TERROR BS 3

ESTB 9 25 POST KIRK 5 SHOOT

:{SEE :{NSPM 7}:

MERRI OK

SEE RENEE GOOD MINNE 1 26 PRETTI DOMESTIC TERROR MAX HARM

SEE FACISM HYPE FEAR ANGER ENEMY

SEE ACTIV SUPPRESS 5 // CRIMINALIZATION

see RUBIO 7 26 FLT CONF LEFT VIOLENCE BS ANTI-COMMIE MILLER 4 BESant treasury

SEE MILLER 3

SEE GORKA 3

see emergency STATE OF EXEMPT MARTIAL LAW INVASION

SEE BOGEYMAN ENEMY

SEE DEFUND 2 REDUMB?

SEE ANTIFA 4 WH MTG 10 25 CRC GAI

AGITATOR reboot, meld w paid protestor soros BS // antifa 4 terror 3 BS

---

rww

07/28/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Mark Meckler claims that New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is "a terrorist": "He's a terrorist supporter, he's an antisemite, he's anti-American."

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boguslaw

10 26

https://www.wired.com › story › us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism

US Law Enforcement Warns of 'Anti-Tech Extremism' as AI ... - WIRED

May 26, 2026As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their back yards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show.

no lnx

in the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.

More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.

This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.

Horror as MAGA ally gushes over tracking tool that could ' ...

Raw Story

https://www.rawstory.com › jennica-pounds

Jennica Pounds, the data scientist known online as DataRepublican, is drawing fire once again after unveiling an interactive database that critics warn could be used to track Americans by their political ties.

Pounds, a former DOGE volunteer who was publicly identified in 2025 after years operating anonymously, announced on Thursday what she calls the DSA Explorer, a clickable map of the Democratic Socialists of America and what she described as the "wider anti-imperialist solidarity network." She said it draws on more than a year of research.

"Click any org, person, or project and walk the network one tie at a time," Pounds wrote on X. "Start at DSA and see where it leads."

ALSO READ: 'I'm shocked': Chris Christie's telling Trump moment among revelations in new Russia files

The tool lets users trace links between organizations, individuals and projects connected to the socialist group. Pounds billed it as a preview of a wider relaunch, DataRepublican v2.0, timed ahead of her book UNELECTED, written with Joshua Lisec and due Oct. 13. She added that she could build similar maps for "the Soros network, democracy organizations, and much more."

The launch set off immediate alarm bells.

Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone, called it a "McCarthyite database tracking Americans based on party affiliation," and noted Pounds "idiotically outed herself as a secret Pentagon employee last week."

Writer Pedro L. Gonzalez went further, describing Pounds as "a special government employee creating tools that will be used to intimidate the public and go after dissenters under the pretext of fighting a domestic terror threat." His warning came as the administration faces accusations of inventing a terror threat to target charities.

Will Sommer of The Bulwark added: "A secret Dept of Defense employee has built a database to track American citizens by their political affiliations. The Pentagon still refuses to say what her job description is."

Another user mocked the project as "just helping my government do the thing that right wingers have been saying is their biggest fear for decades."

The alarms also come amid reports that a data firm was building "detailed portraits of Americans" on Trump's order, and that DOGE turned AI loose on federal workers to flag hostility to the president.

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tnr

An internet troll on the Pentagon’s payroll has made a database to track Americans based on their political affiliation.

Jennica Pounds, the Utah woman behind the prominent right-wing account DataRepublican, launched a public tool Friday called DSA Explorer, which she described as an “interactive map of the Democratic Socialists of America and the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network.”

The truth came to light after Pounds falsely accused Sarah B. Rogers, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, of attempting to get her to leak sensitive information. The DOD later confirmed that Pounds, who was posing as an independent journalist, was actually on the government’s payroll, but refused to explain what her job was or what office she worked in.

The release of the evidently government-funded DSA Explorer comes amid a broader effort to label left-wing activists and organizers as domestic terrorists.

In a lengthy disclaimer on the database website, Pounds warned that her data may not be 100 percent accurate. “Inferred, ideological, and patron/sphere associations are analytical interpretations, not statements of fact, and nothing here alleges unlawful conduct by any named person or organization,” the disclaimer states. “Do not rely on this material without independent verification.”

ref 16 pp

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-USCT-Strategy-1.pdf

toc

Presidential Foreword ................................................................. 3 Introduction | Good versus Bad Counterterrorism...................... 4 The Threat................................................................................... 5 Our Counterterrorism Strategy ................................................... 6 Our CT Principles .................................................................. 6 Our CT Priorities.................................................................... 6 The Goals of Our CT Strategy ............................................... 7 Counterterrorism Resources........................................................ 8 Counterterrorism and Presidential Diplomacy....................... 9 Counterterrorism by Region ..................................................... 10 Terrorists and Weapons of Mass Destruction........................... 15 America First Counterterrorism……………………………….16

PRESIDENTIAL FOREWORD When I returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, four years of weakness, failure, surrender

and humiliation under the last administration came to an end. Today, our nation is strong, our borders are secure, and the United States is respected all over the world. We are once again putting America First. As part of my commitment to defending America from all enemies, foreign and domestic, we are once again working to crush the threat of terrorism. Within 43 days, we apprehended the terrorist mastermind of the attack on Abbey Gate in Afghanistan that left 13 American service members dead.
In just one year, we brought back 106 American hostages from captivity abroad without paying a single dollar to their captors. We designated key chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as the terrorist groups they have always been. We mobilized the Department of Homeland Security to remove illegal alien criminals and Jihadist sympathizers from our country.

We ended the war in Gaza, secured the release of all remaining hostages, and began the process of ensuring Gaza can no longer serve as a haven for terrorism and extremism by bringing security and prosperity to the region through the Board of Peace. Operation Midnight Hammer and Operation Epic Fury have dealt devastating blows to the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, the sinister regime in Iran, to ensure they can never have a nuclear weapon.

At the same time, my Administration has put an unprecedented focus on dismantling threats to the American homeland in our Hemisphere. We are no longer permitting the cartels and gangs who have poisoned millions of Americans to freely operate in our region or smuggle their drugs, guns, or trafficked women and children into our country. Last year, I rightfully designated the deadly cartels as terrorist organizations, and began using the strength and power of the U.S. military to stop and destroy their operations. Our Armed Forces also demonstrated their incredible power and skill by capturing the narco-terrorist outlaw Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, bringing him to face American justice.

We will not let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity. Terrorists of any kind will not be allowed to find safe harbor here at home or attack us from abroad. Our new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy is a return to common sense and Peace through Strength. As I said after our first successful counterterrorism mission, just days after I was sworn back in office – if you hurt Americans, or are planning to hurt Americans, “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

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joe my god

New Republic reports:

An internet troll on the Pentagon’s payroll has made a database to track Americans based on their political affiliation. Jennica Pounds, the Utah woman behind the prominent right-wing account DataRepublican, launched a public tool Friday called DSA Explorer, which she described as an “interactive map of the Democratic Socialists of America and the wider anti-imperialist solidarity network.”

The project is a disgusting attempt to target Americans for their political affiliations, but it’s a particularly inappropriate project for a federal worker. Pounds has been listed as a “special government employee” of the Defense Department since July, The Bulwark reported Thursday. The release of the evidently government-funded DSA Explorer comes amid a broader effort to label left-wing activists and organizers as domestic terrorists.

Read the full article. The cult is applauding.

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3 days ago — Jennica Pounds, the data scientist known online as DataRepublican, is drawing fire once again after unveiling an interactive database that ...

New Pentagon Database Tracks Membership Of DSA

Joe.My.God.

https://www.joemygod.com › 2026/08 › new-pentagon...

1 day ago — Jennica Pounds, the Utah woman behind the prominent right-wing account DataRepublican, launched a public tool Friday called DSA Explorer ...Read more

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GPAGH

July 29, 2026

Trump’s Red Scare

The Trump administration is reviving McCarthy-era tactics, portraying political opponents as communist threats while targeting protected speech, protest, and association. A recent State Department ministerial falsely linked recent attacks to left-wing extremism despite research showing the far right remains the deadliest domestic terrorist threat. Paired with a report praising Cold War blacklists, the administration is building a framework that threatens First Amendment rights.

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AN 7 26

Last week, the Trump administration quietly revealed the scheme it will use to label its opponents as domestic terrorists and target the power of government against them. So blatant is the undemocratic nature of their plan that one of President Donald Trump’s closest aides declared that when it is put into action, appeals to civil liberties “must fall on deaf ears.”

This is according to security expert Miles Taylor, who served in the Department of National Security during Trump’s first term and acted as a whistleblower when he shared the existence of a resistance movement within the White House. Taylor asserts that the Trump administration has developed a “workaround to use terror powers against his foes.”

As Taylor explains, “Last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio gathered representatives from 66 countries at the State Department for something called the ‘Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism.’ Stephen Miller was there to help rally the world against ‘far-left political terrorism.’ The actual purpose was something else. Trump’s team was road-testing its blueprint for using America’s counterterrorism machine against the president’s enemies. And buried in the speeches was the legal trick they’re planning to use.”

To understand the plot, Taylor notes, it is important to keep in mind that “there is no such thing as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’ under U.S. law. The government can only designate foreign terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah. When I helped run the Department of Homeland Security in the first Trump administration, those labels allowed us to take powerful action against global adversaries, including asset seizures, sweeping surveillance and prosecutions that could put a group’s supporters away for decades.”

But because there is no legal domestic equivalent, Trump is unable to use these powers against his political opponents at home, so he’s taking steps to circumvent the law. According to Taylor, Trump started by issuing an executive order declaring antifa a “major terrorist organization,” despite the fact that there is no such thing as an antifa organization.

“It’s a fake label,” writes Taylor. “They’re using it to open investigations into groups that don’t like the president. Even still, they cannot use the government’s most sweeping anti-terror powers against these folks. They must find other crimes if they want to bring a prosecution, like money laundering or fraud. Which brings us to the workaround.”

Here Taylor explains the three-step plan Rubio quietly laid out last week:

“ONE, they’ll designate foreign groups and call them ‘antifa.’ Last November, the State Department added four obscure European far-left groups to the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, labeling all of them ‘antifa.’ Almost nobody reported this tiny detail: only one of the four — a German outfit called Antifa Ost — even identifies with the antifa movement. There’s no clear evidence linking any of them to activists in the United States. That didn’t matter. The point wasn’t the groups. The point was getting the word ‘antifa’ onto the FTO list. And Rubio promised this past Thursday that ‘more designations’ are coming.”

“TWO, they’ll declare it one big transnational network. This is what the ministerial was really for. Rubio told the assembled diplomats that today’s far-left militants ‘coordinate,’ ‘communicate,’ and ‘act together’ across borders and that they can ‘raise money in one country,’ train in another and strike in a third. Miller claimed antifa factions worldwide draw from ‘common networks of funding, organization and information sharing.’ Notice what’s happening. They’re constructing a factual predicate that American activists are connected to the foreign groups they just designated.”

“THREE, they’ll use ‘material support’ as the bridge to go after American citizens. Under federal law, knowingly providing ‘material support’ to a designated FTO is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. And material support is defined in breathtakingly broad terms. It can be money, ‘services,’ ‘training,’ ‘advice or assistance' or ‘personnel.’ Critics of the statute have warned that even sharing a Wikipedia link with a designated group could qualify.”

According to Taylor, “once the government claims a left-wing nonprofit or a protest network is somehow providing ‘material support’ to a foreign terror movement, the entire post-9/11 arsenal unlocks. That means it’s easier for them to activate spy powers meant to monitor al-Qaeda; freeze bank accounts; seize assets; add individuals to terror watchlists; track financial transactions and more. They don’t have to commit violence. They just have to be linked (by the government’s own say-so) to a network the government itself defined. That’s the workaround.”

CNN 7 26

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and top White House adviser Stephen Miller on Thursday sought to paint a dark picture of the threat of “far-left terror” to the United States as they urged diplomats from around the world to “defend” their civilizations against the “scourge.”

In remarks focused almost entirely on the US, Miller spoke of the need to fight the “fatal cancer of civilization,” claiming that so-called left-wing terrorism, when “left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag.” He argued that the US’ political, legal, and judicial systems don’t work “if the threat of violence and terror goes on unchecked.” And he denounced Antifa protesters as “deformed,” saying, “their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

“The greatest risk that we have is that our institutions have grown too soft and too cowardly to be able to defend themselves against a mortal threat,” Miller told a room full of representatives from more 60 countries and fellow Trump administration officials at the State Department on Thursday. “If your civilization is your home, you must defend it with the same passion and force as if an enemy intruder is inside your own house where your family lives.”

The ministerial on Thursday was meant to coalesce allies around a strategy to combat the alleged resurgence. Later on Thursday, Rubio announced a new visa restriction policy to target “members of Far-Left Terrorist and other aligned groups.”

The fight against the alleged rise of “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists,” is a key priority of the Trump administration, which has argued that they are a foremost terrorist threat to the US.

However, multiple former officials said the issue has been politicized by the administration and that the threat from the “far-left” does not rise to the level of that posed by groups like ISIS or by far-right extremists, the latter of which was absent entirely from the administration’s counterterrorism strategy released in May. And critics have expressed concerns that the strategy is an attempt to amplify the threat and target those on the political left who oppose President Donald Trump’s policies.

Rubio said the threat had been dismissed “as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy,” but that its resurgence is “an undeniable reality” comparable to the left-wing attacks of the 1970s.

“They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist, communist, or anarchist, or Marxists, but the fundamental character is always the same,” Rubio said.

Rubio called on the countries in the room to work with the US to “identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it.”

“Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also spoke at the opening session, said his department was “expanding its efforts to identify organizations that abuse charitable and nonprofit structures as vehicles for illicit finance” for alleged far-left terrorism.

Rubio’s convening of the ministerial comes not only as the matter has become a key domestic focus for the administration, but also amid growing chatter about the top US diplomat’s potential political future.

Sixty-seven countries attended the event, a State Department spokesperson said on Thursday. They represented countries mostly from Europe, although there are countries from Asia and the Western Hemisphere with representatives. Israel is the only Middle Eastern country in attendance, according to the list provided by a spokesperson.

Many of the delegations were not be led by the foreign ministers of the countries, but rather ambassadors or working-level and technical officials. Several sources cited scheduling for the lower-level attendance, with invitations to the event only being issued at the beginning of July.

A banner reading ''Free All Antifas'' is displayed at the traditional ''Revolutionarer 1. Mai'' May Day protest in Berlin, Germany, on May 1.

Tonny Linke/NurPhotoGetty Images/File

However, former officials said the ministerial appears to be a part of the administration’s broader effort to amplify the threat to suit a domestic political agenda. Several who spoke with CNN said that the reality of the threat from far-left extremists does not match the administration’s portrayal.

“We looked at terrorism of all stripes, including left-wing terrorism, but the reality and the data, both here domestically and abroad, indicate that left-wing extremism is not and has not been the type of threat or the degree of threat that far-right terrorism or extremist violence or jihadist violence have posed,” said Ian Moss, the former deputy coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department under the Biden administration.

Moss, now an attorney with Jenner & Block, noted that there are “other forms of violent ideological extremism, Islamist violence for starters, and then certainly violent right-wing extremists or White identity terrorists, which are a real risk, a real concern domestically and internationally, and one that the administration seems to have not focused on.”

Michael Duffin, a former senior counterterrorism adviser at the State Department, said that “never” in his nine years of working on counterterrorism “had so-called left-wing extremism risen” to a level warranting such high-level focus.

“There’s no violent extremist element, organizational element on the left, that would justify the expenditure of these resources,” he told CNN. Duffin was among many State Department officials who worked on counterterrorism who were fired last year as part of the administration’s mass firings and overhaul of the department.

Last November, the administration designated four European Antifa groups as terrorists. Throughout Trump’s second term, his administration has also ramped up domestic pressure against alleged far-left extremists.

Trump designated the anti-fascist movement Antifa as a so-called “domestic terrorist organization.” Despite claims that Antifa is a top concern domestically, law enforcement agencies have struggled to define the amorphous group, its size, locations of chapters and other basic information.

BBC 7 26

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has urged countries to collaborate against what he called a growing threat of left-wing terrorism.

The Trump administration hosted representatives from more than 60 countries in Washington, where it argued left-wing political violence was the result of a "unique evil rooted in a deep resentment towards civilisation".

Officials made no mention of countering far-right threats, and Democrats said Rubio's focus on left-wing groups was "politically partisan".

The initiative aligns with the Trump administration's stated priority of confronting left-wing groups, particularly Antifa, a loosely organised far-left movement.

At Thursday's session in Washington DC, Rubio called for a global effort to share intelligence to counter the "transnational" issue of far-left extremism.

The invitation list included officials from most European nations, several Latin American countries and India, Indonesia and Singapore, reports the Washington Post.

The Trump administration has already designated Antifa - short for anti-fascist - as a domestic terrorist group.

At the session, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller characterised leftists as "fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy".

Also on Thursday, the state department announced visa restrictions targeting members of what it labels as "Far-Left Terrorist and other aligned groups", including those that have allegedly participated in "economic sabotage".

Washington has already designated four European groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations: Antifa Ost (based in Germany), the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (Italy), Armed Proletarian Justice (Greece) and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense (Greek).

...

