And for references purposes, here's that post about the craven Paul Weiss surrender to Trump's fascist, but still ultimately financial, intimidation:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114202837875374318

"So, let's make sure we all understand what's going on here. Trump is brazenly and almost certainly illegally, shaking down a powerful law firm that has literally worked on cases opposing him in the past, and is known from their commitment to diverse hiring practices, and instead of fighting back, or even just taking the loss of government money on the chin, they've decided to *check notes* concede that a former partner who worked on cases against Trump was engaged in "wrongdoing," work pro-bono for the fascist regime, and capitulate to the fascist "war on DEI" - an idea whose ever-expanding meaning appears to be "restore mandated white supremacy in America."

As I've mentioned in the past, I'm only a solitary analyst, working through health complications and chronic pain issues; as hard as I try, I can't talk about every story or I want to, or debunk as much spin as I observe in corporate media outlets. Unfortunately in the time since I last covered the Trump regime's ICE abduction of a student protest leader legally residing in the United States, for purely ideological reasons, the Pork Reich has expanded its war on international students who protested Israel's US-back genocide of Palestinians in Gaza; first targeting other students at Columbia, and now expanding to additional schools, like Tufts University, and the University of Alabama.

As I (and many others) predicted, the Trump regime's use of immigration powers to engage in fascist ideological policing, and its loyal Gestapo (DHS/ICE) didn't stop at the illegal abduction of Mahmoud Khalil. In the time I've been writing about other stories, I've failed to talk about a lot of important information and events that shed light on how Trump is using his authority over immigration enforcement to prosecute a war on protestors, and protect a genocide he now owns just as much as the last administration and the rest of the imperialist US establishment do. Unfortunately, I can't rewind time; but I'm going to include some short posts with links to articles talking about what we've missed. It's a lot of reading, but putting it all here in this thread at least allows me to reference these incidents later, once I'm up to current events.

Let's start by looking at Betar; an international, pro-Israel right wing extremist (so, fascist) group who claims to be behind the ICE abduction of Khalil and boasts about supplying the Trump regime with a target list of "thousands" of people for harassment and deportation.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/betar-deportation-list

Far-Right Group Sent List of Palestine Defenders to Trump Officials for Deportation

"Betar, the international far-right pro-Israel group that took credit for the Department of Homeland Security's arrest of former Columbia University graduate student and permanent U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil for protesting the annihilation of Gaza, claimed this week that it has sent "thousands of names" of Palestine defenders to Trump administration officials for possible deportation.

"Jihadis have no place in civilized nations," Betar said on social media Friday following the publication of a Guardian article on the extremist group's activities.

Earlier this week, Betar said: "We told you we have been working on deportations and will continue to do so. Expect naturalized citizens to start being picked up within the month. You heard it here first. Those who support jihad and intifada and originate in terrorist states will be sent back to those lands."

And just in case you think I'm being uncharitable about describing Betar as a fascist organization:

"Critics have voiced alarm about Betar's activities, pointing to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League's recent designation of the organization as a hate group. Founded in 1923 by the early Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Betar has a long history of extremism. Its members—who included former Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin—took part in the Zionist terror campaign against Palestinian Arabs and British forces occupying Palestine in the 1940s.

Today, Betar supports Kahanism—a Jewish supremacist and apartheid movement named after Meir Kahane, an Orthodox rabbi convicted of terrorism before being assassinated in 1990—and is linked to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. The group has called for the ethnic cleansing and Israeli recolonization of Gaza. During Israel's assault on the coastal enclave, which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case, its account on the social media site X responded to the publication of a list of thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces by saying: "Not enough. We demand blood in Gaza!"

As noted elsewhere, White House officials refused to comment on whether or not they were working with Betar, but given that former executive director of the US chapter, Ross Glick, confirmed the existence of the targets list, and held bipartisan meetings about punishing anti-genocide campus protesters with Senators like (R) Ted Cruz, and (D) John Fetterman, it seems entirely plausible that the regime is using Betar's list to target international student protesters for fascist reprisals and deportations.

#Fascism #Trump #Genocide #CivilRights #Khalil #Betar #Imperialism #Israel #Gaza #CampusProtests #Palestine #ICE #ColumbiaUniversity #DHS #SettlerColonialism

Soon after the regime's ICE abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, news broke that Trump's DHS had targeted two other students who had protested or spoken out online against Israel's genocide in Gaza and attended Columbia university; arresting Leqaa Kordia for overstaying her student visa, and revoking the visa of PhD candidate Ranjani Srinivasan, who ultimately self-deported (so, fled) to Canada. At roughly the same time, it was reported that DHS had executed two search warrants for rooms on the Columbia campus.

1) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo

US arrests second pro-Palestinian Columbia University protester

"US immigration authorities have announced the arrest of a second activist who participated in pro-Palestinian protests last spring at Columbia University in New York City.

Leqaa Kordia, who is a Palestinian and from the West Bank, was arrested in New Jersey, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement on Friday.

The statement said another student, Ranjani Srinivasani, who has Indian citizenship, chose to "self-deport" by leaving the US earlier this week.

This follows the arrest of Columbia campus activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained on Saturday in New York before being flown to a jail in Louisiana."

2) https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/3/27/columbia-let-me-down-how-indian-scholar-expelled-by-trump-fled-the-us

‘Columbia let me down’: How Indian scholar expelled by Trump fled the US

"It was the start of 10 days of confusion and fear for Srinivasan that culminated in her name and grainy airport camera image making global headlines after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused her of being a “terrorist sympathiser” on X.

By then, Srinivasan was in Canada, staying with friends and family, having flown out of New York on March 11, four days before Noem’s post, after concluding that she could be arrested – even though the US government has still not made clear whether she is accused of any crime. She rejects the suggestion that she is supportive of terrorists, but assumes her visa was revoked because of online support for Palestine as Israel’s brutal war on Gaza continues."

3) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/14/homeland-security-search-columbia-students

Homeland security agents search two Columbia University students’ rooms

"Agents from the Department of Homeland Security conducted searches in two Columbia University students’ rooms on Thursday night, marking the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s crackdown on some American universities.

Also marking that escalation: Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, said on Friday that the federal justice department would examine whether last year’s student protests at Columbia over Israel’s military strikes on Gaza violated terrorism laws. Blanche also said the justice department would examine whether Columbia’s handling of the demonstrations violated civil rights law as Donald Trump’s White House follows through on its self-stated “mission to end antisemitism in this country”.

The university’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, addressed the school community in a statement, saying she was “heartbroken” to inform them that “there were federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in two University residences” on Thursday night.

Armstrong confirmed that no arrests were made, no items were removed and no further action was taken at the private Ivy League college in New York."

Please not that while Kordia's student visa had indeed expired, and the warrants executed at the Columbia residences were signed by a judge, the larger pattern of using DHS, ICE, and the regime's immigration powers to suppress civil rights, terrorize the students of Columbia, and target international students protesting a US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, was already quite obvious by this point; a fact that the Trump administration didn't deny, but instead bragged about.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #Columbia #Genocide #Israel #Palestine #CivilRights #CampusProtests #LeqaaKordia #RanjaniSrinivasan

As this March 19th article from the Guardian illustrates, the Trump regime's attempts to terrorize and intimidate international students attending Columbia was immediately having the desired (fascist) effect:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/international-students-columbia-university-mahmoud-khalil

‘I could be next’: international students at Columbia University feel ‘targeted’ after Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest

"Now, Columbia students who are not US citizens, some who have vocally supported Palestinian rights, told the Guardian they feel they must be careful who they speak to and censor what they say. They fear being questioned by Ice agents, having their visas revoked or being arrested and detained. Some feel like they are being watched while walking around Morningside Heights and on campus, while others are reluctant to visit family or friends overseas in case they are not permitted back in the country.

“When I leave my apartment, when I go out, I’m just so much more aware and cautious of who’s around me,” said Seher Ahmed, a psychology master’s student from Pakistan. “I went for a run this morning, and I’ve never felt this way before, but I felt like everyone was, like, looking at me.”

Another student who arrived at Columbia in August last year to study journalism had been inspired by student reporters’ coverage of campus protests. She photographed a vigil where journalism school students recited names of the more than 100 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed in Gaza. For a reporting class, the 21-year-old wrote about an anti-Trump rally on election night that called for an end to the Israel-Gaza war. She posted her work and discussed related issues on Instagram and X.

But just days away from applying for a year-long work visa that would follow her expected graduation this May, she stopped posting her opinions and made her accounts private. She is reconsidering attending a friend’s wedding overseas in case she is not allowed back in the country. “I feel like I’m being paranoid, but I’m really scared,” she said."

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #DHS #StudentProtests #Columbia

On March 17th, DHS agents wearing face masks abducted Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University professor and postdoctoral scholar, after informing him that his visa had been revoked by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

1) https://truthout.org/articles/dhs-abducts-georgetown-postdoctoral-researcher-over-pro-palestine-views/

DHS Abducts Georgetown Postdoctoral Researcher Over Pro-Palestine Views

"Badar Khan Suri, an Indian citizen and research fellow at Georgetown’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (which is part of the school’s Foreign Service program), was detained on Monday night outside of his home in Arlington, Virginia. The immigration officials, who wore face coverings, identified themselves as being Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents and told Suri that his J-1 visa was being revoked at the behest of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“Suri was a foreign exchange student at Georgetown University actively spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” said Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin on the social media site X."

It should be noted that the Trump regime has since tried to explain away Suri's detention by pointing out that his father-in-law is a former advisor to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. That reasoning doesn't compute however because Yousef (the father-in-law) left the Gaza government in 2010 and founded a conflict resolution center, and neither Suri not his wife, a US citizen of Palestinian descent have done anything wrong. While Suri has spoken out about the genocide in Gaza, he is not a political activist, and as "a conflict studies scholar, it is well within his professional mandate to share his analysis of the war in Gaza." Despite this, Suri remains in ICE detention under reportedly horrible conditions in Texas.

2) https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/24/badar_khan_suri_georgetown_nader_hashemi

Georgetown Scholar Badar Khan Suri Remains in Immigration Jail After Masked Agents Snatched Him in D.C.

"Over the next 72 hours, Suri was transferred to multiple immigration detention centers. He’s currently jailed at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, separated from his wife, a U.S. citizen of Palestinian descent, and his three children. Suri’s arrest came just days after federal agents apprehended Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who’s being jailed at a different ICE detention center in Louisiana. Both are being detained under a rarely used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which gives the U.S. secretary of state authority to begin deportation proceedings against any noncitizen deemed a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests — even a green card holder, like Mahmoud Khalil is. On Thursday, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting Suri while he fights his case.

DHS has accused Suri of, quote, “spreading Hamas propaganda” and claimed Suri has, quote, “close connections to a known or suspected terrorist,” without providing any evidence. Suri’s legal team says he’s being targeted for his political views and free speech, and pointed to an aggressive doxxing and smearing campaign by pro-Israel groups targeting Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh."

3) https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/26/us/mahmoud-khalil-badar-khan-suri/index.html

A glimpse at complaints inside Louisiana and Texas ICE detention centers holding Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri

"Five-point shackles over open wounds. Foul-smelling milk provided in solitary confinement. Feces left in shower cells.

These incidents and others were reported to the ACLU and other legal aid providers between 2022 and 2024 by detainees at the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center – where Columbia University graduate student and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, facing possible deportation, has been locked up for two weeks. About 370 miles away, at a different facility in Texas, Georgetown University research fellow Badar Khan Suri faces a similar fate following a Trump administration order to crack down on pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses.

Khan Suri was transferred Friday from the Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana – where his lawyers said he was unable to get any contact with the outside world – to the Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas.

“ICE detention centers are … effectively black boxes. They are deliberately placed in remote areas where they are out of sight from the public and difficult for families and legal representation to visit,” said Jeff Migliozzi, communications director with Freedom for Immigrants, a national advocacy group monitoring civil rights issues in immigration detention."

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #DHS #MigrantCarceralComplex #BadarKhanSuri #Prairieland #Texas #Alexandria #Louisiana #Palestine #CivilRights #Genocide #Gaza #Rubio

On March 24th, we learned of another student demonstrator targeted by the Trump regime for anti-genocide protest, when a junior at Columbia University, Yunseo Chung, sued numerous administration officials seeking a temporary restraining order "barring the government from detaining her based on her protected speech and in the absence of independent, legitimate grounds." Cheung, a legal permanent resident who has been living in the US since she was 7 years old, was targeted for helping set up a protest encampment on campus, handing out some fliers, and her mere participation in a sit-in at Bernard College to protest the expulsion of students who participated in the anti-genocide campus protests last year.

1) https://www.commondreams.org/news/yunseo-chung

Another Columbia Protester Targeted for Deportation Sues Trump

"The 21-year-old, who moved from South Korea to the United States with her family at age 7, participated in some student protests on Columbia's campus "related to Israel's military campaign in Gaza and the devastating toll it has taken on Palestinian civilians," states the complaint. "Chung has not made public statements to the press or otherwise assumed a high-profile role in these protests. She was, rather, one of a large group of college students raising, expressing, and discussing shared concerns."

Earlier this month, she was arrested by the New York Police Department at a student sit-in "to protest what she believed to be the excessive punishments meted out by the Columbia administration to student protesters facing campus disciplinary proceedings," the document details. "Mere days later... the federal government began a series of unlawful efforts to arrest, detain, and remove Ms. Chung from the country because of her protected speech."

The suit asserts that Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) "shocking actions against Ms. Chung form part of a larger pattern of attempted U.S. government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech," specifically, "university students who speak out in solidarity with Palestinians and who are critical of the Israeli government's ongoing military campaign in Gaza or the pro-Israeli policies of the U.S. government and other U.S. institutions."

Yeung, who went into hiding to avoid ICE detention as part of a regime act of blatantly unconstitutional ideological policing, was ultimately able to secure a restraining order to prevent her arrest while she continues to fight deportation attempts despite her status as a legal permanent resident.

2) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/25/columbia-gaza-protester-yunseo-chung-lawsuit

Student who sued Trump takes powerful stand against ‘constant dread’ of deportation threats

"On 5 March, Chung – a 21-year-old student at Columbia University – attended a sit-in to protest the expulsion of several students involved in pro-Palestinian activism at the famed New York university. Four days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents showed up at her parents’ home.

When they couldn’t find her there, Ice sought help from federal prosecutors and searched her dormitory – using a warrant that cited a criminal law against “harboring noncitizens”. They revoked her green card and accused her of posing a threat to US foreign policy interests.

