142: State Terrorism and Fascism, with Amanda Rogers AKA MsEntropy
Amanda Rogers dissects Trump’s Iran strikes—targeting Khamenei and opposition figures like Mousavi—as a destabilization tactic mirroring U.S. proxy wars in the 1980s, exposing Saudi Arabia’s complicity while dismissing "terrorism" as a weaponized label to silence dissent, from domestic protests (Prairie Land 19) to Muslim scapegoating. She warns Trump’s redefinition of terrorism risks eroding First Amendment protections, using cases like NSPM 7 and AI surveillance to brand critics as enemies while ignoring state violence, framing fascist consolidation as a global-local strategy where war rhetoric justifies repression at home. [Automatically generated summary]
Another very special episode for you because, well, firstly, hello, Daniel.
Hello, Jack.
Hello.
I always like to check that he's still there.
And as I was saying, very special episode for you because we have returning for the first time for several years, a very special guest, Amanda Rogers.
Amanda, are you there too?
Yes, I am here.
I am here.
Yay!
We're all here.
Misentropy is probably how most of you know me.
So you can call me that too if you want.
Sure.
Yeah.
Now, yeah, the reason we haven't invited you back, Amanda, more regularly is just we just don't like women here.
So, you know, it's just a thing.
Yeah.
Listen, I mean, how could you?
We shouldn't have the right to vote.
We're terrible, right?
I mean, I hear that regularly every day on social media.
Yes, Amanda, I think you and I have been chatting for the last three years about getting you back on the show as soon as possible.
And now it's happening.
So, and ironically, we had you had suggested one topic, and then something else came up that we were just, we have to talk about.
And, you know, that is, of course, the, you know, horrifying, what's the horrifying things that my government and other governments are doing in Iran right now.
Opening the discussion.
And one thing that would be really useful for us when we think about these things.
Ordinarily, I come on here to talk about non-state armed groups and fascism.
But what we're confronting in the U.S. and have been for quite some time is a state actor in the process of fascist power consolidation at home.
And there are different threads of these discussions that relate quite directly in ways that not enough people recognize when it comes to engagements abroad, particularly with the Middle East.
I mean, you might have heard Imperial Blowback and the boomerang, all of these things when some people are discussing, say, Adam Watten Division's targeting of military recruits for their group or CBP and ICE specifically looking for veterans to take on.
And these things are all connected to wars abroad in ways that I think we don't normally put as much emphasis on when we talk about fascism in the States per se, the way that we tend to approach it with non-state armed groups.
And I would consider groups like Patriot Front and Adam Waffen Division and so many of these actors to fit that criteria, even though it's a term that is mostly used in terms of government analysis and assessment of extremism abroad.
So I think that would be a big, useful sort of contextualizing point to go into this with in terms of what we're doing abroad and the fact that it always has an impact on the quote unquote homeland in ways that we're not used to directly connecting and we need to.
Listeners, please be aware that I am not an expert on Iran.
I've spent a lot more of my life living in the Arabic-speaking parts of the Middle East, especially North Africa.
I know more than the average American, but that's not exactly a high bar.
So please don't take what I'm saying as evidence of some expert view into what's happening on the ground.
I can just give you an assessment based on what I know.
So I want to be super clear.
So I would just say, if we're going to summarize what's been going on, the night before last, in the middle of the night, Trump posted a video on True Social that announced, quote, major combat operations had begun in Iran.
There's so much debate swirling about whether or not this was intended to be a regime change operation from the jump and whether or not the United States has gone in on behalf of the Israeli state and met NYAHO's goals in particular, who's pulling the strings.
There are all kinds of different takes on this subject in a time where information seems like it's readily accessible and more accessible than in the past via social media and citizen journalism.
But the ability to verify these takes is further away and more impossible than ever.
So there are a lot of moving parts to what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, there's so much there I want to ask Amanda about, but specifically on the question of regime change, I mean, it certainly looks like it's that to me, because it looks like they're trying to take out and have successfully taken out members of the Iranian government.
Do you have an opinion on whether it's intended to be, it was always intended to be a regime change war?
I think even within your question, there are distinctions that have to be answered as separate questions because the question is, do I think that it is a regime change is different than was it always a regime change?
And that separation points to aspects of the Trump administration's absolute refusal to explicitly articulate in advance why they needed to escalate to military engagement in Iran.
Now, in Trump's own statements and several of those around him, they have explicitly used the phrases war, major combat operations, which is an identical phrase that was used with the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
And he's framed it as regime change in his statements.
