Our podcast is not actually illegal—yet. Thanks to Trump’s recent Security Presidential Memorandum, NSPM-7, or “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” it soon could be.
Today we talk about one of the starkest moves into fascism Americans have yet seen from MAGA: what it is, how pre-crimes can soon be reality, and the fear factor this memo is designed to inspire. We’ll also discuss some possible responses to the next phase of MAGA authoritarianism.
Show Notes
Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”
What Is NSPM-7? Over 3,000 Nonprofits Sound Alarm on New Trump Directive
Trump Orders Broad Effort to Root Out Groups He Says Organize Political Violence
The meme-ification of political violence
The Upside of Collapse
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Had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.
Five, six white people.
Pushed me in the car.
I'm going, what the hell?
Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
All you gotta do is receive the packet.
Don't have to open it, just accept it.
She was very upset, crying.
Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw the flash of light.
Listen to The Chinatown Sting wherever you get your podcasts.
The Chinatown Sting Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You could find us on Instagram and threads at Conspirituality Pod, as well as individually on Blue Sky.
You can search our names there.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at Patreon.com/slash conspirituality, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support.
Also, special announcement: my side project podcast called Antifascist Dad just launched yesterday, October 8th.
So if you go to your pod app and type in anti-fascist dad, you'll find it there.
Conspirituality 278.
This podcast is illegal.
Our podcast is not actually illegal yet.
Thanks to Trump's recent security presidential memorandum NSPM7, or countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence, it soon could be.
Today we talk about one of the starkest moves into fascism Americans have yet seen from MAGA.
What it is, how pre-crimes can soon be a reality, and the fear factor.
This memo is designed to inspire.
We'll also discuss some possible responses to the next phase of MAGA authoritarianism.
MAGA authoritarianism.
Well, I think all three of us came across this story independently, but it's not nearly out there as much as I think it should be, given the possible implications.
As Julian mentioned in the intro, Trump wrote a memo or someone wrote it for him, and it calls for sweeping national law enforcement response to the supposed dramatic increase in assassinations, organized political violence, and targeted attacks in the US.
Orchestrated, obviously, by the anti-fascists and leftists.
Overwhelmingly.
As I'm reporting here in War Ravaged Portland.
Now, the memo claims there are coordinated campaigns with sophisticated strategies designed to intimidate, radicalize, docs, and violently assault federal officers and public figures, which ultimately disrupt democratic society and policy outcomes.
While the impetus for this is likely Charlie Kirk, supposed attacks on ICE officers highlight the quote, threat from within.
And so the memo instructs federal law enforcement agencies to prioritize investigation and prosecution of these networks and their conspirators.
Who are they?
Ken Klippenstein was one of the first to write about this, and here's his list of the purported indicators of violence that the memo is calling for us to watch out for.
Support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race, and gender.
Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, traditional American views on religion, and traditional American views on morality.
Incredible.
Klippenstein also notes that the memo relies on the trope that violence against these figures is coming from the left wing.
But after talking with friends of recent shooters in Utah and Texas, he writes: "I was surprised at the parallels between the different accounts.
I thought it was going to be a mess of disagreements over, I thought he was this, I thought his politics were that.
And there was some, but on the question of politics, it was pretty much consensus by all of the friends in both cases that it was absurd, not just to say that these shooters were left wing, but to say that they're right wing or left wing." To be specific, he's talking about the Charlie Kirk shooting and then the ice shooting that happened in Dallas, and he was talking to friends of those shooters.
Now, the rush to assumptions has been all over the place following every high-profile shooting, a move exemplified by MAGA leaders to immediately label the shooters as coming from the left.
Trump's memo gives the attorney general authorization to recommend formal designation of domestic terrorist organizations that fit within this scope, while federal grant programs will prioritize domestic terrorism prevention and disruption as a key national security area.
And he's made it clear that he's targeting the far left and Democratic Party and organizations.
Klippenstein notes that the memo will likely double the FBI's domestic terrorism terrorism watch list from five to 10,000 people.
You know, one point of clarification is that, you know, current law demands that a domestic terror organization can only be labeled as such through an established financial or organizational link with a foreign terror organization as designated by the State Department.
So in effect, what this means is that, you know, any actual prosecution of Antifa protesters or activists above the threshold of like misdemeanors like property damage or scuffling with the cops.
Uh, because what they want to do is add terror enhancements to all of the charges, which, if you know, they result in convictions that'll put people away for years.
But that would require finding a paper trail from the Seattle kid with a balaclava and a skateboard under his arm uh to Hamas or trend to Aragua.
Uh like they're not gonna do that.
That's not gonna happen, but that doesn't mean they're not gonna fuck up that kid's life in the in the meantime.
Yeah, and and then what they're also gonna try and do is link people like George Soros through some kind of like six degrees of separation, you know, to any way that they can to say, well, this is really what this is about, and it's a grand plot to bring uh to bring Marxist uh cultural Marxism to America or something, right?
Right.