On Monday, Chung sued Donald Trump and other high-ranking administrations to stop their targeting of her and other students. And on Tuesday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to halt its efforts to arrest and deport Chung, saying “nothing in the record” indicated that Chung posed a danger to the community."

#Trump #Fascism #ICE #DHS #Columbia #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #CivilRights #FreeSpeech #CampusProtests #YunseoChung

Yesterday, chilling video emerged online of ICE pigs kidnapping University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was snatched off a Somerville, Massachusetts street while on her way to meet friends for iftar, as part of her observance of Ramadan. Although details are still emerging, it appears that like virtually every other international student targeted by Trump's immigration Gestapo, Ozturk, "a doctoral candidate in the university’s [Tufts] Child Study and Human Development department and formerly attended Columbia University as a Fulbright Scholar," isn't being accused of a crime, but rather had her visa revoked for constitutionally-protected speech criticizing Israel's genocide in Gaza; in this case, an op-ed she wrote in Tufts Daily.

1) https://truthout.org/articles/tufts-student-activist-rumeysa-ozturk-abducted-by-ice-on-her-way-to-iftar/

Tufts Student Activist Rumeysa Ozturk Abducted by ICE on Her Way to Iftar

"Officials initially did not specify where Ozturk had been taken, and Khanbabai was unable to reach her. Later on Wednesday, Khanbabai said in a motion that she was informed by a senator’s office that the student was transferred to Louisiana. DHS agents also sent Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana, where he is being held in an immigration jail notorious for its abuses.

The transfer is despite the fact that a judge approved a petition barring Ozturk from being removed from Massachusetts without advance notice filed by Khanbabai on Tuesday. The Trump administration has been openly flouting court orders when it comes to its anti-immigrant onslaught; earlier this month, for instance, immigration officials deported Brown University assistant professor and doctor Rasha Alawieh to Lebanon, despite a judge having ordered the visa holder not to be removed.

Ozturk’s abduction comes just days after she was doxxed by Zionist vigilante group Canary Mission, advocates for Palestinian rights said. The group cited her activism against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including an op-ed published in Tufts Daily last year demanding that university leadership divest from Israel and condemn its slaughter of Palestinians."

Look folks, I don't know who needs to be told that surrounding and abducting an academic legally studying in the United States for writing an op-ed calling on Tufts to divest from Israel and condemn the genocide in Gaza, is textbook fascism, but it is. This is the kinda shit our government uses as justification for international sanctions and military intervention in non-democratic countries that happen to have large oil and gas reserves. Furthermore, as someone who has a number of close friends and colleagues who've been doxed by the assclowns at Canary Mission for nothing more than attending peaceful anti-genocide protests, I can't tell you how profoundly disturbing it is to even consider the possibility that the Trump regime is using their woefully baseless and politicized records to identify targets for deportation in America. This is fascist ideological policing, designed to intimidate Ozturk and other academics or students who would speak out; absolutely nothing about this is legal, or a legitimate attempt to protect public safety. We're literally snatching up scholars off the street for criticizing the government, Israel, a genocide, and apparently even the response of American universities to anti-genocide protests.

This McCarthy-esque bullshit isn't a warning sign of creeping fascism; this is Trump's all American fascist police state acting in broad daylight, with presumed impunity, to punish political speech and silence dissent. And while this represents an escalation of Trump's fascist war on student protestors, the situation is unfortunately all too familiar to Muslim American observers living in the United States under the still active logic of War on Terror policing.

https://archive.is/IlRY6

The New Video of Federal Agents Ambushing a Student and Disappearing With Her Should Chill You to Your Core

"As a Muslim American, in moments like these, it feels like there isn’t much else left to say. The Trump administration is trying to normalize a disquieting new chapter of something that’s happened now for nearly three decades. In that time, we’ve watched our communities surveilled, detained, blacklisted, and interrogated under the guise of national security. After 9/11, hundreds of Muslim immigrants were swept up and held without charge—some in solitary confinement for months. The NYPD mapped our neighborhoods, infiltrated our mosques, spied on our student groups at places like Yale, Rutgers, and the University of Pennsylvania. (I once discovered it kept a file on me.) None of it produced a single terrorism lead. These stories don’t just vanish when the news cycle goes on. They remain with us, in a country where many of us were born but will always be viewed with suspicion. The message has been clear: The government will find a reason to come for us."

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #DHS #Kidnapping #RumeysaOzturk #CivilRights #Gaza #Genocide #Tufts

The Trump regime has expanded its blatantly unconstitutional college campus kidnapping spree beyond the Ivies; this time ICE snatched University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi at his off campus home at 5AM on Tuesday. The DHS has refused to provide clarification for why Doroudi, a mechanical engineering student from Iran who is legally studying in the United States, was detained; beyond some vague nonsense about "national security."

https://archive.is/m42G7

ICE detains University of Alabama doctoral student as government's college crackdown continues

"David Rozas, an attorney representing Doroudi, said in a statement Saturday that they are "confused" about why Doroudi was detained. Doroudi has maintained lawful status while studying at the university, Rozas said.

"We have not been made aware of any allegations of misconduct against my client," Rozas said. "We do not believe he is suspected to have committed any crimes nor participated in any political activities whatsoever."

He said Doroudi has a pending EB-2 application, a pathway to a green card for immigrants who hold an advanced degree or have "exceptional ability."

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an emailed statement: "ICE HSI made this arrest in accordance with the State Department’s revocation of Doroudi’s student visa. This individual posed significant national security concerns."

Given the DHS's refusal to provide adequate details, many mainstream news outlets are reporting that it's unclear if this particular visa revocation and ICE kidnapping is part of Trump's larger fascist war on college campus protestors and people who write op-eds criticizing Israel's genocide in Gaza. Given the methods the regime used to target Doroudi and fact that ICE has already shipped him to the notorious detention center in Louisiana that it shipped most of the other students to however, I think that position is a little too credulous. At a minimum, sources at the University of Alabama have indicated that the community there regards this as part of Trump's racist repression of international students.

#Fascism #Trump #AlirezaDoroudi #UniversityOfAlabama #ICE #DHS #Kidnapping #CivilRights #Racism #WhiteSupremacy

At the risk of stating the obvious, it would be nice if media minions on my TV would spend any time at all analyzing Trump's fascist ICE kidnapping spree as part of a larger plan, with an eye on what the regime is actually trying to accomplish here. Maybe American media outlets are spooked by living in a country where it's increasingly illegal to admit racism exists, but it's not like it's impossible to do the legwork; even for corporate media. Take for example this piece in the international edition of The Guardian, pointing out that it's almost certainly not an accident all of DHS's targets for fascist ideological policing and deportation are people of color, even though a majority of the folks participating in campus anti-genocide protests the regime is claiming represent a threat to our national security, were white folks born in America.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/us-universities-students-israel-palestine-protests

‘A warning for students of color’: Ice agents are targeting certain protesters, say experts

"Now, at least five students and academics of color at US universities have been targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), as a part of the Trump administration’s ongoing push to punish noncitizens over their support of Palestine.

“What we’re seeing is the use of immigration law to go after visa holders, permanent lawful residents, [over] their speech,” said Samah Sisay, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). “He’s trying to suppress political speech that goes against what the administration wants.”

Despite white students, professors and academics also being heavily involved in pro-Palestine protests, people of color have disproportionately faced sudden arrests and threats of deportation or had their visas revoked.

“We’re just seeing the focus on very specific people,” said Sisay, referring to academics of color. “I think it really is to try to create a wedge in solidarity, the multiracial, multiethnic solidarity that’s been created in support of Palestinian human rights.” Ice’s actions, she said, have “set a warning for students of color at these universities who rely on scholarships and educational support to improve their lives or better the situations for their family.”

So look, maybe you don't need to be a genius to figure out why an openly white nationalist, Islamophobic, and deeply xenophobic Trump administration is starting its attempts to criminalize protest and dissent, with non-white academics, the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslim. These guys are fucking nazis, and that's the kinda shit nazis do; although I'll be honest with you, the next time I see a corporate media outlet explain the actions of the Pork Reich by directly saying "well they're fascists, obviously" it'll probably be the first.

The truth however, is that Stephen Miller, who is definitely running Trump's immigration policies and his fascist war to crush dissent, is the kinda crudely cunning fascist who absolutely "uses the whole cow." Sure the regime is stacked to the brim with raving white nationalists, but they're also clearly working to break the solidarity of the anti-genocide protest movement, while simultaneously targeting people Americans have already been taught to hate in order to shift the Overton Window far enough towards fascism to allow them to start black bagging and imprisoning *anyone* of *any* immigration status, who opposes the regime. It is irresponsible to simply repeat regime propaganda to justify illegally disappearing protestors, without helping your audience put these events in a larger context that would explain why it's important for all of us to oppose Trump's fascist repression of people many Americans don't care about and have been taught to dislike, if they don't want the regime's next assault on civil rights to strike closer to home.

#Fascism #ICE #DHS #Trump #StephenMiller #CivilRights #Genocide #Gaza #Israel #Racism #CampusProtests #Kidnapping #Media #OvertonWindow #Islamophobia

Given the stunning level of illegality and disregard for civil rights the Trump regime has deployed in its fascist war on student protestors who oppose a US-backed genocide in Gaza, would it surprise you at all to learn that the Department of Homeland Security probably lied their asses off to get the warrant they used to search two student dorm rooms for activists they'd targeted for illegal deportations?

https://theintercept.com/2025/03/28/ice-warrants-columbia-students-gaza-protests/

Ice Got Warrants Under “False Pretenses,” Claims Columbia Student Targeted Over Gaza Protests

"Earlier this month, while hunting for Columbia University students to deport over their ties to Gaza protests, the Trump administration convinced a federal judge to sign off on search warrants for two students’ dorm rooms — then raided the residences with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

As details about the warrants have emerged, however, so have allegations that federal agents misled the court and secured the warrants under “false pretenses,” as one of the students whose room was searched, Yunseo Chung, claimed in a lawsuit challenging her deportation.

The warrants were predicated on probable cause that Columbia was “harboring” students who were in the country illegally, court filings indicate. Chung, however, is a lawful permanent resident, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s efforts to deport her based on her arrest and citation at a Gaza sit-in. She has lived in the U.S. since she was 7 years old.

“The idea that they went before a federal magistrate judge and said, ‘We have to search Ms. Chung’s residence for evidence of Columbia harboring her’ — that shows they’re willing to lie to a judge,” said Nathan Yaffe, an immigration attorney."

This story isn't particularly complicated; DHS told a judge they needed search warrants because Colombia was "harboring and concealing illegal aliens on its campus" specifically to find two students it knew had legal status to be in the country. Of course Trump's warpig lapdog Marco Rubio is arguing that the student(s) were "illegal" because he unilaterally revoked their student visas/green cards, but actually he can't legally do that and since the government hasn't brought the matter before an immigration judge, the targets of the warrant were straight up ineligible for the crime the warrant was seeking to find evidence for or suspects for an arrest.

#Fascism #ICE #DHS #Trump #Gaza #Migrants #Genocide #StudentProtestors #Kidnapping #CivilRights #Israel #FreeSpeech #ColumbiaUniveristy #YunseoChung #StephenMiller #IdeologicalPolicing

In an ominous episode that is still being treated as "Trump being Trump" by some portion of the corporate media, Downmarket Mussolini has once again floated the idea of transferring American citizens to a slave labor torture prison in El Salvador:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-el-salvador

Trump Backs 'Blatantly Unconstitutional' Proposal to Send US Citizen Inmates to El Salvador Prisons

"With a deadline looming for the Trump administration to return a Maryland resident to the U.S. after expelling him along with hundreds of other people to an El Salvador detention center under a shadowy deal with the Central American country, U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday stunned observers by expressing a desire to send U.S. citizens into El Salvador's prison system.

In a press briefing aboard Air Force One Sunday evening, Trump was asked by a reporter about an offer made by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to accept prisoners sent by the U.S. from its federal prison population.

"I love that," Trump said. "If we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I would be honored to give them."

"I don't know what the law says on that," he added. "I have suggested that, why should we stop at people who cross the border illegally?"

I know I'm not the only person working in this space that's getting sick of hanging on Der Führer's ever word, musing, and threat, but as we've discussed many times, part of the way this regime operates is by transforming Trump's ravings into presumed consent to act on its worst fascist impulses and plans, in a system of "enforced unreality." When the president says, multiple times, he wants to send US citizens to a gulag in El Salvador, he's being dead serious about the regime's intentions; whether that's legal, or anyone in a position to stop him will do so, is another matter entirely - but this guy isn't just talking to hear himself talk, no matter how hard that may be to believe for people who know how profoundly ignorant and unstable Trump actually is. Given that reality then, the regime's continued quest to manufacture consent for rendering US citizens to a foreign maximum security torture prison, brings up 4 important issues:

1) We literally have no idea what Trump's deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele says, and the arrangement is extra-judicial at best.

"As Trump expressed interest in expelling U.S. citizens to a foreign prison system, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council pointed out that the details of the White House's deal with Bukele have not been publicly disclosed.

"We literally know nothing about it, other than we're paying them $6 million," said Reichlin-Melnick. "No law in the United States authorizes us to pay another country to imprison people. And yet! They're doing it."

2) At the same time Der Führer is advocating for the wonders of rendering US citizens to the carceral "care" of an authoritarian foreign government aligned with the Trump regime, the US government is also arguing in court that once they send someone to CECOT, they no longer have the ability to bring them back because they don't have custody of the prisoner and El Salvador is outside of US jurisdiction. Taken together then, this means that the President of the United States is currently advocating for the wisdom of, and his right to, permanently disappear US citizens. I don't care how much of a trav-sham-mockery you think Trump is, that's arguably the most terrifying news to emerge from the entire Trump 2.0 era.

3) While Trump's current rhetoric is focused on "dangerous criminals" and the examples he gives are mostly made up violent crime stories, the reality is that this regime has been arguing that folks protesting its fascist agenda, boycotting Elon Musk, or acting to oppose a US-backed genocide by Israel in Gaza, are literally domestic terrorists and an active threat to US national security. Furthermore it requires no conjecture to connect these facts to the regime's gulag fantasies because the Attorney General has already indicated support for sending "domestic terrorist" anti-Tesla protestors to CECOT. If they want to disappear you into a gulag for depressing Elon's profit margins, you can bet they're fine with doing so for protesting a genocide, or even just opposing Trumpism in the streets.