I mean, the True Social Post from the night before last explicitly issued an ultimatum to members of the IDRC in Iran, the Iranian army, or the military in Iran, and the police.
And Trump said, basically, lay down your arms and you get full amnesty or you're going to die.
I mean, it was very, very explicit.
And then he ordered the Iranian people to, quote, take control of your government.
So by normal conceptions of what we think a regime change operation would look like in terms of justification, that would meet the criteria pretty clearly, right?
There's not much debate about that.
However, that's a separate question from what is Trump actually trying to achieve, you know, versus his words.
And also, I think people get lost in the idea of what regime change is as an intention in the sense that, you know, it's a separate question to take out the leader of a regime, right?
And also provide a regime after that action.
So to me, I see a lot of good evidence that would support regime change as an overarching justification on the part of the Trump administration.
However, I don't see that as the ultimate goal.
What I see in some ways is a very surreal sort of callback to the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988.
And, you know, I just want to throw this out here and we can come back to it, but it's significant to mention that in 1980 to 1988, that particular conflict, the United States armed and supported Iraq at the time, and the Israeli state armed and supported Iran.
That was a devastating conflict between the two countries, but the goal in that sense, or in that particular time period, and why the U.S. and Israel, who obviously are very dear allies, would go against one another, was simply the destabilization of the region through these two actors, or what the United States likes to term, you know, say when we talk about Iran, proxy conflict, right?
Proxy wars.
And the goal then was to destabilize Iran and Iraq and keep them fighting.
And I think the operations, as far as Iran goes recently, the past two days on the part of the U.S. are similar because of the fact that, you know, the U.S. and Israel didn't just take out Ayatollah Khamenei.
They also targeted Musabi, who was an opposition leader that had a large part to do with the 2009 quote-unquote Korean revolution.
They've also targeted, and this hasn't been confirmed as to whether or not he is dead, in fact, but Ahmedinejad, the former mayor of Tehran that was in charge of, or not in charge of Iran, but president of Iran for quite some time.
So as far as regime change is concerned, and we've seen administration leaders make statements to this effect, you know, they're not concerned with what they would like to call quote-unquote nation building after the fact.
To them, that's they're using all this amazing, fantastical 1984 language about that's up to the people.
It's not their job to make those decisions, right?
So they just created, according to them, a space for the Iranian people to rise up and take control.
Now, considering the fact they've been targeting elements of opposition within the country, that doesn't, to me, indicate that any sort of regime change with a successful democratic transition built in or even assumed was part of the calculus the entire time.
I find it much more likely that destabilization, as far as I could articulate a singular goal, is part of the fundamental goal.
But I'm highly, highly uncomfortable with trying to pin down and claim one intention.
So I think, you know, even regarding that question, we have to be really careful with separating the intention of an operation and combat, you know, combat operations and deployments, et cetera, and the actual goals versus rhetoric.
I think that's really important here.
I mean, the question of proxy wars instantly makes me think of the other thing that is part of the discourse around this, certainly in social media, which is the question of Israel's influence over the United States.
A hell of a lot of people, and this is deeply unfortunate, but a hell of a lot of people, both on the far right and on various sectors of the left, are talking about this event as if essentially the United States is acting as an agent of Israel.
Yeah, I've seen a lot of that.
And, you know, I'll be very frank about my own political positioning when it comes to the state of Israel, because I've written tons of criticisms for decades, right, about that state.
And I'm by no means a fan, particularly of Netanyahu.
I've called it an apartheid state, et cetera.
So you would classify me, I assume, in the far left, you know, part of the spectrum.
I mean, I think describing Israel as an apartheid state is just a statement of reality.
I don't even think that has a, you know, I would too.
Jimmy Carter said that, didn't he?
Exactly.
And Jimmy Carter, by the way, okay, so many thoughts on him.
He was a lovely human being.
But anyway, so to mainstream discourse right now, even saying that and taking the censorist peanut farmer position of Carter, right, makes one a far leftist when it comes to discourse on Israel.
So that's where I'm coming from, right?
Not as like an actual label that I would apply to myself because I don't really stick many of them, but that's where I'm coming from on the subject of the Israeli state.
And I think that's a useful caveat going into what I have to say about is the U.S. acting as an agent of Israel.
I personally think that anyone who is deeply familiar with the region knows that it's way too simplistic to act like Israel is leading the U.S. or the U.S. is leading Israel.