RUBIO 7 26

Remarks at the Opening of the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism - United States Department of State

...For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot – a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream, or worse, as a dangerous fascist conspiracy. It’s treated this way by many in the press, by many in academia and our universities, and by many of our legacy institutions. You will no doubt see the dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and the undeniable reality, in spite of the objective numbers and statistics, in spite of the fact that in this room today there are representatives from across the political spectrum, we will hear this organized – that this kind of organized violence and terror will be dismissed. It will be dismissed as a partisan fiction.

A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of extremism. We have think tanks and fellowships and journals and consultancies, with the unspoken understanding among them that the only kind of political violence that was a true threat to our system – I’m sorry – that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. It is. But a bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary – well, that’s just merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its means were misplaced or overzealous, but its ends were virtuous and just. That’s the implication of how they treat it.

For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline, so entrenched – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact. It is the reason why, here in my country, so many people in positions of power have repeatedly dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression so long as they served a left-wing cause.

It is why during those George Floyd – so-called George Floyd – riots in the summer of 2020, as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through American great – America’s great cities and nearly brought the country to its knees, city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute the people conducting these acts of violence and terror. It is the reason for the now infamous image – and you all recall this – of a news anchor from a very prominent agency – a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed in flames; meanwhile the chyron on the bottom read that the protests were mostly peaceful. This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused; it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.

...

The simple fact is none of this that I’ve just described is new. Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence. Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember – remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.

All of you here from Europe remember. You remember the machine gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held the five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary, so-called “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the 17 November organization in Greece, the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including, by the way, shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home in front of his wife as they were returning home from a Christmas party.

And here in America we remember. We remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, which bombed the State Department, and bombed the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets. In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil, a rate of nearly five a day. The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left.

These are numbers that would shock most Americans today because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence, it simply doesn’t exist or it’s being exaggerated. But it does exist, and we’re actually underestimating it, and our nations bear the scars to prove it.

And today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors. These are not abstract statistics.

Americans have seen what those numbers mean – an all-out assault on our immigration officers, sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his gun marked with slogans like, “Where is your God now?” A health care executive executed in cold blood in the streets. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation, a man who happened also to be a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, who cannot create, who cannot achieve great things, and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can. This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist. But the fundamental character is always the same. It’s always the same.

It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality and justice and liberation, an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and what is right on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness and have nothing else to offer the world. Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us. The old dogma was wrong. The old dogma was wrong; none of this is driven by idealism. It is not utopian. In fact, it is the opposite.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism, for example, is that it sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice. That’s actually not true. Communism does not sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat, grey, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. The world it envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity or ambition, a world without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards, without – a world without miracles, without myths, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. And the world communism envisions is a world without God.

For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization – for them it’s an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy. They attack pipelines; they attack railroads; they attack power grids and laboratories, the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement. This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.

This is an international conference because we are facing an international – we are facing a transnational threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells. They are interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders. They do not believe, in fact, in the nation state itself. They coordinate, they communicate, they travel, they train, and they act together, sharing the same infrastructure, sharing the same enemies, sharing the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and to the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks, to funnel propaganda and training materials and target information through shared encrypted channels, moving through underground networks of safe houses and finance, and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission, like Iraq’s – Iranian proxy networks who are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far-left in our country and in our hemisphere, and it remains inextricably linked to the far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country; they can host their communications in a second country; they can receive training in a third country; they can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. And so, we have no choice but to confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them.

Under President Trump, for the first time, the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror. The President signed National Security Presidential Memorandum number 7, outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt Antifa terror networks and their allies. Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and there will be more designations soon.

In December, we announced Rewards for Justice offering up to $10 million for information disrupting the financing behind these groups. In May, we convened the first Counter Terrorism Law Enforcement Workshop, joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner country – nations together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks. The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany. The coalition we’re building together is already bearing fruit, and we are here today to build on that work.

We can – and we must – identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it. Just as we have done together before, now we must do it together again. Through intelligence and information sharing, through coordinated law enforcement strategy, through financial targeting and disruption, we will dismantle these networks brick by brick. It is time for the people of the civilized world to defend ourselves, to stand united against this encroaching darkness, and fight – fight for what is ours.

It is easy to destroy great things; it is far more difficult to make them. The enemies of civilization are only capable of the former. They are only capable of destroying great things. All they know is destruction. But we have built great things together. We have done it time and again. We know what we must do, and now we must do it.

Thank you for coming today. (Applause.)

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PRARIELAND 100 YRS

30 YRS CONSPIR FOR MOVING BOX OF ZINES, NOT AT NOISE PROTEST

ANTIFA TERROR

Prairieland Nine: Texas ICE Protesters Get Up to 100 Years in Prison as Trump Targets Anti-Fascists

Jun 25, 2026 Latest Shows

:{A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell." The activists attended a protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4 of last year, during which fireworks were set off and a police officer was shot and wounded. All nine defendants were found guilty after being tried before a federal judge in Texas.

Matt Sledge, political reporter for The Intercept, warns that "we just have to watch for this playbook to be applied elsewhere." "Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence, not engaged in any violence, not interested in any violence," says Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center, who represents one of the Prairieland defendants.}:}:

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Peter Thiel's Master Plan to Destroy the World (And Escape It)

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21 minutes, 31 seconds

with it. Peter Teal is interested in these games not because he loves sports at all, but because he wants to see how the human body can be technically

21:39

21 minutes, 39 seconds

upgraded like software. What I do find incredibly interesting though, and stay with me, is how transphobic a lot of

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21 minutes, 47 seconds

these guys are. Like take Donald Trump Jr. for example. He's compared trans people to terrorists.

The radical transgender movement is per capita the most violent uh you know domestic terror threat if not in in America, probably the entire world.

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AN PP 5 26

For a year, White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka promoted the national strategy he was drafting, saying he was pouring his “life’s work” into a “massive” blueprint that would overhaul the U.S. approach to combating terrorist threats.

The finished product, released May 6 after months of delays, is a 16-page, typo-sprinkleddocument that ranks threats based on politics rather than intelligence assessments, according to several current and former counterterrorism officials and threat analysts.

Islamist militant groups, the perennial top concern, now come second to Latin American drug cartels. The violent far right, which the FBI has repeatedly called the leading domestic threat, doesn’t merit a mention. Meanwhile, militant leftists, a small subset of extremist violence in the United States, are portrayed as a threat on par with global terrorist networks such as al-Qaida.

“A new type of domestic terrorism has emerged,” the document says, “driven by violent extremists who have adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.”

Gorka’s strategy — the subject of a recent ProPublica report — lavishes praise on President Donald Trump’s national security agenda but offers few details about plans to tackle the administration’s top priorities: Latin American “narcoterrorists,” Islamist militant groups, and violent leftist antifascists and anarchists.

Gorka, who coordinates White House counterterrorism policy at the National Security Council, has called the document a “return to common sense” after a 2021 strategy by President Joe Biden centered on mostly far-right domestic threats. The new strategy mentions Biden seven times.

“What it tells me is that this administration is not paying attention to the data, to what our allies are seeing globally, or to where the biggest threats of violence come from or how they might be prevented,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University.

Republican leaders often portrayed Biden’s focus on the violent far right as the Democrats cracking down on conservative organizing. That idea fueled Trump’s blanket pardon of more than 1,500 defendants, including those who attacked police, in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.

Gorka did not reply to a request for comment. The White House, asked about criticisms of the plan, referred to a number of Gorka’s public statements touting it. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, added in an email, “President Trump is crushing terrorist threats to the United States and will never let cartels, Jihadists, or the governments who support them plot against our citizens with impunity.”

Here are five notable aspects of the plan, compiled from interviews with counterterrorism personnel and researchers’ published critiques:

It’s about Trump, not terrorism.

The counterterrorism strategy begins with a signed foreword by Trump, who sets the tone by claiming credit for ending “four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the last administration.”

Analysts say the rest of the strategy often reads like a valentine rather than a sober national security communique. Under Trump’s leadership, it states, “America is again the world’s most powerful nation, with the largest economy in history, the most advanced technologies, and the bravest and most skilled warfighters the world has ever seen.”

The strategy’s top threat categories align with the president’s pet issues, including the villainizing of Democrats and leftist dissent. The language also echoes debunked right-wing conspiracy theories the president has shared about a stolen election, a purported genocide of Christians and existential threats to Western civilization by what the strategy calls “alien cultures.” One section refers to Christians as “the most persecuted people on Earth.”

“This was once a serious document written by serious people” across Democratic and Republican presidencies, veteran terrorism analyst and former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem lamented on X. “Now it reads like a partisan screed.”

Data counter the priorities.

Analysts say the most obvious hole is the omission of violent far-right movements. Federal authorities have said for years that neo-Nazi and anti-government militia groups pose the most active and lethal domestic threats, though recently authorities have noted increases in leftist and mixed-motive attacks.

For example, on Sept. 10, the same day conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an outdoor event in Utah, a 16-year-old gunman who was steeped in online forums for white supremacy and mass-shooter fandom opened fire at a Colorado high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself.

The strategy is concerned only with the kind of violent extremism the White House ascribes to Kirk’s alleged shooter, who is labeled a violent left-wing “radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut; the suspect, who has yet to go to trial, reportedly comes from a Republican family but had shifted politically and had expressed opposition to the “hatred” he said Kirk spread.

Just last week, a lawsuit related to a deadly shooting last year at Florida State University revealed that the gunman had used ChatGPT to explore “his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism” and other far-right topics.

In a social media post, Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher who has written extensively about the militant right, called the case a “friendly reminder that the #Trump administration’s new United States Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention far-right violent extremism.”

Policies undermine strategy.

Several of the White House’s stated counterterrorism objectives conflict with the president’s own actions, analysts say.

For one, the pledge of stepped-up efforts to thwart plots doesn’t factor in the diminished capacity of federal agencies since Trump slashed the national security workforce last year and diverted counterterrorism resources to his mass deportation campaign.

Terrorism analyst Colin Clarke, executive director of the security-focused Soufan Center and a Gorka critic, summarized the document as “highly partisan & mostly incoherent.”

It touts the seizure of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation as the important capture of a “narco-terrorist outlaw.” But weeks before the Maduro raid, Trump had granted a pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Another U.S. goal is to aggressively counter anti-American propaganda by Islamist extremist groups, which the administration says have been driven from strongholds in the Middle East and are “exploiting the ungoverned spaces” across Africa. Places where “a resurgent terror threat is the reality,” according to the strategy, include West Africa, the Sahel region, Sudan and Somalia.

Yet efforts to counter anti-American messaging are undermined by increased U.S. airstrikes with civilian casualties, particularly in Somalia and Yemen, and the cutoff of humanitarian programs across the continent, conflict monitors say. U.S. aid has been a lifeline for communities whose desperation can be exploited by militant recruiters.

The strategy calls for a “light military footprint” in Africa, with the expectation that African leaders will take on a greater share of counterterrorism work. But Trump’s halting of foreign aid hobbled regional counterterrorism programs. Conflict monitors, now watching with alarm as Islamist militants capture territory and stage attacks in Mali, urge the administration to pay closer attention to the restive Sahel region and other hot spots.

“Terrorists are on the verge of recreating a new caliphate sanctuary that could serve as an incubator for attacks against the US homeland and interests abroad,” Alex Plitsas, a security analyst and former Obama-era Pentagon official, wrote this month after visiting U.S. Africa Command.

“The result is a warning for Washington: when the United States and its partners step back, jihadist groups and adversarial powers fill the space,” Plitsas wrote.

The strategy also disparages “failed ‘forever war’ policies” at a time Trump’s base is wrestling with his decision to launch the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism.

In a call with reporters after his plan was released, Gorka got defensive when asked how the Iran operation was not a “forever war” that could endanger Americans. He called critics “testicularly challenged.”

Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, drew a distinction: “Unlike the ‘forever wars’ of the past with vague objectives and ever-expanding timelines, President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and he kept Americans apprised of the scope and defined objectives for Operation Epic Fury.”

Successes are exaggerated.

Trump’s preface opens by celebrating counterterrorism achievements that analysts describe as inflated or lacking in nuance.

One example is the claim that, within 43 days of Trump’s return to office, the U.S. had apprehended “the terrorist mastermind” of the deadly Abbey Gate attack in Kabul. In 2021, a suicide bomber detonated in a crowd of civilians outside an airport gate during the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, killing more than 150 Afghans and 13 American service members.

In March, the Justice Department hailed the arrest of Afghan national Mohammad Sharifullah, an Islamist militant it said had “orchestrated” the attack. Gorka has publicly recounted the dramatic scene of waiting on the tarmac in the cold at 3 a.m., alongside several Cabinet members, to welcome the plane carrying the handcuffed “man who was responsible for the murder, the massacre.”

Last month, just before Gorka’s strategy was released, a federal jury dealt a blow to the “mastermind” narrative by returning a mixed verdict. Sharifullah was convicted of aiding the terrorist group known as Islamic State Khorasan, but the jury deadlocked on whether there was sufficient evidence to hold him responsible for the Abbey Gate deaths. The difference shapes how much time Sharifullah could spend behind bars — the more serious charge was eligible for a life sentence.

A Justice Department news release about the conviction (but not the deadlock) was scrubbed of references to Sharifullah as an orchestrator and did not use the “mastermind” language that appeared days later in the White House strategy.

Analysts also expressed skepticism about the blueprint’s claim that “hundreds of Jihadist terrorists in multiple countries” had been killed in recent U.S. counterterrorism operations. The administration releases virtually no details about the identities of those targeted or the circumstances of their deaths. Humanitarian groups say they fear the operations could be causing uncounted civilian casualties.

Opponents are targeted.

Rights watchdogs say the strategy hints at ways Trump administration officials will attempt to build terrorism cases against U.S. leftist and Muslim activists through nebulous or nonexistent ties to transnational militant movements.

A link to a foreign entity formally designated as a terrorist group opens the door for government surveillance and potential charges related to providing aid — “material support” in legal jargon — to a foreign terrorist organization.

Analysts say that’s why the Trump administration has pursued designations targeting leftist militant groups in Europe under the label of antifa, as well as some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood is a century-old Islamist group that renounced violence in the 1970s, though spinoffs such as Hamas remain active and on the U.S. blacklist. Republicans have long tried to portray U.S.-based Muslim advocacy groups as a foothold for the Brotherhood.

The document also calls for the rapid “neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Researchers called the terms ill-defined and said they aren’t used in international counterterrorism work.

Miller-Idriss’ overarching concern about the Trump counterterrorism doctrine: “How damaging could it be? Both in the things it’s ignoring and the things that it’s emphasizing.”

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goaded into doing report? // nsmp 7

rww -->

Josh Kovensky @ Talking Points Memo: Gorka Fumes Against the Left in New Counterterrorism Strategy

Sebastian Gorka released a new counterterrorism strategy on Wednesday, singling out “violent left-wing extremists,” “extreme transgender ideologies,” and “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

Sebastian Gorka released a new counterterrorism strategy on Wednesday, singling out “violent left-wing extremists,” “extreme transgender ideologies,” and “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

As with much that comes out of the Trump administration, the messenger needs to be taken into account with the message. At a press briefing on Wednesday, Gorka replied to a question about what impact the Iran war might have on terrorist threats by calling critics of the war “testicularly challenged,” describing it as a “low-T approach to threats to the United States.”

Low-T refers to low testosterone, and is a term used by extremely online manosphere influencers. Much of the new national counterterrorism strategy reads in a similar vein.

“We have assets outside the realms of hard security in the informational space that were allowed to atrophy in recent years or were used for partisan political purposes,” the strategy reads. “These were previously de-weaponized and must now be reinvigorated to demoralize and delegitimize terror threat groups and their enablers.”

The strategy names three groups as the main terrorist threats to the United States: drug cartels and gangs, “Legacy Islamic Terrorists,” and left-wing radicals, including “anarchists and anti-fascists.”

It’s the latest example of the Trump administration sweeping relatively anodyne left-wing political views into a broader definition of domestic terrorism. In National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the White House told federal law enforcement to prioritize those with views including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” in investigating domestic terrorism cases. That has been operationalized, TPM exclusively reported, via material support for terrorism cases brought against leftists accused of criminal wrongdoing in prosecutions nationwide.

The new counterterrorism strategy released Wednesday echoed NSPM-7’s terminology and broad folding of disfavored political views into potential threats.

“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist,” the strategy reads. “We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

The document ignores right-wing extremists, who, studies show, have stacked up more casualties in domestic terrorist attacks over the past several decades. Studies focusing on more recent timeframes suggest that may be changing.

Instead, the document argues that the Biden Administration used counterterrorism authorities to systematically target conservatives. There’s no evidence of that happening; rather, the Trump administration has done more than any other American administration in modern history to make political views with which it disagrees the basis for targeting by law enforcement.

In Gorka’s world, the result is that “as real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.”

The strategy comes after ProPublica ran a story last month focusing on how Gorka, the counterterrorism czar, repeatedly claimed for the better part of a year that he was “on the cusp” of releasing a blueprint for going after terrorism. None had been released. On Monday, ProPublica reported that Gorka accused the reporter of publishing a “putrid piece of hackery.” The strategy was released on Wednesday.

