Donald Trump’s designation of “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” last week was a perfect encapsulation of both the administration’s authoritarianism and its clownishness. Anyone old enough to remember the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 should get a chill when they hear government officials throwing around the word “terrorism.” That term tends to function as an all-purpose hall pass to justify encroachments on civil liberties.
On top of that, “antifa” is not even the name of an organization, although the general label (referring to militant forms of self-declared “anti-fascist” organizing) might describe varied and disparate small groups that do exist. Moreover, there’s no such category as a “domestic terrorist organization” in American law, so it’s unclear what practical import the order will have, if any.
The executive order used a catch-all term to condemn a vague set of actors to an uncertain fate. It was almost as if, with great fanfare, the president had promised to extrajudicially execute vampires by exposing them to sunlight.
A far more serious and disturbing move, around the same time, attracted far less notice. Trump signed a national security policy memorandum called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” known as NSPM-7. Such national security directives are far less common than executive orders. Where the latter tend to direct day-to-day government operations, the former can set sweeping new policies across the federal government’s military, law enforcement, and intelligence bureaucracies. As the name NPSM-7 indicates, this is only the seventh such directive Trump has issued since taking office.
As journalist Ken Klippenstein reports, NPSM-7…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