4) While all of this sounds horrifying and impossible, the reality is that our anti-terrorism policies under the Bush administration after 9/11 have already established a precedent for the US govt shipping people to legal black holes and claiming they hold no responsibility for protecting their rights as part of the extraordinary rendition policy. As many warned at the time, the War on Terror was always destined to return home, and it seems that under Trump, it has done precisely that.

#Fascism #Trump #Gulag #CECOT #WarOnTerror #PoliceState #IdeologicalPolicing

If for some reason you still had delusions that what's going on under the Trump regime in America is somehow *not* fascism, a since deleted ICE post on "The Daily Stormer the social media site" (aka Twitter, aka X) should disabuse you of that notion quickly:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ice-ideas-border-crossing_n_67f80dc0e4b09493c8d88d45

ICE Says It Will Stop 'Ideas' From Crossing The Border Illegally

"It appears that the country’s primary immigration enforcement agency has, at least briefly, declared itself the border thought police. In a country that is supposed to believe in the freedom of speech and thought, this raises a host of questions.

What ideas does ICE believe are illegal? How can ideas even cross the border illegally? And how does ICE screen for these illegal ideas to stop them from coming in?

ICE did not respond to these questions but did tell HuffPost that the “post was sent without proper approval and should not have been shared.”

″‘Ideas’ should have said ‘intellectual property,’” a spokesperson for ICE said in an email.

That isn’t to say the Trump administration and ICE aren’t policing ideas that they deem “illegal,” including by stripping visas and green cards from students, denying entry to foreign visitors and arresting and deporting people for their opinions.

Chief among them is any criticism of Israel. The administration has sought the deportation of numerous students for their participation in or support for protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. The most high profile of these cases are those of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk."

I don't know who needs to hear that Trump's Gestapo admitting it's policing "ideas" is a sure sign that the regime isn't "fascistic" but is in fact just doing fascism, but it is. Furthermore I don't really see the spokesman's excuse that ICE was talking about "intellectual property" as being valid because when the government acts to protect intellectual property in the context of borders, it's about keeping American IP from being stolen by foreign adversaries; ICE targets people (and apparently ideas) coming INTO the country, not leaving it.

I hate to keep quoting Maya Angelou on you folks, but not a day has gone by since Trump took office a second time where her maxim "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time" doesn't apply.

#Fascism #Trump #PoliceState #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #CivilRights #IdeologicalPolicing #ICE #DHS #AmericanGestapo

As if it's *trying* to prove my point that the Trump regime is engaging in the fascist policing of "ideas" and the targeted repression of those who articulate them, the US government has admitted in court that it has no legal basis to detain and try to deport Columbia University graduate and activist leader Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, besides his ideas and political positions. The government, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is straight up arguing that Kahlil's opposition to Israel's US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, which it baselessly describes as "antisemitism," represents a threat to US foreign policy objectives, which in turn allows the regime to enact a rarely used provision in the Immigration Nationality Act to justify the fascist targeting of the former student protest spokesman.

In other words, the regime is admitting that Kahlil hasn't committed a crime, but is being deported for purely ideological reasons under the guise of protecting American national security; which is more or less exactly what the administration has been saying out loud until the precise moment when someone points out that this is fascism, at which point they briefly deny it.

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/10/deportation-case-mahmoud-khalil-antisemitism-rubio-trump/

The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim

"Khalil’s attorneys said it’s clear the government’s case is about cracking down on his speech in support of Palestine and represents a precedent amid the Trump administration’s nationwide attacks on universities and students. The Trump administration has revoked hundreds of students since Khalil’s arrest. Many were not involved in protests at all, while some were being targeted for low-level misdemeanors.

“And where would this lead?” Van Der Hout said. “Are we going to now throw people in jail for speaking out against the Social Security cuts in this country? This is a dangerous slope, and we are taking a stand on behalf of Mahmoud, and he is taking a stand.”

“He’s decided to stay in jail and fight this case to the bitter end,” he added, “while we try to establish that people like Mahmoud have a constitutional right to speak out in this country.”

If there's an upshot here, it's that all of this is patently illegal, and even the Immigration Nationality Act little Marco is using to justify this fascist bullshit contains a provision "that prevents the secretary of state from using the “foreign policy” provision to deport someone based on an individual’s speech unless it has compelling grounds to do so." The fact that the government has refused to produce evidence that would justify deporting Kahlil probably increases his chances of being released, and soon.

The bad news of course is that the Trump regime has already ignored multiple court orders forbidding its fascist activities, and the government is openly asserting the right to target, detain, and deport, again, a *legal* permanent resident of the United States, who is married to an American citizen, for purely ideological reasons. That assertion may not survive a judge's ruling in this particular case, but with a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court in its pocket, it feels like it's only a matter of time before the regime wins one of these arguments before a more sympathetic judge - and then there is no predicting how far the new American Nazi movement will go to crush dissent and ideological opposition to its authoritarian rule.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #DHS #Nazis #MahmoudKhalil #SCOTUS #MarcoRubio #PoliceState #Gaza #IdeologicalPolicing #Genocide #WhiteNationalism #Israel #Immigration #FreeSpeech

In what may well be one of the most shameful episodes in American legal history since the abolition of chattel slavery, a Louisiana immigration judge has ruled that the Trump regime can continue its blatantly unconstitutional deportation of a lawful permanent US resident and political prisoner, Mahmoud Khalil, pretty much because Marco Rubio says so:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/mahmoud-khalil-deportable

'Very Dark Stuff': Judge Rules Palestine Activist Mahmoud Khalil Can Be Deported

"A U.S. immigration judge in Louisiana on Friday ruled that Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and former Columbia University graduate student arrested last month after protesting Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, can be deported, a decision that came despite the Trump administration admitting the imminently expecting father committed no crime and was being targeted solely for constitutionally protected speech.

Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Jamee Comans said that she lacked the legal authority to question the determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Khalil was deportable. Earlier this week, Comans gave the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until Friday to produce evidence that Khalil is eligible for deportation.

No such evidence was provided other than Rubio's assertion that he reserves the right to order Khalil's expulsion under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which empowers the secretary of state to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests."

As the article itself notes, this isn't a final victory for the Trump administration; Khalil can and will continue to fight this, and most legal experts seem pretty confident this is all going to end up in front of the Supreme Court before the government can actually deport him; although why the court's 6-3 fascist high composition gives anyone confidence that they'll stop the regime's fascist and blatantly unconstitutional ideological policing and repression, is somewhat beyond me. As horrifying as this decision is, a random immigration judge doesn't get to say "surprise, fascism is legal now" even if that's more or less what this ruling is pointing to.

With that having been noted however, I need folks to understand what the regime's successful (for now) argument is here, because if you don't get that, it's impossible to grasp just how far these nazis clearly mean to go with this. The government is admitting that Mahmoud Khalil had a legal right to be in the United States, and committed no crime whatsoever. They are expressly stating that he's being targeted for deportation because of his political beliefs, and opposition to the US-back genocide being conducted by Israel, against Palestinians in Gaza as we speak; which they have chosen to define as antisemitism for political and propaganda reasons. This is a fundamental denial of Khalil's First Amendment rights which regardless of what you heard on Fox News, apply to everyone in the United States, not just people born there.

Despite this however, the regime is arguing that they have the right to deport Khalil because the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 gives the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, the right to unilaterally, even unconstitutionally, order Khalil's expulsion; citing that the Act empowers him "to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests." Who decides what US foreign policy interests are, has a right to to declare those decisions state secrets, and can change those potentially secret objectives at a whim? The Trump regime. Who decides which actions are "detrimental" to U.S. foreign policy decisions and who should be deported for them? Well the regime's argument is that it's Marco Rubio or whoever happens to be Trump's Secretary of State, and that he can do it by a whim, without explaining or justifying his decisions whatsoever.

So you caught that right? The regime can violate the constitutional rights of even a lawful US resident, because Marco Rubio feels a way, and he's not required to provide any more proof than "I said so." And yesterday, a U.S. immigration judge agreed with that logic. All of which now begs the question, what, or who, will Little Marco decide is "detrimental to U.S. foreign policy decisions" tomorrow?

#Fascism #Trump #Immigration #Courts #MahmoudKhalil #Protest #PoliceState #MarcoRubio #Gaza #CivilRights #JameeComans #ImmigrationAndNationalityAct #Genocide #McCarthyism #FreeSpeech #Israel #Constitution

So, if you were wondering whether there's anything hypothetical about the "chilling effect" all this fascist repression is designed to produce in folks who oppose the Trump regime, a recent Guardian article demonstrates that it's real and ongoing - not just for anti-genocide protestors and foreign students, but for US-born critics of the regime writing in college papers too:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/student-journalists-remove-stories-trump

US student journalists go dark fearing Trump crusade against pro-Palestinian speech

"Fearing legal repercussions, online harassment and professional consequences, student journalists are retracting their names from published articles amid intensifying repression by the Trump administration targeting students perceived to be associated with the pro-Palestinian movement.

Editors at university newspapers say that anxiety among writers has risen since the arrest of the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, who is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention fighting efforts to deport her. While the government has not pointed to evidence supporting its decision to revoke her visa, she wrote an op-ed last year in a student newspaper critical of Israel, spurring fears that simply expressing views in writing is now viewed as sufficient grounds for deportation.

Ozturk is one of nearly a dozen students or scholars who have been seized by immigration officials since 8 March, when Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and green card holder, was arrested and placed in deportation proceedings over his role in pro-Palestinian protests. Student editors report particularly acute anxieties among international students who have contributed to their newspapers, but say that requests to take down stories over fears of retaliation are coming from US citizens, too."

The reality that no authoritarian regime wants dissidents to realize, is that they literally do not have the resources to police and punish *everyone* who opposes the state. What they rely on is cracking down on high profile targets that generate a lot of publicity, folks like Mahmoud Khalil, and Rumeysa Ozturk, to force everyone else to self censor, lest they be next. I'm not going to criticize the student writers for asking college newspapers at institutions that have shown no ability or willingness to protect them, to erase their critiques of the regime to protect their personal safety; very few people in our society are actually prepared to suffer the horrible consequences of a fascist police state targeting them personally, and a lot of people reading this would make the same decision in their shoes.

What I will say however is that this response is exactly what the fascist Trump regime wants, and that's why it behooves the rest of society to give a fuck about the free speech rights of student protestors and journalists; and act in numbers large enough to protect us all while working to stop this fascist repression by any means necessary.

#Fascism #Trump #StudentProtests #FreeSpeech #Journalism #IdeologicalPolicing #PoliceState #CivilRights #Gaza #Genocide #Palestine #Israel #MahmoudKhalil #HigherEd #RumeysaOzturk

Emboldened no doubt by the fascist repression and rhetoric deployed by the Trump regime, and a large number of right wing extremists in the US judiciary, state governments all over America are proposing or passing laws that criminalize even peaceful protest - with multi-decade prison terms laid out for dissidents and resisters:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/anti-protest-bills-trump

US intensifies crackdown on peaceful protest under Trump

"Anti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests – especially targeting those speaking out on the US-backed war in Gaza and the climate crisis – have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.

Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year – compared with a full-year total of 52 in 2024 and 26 in 2023, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.

This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines – a crackdown that experts warn threaten to erode first amendment rights to freedom of speech, assembly and petition."

I don't know about you, but I've been having arguments with liberals about what constitutes an effective protest since at least the Occupy Wall Street movement, and invariably their excuse for not actually disrupting anything or shutting shit down, is that effective resistance will give the authorities an excuse to crack down on otherwise peaceful protests. So what now folks? If you're gonna be called a domestic terrorist and do twenty years in prison for peacefully disrupting the oil and gas industry or opposing a US-backed genocide conducted by its client state Israel regardless, why remain peaceful? Given that Trump's Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is openly talking about twenty year prison terms for vandalizing a Tesla dealership, it seems pretty clear that the penalties are the same whether you march peacefully waving your little signs, or actually shut the fuck barrel down and hurt these folks where it counts - their wallets.

Furthermore, while it's obvious these anti-protest bills are designed to target anti-genocide protestors as part of the Trump regime's crackdown on anyone who doesn't support settler colonialist massacres by Israel in Gaza, don't sleep on the fact that these guys are also targeting climate crisis protestors who disrupt the fossil fuel and energy industries. As I've been telling you for years now, understanding climate crisis and what our leaders already know about it, is crucial to understanding the rise of fascism because these folks absolutely intend to lead us all off the ecological cliff and they know, sooner or later, the public at large isn't going to accept "we think you should all die so a handful of nazi billionaires can keep stacking filthy lucre." All over the Pig Empire, whether your government is overtly fascist, or covertly fascist under the guise of neoliberalism, our states are preparing to meet everyday people rising up against the capitalism that's killing us, with fascist repression - and we've already caught the companies that know they've got bodies on their hands, actively funding the lobbies behind these anti-democratic suppression laws, to protect their business interests.

As I've told you a number of times already, it only takes one side to declare war, and the rise of fascism in the so-called West must be understood as part of a much larger class war; a war nazi billionaire cultists and corporate power intend to win, once and for all. It doesn't matter how peaceful you are, the fact that you know the machine is killing your kids for five pennies a share and don't like it, is enough to make you the enemy of a capitalist order increasingly turning to overt fascism to lock in their way of life and future profits, no matter how many of their victims (all of us) don't like it. Whether you fight back, or not, the boot is coming.

#Fascism #Trump #Democracy #Protest #Crackdown #Genocide #HumanRights #FirstAmendment #CivilRights #Gaza #ClimateCrisis #Israel #StudentProtests #ClassWar #Capitalism #UnitedStates #FossilFuels #SettlerColonialism

In a sign that the Trump regime plans to continue its fascist repression of student protestors legally in the US and dissent in general, even as its authority to do so is being challenged in court, ICE has kidnapped another Columbia University anti-genocide protest leader. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian who has legally been studying in the United States for the past 10 years, was arrested by ICE as he arrived for a citizenship test; now the regime seems intent on deporting him under the familiar Calvinball argument that Marco Rubio can deport anyone he deems "detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests" on a whim; a tactic the administration has used to justify prior attempts to deport political prisoners Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, among others:

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/14/ice-columbia-student-mohsen-mahdawi-citizenship-interview/

Palestinian Student Leader Was Called In for Citizenship Interview — Then Arrested by ICE

"Even before his friend and fellow Columbia activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by immigration authorities, Mahdawi asked university administrators to help him find a safe place to live so he would not be taken by ICE agents, according to emails reviewed by The Intercept. The school did nothing in response, Mahdawi said.