Well, part of what I'll get to is the nonprofit angle, because that's also part of this, is he wants to defund and then also try to, you know, uh prosecute nonprofits who are doing work that anything that is considered left at all.
And I don't know about you guys, but my social media feeds have generally been silent on this memo.
But you know, at the same time, we can see the implications of it playing out in Chicago and to a lesser degree my home city now of Portland.
But it didn't escape a group of over 3,000 nonprofit organizations because they wrote an open letter rejecting the thesis of Trump's directive.
This is because Trump has specifically cited nonprofits as a target of his strongman move here, especially all of those quote un-American ones, with this administration defining that term just like all the others.
One of those, you preempted this, Julian.
Yeah.
George Soros, whose open society foundations has long funded progressive nonprofits.
The letter notes.
This attack on nonprofits is not happening in a vacuum, but as part of a wholesale offensive against organizations and individuals that advocate for ideas or serve communities that the president finds objectionable and that seek to enforce the rule of law against the federal government.
Whether the target is a church, an environmental or good government group, a refugee assistance organization, university, a law firm, or a former or current government official, weaponizing the executive branch to punish their speech or their views is illegal and wrong.
If only there was a blueprint for this administration published online for anyone to read in 2023 that would have predicted this move.
Yeah.
And of course, Trump now touting his Project 2025 credentials, which he said he didn't wasn't aware of, which we all knew is bullshit.
So when I see mainstream media being like, oh, we actually knew about it, it's like, what the fuck are you really covering?
As the New York Times notes, Trump has long spread conspiracies about liberal activists and organizations secret secretly funding anarchists and anti-fascists.
As with many things in this administration, he's now making his conspiracies law.
His main henchman, Stephen Miller, shared his paranoia about the supposed left-wing takeover of America.
I don't think I could do his voice, but uh this is this is this is what he says.
There is an there's an entire system of feeder organizations that provide money.
I can't do it.
Provide money, resources, weapons.
And when they're attacking ICE officers, they're attacking federal buildings, whether isolating public officials for harassment, doxing, intimidation, and ultimately attempted assassination.
It's all carefully planned, executed, and thought through.
It is terrorism on our soil.
Any sort of screeching works.
So you were you're you're doing it.
Yeah.
Look in the mirror, man.
Look in the mirror.
I'd like to go from broad to specific for a moment, as I do live in Portland.
In fact, the ice facility is directly next to the Tesla showroom, and it's separated only by a bike path that connects North and South Portland from the Selwood Bridge to the Steel Bridge.
And I'm on that path often as I'm a cyclist.
And there have been protesters camped up outside of ICE since the spring.
Their presence now is not that much larger than at any other time.
What's changed is the number of cameras that are now on that single city block, which happens to be wedged between a highway and one of the priciest neighborhoods in Portland called South Waterfront.
The ice building is two to three short blocks from coffee shops, Pilates studios, and a fantastic waterfront dog park that I bring my puppy to pretty regularly.
Now, there's been a conflicting mindset here because Portland loves to protest.
There's going to be a No Kings protest here next weekend, and tens of thousands of people will likely be there.
I'll be out there on those sorts of days.
But on a day-to-day, the sentiment has generally been to not feed into the frenzy.
The Greater Portland area has a population of 2.5 million people, and Portland, the city limits is 635,000 people.
Of that number, there's between 10, maybe up to a hundred people outside of ICE at any given time.
As one of our senators, Ron Wyden, who's been out there, and one of our congresswomen, Maxine Dexter, who's been out there, she's holding a town hall tonight on the day we're recording.
They've both noted while standing in front of the ICE building that there are more media crews than there are protesters.
And this has nothing to do with inertia.
Most of us have just decided not to feed the right-wing propaganda machine.
And it's not like they're out there bringing people in.
They're just standing there 24 hours a day in case any cars come through.
And that's when you see everything happen.
Then of course, add the snipers at the top of the ice building shooting rubber bullets down because they're dancing salsa in the street because that's happening.
Because it doesn't really matter that there's not much going on.
There could be zero people out there and they'd manufacture a crisis.
Fox News has been running clips from 2020 in Portland, which was miles away in downtown, and also just one single city block.
And you know that that's basically all that Trump is watching all day is old news clips on Fox.
Right.
Okay.
Yep, yep.
Fox has also been running clips from Chicago while talking about Portland.
And just this morning, someone, it's a mainstream media, I'm forgetting which one, but I saw it on my thread.
They shared a story about Portland and showed a riot that was occurring in Los Angeles in the 90s at Winchell's Donuts.
They showed a donut shop, a donut shop building burning down.
The Rodney can't.
And they and they, yeah, uh, was it '92?
Okay, yeah, I believe it was.
Yeah.
And yeah, exactly.
And they, and the, but the headline was about Portland.
And this was like ABC.
It was a mainstream, like one of the top ones or MBC.
It was one of those.
Yeah.