I think since the special relationship began between those two states, there's been a very sort of symbiotic parasitic relationship back and forth that changes in ebbs and flows.
But my issue more broadly with this portrayal of what's happening in Iran is just down to Israel made us do it, it misses a lot of things.
And I think it applies more broadly to assessments of U.S. actions in the region.
You know, Israel is our closest ally, but you know who our second closest ally is right up there basically with Israel in a lot of ways?
It's Saudi Arabia.
And that relationship has been considered a special relationship for just as long as the Israeli and American alliances.
And so I definitely think that Netanyahu wanted to put Trump in the position of having to act in Iran in this particular instance, sure.
However, Trump has been surrounded by Iran war hawks who have been militating for this stuff for decades.
I mean, this goes back to Reagan and Carter, right?
The idea of offensive operations against Iran for a variety of reasons that we can go into.
But in terms of this particular engagement, it's just inaccurate to view this entirely through the lens of Israel because for one, I mean, in addition to everything else I've been saying, you know, geopolitics in the region are not that simplistic, no matter how you feel about the state of Israel.
And I'm saying that as someone that does not like it very much.
And in, again, the strikes that began the night before last, you know, Saudi Arabia, and this is very typical for how conflicts operate in that part of the world.
Saudi Arabia took one stance publicly about, you know, kinetic operations in Iran versus in private.
In private, Mohamed bin Salman has been agitating for this for quite some time.
In public, Saudi has been much more restrained about claiming that they will not let the U.S. use Saudi airspace, for example, to conduct strikes.
And, you know, the fact of the matter is the Saudis, Saudi was behind this as well.
So, you know, if you're going to take just this binary approach to what's happening, not only does it mistake how these things unfold in practice, but it's counterproductive in many different senses, including the fact that it's myopic enough that you miss how engagements like this will be and are already being used domestically for other purposes of fascist power consolidation.
Insane Iran Responses00:10:01
And I think that is an enormous mistake that people are making.
You know, that's entirely besides all of the other critiques that many people are making about, you know, is this line of rhetoric about targeting Jews versus targeting the state?
I mean, that's a different discussion entirely as well.
But I think that's the primary response I would give to that question.
And be interested to see how you guys feel about it.
Well, for myself, I pretty much perfectly agree with you.
I'm again very critical of the state of Israel, have been for a very long time.
You know, I consider it an apartheid state, a rogue state, et cetera, racist settler colonial society.
I'd even go as far as to say, but look, you can't make it the sole demon of the region.
That just isn't factually accurate, you know, as you were just saying.
And that sort of talk, it tends towards conspiracism and it tends towards anti-Semitism.
It does in a lot of senses.
One thing that I wish that leftists could stop and sort of, you know, and I consider, you know, my people would be leftists in this.
You know, there's a huge danger in a very Euro or very American-centric way of thinking when every possible thing you don't like that unfolds in the Middle East has to be because the Americans made it happen.
Oh, yeah.
You know, it deprives agency from everybody.
And you're also making your supposed enemy in this situation even bigger and more frightening.
And you're crediting them for just this absolutely demonic brilliance that, in fact, a lot of times they don't actually have.
You know, so that's part of the problem too.
But in terms of this line of critique veering towards anti-Semitism, I think for a lot of people, that's frankly exactly what it is.
I don't think for everyone.
I mean, I know certainly not for myself, but it is an excuse for lots of people.
You definitely see that all over the right.
And that's a problem.
And I frankly don't think that we have anything to gain from unintentionally co-signing that line of attack.
I think we have everything to lose, mostly on an ethical level.
And I want to also build onto that because, you know, there's a meme of Iran response going around right now that I find really, really disgusting.
It doesn't seem initially to connect to the question of Israel, but to me, it very much does.
And that is reactions from the left who are mocking the bombings in Dubai and the Emirates.
And they're doing so because they're, you know, laughing at the fact that a lot of influencers and rich people live in Dubai.
All right, that's a fact.
But the thing that connects the two for me, you know, Israel, in my view, as well as the Emirates, in most people's view, with backing in this area, these are ethno-states.
All right.
The United Arab Emirates could not exist without 80 to 90% of the population being foreign.
And that's not just influencers and Andrew Tate and all of these loathsome people that you want to laugh at at this particular time.
It's slave labor from Africa and South Asia.
And they are going to, and they are bearing the brunt of what is going on without the resource wealth of the state returning to them in any way, shape, or form.