After ICE abducted Khalil last month, Mahdawi sheltered in place for more than three weeks for fear of being picked up himself.

Instead of taking him off the street, however, immigration authorities scheduled the citizenship test at the Colchester USCIS office and took Mahdawi into custody when he arrived.

Now, Mahdawi is facing an order to deport him to the occupied West Bank, where escalating attacks from both the Israeli military and Jewish settlers have led to increased casualties among Palestinians.

“It’s kind of a death sentence,” Mahdawi said. “Because my people are being killed unjustly in an indiscriminate way.”

Please also note that a number of other kidnapping targets taken by ICE, Mahdawi was previously marked out for reprisal by pro-Zionist smear group Canary Mission, and Betar, a far right hate group that's widely considered a fascist organization even in Israel; because apparently US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now taking foreign policy and national security advice from ultra-Zionist extremist hate groups that openly advocate for violence against Palestinians and protestors. Like all of the other anti-genocide protestors the regime has kidnapped, there is no evidence that Mahdawi is a "terrorist" or committed any serious crimes, except of course the Trump administration's argument that protesting a genocide is in and of itself, domestic terrorism.

#Trump #Fascism #Columbia #ICE #MohsenMahdawi #MarcoRubio #Betar #CanaryMission #Kidnapping #PoliceState #StudentProtests #Gaza #Genocide #Israel

I think at this point you have to be using some kind of motivated reasoning to pretend a Trump regime full of literal nazis who're kidnapping anti-genocide student protestors legally living and studying in the United States, is doing so to fight "antisemitism." This regime doesn't care about antisemitism, it cares about its genocidal settler colonial client state in the Middle East, Israel, but the administration, which frequently dabbles in open antisemitism, is happy to use the fight against really existing hatemongering against Jewish people as a cudgel to accomplish its fascist goals; namely allowing Israel to complete its genocide in Gaza, purging student dissidents with experience fighting the regime, and seizing control of higher education as part of a Yarvinite scheme to create a fascist dictatorship under Trump. As many, including some of the students quoted in the article I'm about to share have noted, weaponizing antisemitism to do fascism is in and of itself a form of antisemitism, and it's certainly not doing anything to help keep Jewish American students safe.

If any of that seemed controversial to you, I'd ask that you please consider the case of Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student organizer who was lured in for seizure by the promise of a citizenship interview after being marked out by fascist, pro-genocide doxing groups Canary Mission, and Betar for having the nerve to go on 60 Minutes to talk about the occupation of Gaza and why the fight for Palestinian liberation and the fight against antisemitism "go hand-in-hand."

https://zeteo.com/p/jewish-students-slam-trump-arrest-moshen-mahdawi

'New Kind of Antisemitism': Jewish Students Slam Trump's Detention of Mohsen Mahdawi

"Mahdawi, like Mahmoud Khalil, reportedly wrote to the university asking for help finding a safe location to live, away from ICE. As with Khalil, the university appears to have ignored the repeated pleas. Mahdawi’s requests came after months of anti-free speech groups like Betar USA and Canary Mission targeting him, amid his involvement in the Columbia anti-war and pro-Palestine protests over the last 18 months.

The groups pointed to things like his appearance on CBS’ ‘60 Minutes’ – where he discussed not viewing Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in a vacuum – as proof of his villainy. In that same appearance, Mahdawi condemned antisemitism, recounting an instance during a student walkout when he told off a campus non-affiliate saying antisemitic phrases.

“To be antisemitic is unjust,” Mahdawi said during the segment. “The fight for freedom of Palestine and the fight against antisemitism go hand-in-hand because injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

And so Mahdawi becomes the latest in a string of students the Trump administration has targeted nationwide in the name of “student safety” and “combating antisemitism” – while Jewish peers of these students express feeling safe and heard around them."

I think one of the students quoted in this article summed up the situation best when he pointed out that Palestinians shouldn't have to be model minorities in American society for folks to treat them like human beings and care about their rights, but by all accounts, including those from school faculty and Jewish students who knew him, Mohsen Mahdawi was in fact that person. Indeed at the time of his kidnapping Mahdawi was actively working to bridge whatever rift exists between Palestinian and Jewish students at Columbia and in the surrounding community; so to claim you're fighting antisemitism by confining and attempting to deport such a person is a particularly crass and odious weaponization of one vulnerable minority to persecute another; which is probably why it appeals so much to a fascist regime full of imperialist Islamophobes and antisemites.

Look, as much as the regime (and society at large) wants to divide us all and put us into little boxes, the reality on the ground is that none of this serves the interests of everyday people in our society, be they Palestinian, Jewish, or neither. Weaponizing Jewish students and the safety of American Jews to install fascism *is* as one student put it, "the new kind of antisemitism." Targeting foreign students legally studying in the United States for opposing a genocide the regime wants to profit from, *is* fascism in action. Using foreign policy as an excuse to expel non-white people *is* part of a fascist project to establish a white ethno-state in America. Whether Americans want to hear it or not, we all have a vested interest in stopping the persecution of folks like Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mahmoud Khalil; not just because we could be next, but because a failure to do so will be a terrible stain on our common humanity, and diminish all that is worth saving about our shared society.

#Fascism #Columbia #Genocide #CanaryMission #MohsenMahdawi #Betar #Trump #StudentProtests #PoliceState #ICE #DHS #Israel #Gaza #antisemitism #Imperialism #Islamophobia #SettlerColonialism #RumeysaOzturk #MahmoudKhalil

While the abduction and attempts to deport every foreign student who participated in anti-genocide protests on American campuses are all important stories, I'm genuinely surprised Trump's targeting of Rumeysa Ozturk hasn't become a flashpoint in this larger story, the way the Abrego Garcia abduction has in the trafficking migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador scandal.

Frankly, demonizing anti-genocide protestors is a bipartisan sport in the American establishment, but the Ozturk abduction is unique in that she never participated in a protest; the regime is detaining and attempting to deport Ozturk because she wrote an op-ed calling for Tufts University to divest from Israel while it conducts a genocide, and the wrong people noticed. Specifically Canary Mission, a doxing group that specializes in harassing anti-genocide protestors in multiple Pig Empire nations. Soon after the group accused Ozturk of antisemitic activities; again, for writing an op-ed calling on Tufts to divest from Israel, she was snatched off the street by masked ICE agents in a video half the country watched and shared online.

This transcript of a recent interview with one of Ozturk's lawyers touched on the subject of the Trump regime obtaining target lists from an anonymous doxing group with unclear funding, and provides an update on Ozturk's legal fight; which appears to be going about as well as can be expected because all of this is fascist Calvinball bullshit designed to silence dissent and protect a genocide being conducted by an American client state.

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/22/rumeysa_ozturk_vermont_ice_tufts

“The Doxxing-to-Deportation Pipeline”: Update on Abduction & Jailing of Tufts Student Rümeysa Öztürk

"JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the role of Canary Mission and others like it in, essentially, identifying for the government people that they should be deporting?

MUDASSAR TOPPA: Yeah, and, you know, I think at this point there’s been a clear connection that we can draw — right? — from the doxxing organizations, the pro-Israeli doxxing organizations. And there is a clear doxxing-to-deportation pipeline that’s taking place.

And in Ms. Öztürk’s case, it’s even more apparent, because Ms. Öztürk was not a known organizer or advocate for any cause, really. And Ms. Öztürk’s sole sort of publicly identifiable association to the movement against the genocide and the movement for Palestinian human rights was this co-authored op-ed in her school newspaper that was really just asking the university to respect the wishes and the vote of the student Senate. And, you know, all of the sudden, in February of 2025, almost a year after she’s written — she’s co-written this op-ed, Canary Mission publishes a page on her, doxxing her and alleging that she’s engaged in antisemitic behavior because of this co-authored op-ed. And less than a month later, she’s abducted by ICE.

And so, it’s very chilling that the government seems to be taking their marching orders from these private doxxing organizations with mysterious funding and backing. And I think it underscores why the government’s actions are simply unconscionable."

#Fascism #Trump #RumeysaOzturk #CanaryMission #Doxing #ICE #DHS #Courts #Kidnapping #Genocide #Israel #Palestine #Gaza #Tufts #FreeSpeech

Given the absolute shitshow that has been the fascist Trump regime's campaign to crush anti-genocide protestors, would it surprise you to learn that ICE just revealed in a court filing that they didn't have a warrant to arrest Mahmoud Khalil?

https://www.commondreams.org/news/ice-warrant-mahmoud-khalil

ICE Admits They Didn't Have a Warrant When They Arrested Mahmoud Khalil

"ICE has admitted it detained Mahmoud illegally and without a warrant—to justify it, they are now flat out lying with an absurd claim that he tried to flee. At every step of the way, the Trump administration has flouted the law," said Samah Sisay, a staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Another attorney for Khalil, Amy Greer, said she was on the phone with Khalil, his wife, and even spoke to the agent making the arrest on March 8.

"In the face of multiple agents in plain clothes who clearly intended to abduct him, and despite the fact that those agents repeatedly failed to show us a warrant, Mahmoud remained calm and complied with their orders," she said Thursday. "Today we now know why they never showed Mahmoud that warrant—they didn't have one."

Frankly everything about the Gestapo abduction and attempted deportation of Khalil follows the now-typical Trump regime pattern of being a Russian nesting doll of fascist fuckery. Khalil, who is legally residing in the United States with his American wife, is being targeted simply for his role as an important spokesman for the student encampment anti-genocide protestors at Columbia, under the guise of fighting wholly made up "antisemitism in higher education." The regime has admitted that Khalil committed no crimes, and claims the authority to detain and deport him simply because the fascist Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, feels that Khalil is a hinderance to American foreign policy objectives; which sure does sound like the government is targeting Khalil on behalf of our genocidal client state, Israel.

None of this is about enforcing the law or protecting the American public; the regime decided its goal was to crack down on anti-genocide student protestors and the easiest way to do that was to go after foreign students who protested against the genocide in Gaza through the executive branch's expanded authority over foreign policy and immigration matters. The "criminal" was identified, before the "crime" was decided on; which is a sure sign of an authoritarian regime weaponizing the law to engage in political repression. As such, it's hardly surprising that Trump's Gestapo, ICE, didn't bother to get its paperwork in order before snatching Khalil, nor that they're lying about thinking he was a flight risk to justify it after the fact. Fascists don't care about the law except in so much as it can help them persecute their targets, and the Trumpenreich regime is not exceptional in that respect.

#Fascism #Trump #MahmoudKhalil #ICE #DHS #Gaza #Genocide #Imperialism #Israel #PoliceState #IdeologicalPolicing #Rubio #CampusProtests #Columbia

In that same vein, I'd like to talk a little more about the regime's pattern of identifying the "criminal" they want to target, before determining what "crime" they're being charged with, in regards to its targeting of foreign students who expressed anti-genocide sentiments while legally studying in the United States. Nowhere is the authoritarian inversion of the process of legal enforcement more apparent than in the abduction, detainment, and attempted deportation of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University student targeted by the regime for writing an op-ed calling for the school to divest from its financial relationships with companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel, as it commits a genocide in Gaza.

What makes Öztürk's case so revealing is that we have access to a State Department memo that shows Foggy Bottom knew the regime had no case against her, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio was advised to use his (presumed) authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to accomplish the desired goal - attempting to deport Öztürk for her completely legal exercise of free speech rights to criticize her school and its support for a genocide.

https://truthout.org/articles/state-department-found-no-evidence-of-dhss-reasons-for-abducting-tufts-ozturk/

State Department Found No Evidence of DHS’s Reasons for Abducting Tufts Student

"The Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing a State Department memo, that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had not provided any evidence of Öztürk engaging in activity labelled antisemitic or “terrorist” supporting. Additionally, searches of government databases did not turn up any evidence of Öztürk participating in terrorism-related activity.

As a result, Secretary of State Marco Rubio lacked grounds to revoke her visa under certain immigration provisions allowing him to do so. Instead, the department recommended a different authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act that legal experts cited by the Post say allow Rubio to revoke immigration status that does not require “a rationale and explanation and evidence.”

The agency recommended a “silent” revocation of Öztürk’s visa as part of that authority, the memo reportedly says, meaning that the administration would not notify her of the action.

Days later, immigration agents “disappeared” Öztürk, with footage showing that they swarmed her on the street outside of her home and forced her into an unmarked car."

Folks, this is literally the smoking gun that proves what anyone who isn't a disingenuous apologist already knows in their heart; the Trump regime is transforming the law into a weapon to punish protestors, intimidate dissidents, and suppress the free speech of folks who oppose Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. These fascist jackanapes are literally so incompetent that their own memos prove they're inverting the legal process to target portions of their political opposition in a very visible type of fascist ideological policing. Anyone still arguing that this isn't a fascist government while the Trump regime itself is more or less shouting "yes we're doing fascism" in its internal memos, is either a fool, or thinks you are.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #DHS #StateDepartment #MarcoRubio #Gaza #Genocide #Palestine #Israel #Imperialism #SettlerColonialism #RumeysaOzturk #Kidnapping #Tufts

After threatening to target the media several hundred times since he first announced his candidacy for President, Trump is now instructing his bootlicking Attorney General Pam Bondi to make his war on journalists possible. Although Bondi is acting in the context of hunting down leakers in the Department of Defense, the reality is that Downmarket Mussolini will almost certainly come for his critics in the media and the sources they speak to, next.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/bondi-journalism-protections

Bondi Shreds Biden-Era Protections for Journalists as Trump White House Hunts Leakers

"As part of a renewed crackdown on leaks, Bondi said she is issuing revised Justice Department regulations stating that media outlets "must answer subpoenas" related to efforts to uncover sources of unauthorized disclosures within the federal government.

"The policy contemplates the use of subpoenas, court orders, and search warrants to compel production of information and testimony by and relating to members of the news media, subject to the Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000aa, and the approval of the department's leadership in some instances," the memo states. "The attorney general must also approve efforts to question or arrest members of the news media."

As I alluded to above, I find US corporate media's bloodless, minutiae-focused reporting on Bondi's actions here curious and alarming given that the Trump regime is giving itself the power to come after them and their journalists. Obviously the regime is acting in response to the embarrassing leaks surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the investigation DNI Tulsi Gabbard is conducting into those leaks. None of this is happening in a vacuum however, and I don't know who it serves to report only in the narrow context of the regime's narrative here.