Well, they have to create a 30-year, this is a connected phenomenon that we've been dealing with for the entire time.
And it's probably the same people.
And this is what happens when any kind of protesting gets out of control.
Yeah, the donut shops first to go.
They'll put Portland will protect Voodoo Donuts.
I don't know why.
You should protect Blue Star, but but Voodoo is the cult donut shop here.
And then, of course, besides the protesters, you have a bunch of instigators.
So MAGA douchebag, Nick Sorter has been out there instigating the crowd.
He was actually arrested by the Portland police department.
And now the federal DOJ says it's going to investigate our police for this when all the video footage shows sort of purposefully trying to rile protesters up.
Well, he also initiated the physical contact with a woman that he was speaking to.
Like he assaulted her to begin with.
Yes, correct.
Yeah.
And then there's a couple others because there's there's some Washington white nationalists that want to be out in the fucking woods shooting rifles out here now, coming in to try to instigate, specifically caught on camera saying they're here for the violence.
Yeah.
So this is the thing that's going to be investigated is any kind of any kind of attempt by authorities to like deal with people like this, not all of the actual abuse that's happening.
Well, if you have to have the cops on your side, right?
Like there's no room for the Portland police department to actually police.
Well, there's also been footage of Portland police telling ICE how to drive on the streets because they were like just drive.
And Portland police, I mean, first of all, living here.
Portland police are basically non-existent.
Like I've never lived in a city where you see so few of them.
Now, I'm sure in different areas downtown, they obviously have more of a presence, but on a day-to-day, I've never lived anywhere with so little contact with the police department.
And in general, they are hands off with most people.
Obviously, there are systemic problems here, not gonna lie about that, but they are generally it's a calmer presence than other places I've been in.
So the fact that they have to deal with the National Guard coming from Texas and try to rein in ice, they're not, they're not really capable of doing that.
So it's gonna be a shit show.
Now, Sorter returned after his arrest and he tried to walk through the main protest area.
And you can see in videos, Portlanders turning their back to him to let him bump into them.
Then he pretends he's being assaulted.
So this is after the arrest.
I mean, this acting wouldn't fly in professional soccer, and yet he's got the DOJ behind him now.
Now, as I said, we have the National Guard coming in, definitely from Texas because Abbott gave the go-ahead, possibly from California.
They might mobilize Oregon, although judges have blocked that.
But this all means the protests are going to grow and more people are going to come to that city block.
I have seen a scooter caster here with Freedom News TV.
She's been filming too.
And that's been a good thing to get some of that footage.
Now, considering the guards have already been firing bullets, as I said, and pepper gas at the handful of people, it's going to escalate.
You can't push people without it doing that.
And then the right wing media is going to be there to weaponize it.
Now, back to the big picture to wind down this segment.
Friend of the Pod and one of my closest friends, Dax Stevlin Ross has worked in the nonprofit space since we graduated college in the 90s, and he's been covering it from that angle.
He wrote an essay called The Upside of Collapse that I'll share in the show notes.
In it, he relates insights from archaeological sites with modern society.
And he writes, he's talking about resilience.
That's been a big thing for him, the concept of resilience and what that means.
And he writes that resilient societies weren't the biggest or the most resource abundant.
They weren't the ones that managed to avoid collapse altogether.
They were the ones that learned how to recover.
Now, Dax lays out three key pillars about coalition building and organizations, something he's been doing his entire career with nonprofit organizations and college campuses.
In pillar two, it's called innovating and collaborating under pressure.
He mentions the necessity of pivoting during pressure periods instead of doubling down when the plans are not working out.
And I'll be thinking about that as a lot as we navigate Portland and broader, you know, issues happening in America.
But reading his essay reminded me of Jose Saramago's novel, Seeing, which was a response to his most famous work called Blindness.
In it, he writes about the these torrential rains that occur in Portugal on the day of a national election, and almost no one turns up to vote.
And those who do cast a blank ballot.
The population was already beyond frustrated with their choices or lack of choices.
And their revolt was to ignore the process altogether.
Now, obviously, the book is satire.
And while I'd personally never advocate for sitting out elections, there's some amount of wisdom in choosing your battles.
And as Dax notes, pivoting is a powerful tool when it comes to resilience in times of crisis.
I'm not sure what it means for Portland, but I knew I do know that satire has been a really important tool so far because fascists and authority uh authoritarians hate being mocked.
I mean, the most famous picture so far has been 10 ice agents lined up and the guy in the frog costume standing there like staring at it.
Perfect.
Yeah.
It's fantastic.
Now, sadly, ICE and MAGA and the administration, they have the weapons and the manpower and the legislation on their side.
So we're just going to have to see how long the weapons of mockery and satire will last.
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All right, guys.
So speaking of Klippenstein's article about terrorism indicators, my sci-fi nerd eyes really lit up because he used the term pre-crime to describe the idea that the intention of these supposedly dangerous leftists to do with terrorism could be deduced ahead of time from evidence of anti-American or anti-Christian beliefs.
