The New Years Eve 'Terrorist' Threat That Wasn’t?
Every month, I assemble a round-up of stories I’m following and issues I’m covering, with palate cleansers at the end. Please consider a paid subscription so I can keep up my independent reporting.
Earlier this month U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi made a big announcement: the FBI had thwarted a “a massive and horrific terror plot” to bomb buildings associated with two U.S. companies at midnight New Year's Eve. According to the press release, these would-be attackers were members of “a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group” called the Turtle Island Liberation Front or TILF. And their arrest was a direct response to an executive order from Donald Trump to crack down on leftist groups. Federal officials indicated these alleged terrorists were organized and sophisticated.
However a close look at the affidavit says different, and it provides clues to what this crackdown on the Left is going to look like in the years ahead, including for environmental movements. In short: “sophisticated” is not the term I would use. Moreover, the TILF members were hanging out with not only an FBI informant but also an undercover FBI agent.
The accused, according to the affidavit, were remarkably bad at op-sec, a term that stands for operational security. In other words, they didn’t take careful steps to assure that their communication wouldn’t be intercepted by law enforcement or some other outside party. It’s hard to imagine seasoned activists making such big mistakes. For example:
--They wrote down their plan to bomb buildings, and planned to hand out copies of the plan
--Although they’d developed an elaborate plan to avoid using their phones during the bombing, they also plotted out their bomb-making over the phone (using Signal, sure, but that app has serious limitations in terms of security, which most activists, not to mention journalists, know)
--They met one of their co-conspirators over Instagram
--They sent a list of bomb-making ingredients over the phone
--They sent a satellite map to where they would test the bombs over the phone
--They bought their bomb-making ingredients on Amazon
Reading this affidavit, my mind went to the opening scenes of the movie One Battle After Another, where this badass crew of revolutionaries is casually blowing shit up, while looking cool — and while displaying what seem like clumsy security practices.
We can’t really keep talking about this without acknowledging that the acronym TILF rhymes with MILF and immediately draws to mind the term “Turtle I’d Like to Fuck.” I could imagine activists choosing this name, because it’s hilarious, but there is no indication of irony on TILF’s social media pages.
So we know for sure that these guys were bad at op-sec and that they were in touch with an informant and an undercover agent. The question is: were they set up? It’s a chicken or the egg thing. Did their inept security practices get them caught? Or did FBI operatives give some hapless activists a nudge toward crime?
We don’t really know yet. But this is a key case to watch in terms of understanding what Trump’s crackdown on the Left actually means in practice. In fact, the head of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles said explicitly that the TILF investigation “was initiated in part due to the September 2025 executive order signed by President Trump to root out left-wing domestic terror organizations in our country.”
It’s not the only new indication of what’s ahead that came through the pipeline this month.
In early December, journalist Ken Klippenstein published a memo that Attorney General Bondi sent to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies, on how to implement National Security Presidential Memo 7, the executive order we mentioned earlier. The new memo calls for the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism.” The Justice Department will provide grants for local law enforcement to go after so-called domestic terrorism as well as a cash reward system for tips leading to the arrest of “leadership of domestic terrorist organizations.”
The problem of course is the definition of “domestic terrorism.” It says that ideologies animating domestic terrorism, include “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology, anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, or anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; hostility towards traditional views on family, religion, and morality.” The memo focuses heavily on antifa, but it doesn’t mention right-wing ideologies like white supremacism that have a long history of animating violent attacks. In other words, it’s not just that the administration cares about domestic terrorism broadly — they care about it specifically where it comes to the left.
So what are the implications of all this for environmental movements? The memo also highlights that the definition of domestic terrorism includes “acts potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources.” The term “critical infrastructure” has for years been applied to fossil fuel infrastructure, especially pipelines. So the memo effectively encourages increased attention on land and environmental defenders whose protest tactics at times include blocking access to polluting industries’ infrastructure.
Also included in the terrorism definition: “conspiracies to impede or assault law enforcement, destroy property, or engage in violent civil disorder.” In other words, a protest movement that blocks a road — as many climate activists have done — apparently could be considered terrorism and so could a sit-in where protesters refuse to follow police orders to leave. The memo calls for Joint Terrorism Task Forces to “map the full network of culpable actors involved.”