Like let's cut the crap right? During his first administration, Trump's Department of Justice already tried to go after reporters to expose their sources. Trump is a guy who threatened journalists with implied carceral sexual assault if they didn't give up their sources, on the campaign trail. The Kelpto Kaiser has literally said negative reporting about himself and his regime should be "illegal." The regime is weaponizing the FCC and holding McCarthy-esque hearings lead by fascist conspiracy crank-turned Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene to target NPR and PBS for criticizing Trump and admitting LGBTQ people exist in American life. Trump is literally exerting so much pressure on CBS over the editing on a 60 Minutes segment featuring Kamala Harris (a woman he already beat in the 2024 US election) that the program's longtime editor resigned because the show's independence was compromised.

I honestly couldn't give a rats ass about warmongers working for a fascist regime who get caught leaking, but surely it doesn't take a psychic to realize that the would-be dictator already targeting media that criticizes or opposes his fascist agenda, is going to use new Department of Justice guidelines that let him more freely target media that criticize or oppose his fascist agenda, to further target media that criticizes or opposes his fascist agenda. This isn't rocket science here. For corporate media outlets to pretend this story is purely about internal leaks inside Pete Hegseth's staff strains credulity, and would appear to be very shortsighted indeed.

#Fascism #Trump #PamBondi #Leaks #FreedomOfThePress #FreeSpeech #Dictatorship #DoJ #PeteHegseth #Journalists #MTG #IdeologicalPolicing #PoliceState #GOP #USPol #60Minutes #CBS #PBS #NPR #FCC

After Charlottesville in 2017, I wrote an essay correctly predicting much of Trump's final six months in office and the coup attempt he'd launch after losing the 2020 election. Although I didn't discuss whether or not I thought that coup attempt would succeed at that time because I was more interested in stopping it in advance, I did theorize that as long as the US military stayed out of the equation, Downmarket Mussolini could make a passable attempt to retain power and govern as a dictator through some combination of police forces, ICE, the Insurrection Act, some percentage of state National Guard units, and martial law. Naturally then, I was very concerned when Trump spent the final portion of his first term courting that exact coalition and telling anyone who would listen that he wouldn't accept any election he lost. In the long run however Trump's coup failed because he didn't lock down the security forces he needed to actually complete and enforce the coup; like a lot of things Der Leader does, he tried to bullshit his way over the finish line with a half-baked autogolpe and the whole thing flopped.

Given all that, I must confess that Trump's latest executive order further empowering and militarizing American police forces while integrating their training and operational structures with the military and the Department of Homeland Security, is triggering alarm bells loud enough to shake every fiber of my being right now.

https://archive.ph/WLyOo

Trump’s Newest Executive Order “Unleashes” the Cops—and Flirts With Martial Law

"Now, Donald Trump has issued an executive order that will make it even harder to hold cops accountable—and flirts blatantly with martial law. Named the dystopian “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” this new order purports to “unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.”

The aggressive language in the order could be cribbed from any military police state in the annals of history, and that’s clearly the kind of polity that Trump would like to create and lead. The order instructs the secretary of defense to put down the bottle long enough to “determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.” It also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to “advance the objectives of this order.”

Careful readers will note that this sounds an awful lot like the prelude to martial law, a framework where national military assets are deployed in American cities to enforce the president’s priorities. That would, of course, be a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prevents the president from using the American military as a domestic police force. But I think it’s well established that Trump has never watched The West Wing and doesn’t respect the rule of law in this country anyway."

If I'm being honest I don't think Elie Mystal, is being alarmist *enough* given the scope of this executive order. If you were purposely trying to create a fascist police state under a perpetual enforcement of martial law, this is the exact kind of policy you'd enact. Democratic countries, even faux-democratic liberal capitalist "democracies," separate law enforcement, counterterrorism, and military forces for a reason; dictators around the world rely on a full state oppression apparatus precisely because you can't control a fascist police state without controlling the entire security apparatus of that state, and integrating them the way Trump is trying to do here facilitates that unification and full state oppression structure. Although Mystal doesn't mention it, I challenge any reasonable person to figure out a good reason to provide military training and Homeland Security support to American police forces unless you're planning on treating them like an occupying army.

All of which is still ignoring the obvious authoritarian objectives Mystal does discuss. This executive order does make it borderline impossible to hold police, an already protected class in our society, criminally accountable for their actions; in fact it ensures they won't even be charged by instructing the Department of Justice to go after officials who try to prosecute police. This order *will* also further militarize US police forces that already look like the Army occupying Iraq due to prior initiatives to provide murderpigs with military gear through the DoD. Finally, I think Mystal is correct to connect Trump's promise of pro-bono legal aid to cops who break the law, with the regime's efforts to secure nearly a billion dollars worth of promised pro-bono work from bigtime DC Law firms who sold their soul to Trump out of cowardice and greed.

#Trump #Fascism #PoliceState #Police #DHS #DoJ #MartialLaw #Military #Occupation

As the methodology and operational systems of Trump's fascist regime come into focus, human rights observers in the US are increasingly comfortable calling what we're observing, what it actually is; namely fascism. A collection of government watchdogs and civil liberties groups have compiled a report for the UN detailing the Trump regime's assault on civil rights, employment of a vast surveillance panopticon, and descent into an open authoritarian police state. Now these observers are calling on the UN to condemn the regime's anti-democratic activities ahead of a review of America's behavior at the UN Human Rights Council.

https://truthout.org/articles/rights-groups-detail-authoritarian-reality-of-us-surveillance-in-report-to-un/

Rights Groups Detail “Authoritarian” Reality of US Surveillance in Report to UN

"A new report from human rights experts urges the United Nations to condemn the “evaporation of fundamental rights” in the United States, where the Trump administration is using high-tech surveillance tools and a nebulous “anti-terrorism” legal framework that has ballooned since 9/11 to weaponize law enforcement against social movements that challenge state power.

While the legally dubious arrests of pro-Palestine student activists and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego García along with other immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador have received the most media attention, these cases provide only a peek into the expanding surveillance dragnet President Donald Trump and his appointees have at their disposal, which includes tools capable of sucking up an unprecedented amount of online personal data.

“The human rights violations described in the report make clear that the U.S. is in an authoritarian political reality where the Trump administration, Congress, and state governments have fully suspended international human rights and are engaging in tactics of repression that are hallmarks of fascist regimes,” said Nadia Ben-Youssef, advocacy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, in a statement.

Released on April 24 by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology; the University of Dayton Human Rights Center; the University of California, Irvine School of Law; and a coalition of civil liberties groups, the report highlights alleged violations of international human rights law under the Trump administration and outlines a vast surveillance apparatus used to repress freedom of expression. The report was submitted to the UN Human Rights Council, which is scheduled for a regular review of U.S. human rights commitments in November. The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the council in February, as he did in his first administration."

Obviously the report focuses on the Trump administration's kidnapping of foreign student anti-genocide protestors, and Der Leader's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to justify trafficking migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador, but I think the inclusion of the vast surveillance apparatus the regime is deploying to stifle free expression, punish opposition, and conduct its illegal mass deportation agenda is an equally important, and far less examined part of this analysis. While you can reasonably articulate a large number of contributing factors in analyzing how we came to this moment under Trump, I strongly feel that it's impossible to properly tell that story without looking at the surveillance state and counterterrorism procedures the United States adopted after 9/11. Without antiterrorism laws and the "homeland security" framework we constructed to enforce them, much of the fascist repression Trump is engaging in right now would not even be possible, let alone plausibly justifiable under a Simon Says winger reading of American law.

As the report details, the scope of this fascist panopticon, which again, Trump mostly inherited from the War on Terror, is large enough so as to be ubiquitous:

"What remains unanswered in many of these cases is how the government identified, tracked down, and targeted immigrants and activists in the first place. According to the report, digital surveillance in the U.S. is so comprehensive that people reasonably fear taking action that could invite government intrusion into their lives or the lives of people they associate with, which violates principles of freedom of expression. Both law enforcement and private right-wing groups used facial recognition technology to identify activists during anti-genocide protests, which has led to protests by students demanding free speech protections.

To track down targets for deportation, immigration police are using social media scanning tools to geolocate individuals and identify home addresses by accessing license plate databases, utility billing databases, app-based location data, and other online data sold by private data brokers, according to the report."

I don't know that anybody reading this needs the UN to confirm what they already know, but don't let cowards, collaborators, and nazis tell you it's wrong to call this fascism.

Continuing to push a manufactured moral crisis about "antisemitism on college campuses" to justify the Trump regime's war on higher education, free speech, and protest rights, the fascist GOP are holding another round of HUAC-style "antisemitism" hearings; this time targeting the presidents of Haverford College, DePaul University, and California Polytechnic State University. In response to this latest perverse appropriation of Jewish identity and anti-hate activism to justify a genocide, ideological policing, and fascist repression of student activists, Congressional Democrats, free speech advocates, and Jewish peace activists are all speaking out against the conflation of anti-genocide activism with antisemitism, and these clownshow McCarthyite hearings as a whole.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/house-antisemitism-hearing

Jewish Voices for Palestine and Free Speech Slam House GOP 'Kangaroo Hearing' on Antisemitism

"Tali Beckwith-Cohen, a Jewish senior at Columbia-affiliated Barnard College, argued: "The Trump regime is using false allegations of antisemitism to disappear our friends, punish student protestors, and dismantle higher education. What we are seeing has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe, and everything to do with crushing dissent."

"Thousands of Jews on campuses across the country have spoken out in solidarity with the people of Gaza and we will not be silent," Beckwith-Cohen vowed.

JVPA political director Beth Miller contended that "the far-right does not care about Jewish safety."

"Trump and his allies in Congress are platforming neo-Nazis and Christian nationalists, all while pretending to care about antisemitism in order to take a hatchet to our communities and most basic freedoms," Miller added. "This is intended to silence the Palestinian rights movement, sow chaos, and sharpen authoritarian tools that will then be used to dismantle civil liberties and democracy itself."

Alright there's a lot of absolutely wild shit going on here, all of which contribute to the stunning DARVO-esque fascist unreality being created by this spectacle; so we've got to go through it all.

- Yes multiple GOP members sitting on this commission are either racists or antisemites themselves; including the chair, Michigan's own Tim Walberg who suggested during a recorded town hall that Israel should nuke Gaza like "Hiroshima and Nagasaki" after October 7th. Using an expansive definition of antisemitism that conflates opposition to Zionism and Israeli crimes against Palestine with antisemitism, the Republicans managed to extract groveling apologies from the University Presidents, who supported Republican lies and threw the free speech rights of their students and faculty to the wolves without too much provocation.

- Numerous Jewish students and anti-genocide activists accused the GOP members of the committee of appropriating Jewish pain and identity to justify a campaign of ideological policing, authoritarian repression, and illegal kidnapping of student protestors. This matters because while the Trump regime and pro-genocide mainstream media outlets have worked very hard to portray anti-genocide student protests as inherently antisemitic, the fact is that Jewish Americans are massively overrepresented in the anti-genocide protest movement on college campuses. Their voices are consistently erased from the discourse by an establishment working hard to manufacture consent for a US-backed genocide being conducted by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza.

- As former ACLU national legal director David Cole pointed out, anti-Israel advocacy and even actual antisemitic speech are still protected under the First Amendment; although obviously hate crimes and threats are not. Professor Cole also mentioned the disturbing parallels between this hearing and the House Un-American Activities Committee sessions from the days of McCarthyism. Finally, Cole drew the obvious connection between the GOP member's arguments and the Trump regimes larger authoritarian attempt to ideologically police and take academic control of American universities.

- Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar also pointed out the direct connection between the committee's activities and the Trump regime's ongoing campaign of kidnapping, detainment, and attempted deportation of noncitizen activists to suppress anti-genocide protest and speech. Additionally *multiple* other Democrat politicians on the committee expressed disbelief that the clearly-cynical "party of 'very fine people on both sides' or ' Jewish space lasers' does not give a damn about stopping antisemitism," particularly while openly and disdainfully neglecting to bright forth literally any other type of civil rights investigation or legal case against marginalized people being victimized anywhere else in American life.

#Fascism #GOP #Genocide #Gaza #Trump #Israel #StudentProtests #FreeSpeech #DemocraticParty #IlhanOmar #DavidCole #ACLU #Antisemitism #TimWalberg #JVPA #McCarthyism #IdeologicalPolicing #Propaganda

This past weekend, one of the most terrifying episodes of the Trump regime's war on dissent played out in a Chicago airport, and unless you're big into Twitch streams or YouTube culture, there's a pretty good chance you didn't even hear about it. On Sunday, the most popular left wing political streamer on Twitch, Hasan Piker, was stopped at the airport after returning from a speaking engagement in France, detained, and questioned in what was far as I can tell was an exercise in attempted entrapment, for a little over two hours by Customs and Border Protection. Piker is a prominent critic of the Trump regime and Israel's ongoing, US-backed genocide in Gaza and even if you haven't heard of him, I guarantee you that your kids have; he's "a whole big deal" in the political streaming scene.

According to Piker, who I have no reason to disbelieve, the CBP interrogator directly asked him about his political positions, his support for Palestine, and his opinions on Trump himself; none of which is any of the government's goddamn business. The agent also seemed very determined to directly link Piker to organizations the US government has labelled as terrorist (Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis) for the purposes of extending his detention. At one point Piker reports that he was grilled about whether or not he had ever interviewed a member of these organizations; despite the fact that Hasan is effectively a member of the media, interviewing people we're bombing or helping to bomb the shit out of is journalism, and American journalists seek out interviews with "our enemies" all the time. Piker had not actually interviewed any members of those organizations, but objectively it doesn't matter if he had and the government once again has no business asking that question.

All of which brings us to the *really* weird part of this story; the fact that a large number of the CPB agent's questions seemed to be formulated directly from accusations made by a Zionist streamer going through a protracted public mental health episode, or a pro-Trump fascist streamer who hasn't washed his body in years; both of whom do not like Hasan and have based a lot of their content around trying to paint him as a terrorist sympathizer and an enemy of the United States. In other words, the fascist government of the United States has someone watching right wing fucking Twitch streams and YouTube personalities to find targets for state repression and accusations to prosecute against them; no, really, that does appear to be what's happening here.

