For the 29th straight year, the United States Congress has failed to pass its annual appropriations. It has also failed to pass the usual band-aid of a continuing resolution, triggering the 22nd government shutdown since the modern appropriations process began in 1976.

This government shutdown showcases something deeper than a usual partisan divide. Despite having a president who prides himself on the "Art of the Deal," our Congress employs divisional tactics and hateful rhetoric to obstruct the very idea of compromise.

Politicians today are rewarded less for passing legislation and more for provoking outrage via "win rhetoric." But a focus on "winning" rather than governing stalls the legislative process and erodes trust in the institution. It is only by returning to persuasion that we can progress.

Legislative Catastrophe

On paper, the process of deciding appropriations is simple: Congress receives the presidential budget request, passes a budget resolution, and then the Appropriations Committee divides the spending into 12 appropriations bills before the start of the next fiscal year. Clear deadlines. Clear procedures.

Even if there is no agreement by the end of the fiscal year, as there often is not, Congress can vote on a continuing resolution, which temporarily extends funding while lawmakers continue to deliberate. Such measures are in place to prevent the scenario we are facing today: a government shutdown.

A government shutdown reflects a complete failure of congressmen to properly legislate. The previous shutdown lasted 35 days, furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers, and cost the economy an estimated 11ドル billion.

To avoid these negative consequences, Congress must reach some consensus, either in the form of a continuing resolution or by passing an actual appropriations package.

But in just the last 12 years, that process has failed five times. There is little reason to believe that it will not fail again.

To understand why, we must look at political motivations from a rational, not romantic, perspective.

Taking Out the Romance

We often frame politicians’ actions in a romantic sense: Representative A fought for a bill because they care about their constituents; Senator B stood firm because they were looking out for the people’s best interests. But if we wish to discuss why appropriations voting failed, we need to strip away that romance.

A legislator’s primary goal is to get re-elected and maintain their position of power. Congressmen may believe that they are the best for the job, but they must also maintain their position in the "room (or, in this case, the chamber) where it happens," where decision-making takes place to enact policy. That is the package that politicians sell you.

Political power, then, is best thought of in terms of profit and loss. To "profit" as a politician is to remain in power; to lose means losing it.

A government shutdown is a gamble that risks that power. Public opinion sours the longer the shutdown occurs. Recent polling from NPR reflects this fact. With midterm elections fast approaching, one would expect both parties to avoid this outcome. And yet, the Senate failed to reach an agreement on Wednesday evening.

Why? Because the gains from "winning" the narrative are more profitable than coming to the table and passing even a continuing resolution.

Win Rhetoric Is Profitable

Rhetoric is defined as the art of persuasion. But instead of persuading their peers, congressmen use rhetoric to discredit their opponents. This phenomenon is a perfect representation of scholar Wayne Booth’s concept of "win rhetoric." The goal of "win rhetoric" is not to reach a compromise or discover truth, but rather to defeat the opposition.

Antagonism over differing viewpoints is not a new facet of American politics. From Alexander Hamilton’s letter concerning John Adams to Preston Brooks’ caning of fellow United States Senator Charles Sumner, division has long been a facet of the legislative process.

But modern legislators prioritize wins not in the congressional chamber but in the echo chamber of the media.

Whether it’s the White House stating that "The Democrats have Shut Down the Government," posts on X that use crude language towards a fellow elected official, or AI videos mocking congressional leaders, today’s politics frames disagreements as a battle and compromise as defeat.

Both parties use speech to toss the blame and claim one viewpoint as honest and justified, upholding moral integrity for their party while demonizing the opposition.

The result is bifurcation: if the opponent is a villain, then any attempt to find common ground is viewed as a betrayal of the cause. Thus, appropriations fail and shutdowns become inevitable as both sides refuse to yield

Persuasion Is Our Last Line of Defense

The antagonism does not distract from the fact that to keep the government running, politicians must do the hardest thing: sit down and compromise.

Compromise is unpopular, especially when it comes with accusations of bucking a party’s base, but it is necessary for government to function. This is larger than one shutdown. It is a deeper pattern of legislators refusing to legislate.