So here's a little primer on this.
What is pre-crime exactly?
It comes from the mind of science fiction author Philip K. Dick, whose inventive short stories have been adapted into some of my all-time favorite movies and maybe some of yours and TV series.
But films like Blade Runner and the Adjustment Bureau rank at the top alongside the Steven Spielberg Tom Cruise blockbuster minority report, which is where we get the concept of pre-crime.
So this film is set in a near future in which the government has established a supposedly perfect system of law and order by arresting citizens before they commit the crimes they would have otherwise enacted.
And they do this through this ingenious computer technology that is wired up to a group of three mutant humans with clairvoyant knowledge of the future.
And those clairvoyants, referred to as precogs, precognitive precogs, are kept in a semi-catatonic state, floating in nutrient-rich fluid in a kind of shared isolation tank where their lives are dedicated to picking up on the criminal intentions of the entire population,
which are then processed through surveillance technology that allows these pre-crime police units to come crashing through the doors or windows of people right before they do the criminal deed that's already been downloaded from the future.
Like magic, all crime is prevented and all would-be criminals are punished for what they would have done.
So, as with the best science fiction, this compelling idea invites a philosophical reflection on social issues that surround us in today's reality.
In this case, crime, punishment, and how reliably we can claim knowledge of the future.
The story centers around a murder of which, in a plot twist, the main character, who is the police commissioner, John Anderton, stands accused.
He goes on the run to Avoid jail and exonerate himself.
And we find out that there's a suppressed minority report on this murder, which is what it's called when one of the three precogs has a different vision of the future than the other two had.
And in the minority report, which I just think is such a great phrase, our hero is actually not guilty, but there's a shadowy figure that has framed him.
The film is from 2002, and it has this incredibly prescient depiction of surveillance capitalism, in which all of the advertising screens in public spaces are constantly scanning the eyes of consumers and then showing them ads tailored to their interests and previous purchases.
So to avoid being captured, Anderton has this gruesome black market eye transplant so that he can hide in plain sight.
It's an excellent catch by Ken Klippenstein to reference this film in relation to what we're talking about today.
Have you guys seen it?
Do you have thoughts about this?
Yeah, I haven't seen that film, but all I can think about what's ringing in my head from the list of prescripted thoughts that uh, you know, Klippenstein's calling uh pre-crime is that uh they are all about trying to go inside the person,
inside the citizen and the subject to say if you have any emotional resistance to what we're always already going to do moving forward with you know our particular economic activities or with our vision of what traditional family life should be or or what what morality should be.
Like if you have even if you even don't like it, if you don't like it inside, uh, we're going to root that out.
It's in it.
That's that's amazing.
It's not, it's it's not about the suppression of activity.
It's like it's it's really Trump saying, you all you need to like me more.
You actually need to like what I'm doing.
Uh and I want you to shoot.
You should applaud if you want to.
Well, we'll get to that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's it's very reminiscent, actually, what you just said to this other film called The The Lives of Others about uh East Germany before the wall came down and just the level of like everyone getting co-opted into doing surveillance on their neighbors and everyone being mic'd up.
And it's all about the the conversations.
You're not even allowed to talk about things that disparage the great leader and the and the one true party.
I saw a minority report back when Netflix mailed you DVDs.
Oh it's been quite some time.
I remember that.
It's interesting.
It's interesting because it kind of those movies that like I hear people regularly cite idiocracy as a moment for our time.
And I actually just made it onto Netflix.
So it there's been a lot of talk about that movie again.
I think minority report is equally as relevant.
It was also around the time though that I became fascinated with neuroscience, and especially in regards to meditation and music.
And I just want to geek out on that for a moment because there's been a lot of fascinating research about the brain's ability to predict.
For example, our brains automatically predict chords in music.
And when an artist completely diverges from known musical structures, people become really frustrated and give up on the song because they had expected something that didn't actually manifest, and they get emotionally chemically, neurochemically let down from it.
And there's really something formulaic about music that appeals to us in that sense.
And this is beyond pop music.
Now, extrapolating from that research, neuroscientists have long wondered what else we can actually predict.
And the thing about these predictions is that they're happening on the scale of milliseconds.
A pre-crime would occur on a much longer time scale, minutes, hours, weeks, even years.
And so the question becomes we can see inside your brain and know you're thinking about doing something heinous.
You don't quite line up with what we want to do, or in authoritarian terms, you're thinking about an act that is not prescribed by us.
And that to me is where the idea becomes really frightening for two reasons.
Having a thought doesn't necessarily imply you're ever going to follow through with that action.
And obviously, in American democracy, you can't be prosecuted for thoughts.
So what this memo is implying is that we're going to Try to manipulate your thinking process so that the very thought of anything anti-establishment will never arise or even be allowed to germinate.
That's sort of falling in line tracks with the goal of MAGA, which is why anyone critical of any aspect of it should be scared by documents like this memo.