===

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PRETTI AND GOOD CALLED TERROR RT AWAY THEN 3X DOWN

MMA

### Megyn Kelly: Minnesota protesters are “terrorists” who must “behave well and submit immediately”

01/26/26

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Josh Kovensky @ Talking Points Memo: FBI’s Top Influencers Tout ‘Antifa’ Funding Investigations

FBI Director cites NSPM-7 as enabling crackdown on left-leaning activists.

THE White House wanted investigations into those it describes as left-wing activists and the groups that fund them. And now, FBI Director Kash Patel says, the FBI is delivering.

The FBI is investigating funding associated with left-wing activism, Patel confirmed to longtime podcaster and brief FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on his recently revived streaming show.

“This FBI, thanks to what we stood up over the last year, has made significant headway under the NSPM-7 process in looking at those who funded these streams,” Patel told Bongino, adding that the bureau is “starting to arrest people who used their funds to incite violence in the guise of political peaceful protest.”

The White House issued NSPM-7 in September, a presidential memo that directed federal law enforcement to investigate ideologies — naming those who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” — as potential sources of political violence. That memo has been operationalized in part through several terrorism prosecutions, TPM reported this month. Patel’s remarks suggest that the FBI is implementing the memo to investigate funding sources for left-leaning activist groups.

At the same time, it’s Kash Patel. He’s more a streamer than a law enforcer. Bongino’s brief tenure at the FBI — during which he memorably complained about the workload before the administration took the unprecedented step of appointing a “co-deputy director” to assist him — testifies to some of this. Beyond that, Patel is operating in Trumpworld, a universe where senior officials can curry favor with the president by demonstrating how tough they are in carrying out his fantasies. Even in that credibility-killing environment, Patel has distinguished himself by using his megaphone as FBI director to misstate details in sensitive, ongoing investigations.

One ongoing case that Patel mentioned in Wednesday’s discussion with Bongino is the Prairieland prosecution. The case is the Trump administration’s first terrorism prosecution against a group of people that it has deemed members of “Antifa.” In the case, prosecutors accuse an “Antifa cell” in North Texas of having staged a demonstration outside an ICE detention facility that left one police officer shot and wounded.

After Bongino brought up the case, Patel claimed that there have been more than two dozen federal arrests. Per TPM’s count, sixteen people have been charged in federal court over the incident.

The trial was set to start on Tuesday. But District Judge Mark Pittman for the Northern District of Texas declared a mistrial during jury selection, reportedly after a defense attorney wore a jacket with a T-shirt underneath that featured a picture of Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders.

Patel likened the case to the Cop City prosecution in Georgia. There, state prosecutors filed a sprawling RICO indictment against a group of activists that had been protesting the construction of a police training center. Critics accused prosecutors of using the case to silence activists that had no tie to any act of alleged wrongdoing; a judge dismissed the RICO charges in December.

The FBI director said that his agency had to “rearrest everybody” in order to compensate for errors in the state investigation. It’s unclear what he was referring to. No federal charges have been filed in the Cop City case.

He did suggest that his leadership had seen a change in the FBI’s focus to “Antifa,” the chimerical group of beliefs that Trump II leadership has held up as a national, internal enemy.

Federal law enforcement is not only pursuing foreign threats, he said, “but those who cause violence here in America and use the guise of politics to delete that violence.”

Threats from the administration to investigate ideologically opposed charities spread fear in the nonprofit community last year. Some, per TPM’s reporting, sought to move money overseas; others considered whether to incorporate subsidiary fiscal sponsors as separate organizations.

He reminded Bongino that the two of them had “launched a serious investigation” when the podcaster was in government last year.

“We had said these organizations don’t operate alone, don’t operate in silence. They operate with a heavy heavy stream of funding,” Patel said. “And we started looking into it. And guess what, Dan? We found them.”

Josh Kovenskyis an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.

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RWW

02/09/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Miles Klee @ Wired: Turning Point USA’s Halftime Show Was Exactly What You’d Expect

“The All-American Halftime Show," born out of outrage over Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, fell short of the hype. From Kid Rock’s poor lip synching to Erika Kirk being MIA, it was simply dull.

Ellen Ioanes @ The American Prospect: Board of Peace Is a Board of Profits

Corporate interests dominate the organization planning the reconstruction of Gaza.

Oriana González @ NOTUS: Republicans Want Nothing to Do With Conservative Efforts to Ban Gay Marriage

Trump has moved the Republican Party away from its decades-old opposition to same-sex marriage, and public support remains high.

Bryan Kaylor @ Public Witness: At National Prayer Breakfast, Hegseth Says US Soldiers Gain Salvation by Dying for ‘Christian Nation’

Pete Hegseth, who likes to call himself the “Secretary of War,” spoke after Trump to baptize the U.S. and especially its military. He did so by highlighting the worship services he’s been leading at the Pentagon. And he even suggested that soldiers can gain salvation by fighting for the United States.

Hafiz Rashid @ The New Republic: March for Life Attendees Are Getting Measles

It turns out the anti-abortion March for Life demonstration was a measles superspreader event.

Josh Kovensky @ Talking Points Memo: Trump DOJ Files 9/11-Era Charges Against Leftists Across the Country

Under Trump, the DOJ has changed how it brings terrorism cases, and is training them on the opposition.

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TPM

Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his political enemies.

It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have largely reserved the statute —2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays. It’s been used in recent years to charge the leadership of Hamas over the Oct. 7 attacks, pursue men accused of assassinating the president of Haiti, and take down networks of white supremacists who allegedly conspired to blow up power plants.

But after Trump DOJ leadership issued a series of memos demanding that prosecutors target those who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” both the focus and the standards in these cases have changed. The memos direct federal law enforcement to use speech — including “extremism on migration, race, and gender” — as key criteria for who to investigate and against whom to bring the most aggressive charges possible.

They are part of the Trump administration’s broader crusade against the left, and include executive orders labeling “Antifa” a terrorist organization and directing law enforcement to pursue investigations and possible charges against left-leaning advocacy groups and their funders.

This full-bore assault on speech is now bearing fruit.

In Birmingham, Alabama, federal prosecutors in November charged a longtime local Black Lives Matter activist under the statute over an arson he allegedly committed at an area Walmart. In Texas, a July 4 demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility, at which a responding local police officer was shot and injured, has resulted in more than a dozen people facing federal terrorism charges. It also spawned a Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation into “Antifa.” The new focus on the left has yielded other cases across the country, as well.

These cases all feature some credible accusations of criminal conduct. But by casting the allegations as terrorism, the DOJ has dramatically increased the severity of the charges relative to what prosecutors allege. Legal experts say this could result in longer and harsher sentences, makes defendants likelier to lose on appeal, and risks saddling them with the label of “terrorist” for life.

The cases raise grave concerns about free speech and freedom of association. The Trump administration is using terrorism statutes to retaliate against its opponents, seemingly applying a different standard of law to people associated with left-wing causes. Those individuals are now more likely to face federal terrorism prosecutions, and their associates — even if not implicated in any wrongdoing — are more likely to face investigation and possible charges.

To Jeff Breinholt, a longtime former DOJ counterterrorism prosecutor who handled terrorism cases during the Bush, Obama, Biden, and first Trump administration, the crackdown hearkens back to the most repressive moments in the history of federal law enforcement.

“It’s suspiciously like the COINTELPRO days of the Hoover administration back in the sixties,” Breinholt said. “You’re declaring a sort of informal law enforcement war on this shadowy group.”

After the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September, senior Trump administration officials began to talk about his death as having been perpetrated by the “Radical left” or “Antifa,” which they have long portrayed as a shadowy, organized, violent organization. It was far from the first time that Antifa came up in MAGA messaging. But the White House seized on the moment to begin building the architecture for a federal law enforcement crackdown on the left. That took place in part through NSPM-7, the DOJ memo issued after Kirk’s killing that directed federal and state law enforcement to aggressively pursue domestic terrorism charges against those who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

This spate of new cases shows how that approach is being put into practice, several former DOJ counterterrorism officials, including Breinholt, who helped pioneer the use of 2339A after 9/11, told TPM.

TPM has found:

Federal prosecutors have recharged conduct as material support for terrorism in cases where defendants were associated with left-wing causes including Black Lives Matter or trans rights activism.

This came after the issuance of NSPM-7, the September memo that directed prosecutors to consider those who espouse “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as targets for domestic terrorism cases.

One charge, depredation of government property, has not used in a material support for terrorism case for at least a decade before 2025, a TPM review found. It can apply to anything from breaking the windows of a building to spraypainting.

In one case, prosecutors charged several people with material support while relying on coordinated dress — black bloc — as a link to an alleged terrorist plot.

FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other Trump appointees have promoted the cases as part of a broader fight against Antifa.

These prosecutions have ripple effects. In Texas, state prosecutors have brought “hindering the prosecution of terrorism” charges against three people who weren’t at the July 4 event at the ICE facility; a warrant in one state case included a reference to a White House Executive Order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization in seeking probable cause. Legal experts say the order is meaningless as domestic terrorist organizations do not exist under federal law.

Earlier cases using the material support for terrorism statute required months or years of preparation, former prosecutors tell Taking Points Memo, because of the law’s severity, because of a high standard of proof embedded in its provisions, and, paradoxically, because of the relative ease with which the government can bring the charge. Under 2339A, prosecutors do not need to accuse people of belonging to or helping a specific terrorist group. As long as they show that someone knowingly intended to help commit a crime that Congress has listed as a terrorism offense, they can be prosecuted for material support.

Convictions on material support charges can come with far more draconian penalties. 2339A carries a maximum sentence of 15 years if no death is associated with the crime. Prosecutors will also be able to apply for a terrorism enhancement. Though there’s no mandatory minimum associated with that, it would set a guidelines recommendation for the sentencing judge at 17.5 years behind bars regardless of the underlying crime. Charging or even investigating crimes as terrorism also gives the government more power: terrorism defendants are far more likely to be detained before trial. Under current law, prosecutors can take more aggressive actions during a terrorism investigation, including making use of material gathered by the intelligence community. On top of that, indictment on a crime of terrorism carries reputational consequences that far outstrip most other crimes.

Congress enacted the material support for terrorism law in 1994 as part of sprawling anti-crime and anti-terrorism legislation, responding in part to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Waco siege. After 9/11, Congress used the PATRIOT Act and other legislation to broaden the law’s scope. As prosecutors increasingly used it to pursue cases involving Islamic fundamentalist terrorism and, later, domestic terrorism, the DOJ evolved strict internal guardrails to prevent domestic terrorism charges from being used frivolously or for partisan reasons. Those guardrails disappeared over the past year. Now, the White House has replaced them with directives ordering prosecutors to target the administration’s perceived opponents.

US President Donald Trump listens to HomelandSecurity Secretary Kristi Noem speak during a roundtable about Antifa in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on October 8, 2025. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP) (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Fire at a Walmart

On Aug. 22, 2025, protesters gathered at a soccer field in the Birmingham suburb of Homewood. In June, local police had fatally shot an 18-year-old Black man named Jabari Peoples. Police said he fought law enforcement; his family, after viewing body cam footage, said he was shot while running away.

Local Black Lives Matter activists staged the protest to demonstrate against a local DA’s decision not to file charges against the officer who shot Peoples. The protest began in the morning. According to police reports, a fire started at a Walmart down the street that afternoon.

Days later, police arrested a locally known Black Lives Matter activist named Mercutio Southall. They charged him in state court with arson, criminal mischief, and possession of psilocybin mushrooms, per a local news report. Southall, police said, had gone from the protest to Walmart, where he allegedly filled a shopping cart with rags, charcoal bags, and fuel. A fire later started.

Federal law enforcement followed up in October, charging him and a local woman, Lillian Colburn, with one count of federal arson each.

The next month, federal prosecutors upgraded the charges: Southall and Colburn were now each facing a count of providing material support to terrorists. “Great work,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote in a quote tweet addressed to the local FBI field office, which appeared to misstate the date of the alleged arson.

Southall has pleaded not guilty in both the state and federal cases, which remain pending. Colburn has pleaded not guilty as well.

The case has raised eyebrows among national security lawyers in part because of the apparent mismatch between the severity of the charges and the alleged wrongdoing, and what appears to fill the gap between the two: affiliation with a Black Lives Matter protest.

“This really poses a grave risk for conduct that is otherwise criminal being recast as terrorism because of the ideology involved,” Josh Herman, a Chicago attorney who has represented defendants in material support cases, told TPM.

NSPM-7 in Action

Previous terrorism cases tended to follow a different path.

During Trump’s first term, for example, Manhattan federal prosecutors charged an Army private named Ethan Melzer with material support for terrorism over his involvement with an online neo-Nazi group called the Order of the Nine Angles.

Melzer, prosecutors said, spent weeks talking to members of the group in an online chat room. Melzer was an accelerationist: a type of extremist familiar to those who have spent too much time online, he purportedly sought to hasten the decline of Western civilization by inviting an attack on his army unit. In the chatroom, he gave away information about his unit’s upcoming deployment to Turkey, including its location, the number of soldiers, where they were to be stationed, and the “facility’s surveillance and defensive capabilities,” prosecutors said in an indictment.

Melzer eventually pleaded guilty to one count of material support, as well as counts including attempting to murder U.S. servicemembers.

Francesca LaGuardia, who studies terrorism prosecutions at Montclair State University, told TPM that the administration was now entering new territory by bringing terrorism charges in cases that involve protest and property damage.

“In the past, we would not have seen terrorism prosecutions for property damage, and that’s obviously a direction that this administration is going in,” she said. “In the past, we haven’t seen a lot of terrorism prosecutions for anything that runs the line between activity and protest. “

Former DOJ officials attributed the shift to the guidance issued by the Trump administration after Charlie Kirk’s death. In NSPM-7, the White House directed prosecutors to approach cases involving people who believe in what it described as gender extremism as well as “anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, and anti-capitalism” as domestic terrorism.

That’s now being operationalized, said Tom Brzozowski, the former counsel for domestic terrorism at the DOJ’s counterterrorism section.

The Justice Manual, a document that lays out internal policies for prosecutors, includes a detailed section on domestic terrorism cases, he said.

When the DOJ announces a material support case, it typically says which attorneys from the National Security Division — located in D.C. — were on the case. The U.S. attorneys offices that have charged the Prairieland and Birmingham 2339A cases under Trump have not included attorneys from Main Justice in their press releases.

“In the normal run of business, that charge would be vetted and staffed all the way up through Main Justice before it was approved,” Brzozowski said. “It’s not immediately clear to me that those approval processes remain in place for domestic terrorism cases.”

“They have taken on that term and applied it pretty loosely to activity that is anti-Trump,” he added.

The DOJ did not return TPM’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern District of Alabama declined to comment. The FBI declined to comment.

Defining the Enemy Within

For Lydia Koza, the charges came as a shock.

Koza’s wife, Autumn Hill, was charged in federal court over a July 4, 2025 incident that took place outside the Prairieland ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas. More than a dozen protesters descended on the facility, which is around an hour’s drive from Dallas, for a demonstration that prosecutors have described as a “direct action.” The assembled group allegedly shot fireworks at the facility, spraypainted cars, and damaged a surveillance camera. When a local police officer responded, one protester allegedly shot him with a rifle. The officer, wounded in the neck, returned fire and survived.

Search warrants and documents from parallel state and federal cases obtained by TPM show that the regional Joint Terrorism Task Force — itself a mix of state and federal law enforcement in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area — came down hard. The next evening, Koza recalled to TPM, FBI and state law enforcement broke down the door to the group home that Koza shared with Hill and others. Hill was detained, while FBI agents seized computers, guns, fireworks, and a booklet called “Satanic Death Cult is Real,” per a warrant and receiptreviewed by TPM.

Koza, who told TPM that she wasn’t at the Prarieland demonstration, stood outside as a mix of federal and state law enforcement searched the group house in which she and Hill were living.

“We were all kind of looking at each other like, ‘are we gonna be sleeping rough tonight?’” she said. “Like, we also don’t even have any shoes. This fucking sucks.”

The FBI conducted that search as part of an investigation into assault of a federal agent, damage to government property, and conspiracy, per a search warrant reviewed by TPM. That month, federal prosecutors charged several of those detained at Prairieland with attempted murder of a federal officer and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence.

But by October, the case had shifted. Prosecutors charged two people who were allegedly at the incident under 2339A. The next month, they filed material support charges against six others.

Federal prosecutors said that the protester who allegedly shot the police officer had sent a damning message before the demonstration in a Signal chat with five others. “Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle so it tends to make them back off,” the person, Ben Song, allegedly wrote.

At a September probable cause hearing, a federal prosecutor likened Song to a “cult leader” who took a leading role in planning the incident. The prosecutor said that he shot the police officer and affixed a “binary trigger” to a rifle that he brought, allowing him to double his rate of fire. Song faces charges of attempted murder of a federal employee, use of and conspiracy to use an explosive, and using a firearm during a crime of violence. He has pleaded not guilty.

Autumn Hill, along with seven others, faces charges of material support. Hill is additionally charged with attempted murder of a federal employee, use of and conspiracy to use an explosive, and using a firearm during a crime of violence. She has pleaded not guilty. Hill, Song, and six others have pleaded not guilty to the 2339A charges.

Prosecutors have managed to secure guilty pleas from others charged in the case. Seven people pleaded guilty to single counts of material support late last year.

