The latest Presidential memo, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” is to be a preemptive war against those individuals and institutions which threaten Trump’s absolute grip on power.
Ethic Cleansing by Decree — by Mr. Fish. (clowncrack.com)
By Chris Hedges
The Chris Hedges Report
Fascists, historically, are surprisingly candid about the world they intend to create. Those they target, despite this transparency, are surprisingly obtuse about what is coming.
The most ominous warning to date from our homegrown fascists is the latest Presidential memo, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.”
It accuses any critic of law enforcement, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the American empire, capitalism, the Christian right, the persecution of immigrants and those that decry discrimination based on race and gender, as well as those who question white, male patriarchy, described as “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality,” of fomenting “violent revolution.”
It is a declaration of war on the so-called “radical left,” those the Trump administration blames for “heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence” from the murder of the right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk to “the 2024 assassination of a senior healthcare executive and the 2022 assassination attempt against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.” The memo goes on to list the two assassination attempts against Trump.
The memo, typical of the self-serving narratives favored by Trump, ignores the murder by a Christian nationalist of Democratic Minnesota state legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband, and the attempted murder of state senator John Hoffman and his wife.
These “anti-fascists,” the White House memo warns ominously, “have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations.”
California National Guard in front of protesters, June 2025. (U.S. Northern Command)
The memo’s definition of state enemies is by design amorphous, grounded in the fiction of phantom organizations bent on murder and sedition. The accusations are absurd. They are not based on evidence or verifiable fact. But, as in all totalitarian regimes, truth is whatever those in power declare it to be.
This “truth” justifies the crusade.
The memo brazenly inverts the rule of law. It turns the law into an instrument of injustice. It uses the decorum of federal agencies, the courts and trials to legalize state crimes. It is grounded in magical thinking, bizarre conspiracy theories and a paranoia that sees the most tepid acts of dissent or criticism as treason.
Those who defy the state will, I expect, be decapitated one by one. The forlorn hope that the state will tolerate those who obey will silence many who have already been condemned.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on a train, in Vladivostok, summer 1994, after nearly 20 years in exile. (I. Evstafiev, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
“Universal innocence,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago, “also gave rise to the universal failure to act. Maybe they won’t take you? Maybe it will all blow over.”
“The majority sit quietly and dare to hope,” he writes. “Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!”
“Does hope lend strength or does it weaken a man?” Solzhenitsyn asks. “If the condemned man in every cell had ganged up on the executioners as they came in and choked them, wouldn’t this have ended the executions sooner than appeals to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee? When one is already on the edge of the grave, why not resist?”
“But wasn’t everything foredoomed anyway, from the moment of arrest?” he asks. “Yet all the arrested crawled along the path of hope on their knees, as if their legs had been amputated.”
Totalitarian regimes promulgate broad security decrees, from Stalin’s Article 58:10 to the Nazis’ Malicious Practices Act, to give themselves the sweeping powers to indiscriminately target anyone.
The memo lays out in chilling detail what I assumed in my column, “We Are All Antifa Now,” was behind the Trump administration’s designation of antifa as a terrorist group. The designation allows the state to brand all dissidents as supporters of antifa and prosecute them as terrorists.
“Totalitarian regimes promulgate broad security decrees, from Stalin’s Article 58:10 to the Nazis’ Malicious Practices Act, to give themselves the sweeping powers to indiscriminately target anyone.”
The memo says that state and federal agencies, adopting “a new law enforcement strategy,” will “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
These “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources” will, the memo promises, be disbanded and uprooted.
This is to be a preemptive war. It will be waged against those individuals – James Comey, John Bolton, George Soros and Reid Hoffman – and institutions, including the Democratic Party – which Stephen Miller has labeled a “terrorist organization” – universities and the media, which threaten Trump’s absolute grip on power.
This is not simply a war on the left, which is a marginal and ineffective force in American society, but a war on the remnants of our liberal institutions and those that support them. Once these establishment institutions and their representatives are neutered those of us on the left will be next.
The memo instructs Federal law enforcement agencies to detain, “question and interrogate” individuals suspected or accused of “political violence or lawlessness.”
It demands the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) strip organizations of their tax-exempt status if they are seen by the state as “directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism” and report them to “the Department of Justice for investigation and possible prosecution.”
I spent two years with the architects of our emergent fascism when I wrote my book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. They do not hide their vision for America. They plan to make the legal system subservient to dogma.
They hate the “secular humanist” society based on science and reason. They dream of making the Ten Commandments the basis of the legal system. They plan to teach Creationism or “Intelligent Design” in public schools and make education overtly “Christian.”
They brand the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals, and those dismissed as “nominal Christians” — meaning Christians who do not embrace the fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible — as deviants. These deviants are worthy only of being silenced, imprisoned or killed.
They condemn government assistance programs, especially for the poor. The climate crisis is a hoax. They call for the federal government to be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war.
They want church organizations to run social-welfare agencies and schools. They demand the expansion of the death penalty to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder.
They call for a return to white, male patriarchy by mythologizing the past. They demand women be denied contraception, access to abortion and equality under the law. The only legitimate voices in public discourse and the media, to them, are “Christian.”
America is sacralized as an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities, at home and abroad, are agents of Satan.
White supremacists beating an African-American man in Charlottesville, Virginia. August 12, 2017. (Copyright Zach Roberts/GregPalast.com – reproduced with permission)
These Christian fascists are incapable of dealing in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity. Stunted by emotional numbness and an inchoate rage, they are unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are an anathema.