Thinking a little bit more about this and listening to you, Derek, I I also hear a real sort of emphasis or sort of, I mean, it's it's subconscious, but there's uh a real sort of pointing the finger at transgression and sinfulness, too, right?
There's a way in which uh the very sort of Christian um nationalist and authoritarian psychology of this movement is coming to bear in a kind of in a in a directive like this, where you know we live alongside people who, if they are deeply invested in white Christian nationalism, are having contradictory and transgressive thoughts all the time.
Right.
But they know that God is always watching.
They know that God is always watching.
And so they have to invoke a constant purification and monitoring process for themselves.
The stress of that, I can imagine you could relieve somewhat by forcing other people to do that on your behalf.
And yet grinder usage seems to go up in all the republic.
That's conventionists go to.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, grinder crashes wherever there's a uh funeral for a martyr or something like that.
Yeah.
This uh memorandum comes into a kind of social psychology that is always trying to police itself and always terrified of its own transgressions.
Well, I noticed, Matthew, that your bonus and brief this week, and which I have not yet heard, are called Black Jesus.
So I'm sure uh that is not going to fit into the prescribed idea of Christianity as per this memo.
Yeah, yeah.
How dare you?
And also as as someone who's much more well read in terms of people like Foucault, this sounds to me, Matthew, like sort of the the panopticon writ large, right?
Well, it's confession, right?
It's it's like that idea, part of that idea was that the religious function of confession gets conferred upon the state.
Uh, and eventually the subject sort of shows its allegiance to power by saying, This is my internal reality.
You can see all of it.
And you might grab it through surveillance, or I might confess it to you through technology.
But, you know, there's not going to be any hidden or secret or private place anymore.
And that's how power organizes in part.
All right.
Last interesting detail here about all of this is that Philip K. Dick, who wrote 44 novels and over 120 short stories.
Yeah, hypergraphia.
Yeah, there you go, which explored the nature of reality, perception, human nature, identity, consciousness, drug use, and mental illness in relation to artificially generated false realities and corporate monopolies and authoritarian governments.
This guy was just incredibly prolific.
And his ideas are so strong.
He's so good at like finding the real crux of the matter in terms of how to talk about this almost metaphorically.
He and one of his five wives, as it turns out, were actually investigated and visited in the 1950s by the FBI for the left-wing political activities.
He also sadly struggled with anxiety and paranoia, which could have been related to his amphetamine use, but could also have been about the FBI actually surveilling him.
He did have multiple stays in mental hospitals.
He was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
And you can actually find on YouTube, if if you're interested in this sort of thing, a video of this quite strange press conference that he called at one point in which he announced that the concepts and themes in his writing were actually intuitive revelations of the reality itself beyond the world around us, which is an artificial construct.
And I can't help but notice, oh, there's aspects of this in terms of a more concrete political reality that, you know, he's very prescient about.
Thank you.
So I've got two related things that I want to look at, and they're both about originality or lack of it in Trumpism Or Trump fascism or whatever we're calling it.
One is the American history of each pre-crime listed in NSPM 7, because for the most part, they're recycling red scare themes dating back to the end of World War One.
And maybe one definition of a fascist era is that if you write down all of those themes on one page in one document, if you pull all of the greatest hits together, that's where you are.
You're you're then a fascist state.
It's like it's kind of like they fed a stack of Mickey Spillane novels into Chat GPT.
And so that's one thing.
The other thing is about the facade of charismatic leadership wielded by Trump.
And for our purposes today, Pete Hegsef is only viable and potent depending on context.
And they didn't look too authoritarian at that big meeting of the generals.
So that'll be the second thing.
The tie-in is that I think fascists do predictable things, building on pre-existing panics and cruelties.
And if they falter, it's because they're not adequately capitalizing on those waves.
So we've listed or Derek listed the items, uh the thought crime items, but here's the actual paragraph in NSPM7 that lays out the you know, pre-crimes.
So, Julian, I'm wondering if you could just read this.
There are common recurrent motivations and indiquia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described anti-fascism.
These movements portray foundational American principles, examples, support for law enforcement and border control as fascist to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.
This anti-fascist lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.
Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity, support for the overthrow of the United States government, extremism on migration, race and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.
As described in the order of September 22, 2025, designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, the groups and entities that perpetuate this extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations.
For example, Charlie Kirk's aligned assassin engraved the bullets used in the murder with so-called anti-fascist rhetoric.
It's amazing how, like just bad reporting and sort of, you know, confused internet whispers just make their way into White House documents all over the place.
So that's the paragraph where the list of thought crimes uh is planted.
And as the guy with a podcast side project called Anti-Fascist Dad, I've got some thoughts about how this is framed because obviously I've been served.
So I mean, I don't think we have to say it that none of the insinuations that anti-fascists are predisposed to violence or responsible for organized violence is true.
This is a responsive, you know, quite disorganized ad hoc movement.
So it's the opposite.
Like the vast majority of instances of actual political violence are committed by members of right-wing groups.