Of the eight people charged under 2339A, only one — Song — is directly accused of having committed any crime of violence. Three of those charged, prosecutors say, were not present on what the DOJ characterized as a “core” Signal chat that was used to plan the incident. Others are tied to the case either by involvement with what prosecutors have described as spreading “insurrectionary materials called ‘zines,’” or through clothing: everyone at the demonstration, even if not accused of having shot fireworks or vandalized property, was dressed in black.

“If you are going to be charged for materially contributing to someone else’s illegal actions, you need to mean to support them in those actions, not just abstractly support their belief system,” Rachel Moran, a professor at the University of St. Thomas Law School who has studied protest cases, told TPM.

The federal case had become a national talking point for senior Trump federal law enforcement officials; the Department of Homeland Security took to calling it an “ambush.” When federal prosecutors recharged the case as material support for terrorism, Bondi wrote: “Antifa is a left-wing terrorist organization. They will be prosecuted as such.”

For the first time, Trump officials have been forced to define what it thinks Antifa means before a judge. As one FBI agent put it when asked to define the group during a September probable cause hearing, “Antifa is a loosely organized, kind of decentralized anarchist mindset, an ideology. These individuals commonly practice anarchy and don’t believe in a normal system.”

Bondi cited the case in a December memo that called for more domestic terrorism prosecutions, calling it an “ambush” by an “anti-fascist group.” The memo directs prosecutors to make a list of groups “engaged in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” and to review past, closed investigations for “Antifa-related intelligence” that could be used in future charges.

To Breinholt, the former DOJ counterterrorism prosecutor, it’s all new territory.

“These are not the types of things we would normally charge in the old days as terrorism,” he remarked.

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Josh Kovenskyis an investigative reporter for Talking Points Memo, based in New York. He previously worked for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine, covering politics, business, and corruption there.

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The Trump administration is using secretive orders to crackdown on dissent

SARAH MCL

Imagine finding out that the government is issuing secretive orders to unearth your personal information and then sending federal agents to question you — all because you sent an email criticizing the life-or-death decisions the government makes.

That sounds like something out of China, Russia or the increasingly dystopian United Kingdom, right? Well this time, it’s happening here.

The Trump administration is reportedly abusing oversight-free administrative subpoenas to chill protected speech. Recent targets include a man who sent an email criticizing efforts to deport an Afghan man on humanitarian parole seeking asylum.

Our right to express ourselves, particularly in ways that displease the government, is under attack — sometimes echoing authoritarian censorship efforts abroad.

While subpoenas have been used to chill speech across numerous presidencies, the way this administration is using them, and the broader repressive pattern they are part of, should disturb all Americans. As The Washington Post reported this week, a Philadelphia-area retiree wrote an email to a federal prosecutor last year asking him to “[a]pply principles of common sense and decency” to the deportation case of an Afghan man, who feared death at the hands of the Taliban. Only the retiree’s first name, Jon, is given, as he fears for his safety.

Only hours later, to Jon’s shock, he received a notice from Google that the company had received a subpoena compelling the release of identifying information, including older account activity and his physical address. The Department of Homeland Security issued an administrative subpoena, which doesn’t require the oversight of a judge or grand jury, to get Jon’s information. DHS attempted a similar stunt to target internet commenters who posted about Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That was not Jon’s only brush with DHS. Agents would also soon show up at his door with a copy of the email he’d sent and ask him to explain himself.

There is no better guarantee of the right to speak and criticize our government than the First Amendment, which stands as guard between us and the power of the state. But our right to express ourselves, particularly in ways that displease the government, is under attack — sometimes echoing authoritarian censorship efforts abroad. Americans must understand that with enough time and pressure, even the strongest of foundations can weather down to dust.

These administrative subpoenas intended to unmask critics of government action are just the tip of the speech-chilling iceberg.

Between these disturbing allegations, recent alarming on-camera encounters between civilians and law enforcement and the ceaseless incursions from the Trump administration against our First Amendment rights, Americans must recognize that the United States is failing as a bulwark for liberty in a world increasingly bereft of it.

Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis last month was deeply alarming. Rather than immediately commit to an intensive investigation of what took place, officials such as Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem spread the unfounded claim that Pretti tried to “kill” law enforcement. Senior adviser Stephen Miller called Pretti an “assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.” The administration has since started to shy away from these fantastical claims after Americans could watch the video for themselves.

Their narrative might still stand, however, had protesters nearby not caught the shooting on camera from multiple angles. But that First Amendment right to film law enforcement is increasingly under attack. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said filming and posting videos of ICE is “doxing our agents” and the government “will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law.” Pretti himself had been recording agents with his cell phone moments before he was killed.

U.S. federal agents also appear to be creating a database to track protesters and observers who are legally and peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights. In an encounter a woman filmed in Maine, an ICE agent told her he’s recording her information for a “nice little database” for “domestic terrorists” like her. A CNN report confirms a DHS memo informing agents to “capture all images, license plates, identifications, and general information on hotels, agitators, protestors, etc., so we can capture it all in one consolidated form.” News of this database follows in the footsteps of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s plan to crack down on “domestic terror organizations,” using a framework that targets broad ideologies such as “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as markers of political violence rather than constitutionally protected beliefs.

You may be familiar with lists of alleged anti-government activists from their other iterations in Belarus, Russia and China. The lists are frightening. What governments do with them is usually even worse.

The distance between freedom and tyranny is shrinking fast — and so is our window to combat it.

And many Americans were rightfully shocked by a “60 Minutes” exposé of German censorship last year, which included raids on the homes of social media users who had insulted politicians, and by regular reports from other nations such as the U.K., where a late-night knock at the door from police has become disturbingly commonplace. In Germany, the government treats insults to politicians more, not less, harshly than other forms of insult, essentially exempting the powerful from upsetting speech.

That’s the opposite of how we view political speech in the U.S. — with great power must come a thick skin.

But the Trump administration doesn’t see it that way. In fact, ICE and DHS leadership have undertaken a concerted effort in recent months to pervert the concept of “doxing,” the sharing of identifying information about an individual, into one so broad it includes simply saying the name of the men and women who serve as armed agents of the state. Administration officials have repeatedly — and wrongly — suggested this “doxing” is illegal.

Imagine a United States in which federal agents have the authority to fire their weapons as representatives of the government, and yet everyday Americans aren’t even free to state clearly who or where those agents are. Even worse, those same Americans may find themselves on a clandestine government database for engaging in protected speech. Or, like Jon, they could even face a secretive administrative subpoena followed by a knock at the door from DHS agents.

“Secret police” cannot be a necessary term in the American vernacular, but if we do not stem the tide of these First Amendment violations and transgressions, it may become one. The distance between freedom and tyranny is shrinking fast — and so is our window to combat it.

The post The Trump administration is using secretive orders to crackdown on dissent appeared first on MS NOW.

This article was originally published on ms.now

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AN 1 26

Following the recent shooting of Renee Good by an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States, the Donald Trump administration’s latest narrative suggests that “deluded wine moms” are to blame for the violence in ICE-related demonstrations in Minneapolis and across the country.

This mother-blaming is nothing more than an old trick with a new spin.

Organized gangs of ‘wine moms’

A Fox News columnist recently wrote that “organized gangs of wine moms” are using “antifa tactics” to “harass and impede” ICE activity. In the opinion piece, he claimed that “confusion” over the what constitutes civil disobedience is what “got 37-year-old Renee Good killed.”

Similarly, Vice-President J.D. Vance called Good a “deranged leftist” while a new acronym, AWFUL — Affluent White Female Urban Liberal — has appeared on social media.

In framing protesters like Good, a mother of three, as confused, aggressive and “delusional,” this narrative delegitimizes and pathologizes maternal activism.

This strategy aims to divert blame from the U.S. government and its heavy-handed approach to immigration — which has resulted in yet another slaying of a protester by ICE agents in Minneapolis, this time a male nurse who was reportedly coming to the aid of a female demonstrator — while also drawing on a centuries-old strategy of blaming mothers for social problems.

What makes a ‘wine mom?’

The term “wine mom” emerged over the last two decades as a cultural symbol of the contemporary white, suburban mother who turns to a nightly glass of wine (or two) to cope with the stresses of daily life.

The archetype goes back much further, reflected in literature, film and television characters, such as the wily Lucille Bluth of Arrested Development.

Yet, this motif is less light-hearted than assumed: a recent systematic review reveals a strong link between maternal drinking and stress, especially for working mothers.

While it would be easy to view problematic drinking as another example of maternal failure, it is important not to. Here’s why.

Mother-blame in history

Throughout history, mothers have found themselves in the midst of what American sociologist Linda Blum calls a “mother-valor/mother-blame binary.”

When behaving in accordance with socially acceptable and desirable parameters — that is with warmth, femininity and selflessness — mothers are viewed as “good.” When mothers violate these norms, whether by choice, circumstance or by virtue of their race or class position, they’re “bad mothers.”

Mother-blame ultimately reflects the belief that mothers are solely responsible for their children’s behaviour and outcomes, along with the cultural tendency to blame them when things go wrong. Yet, as Blum points out, “mother-blame also serves as a metaphor for a range of political fears.”

Perhaps the most striking example of this is the suffrage movement, which represented a direct challenge to patriarchal notions that women belonged in the domestic sphere and lacked the intelligence to engage in political discourse.

Suffragettes in the United Kingdom — many of them mothers — occasionally used extreme tactics, such as window-smashing and arson, while women in the U.S. obstructed traffic and waged hunger strikes.

These activists were framed as threatening to not only the establishment, but also to families and the moral fabric of society.

Ironically, despite the fact that women’s entry into politics led to increased spending and improved outcomes related to women, children, families and health care, scholars have found that mother-blaming was as common after the women’s movement as it was before.

Contemporary mother-blame

Beyond political matters, contemporary mother-blame is rampant in other domains.

Mothers have been blamed for a wide variety of their children’s psychological problems, including anxiety, depression and inherited trauma. In media and literature, mothers are often blamed for criminality and violence, reflecting the notion that “mothers make monsters.”

When children struggle in school, educators and administrators may blame the mother. Mothers risk being called “too passive” if they don’t advocate for their children or “too aggressive” when they do.

Similarly, the “crazy woman” or “hysterical mother” is a well-known trope in custody law, and mothers may be blamed even when their children are abused by others. Mass shootings? Mom’s failure. The list goes on.

By setting up mothering as a high-stakes endeavour, the cultural norm of mother-blame also serves to “divide and conquer.”

In my sociology research, I found that mothers on Facebook worked to align themselves with like-minded “superior” mothers, while distancing themselves from perceived “inferior” mothers. This feeds into the cultural norm of “combative mothering,” which pits mothers against each other.

An old trick with a new spin

The “wine mom” narrative builds on this historical pattern of mother-blame. It is meant to trivialize, delegitimize, divide and denigrate mothers who are, in fact, well-organized and motivated activists concerned for their communities.

While there are legitimate concerns around maternal drinking as a coping mechanism, the “wine mom” label has begun to represent something different. Mothers are reclaiming the title to expand their cause.

As @sara_wiles, promoting the activist group @redwineblueusa stated on Instagram: “They meant to scare us back into the kitchen, but our actual response is, ‘Oh, I want to join!’”

We should acknowledge that rather than causing societal problems, mothers have a long history of trying to fix them, even if imperfectly. Mothers like Renee Good are no exception.

Darryn DiFrancesco, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Human and Health Sciences, *University of Northern British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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ICE LOOKING FOR EVID OF FOREIGN TERROR ORGS WHEN BUST PPL 1 26

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AN 12 25

On my Sirius XM program, I discussed the almost comical hearing this month in which a top FBI official, flanked by dog-killing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, claimed antifa — short for anti-fascist — was the “number one terrorist” threat in the United States. Yet he couldn’t answer repeated questions from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) about where the group’s headquarters are, or how many people are actually in the group:

Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, said antifa was the agency’s “primary concern” and “the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing.”Glasheen did not answer a question from the top Democrat at the hearing, U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, about the group’s location. When asked about the number of members, Glasheen said it was “very fluid” and that “investigations are active.”

“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee to say something that you can’t prove,” Thompson said to Glasheen. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”

Later, Glasheen was asked if the Proud Boys were still on the FBI’s list of domestic extremist organizations — after they were added in 2018, under Trump’s first term — but he didn’t answer, just saying, “We’re in the process right now of changing our categories for domestic terrorism.”

After I played the clips of the exchanges and commented on the ludicrousness of this — and the dangers — Steven from Los Angeles, clearly a MAGA supporter, called the program to disagree with me, claiming antifa is a terror threat he has witnessed firsthand.

Antifa of course doesn’t exist as any organized nationwide group. Some people engaging in protest call themselves ant-fascist, and often take on the name antifa — even carrying banners and other identifiers — but they mostly act independently of others who might use the term to to identify themselves.

The majority of those who call themselves antifa are opposed to violence, per the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration. Even if some people have called themselves antifa and have engaged in or inspired violent actions in one place or another during protests (which has happened), that doesn’t mean there’s an organized group engaged in actual organized terror plots.

:{:{But Steven didn’t get that,}:

Steven:Okay, so I, um, I disagree with you, uh, living on the West Coast. Whether it’s antifa, whether you want to call it, whatever organization it is. But, I mean, they’ve ruined the streets of Los Angeles. San Francisco is a dump. Um, uh, Oregon is a dump. Uh, Seattle, Washington.MS:Who who did this? Who ruined the streets? What did they do?

Steven: It was. Well, whatever organization you want to call it. Uh, the people that were protesting on the streets.

MS:You said antifa.

Steven: Well, that's who they're supposed to be, right?

After I pressed him on what they’re doing he said that in Portland and other places, “These people are on the streets every day. They're yelling at cars. The traffic is stopped.”

Yelling at cars? Yes, that’s what he said.

MS: Okay, Steven, that's not terrorism.Steven: What is that? Terrorism. The stores are all closed.

MS: No, Stephen, that's not terrorism. You could tell me about vandalism. You could tell me about protests. You could even tell me about rioting, if you want, which we haven't seen.

But a terrorist and a terrorist organization are highly coordinated groups of people with plots and plans to take down the government or send a message to a group of people, and they engage in mass violence, bombings, mass shootings, kidnappings.

Why is our government spending all this money on this? You're telling me about what? Graffiti in Los Angeles?

He went on about how yelling at protests and throwing things — not explaining more — was terrorism.

But then when I brought up actual terrorism — January 6, police officers bludgeoned, the Proud Boys making threats, and the Oath Keepers, per law enforcement, stockpiling weapons at a hotel in Virginia, with a plan to bring them up the Potomac to take the Capitol — he had a very different answer.

Steven: You know what? I don't think we'll ever know the truth of that whole situation.

Oh yeah, it got a little hot from there before I ended the call Listen in and let me know your thoughts!

*Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.

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an no lnx

Trump admin hits protesters with terrorism charge

FILE PHOTO: Protesters march during a brief rally after the sentencing of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis policeman found guilty of killing George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S. June 25, 2021. REUTERS/Eric Miller/File Photo

:{:{Jordan Green and Raw StoryDecember 21, 2025}:

Two Alabama Black Lives Matter activists accused of setting a shopping cart on fire as part of a protest against the fatal police shooting of a young Black man have been charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, in what one supporter calls a “railroading.”

The federal charge unveiled as part of a superseding indictment against Mercutio Southall, 41, and Lillian Colburn, 26, alleges that the pair committed terrorism through an arson at a Walmart Supercenter in Homewood, a Birmingham suburb, on Aug. 22.

“They’ve been trying to label Black Lives Matter a terrorist movement,” RaShaun Whetstone, a friend of Southall and Colburn, told Raw Story. “This is a railroading.”

The indictments come as President Donald Trump attempts to paint left-wing activism as “domestic terrorism,” through a national security memorandum that accuses activists of undermining “support for law enforcement” in order “to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.”

This month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo instructing the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include local law enforcement partners, to prioritize investigations of antifascist groups.

Echoing Trump’s national security memo, Bondi claimed: “These domestic terrorists use violence or the threat of violence to advance political and social agendas, including 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.”

‘Not even Mercutio’s MO’

Luke Baumgartner, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Raw Story the Alabama case is, as far as he knows, the first time the federal government has applied the material support to terrorists charge to Black Lives Matter protesters.

Southall and Colburn pleaded not guilty.

Whetstone told Raw Story he believes Southall and Colburn to be falsely accused. He said the alleged crime was completely out of character for Southall, who as an early leader of Black Lives Matter became one of the most high-profile racial justice activists in the Birmingham area.

Whetstone added that Colburn doesn’t match the person seen in store surveillance video.

Homewood has seen protests since June, when an 18-year-old Black man, Jabari Peoples, was fatally shot by an unidentified police officer at a city park. Police said the shooting followed a struggle, after which Peoples attempted to retrieve a handgun from his car, according to WVTM 13. Peoples’ family and a young woman who was with him say he was unarmed.

Community members have held several protests resulting in multiple arrests, WVTM 13 reported. The news station quoted a leader of the Birmingham chapter of Black Lives Matter as saying they planned to disrupt businesses until their demands, including the release of police body camera video, were met.

Homewood police said in a press release shortly after Southall’s arrest on state charges that detectives obtained evidence he attended a protest at the park on the day of the alleged arson.

The police allege Southall traveled from the protest to Walmart, and accuse him of filling “a shopping cart full of rags, blankets, charcoal bags, small engine fuel, and paint thinner,” then pre-positioning “the shopping cart in a clothing aisle,” before returning to the protest.