One’s duty is to obey.
These are the ideological underpinnings of this memo and the society those who authored it plan to create.
Power in the age of Trump is based on blind personal loyalty. Rights are privileges that can be instantly revoked. Lies replace truth. Opinions replace facts. History is erased and rewritten. The cult of leadership replaces politics.
Paranoia grips the ruling elite, composed of narcissists, buffoons and gangsters, who feed off conspiracy theories. They see mortal enemies everywhere and live in a hermetically sealed non-reality-based universe.
They are creating a pseudo-democracy populated with pseudo-legislators, pseudo-courts, pseudo-journalists, pseudo-intellectuals, pseudo-Christians and pseudo-citizens.
Fascists mean what they say. The rhetoric condemning the rest of us is not hyperbolic. They cannot be reasoned with. We cannot open channels of dialogue and communication. Our anemic and calcified democracy, including our bankrupt liberal institutions, cannot defeat them.
Fascists are the swamp creatures that rise up out of all failed democracies.
Our enemies intend to implement this dystopia. The question is not if, but when. How long before the iron bars slam shut and America as we know it disappears? How long before the state rounds us up and hauls us away?
I can’t say. But it won’t be long.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
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My conversations with my eldest son, and incipient planning, have turned into much more direct concerns that we must act within the next year to protect his siblings and their children…that has become the time line; use the remaining functioning legal systems (property laws, banking systems, etc.) and intentional community building to create, at least, ways of sustaining some levels of primary safety.
Escaping to other countries — that is, joining the coming great migrations — has become a false hope. Here in the US, some states are better than others, but even if the plutocratic cabal’s dictatorship dreams are limited by public action, the driving forces of political and economic processes have and will continue to move toward an authoritarian feudalism.
I’m not religious but it seems to me that Satan has won, again. Evil seems much stronger than goodness, that is goodness can never beat evil. I’m turning 70 soon and from a young age I always thought living in America that the world would be safe from fascists, or the boogie man on the other side of the world. I never thought America would become fascists country, but all these years, especially after Bush’s Iraq war my eyes have become open to the truth of what America truly is. I no longer live in the USA and I have no desire of ever going back there. I probably have a few years to live but if my doctor, one day, tells me I have 6 months to live, I’ll ask, can you give me 1 month? The faster I go the faster I’ll leave this hell hole of a planet.
And judging from the support the USA gave to the Nazis early on, not to mention sources of inspiration (e.g. Jim Crow) and the retention of prominent Nazis in NATO post-war, one is left thinking the USA was already fascist to begin with.
“Fascists are the swamp creatures that rise up out of all failed democracies” – couldn’t have put this better myself
You’re contributing to the problem with statements like “They cannot be reasoned with,” “Our enemies intend to implement this dystopia.,” and, “How long before the state rounds us up and hauls us away?”
You have essentially declared that violence is the only option, justifying “your enemies” when they say that the left cannot be reasoned with, and point to the assassination of Kirk as an example. You sound exactly like those you’ve declared to be your enemies: unhinged, incapable of dialogue, and unwilling to compromise.
God help us all if you represent the “reasonable” American left.
The problem, Shane, is that there has been, in political systems generally and especially as democracies become unsupported by the vigilance of their populations, a selective process for narcissistic sociopaths: people like so many in the present Trump administration (and politics generally). Sociopaths and psychopaths cannot be reasoned with in the expected designs of dialogue and compromise; this is simply the unfortunate fact, be it a next-door neighbor or persons in positions of economic or political power. Recognizing that fact is necessary to redefine the options toward reality.
And oh, I failed to note: it also doesn’t mean that ‘you lose’, it just means that the rules you would like to play by must be supplemented by understanding and action that can win….and even then you might have to redefine winning.
“They brand the LGBTQ community, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews,…— as deviants. These deviants are worthy only of being silenced, imprisoned or killed.”
This is borderline inaccurate.
The suppression, censorship and repression we’re currently being subjected to is being implemented by Zionist supremacists at the ADL and billionaire donors like Ackman, Paul Singer, and Miriam. Ellison taking over TikTok will drive a death nail into free expression, soon to expand to other social media outlets. These parasites also have an affinity for illegal immigrants as it’s good for low wages and it makes it difficult for the masses of US citizens to rally together against them.
The fascistic policies that will be washing over the U.S. are being driven primarily by the fear of Zionists and their astute realization that tens of millions of Americans are becoming aware of the drain they cause to our Treasury and democratic freedoms and the grotesque slaughters they commit in the Middle East. This awareness is growing! This knowledge genie isn’t going back into the bottle, though the Zionist supremacists are trying desperately to wrench it back in there.
This is fascist rhetoric supposedly aimed at fascist actions.
As sad as Chris says, and I think even worse. From my 77 years, I see humanity as essentially self-autocratizing, Fascistic at heart as it were, and of all sorts supports a leader who is doing what they would themselves do if king. Democracy, First Amendment, was a rare, precious, and failed experiment.
Ah yes, very Debbie Downer. It is so bad we might as well give up.
I think we only ever had Democracy and a First Amendment and a Bill of Rights in the first place because of people who did not have a negative and pessimistic and defeatist attitude like you seem to have. I think there is something noble in the human spirit which ought not to be dismissed, and which will work and fight for that which is good even when things look bleak or almost hopeless.
Hey, what would you want to say to a young person? What message would you have for a young person? A young person who might have some high ideals but who might become easily discouraged and tempted to give up and maybe decide to not bother caring and/or to become cynical?
I think what you say is a self-fulfilling prophecy.