We know that.
There's all kinds of studies on it.
Um, so with this, they're basically naming self-defense as terrorism.
And that trick has a long history that is pinged by the post-colonial theorists by Fanon, you know, who in Retro of the Earth writes that colonial authority is maintained only by means of a vast apparatus of repression to those who take the native's resistance for an act of criminal violence or terrorism, there is a collective effort to demonize the native and justify this repression.
So, Matthew, this this is coming out of the chapter in that book called uh concerning violence.
On violence.
Is it called onviolence?
He makes a really uh well-reasoned argument for why colonized people inevitably uh and justifiably turn to violence as and and he even describes it as a kind of cleansing force that restores their their self-respect and helps them overcome an inferiority complex.
How does this apply to America in 2025?
Well, I'm just saying that to flip the definition to say that self-defensive actions are actually terroristic goes back to this discourse.
I'm just saying that, like, you know, the people who identify this particular Darvo flip of, oh, the person who's responding to state violence with a form of self-defense, you know, and we can talk about what the what the gradients of those are.
Yeah.
But if it's a self-defensive action, you know, it's really the post-colonial theorists who said, oh, hey, wait a minute.
You're doing this thing where you're saying that we are the violent people.
Yeah.
Wait a minute.
That's actually backwards.
Yeah.
And that's Fannon's point, which is that people have been so brutalized by state violence and colonizer violence that actually they're they're sort of forced into the position where violence is their sort of only response, right?
Um there was some there was some uh progressive commentators this week talking about Stephen Miller, who said he, you know, in in these missives that he's been generating lately, he always sounds like he's fleeing into the mountains somewhere to get away from the absolute terror of what's happening in our cities, right?
He does.
He does sound like he's like calling it in over the radio and uh almost like you can hear him in the I don't know, like the bird's nest uh surrounded by I don't know, people in frog suits or something.
Yeah, the horde.
This is all happening.
They're framing it specifically uh against the enemy within.
They're actually they're using that phrase.
Like Trump is using that phrase, Miller is using that phrase all the time.
So, you know, framing it through Fanon or or anybody like that, I think points to this imperial boomerang thing where you know what you have in uh a global North society is the return of an externalized violence, you know, and turned against its, you know, one's own people.
And I think we see this acted out somewhat symbolically in Heg Sith hauling over 400 generals home from 700 US foreign military bases so that he can fat shame them and so that Trump can tell them that their new assignment is to occupy blue state cities.
So we'll get to that.
But I want to go through the thought crime list to see how everything old is new again.
So anti-Americanism.
So long-term, long-term subject, world war one era loyalty campaigns and later red scare tactics were very common to suppress anti-war or anti-government sentiment.
Uh, there were the espionage and sedition acts that uh criminalized opposition to US policy.
The whole purpose of COINtel Pro starting in 1956 was to target supposed subversive, subserv subversive, you know, people and anyone critical of US policy.
And of course, that would include civil rights activists and other dissenters.
Uh, the theme of anti-capitalism or overthrowing the US, also old news.
And, you know, we have this long history of the FBI collaborating with bosses on suppressing labor actions.
The Palmer raids of 1919 are emblematic because there was this fear of a Bolshevik-style revolution amongst, you know, the laboring population.
It was also a response to a spate of anarchist bombings, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And the feds arrested thousands in raids across multiple cities, uh, many times without warrants, which should sound familiar.
Hundreds of immigrants were deported.
All of this continues through the second Red Scare after the second world war.
Extremism on race uh is also old news because civil rights activists and black liberation movements were always the targets of very intense federal surveillance under COINTELPR, with racial equality efforts always being called extremist and linked to subversive foreign influence.
And, you know, a good early starting point for this dates back to W.E.B. Du Bois going to Versailles in 1919 with 25 members of the this new group that he mainly helped form, uh, the NAACP to try to negotiate with the colonial powers for the liberation of Africa.
This is the same year that Hoover opened a file on Marcus Garvey.
So that's very old news.
Extremism on gender, um, this is something I want to learn a little bit more about because the FBI actually targeted uh women's groups beginning in the 50s, also through COINTELPR.
Uh The feds surveilled and disrupted the women's liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, but also the national organization for women was surveilled for communist infiltration.
Maybe, I don't know, betrayed by unshaved armpits or something.
The thing that's kind of new is the Christian stuff.
And maybe that's because white Christian nationalism has not attained as much structural power until this point in any previous administration.
Because most FBI lingo down through the years, there's a little bit from McCarthy that goes to the right of this on family values.
Um, but a lot of it is a lot of the red scare scare stuff is firmly secular.
Umbody liked the supposed atheism of the communists, but that wasn't the main fixation that they had.
Yeah, and the thing with McCarthy is that he was a complete buffoon.
McCarthy was kind of like the the less successful Trump of his time.
He was really opportunistic.
Yeah.
He he didn't have any evidence.
He was just doing it to further his career and to and to, and he knew how to manipulate the media.