Southall was charged in state court with arson and first-degree criminal mischief.

The police said at the time they were working with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “on pursuing federal arson charges.”

Colburn was arrested on identical charges.

AL.com reported that detectives testified that Colburn accompanied Southall from the protest to Walmart and the two loaded the cart together, then left in a car that investigators determined was registered to Colburn.

Later, investigators said, a woman wearing a blond wig, identified as Colburn, returned to the store and ignited the cart.

Whetstone told Raw Story he doesn’t buy prosecutors’ claims.

“It’s not even Mercutio’s MO,” he said. “Never has he done anything like that. Being who he is, he’s going to set a shopping cart on fire? What the hell kind of sense does that make?”

Federal prosecutors obtained an indictment for arson in late October. A month later, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment adding the charge of material support to terrorists.

Southall and Colburn could not be reached for comment.

An announcement by the FBI’s Birmingham office last week did not mention the defendants’ ties to Black Lives Matter, but characterized them as “violent actors.”

“Let it be clear: While peaceful protesting is a protected right, arson and destruction of property are violent crimes that will not be tolerated in our community,” Special Agent in Charge Dave Fitzgibbons said.

Baumgartner told Raw Story: “It’s not surprising they would levy this charge given that their focus has shifted [to the left]. They’re focusing on these left-wing or anarchist groups. Coming at them with all the tools in their toolkits is definitely in line with their stated strategy.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Northern Alabama did not respond to a question about whether AG Bondi played any role in the decision to charge the defendants with terrorism. A spokesperson said the office did not comment on ongoing litigation.

‘Federal crime of terrorism’

Federal statute makes it a crime to act in support of “an offense identified as a federal crime of terrorism.”

Federal prosecutors have applied the material support to terrorists charge to white supremacist groups and activists, recently including Dallas Erin Humber, the leader of Terrorgram Collective, who is linked to a mass shooting targeting LGBTQ+ people in Slovakia and a deadly school shooting in Brazil, in addition to plots to assassinate politicians and attack the power grid.

The United States, Canada and New Zealand have all designated Terrorgram as a terrorist entity.

In another case, in 2022, four white supremacists pleaded guilty to material support to terrorists, for plotting to carry out coordinated attacks on the power grid in an attempt to instigate race war.

The charge is also being used to pursue violent nihilist groups.

Writing with Barry Jonas, Baumgartner noted in the journal Just Security that in October, for the first time, federal prosecutors indicted a leader of 764, a nihilist network, for conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

The government alleges that 764 leader Baron Martin manipulated child victims to self-harm.

Baumgartner and Jonas wrote: “By charging Martin with conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, the shift represents a long-overdue recognition that such conduct is not just depraved — it is terrorism.”

Last week, Canada became the first country to list 764 as a terrorist entity.

A closely related and better-known statute making it a crime to knowingly support “a foreign terrorist organization” has been used frequently since the Sept. 11 attacks to prosecute American citizens who attempted to join jihadist groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS.

Baumgartner said federal prosecutors now appear to be utilizing the material support charge with increasing frequency against defendants across the ideological spectrum.

Last month, prosecutors in Texas obtained an indictment against eight defendants for providing material support for terrorists, regarding an attack on an ICE facility.

The government has named one defendant as firing a weapon at law enforcement, while alleging others ignited fireworks, destroyed a surveillance camera, and vandalized vehicles and a shed.

‘Cause of justice’

Birmingham is a Southern city known as a cradle of the Civil Rights movement, where the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. launched a massive desegregation campaign in 1963, in which child marchers were met with police dogs and firehoses.

In his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King excoriated “the white moderate” and called himself an “extremist for the cause of justice.”

Of the two activists now facing federal charges, Southall has a long history of activism — which has seen him singled out by Trump for verbal abuse.

In November 2015, the activist was forcibly ejected from a Trump rally in Birmingham.

After Southall disrupted the event by chanting, “Black lives matter,” the Washington Post reported that video showed him falling amid a throng of white men who appeared to kick and punch him.

A Post reporter observed a man put his hands on Southall’s neck and a female onlooker shout, “Don’t choke him!”

“They said, ‘Go home, n-----, and somebody punched me,” Southall told Al.com.

Speaking to Fox News, Trump reportedly said: “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing.

“I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a troublemaker who was looking to make trouble.”

‘Untethered from reality’

Despite Trump’s hostility, conservative efforts to get Black Lives Matter designated as a terrorist group did not gain traction in his first term.

In 2017, the FBI drew criticism for an internal assessment that appeared to classify BLM activists as “Black Identity Extremists” who posed a threat of lethal violence.

Three years later, a law enforcement training group characterized BLM protesters as “terrorists.”

It also drew rebuke, one advocate for police reform calling the characterization “untethered from reality” and worrying that it could lead “to people dying unnecessarily.”

In the South, the Ku Klux Klan long waged a campaign of terror which succeeded in intimidating Black people from exercising their right to vote and ousting multiracial governments. Whetstone noted that the U.S. government has never designated the Klan as a terrorist organization.

“Black Lives Matter ruffles a few feathers, and they want to call us terrorists,” he said. “This is just one small step in how they normalize punishing anyone who is associated with any liberation movement. They’re trying to criminalize it.”

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COKE IRAN CONTRA

BIZZARELY SAME TIME AS 2X TAP BOAT STRIKE HEGS 12 25

Ben Shapiro criticizes Trump pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez: “I just don't understand the president's logic here”

12/02/25

### Newsmax host on Trump's threats against Venezuela: “If it was about drugs, he'd be in Mexico right now, right?”

12/02/25 12:15 PM EST

### Tim Pool: “Trump seems to be going a little bit into the neoliberal. You know, neocon-neoliberal.”

12/02/25 12:05 PM EST

### Roger Stone claims Trump announced pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández “three hours after” he sent Trump a letter from the former Honduran president

12/01/25

Roger Stone claims Trump announced pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández “three hours after” he sent Trump a letter from the former Honduran president

Ana García de Hernández to Stone: “We also want to express our helpful gratitude for the support that you had given … to my husband and the father of my daughters. Since you start speaking about this case, you made such a huge difference.”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published 12/01/25

November 30, 2025

Audio

From the November 30, 2025, edition of WABC's The Roger Stone Show

ROGER STONE (HOST): For many months, at least six months, I have written extensively about the persecution of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who I believe was framed for drug trafficking on the basis of really no evidence whatsoever in a politically motivated act of lawfare by the Biden administration. These are the exact same tactics that were used against President Donald Trump himself by the illicit and unconstitutional investigation of Jack Smith. And I had great sympathy for President Hernández, who was framed not because there was evidence that he was actually involved in drug trafficking, but framed to get him out of the way to make way for the narco-Marxist regime to take power in Honduras. There's an election in Honduras today, but that's not what I'm really here to talk about.

On Friday, I got from the investigative journalist Shane Trejo a letter that President Hernández wrote to President Trump. It was a extraordinarily compelling nine-page letter, which frankly broke my heart because I have been where President Hernández was. I know what it is to be persecuted and have the full power and the unlimited financial and legal capacity of a corrupted, politicized Justice Department come after you, as well as the complicity of the mainstream media who never wants to pick apart the charges against him and just takes everything for granted.

...

STONE: I was delighted about three hours after I sent a copy of this letter to President Trump to read on Truth Social that he had announced the full and unconditional pardon for Juan Orlando Hernández. I think this is fitting. This is justice. Now the [unintelligible] — the US-based media has gone completely insane because they refuse to look at the facts regarding the persecution and trial of Juan Orlando Hernández. And to them, they say, “Well, why is Trump pursuing the Venezuelan dictatorship over drug trafficking at the same time that he's releasing a drug trafficker?” To which I say, there is no shred of evidence other than the testimony of convicted drug traffickers, people that Juan Orlando Hernández himself's government prosecuted, that would tie the former president to drug trafficking. He is an innocent man who was a target and victim of lawfare. And anyone who will examine his trial and the charges against him and the sham trial that they ran in New York would realize that.

Joining us now is the former first lady of Honduras, Ana García de Hernández, President Hernández's daughter, Ana Daniela Hernández, and his other daughter, Isabella Hernández. I want to welcome you to The Roger Stone Show, and I want to tell you how incredibly proud I am to have played just a small role in the justice that has now been meted out for your father and for your country and for your family.

...

ANA GARCÍA DE HERNÁNDEZ (FORMER HONDURAN FIRST LADY): Oh, thank you, Mr. Stone. This is Ana. We are so grateful because of what’s happening to our family. We’d like to say thank you for you for hosting us on your radio show today. It’s truly a pleasure speaking with you.

We also want to express our helpful gratitude for the support that you had given to our — to my husband and the father of my daughters. Since you start speaking about this case, you made such a huge difference. Because as you say, you suffered the same that my husband is suffering or was suffering before President Trump decided to give him a full pardon. So thank you, because — thank you to your efforts, in part Juan Orlando would be [unintelligible] free man, an innocent man has been pardoned and will finally be reunited with our family. So we are really deeply grateful with that.

A comprehensive guide to Trump ally Roger Stone, a racist, sexist conspiracy theorist

05/09/16

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USE OF TERM

'Grotesque': Lindsey Graham slammed for blaming shutdown on Dem 'political terrorism'

AN 11 25

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Newsmax host: “The people of New York City just elected the most radical politician in American history, right up there with Jefferson Davis”}:

11/06/25

November 5, 2025, edition of Newsmax's Finnerty

ROB FINNERTY (HOST): Republicans did not win last night, but Democrats really didn't win either. Democrat socialists had their biggest night ever last night after a communist was elected mayor of New York City, the Democrat Socialist Party of America. Ilhan Omar tweeting last night praise be to Allah in Arabic because that's a normal thing for a United States congresswoman to do, isn't it? Tweet something out in Arabic. Tweet in the language of the country that you immigrated from, not the country that you immigrated to, a country that's so amazing that it made you a member of Congress and you're tweeting in a foreign language.

And after eight years of Bill de Blasio and four of Eric Adams, the people of New York City just elected the most radical politician in American history, right up there with Jefferson Davis. He was the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

And if you've ever been to New York City — maybe you haven't, but if you have been to New York City, hold on to those memories, because the city will never be the same again. Which is exactly what Zohran Mamdani wants to happen. Zohran never lied to us from the very beginning. He told us who he was — a man who spends his free time with terrorists. Remember this little number right here? The guy in the white, an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That photo was taken 19 days ago. Zohran never lied to us. And Zohran told us what he wanted to do to New York City and to America.

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senate testimony knowles

...

The Black Lives Matter riots—overtly leftist demonstrations that left dozens of people dead and over a billion dollars’ worth of property damage—likewise fail to show up on registers of left-wing political violence. Even an attack by Antifa operatives that targeted me personally for my conservative political views appeared in official records and data sets as nothing more than “obstructing law enforcement” on the rare occasion it appeared at all. It turns out the Left commits relatively little political violence when one does not count the political violence that the Left commits. I’m here today to speak about that single, illustrative incident.

On April 18, 2023, I was scheduled to participate in a debate at the University of Pittsburgh on the topic of transgenderism. Before the debate, left-wing protesters gathered outside the O’Hara Student Center, many dressed uniformly in black with face coverings. The demonstration grew to an estimated 300-350 people, who lit the street on fire while burning me in effigy with a miniature mustache drawn on my lip. All because I held the opinion that men cannot become women. I awaited the start of the debate from inside the auditorium and therefore did not witness these events directly, though many were filmed and posted to social media.

But according to an FBI affidavit, at approximately 7 p.m., the demonstrators moved to the front entrance of the student center and prevented vehicles from passing, despite that road’s serving as the main access to the hospital. Buildings in the area were placed on a “soft lockdown.” As the Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire put out my burning effigy, an Antifa operative named Brian DiPippa rolled a smoke bomb under police barricades. Twelve minutes later, Dipippa, hiding behind his wife Krystal, lit a second smoke bomb and placed it among the attendees as well as the University of Pittsburgh Police officers who had been called to maintain order. Attendees waiting in line scattered while demonstrators shouted, “Fascists, go home!”

The demonstrators then moved to the side of the building with window access to the auditorium in which my debate was set to begin. Police, seeing the threat, moved to create a barrier between the leftists and the building. The debate moderator, my interlocutor, and I began to walk to the stage one minute after the event’s scheduled start time. But before we reached the stage, we heard an explosion, which caused our security personnel to escort us back into the wings. A demonstrator, later identified as DiPippa, had thrown a lit firework into a group of police officers protecting the rear of the building.

The explosion injured several officers, including severe and life-altering injuries to a female officer. Even the less severe injuries included burns, bruises, hearing loss, and possible concussions. Demonstrators continue to disrupt and threaten us in the auditorium after the event began. Four protesters began to shout, “Trans lives matter!” before security agents escorted them off the premises. Toward the end of the debate, a protester in a hat, sunglasses, and face mask stood up and walked threateningly toward the stage before taking a seat in the second row after the protection team began walking toward her. The debate ended early after campus police notified security personnel inside the auditorium that protests outside were becoming even more destructive, and the campus had issued a “safety emergency” notification.

While Democrat politicians and liberal journalists have sought to downplay and even deny the existence of organized, left-wing terror, the attack at the University of Pittsburgh provides just one example among countless of serious and increasing leftist terrorism. Brian and Krystal DiPippa were not merely two citizens impelled to protest a speaker with whom they disagreed. According to reporting by investigative journalist and Antifa expert Andy Ngo, the DiPippas were members of an extremist left-wing cell that met at the Big Idea Bookstore in Pittsburgh. Such anarchist bookstores operate as meeting and training grounds for left-wing terror attacks. The Torch Antifa Network later claimed the DiPippas as members and offered the opportunity to donate money for them through a tax-exempt non-profit organization.

Thanks to the efforts of a courageous FBI agent who happened to be on the scene, the Department of Justice was impelled to bring charges against the DiPippas. Unfortunately, our justice system gave them only a slap on the wrist. Throwing an explosive into a crowd of people constitutes attempted murder. Justice calls for life in prison. Our justice system sentenced Brian DiPippa to minimal jail time for “obstructing law enforcement.” His wife got off with probation. The federal government must act now to stop the consistent and accelerating trend of leftist terrorism. For a legislator to deny the threat and neglect the remedy might once have been chalked up to ignorance; today, it is nothing less than complicity.

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pix chill dudes smoke

Photos: People protest debate featuring Michael Knowles - The Pitt News

Anti-trans speaker met with protests - Pittsburgh Union Progress

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regent Square couple indicted in smoke bomb incident at April protest

Thursday, July 6, 2023

By SUSAN JONES

A married couple from Regent Square has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh in connection with the smoke bombs and fireworks that were set off during an April 18 protest outside a transgender-rights debate between Daily Wire host Michael Knowles and libertarian journalist Brad Polumbo at O’Hara Student Center.

More than 150 people were protesting outside the center — where the debate topic was “Should transgenderism be regulated by law?” — when a loud incendiary device was set off. The explosion was later attributed to a combination of a firework and smoke bomb.

Brian DiPippa, 36, and his wife, Krystal DiPippa, 40, were indicted on charges of conspiracy and obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder. Brian DiPippa also was charged with using an explosive to commit a federal felony.

The indictment, issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said, “Brian DiPippa ignited and dropped two homemade smoke bomb containers in and around a line of persons waiting to enter the O’Hara Student Center. … The Indictment further alleges that, when Pitt Police officers gathered and formed a barrier to prevent the protesters from entering the rear of the building, Brian DiPippa, concealed by his wife, Krystal DiPippa, ignited and threw a large explosive firework into the group of Pitt officers, causing a loud explosion and injuries to several officers.”

The protest prompted Pitt Police to send out alerts to warn people to stay away from the area. Several buildings were closed before police cleared the scene.

The charges of conspiracy and obstruction of law enforcement carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, a fine of $500,000 or both. The charge of using an explosive to commit a federal felony has a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years imprisonment, with a maximum fine of $250,000.

The FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force — of which the Pitt Police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and Pittsburgh Bureau of Police are all members — conducted the investigation leading to the indictment.

A Pitt spokesperson said in a statement: “The University appreciates the diligence of law enforcement agencies that partnered on the investigation into the devices used during demonstrations on campus on April 18. The indictment of the suspects today marks the next step in the process, and we will continue to fully collaborate with federal agencies.”

Although many students were at the protest, Chancellor Patrick Gallagher said shortly after the incident that he didn’t believe everyone involved was affiliated with Pitt.

At the April 20 Senate Council meeting, Gallagher condemned the actions of some demonstrators who he said abused their free-speech privileges. “Let me just be unambiguous: That is an absolutely unacceptable outcome that we saw here.

“Freedom of speech does not mean you get to throw explosive devices at anyone, including responding police officers,” he noted. “It does not mean you get to disrupt and light fires and close roads and deter patients from hospitals and all the other nonsense that we saw Tuesday night.”

Before the transgender debate and appearances by two other conservative speakers on campus, nearly 11,000 people signed an online petition asking Pitt to cancel the events.

Gallagher said on March 23 that a university is not a place to limit or quash ideas, no matter who is espousing them. The student-sponsored events were all paid for by entities outside the University.