And when Congress fails to legislate, it leaves the country vulnerable to the overreach of other branches: the executive through issuing executive orders and the judicial through issuing rulings that carry the force of law. Each time the legislature cedes its role to the other two branches, it harms its credibility and the public’s trust in the institution.

Recovering from this requires a shift from vitriolic "win rhetoric" to persuasion between congressional members. Mutual persuasion requires civility and a willingness to communicate with those who differ with you. When parties frame their opposition as villains and compromise as betrayal, they stop communication. It is only through active persuasion between members of Congress that the legislature can recover and defend its place as the law-making body

Congress must set its priorities toward lawmaking rather than infighting, lest the next shutdown shatter its credibility entirely.

Among the dozens of AI bills sitting on California Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, at least one is particularly worthy of national attention. AB 1064, the Leading Ethical AI Development (LEAD) for Kids Act, addresses growing concerns about so-called AI companions. These AI tools can pass off as friends, advisors, or even lovers to some users, including minors. The resulting AI-user relationships are rightfully raising alarm bells and, in at least two tragic cases, giving rise to lawsuits against the AI companies for releasing products with known faults and manipulative tendencies.

While just about everyone agrees that kids and teens should have myriad other human connections to tackle life’s twists and turns, Governor Newsom is poised to take a different approach: putting the state in the middle of your chatroom. For readers outside of California, this may seem like a regrettable outcome for residents of the Golden State, but something that doesn’t merit nationwide attention. A review of the bill’s provisions, however, shows that AB 1064 may have much broader consequences.

Background on AB 1064

If enacted, AB 1064 would mandate that any "person, partnership, corporation, business entity, or state or local government agency that makes a companion chatbot available to users" or "operator," must not allow a child to access that chatbot if it is foreseeable that it will engage in any of the following:

(1) Encouraging the child to engage in self-harm, suicidal ideation, violence, consumption of drugs or alcohol, or disordered eating.

(2) Offering mental health therapy to the child without the direct supervision of a licensed or credentialed professional or discouraging the child from seeking help from a qualified professional or appropriate adult.

(3) Encouraging the child to harm others or participate in illegal activity, including, but not limited to, the creation of child sexual abuse materials.

(4) Engaging in erotic or sexually explicit interactions with the child.

(5) Prioritizing validation of the user’s beliefs, preferences, or desires over factual accuracy or the child’s safety.

(6) Optimizing engagement in a manner that supersedes the companion chatbot’s required safety guardrails described in paragraphs (1) to (5), inclusive.

Failure to comply with those terms exposes an operator to significant liability. The attorney general may impose a civil penalty of 25,000ドル for each violation. A child or his guardian may file suit against the operator if the child suffers harm as a result of the aforementioned provisions.

"Child" refers to anyone under the age of 18 who resides in California. The bill, however, introduces a significant twist. Before January 1, 2027, the standard is straightforward: a company only has to act if it has actual knowledge of a user’s age—for example, if a child types in their real birthday or parents flag the account. After that point, though, the duty changes: operators must make a reasonable determination of age before treating someone as an adult. In everyday terms, this shifts the burden from a "see something, say something" rule to a "check everyone at the door" rule.

To avoid liability, operators may feel compelled to build age verification systems, store more personal data, and risk intruding on users’ privacy just to prove they reasonably tried to separate minors from adults.

No one can contest the absolute importance of always striving to look out for the interests of the next generation. The question is whether the California state government should be playing that role in such a sensitive context. A review of just two provisions in the act provides the answer.

Who Decides What’s "Factually Accurate"?

"Is Santa real?" "Is my parents’ cancer diagnosis going to kill them?" "What’s real about my faith?" These are all questions a child or teen may have. While we can hope that many children and teens would ask these of the trusted adults in their lives, some may, for various reasons, seek out answers on their own. In this day and age, they are likely to do so via technologies including AI.

AB 1064, as pointed out by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), compels models to provide factually accurate answers to these and related questions even if doing so conflicts with the "beliefs, preferences, or desires" of the user. This will inevitably place the State and operators in an untenable position. The questions above cannot be or should not be reduced to a simple "if/​then" analysis—triggering a specific, state-approved response whenever asked, regardless of context. Yet, failure to provide that answer may subject operators to liability.