As absurd as all that is however, I agree very much with Piker when he theorizes that the purpose of stopping him for the regime is to send a message to other small (by industry standards) content creators affecting the discourse and criticizing the Trump regime. These nazis want you to know that the eye is always watching, dissent is at least vaguely criminal, and they can get anyone, anywhere, at any time, for anything they like whether it's actually illegal or not. Piker's high profile in the streaming/Youtuber communities, and the fact that he perpetually lives on camera, likely made him the ideal target to send that message to the rest of his community. Factually speaking, I don't think Trump has the power to march into the head offices of say MSNBC and just start arresting journalists, yet. But the regime certainly can start going after independent creators in the media environment without too much trouble, and as such I think it would be foolish to believe the regime's attempts to suppress the media and quash dissent aren't more likely to start with the "little guys" like Hasan. I can't predict the future, but I'm absolutely certain that the threat is real, and Piker won't be the last independent critic of the regime, or Israel's US-backed genocide in Gaza, to be targeted this way.

Finally, I'm not sure this video offers up anything I didn't talk about here, but I like to source my claims out here as you know, so here's Mike Figeuredo of The Humanist Report discussing the situation, with clips from Hasan Piker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUUQQ2NIgYI

The Humanist Report: Leftist Twitch Streamer Hasan Piker Detained & Questioned Over His Anti-Trump Views

"Twitch streamer Hasan Piker announced on Sunday that he was detained and questioned by CBP for approximately two hours at an airport after returning home from an international flight. He explains that a federal agent knew a lot about him and questioned him about his views on Trump and Israel/Palestine. Hasan says he thinks he was detained so the Trump administration could send a message to other content creators like him."

#Fascism #Trump #Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Palestine #HasanPiker #Censorship #IdeologicalPolicing #CBP #PoliceState #Dissent #Media #TheHumanistReport #Twitch #MikeFigueredo #Dictatorship

As I approach four months of analyzing the news in the second Trump era, I'm still frequently alarmed at the way the surreal, "assclown circus" atmosphere of the entire Trump regime, somehow functions to mask and minimize the overt fascist machinations and operations the government and the president himself engage in. Take for example the recent story about Downmarket Mussolini getting into a spat with, and then openly threatening aging American rocker Bruce Springsteen; a consistent critic of the Trump regime, and longtime supporter of the Democratic Party.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-warns-springsteen-ought-keep-151423368.html

‘Trump Warns Springsteen: “He Ought to Keep His Mouth Shut Until He’s Back Into the Country”

"Earlier this week, Bruce Springsteen launched his “Land of Hope and Dreams Tour” in Manchester, England. The opening concert proved to be a decidedly political affair, as the New Jersey rocker repeatedly took aim at the Trump Administration with a series of pointed speeches throughout the night. “In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, and has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous administration,” Springsteen proclaimed at the top of the concert. Later, he remarked, “A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government.”

It seems Donald Trump has finally got wind of Springsteen’s comments (possibly via Fox News), and on Friday, he responded in a post on Truth Social. “I see that Highly Overrated Bruce Springsteen goes to a Foreign Country to speak badly about the President of the United States. Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — Just a pushy, obnoxious JERK,” Trump wrote.

He then issued what some may perceive as a not so subtle threat: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Okay, so on the surface is this story kind of funny? Yes. One of the most bizarre things about Trump is the way the president mentally lives in a version of reality dominated by fame and public image, and thus his already quite bizarre feuds with variously liberal celebrities are often unhinged and highly-charged emotionally. Freaking out about a rock star's skin when you look like a bag of oatmeal covered in pancake makeup is a bold, but puerile move my dude. The whole thing is pathetic, weird, and makes the President of the United States look like an assclown; which probably really matters to boutique liberal snark media outlets, but isn't actually anything that materially moves the needle.

The thing is, Der Leader didn't stop typing after he mocked Springsteen's skin; the President then proceeded to issue a demand for silence and a thinly-veiled threat to punish the again, famous liberal rockstar, in unclear ways. Whether you want to talk about using the bully pulpit to try and suppress the constitutionally-protected free speech rights of a prominent critic, or the clear if undefined threat towards that same critic, this is fascist dictator shit and it's illegal. Given the regime's weaponization of the Department of Justice against media critical of the government, the abduction and attempted deportation of student anti-genocide protestors including at least one woman who did nothing more than write an op-ed, and even the recent detainment and questioning of anti-Trump, anti-genocide streamer Hasan Piker by CBP in Chicago, it seems to me that we should probably take Trump seriously when he threatens an outspoken rock star he doesn't like too.

So why exactly is the lead story in the vast majority of corporate media outlets "ha ha, Trump is such a pathetic narcissist" and not "the fascist President just threatened Bruce Springsteen?" Yahoo had to pull that analysis from an upscale blog I've never heard of; and I'm not seeing much focus on the important part of this story in The Guardian, NBC, or ABC for example. Given what we already know about what this administration is prepared to do to silence dissent, I don't think chalking it up to Trump being a loser is gonna cut it; and yet that's where we're at across much of the mainstream media environment.

Look, it's not lost on me that Trump, his sycophants, and state media outlet Fox News are all gonna deny what Der Führer said was a threat, but like I've said before, just because lying nazis play disingenuous games of Simon Says doesn't mean we have to pretend they're speaking in good faith. You know it's a threat, and I know it's a threat; so does the media, they're just too scared of Trump to focus on the important part of the story.

#Fascismt #Trump #PoliceState #BruceSpringsteen #FreeSpeech #Authoritarianism #Dictatorship #Media #IdeologicalPolicing #Dissent

As every move Trump makes builds towards ideological purges, martial law, and a war against the broader left, news leaks that Thiel-backed firm Palantir is supercharging the Pork Reich’s panopticon in a story right out of science fiction dystopias.

https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/06/05/one-eye-to-see-them-all/

One Eye To See Them All

"The Pork Reich has made no secret about its intentions to transform America into a fascist dictatorship under a perpetual state of something that sure does look like martial law. With an already-functioning militarized police state at his disposal, the biggest obstacle facing Downmarket Mussolini is the pure logistics involved in tracking and targeting all the folks who have no place in the “new America” he’s trying to build. Now, just like IBM punch card computers allowed Hitler to conduct the Holocaust, noted supervillain Thiel, his shadowy contracting company, and the power of “AI” are offering a way for Trump to unlock that panopticon and use it to empower a police state that would make East Germany at the height of the Cold War jealous."

#Trump #Fascism #Palantir #Panopticon #PoliceState #USPol #PeterThiel #MassSurveillance #AI #Dissent #FirstAmendment

While I understand why some liberals get frustrated when left wing analysts stress the bipartisan nature of the US establishment's efforts to create a new McCarthyism, and support for deploying an already existing police state against student anti-genocide protestors, I'd like to think that months into the Kelpto Kaiser's openly fascist presidency, it's clear to reasonable observers why this matters. The conflation of anti-genocide, with antisemitism and support for Hamas, an organization the US government had labelled as "terrorist" long before Trump took office, as well as public demonization of student protestors calling for the larger US establishment to sever ties with Israel, and the normalization of militarized police responses on university campuses, all supported by both the Biden administration *and* the larger "liberal" capitalist establishment, are so foundational to Trump's expanded fascist repression of protestors and critics, that you can't separate one from the other; even while acknowledging that Downarket Mussolini is using that bipartisan support in appalling ways Biden did not, to drive his larger fascist agenda.

The other reason you can't separate the support of the larger liberal establishment from the fascist shit Trump is doing to anti-genocide, pro-Palestinian protestors now is because said liberal establishment hasn't actually stopped engaging in their own acts of fascist repression targeting student protestors. For an example of what I'm talking about, let's return to my home state of Michigan, where sharp-minded readers may recall Dem state AG Dana Nessel got into hot water in April after she allowed FBI (so, federal) agents and local law enforcement to smash in the doors of pro-Palestine anti-genocide activists connected to the University of Michigan, and then told a bunch of big stupid lies about why that didn't mean she was working with Trump to target student protestors. Well I'm sorry to say the targeted harassment and intimidation of pro-Palestine activists at UM continues, but this time it's coming from the university itself.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/michigan-university-gaza-surveillance

University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters

"The surveillance appears to largely be an intimidation tactic, five students who have been followed, recorded or eavesdropped on said. The undercover investigators have cursed at students, threatened them and in one case drove a car at a student who had to jump out of the way, according to student accounts and video footage shared with the Guardian.

Students say they have frequently identified undercover investigators and confronted them. In two bizarre interactions captured by one student on video, a man who had been trailing the student faked disabilities, and noisily – and falsely – accused a student of attempting to rob him.

The undercover investigators appear to work for Detroit-based City Shield, a private security group, and some of their evidence was used by Michigan prosecutors to charge and jail students, according to a Guardian review of police records, university spending records and video collected in legal discovery. Most charges were later dropped. Public spending records from the U-M board of regents, the school’s governing body, show the university paid at least $800,000 between June 2023 and September 2024 to City Shield’s parent company, Ameri-Shield."

There are a lot of local political winds in the background of this story, but the key point here is that UM is hiring private goons to intimidate activists calling on the university to stop supporting Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of which are their own students. Furthermore, there's no evidence whatsoever that Trump is making them do this; UM, which proudly bills itself as a Midwestern bastion of enlightened liberal culture and a leadership factory for broader American society, just really wants to scare students into silence on its own, and in doing so happily prosecutes Trump's agenda for him.

The point I'm getting at is that when a school like Michigan, acts against its own students and communities in the precise way Trump would do himself, it's hard to believe that school sincerely opposes Trump, or even his fascist policies. And while this is just one school, this act of doing one thing and saying another is being replicated all across the broader US liberal establishment in both the public and private sectors. This has helped, and continues to help Trump in his quest to intimidate American universities and crush dissent under the guise of fighting made up antisemitism half of that liberal establishment continues to falsely insist exists broadly on the anti-genocide left. Until such a time as so-called "liberal" leaders stop supporting actions and ideology that harms protestors and furthers the goals of a fascist regime, they will remain a vital part of this story.

#UM #Fascism #Gaza #Genocide #Palestine #Israel #Protestors #Trump

In a recent Journal published on NIDC, I argued Trump's fascist invasion of LA would become the defining story of his second presidential term. Part of what I meant by that is that the Trumpenreich invasion of LA would come to influence and affect almost every story out of the Klepto Kaiser's regime, subtly or not so subtly changing the meaning and gravity of everything Trump and his cronies do or say, going forward.

A good example of what that looks like in action, can be found in the president's recent terrifying comments about meeting anyone who dared to protest his fascist birthday boy military parade with "very heavy force." While this statement and Trump's subsequent attempts to avoid clarification are getting some play in the news, veteran human rights observers are rightfully pointing out that the president did not use the word "violent" and thus just threatened to attack people with his police state for simply protesting this ostentatious fascist shitshow.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-heavy-force-military-parade-protesters

Amnesty Condemns Trump Threat of 'Very Heavy Force' Against Military Parade Protesters

"In Tuesday remarks to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said he didn't know of any planned protests timed to coincide with his $134-million parade, taking place on his birthday, but said if there are, "these are people that hate our country."

"For those people who want to protest, they're going to be met with very big force," Trump said, making no distinction between peaceful demonstrators and those who might be more confrontational or even violent.

"Now is a good moment to remind President Trump that protesting is a human right and that his administration is obligated to respect, protect, and fulfill the human rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly–not suppress them," said Paul O'Brien, executive director of Amnesty International USA, in a statement on Wednesday."

Alright, let's deal with the elephant in the room right away; no, I do not actually think Trump intends to shoot what will almost certainly be well-behaved liberals attending organized "No Kings" protests. I do however believe that Trump's use of the naked word "protestors" was entirely intentional, and he is purposely trying to intimidate his political enemies by suggesting he might shoot suburban white liberal families waving pre-printed signs about Trump not being our king, and thus exercising their constitutionally protected rights to nonviolently protest the US government. Trump absolutely wants people who vote Democrat and think he's an assclown to be afraid they might get shot for protesting, and he's relying on the ambiguity of whether or not he just forgot to say "violent" to convey that message without any real consequences for the regime.

In my opinion however, this crass attempt at political intimidation is not the primary purpose for Trump's wholly intentional "misstep" here, and that's where we get back to the invasion of LA shaping almost every Trumpenreich story going forward. The entire Pork Reich has just spent the past six days conflating protests with riots, vandalism with violence, and resistance to fascist ICE raids with an actual insurrection against the US government. They've portrayed protestors in LA as a foreign invasion, spread conspiracy theories about the people in the streets being paid agitators enacting a plot to overthrow Trump, and pretended all of Los Angeles is an apocalyptic warzone that justifies potentially lethal military responses. Trump knows the regime has put in the work to convince a significant portion of the US public that "protestor" means "violent insurrectionist" and or "a terrorist who wants to destroy America" and he made sure to tie that implication into what he said. In other words, the protests on June 14th won't have to actually be violent to justify whatever the regime intends to do next, the mere act of protesting will be understood by much of America to be an attack on Trump and the US military that warrants some type of maximalist state response.

So, what is that response likely to be? Well I'm not in the rampant speculation business, but as I noted above, I don't really see what shooting a bunch of sign-waving milquetoast soccer moms and grill dads actually gets the regime here. If however Trump and his fascist lackeys were able to *pretend* the No Kings, anti-birthday military parade protests were the beginnings of a national uprising against the US state, that could be used to justify invoking the Insurrection Act, instituting martial law across much of America, and deploying military forces to anti-Trump "hotspots" all over the country. Is that the plan here? I'm sure on some level the regime has discussed it, and they're clearly propagandizing like they want to give it a go at some point. Whether or not recent setbacks will give the Trumpenreich cold feed by Saturday however, remains an open question.

#Fascism #Trump #MilitaryParade #CivilRights #Dictatorship #USPol #InvasionOfLA

In another thread and some recent conversations on my personal account, I talked a little bit about why the Trump regime's actions in court signal that they have no intention of ceasing their ideological policing of anti-genocide, pro-Palestine critics, through the federally-controlled immigration process. As if to demonstrate the point, the US government has deported an Australian blogger returning to the country, expressly for his writings about Israel's genocide in Gaza, and anti-genocide student protests in the United States.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/15/australian-deported-from-us-says-he-was-targeted-due-to-writing-on-pro-palestine-student-protests

Australian deported from US says he was ‘targeted’ due to writing on pro-Palestine student protests

"The 33-year-old said he was “clearly targeted for politically motivated reasons” and said officials spent more than 30 minutes questioning him about his views on Israel and Palestine including his “thoughts on Hamas”.

Kitchen said officials asked him for his “thoughts about the conflict in a very broad sense”, including about student protesters, what Israel “should have done differently” and “how I would resolve the conflict”.

“It was quite an in-depth probing of my views on the war,” he said.