In early June, the conservative nonprofit legal group Alliance Defending Freedom sent a letter to Pitt saying the $18,000 in security costs the University is seeking from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Pitt College Republicans — which hosted the April 18 debate — violates the two groups’ constitutional rights

The University acknowledged receiving the letter but a spokesperson said Pitt could not comment on it because of “an implicit threat of legal action.”

*Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her atsuejones@pitt.eduor 724-244-4042.

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an ah 10 25

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House on January 20, 2025, he issued a wide range of executive orders — one of which was a full pardon for all of the

rioters involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building, including those who violently attacked police officers and members of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Trump, however, vowed to use the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI against left-wing groups.

In an article published by Wired on November 3, reporter Ali Winston takes a close look at the case of Casey Goonan — a Northern California anarchist whose crimes included attacking a federal building in Oakland. Winston emphasizes that although the charges against Goonan originated during Joe Biden's presidency, the Trump-era responses has dangerous implications that go way beyond Goonan's case.

"By the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area's hard left," Winston explains, "Casey Goonan's crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV partially burned by an incendiary device on UC Berkeley's campus. A planter of shrubs lit on fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to smash a glass office window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in Downtown Oakland. But thanks to a series of communiques where Goonan claimed to have carried out the summer 2024 attacks in solidarity with Hamas and the East Bay native's anarchist beliefs, federal prosecutors claimed Goonan 'intended to promote' terrorism on top of a felony count for using an incendiary device."

The Wired reporter adds, "Goonan's original charges notably did not contain terrorism counts. In late September, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, whom they called 'a domestic terrorist' during the hearing, to 19 and a half years in prison plus 15 years probation."

IFrame Content

According to Winston, the Goonan case "offers a glimpse of the approach the Department of Justice may take in President Donald Trump's forthcoming offensive against the 'left.'"

That approach, Winston adds, was "formalized in late September in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), an executive order targeting anti-fascist beliefs, opposition towards Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids, and criticism of capitalism and Christianity as potential 'indicators of terrorism.'"

"The executive order, meanwhile, directs the American security state's sprawling post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus to be reoriented away from neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and other extreme right-wing actors that have been overwhelmingly responsible for the majority of political violence in the past few decades, and towards opponents of ICE, anti-fascists, and the administration writ large," Winston notes. "Along with potentially violent actors, NSPM-7 instructs federal law enforcement to scrutinize nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations involved in funding organizations that espouse amorphous ideologies, from 'support for the overthrow of the United States Government' to expressing 'hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.'"

*Read Ali Winston's full article for Wired at this link.

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RWW

10/16/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Robert McCoy @ The New Republic: Trump Plots to Use IRS to Go After His Enemies—and All Liberal Groups

The Trump administration is already drawing up a list of targets.

Trump Plots to Use IRS to Go After His Enemies—and All Liberal Groups

The Trump administration is already drawing up a list of targets.

IFrame Content

The Trump administration is devising a new plan to weaponize the government against his political opponents. This time, his team seeks to mold the Internal Revenue Service into a cudgel to be wielded against the left, and is already putting together a list of targets, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

Under the plan, MAGA allies would be installed at the IRS criminal investigative division, where they would “exert firmer control over the unit and weaken the involvement of IRS lawyers in criminal investigations.” Spearheading the plan is IRS official Gary Shapley, who, according to WSJ sources, has expressed the possibility of taking the place of the IRS veteran currently heading the investigative unit.

He also reportedly has been compiling “a list of donors and groups he believes IRS investigators should look at.” Possible targets include liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros, a long-standing boogeyman for the MAGA right, whom the DOJ is reportedly investigating as Trump has called for him to be jailed.

The new IRS plot was conceived after “a separate effort to strip tax-exempt status from certain nonprofits” wasn’t yielding sufficient results for the administration, per the report.

As the Tax Law Center notes, federal law prohibits many government officials, particularly those in the executive branch, from directly or indirectly requesting that a taxpayer be audited or investigated. Such guardrails were strengthened after President Richard Nixon sought to weaponize the IRS against his enemies—abuses detailed in the second article of impeachment against him.

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...

Julianne McShane @ Mother Jones: No One in the GOP Hitler Chat Was a “Kid”

We checked. Sorry, JD Vance.

Will Sommer @ The Bulwark: Racist Young Republican Chat Leaves GOP Stumbling to Respond

Split over whether to discipline the offenders or just ignore the whole affair.

Payton Armstrong, Noah Dowe, and Jack Winstanley @ Media Matters: Calling their opponents “demonic,” some right-leaning online shows are embracing “spiritual warfare” rhetoric

Online figures and podcasters have warned of a “satanic world order” and called on their audiences to “fight these demons in culture if we're going to win politically.”

Shawn Musgrave @ The Intercept: He Tweeted Charlie Kirk “Won’t Be Remembered as a Hero.” The State Dept. Revoked His Visa.

Nota Baloyi is one of several people who lost a visa to visit the U.S. because he spoke ill of Charlie Kirk on social media.

David French @ The New York Times: Something Is Stirring in Christian America, and It’s Making Me Nervous

Despite what you may have heard about the renewal of interest in religion in America, we are not experiencing a true revival, at least not yet. Instead, America is closer to a religious revolution, and the difference between revolution and revival is immensely important for the health of our country — and of the Christian church in America.

Christian Paz @ Vox: The mega-viral ICE videos that explain America right now

They unite — and divide — a deeply polarized audience.

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no lnx

‘Absurd’: Noem claim to have arrested ‘antifa’ founder’s girlfriend stirs ridicule

Jordan Green, Investigative Reporter

October 15, 2025

:{:{This article was paid for by Raw Story}:

A dramatic claim by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to have arrested “the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa,” therefore putting the Trump administration in position to “eliminate” the leftwing “network,” was dismissed by both the activist the arrested woman was said to have dated and a leading expert on such leftwing groups.

“I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not now, nor have I ever been, the ‘founder’ of ‘Antifa’ — in Portland [Oregon], the United States, or anywhere else,” said Luis Enrique Marquez, the activist, in a statement on a website promoting a book.

“It’s an absurd claim, no matter how they try to frame it,” Stanislav Vysotsky, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Fraser Valley in British Columbia, told Raw Story.

ALSO READ: This Trump lackey's ridiculous promos actually point to the fall of American law

Nonetheless, Noem’s trumpeting of the arrest of Katherine Vogel, 39, showed the administration’s determination to make headlines as it seeks to paint “antifa” activists as a danger to the American public, and Portland as the supposed base of such groups.

‘Root them out’

Seated alongside President Donald Trump during a White House roundtable last week, Noem said: “One of the individuals we arrested in Portland was the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa.

“We are hoping that as we go after her, interview her and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”

On Sept. 30, Vogel was the subject of a targeted arrest carried out by Federal Protective Services and U.S. Border Patrol agents, after she was allegedly observed with a group of people spilling red paint on the sidewalk outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility.

A federal criminal complaint alleges that “while Vogel was being escorted into the facility for processing, she actively resisted by flailing her body” and struck one of the agents on the jaw with a closed fist.

She told an investigator she did not recall striking the agent.

Vogel was a contractor with the U.S. General Services Administration. As a result of her arrest “she was found unsuitable” and will no longer work for the agency, a spokesperson told Raw Story.

Noem’s description of Vogel as a potential linchpin for a nationwide network supposedly posing a terrorist threat appears to have been sourced to Andy Ngo, a right-wing media figure who Trump said at the roundtable was “a very serious person.”

Ngo was previously represented in a lawsuit for assault against Rose City Antifa, a Portland group, by Harmeet Dhillon, now assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice. Rose City Antifa was dismissed as a defendant. Ngo and Dhillon frequently share each other’s posts on X.

A week before Noem’s White House remarks, Ngo posted that Vogel was “a veteran Rose City Antifa member” and “the previous girlfriend of violent Rose City Antifa member Luis Enrique Marquez.”

Vogel, who was released from custody on Oct. 1, could not be reached for comment.

Marquez, the author of the book Antifascist: A Memoir of the Portland Uprising, refuted Ngo’s claim. The statement on his website said: “I have never been a member of Rose City Antifa or any other Antifa group.”

Marquez also said his relationship with Vogel ended in 2020, adding, “Any insinuation of an ongoing connection between us is false and disingenuous.”

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a request to clarify Noem’s reference to Vogel as “the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa.”

Vysotsky, who has extensively interviewed antifascist activists, said that notion was difficult to square with reality, given that the movement dates back to the early 20th century.

“If we’re talking about the girlfriend of the founder of antifa, then we’re talking about someone who would have to be 120 years old or 130 years old,” Vysotsky told Raw Story.

While antifascism emerged in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, in response to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, Vysotsky said the modern antifascist movement in North America can generally be dated to the mid- to late-1980s.

Rose City Antifa, the Portland-based group referenced by Ngo, was founded in 2007. Vysotsky said that to the best of his knowledge, Marquez was not a founder.

“He came on the scene in 2016 or 2017,” Vysotsky said. “He happens to be someone who is prominent and outspoken on social media. It’s an absurd claim, no matter how they try to frame it.”

A DHS spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said Vogel’s activist connections were the subject of “an ongoing investigation,” adding: “We will release more information when we can.”

‘A militarist, anarchist enterprise’

In a Sept. 26 X post, DHS described Rose City Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The post followed an executive order issued by Trump days earlier, which described “Antifa” as “a militarist, anarchist enterprise.”

But Vysotsky said Noem’s vow to “root out” and “eliminate” an “antifa” network was likely to go nowhere because there is no formal membership organization or international network.

“It’s an orientation, because it’s a set of beliefs by people opposed to fascism,” Vysotsky said.

“What they mean when they say ‘fascism’ is a movement based on a belief in an inherent inequality between people that is enforced by violence. What antifa stands for is equality between people, and what drives antifascism is a desire to create a more just and equal world.”

The idea that the Trump administration will be able to use Vogel’s arrest to identify a leadership cadre and, as Noem put it, “eliminate” an “antifa” network “from the existence of American society” is “an almost absurd claim,” Vysotsky said.

“Antifa activism, as it exists, is highly decentralized,” Vysotsky said, adding that antifascist activity ranges from individuals engaged in intelligence gathering and educational work “to small, local affinity groups that are organized in a direct, democratic manner.

“There’s no leadership,” he said.

The Sept. 26 DHS post accused Rose City Antifa of doxing ICE agents.

On Sept. 19 a website called Rose City Counter-Info did post two profiles that showed the names and images — and in one case, information about the employment history of a spouse — of two individuals purported to be ICE agents active in the Portland area. The DHS post included a photo of a flyer soliciting information about ICE agents that appears to include Rose City Antifa's email address, although it is partially redacted.

A statement published on Rose City Antifa's behalf denies that the group has doxed ICE agents or had anything to do with the flyer. The statement references a Bluesky post two months earlier that acknowledges the flyers but indicates Rose City Antifa was not responsible for putting them out.

The DHS X post referencing Rose City Antifa came a day after Trump issued a national security memorandum, NSPM-7, which argued that domestic terrorists organized under the banner of “anti-fascism” are engaged in “sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation.”

The memo claims campaigns “escalate to organized doxing, where the private or identifying information of their targets (such as home addresses, phone numbers, or other personal information) is exposed to the public with the explicit intent of encouraging others to harass, intimidate, or violently assault them).”

The memo specifically references activists targeting ICE agents.

“For the Trump administration to argue that antifa activists are terrorists, they’re going to have to greatly expand what acts constitute terrorism,” Vysotsky said.

They’re already doing that, he argued, by “talking about doxing as a form of terrorism.”

‘Exceptionally broad’

Vysotsky said rhetoric from the Trump administration linking antifascism to terrorism appears to be calculated to distract attention from ICE activities and violence by far-right actors.

“This serves as a distraction to focus Trump supporters away from the negative images of families being separated,” Vysotsky said. “It’s also a way to distract away from political violence, which has overwhelmingly been right-wing political violence.”

Antifascists, with journalists and observers, confront white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va in 2017. Picture: Anthony Crider

Vysotsky and Marquez said they saw the campaign against “antifa” as signaling a crackdown on all who oppose Trump’s policies — not just the far left.

“It’s exceptionally broad, because when they talk about antifa, they’re creating this image that ranges from the bogeyman of black-clad protesters to mainstream politicians like Adam Schiff [the Democratic senator from California] to the Ford Foundation, which is a major philanthropic organization,” Vysotsky said.

NSPM-7 charges that an “‘anti-fascist’ lie has become a rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights and fundamental American liberties.”

Core tenets of antifascism, the memorandum claims, “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.”

Marquez said that “by targeting innocent people and fabricating threats that do not exist,” the Trump administration is “attempting to build a mythical enemy in order to expand control over our lives.”

This story was updated on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025 at 1:57 p.m. to reflect that Rose City Antifa has denied doxing ICE agents and responsibility for the flyer soliciting tips on agents.

Jordan Green is a North Carolina-based investigative reporter at Raw Story, covering domestic extremism, efforts to undermine U.S. elections and democracy, hate crimes and terrorism. Prior to joining the staff of Raw Story in March 2021, Green spent 16 years covering housing, policing, nonprofits and music as a reporter and editor at Triad City Beat in North Carolina and Yes Weekly. He can be reached at jordan@rawstory.com. More about Jordan Green.

Thom Hartmann

This Trump lackey's ridiculous promos actually point to the fall of American law

Here's how to bring Trump and his lawless thugs to justice

John Stoehr

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Trump’s Orders Targeting Antifascism Aim to Criminalize Opposition | Brennan Center for Justice

faiza Patel

Published:October 9, 2025

DVIDS

](https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/advance-constitutional-change)

Advance Constitutional Change

- First Amendment

In late September, President Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.” A few days later, he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence. This analysis evaluates the claims made in these documents and their potential damaging effects, drawing on the Brennan Center’s decade of work on the government’s framework for responding to terrorism, both foreign and domestic.

Both the order and the memo are ungrounded in fact and law. Acting on them would violate free speech rights, potentially threatening any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.

No Evidence of a Widespread Left-Wing Conspiracy to Carry Out Acts of Political Violence

NSPM-7 starts by listing a mishmash of incidents, some of which are criminal and some of which constitute activity protected by the First Amendment. These include violence directed at public figures such as conservative activist Charlie Kirk, President Trump, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh; the killing of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson; a purported 1,000 percent increase in attacks on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; a shooting at an ICE facility; and anti-police and criminal justice protests.

The events listed, according to NSPM-7, are “not a series of isolated incidents” and have not “emerged organically.” Rather they are the culmination of “organized campaigns” of intimidation and violence designed to “silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”

As a basic factual matter, this claim is not credible. For one thing, the list is obviously cherry-picked to highlight what the administration believes to be “left-wing” violence and excludes other high-profile examples of political violence that do not comport with its storyline. These include the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol; a 2022 mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store motivated by white supremacist beliefs; and the deadly 2025 shootings of two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers and their spouses. Painting this fuller picture, however, would puncture the narrative that political violence is the result of a left-wing conspiracy.

Nor is there any support for the claim that those involved in the incidents listed were acting in concert. The connection between the range of actors involved in the acts identified as political violence in NSPM-7 is simply that they are all seen as opposing the administration’s policies in one way or another (the killing of the United Healthcare CEO seems to be an outlier since no motive has yet been established). And there is no evidence to suggest that the broad universe of activism and criminal acts the memo cites is either organized or funded top-down. A loose ideological affinity does not add up to a concerted scheme to carry out violent acts to meet political ends.

No Authority to Designate Either “Antifa” or Any Domestic Group as a Terrorist Organization

The administration has also sought to elevate the perceived threat level from left-wing political violence by designating antifa to be a “domestic terrorist organization” and instructing the attorney general to make recommendations for other groups to be designated. The designation makes no sense. As both former FBI Director Chris Wray and the Congressional Research Service have explained, antifa is not a group or an organization, but a decentralized movement. Moreover, the administration has no authority to designate groups as domestic terrorist organizations, as is obvious from the failure to cite any statute or constitutional provision in support of the president’s action. There is none, and the purported designation has no legal effect.

This stands in sharp contrast to the president’s authority (delegated to the secretary of state) to designate “foreign terrorist organizations.” As explained here, there is good reason not to extend the current foreign terrorism regime, which criminalizes the knowing provision of material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations, to the domestic context. The political aspect of such a designation (already fraught in the international context) would carry enormous First Amendment risks.

Because terrorism is inherently a political crime, extending the foreign material support for terrorism regime would allow the government to formally assign the label to domestic groups with unpopular beliefs and prosecute anyone who supports them. The risk of abuse is particularly acute because under the material support statute any aid — even if not meant to support violence — is enough to incur a hefty prison term. The implications of applying this construct in the context of antifa or antifascism are enormous: Buying a sandwich for an activist, allowing a protester to crash on your couch, or briefly lending a computer to print pamphlets critical of government policy could all potentially be considered material support.

Indeed, in the decision upholding the foreign terrorist material support law, the Supreme Court recognized that the material support logic could violate the First Amendment in other circumstances. The Court was careful to say that it was not suggesting that Congress could extend the same prohibition to domestic organizations (much less that the president could do so acting unilaterally).

Multiple Disfavored Viewpoints Targeted

Building on the antifa executive order, which already targets a broad range of political speech, NSPM-7 directs federal agencies to prioritize investigations of a swath of identities and ideologies that it depicts as falling under “the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’” These 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.”