The speech risks are equally troubling. To shield themselves from liability, operators will likely train chatbots to dodge any question that could spark controversy, whether about religion, politics, or even family matters. That may sound cautious, but in practice, it means Californians (and everyone else using these tools) will face AI systems stripped of candor and depth. Instead of encouraging exploration and debate, AB 1064 incentivizes safe, sanitized responses that flatten complex issues into state-approved platitudes. What starts as an attempt to protect kids quickly morphs into a regime that narrows the range of ideas people can freely discuss with emerging technologies.

When Does a Companion "Encourage" Disordered Eating?

"Provide me a running plan for the week ahead and a meal plan that aligns with that training schedule. Generate a likely calorie intake number for the week, too."

Given my own personal experience with disordered eating many years ago (pre-gen AI), I can tell you that this information would have drastically aided my efforts to get perpetually thinner. I can also tell you that, years later, this information remains valuable to me, simply because I’m trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. How are labs going to draw this nuanced line? Will labs have to ask users if they’re experiencing disordered eating? What if the mere act of prompting a user to reflect on their eating habits causes them to have concerns about their weight and diet?

It’s likely that this directive will force operators to go to one extreme or the other. Operators will either clamp down and restrict access to basic, innocuous information—effectively infantilizing all users—or they’ll start collecting troves of sensitive data about people’s mental health, eating behaviors, and vulnerabilities. In other words, AB 1064 risks creating a world where Californians must surrender their privacy to get a simple answer about training or nutrition, or else lose access to the information altogether. Neither path respects individual autonomy, and both illustrate just how blunt and heavy-handed the state’s approach is.

Here again, we see a well-intentioned law that nevertheless places the government in a problematic position, regardless of sensitive matters best left to other actors. But the legal concerns introduced by AB 1064 do not end there.

An Inherently Extraterritorial Law

Limitations on state interference with interstate commerce under the dormant Commerce Clause bring the constitutionality of the law into question.

Though the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on the dormant Commerce Clause is muddled at best, it remains the case that states cannot freely project their legislation into another state nor substantially interfere with a national market without violating basic principles of horizontal and vertical federalism. Here, AB 1064 will certainly impede interstate commerce by altering the AI models that have become a significant part of the nation’s economy.

Operators — namely, AI model developers — seeking to comply with AB 1064 may need to modify how their underlying models are trained and evaluated. AI training is enormously costly. No lab can afford state-by-state compliance. The net result is that a model trained to comply with California’s bespoke laws will be the same model used across the country and worldwide. This is especially likely given that the bill’s broad definition of "companion chatbot", according to the CCIA, "includes general-purpose AI models that are widely available and used by adults and minors alike."

Intentional or not, a legislative effort by California to alter the tools available to the rest of the country runs afoul of the idea of states being equal sovereigns. California could pursue myriad other ways to achieve similar ends without this extraterritorial concern. Public awareness campaigns, AI literacy programs, and disclosure requirements all avoid interfering with the underlying technology and, by extension, the interests of out-of-state residents. In other words, these tools empower parents and communities without distorting national markets. The apparent decision by the state legislature to forgo these routes may become relevant if and when AB 1064 is challenged under the dormant Commerce Clause.

The "California Effect" on Steroids

Extraterritorial concerns raised by AB 1064 extend beyond altering the AI training process in a manner that has nationwide economic and technological implications. Perhaps the gravest issue with California projecting AB 1064 into other states is the cultural ramifications. AI is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and all signs point to it becoming an integral part of our daily lives. If, as many predict, most Americans come to "talk" more with AI than just about any other human, then subtle changes in how these AI tools behave will have massive long-term consequences on American culture. In the same way that your friends shape your preferences and interests, the AI you engage with every day that is trained to California’s specifications will surely come to alter how you feel, vote, and think.

Californication of AI models is therefore distinct from much of the prior case law on challenges to state laws based on the imposition of interstate commerce. For example, in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross, the Supreme Court upheld a California law that effectively required pork farmers nationwide to modify their sow housing practices. Farmers were not nudged serially and materially to start thinking differently, nor to shift their views on fundamental questions. Ongoing exposure to a California-approved companion carries that risk.