So to solely view the situation in the al-Aimarat through the lens of rich Westerners is really disgusting to me.
And it's completely inaccurate, violates your whole ethical grounds.
And you know what?
You can make an awful lot of, I think, analytical, analytically valuable points when you frame this question as what it is: one of ethno-states and who legally should enjoy the resources and riches of the state as a resident and citizen, you know, and who gets access to that.
I think that's the bigger question.
And if you're seriously concerned with the critique of Israel about, you know, barring Palestinian equitable access to these things, you need to apply that mechanism all over the region because that's really what we're fighting, not in one specific area, you know.
And in that sense, the whataboutism that people often throw back at you, it's not always, most of the time, it's very much not motivated by a genuine desire to critique these other regimes, but they do have an accidental point, and not engaging with that is, I think, a horrible idea.
You know, because from the beginning of my engagement on Twitter, you know, I say anything about Israel and someone pops up to say, well, you know, why haven't you talked about Saudi Arabia?
I talk about Saudi Arabia and the problems of that state all the time.
And I don't think that anyone seriously concerned with systems of oppression and apartheid can afford to neglect their assessment of any of these actors.
They support each other in ways that are not so readily apparent.
And perfect example of this, Lindsey Graham just came out and said that ridding the region of Khamenei, the best case scenario, that Saudi Arabia will somehow normalize relations with and recognize the state of Israel.
And that's going to be what solves ultimately the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which is, I don't want to use ableist language in terms of talking about mental health, but it's insane.
That is an insane view to take.
You know, so that's where I think these kinds of things matter.
And one of my recurrent sort of rants about Lindsey Graham in particular, but everyone that discusses Iran first and foremost in the language of the-by the way.
Yes.
I didn't even realize that Jack Graham, Lindsey Graham.
I'm too caught on the Iran tip.
I apologize.
I interrupted you to make a stupid joke.
I am deeply sorry.
No, don't apologize.
It was funny.
I'm just, you know, I start talking on this stuff and I cannot shut up, which listeners and both of you already know.
Before I forget, the last thing that I would sort of tackle about this is everybody that frames or accepts the framing of Iran as the biggest sponsor of terrorism in the world, state-sponsored terrorism, et cetera.
People, you know, tend to read that and either agree or push back in ways that are not at all effective by saying, oh, no, they're not, period, right?
Well, I mean, I personally like to quote, tweet, for example, those statements and say, I think you've spelled Saudi Arabia wrong, right?
But I don't think that my point here is I don't think that you can neglect any of these powers when you are making an assessment and analysis of what's going on in the region because they are all involved in different ways that are not obvious in a headline.
Yeah, I mean, I find, you know, for me, the whole thing, and I don't know, I have a very like grug-brained simple kind of view of this is, you know, ultimately, whenever we're talking, whenever you're talking about air power and geopolitics and regime change, ultimately in the end, you're talking about children buried in rubble.
That's the end of the story for me, you know.
I mean, not really the end of the story, but that's what always, that's what gets lost in these conversations when we are kind of talking about this.
And I think that that's something that, to me, like any discussion, you know, like, you know, will Americans support this if, you know, if we don't put, you know, American boots on the ground?
Like, we care about our soldiers more than, you know, the lives of these other people because they live far away.
They don't speak our language and they're brown, quite frankly.
And, you know, I think I find that whole, I find the whole thing disgusting.
And I'm not disagreeing with you at all, Amanda.
I just, I just, you know, for me, I just wanted to just kind of say that out loud, just because I feel like it just, so we get, we get involved in these kind of conversations.
And ultimately, we're talking about, I mean, we're talking about state-sanctioned murder, you know, and suddenly the terror, It's not terrorism if it's done by the United States or by Israel or by it's, it's, it's not.
It's not if there's a, if there's a man in a uniform dropping bombs from a thousand feet up.
It's suddenly that's just, that's just something that happens, you know.
Whereas if it's, you know sorry, go ahead.
You're on to something super, super on point.
And I I agree with you.
You know, my first instinct when I see you know pray for our brave men and women in uniform is, um, you know, I i'm not, you know attacking, attacking troops individually or, you know, neglecting to recognize the fact that the U.s military prays on poor neighborhoods to recurs people who see no other way out of poverty other than, you know, military college, etc.
Right, that's a whole separate issue.
But what makes me so upset when I see these um response like to me, I don't pray first and foremost for people in uniform on behalf of the United States ARMY.