Yeah.
And I wonder whether I don't know much about his actual religious bona fides or if he had any kind of like church connection back in Wisconsin, but like it it's it's very fitting that the guy who's also an absolute mess of a human being who can't keep his eyes open because he's so drunk from He drinks himself to death.
He drinks himself to death and he he's he's completely dysfunctional.
It's not surprising that he would add a little bit of Christian piety into the mix to sort of freshen things up or make himself look better or something.
Yeah, I've never seen anything about him having a strong religious connection.
But you know, he was also exploiting the reality that that Alger Hiss had happened, the Rosenbergs had happened.
There really was Soviet espionage that was being attempted.
But this is into the point of what we're talking about today.
It's this opportunistic riding on that, which you just referenced a couple paragraphs ago.
So I think we have this white Christian nationalism jet fuel in the Trump era, where it's not just about purifying the zeitgeist of anything related to collectivization.
It's about becoming something else, like adding something else.
Like being American is not enough for Trump.
Like he's gotta add a kind of hyper-reality to what Americanism means.
And if being American was enough, I don't think he would be plastering more fake gold sconces on every wall of the White House.
It's additive, right?
Like the Red Scare was always about purging.
Uh, but Trumpism is about purging, but then applying like a ton of pizzazz, like spray tan, a ballroom, Paula White speaking in tongues.
It's adding stuff.
It's not like it it is, it is truly Broadway uh fascism that way.
Yeah.
Welcome to the circus.
So rolling off this just briefly, Matthew, this whole tap topic has like a deep personal resonance for me in some ways because I grew up under the authoritarian apartheid regime.
Uh and the last nine years in the US have been increasingly unsettling for me, and of course, much worse for a lot of other people, given Trump's impulses and the types of people who support and influence him.
And I just want to share that in the 80s in South Africa, there was one state-run broadcasting company, one official version of the TV and radio news, the newspapers were censored and then were increasingly more and more sent uh censored as the resistance movement grew more active and successful.
Nelson Mondela, who, of course, is world famous, was jailed for life in 1964.
But I have to say, as a kid born in 1970, I knew his name, but it was illegal to own or print any photographs of him.
Likewise, to ever quote his words or play any film or audio recordings of him.
It was illegal to say his name or talk about him in front of a public gathering on a microphone.
This was true for an ever-growing list of what they called banned people.
I just want to say, too, that the technological sort of limitations of this particular era creates a different picture because being able to ban pictures is actually possible, right?
Yeah.
It's it's not like very, very different time.
And I wonder whether some of the anxiety and almost, I don't know, Like overreaching quality of the person like Stephen Miller is this sense that he can't really control ultimately what people say about him or what kind of memes are made about him.
Yeah, it's much harder to clamp down in these same ways.
And what you were, you know, referencing the Red Scare and especially like what happened before McCarthy with the with Hollywood, right?
And the House on American Activities Committee, like that was all about trying to control what was being put into movies and basically saying all of these directors and writers and actors are actually secretly communists and they're trying to, they're trying to corrupt our society.
You know, in South Africa at this time, any movies from America that were deemed to have subversive themes would end up being banned.
But the the censors were culturally illiterate and kind of stupid.
So you'd always get like a couple weeks to see easy writer, to see the Rocky Horror picture show, to see hair where a black a black woman and a and a white man may kiss or or or vice versa.
And then they would get banned, because it'd be like, oh no, we can't have that.
And of course, this is apartheid.
So it was also illegal for blacks to live in whites only areas, also be employed as anything other than unskilled labor, or for blacks and whites to have sexual relations.
And then anti-apartate organizations could also be banned.
And what it meant at that time was that if you were found to belong to those banned organizations, you could be sentenced to 20 years in jail.
So my parents were constantly having to, you know, do a little tap dance around like, okay, let's let's not be affiliated with that organization anymore.
Maybe you go to jail, maybe you face such steep fines that you'd have to sell your house to pay for them.
And the reason was that these groups were said to support terrorism.
And we did have elections, but only 20% of the white population, the 20% population who was white had the vote.
And the party who created an enforced apartheid was in power for about 45 years.
And there was one prime minister in place for the 11 years that I was there between being eight and 19.
I was there for longer than that.
But that entire 11 years, we had one guy at the top.
And then not unlike these ice motherfuckers, yellow police pickup truck vans roamed the whites-only neighborhoods to arrest any blacks who didn't have the right papers for doing menial work in that particular area.
Can I just ask, yeah, um, were were they were they able to do that with impunity?
Because again, I'll just mention this.
Some of the most inspiring stuff that comes out of our, you know, continual media barrage at this point is watching people in neighborhoods in Chicago or Los Angeles actually come out in their flip-flops and you know, bathrobes and and and chase these guys out of town.
But it was was that was that just impossible in that situation?
The vast majority of people in white neighborhoods were absolutely on board, uh, did not want, did not, you know, essentially you had you had housekeepers who lived in servants' quarters in the backs of the houses.