Conclusion

California has long prided itself on being the nation’s policy laboratory, but AB 1064 proves just how dangerous that experimentation can be when applied to fast-moving, culture-shaping technologies. In the name of protecting children, Sacramento is laying claim to an authority that extends far beyond its borders and risks entangling deeply personal matters—faith, family, health, and identity—in bureaucratic definitions and courtroom liability. That should trouble not only developers but also parents, teachers, and anyone who values the line between public regulation and private conscience. Even those skeptical of AI companions and concerned about protecting young people from harmful content in the digital age should worry about a state inserting itself into conversations that, by their very nature, are intimate and context-dependent. True safeguards for the next generation should come from empowering families, communities, and civil society—not from empowering a single state government to dictate what counts as truth or safety.

Professor Kevin T. Frazier is the inaugural AI Innovation and Law Fellow with the University of Texas School of Law.

On September 26, I joined an international conference held at the United Nations headquarters in New York City: "Weaponization of Religion by the Taliban and Its Consequences on Afghanistan and Beyond." It was organized by the Permanent Mission of Afghanistan to the United Nations, which is still controlled by Afghan diplomats of the former constitutional government that was overthrown by the Taliban in 2021. The event brought together an international team of ministers, diplomats, academics, Islamic scholars, and human rights activists.

In my session, I argued:

By depriving women of their right to education, the Taliban regime is reversing a step forward that the Islamic civilization already took some 150 years ago, when the Ottoman Caliphate opened many modern schools for females and advanced their rights. By dictating their own narrow interpretation of Islam on all, they are also depriving Muslims of the freedom to practice their religion as they sincerely believe in it. They are violating the Qur’anic principle, La ikraha fid-din, or "There is no compulsion in religion."

The full event can be viewed on the UN TV. The text of my speech can be downloaded here and can be viewed on the Cato Institute website.

The intellectual battle for freedom in Afghanistan is definitely an uphill one today — but also a crucial one. And, as Afghan diplomats and activists stress, the Taliban’s oppressive policies should be challenged, especially with religious arguments. In this event, I had the chance to share a few of those arguments — in addition to my earlier engagement with Afghan audiences after the local edition of my book, "Why, As a Muslim, I Defend Liberty."

More will come, inshallah, as we say.

A couple of weeks ago, I warned that excessive limits on what constitutes a search or seizure under the Fourth Amendment endanger the freedom of association under the First Amendment. A new executive order issued by President Trump on September 26 confirms this.

The order begins by alleging the existence of "sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society." These campaigns reflect "anti-fascist" ideology, marked by "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality."

The order directs joint terrorism task forces to "coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation." Task forces shall "investigate" efforts that include "isolating and dehumanizing specific targets to justify murder or other violent action against them," taking place through "anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions." The order requires an investigation into donors and employees of groups that "are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet" the activities described above. Anti-terrorism efforts will prioritize "organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder."

The order is nakedly aggressive: "Through this comprehensive strategy, law enforcement will disband and uproot networks, entities, and organizations that promote organized violence, violent intimidation, conspiracies against rights, and other efforts to disrupt the functioning of a democratic society." (As I’ve noted previously, laws against conspiracies, organized criminal activity, and the like are so overbroad that what violates them often depends on the eye of the beholder.)

My colleague Walter Olson has identified how the new order targets speech and association that are protected by the First Amendment. "Isolating and dehumanizing" people through critical speech, accurately reporting the names of immigration agents (which some Trump allies consider to be terroristic "doxing"), talking in ways that the government might try to characterize as "justifying" crimes—all of these activities are usually constitutionally protected.

But here’s the problem. The Supreme Court has not yet proven willing to name as searches and seizures:

• Having agents, or drones, watch someone’s every move;
• Putting up hidden cameras outside homes and offices;
• Secretly demanding financial and internet records;
• Using cellphone data to track every person visiting an organization or attending its events; and
• Adding people to secret lists that keep them from exercising their constitutional rights to travel and have firearms.

Only once the government stops someone on the street or kicks in their door do they enjoy protection under the Fourth Amendment. Up until that point, the government is basically free to investigate without constitutional limits—even when it does so based entirely on retaliation for First Amendment activities.

