"Trump’s newest presidential memoranda criminalizes critics of empire, capitalism, Christian nationalism, abuses by the state and those who fight racism and gender discrimination" -Chris Hedges

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.”

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.

“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 70 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.

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.

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.

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