Kitchen said he was deported and landed back in Melbourne on Saturday morning.

“The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia on Sunday. The US Department of Homeland Security was contacted for comment."

To be clear, Kitchen is not a resident of the United States and nothing CBP did is strictly illegal; it's not like they kidnapped him and threw him in private prison cage, as they have done to anti-genocide protestors and critics in America where immigration law made it possible (but not legal.) However the blogger's testimony makes it clear that US immigration officials knew who he was in advance, wanted to grill him on his writing about the genocide and anti-genocide protests on college campuses, and denied him entry for the purely ideological reason that he doesn't support Trump's genocide or fascist repression of student protestors. The investigating officials made up some bullshit about there being evidence of drug use on Kitchen's phone, but their laser-like focus on his writing makes it abundantly clear that this was fascist ideological policing.

Folks, let's be clear here; Kitchen is a guy with a conscience who maintains a small blog. He is not a threat to the US government, and there was no valid reason to deny him entry to the United States or deport him whatsoever. Immigration enforcement under the Trump regime is clearly about keeping the kind of people Trump himself doesn't like out of the country, and has nothing to do with the law, national security, or keeping us safe.

This episode brings us back to something I was talking about when immigration pigs harassed and detained Hasan Piker at the Chicago airport, in that it speaks to the scope of the Trump regime's ideological policing. These fascist pigs are tracking Twitch streamers and guys writing blogs with a few thousand regular readers (folks not unlike myself) and the only reason this is all focused on immigrants and foreign visitors to the United States is because that's the part of the government Trump more or less controls completely. The regime thinks opposing the regime itself is a crime, and as soon as they can make this ideological policing an operational program domestically, you can bet that they're coming for American-born critics in the same ways, and for the same reasons.

#Fascism #Trump #CBP #Immigration #AlistairKitchen #IdeologicalPolicing #MassSurveillance #Panopticon #PoliceState #Gaza #Genocide

I'd like to talk about a story that's a big deal in Georgia, but isn't breaking through the current news cycle nationally; specifically the arrest and presumed attempted deportation of influential Spanish-language journalist Mario Guevara for, I shit you not, "improperly entering a roadway, obstruction of a law enforcement officer and unlawful assembly" during an anti-ICE protest in the Atlanta. This June 16th Guardian report by George Chidi is enlightening in terms of what it can tell us about topics we've already been discussing on this blog; like the Gestapo's targeting of journalists during protest events, the regime's attempts to use immigration laws to silence its critics, and the types of protests our fascist police state will tolerate as opposed to those it will not.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/journalist-ice-protest-arrest-mario-guevara

Spanish-language journalist to be turned over to Ice after protest arrest

"Mario Guevara, a prominent Spanish-language journalist in metro Atlanta who frequently covers immigration and customs enforcement raids, will be turned over to Ice detention after being arrested by local police while covering the “No Kings” protests.

Guevara, 47, was born in El Salvador and has been in the United States for more than 20 years. He recorded his own arrest on Saturday during a raucous street protest in the Embry Hills area of north DeKalb county, an Atlanta suburban neighborhood with a large Latino population. The protest ended with riot police throwing teargas and marching protesters down the street after declaring an unlawful assembly."

I think it's important to read this article carefully, because the author does not come right out and say this is targeted fascist repression against a prominent media critic of the Gestapo, but the information you need to reach that conclusion is scattered throughout the piece.

For starters, Guevara is not a random YouTuber the feds wouldn't know from Adam; he's an Emmy award-winning criminal justice reporter who founded his own news organization to focus on ICE immigration enforcement. At the time of his arrest, he was streaming to over 1M viewers which the article notes, outdrew both CNN and Fox News combined. Because of his work exposing ICE abuses, this guy is more or less public enemy number one for the Gestapo in Atlanta, so when they tell you that he was arrested and they want to deport him for blocking a roadway and "obstruction," you should be extremely fucking suspicious of the feds' motives here. Although the author does not say so, what they describe in the piece is clearly a targeted abduction of an independent journalist the Gestapo hates.

"About 35 minutes into the video Guevara was live-streaming on Facebook to more than 1 million people, he can be first seen on the sidewalk, then backing away from a police officer approaching him. As he backed into the street, two other police officers immediately arrested him."

This then brings us to the transfer of Guevara to ICE detention due to his status as a migrant who has lived in the United States for over 20 years; a clear precursor to deporting him. Obviously an award-winning journalist whose crime appears to be stepping into a road to avoid a physical confrontation with a murderpig, is not a violent "criminal" nor any sort of danger to the community; a fact confirmed by his "release" on a a recognizance bond. So, what are we left with? A prominent journalist critical of the Gestapo was arrested on trumped up charges and the government is now going to try to deport him for purely ideological reasons. He exposes ICE's fascist abuses, and stands up for the rights of migrants, so they're sending him back to El Salvador despite the fact that he's been a pillar of his community and an important voice in our media for decades; full stop. In fact, I expect Trump's hate goblin Stephen Miller to brag about removing "another criminal" from our streets if they're successful in deporting Guevara, even though the charges are clearly bullshit.

Finally, don't sleep on what Chidi wrote about the difference in how Atlanta area police handled the more mainstream-liberal No Kings protest earlier that day, as opposed to the violence they displayed against the browner, less affluent Party of Socialism and Liberation protest Guevara was arrested at.

“The decision to deploy teargas – particularly in a neighborhood context with nearby homes and businesses – raises serious questions about the proportionality and justification of the county’s response to peaceful civil action,” he wrote."

In the end, I guess that's the most frustrating part of the story; were it not for Trump's ongoing fascist takeover of US life, this would be just another day in Amerikkka where brown anticapitalists get teargassed and affluent whiter people get a police escort. The reality is that Trump's takeover is real however, and that makes the targeting of Mario Guevara a part of our larger story about the (short) descent of America into a fascist dictatorship.

“When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.” - Halford E. Luccock

(This is our thread for the discussion of America's ongoing transformation, in so much as that is even necessary, into a fascist dictatorship police state; including, but not limited to internal McCarthyism in the US government, the exercise of state power to conduct ideological policing in our broader society, state targeting of activists and ideological opponents for legal reprisals or violent suppression, and the construction of a vast mass surveillance panopticon targeting protestors, ideological opposition, and dissenters in general.)

Note: due to extremely poor thread discipline on my part in 2025, I have three other threads that actually should have just been a part of this thread kicking around in my post history. Rather than reposting months-old news, I'm just going to link to those entire threads here in this post. It certainly won't look pretty, but it will make it easier for interested parties (including myself) to find my social media blog posts later if that is ever something that needs to be done.

US Domestic Mass Surveillance Programs (under Trump) - 3 Posts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114909777441450607

Trumpism as a McCarthyism Update - 2 Posts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114269457443864186

Using the "War on Terror"-fueled US counterterrorism apparatus to target protest and dissent - 3 posts: https://social.treehouse.systems/@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes/114359307758552609

As with the other threads I've revived recently, I'm going to need to post some (hopefully) shorter posts about important, literally nation-altering stories about the Trumpenreich turning America into the Pork Reich that happened over the past few months while I wasn't writing. I promise this won't last forever; my open tab bar only *feels* like an infinite tsunami of nazi bullshit. Thanks for your patience.

I've been staring at this empty box for a while now, because the first and perhaps most important event shaping the fascist environment in America today that happened while I was away from writing, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The simple truth is that I don't have anything important to say about the assassination, the person who shot him, or the various conspiracy theories surrounding Kirk's death that you haven't already heard elsewhere. Furthermore, I have almost no desire to talk about dead ass Chuckie himself, if I'm being quite honest. I don't think the world is a worse place without Charlie Kirk, I'm not sad he's dead, and asking me to mourn a guy who was in the middle of arguing trans people like myself are inherently mentally unstable and should be locked in camps to protect American society when his words finally caught up with him, is an intentional act of subjugation I refuse to participate in.

If at this late an hour, you still have any questions whatsoever about why I feel that way, please allow Charlie to tell you himself in the article below. This is a collection of direct quotes from Kirk, about a variety of subjects that are super important to American nazis precisely because they are nazis, that should more than demonstrate why Kirk's passing was not a significant loss for American society or indeed human civilization. Please keep in mind, these quotes are by no means exhaustive; nor does this represent the worst things Charlie Kirk has ever said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs

Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

"Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023"

"We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024"

Right, so the guy was a fucking nazi and I've got too many tears to cry for the victims of nazi violence and oppression in America, to spare any for dead ass Chuckie fucking Kirk. So why are we talking about him here? Well, unfortunately and as we'll see going forward in this thread, pretty much everything the Trump administration has done to accelerate its project to transform America into a literal fascist dictatorship under a quasi-permanent state of martial law, has been justified in whole or in part, by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Furthermore, because of the way all of the events immediately after Kirk's assassination played out in the political discourse, most Americans don't realize the Trump regime is still openly behaving as if everything they said about leftists and Democrats organizing terrorist cells to commit political violence is true.

In the wake of the assassination, the larger fascist American right tried to transform Kirk into a martyred civil rights icon on par with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, but for the rights of cracker Christian Nationalists and other assorted nazis. This when combined with Trump regime accusations of left wing organized terrorism, and right wing media arguments that Democrats and "liberal" media outlets (rightly) calling the Trump regime fascist were responsible for Kirk's murder, was ultimately supposed to be Trump's "Reichstag Fire." Using Kirk's murder as a pretext, the regime sought to suppress online speech, repurpose the counterterrorism apparatus to punish his perceived political and social enemies, and by transforming Kirk into a modern Horst Wessel figure, generate widespread popular support to literally turn the Hitler trick and complete America's transformation into a real as steel fascist dictatorship under the Swine Emperor.

The problem (for the regime) is the propaganda portion of this operation didn't work. After a few days of handwringing and several hundred illegal firings for social media comments, even America's "liberal" centrists came to their senses and cried bullshit. Kirk didn't become a civil rights martyr, Trump's fascist dictator agenda didn't garner widespread support, and nobody, not even the actual goddamn nazis, really believes milquetoast lib No Kings protestors are terrorists or doing a terrorism. There is however just one problem for the rest of us too; namely that hasn't stopped Trump's Injustice Department and the larger War on Terror-fueled counterterrorism apparatus from behaving as if Stephen Miller's antifa insurgency fantasies involving liberal wine moms going full Al-Qaeda are entirely real. Much in the same way everyone knowing the regime's bullshit about a drug cartel invasion is fake hasn't stopped them from using the US military to do white nationalist repression on our streets, the Trump regime clearly intends to fake it until they make it - where "it" remains a fascist dictatorship under Trump and his shadow chancellor Miller.

#Fascism #Trump #CharlieKirk #HorstWessel #Dictatorship #GOP

Frankly, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to spend a ton of time analyzing stories from last September, but I think it's still important for us to note how immediate, obvious, and direct the connection was between Charlie Kirk's assassination, Trump's increased efforts to consolidate dictatorial power, and the larger American fascist movement's propaganda to justify those measures. Take for example this September 2025 article published in Rolling Stone magazine.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-authoritarian-week-kirk-kimmel-antifa-khalil-1235431626/ (archive: https://archive.ph/UOKcQ )

Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet

"It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.

The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.

Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.

This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power."

With all due respect to Perez, Ramirez, and Suebsaeng, who are all fine journalists, this is hardly Woodward and Bernstein hooking up with Deep Throat to expose Nixon's Watergate conspiracy here. The entire fascist American right, including the Trump administration itself, spent the first week after Kirk's death openly arguing that Trump was now allowed to do fascist dictator shit because "the left" (read: some individual person disgusted by Kirk's hatemongering) killed Charlie - and then testing the limits of how far that presumed power to transform America actually goes. At one point Trump was literally threatening to pull media broadcasts licenses for outlets that criticized him "too much," while implying that NPR (a government-supported public broadcaster) might be working with the very same "antifa" he just said he wanted to declare a terrorist organization.

I'm not going to summarize the rest of the article here, but if you actual do read it you'll see that in each and every power grab, or authoritarian exercise of state power to force compliance with fascist ideological goals, Trump regime officials directly linked the justification for doing so to the idea that "the left" was a domestic and even national security threat because Charlie Kirk caught a bullet and expired. This wasn't a mystery you had to solve, this was the Trump regime's openly articulated intention. Which probably should leave you asking why, if the guys at Rolling Stone could sniff out that Trump was using Kirk's death to do dictator shit, this same realization escaped so much of our (complicit) corporate media complex - who spent most of that same week decrying political violence and weeping crocodile tears for poor ole deadass Charlie. I guess they were just too afraid of Brendan Carr and the Trumpenreich FCC; which doesn't bode well for US media independence going forward under the Swine Emperor.

#Trump #GOP #Fascism #antifa #Dictatorship #PorkReich #CharlieKirk #FCC #BrendanCarr #Media #Censorship

Perhaps the most clear articulation of how far the Trump regime intended to leverage Charlie Kirk's death to effectively criminalize their political enemies, from left wing protestors to the actual Democratic Party, was shouted into the record by the Trumpenreich's self-styled "Prime Minster" Stephen Miller, appearing on slavishly pro-Trump outlet Fox mere days after Kirk's assassination. I want to take a look at this September 13th, 2025 piece on Common Dreams because the author *extensively* quotes Miller himself, and particularly with the benefit of hindsight, I think Miller's own words have largely foretold the opening phases of a new, Trump-specific type of COINTELPRO or "Red Scare" type program that has emerged in the months since Kirk was shot.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/stephen-miller-dismantle-the-left

Miller Says He and Trump Will Use Law Enforcement to ‘Dismantle’ the Left After Kirk Shooting

"White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed Friday that he and President Donald Trump would use this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk to “dismantle” the organized left using state power.

In a rant on Fox News, Miller—the architect of Trump’s mass roundups and deportations of immigrants—shouted that the best way to honor Kirk’s memory was to carry out a political purge against the left, which he called a “domestic terrorism movement in this country.”

Miller provided few details on what specific left-wing figures or groups he believed were stoking this violence."

Bear with me here for a moment folks, because while Stephen Miller may be using made up definitions of his own terms, he rarely speaks without intention behind the words he does choose. First of all, Miller did say who he felt was stoking the violence.

"He did, however, cite many examples of harsh, but nevertheless First Amendment-protected, speech that he considered an incitement to violence, including that “the left calls people enemies of the republic, calls them fascists, says they’re Nazis, says they’re evil,” and claimed that many people online were “celebrating” Kirk’s assassination."

