Late on Thursday, the White House issued a presidential memo in which Donald Trump Hereby Declared that the US is facing a dire crisis of political violence and domestic terrorism. The Terror Memo (we’re stealing that term from Jeff Sharlet) then calls on federal agencies to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence” and wipe them out.
The Terror Memo claims, logically enough, that the assassination of Charlie Kirk and Wednesday’s deadly shooting at that ICE facility in Dallas weren’t the work of lone crazies with guns, and definitely “not a series of isolated incidents,” but are in fact the “culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence.”
And what a conspiracy it is! The memo links Kirk’s murder with the 2020 protests against police murders of Black people — or as the memo puts it, “anti-police and ‘criminal justice’ riots” — and various other acts of real or attempted violence, including the two assassination attempts against Trump last year, the “riots” in Los Angeles and Portland in response to ICE raids this year, the shooting of that United Health CEO in Manhattan, and the sad fuckup who had a vague plan to kill Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 but gave up after seeing police outside.
No, Trump didn’t include June’s very real assassinations of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, as well as the attempted killings of state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, by a Christian nationalist who had a long list of other Democrats he also wanted to kill. Or any other incidents of rightwing violence, from the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol to the guy who shot up an FBI office after the agency served a search warrant for the federal documents Trump squirreled away at Mar-a-Lago and on again to the guy who killed a cop while shooting up the CDC because he was mad about vaccines. Some political violence really is random, apparently.
The goal of the Terror Memo isn’t simply to amaze us with its incredibly loose logic, but to create a pretext for launching investigations and arrests of Trump’s political opponents, especially organizations on the Left which might organize opposition to him. It assumes that disparate acts are part of some shadowy plot by evildoers who must be punished, however tenuous or completely imaginary the connections between real acts of violence and the supposed leftist baddies may be.
Announcing the Terror Memo in the Oval Office yesterday, Trump said, “We’re going to get out there and we’re going to do a pretty big number on those people,” although he didn’t say who “those people” were, other than suggesting that “wealthy people” are secretly bankrolling not only the protests against Trump’s mass deportation terror, but also the extremely online 22-year-old from a conservative Mormon family in Utah who shot Kirk. And Luigi Mangione too!
The administration declined to identify any of these supposed groups that need to be targeted, although Attorney General Pam Bondi helpfully explained that the administration will go after “Any organized group who is committing these crimes.” Trump later said he considered George Soros a good target, duh.
“I don’t think anybody has to ask,” Trump said. “If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” he added. “He’s in every story that I read, so I guess he’d be a likely candidate.”
Trump also named billionaire venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, because “I hear about him. Maybe it could be him. It could be a lot of people.”
Really, it could be any group that does “anti-fascism,” which is terrorism now. The Terror Memo explains that almost anything leftish could fall under the “recurrent motivations and indicia” of the terror groups that must be rooted out.
These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include 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.
And the groups that are fomenting such evil are truly everywhere, “including anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.”
As Sharlet explains, the absurd broadness and inclusiveness of the targeting here isn’t necessarily to criminalize everyone and every group on the Left.
The purpose of such sweeping authority isn’t comprehensive prosecution. Rather, like Article 70 in the Soviet Union, it provides authorities with potential cause to prosecute not everyone but anyone; run afoul of the regime, and there could already be a case against you.
To that end, the memo enables government agencies to investigate the finances of any group whose speech might conceivably inspire violence, just in case you say or do something that you need to be punished for. It’s really quite inventive.
Not surprisingly, Stephen Miller thinks the memo is the greatest thing since sliced immigrant families, and called it “historical and significant.”
“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle leftwing terrorism, to dismantle antifa, to dismantle the organizations that have been carrying out these acts of political violence and terrorism,” Miller said. The joint terrorism taskforce, a unit inside the FBI, would be “the hub” of the effort, he added. […]
“It is all carefully planned, executed and thought through,” said Miller. “It is terrorism on our soil. We are going to use the entire force of the federal government to uproot these organizations, root and branch.”
Again, no names, not yet. We’ll find out when it’s our turn in the barrel, won’t we?
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[Scenes from a Slow Civil War / CNN / Guardian]
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