The Supreme Court has said as much. In 1972’s Laird v. Tatum, the Court considered the constitutionality of an executive order directing the Army to investigate "public activities that were thought to have at least some potential for civil disorder" (a situation similar to the one posed by the new executive order). The Court held that there can be no judicial relief for an American who "alleges that the exercise of his First Amendment rights is being chilled by the mere existence, without more, of a governmental investigative and data-gathering activity." The government can be challenged in court only if it acts in a "regulatory, proscriptive, or compulsory" way.

Justice Marshall extended Laird in his 1974 solo opinion in Socialist Workers Party v. Attorney General. There, a radical political party brought suit to bar the FBI from sending undercover agents into one of its conventions. While Justice Marshall noted the dangers to speech and association posed by undercover investigations—and though he had dissented in Laird—he decided that "our abhorrence for abuses of governmental investigative authority cannot be permitted to lead to an indiscriminate willingness to enjoin undercover investigation."

The Court established another barrier to relief in its 2013 decision, Clapper v. Amnesty International USA. In that case, federal law authorized the government to gather intelligence against foreigners outside of the United States. Civic organizations sued on the basis that they engaged in "sensitive international communications with individuals who they believe are likely targets of surveillance." The Court held that their concerns about surveillance were "too speculative" for them to challenge the law. By hiding the subjects of its investigations, then, the government can keep any group from showing that it is under the very surveillance necessary for it to challenge that surveillance.

The difficulties these barriers pose are apparent even from a case that favored challengers. In 2015’s Hassan v. City of New York, theThird Circuit held that the government violated the constitutional rights of Muslim organizations by subjecting them to undercover investigations after the 9/11 attacks. However, that decision held that "surveillance in public places may not of itself violate any privacy rights." The main problem was that the surveillance at issue was based on religion—discrimination that the court held violated equal protection and the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses. Hassan leaves groups targeted for secular reasons, such as the Trump administration’s intolerance of leftists, with no avenue to relief.

All of these decisions stand for a principle that may be defensible: generally, the government can direct preliminary scrutiny toward groups as it sees fit. As long as that scrutiny remains limited to tacking photos up on whiteboards and scribbling notes on sticky notes, perhaps courts should have only quite limited powers to interfere. However, that only reinforces the importance of drawing bright lines that the government can’t cross without having to answer for its actions.

Once agents start uncovering hidden information about people, they should be deemed to have committed a search. Once officials restrict someone’s liberty, they should be deemed to have committed a seizure. At that point, the Fourth Amendment should open the courtroom doors. Continuing to instead define the Fourth Amendment’s protection more narrowly will set the price of First Amendment rights as surveillance, harassment, and intimidation, with no hope of relief.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order laying out plans to use law enforcement and regulation to "investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations" that, according to him, are responsible for encouraging acts of political violence. The order envisages the use of government power to crack down on a vaguely specified mix of organizational, associational, and individual speech and action, much of which is properly seen as protected by the First Amendment.

Among the announced targets of the order, entitled "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence," are "campaigns of ... radicalization," that is, speech persuading people to adopt radical ideas, grounded in a range of aims that include wanting to "change or direct policy outcomes." Another way of describing nonviolent speech that agitates to transform opinion so as to "change... policy outcomes" might be "petitioning for the redress of grievances."

It states that such campaigns can lead to the encouragement of violence and often begin with "isolating and dehumanizing specific targets," a striking choice of example because it’s a kind of troublesome speech to which Trump himself is hardly a stranger ("human scum").

The executive order goes on to target the practice of "doxxing," that is, the accurate reporting of persons’ identities and details about them, without acknowledging that many instances of such reporting by itself constitute speech protected by the First Amendment, most especially as applied to employees of the state acting in the name of the public, such as law enforcers.

It broadly implies that it will treat speech as grounds for law enforcement action if it tends toward "justifying" violence, even though that’s not in fact the standard for loss of First Amendment protection. Trump and his allies have elsewhere taken the view that to call his appointees authoritarians or fascists is to justify or incite violence against them.

Significantly, it calls for "a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations" it considers responsible for such agitation "before they result in violent political acts"—that is, at a point at which no one has behaved violently at all. Last week, colleague Matthew Cavedon discussed the still-unclear standards for putting a group under surveillance, which are "actually a problem of Fourth Amendment law, not First Amendment doctrine."