What about Indigenous movements? This memo and the original NSPM-7 both declare “anti-Americanism” as a type of ideology motivating domestic terrorism. Judging by recent right-wing rhetoric in recent years, this “anti-Americanism” seems to include basic U.S. historical facts about the genocide of Indigenous peoples.
The “Turtle Island” in Turtle Island Liberation Front is a term many Indigenous people use to describe North America. I haven’t seen any reporting so far indicating whether or not any of the accused are actually Indigenous, but it’s notable that this is the name of the group that was targeted. In fact, a right-wing commentator for Canada’s National Post, Terry Newman, recently made a blunt-edged connection between TILF and the avowedly nonviolent activist group Turtle Island Solidarity Network, arguing that Turtle Island is a name that “extremist anti-colonial groups” use.
This is a good time to look back at what happened post-9/11. I’ve mentioned this before, but when law enforcement agencies received new incentives to go after terrorism, they poured resources not only into targeting Muslim communities but also into targeting environmental movements. Check out my piece on this from a few years ago. It’s part of this great pre-Trump series on domestic terrorism prosecutions led by Margot Williams and Trevor Aaronson for The Intercept. Also check out Trevor Aaronson’s broader body of work on informants and infiltrators. It’s worth going a ways back in his archive – he’s got so many good investigations, including his podcast The Alphabet Boys. And finally, try my Drilled podcast episode from this year about how the U.S. War on Terror radiated outward and ended up hitting Indigenous land defenders in other nations, including the Philippines.
In case you missed it:
Before the holidays, I wrote an update on what’s going on with the Energy Transfer vs. Greenpeace case for the Center for Media and Democracy and Drilled. In short: the judge cut the damages almost in half, to $345 million — still a deadly sum for Greenpeace in the U.S. However, a final judgement has weirdly not been issued, so Greenpeace’s plan to demand a new trial is on hold until then. Meanwhile, Energy Transfer is attempting to stop Greenpeace International’s anti-SLAPP suit underway in the Netherlands.
Also, journalist and researcher Josh Voorhees at Fieldnotes, ran with one of the documents I uncovered for the SLAPP'd podcast and wrote about it for Drilled. In a deposition from the trial, Energy Transfer spokesperson Vicki Granado confirmed that the company funds and helped set up the group Grow American Infrastructure Now. Yet that same group filed an amicus brief in Energy Transfer’s appeal regarding the anti-SLAPP suit. As Voorhees put it, “In effect, Energy Transfer indirectly submitted a friend-of-the-court brief on its own behalf in a bid to convince a North Dakota court to intervene in a foreign one.” The New York Times first reported on Fieldnotes’ research and the amicus brief.
Also, I just killed the Wix web site I used to have, because they upped their rates an estimated 1 million percent. So I migrated all my web site content to Ghost’s platform, which I use for Eco Files, and you can now find an (almost) full archive of my work here. It’s for the best, because Wix was actually started by a former Israeli intelligence agent. The company fired at least one employee in Ireland after she called Israel a terrorist state on social media. A Wix manager in Ireland also set up an internal Slack group encouraging staff to “join a company initiative to create videos and creative campaigns” to “support Israel’s narrative.” Bye-bye Wix!
Other stories I’m following:
“At every turn, our rights and the health and safety of our people and the environment are ignored.”
One of the biggest things that happened on my beat this month was that the U.S. Army Corps FINALLY released its final environmental impact statement for the Dakota Access Pipeline. In short, the Army Corps decided that the oil should keep flowing. You can learn about the literal backwardness of this in this Drilled podcast episode we ran in 2023. Check out the North Dakota Monitor’s coverage of the decision here. Or read the whole damn thing here. I’ll share some thoughts on this and the wider world of pipelines next month. The decision really truly becomes official on January 20.
"I think of a balloon just deflating."