In other words, identifying the fascist Trump regime as fascist, is inciting violence. Which means millions of Americans, from activists, to historians, to elected politicians are the people Miller is identifying as a domestic terrorism movement in the United States. Furthermore, Miller went on to indicate precisely how the entire US government would be repurposed to target the Trumpenreich's political enemies, and while Miller himself didn't clarify that he meant powerful donors to liberal and progressive political causes, Trump certainly did.

"I don’t care how,” he said. “It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which the government has traditionally used to prosecute organized crime groups. Trump later said one of his targets for these charges may be the billionaire liberal donor George Soros, the owner of the Open Society Foundations nonprofit, whom Trump accused of funding “riots,” a charge Soros denied."

Of course the Trumpenreich has to this day tied Kirk's murder to a purely fictional "vast anitfa conspiracy" that conveniently includes literally every protester, activist group, civil rights attorney, and opposition party politician in the country to create an obviously false pretense of legality. Not that it really matters, because as Miller also articulated in the interview the real crime is opposing fascism, which means opposing Trump, and the actual legal code has absolutely nothing to do with it.

"Miller did not limit his call to destroying those who commit crimes. He also spoke of those “spreading this evil hate,” telling them, “You will live in exile. Because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, to take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

So you caught that right? Miller just admitted the Trump regime intends to persecute its political enemies whether or not they've broken the law; which is not only brazenly unconstitutional, but also borne out by the past six months of our news cycle. From assassinating anti-Gestapo protestors in Minneapolis, to trying to prosecute Trump's political enemies in the American establishment for crossing him, while compiling multiple secret enemies lists of everyday Americans who don't support the Trump's fascist takeover of America, Miller's words have proven to be more than just red meat for the base, but rather the call of the harbinger at a feast for crows; and anyone who isn't a Trump cult nazi, is now on the menu.

#Fascism #Trump #StephenMiller #Nazis

Within days of Trumpenreich shadow chancellor Stephen Miller's ominous Fox News appearance, during which he openly declared the government's intention to criminalize political opposition to Trumpism, the regime began laying the (quasi) legal groundwork to turn Miller's threats into a reality. First Trump signed an unhinged executive order declaring "antifa" a domestic terrorist organization; despite having no power to do that, and antifa being a term for antifascist protestors, not an organization.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-signs-order-designating-antifa-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/

Trump Signs Order Designating “Antifa” a “Domestic Terrorist Organization”

"Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa — the decentralized movement against fascism — a domestic terrorist organization, although the U.S. does not have a federal domestic terrorism law.

“[Antifa] uses illegal means to organize and execute a campaign of violence and terrorism nationwide to accomplish these goals,” the order states. “This campaign involves coordinated efforts to obstruct enforcement of Federal laws through armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.”

“Because of the aforementioned pattern of political violence designed to suppress lawful political activity and obstruct the rule of law, I hereby designate Antifa as a ‘domestic terrorist organization,’” the order continues.

The order directs the federal government to investigate and prosecute “those who fund [antifa] operations.”

As the article notes, the Trump regime went out of their way to hold up anti-ICE protestors, and folks who publicly identify masked Gestapo goons, or even "political figures and activists" (on the right, of course) as part of Trump's made up "antifa" organization - which may go a long way towards explain why, months later, ICE and CBP goons were prepared to treat half the city of Minneapolis like a terrorist threat. Of course Trump was widely mocked in the media because this executive order is legally meaningless, but as we'll discover later on in this thread it doesn't really matter if Trump is just making up new powers for himself out of thin air, so long as the rest of his fascist government is prepared to pretend and act as if his word is the law. Regardless, Trump had just defined working to oppose the Trumpenreich's ethnic cleansing operation as terrorism, in writing.

Of course, the Swine Emperor's outrageous executive order only hinted at how broadly the label of "antifa," and thus terrorist, would be applied against his political enemies. The domestic terrorism memo Trump signed soon afterwards, would however make it abundantly clear that he means the more than half of the country that didn't vote for him, and doesn't want him to be America's Hitler.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-domestic-terrorism-memo-focuses-on-the-left-ignores-right-wing-violence/

Trump “Domestic Terrorism” Memo Focuses on the Left, Ignores Right-Wing Violence

"Part one of the memo attempts to explain, though very ambiguously, what it means to be “anti-fascist.” In defining what constitutes supposedly “antifa” beliefs, the memos lists “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-Christian” views. However, it doesn’t specify whether it will target groups based on actual incidents of violence or simply for professing a certain ideology. It also describes “anti-fascists” as being “extreme” on issues of “migration, race and gender,” but doesn’t provide a definition of “extreme.”

It further states that people who are generally hostile “towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” may be considered “antifa.” Earlier this week, the president issued an executive order designating “antifa” as part of a broader domestic terrorist network, despite having no legal basis to do so."

Please keep in mind that even this unhinged list of "antifa" beliefs has to be filtered through the lens of fascist right wing newspeak. Being anti-American, might just mean opposing US imperial violence. Do you think billionaires should pay a wealth tax to support the communities they pillage? That may sound like anti-capitalism to our fascist police state, who can say? Furthermore Trump pretty much said the quiet part out loud anyway when he noted that people who are "generally hostile" towards MAGA nazis, "may be" considered antifa too. "Be nice to us or we'll put you in Gitmo!"

Look, I just want to be clear - this is the fucking President of the United States, declaring in writing, that more or less 60% of the country either is a terrorist, or could be considered one if it suits the Trump regime's purposes. And as we'd learn in the months that followed, grandpa Dealz didn't just forget to take his meds that week - these were and are statements of intent for the Trumpenreich itself.

#Fascism #Trump #GOP #Antifa #PoliceState #Dictatorship #Dissent #Protest #CivilRights #SwineEmperor #PorkReich

So what exactly does it mean when the President signs a "domestic terrorism," or rather a national security directive declaring anyone left of Bull Connor is a terrorist? Well, I'm glad you asked, because for the most part US corporate media either didn't bother to report it, or treated it like another in Trump's long line of unhinged executive orders that are terrifying, but do not by themselves spring the full power of the US government into action. As this important article published by independent national security state critic Ken Klippenstein makes abundantly clear - this order has teeth, and represents "a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda."

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-common-beliefs

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

"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."

Okay you'll have to forgive me for heavy quotations, because what Ken articulated here, still hasn't sunk in enough to factor into the analysis of most corporate media minions. NSPM-7 is not only the backbone of Trump's authoritarian agenda right now, but if indeed America does become the nazi dictatorship of Trump (and the right)'s dreams, this barely reported national security directive may be the critical reason why. Since we already covered who NSPM-7 instructs to target (everyone who isn't a MAGA nazi and opposes Trump's fascist agenda, even nonviolently) I want to focus on the forces the Swine Emperor is bringing to bear on not just protestors, and activists, but scholars, media critics, elected officials, and literally anyone who isn't nice enough to nazis.

"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."

You read that correctly; by signing NSPM-7, the Swine Emperor just repurposed the entire federal counterterrorism apparatus consisting of thousands of murderpigs spread across the country to go after wine moms who call him a nazi, journalists who report on the nazi shit he does, and politicians who criticize his nazi regime in the public discourse. It's a microwave COINTEPRO operation, made to order.

"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.”

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.”

Of course, NSPM-7 is written in enough right wing newspeak about "fomenting violence" to throw casual observers off the trail, but I think the part where NSPM-7 tells us who decides what is terrorism gives the game away.

“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.

So Pam Bondi gets to decide who is a terrorist now and yes folks, that says "civil disorder." Or, you know, a protest. Cool country we got here, huh?

#Trump #Fascism #NSPM7 #StephenMiller #PamBondi #PoliceState #COINTELPRO #Dictatorship #FBI

As I mentioned in the post above, the US corporate media's response to the seismic event that was Downmarket Mussolini signing NSPM-7, was pretty much a collective yawn; but antifascist organizers and independent journalists took the threat of a new fascist COINTEPRO operation seriously. In early December, 2025, Ken Klippenstein once again broke a story of the decade when he obtained a leaked memo from Trumpenreich Attorney General Pam Bondi ordering the FBI to compile political "enemies" lists, bribe Americans to snitch on each other for thought crimes, and seed supposed "terrorist organizations" with informants. So, literally the full J. Edgar Hoover.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-fbi-list-of-extremists-is-coming

FBI Making List of American “Extremists,” Leaked Memo Reveals

"Attorney General Pam Bondi is ordering the FBI to “compile a list of groups or entities engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism,” according to a Justice Department memo published here exclusively.

The target is those expressing “opposition to law and immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; adherence to radical gender ideology,” as well as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” and “anti-Christianity.”

That language echoes the so-called indicators of terrorism identified by President Trump’s directive National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, which the memo says it’s intended to implement. Where NSPM-7 was a declaration of war on just about anyone who isn’t MAGA, this is the war plan for how the government will wage it on a tactical level."

This is a much shorter article that's probably worth your time to read in full. The quick version here however is that in addition to making an "enemies" of the Trumpenreich watchlist, Bondi also wants to beef up the FBI tip line to make it easier to snitch on your neighbors, doll out cash rewards for snitches who help them round up pinkos and other undesirables, and funnel Justice Department grant money into this new "war on terror" (read: opposition to fascism) right here at home. She also instructed the feds to cultivate "cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members" of the groups (read: more than half the country) she's identified as a terrorist threat.

Finally, because literally all fascist laws are retroactive, Bondi also wants reach into the past to punish thoughtcrime, dissent, and political opposition.

"The memo also directs the FBI and JTTFs to retroactively investigate incidents going back five years, authorizing the JTTFs in particular to use everything at their disposal to do so.

“Upon receipt of these referrals, the JTTFs shall use all available investigative tools, consistent with law enforcement internal policies and statutory obligations, to map the full network of culpable actors involved in the referred conduct inside and outside the United States,” the memo says."

So, the fascist Trump regime is tasking the FBI with making political enemies lists, and the fascist Attorney General wants cops all over the country to investigate and hopefully arrest you for that post you made calling Trump "Cheeto Mussolini" back in 2021. Furthermore, the Department of Justice has created a roadmap to persecute anyone a random MAGA cultist wants to punish for talking back in precisely the way Trump's fascist advisor Stephen Miller promised the Trumpenreich would immediately after Kirk's assassination. Shit man; that sounds serious, doesn't it?

That may be so. But whatever you do however, don't tell the corporate American media about all this - because as Klippenstein notes, they've been fast asleep this entire time.

#Trump #Fascism #NSPM7 #StephenMiller #PamBondi #PoliceState #COINTELPRO #Dictatorship #FBI #KenKlippenstein #Media #DepartmentOfJustice #DoJ

Given everything you know about the Trump regime, and especially its obscenely dishonest and corrupt Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, would it surprise you to learn that the Trumpenreich trotted out DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin to deny these enemies lists even existed? I thought not, nor do I expect you to be surprised to learn that she was, as usual, just bald-faced lying to the American people.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/secret-watchlists-of-americans

‘She’s Lying’: Journalist Exposes Secret Watch Lists That Trump Official Says Don’t Exist

"Despite denials from a senior Trump administration official, secret watchlists of Americans are being used by federal agencies to track and categorize US citizens—especially protesters, activists, and critics of law enforcement—as “domestic terrorists,” investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Wednesday.

Klippenstein said that two senior national security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told him that there are over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are using to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and pro-Palestine protesters, antifa-affiliated individuals, and “others who are promiscuously labeled ‘domestic terrorists.’”

Of course, a smarter nazi than the likes of Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, or McLaughlin probably would have realized it's not a great idea to publicly call the NatSec journalist who clearly has sources inside your own department a liar, but it's safe to say the Trumpenreich isn't composed of the best and the brightest this nation has to offer the species, so I'm not surprised they tried it. Through those sources, Klippenstein was able to confirm that DHS and the FBI were maintaining a whole bunch of different watchlists that appear to be targeting Americans the Trumpenreich doesn't like; to fight "terrorism."

As this article notes however, the reality is that at the very same time McLaughlin was setting the regime up for a spectacular own goal, ICE Gestapo goons in the street and Trumpenreich "Border Czar" Tom Homan were publicly talking about the existence of a "domestic terrorism database" expressly targeting people exercising their civil rights to protest ICE's ongoing and illegal ethnic cleansing project. In other words, one part of the Trump administration was denying the existence of these enemies lists, while another part of the Trump administration was intentionally threatening to put protestors on an enemies list that legally shouldn't even exist. This would be fucking hilarious if these people weren't trying to install a fascist dictatorship that will pile corpses so high it will blot out the sun if we don't come together as a society and stop them.

And why exactly does the US government think Trump's anti-terrorism apparatus has the right to go full McCarthyism on everyday Americans who don't want a fascist dictatorship or ethnic cleansing? Yes, that's correct - because of NSPM-7, and Bondi's ensuing Justice Department memo.

Okay, so they're caught red-handed; through leaks, and by Homan's own admission, the regime is keeping enemies lists. Furthermore, while corporate US media coverage of these events was still dismal, by now the opposition Democratic Party had locked on to NSPM-7 and the enemies lists Bondi's memo instructed the FBI to make, as a genuine threat to American democracy. Surely in February, once Democrats on the Oversight Committee had Pam Bondi under oath, she'd have to let the cat out of the bag, right? Absolutely not. Bondi stonewalled - even though, we literally have a leaked copy of her order to compile those enemies lists because of Ken Klippenstein's reporting.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/bondi-nspm

Bondi Stonewalls Congress on the ‘Enemies List’ She Directed DOJ to Compile

"When the congresswoman asked Bondi to confirm whether the list she called for in her December memo has been compiled, the attorney general said she was “not going to answer yes or no” before saying that “an antifa member” was arrested earlier this month in Minneapolis for “cyberstalking.”

Scanlon later asked Bondi if she would commit to providing the committee with the list of entities that the DOJ believes should be “designated as domestic terrorist organizations.”

“I’m not going to commit to anything to you because you won’t let me answer questions,” the attorney general replied.

Scanlon responded, “We understand your current position is that you have a secret list of people or groups who you are accusing of domestic terrorism, but you won’t share it with Congress.”

So you got that right? The AG who instructed the FBI to start making political enemies lists, refuses to confirm or deny that those lists now exist, but is also pretty sure "antifa is a part of that" - where that is enemies lists that don't exist. Kafka fucking wept.

#Trump #Fascism #NSPM7 #PamBondi #PoliceState #COINTELPRO #FBI #DoJ #DHS #TriciaMcLaughlin #EnemiesList #TomHoman #ICE