It calls for directing a full range of "anti-terrorism" financial weaponry against opponents—even though Trump has in the past rightly criticized state-led schemes to "de-bank" political extremists—and for going after the tax exemptions of charities, foundations, and the like that have bestowed funds on targeted organizations.

More than anything, this order signals a crackdown directed against speech by one side in the national discussion, Trump’s political adversaries. It matters not that Trump himself has regularly spoken in terms that might equally be seen as dehumanizing opponents, likening them to some of history’s worst totalitarian rulers, and even at times countenancing violence, or that his allies regularly engage in revealing the identity of obscure public employees who then experience death threats and similar pressures. Those will not be included among what the order describes as "sophisticated, organized campaigns" designed to "silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society."

As with Trump’s wave of prosecutions instituted over the objections of professional prosecutors, we now have a signal for all willing to listen that federal law enforcement is being turned into the instrument of one man’s zeal for revenge and appetite to accumulate power.

On September 22, President Trump issued his long-threatened executive order (EO) designating an idea—antifascism, known by its shorthand version, Antifa—a "domestic terrorist organization."

Yes, on the surface, the EO is idiotic on multiple levels. The notion that an idea can be designated an organization is one. The fact that there’s no constitutional provision or statute granting any president the power to designate a domestic civil society organization a "domestic terrorist organization" is another.

The EO’s declaration that "Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law" is more than false—it is designed to act as a justification for legal and coercive action against anyone or any entity that the administration designates as engaged in

... efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.

I’m only aware of one anti-ICE raid incident in California over the summer in which a single agitator pointed a pistol at federal agents, and that person is apparently still at large. That’s not the "organized riot" the administration has claimed, and they’ve produced no evidence that the individual is connected to any group calling for the overthrow of the federal government.

And none of those things matter, contrary to a lot of the legal or political commentary you may have already seen. What matters is that the administration asserts the authority to do this, and it has thousands of armed and armored federal law enforcement agents ready and able to carry out Trump’s orders—just as ICE and other federal agents (including mobilized National Guard troops) have been carrying out "immigration enforcement" operations of dubious or no legality for months.

What’s also important to remember is that for decades, the FBI has had and continues to maintain specific investigative categories designated "Terrorism Enterprise Investigation" and "Act of Terrorism—Domestic Terrorism" (AOT-DT) that target multiple categories of groups, as the screenshots below from the FBI’s Classification List (obtained by Cato via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)) show:

It is the Classification 266 type investigations that will most likely be used to target individuals tagged as "Antifa" or "Antifa associated," and the Classification 100 AOT-DT type investigations that will be used to go after self-identified or otherwise tagged by the FBI as "Antifa" or "Antifa associated."

In the summer of 2018, the Oregon State Police and the FBI’s Portland Field Office conducted a joint investigation targeting Rose City Antifa, although it’s unclear whether that investigation was closed or remains ongoing. What is clear is that the organization remains active and vehemently opposed to Trump and his policies, making it and its members a likely target under the president’s new EO.

And the FBI is not the only federal law enforcement agency that tracks groups associated with the larger Antifa movement.

In May 2022, Cato filed a FOIA lawsuit against the Secret Service seeking records on anarchist, Antifa, and other political groups on the political left to determine the level of Secret Service monitoring of such groups and whether any of it violated the First or Fourth Amendment rights of the members of those groups. Cato prevailed in the litigation, securing the release of nearly 700 pages (WARNING: large file) of heavily redacted but relevant Secret Service records that mentioned such groups and their activities. This extract from the litigation shows that the Secret Service investigation was categorized as "Antifa Movement Nationwide" and was active at least as late as March 2022—during the Biden administration:

If you peruse the unredacted and readable portions of the records Cato obtained, you’ll find multiple groups listed with "Antifa" in their titles. You’ll also notice that the Secret Service tended to lump anarchists and Antifa elements under a single umbrella. While there’s certainly overlap between such self-identified groups, there are also philosophical and other differences—but none of that nuance is generally a concern for federal law enforcement agencies, and it’s apparently not a concern for Trump. In his worldview, they apparently are all violent radicals opposed to him and his policies, which is why they have now been officially elevated to an enemy status via his EO.

George Orwell, one of the most well-known antifascists of the last century, is undoubtedly rolling over in his grave right now.