presidentialist body of constitutional law even further toward a posture of judicial abnegation. Once “transnational” gangs are deemed appropriate objects of designation, legal boundaries upon the reach of designation dissolve even further.

Designation involves an indirect use of state coercion. Upping the stakes, the Trump administration has called on military troops in Los Angeles, Washington, and soon in Memphis (if not Chicago or Baltimore, at least for now). Despite nostalgic sentimentality about the American revolutionaries’ opposition to militarization of la patrie, actual legal constraints on presidential weaponization of the military against domestic foes are fragile. They are found in a complex web of statutes, many of which have obscure and uncertain meanings.

To date, the administration has federalized national guard troops in response to immigration-related protests but has not deployed them against protests generally. But it has shown strategic savvy in the precedents it is creating. By drawing on troops from politically aligned states, for example, the White House avoids legal impediments that can be thrown up by blue-state governors.

Legal challenges to that deployment initially failed, with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals signaling a retreat from any serious scrutiny of the president’s initial justification for taking control of the guard. Subsequently, one district court held that some of the specific activities undertaken by the guard exceeded prohibitions found in the Posse Comitatus Act. Whether that opinion stands up on appeal is doubtful: the Supreme Court, after all, has already blessed racialized immigration raids in that city.

The present set of targeted deployments, in short, might be understood as a testing ground for mechanisms of deployment and as a means of generating favorable judicial precedent. Both open the gates, the next go around, to more nakedly suppressive uses of state violence.

If all this already seems concerning, let me add one more terrifying thought, though it is, for the moment, a more distant possibility: Three times this month, the US military has attacked boats allegedly used by Tren de Aragua for drug smuggling, killing those aboard. This is the first time the military has been directed against noncombatants in many decades (although certainly not the first civilian causalities from US military projection). Its putative legality rested, at least in part, on the notion that Tren de Aragua is a designated organization.

Consider then how these pieces fit together: An unbounded designation authority; the authority to use the military in US cities; and the claim that the military is allowed to kill civilians if the president designates an organization of which they might be a member. The terms of US coercive power, legal or otherwise, against its domestic foes are on the move.