For me, any civilian that will suffer the brunt of um the violence in any of these countries, by any of these countries, is first and foremost.
Who i'm concerned about?
Um yes, and that's my, that's my initial response.
As far as the you know, you can't call it terrorism if the United States does it.
I think that's a really, really valuable entry to another point of discussion.
Um, you know, which is to say when you start, there's a really phenomenal book, that that discusses this.
It's called on suicide bombing by Talal Assad and it looks at um, you know, different ways of inflicting death on a population and attempts some, an assessment of that that is detached from a moral value judgment, and it's fascinating and very, very useful, even though it's, you know, philosophical and not exactly the most um, entertaining reading.
Imperialism And Mainstream Figures00:02:35
If you're looking for, you know, your day off, but I loved it.
I loved it, but I am a huge nerd that, like when I was a kid, i'd rather watch C-span than cartoons.
Right, like I have problems is my point.
It sounds like sorry, i'm gonna, i'm gonna go here.
It sounds like exactly the book, sounds like exactly the book you'd want to read on those beautiful shores of Gazalaga, and you know, oh god, i'm sorry, i'm sorry, I apologize, it's a dark joke.
It's a dark joke but yeah, it's totally fine.
We have to laugh at times like this right, because it's unbearable.
So don't apologize for a joke definitely not with me, because i'm guilty of all of them.
I saw a BLUE SKY post a while back where we were talking about that issue.
It's like, well, yeah, we already had that happen.
It's just called Bali, you know, like, you know.
Yeah, I mean, you know, basically, basically, any like far-flung vacation destination is exactly the result of that kind of imperial process.
You know, well, I mean, look at Hawaii, you know, absolutely.
Indigenous, like, in monarchy.
I mean, that's yes, yes, yes, and yes.
What I would say about the state.
Our last episode was about the Bad Bunny Halftime show, which equally important topics, you know, bombing Iran versus the Bad Bunny Halftime show.
But one of the songs that Ricky Martin sings literally has lyrics referring to, we don't want Puerto Rico to end up like Hawaii did.
So it's all on point.
Wait, Ricky Martin or Bad Bunny?
Like, was Ricky Martin's?
I didn't see it.
Ricky Martin had, he sang, I believe it's a Bad Bunny song, but he sang, he sang a few.
He sang for a minute or so.
And so did Lady Gaga.
All the people complaining that all of it was in Spanish didn't realize that Lady Gaga sang completely in English.
It was, you know, sorry, stuff I didn't even get into that other episode.
But aside from what, sorry, I'm trying to keep it like a little bit lighter.
You know, I feel like one thing that we've always tried to do is to make this about imperialism in some degree, that like the minute you start talking about these, you know, I don't think you're making it about imperialism.
I think it naturally already is.
And that's just something that isn't discussed as often.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't speak German in general.
It's kind of always been kind of, that's always been lurking in the background because ultimately what we're talking about is these like right-wing influencers, these far-right influencers trying to create a localized imperialist or trying to use the logic of imperialism at home and abroad.
And as this stuff becomes more mainstream and as we've been talking about more mainstream figures, it just becomes like, you know, again, as you were saying in the DMs with me, you know, it is about this, you know, the state power that suddenly this is what fascist states do abroad.
And I think that that's something that's really, really important to highlight.
Pause though, pause, because there's something else really equally important, in my opinion, to highlight.
Sure, sure.
Yes, it's what imperialist states do abroad.
Right-Wing Influencers and Imperialism00:15:05
Yes, absolutely correct.
However, it's also what imperialist states are continually engaging in at home to the most marginalized of the populations.
And that violence against, you know, black and brown folks here goes unrecognized in terms of those direct connections about, you know, yeah, there's an element of imperial blowback.
For sure, that does not mean that the violence done over there was not already occurring here.
What it does mean is that once that blowback and boomerang hits the domestic front, it is, dare I say, democratized to everyone in a really perverse sense of the word democratized because it applies to basically anyone that dissents from the powers that be.
And that's another element of discussion that I think is worth going into.
But before we get there, I want to just very quickly touch back on this issue of state terrorism versus non-state terrorism in terms of the United States and how they behave.
So one of the biggest problems about the term terrorism is that inherently it has absolutely no meaning.
It is flexible.
It can be applied equally to the actions of many, many, if not all states.
And this is what's connected with Talal Assad's book.