I’ve really been appreciating the podcast Anti Trans Hate Machine, hosted by journalist and activist Imara Jones for Translash Media. It’s super valuable for understanding the individuals and institutions pushing policies that erase, criminalize and encourage violence against trans people. The latest season examines how anti-trans ideology is being used as a Trojan horse to end public education and privatize schools, but I’ve also been listening further back. It’s eye opening, for example, to listen to season 3, which ran right before Trump’s elections and focused on how right-wing paramilitary organizations have stoked violence against trans people. The stories stand in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s rhetoric claiming falsely that trans ideology is driving terrorism — an allegation raised even in this latest TILF case.
The episode that moved me the most though was from season 2, titled “Capturing the New York Times.” The episode discussed how anti-trans ideas pedaled by Christian nationalist groups became embedded in the paper of record. Jones tells the story through an interview with a trans employee who worked there, and it’s totally heartbreaking. The employee, who stayed anonymous, was a Times true believer, who genuinely felt like they’d found the place where they belonged when they landed a job at the paper. It all fell apart when the Times started regularly amplifying anti-trans rhetoric, despite interjections from staff asserting that the pieces were inaccurate and harmful.
In November, Kalen Goodluck at No Frontiers investigated the Committee to Protect Journalists’ system for adding up Israel’s killings of journalists. He pointed out that the majority of the Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza by the Israeli military have been categorized by CPJ using a category called “dangerous assignment.” The term suggests they were killed while on the job covering something risky. However, Goodluck points out that that category includes 60 journalists killed at home. The organization Database for Palestine has gone so far as to call CPJ’s numbers a cover-up. CPJ countered that “dangerous assignment” is their “default classification, given the difficulties of confirming information when a war is raging.”
Goodluck highlights a report the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) released “The Assassination of Truth: Killing of Journalists amid Genocide in Gaza,” which identified twice as many deliberate killings as CPJ. Other data sets also include the deaths of journalists’ family members. For example, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate “found that between October 2023 and April 2025, the IOF bombed 152 houses linked to journalists, resulting in the death of a total of 665 family members and relatives.”
On the one hand, I can see why CPJ might choose to be conservative. It makes it harder to undermine the data if you acknowledge that you can’t prove whether a killing was targeted or not. But the way CPJ went about this does seem to obfuscate the truth. You’re not on a “dangerous assignment” when you’re hanging out at home with your family. It is really important to use accurate terms to categorize these horrible killings.
“That is precisely why I intend to keep saying, ‘Globalise the intifada, free Palestine.”
In the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre of 16 Jewish people attending a Hanukkah celebration, the Australian state of New South Wales has passed a bill giving the police commissioner the power to ban protests for up to three months after a terrorist attack. The state’s premier, Chris Minns, who supports the bills, argued that “Ratcheting up the pressure, ratcheting up the rhetoric and language can unleash forces that you can’t control.” It appears to be particularly aimed at pro-Palestine protests (though will inevitably impact a range of speech, including, likely, speech related to the climate). The change to the law was tacked onto a larger bill that included gun control measures. The local government is also considering banning the term “globalize the intifada” via future bills. Protest participants countered that intifada means uprising, revolution or, shaking-off. Minns argument that protests lead to terrorism fits with a Trumpian theme of claiming certain (mostly leftist) ideas cause violence. But isn't it more likely that Israel’s genocide against Palestinians breeds future violence, rather than protests against the killing of tens of thousands of civilians?
I probably missed journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s podcast Wind of Change because it came out in May 2020, when we were all spinning out about the pandemic. It explores the question of whether the CIA wrote the Scorpions song Wind of Change. As a reporter, sometimes there are these tips that get under your skin, and you want to write about them, but you don’t feel like you will be able to confirm the story one way or another. Keefe didn’t actually prove that the CIA did write the song. But I liked that this series used that burning question as a narrative device to tell the story of this world of CIA operatives.
My favorite episode was 7, where Keefe discusses his investigation with a Russian journalist. She feels genuinely hurt by the idea that this song could be a CIA op, and her reaction got to the heart of the impact of covert activity – the cynicism it breeds, the sense of not being able to trust reality. I also liked that Keefe used the moment to reflect on the question of whether the podcast itself could be serving as CIA propaganda, by suggesting the CIA did this really big, successful, sneaky thing that influenced culture in a major way. This question of journalism becoming propaganda is one I’ve had to consider myself at times and that I’ve seen come up in journalism organizing spaces I’m a part of. By amplifying stories about government activities that spread fear, are we participating in spreading that fear? I always come down to siding with truth. It’s good for us to know that we are swimming in a sea of misinformation and that people with interests that are not our own are deliberately trying to mess with our heads. The question becomes what do we do with that information.
