Reagan-era official warns ‘red-green alliance’ has shared goal of ‘destroying’ America

Frank Gaffney has been making this argument since the Bush administration, and every few years a new set of headlines gives it fresh legs. The label "red-green alliance" sounds like a bumper sticker, but the underlying observation isn't crazy: you do see odd convergences between hardline Islamist movements and segments of the far left that otherwise agree on almost nothing, from campus politics to foreign policy statements that end up excusing regimes and groups most Americans would call enemies. The question worth asking isn't whether that convergence exists. It clearly does in pockets. It's whether calling it a coordinated "alliance" aimed at "destroying" the constitutional order is the most useful way to describe it, or whether it flattens a messier reality into something scarier and simpler than what's actually happening.

That matters because language like this gets used two ways. Sometimes it accurately names people who really do want to tear down American institutions and replace them with something else entirely. Other times it becomes a catch-all that lets people avoid making distinctions between, say, a socialist city council member and an actual jihadist sympathizer. Those are not the same threat, and treating them as interchangeable members of one alliance does the same flattening the left does when it calls every conservative a fascist.

None of that means Gaffney is wrong to point at real overlaps in rhetoric and objectives among some activists and organizations. There's a legitimate story in how anti-American sentiment on the far left sometimes finds itself standing next to Islamist talking points at the same rallies, defending the same regimes, using the same language about Western institutions being irredeemable. That deserves scrutiny and reporting, not just a slogan.

What we'd rather see is less "alliance" framing and more specifics: which groups, which funding, which actual coordination, if any. America has real adversaries at home and abroad. Naming them precisely, rather than bundling them into one big menacing category, is what actually helps people take the threat seriously instead of writing it off as another culture-war talking point.