Right.
And these would generally be young men who were who were their boyfriends or husbands who were true who were coming to visit them but didn't have the right papers to be in the neighborhood.
Right.
And I think most white people were like, yeah, get those, uh, get those black guys off the street.
We don't know what they're doing here.
There wasn't a strong sense of resistance within most whites-only neighborhood.
And then last thing here, as I'm going down this uh uh unpleasant memory lane, my sociology professor at university was shot dead on his doorstep.
And years later it was revealed that he was one of thousands of political activists, either kidnapped and tortured or murdered and often buried in shallow unmarked graves by a secret police force dedicated to squashing old dissent.
I had student leader friends on our university campus who would disappear and then return only weeks later, traumatized and compliant and not wanting to talk about it.
Anyone who questioned or criticized the regime was labeled a communist or a terrorist.
And when Mandela was finally released and unbanned is the amazing terminology, right?
In 1990, it was the first time that I and many of my peers had ever seen his face or heard his voice.
So this is where a lot of this kind of stuff goes.
Yeah.
And that silence and that absence must have made him uh just an incredible figure and force almost mythic.
I don't know, supernatural in a way, mythic.
Yeah.
So speaking of people trying to be mythic, last October, during the election, I did an episode called Trump Temple Playlist, where I analyzed that rally in Oaks, Pennsylvania, where uh Trump probably wasn't feeling Very well.
He didn't want to keep talking.
He was done for the day.
And so he replaced his town hall QA with a half hour of uh show tunes, where, you know, he he put on Pavarotti and, you know, Phantom of the Opera and other, you know, bits of favorite music of his.
And Christy Gnome was the MC, and she was trying to look very normal, uh, trying to sort of sway in time with Trump.
And what I said was that from, you know, far from being bizarre, uh, it showed because a lot of people were freaked out by that.
But I kind of recognized it from a number of cultic situations that I'm familiar with and I've reported on, because it really showed Trump's dependence on trance-inducing spectacle, especially in times of sort of personal, I don't know, fatigue or weakness to maintain emotional dominance over followers.
So I cited how Yogi Bhajan and Jim Jones uh would do stuff like this.
I had actually a uh cult leader, the guy that the guy that led the group that I was in in Wisconsin, when he was sort of exhausted for the day, he would just have his DJ play uh his favorite songs, and everybody would kind of try to osmotically absorb whatever his spiritual intuition was through, you know, listening to I don't know, uh show tunes.
And uh this is how aging charismatics will use props, sometimes music to outsource self-worship when cognition and rhetoric falter.
And I said that his rallies were kind of functioning as parasocial rituals of shared affect rather than politics.
So the idea of fascism as emotional contagion.
And that was working for Trump back in the fall.
Now, through the late winter and early spring, he kept up a semi-regular schedule of rallies, but that has fallen off.
Uh, he's not really doing that anymore.
I think the shine is still dimming.
And then we have this entrance that he made to the gathering of 400 generals at Quantico last week, where he realized he was facing a tough room.
Thank you very much, Pete.
Great job you're doing too.
Fantastic job.
I've never walked into a room so silent before.
This is very don't laugh, don't laugh.
You're not allowed to do that.
You know what?
Just have a good time.
And if you want to applaud, you applaud.
And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want.
And if you don't like what I'm saying, you can leave the room.
Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.
But you just feel nice and loose, okay, because we're all on the same team.
And uh I was told that you won't hear a you won't hear a murmur in the room.
I said, we got to loosen these guys up a little bit.
So he can alienate and fire whoever he wants if he's willing to risk the stability of the foreign empire.
Uh, if he's only interested in finding loyalists who will abuse citizens here, he can probably find them.
But I don't think he wants too many moments like this where the shtick falls flat in front of extremely important people.
Because he's not showboating for followers that he's making promises to.
He's not showboating for oligarchs that he's nudging and winking at.
That room was filled with careerists who have navigated a complicated bureaucracy and many different administrations.
He's just the next commander to them.
If they bow out under him, well and good.
But they're not going to let him have his spell.
So I don't think we've seen him try to play a tough crowd before.
The closest I think the administration comes to stuff like this is sending like Cash Patel to make a fool of himself in front of an auditorium of FBI agents.
And in a way, that plays to Trump's advantage as well, right?
It's like he's the one who never gets laughed at or who never has the the awkward room.
Or, you know, he can send RFK Jr. to chew out the whole staff at HHS.
And I imagine there's part of Trump that's actually laughing at the voice, right?
Uh, and you know, wondering, you know, how many people are finding this funny?
I'm sure this makes him feel good.
But when he flops in front of generals, the stakes are a lot higher because ultimately fascism depends on majority buy-in, not only from the media and tech sectors, but from the brass.
And I think he already knows that his stock is low there.
And that's part of why he's on track to basically hire 10,000 ICE agents at $50,000 hiring bonus each with no pay stoppages during the government shutdown.