He essentially points out that these categories of violence and killing are separated essentially by how the power of the state is considered legitimate versus other situations.
So, you know, the hesitance of most people to look at the United States military or any other military of a nation state in the world, looking at the violence they inflict abroad and not calling it terrorism essentially boils down to the fact that they are operating on behalf of a nation-state's governance,
which means that they have, according to theories of legitimacy, they have a monopoly on the ability to apply violence, right?
And therefore, anyone that's not the state engaged in violence, even if that's for self-defense or resistance to occupation, that becomes de facto illegal violence that's very easy to write off as immoral.
What's important about the terrorism category in particular is: let's take, for example, the common mechanism of sanctions and conflicts abroad and think about that alongside prevalent definitions of terrorism.
And that's another issue, by the way, definitions of terrorism.
So people assume that the definition of terrorism is anything that is meant to, you know, frighten and target a civilian population in such a way as to persuade them to change political policy.
Now, sanctions absolutely fit that criteria, absolutely, because even when you apply it in most cases to the government of a particular regime, I'm thinking Iraq here in previous years.
Those that suffer are not the governmental leadership, it is the people of the regime.
Absolutely.
Now, when you do that, knowing that the civilian population will suffer, and your fundamental objective is to get them to agitate against their particular government, you are by definition, right, you are applying harm and violence to a civilian population in the interest of leveraging that reaction for political change.
So that shows you one of the problems of terrorism.
Another thing I think that's worthwhile to mention here is, you know, terrorism didn't exist as a definitional criteria or criminal criteria before the 1970s.
And I mean, you know, that was, it grew hand in hand with hijackings and, you know, yeah, basically a bunch of these events in the 70s and 80s that used to be prosecuted under extant law, like hijacking, bombings for political purposes, et cetera.
And terrorism was an outgrowth of approaching those, even though they were, you know, pursued for justice with extant laws on the books.
One thing that I really want to hammer home before we go any further is there's a lot of concern about domestic versus international terrorism and laws around that, not just related to pushback against ICE, et cetera, DHS and ASIFA here, but also the blowback people are saying from the Iran conflict.
I mean, we've already had a couple mass casualty events in the States that are being investigated as terrorism.
But one thing people need to understand is that terrorism, this is another definitional problem.
There's so much lack of consensus internationally on what actually defines terrorism that the United Nations has issued resolutions about that fact, that nobody agrees.
That's not just an international problem.
Even within the States, the FBI definition of terrorism and the NSA definition of terrorism varies from the DODs.
And the problem with that, obviously, again, is because it is so flexible and can be applied any way the person with the power to apply it sees fit that generally tells you much more about whoever is applying the label than it does who they are or who the label is applied to.
And to give you another example of this, I mean, when I teach critical security studies and war on terror related things, one thing I love to do on the first day is divide my students up into small groups and I tell them that their job is to define terrorism.
And then I let them do that and let them decide in their groups that they have got it, you know, absolutely.
And then I make them meet with other groups and they see the differences.
I tell them that they're all wrong and they get to do it again.
So I divide them in new groups.
They do that the entire first period.
And they want to kill me by the end of it.
But it's very, very effective because it shows you how fluid that definitional criteria is.
And this is super relevant for the fact that despite the fact that Trump legally does not have the power to define or prosecute at a federal level domestic terrorism, he's taking actions to do that.
But the thing is, the United States has not had a federal domestic terrorist organization list because of the flexibility of that term.
It impinges on the First Amendment right, you know, constitutionally protected speech.
And that's why historically, you have not ever been able to, at a federal level in the United States, go after someone for material support of terrorism unless it is attached to an organization that is located abroad.
And that is a firewall that was attempted, you know, to be in place because of constitutionally protected free speech.
And one of the most mystifying and frightening things about the fascist power consolidation underway here and now is the invention of domestic terrorism, you know, in a way that it just furthers like the secrecy and lack of transparency that's already a problem with prosecuting, you know, international cases of terrorism.
It's just not clear.
It does not add anything.
That is really interesting.
Just parenthetically, I feel like page one or day one of teaching any subject should probably be getting students to realize that definitions are never any good for anything.
There's no such thing as a definition.
I mean, I think there are, but when it comes to things like terrorism, my favorite thing to do is, I mean, because you cannot pin that one down.
You just cannot do it.
But at the end, you know, I ask them, okay, so you guys can't even agree amongst yourselves about what actually constitutes terrorism.
Am I right?
And, you know, they nod.