As a food-motivated animal, this article by Emily Atkin at Heated and Miranda Green at The Understory really pissed me off. It talked about how celebrity chefs, including Rachael Ray, David Chang, Thomas Keller, and Marcus Samuelsson all wrote letters opposing a law in California which would ban nonstick pans made with a type of PFAS “forever chemical” that is obviously terrible for public health. They dclaimed Teflon can be safe if it’s use correctly. Shockingly (or not) all of them happen to have business ties to brands of cookware that use the chemical. They were working with the bullshittily named American Cookware Sustainability Alliance, a new lobbying group. And look, I get it chefs, it’s easy to make eggs in a pan coated with poison chemicals. But guess what? I’ve been using ceramic nonstick pans lately and they are FINE. I am NOT a professional. You can make great, non-messy food on a non-poisonous pan without it being a big deal. So can we just agree to not be assholes for a minute? I have a chip on my shoulder for a culinary culture that puts chefs on a pedestal and gives them permission to be abusive bosses, promote bad labor practices, or support polluting industries in the name of fine dining (why I can’t stand The Bear). Service industry trauma speaking here! End rant.
Palate Cleansers
I cover topics that are heavy and distressing to take in, so I'm ending these posts with things that make me feel grounded: food, nature, community.
Something Delicious: Marinated Beans
My culinary discovery of the month is big white Gigante beans marinated in vinegar and mixed into salads and rice bowls or popped in my mouth as little snacks. You can batch-cook these babies and then pick at them over the course of a couple weeks. I used Rancho Gordo’s expense-ass Gigantes and cooked them from dried, but the recipe I used, from Alison Roman, called for canned beans. (And there’s all kinds of other recipes online if you’re anti-Alison.) Labor-efficient and delicious.
Garden Update: Righteous Billowing
I can’t think of anything I could even claim to call a garden this month, but in a way I’m grateful for that. December in the North is supposed to mean a thick layer of snow lulling us all into rest, but last year neither Minnesota nor New York got much of that over the solstice month. This year, though the snow has been billowing. The streets are encased with ugly ice that forces you to walk stiffly and fear for your life, and the snow changes back and forth between slop and crust. It’s almost just like it’s supposed be.
Community: Book Alert + Freelance Organizing
My good friend Nina Lakhani has a chapter in the new book Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro. It focuses on ecocide on the strip. Nina’s big picture investigation into how the Israeli military has decimated water, sanitation, and agriculture in Gaza is complimented by the chapters that follow. The next chapter is an account by Noor Alyacoubi about what it was like to starve in Gaza, to eat animal feed and grass, to drink salt water. Then comes the account of Dr. Tanya Han-Hassan, a volunteer pediatrician who describes treating children with hepatitis A, liver failure, and skin infections as a result of destroyed water and sanitation systems. There’s also Susan Abdulhawa’s description of the devastating impact of Israel’s genocide on animal life, and how the genocide has revealed the moral bankruptcy of the animal rights movement’s largest organization. According to Abdulhawa’s account, PETA sent a letter calling on the UN to send aid to the starving animals, without mention of Israel’s role as the aggressor, or the 250 bird species predicted to go extinct because of the attacks, or the farm animals killed in aerial bombardments, or the zoo animals traumatized by deafening explosions. The chapter that I think moved me most, though, was titled “Unsafe Passage,” by Mosab Abu Toha, who described viscerally the terror of being detained by Israeli soldiers as he attempted to cross out of Gaza with his wife and son, a US citizen.
One last little community message: In 2026 I’ll be continuing to organize for fair labor practices for freelance media workers with the National Writers Union’s Freelance Solidarity Project. I know a lot of you readers are freelancers, and I really encourage you to make a resolution in 2026 to become a member and get involved. Building a meaningful movement and a stronger media economy will take all of us.
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