For Drop Site News, Chip Gibbons writes that in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Trump administration has seized the opportunity to attack the left through reinvigorated “counterterrorism” policy.
President Trump has continued to make changes that impact the future of First Amendment rights. Responding to Trump’s signing of an executive order designating “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization, Gibbons writes: “Under U.S. law, there is no statutory framework for designating domestic groups as terrorist organizations. Congress has empowered the Secretary of State to designate Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The executive branch has also used the International Emergency Powers Act to sanction Specially Designated Global Terrorists. While this designation has been applied to U.S. groups and even U.S. citizens, to be designated the U.S. government must allege they acted on behalf of or provided services to foreign terrorists. Because the U.S. considers activity that in any other context would be First Amendment–protected speech to be ‘coordinated advocacy,’ these designations have sweeping ramifications for domestic political speech.”
In addition, Trump issued the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7). NSPM-7, Gibbons warns, was “drafted with a deep understanding of the U.S. counterterrorism bureaucracy” and “lays out a range of responsibilities for government agencies,” including the Secretary of Treasury, the IRS, and the Attorney General. Overall, the memorandum opens the door to investigations on First Amendment-protected speech. The strategy hinges on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), which uses a “‘preventative’ approach to terrorism rooted in political spying. Though there are only 55 FBI field offices across the country, there are 200 FBI JTTFs. Staff include members from federal, state, and local agencies and deputize local police to carry out FBI terrorism investigations. The memorandum also adds a list of suspect ideologies, including ‘anti-Americanism’ and ‘extremism on gender,’ doubles down on the FBI’s approach to treating ‘civil unrest’ as terrorism, and creates a pipeline of intelligence from JTTFs to Stephen Miller.”
CHIP GIBBONS; [email protected]
Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, where he edits the Gaza First Amendment Alert.
Gibbons told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “These changes are both an escalation and build upon activities that are already happening. Taken together, this is something to be concerned about. The executive order on Antifa could be read as hot air or bluster, since there is no legal legal meaning to calling a group a domestic terrorist organization. But the order gives a green light to the FBI and others to investigate and go after them. The FBI has a definition for domestic terrorism for anarchist extremists. The Biden administration used it––so did the Obama administration and even the Bush and Clinton administrations. We treat political crimes and violence differently from other crimes and violence. The FBI demarcates its domestic terrorism investigations by ideology: anarchist extremism, black extremism, white supremacy extremism, and so forth. During Trump 1, they changed them into broad public categories. That way, if there are a bunch of white supremacist attacks, hypothetically, the FBI can say that they have investigated violent extremists because they’re investigating black extremists, even if they have created zero investigations into white supremacy extremists. My impression is that those categories are designed to hide the ball––obfuscating what they’re really doing.
“With the second document, the NSPM-7, it’s clear there was a blueprint to use the existing counterterrorism bureaucracy to go after left-wing speech. One change is that it gives Stephen Miller a role that he shouldn’t have. Miller has made it very clear that his goals are destroying political enemies and purging the country of immigrants. There is a big consolidation of national security policing powers into Miller’s hands.
“Everything else [in the memorandum] is about mobilizing existing counterterrorism structures. I’m most concerned about the FBI JTTFs, which have a long history of being used to do politically motivated intelligence spying. They are troubling because a lot of the task force officers are local police acting as FBI agents. The JTTF dramatically expands the scope of the FBI, allowing the FBI to do sprawling political investigations. The JTTF’s sole purpose is to carry out FBI investigations all over the U.S. They have to go find terrorism, and they’re being told that the threat is people with anti-capitalist, ‘anti-American,’ ‘extreme views on race and gender’––whatever that means.”