This breathtakingly broad list easily encompasses everyone from labor organizers, socialists, many libertarians, those who criticize Christianity, pro-immigration groups, anti-ICE protestors, and racial justice and transgender activists, to anyone who holds views that the administration considers to be “anti-American.” Under NSPM-7, the antifascist label can be attached to any of these types of people and groups and many more besides, giving the government maximum flexibility to pick and choose its targets.

For all its references to violence and intimidation, much of NSPM-7 is squarely directed at speech and nonviolent action by organizations and individuals protected by the First Amendment. One of the targets of the memo is “campaigns of . . . radicalization” — that is, speech aimed at promoting ideas that the administration considers to be “radical.”

Over the last decade, various law enforcement agencies have built social media monitoring programs that have regularly been used against protest movements. In 2020, for example, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis monitored people participating in racial justice demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, as well as journalists covering the government response to the protests. Since then, it has kept tabs on online discussions of abortion and pro-Trump truckers. These efforts can easily be turned — or even expanded — to focus on disfavored ideologies.

The directives may also lead social media companies to expand the universe of posts they remove or suppress. The major platforms’ content moderation rules generally either ban or severely restrict the online speech of anyone perceived to be supporting terrorists. Extending this framework to all the types of speech that the directives have associated with domestic terrorism would quash an enormous range of viewpoints. And the administration’s record of pressuring companies to muffle voices that question its policies — from the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show to the removal of the ICEBlock app from the Apple app store — suggests that it may well pressure social media platforms to take this course of action.

Full Force of the Federal Government’s Authority Unleashed

Building on its framing of the threat from anti-fascism as a wide-ranging conspiracy and domestic terrorism, NSPM-7 directs government agencies to go after “all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them.”

The memorandum directs Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) to “coordinate and supervise a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals engaged in acts of political violence and intimidation designed to suppress lawful political activity or obstruct the rule of law.” Given the framing of the threat as anti-fascism, the direction to law enforcement is to focus its resources on the left-leaning organizations and people who oppose the administration’s policies, rather than on the types of political violence that most threaten Americans’ life at home.

NSPM-7 also targets major grant-making organizations in multiple ways. First, NSPM-7 directs JTTFs to investigate not just the entities providing funding, but also their officers and employees. This ratchets up pressure by putting individuals rather than institutions in the crosshairs. Second, when questioning individuals they arrest for political violence, NSPM-7 instructs law enforcement officers to question them regarding “financial sponsorship of those actions prior to adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement.” This seems an attempt to incentivize protesters to point the finger at others in a perversion of the common prosecution strategy of turning lower-level participants in a criminal conspiracy against those further up the food chain.

Third, NSPM-7 directs the treasury secretary to “disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terror and political violence.” Disrupting the financing mechanisms used by terrorist groups is a longstanding feature of counterterrorism strategy. In the context of the vast anti-fascist conspiracy conjured up by NSPM-7, however, investigators could abuse it to block the bank accounts and financial transactions of various organizations merely because they stand in opposition to the administration.

Finally, both NSPM-7 and the antifa executive order take aim at the tax-exempt status of the foundations that fund civil society groups as well as civil society groups themselves. NSPM-7 directs the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service to ensure that “no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.” The antifa executive order instructs federal law enforcement to investigate and prosecute those who provide “material support” by funding the “illegal operations” of “Antifa” or anyone claiming to act for it. Like the instruction to the treasury secretary, this directive must be read in the context of the memorandum’s unsupported allegations of a left-wing conspiracy, which will likely drive the commissioner’s investigations.

In 2024, civil society groups raised serious concerns about a bill that would have given the treasury secretary virtually unfettered discretion to designate a U.S. nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and strip it of its tax-exempt status.

In a letter to the House, more than 350 organizations wrote, “The executive branch could use this authority to target its political opponents and use the fear of crippling legal fees, the stigma of the designation, and donors fleeing controversy to stifle dissent and chill speech and advocacy. And while the broadest applications of this authority may not ultimately hold up in court, the potential reputational and financial cost of fending off an investigation and litigating a wrongful designation could functionally mean the end of a targeted nonprofit before it ever has its day in court.”

All these concerns also apply to the antifa executive order and NSPM-7.

Existing laws give the president great latitude in combating threats to national security. NSPM-7 and the antifa executive order are an obvious abuse of this latitude, threatening to turn the full force of the federal government to rooting out a conjured-up left-wing conspiracy of political violence funded by shadowy figures. Neither the law nor the facts support this premise, and court challenges to actions taken pursuant to these orders will likely meet with success. But in the process, many individuals and organizations will be vilified and harmed for their constitutionally protected activities and others will be muzzled as they fear the consequences of associating with or speaking up for groups that have been targeted. And we will all be less safe as law enforcement resources are diverted from real threats to imagined ones.

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OMFG TERROR

NO TXT JUST VID NO TRANSCRIPT

INGR id BOTH AS JRNLISTS ANN-TIFA FRIEND

ATTACK ON STUDENT MINN CHRLIE ASSAS TRIUMP, CATH SCH? ...NO TIME TO LOSE FELOINY CONSP STATE DEPT DECL INTL ARM OF ANTIFA TERROR ORG; OPEN UP TO SANTIONS; SAV BIDEN IGNORE JRNL AND STREETS; ANDY BRITALLY ASSAULTED; DOM TERR ORG ; JRNL DEMONIZED BY LAMESTREAM, ALSO IGNORE VIOLENT STR THUS VINDCATED; PRO HAMAS FREAS IN HY, PPL TIRED OF TERROR BEG FOR NAT GD; PRTOZ MAYOR JOHNSON CALLED TUMP NAZI IS THAT INCTE VIOL; ANTIFA SHOCH TROOPS FOR DEMS, ATTACK POL OPP; YOU ARE ON HIT LIST BRAVE TO COME TO DC

Inside the road to dismantle Antifa: 'We don't have any more time to lose' | Fox News Video

Inside the road to dismantle Antifa: 'We don't have any more time to lose'

Journalist Andy Ngo and Frontlines TPUSA contributor Savanah Hernandez discuss their experiences reporting on rioters on 'The Ingraham Angle.'

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AN 10 25

During Wednesday’s White House roundtable on “Antifa,” Trump Cabinet secretaries compared it to international drug cartels and vowed to dismantle it “brick by brick,” while the President described Antifa as “treasonous, probably.”

Antifa, which the President has labeled a “domestic terrorist organization,” is widely seen as a movement of people opposed to fascism and racism. It is not believed to be a formal organization. BBC News describes it as “a loosely organized, leftist movement that opposes far-right, racist and fascist groups,” and which “lacks a distinct leader, membership list or structure. In 2020, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa was better defined as an ideology than as a formal organization.”

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem told roundtable attendees, “One of the individuals we arrested recently in Portland was the girlfriend of one of the founders of Antifa.”

Secretary Noem said they are “hoping that as we go after her, interview her and prosecute her, we will get more and more information about the network and how we can root them out, and eliminate them from the existence of American society.”

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She also said that “this network of Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TdA, as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them.”

“They are just as dangerous. They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years. And today is the day that we have a president that won’t tolerate it, and will stand up and fight for the American people.”

Similarly, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets. It’s breaking down the organization, brick by brick. Just like we did with cartels. We are going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa, destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart.”

“Their hatred for President Trump, and for law and order agendas, fuels their violence,” Bondi said. “We saw what’s happening in Portland and Chicago, and you saw what happened in Dallas. No longer. It is not activism, it’s anarchy. We can’t, and we will not, let masked terrorists burn our buildings, attack our law enforcement, and intimidate our communities.”

She declared that the Trump administration is “deploying the full might of the federal law enforcement to crack down on Antifa and other domestic terrorist organizations.”

President Trump said, “we’re going after Antifa criminals and all who fund and support their campaigns are in serious trouble, and we have a lot of records already, a lot of surprises, a lot of bad surprises — people that you would never think.”

He also asked the group to identify the “funders” of Antifa: “These are people that do not have good intention for the country, and that’s treasonous, probably.”

Critics blasted the event.

“After the US bombed multiple boats in the middle of the ocean, murdering people on grounds that they were allegedly ‘carrying drugs,’ the US Attorney General says ‘Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take the same approach…with Antifa,'” wrote Zeteo News’ Prem Thakker.

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council observed, “Cartels have actual leadership structures, central funding, command and control, and more. ‘Antifa’ is mostly a philosophy. That the Attorney General doesn’t know the difference is quite the thing to admit!”

Bill Kristol, the director of Defending Democracy Together, wrote: “Which is more alarming? That the Homeland Security secretary might actually believe that ‘Antifa’ is as dangerous as Hezbollah or Hamas? Or that she’s willing to engage in this level of lying and demagoguery? Neither is good!”

Olga Lautman, a Russian intelligence expert and senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, pointed to Bondi’s remark about cartels and asked: “Are they planning on sending missiles to American cities to carry out extrajudicial killings.”

SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah issued this warning: “Please understand that This is Trump regime explaining how they will use the government to prosecute Democrats. Page 1 of the fascist playbook is imprison political opponents so that the fascist has one party rule.”

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Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

New directive targets “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” and “anti-capitalism” opinions

Ken Klippenstein

Sep 27, 2025

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!fMp7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F91129dba-8e6b-4ca7-a4ac-83d34e6abfee_1200x800.webp)Trump displays NSPM-7 at the Oval Office on Thursday

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’s being referred to as “NSPM-7” by administration insiders.

“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism,” Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance.

To the extent that the major media noticed the directive at all, they (even C-SPAN!) incorrectly labeled it an “executive order,” like this week’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization.

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mkJ5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff3af4d84-03ee-40bb-a36f-62363ef39cd4_1220x988.png)Come on, C-SPAN

It’s hard to overstate how much different NSPM-7 is from the over 200 executive orders Trump has frantically signed since coming back into office.

An executive order publicly lays out the course of day-to-day federal government operations; whereas a national security directive is a sweeping policy decree for the defense, foreign policy, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus. National security directives are often secret, but in this case the Trump administration chose to publish NSPM-7 — only the seventh since he’s come into office.)

Previous national security directives have been controversial, even politically earthshaking. In 1980, for example, President Jimmy Carter signed the Top Secret Presidential Directive 59 (“PD-59”) directing new nuclear warfighting policies that persisted until the end of the Cold War. When revealed, PD-59 caused a public furor.

[](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!THR3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F239e355c-5037-47ed-bfcb-31c582f4e1f0_1872x1304.png)Declassified copy of PD-59 | Carter Library}:

Similarly, President George W. Bush signed a series of classified national security directives after 9/11, the most famous of which authorized NSA’s unlawful domestic intercepts, a directive that wasn’t publicly revealed until four years later.

In NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.”

NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”

In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report.

The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:

anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts,” the directive states (emphasis mine).

A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.

Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover “radicalism.” (Contrary to other national security documents all during the post-Watergate era, NSPM-7 doesn’t even mention the First Amendment or the fundamental right of Americans to organize and protest.)

The focus on speech is evident throughout NSPM-7. The directive says that political violence is the result of “organized campaigns” that often begin (with the left) dehumanizing targets in “anonymous chat foras, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.”

To give a sense of how broad this formulation is, Trump’s earlier designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist group was accompanied by a White House fact sheet singling out people who “celebrated” Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December. As I wrote at the time, this describes a lot of Americans!

Trump’s new national security memorandum also alludes to Mangione but adds to it even larger categories of potential targets.

NSPM-7 is fundamentally a law enforcement directive, and it dispenses with the complications of using the active duty military or the National Guard in pursuit of political violence. It directs the Department of Justice to focus the FBI’s approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) to the new mission. The FBI network of task forces comprises over 4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers (or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies, including special agents, police officers, intelligence analysts and surveillance technicians. First established in New York City in 1980 to systematize FBI and NYPD cooperation, today there are task forces around the country, including at least one in each of the FBI’s 55 field offices.

For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level. States, cities, and local police have already signed Memoranda of Agreements with the feds to fight terrorism and officers are already assigned as task force officers.

NSPM-7 says the JTTFs “shall investigate” potential federal crimes relating to “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.” It authorizes the JTTFs to investigate individuals, organizations, and funders “responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct.”

“The Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder,” NSPM-7 says. Civil disorder?

I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda. Yes, it repeats the word “violent” over and over to purport only to go after citizens who are moved to take up arms, but it also directs monitoring and intelligence collection to map and target the new “evildoers,” to borrow a Bush label he took from the Bible just days after 9/11.

The partisan focus couldn’t be more obvious.

“The real problem is this: since Charlie [Kirk] was murdered — a friend of mine, assassinated — nothing’s changed on their side,” White House counter-terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka told Newsmax after NSPM-7 was signed. “Not one leader —not one left wing thought leader, member of Congress, Senator — nobody has said we distance ourselves from the violent rhetoric.”

“The left refuses to rid themselves of the justification for violence,” Gorka continued, “and as such, President Trump is taking measures to protect us from the violent rhetoric that becomes snipers and bullets.”

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Washington’s biggest law firms are issuing memoranda on the implications of NSPM-7, Trump’s new national security directive, yet virtually no one in Congress has bothered to say a thing. What little the mainstream media have said about NSPM-7 has so far been wrong, often downplaying it.

The mainstream media is hopeless in the face of the complexity and secrecy of the national security state. Please help us in our effort to reveal and explain what’s going on by becoming a paid subscriber

Sources tell me that NSPM-7 will likely cause the FBI’s domestic terrorism watchlist, currently at about 5,000 U.S. citizens, to double in the coming months.

Last Thursday, President Donald Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism

and Organized Political Violence.” It creates a national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and dismantle organized political violence and domestic terrorism, identifying indicators of a potential domestic terrorist as the expression of “anti-Christian” or “anti-capitalism” or “anti-American” views. NSPM-7 directs the federal government to disrupt groups “before” they result in violent political acts. In other words, pre-crime.

Law firms like Arnold & Porter, WilmerHale, Caplin & Drysdale, Akin Gump, and Elias Law Group swiftly responded to NSPM-7 by issuing guidances explaining the implications for non-profits and other organizations that are among their clientele.

To date though, almost no members of Congress have commented on NSPM-7. I reached out to the following congressional leaders for a statement, but received nothing:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (Minority Leader)
Sen. Mark Warner (Senate Intelligence, ranking member)
Sen. Gary Peters (Senate Homeland, ranking member)
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (Minority Leader)
Rep. Jim Himes (House Intelligence, ranking member)
Rep. Jamie Raskin (House Judiciary, ranking member)

Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of the Homeland Affairs Committee, responded with the following statement:

*“Just like with Trump’s reckless — and incorrect — antifa designation, his domestic terrorism memorandum serves no purpose other than an excuse for the Trump administration to stifle dissent, investigate anyone - or any group - they don’t like, punish their enemies, and potentially label any American they want as a terrorist.”

But the national security directive is far more consequential, as I recently explained, in that it directs the countrywide network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to characterize, surveil, and conduct actions to thwart organizations and individuals espousing the domestic terrorism indicators described above (“anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-American” rhetoric).

Legal heavyweights from Akin Gump to WilmerHale warn that NSPM-7 is not mere rhetorical theater — it presents real danger for tax exempt organizations.

(The directive says that the Secretary of the Treasury should make available ‘all resources’ “to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism and political violence”; and that the Secretary “shall provide guidance for financial institutions to file Suspicious Activity Reports and investigate indicia [indicators] of illicit funding streams to ensure such activity is rooted out at the source and referred for law enforcement action…”)

Arnold & Porter, a heavyweight in Washington’s legal and policy circles, says “the stakes are high,” cautioning that NSPM-7 signals Justice Department plans to target tax-exempt organizations and their funders for criminal investigations based on actions historically protected by the First Amendment.

“The Presidential Memorandum makes clear that DOJ intends to target tax-exempt organizations and their funders for investigation and potential criminal prosecution,” the legal minds at the law firm say.

“Even the ‘indirect’ financing of ‘political violence’” could provoke liability, they warn.

Their analysis further notes that the memo doesn’t just threaten fringe actors: it stretches to organizations seen as supporting “progressive causes,” suggesting the scope could well include mainstream nonprofit advocacy. This runs contrary to the Trump administration’s framing of the crackdown as merely focused on extremist or radical elements, the law firm concludes

WilmerHale, a DC legal powerhouse, offers a similar reading. Their guidance warns that NSPM-7 may cause the federal government to pursue IRS investigations of nonprofit groups, assess terrorism designations, block nonprofit assets, and even target individual officers and employees.

“Employees and officers … are possible subjects of Justice Department and other investigations,” the law firm’s alert states.

Caplin & Drysdale, known for its political law practice, flagged the revival of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as especially significant, saying that with NSPM-7, Trump had brought FARA “back from the dead.” They call NSPM-7 a signal that the firm’s clients must no longer treat FARA enforcement as a low priority. (FARA requires registration and disclosure of individuals who act at the behest of foreign entities — at the intersection of political speech and foreign influence.) They also emphasize that NSPM-7’s focus is heavier on nonprofits and civil society than on for-profits.

Akin Gump, a leading international law firm with more than 900 lawyers, offers a brief summary of the practical effects of NSPM-7:

*“Directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate, prosecute, and dismantle networks, organizations, and funding streams behind domestic terrorism and organized political violence. Orders federal law enforcement and financial regulators to prioritize identifying, disrupting, and prosecuting those involved, including funders, tax-exempt entities, and foreign-linked actors, and allows the Attorney General to recommend formal designation of domestic terrorism organizations.”