And my final question on day one is: okay, so are you okay with letting the powers of the state put you to death for something you can't even define?
Are you okay with ceding that power?
Yeah.
And I think that's really effective, you know, because other cases like murder, for example, there are enough boundaries to that definition that you could apply it without losing your mind.
I mean, I don't agree with the death penalty, but you see what I'm saying.
It's more, there's a way that you can match it to an action.
That's seriously something you can validate, not terrorism.
Sure.
But on terrorism, it sounds like what you're saying is that the very fuzziness, the very flexibility of the concept is what gives it its utility to the powerful.
And what's been done is that that had been used externally for imperialistic purposes.
And so what's happening, it sounds like, is what you're saying is that what has previously been legally blocked in certain ways domestically within the United States is now being opened up.
And they're trying to retrain that very useful, fuzzy, open concept of what is terrorism internally towards dissent, towards internal dissent.
I think that that's very valid, sure.
But I also think, you know, I've reassessed my stance on even the use of the word.
And I can send you guys, if you're interested, I did an interview with the loopcast on this issue several years ago because for a long time, even when I criticized the application of the label terrorism to certain actions, when I found myself trying to push back, what's interesting is that I was never able to escape mirroring the logic of a nation state applying that.
So, for example, I used to talk about the assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Kansas in 2009, the abortion provider, as an act of terrorism.
And when I discussed why, I could not escape the fact that my pushback was always relying on tropes like, you know, he was a Republican and this, you know, Navy veteran and from the heartland, and he was religious and he was killed at church and he was a practicing Christian, all of these things that go hand in hand with who we consider to be, you know, the peak embodiment of what a citizen is.
And when you look further and further into it, there's, I really think that in many, many cases, terrorism is a citizenship claim.
And I think this administration in a lot of ways has moved to turn that imperial logic back on the homeland.
And I hate replicating that language, but it's useful in this context precisely because of how it's abused abroad, but in a more far-reaching way, because it already has been applied here in similar senses.
What I mean by that, too, is you look at the use of invasion to frame undocumented immigration at the border and the problems with that by Stephen Miller and what is now the mainstream GOP and the MAGA contingent thereof.
That rhetoric has been a trial balloon by specifically Miller for quite some time.
And the aim, if you look further into the rhetoric other than just invasion, illegal, et cetera, there's also a push to identify the Democratic Party and anybody that dissents from that framing as a fifth column within.
They're defending invaders.
They are aiding and abetting an invasion of the country.
This is why we need the Insurrection Act.
This is why, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's been imported and again, I like sarcastically, but it's accurate, democratized as far as who it applies to here in a way that started initially in the 70s with folks like Tom Metzger and David Duke, who have seeded that for 50 years to push the Overton window further to the right.
And this application of terrorism as a label to those at home that dissent is something that way more people need to pay attention to.
And I wish that when we talked about things like Iran, especially those of us on the left, we understood that this is why stopping and starting at Israel made us do it.
I mean, it's inaccurate in the first place.
I understand where their emotional reaction comes from, but it also leaves us so, so open to not seeing the connections and how they're operating here and how the administration specifically is leveraging. that type of myopia in ways that are screwing us all, frankly.
Yes, and they're heavily using the rhetoric of citizenship in their essentially ethnic cleansing program, aren't they?
They're using, you know, we're going after non-citizens and non-citizens are voting and stuff like that.
And at the same time, it started as about, quote, illegals committing crime.
And now it's turned to, you know, give us your social media handles.
And if you are critical of our policies, we don't want you in our nation.
So at what point, I mean, again, that's a perfect illustration of the citizenship claim and also the redefinition of constitutional protections and who they should apply to and in what capacity.
And it's really, really dangerous.
I mean, remigration, for example, that now official American government accounts are tweeting out began as, again, one of these white supremacist labels and, you know, strategic paths to get to the ethno-state.
And now it's been picked up and is a mainstream MAGA talking point.
It's absurd.
That's been the story of this podcast, ultimately, is that what we were going to talk about in 2019 is like, oh, yeah, these crazy guys in the former alt-right, you know, like Mike Enoch and the Daily Storm are talking about this stuff.
And now it's like, it's members of the administration.
I was just going to point this out.
You know, I don't know that you spend any time listening to Jack Pesobik or Megan Kelly or anything.
Unfortunately.
Unfortunately, you have other things to do with your life.
I do not.
This is what I do with my life.
No, I really don't.