Elias Law Group,which describes itself as “the nation’s go-to law firm to fight back against voter suppression and election subversion,” warns that under NSPM-7, the government may interrogate individuals about “financial sponsorship” of protests or political activity. NSPM-7, the firm goes on to warn, “sends a troubling signal” that organizations opposing the administration may face investigations, punitive measures, or revocations of tax status.

“At a minimum, such politically motivated investigations would bog down targeted organizations with legal costs and compliance headaches all while detracting from their missions,” Elias concludes.

At root, NSPM-7 is not just about thwarting violent actors — it’s about chilling free speech and association. The directive empowers federal task forces to pursue not only organizations deemed in “support” of violence, but also funders, officers, employees, and indirect financial supporters, which means donors. Under the framework, even speech or advocacy currently considered protected could be swept into criminal exposure.

Maybe, someday, eventually, Congress will take notice of the most important change in the expansion of government power since the PATRIOT Act.

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REUTERS

Trump’s war on the left: Inside the plan to investigate liberal groups

By Nandita Bose, Jana Winter, Jeff Mason, Tim Reid and Ted Hesson

October 9, 20251:43 PM PDTUpdated October 9, 2025

:{:{A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Illinois. REUTERS/O}:

Summary
Companies

Powerful Trump aide Stephen Miller key part of crackdown
ICE agents being redeployed to target activist groups
George Soros' charitable network on White House list
Trump using isolated ICE clashes to justify national crackdown

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's threatened crackdown on the finances and activities of liberal non-profits and groups opposed to his agenda is a multi-agency effort with top White House aide Stephen Miller playing a central role, according to officials.

The Trump administration plans to deploy America's counter-terrorism apparatus - including the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department - as well as the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department against certain left-wing groups it accuses of funding and organizing political violence, the officials said.

The effort marks an escalation in the administration's efforts to target domestic opponents, raising alarm among civil rights groups and Democratic leaders about the use of executive power.

Reuters spoke to three White House officials, four Department of Homeland Security officials and one Justice Department official to produce the first comprehensive account of how decisions are being made, forces deployed, and operations coordinated in the crackdown.

All of the administration officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations more freely.

Miller is deeply involved in reviewing government agencies' investigations into the financial networks behind what the administration labels "domestic terror networks," which include nonprofits and even educational institutions, a White House official said.

The Trump administration has released some examples of what it alleges are incidents of left-wing violence, but it has provided little evidence of a coordinated effort.

"Left-wing organizations have fueled violent riots, organized attacks against law enforcement officers, coordinated illegal doxing campaigns, arranged drop points for weapons and riot materials, and more," the White House said in a statement to Reuters.

Miller did not respond to a request for comment.

'ANTI-AMERICANISM, ANTI-CAPITALISM AND ANTI-CHRISTIANITY'

Two weeks after the September 10 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Trump issued a presidential memorandum directing the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to focus on "domestic terrorists" whose common ideologies include "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity."

Trump's opponents say the focus on liberal and left-wing groups ignores violence by right-wing organizations. They point to the January 6, 2021, violence by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol who sought to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has pardoned most of those convicted of violence that day.

A Manhattan federal judge on Thursday dismissed rapper Drake's defamation suit against Universal Music Group,

While Trump has frequently blamed violence on left-wing groups, a second White House official noted that the president's directive does not mention them specifically and is aimed at disrupting organized political violence before it occurs.

The official said the "focus remains on violence and illegal activity," and that left-wing groups are free to protest within the bounds of the law.

Trump's sweeping crackdown on migrants has triggered confrontations in U.S. cities between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and protesters, including Los Angeles and Chicago. Trump and Miller have claimed protests in which sporadic violence occurs are evidence of domestic terrorism.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Miller asserted that protesters were engaged in a "continuum of violence" that was part of a larger conspiracy to disrupt federal operations.

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an 10 25

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared to take a step toward circumventing federal laws that bar the military from taking part in domestic law enforcement in a letter she sent to the Department of Defense Sunday as the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles amid mass protests over immigration raids.

In a letter obtained by The San Francisco Chronicle, Noem wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the Pentagon should direct military forces "to either detain, just as they would at any federal facility guarded by military, lawbreakers under Title 18 until they can be arrested and processed by federal law enforcement, or arrest them."

The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from taking part in domestic law enforcement without the authorization of Congress.

Noem called on the DOD to "support to our law enforcement officers and agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Federal Protective Services (FPS), as they defend against invasive, violent, insurrectionist mobs that seek to protect invaders and military aged males belonging to identified foreign terrorist organizations, and who seek to prevent the deportation of criminal aliens."

Noem did not specify the so-called "identified foreign terrorist organizations" that she claimed are involved in the protests that have erupted in Los Angeles in recent days in response to raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in which 118 immigrants were arrested last week.

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President Donald Trump has referred to the protests against his mass deportation operation as "riots," and has claimed those attending the demonstrations are "insurrectionists," but the protests were reported to be "largely peaceful" before Trump ordered more than 2,000 members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles on Saturday.

On Monday, 700 Marines were also deployed.

Syracuse University law professor William Banks told the Chronicle that Noem's request for members of the military to arrest protesters whom she labeled "lawbreakers" could be a step toward "the invocation of the Insurrection Act."

The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992 when Los Angeles residents erupted in fury over the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers who had been filmed savagely beating Rodney King, a black man who they had pulled over after a high-speed chase.

The 1792 law authorizes the president to deploy military forces domestically to suppress rebellions or unrest, when local or state law enforcement is unable to control the situation.

But Stephen Dycus, a professor emeritus at Vermont Law and Graduate School and an expert in national security law, emphasized that local authorities did not appear to lose control of the protests over the weekend.

Noem's requests for military arrests, along with Trump's federalization of the National Guard and deployment of the Marines, "can be seen as using the military, or at a minimum using that threat, to instill fear in the American people and discourage the kinds of protests that are going on in Los Angeles," Dycus told the Chronicle. "So this could be viewed as a preparation for invoking the Insurrection Act, or it could be viewed as part of a larger effort to frighten people who otherwise would exercise their First Amendment guarantee of free speech and protest."

Banks called Noem's push for military detentions of Los Angeles residents "a grave escalation."

The secretary indicated in her letter to Hegseth that she would send a formal request in the coming days. She also called for "the transportation of munitions" from Fort Benning and Wyoming, but did not say what the weapons would be used for.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-11) said Trump's use of the military to suppress protests—which began when ICE agents searched the garment district of Los Angeles for undocumented workers—proves his mass deportation campaign "has nothing to do with deporting criminals and everything to do with creating a militarized terror police state."

"This isn't what happens in a democracy," Wiener told the Chronicle, "this is what happens in a dictatorship."

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DRAFTING ON MILLER TRUMP bs POST KIRK?

AN 10 25

'I don’t negotiate with terrorists': GOP congressman targets Democrats in outrageous rant // COMPROMISE?

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OMFG

an 9 25

In between his highly publicized designation of Antifa as a domestic terror organization and his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, US President Donald Trump signed a little-reported national security memorandum that gives law enforcement new tools to target his critics.

Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Thursday. The directive, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” focuses exclusively on “anti-fascist” or left-wing activities, and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

“I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote in a piece raising alarm about the directive on Saturday.

Klippenstein argued that the memorandum was worrying on several fronts. For one, its focus on preventing crimes before they are committed opens the door to rights violations.

“In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report,” Klippenstein wrote.

IFrame Content

For another, the memorandum casts a very wide net, targeting groups, individuals, funders, and “entities” and listing several protected beliefs as “indicia” of extremism.

These 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.”

What’s more, the memorandum entrusts enforcement to the FBI’s over 4,000-strong Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), which removes the legal challenges to directing the National Guard or other military forces to quash domestic dissent.

“For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level,” Klippenstein wrote.

The types of activities that will be targeted are also quite broad, with the document defining “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” as “domestic terrorist acts.”

The memorandum also targets any individual or group who might fund activity the administration deems terrorism and directs the Internal Revenue Service to “take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” which could be a means of threatening the status of nonprofits.

Finally, as Drop Site Newspointed out, the memo authorizes the attorney general to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations for the first time in US history.

“By targeting beliefs and protest activity, the directive positions dissent itself as a potential crime,” Drop Sitewrote.

The Trump administration’s focus on violence associated with left-wing beliefs and groups is not supported by the facts. National Institute of Justice data found that right-wing violence had led to 520 deaths since 1990 compared with 78 deaths due to left-wing violence. However, the administration removed that study from the Department of Justice website shortly after Charlie Kirk was killed, The Guardianreported earlier this month.

The administration’s efforts, while accelerated, build on processes that began during the US response to the September 11 attacks, as Klippenstein explained:

A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.

However, the Trump administration is expanding the War-on-Terror mandate with fewer guardrails.

“Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover ‘radicalism,‘” Klippenstein said, noting that the NSPM-7 breaks with post-Watergate national security documents by failing to mention the First Amendment rights to protest and organize.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is already eager to make use of the document.

“We are witnessing domestic terrorist sedition against the federal government,” he wrote on social media on Friday. “The JTTF has been dispatched by the Attorney General, pursuant to NSPM-7. All necessary resources will be utilized.”

In an interview with Greg Sargent for theNew Republic, Trump ally Steve Bannon confirmed that Miller and others in the administration were preparing to go after left-liberal groups and media whose criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could be interpreted as “goading” on violence against the agency.

Referring to Miller’s comments that calling ICE authoritarian incited violence and terrorism, Bannon responded, “Stephen Miller is correct—more importantly he’s in charge.

The threats of investigations put liberal and left-leaning organizations in a tough place. On the one hand, they want to prepare as best they can. On the other, they do not want to obey in advance.

“Officials at these groups tell me they must strike a balance between being clear-eyed about how bad this could get while not letting it discourage political activity,” Sargent wrote. “That latter form of surrender is exactly what Trump and Miller want. And under no circumstances should anybody willingly hand it over to them.”

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dem dock 9 25

Trump signed a memorandum Thursday directing the federal government to investigate and dismantle “domestic terrorism networks.”

The move appears targeted at left-leaning progressive nonprofit groups, which Trump days ago vowed to dismantle, falsely claiming they fund and support political violence and terrorism in the U.S.

The memo directs the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to go after “anti-fascist” movements in the U.S.

“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,” the memo reads.

Trump signed the memo shortly after the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice directed several U.S. attorneys offices across the country to open investigations into the Open Society Foundations, a progressive grant network founded by Democratic megadonor George Soros.

Asked what specific people or organizations the memo seeks to target, Trump named Soros, who Republicans have long claimed without evidence funds violent protests in the U.S.

“Soros is a name certainly that I keep hearing,” Trump said. “I don’t know. Soros is a name that I hear.”

Trump earlier this month asserted Soros must be “jailed” because “he’s a bad guy,” while Vice President JD Vance baselessly claimed that Soros and the Open Society Foundations pay “the salaries of terrorist sympathizers” and “promote violence and terrorism.”

The Open Society Foundations in a statement to Democracy Docket said the Trump administration’s “accusations are politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.

“When power is abused to take away the rights of some people, it puts the rights of all people at risk,” it added.

“The Open Society Foundations unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law.”

“Our work in the United States is solely dedicated to strengthening democracy and upholding constitutional freedoms. We stand by the work we do to improve lives in the United States and across the world.”

Trump also named LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party. Hoffman founded the Aphorism Foundation, a California-based private grantmaking group that focuses on noncontroversial causes such as supporting universities and hospitals.

Through a separate nonprofit, Hoffman provided financial support for writer E. Jean Carroll’s sexual assault lawsuit against Trump.

In terms of specific actions, Thursday’s memo ordered the commissioner of the IRS “to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism.”

“In addition, where applicable, the Commissioner shall ensure that the [IRS] refers such organizations, and the employees and officers of such organizations, to the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution,” the memo reads.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has repeatedly threatened to strip left-leaning organizations of their tax exemptions.

Federal law bars senior executive branch officials from directing the IRS, which is currently headed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an acting capacity, to audit any taxpayer or nonprofit organization.

However, the Trump administration could create pretext triggering an IRS audit through several different means.

The White House has repeatedly attempted to link the recent murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to progressive causes and groups. The effort has heightened fears that Trump and his allies seek to exploit the killing to further attack institutions that power the political left.

The Trump administration has also specifically targeted the Ford Foundation, another progressive philanthropic organization.

Earlier this week, Trump signed a separate memo claiming to designate “antifa,” a leaderless and decentralized anti-fascist movement, as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Trump and many of his fellow Republicans have long used antifa as a catch-all designation against protests or speech they disapprove of.

Senior White House officials Thursday claimed that large-scale nationwide protests in recent years, such as the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, were organized by unspecified organizations and amounted to terrorism.

“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism, to dismantle antifa, to dismantle the organizations that have been carrying out these acts of political violence and terrorism,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security advisor, said as the president signed the memo.

“Whether it be going back to the riots that started with Black Lives Matter and all the way through to the antifa riots, the attacks on [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officers, the doxing campaign and now the political assassinations, these are not lone isolated events,” Miller added. “This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism.”*

Miller recently referred to the Democratic Party as “not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

*This breaking news story has been updated with additional details throughout.

Next Up

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Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted on two criminal counts days after President Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue his perceived enemies more aggressively.

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GUK 9 25

Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.

Prompted by journalists, Trump suggested that George Soros, the billionaire Hungarian-born philanthropist who funds the Open Society Foundations, could be in his sights. He also identified Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist, adding: “I hear about him. Maybe it could be him. It could be a lot of people.”

Earlier, the Open Society Foundations had hit back at reports that the justice department was planning to target the group and criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society”.

Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement: “After one of the most harrowing weeks for our first amendment rights, the president is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism’. This is a shameful and dangerous move.”

At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, the memorandum was presented as aimed at “establishing a comprehensive strategy to investigate, disrupt and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism”.

It was said to be part of an administration-wide response that would include the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury.

The ACLU said in a statement that joint terrorism task forces “already have a long history of investigations that wrongly target protestors, communities of color, and those engaged in dissent”.

Surrounded by members of his cabinet, Trump said the goal was to target “the funders of a lot of these groups”, some of whom he claimed to know. But he was vague when asked which groups he meant or who the funders were.

“These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people, some of whom I know, I guess, probably know,” he said. “You wouldn’t know at dinner with them. Everything’s nice, and then you find out that they funded millions of dollars to these lunatics.”

Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School and former federal prosecutor, said the memorandum itself probably doesn’t carry much legal weight. “You can’t by executive order create new crimes. This does not create new crimes. This says you will use the Terrorism Task Force to go after things they would usually go after,” Richman said.

But, he added: “The concern is that this administration has made clear it is only interested in pursuing politically oriented terrorism that disagrees with its political agenda.”

The Trump administration does not need to create new crimes in order to do this, he said. Laws already on the books “have and continue to provide the ability to go after ideological opponents”.

Though the memorandum may not hold up in court, “I fear how far they are going to take this,” said Jason Charter, a former activist who faced charges during Trump’s first term in connection with efforts to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue in front of the White House. “Antifa is antifascism, and antifascism is a very widely shared thing, and being against fascism should not be illegal.”

“It’s trying to slap terrorism charges on people doing protected activities under the Bill of Rights,” Charter said.

The memorandum comes amid a rightwing clamor for retribution in the wake of the 10 September murder of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk, which Trump and his supporters have blamed on an organized leftwing network, despite early indications that the suspect acted alone.

It also followed Wednesday’s deadly attack on a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Dallas that killed one detainee and injured two others. One of the bullets used in the attack was inscribed with the message “anti-Ice”.

The memorandum lumps together a series of apparently unrelated episodes, including a foiled 2022 assassination attempt on the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare in Manhattan last December, last year’s two failed attempts on Trump’s life, and unrest on the streets of Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.

Stephen Miller, the influential White House deputy chief of staff – who has been vocal in the administration’s previous calls for a crackdown – called the initiative “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.

He said “an entire system of feeder organisations” were funding “harassment, doxing, intimidation and, ultimately, attempted assassinations” of public officials.

“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.”

Trump and his allies have portrayed political violence as a phenomenon primarily associated with the left, overlooking recent incidents in which Democrats have been targeted by people who are believed to be rightwing extremists or incidents in which the perpetrator’s motives are unclear.

Postingon his Truth Social network on Wednesday, Trump clearly tied the Ice facility attack to the Democrats and their criticism of his immigration crackdown in a manner resembling his response to Kirk’s killing.

“This violence is the result of the radical left Democrats constantly demonizing law enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis,” he wrote. “The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat.”

But authorities on Thursday said that they did not find evidence that the suspect was a member of “any specific group or entity, nor did he mention any specific government agency other than Ice”.

In the wake of Kirk’s killing, Trump issued an executive order designating antifa, a loose network of groups that has been involved in confrontations with the far right, as a “domestic terrorist organization”.

The new memorandum states: “This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination 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.

“A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies – including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them – is required.”

“Intimidation tactics against those standing up for human rights and civil liberties are sadly not new in the history of this country,” Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s national security project, said. “In an earlier era, civil rights movement leaders were also labeled security threats and investigated, monitored, threatened, and even arrested.”

*Lauren Gambino contributed reporting

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