I mean, that's what I do all day, every day, too.
So don't.
Apparently, anti-ice whistles are acts of terrorism in order to become a person.
These whistles are so loud.
They're so aggressive.
They're getting in the way of the cops.
And of course, the cops cannot be violent.
Mainstreaming Extremism Narratives00:16:16
They can only be violated.
I mean, according to Mueller, at all, they have absolute immunity, which should terrify us.
And on that, I just, I want to point out, too, that lest we forget these figures like Jack Pesobiak and those even further to the right of him are very, very well aware that this kind of encroachment on freedom of expression, dissent, and civil liberties applies to them.
You get on Telegram, for example, and you look at any of the fascist channels in their breakdown and assessment of, say, NSPM 7, Trump's, you know, very much extrajudicial presidential memo on terrorism criteria domestically that's horrifying, which we can talk about if you guys would like.
You know, their reaction is this in the long run is horrible because it will apply to us and anybody else that disagrees with whoever is in power.
In the short term, I like seeing Antifa people get locked up, but we should, you know, so they're very well aware of this.
Now, the problem and the disconnect that I think a lot of us miss far too much of the time is that, you know, it's not that they don't realize, and by they, I mean MAGA and the mainstream GOP, they very much realize how this decimates constitutional protections in a pluralist state.
They pretend that it doesn't, but that's not because they're ignorant or stupid.
It's because they don't want to give up power.
They know that if they give up power, this can be applied to them as well.
And I will say that this is why I argued emphatically against using domestic terrorism as a way to go after the groups responsible for January 6th, because that will always come back on the left and the most marginalized among us, inevitably, every single time.
There are other ways to prosecute the same actions that don't have a constitutional attack on just the basics of free speech and the right to bear arms built into them.
Terrorism, however, does.
So don't let them off the hook in thinking that when Poso says this stuff, he's unaware that it applies to him or any of the other actors in this movement.
They know.
And that's actually more evidence of why they are pushing so hard for a permanent fascist.
Well, some of the power.
Some of the earliest stuff that I remember seeing kind of my political engagement when I was a teenager was right-wing militia groups being gone after using some of these same statutes.
Absolutely.
Thinking about like a, you know, like a Waco Ruby Ridge.
Exactly, exactly.
You know, even the Marlworld Wildlife Reserve stuff, you know, some of the same kind of language.
And, you know, these people were, you know, I don't know.
I don't like this term.
We use it just for simplification of the anti-government extremists.
I don't like the term extremist.
I find it just a silly word.
Absolutely.
Because now what's extreme?
The same things that were extreme under, say, you know, Reagan and Bush, not that I liked Reagan or Bush, the extreme elements that the mainstream then GOP was willing to call out, even if there were facet factions among them that liked it.
Now, this stuff would be considered left, right?
Like Reagan himself, if MAGA looked at his record, and I can't stand Reagan or anything about him, but if they looked at him now, they would call him a member of Antifa.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Some of them really do, yeah.
Yeah, no, I just I find uh sorry, just to use just to finish my former thought, you know, I find that you know, a lot of the you know, a lot of the uh kind of liberal commentariat in the 90s and 2000s kind of talking about this stuff were kind of no, it's just those right-wing guys, these kind of they're scary looking with their guns and everything, and then like, well, yeah, but you know, a few years, I mean, yeah, they were bad guys, don't get me wrong, but uh, you know, maybe we don't let the government just run roughshod over them quite, you know, it's a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more nuanced, precisely.
I mean, the thing is, like, like take Ruby Ridge.
I mean, Randy Weber was an adherent of Christian identity movement ideology, right?
Literally, neo-Nazi theology of Jesus wants a race war.
I don't, I don't, as the kids say, fuck with that, never have, never will, right?
However, um, Randy Weaver was actually entrapped in weapons dealing, um, uh, legal like wrangling on the part of the FBI, and all of this blew up about um, you know, an issue surrounding a weapon, period.
It wasn't about him, you know, eminently acting to implement Christian identity movement beliefs.
And as abhorrent as I find him, he was living off the grid with his family and the overreach, I don't even think that's the right word, but like the actions of ATF and Waco and the FBI and Ruby Ridge, et cetera, like the blowback from that has been substantial and horrifying in ways that you can and should absolutely recognize and want to fight against, even when, and especially when you abhor the ideology of someone that they're targeting.
Because if you don't, what you are ignoring or choosing not to see is that you are simply next against the wall.
That is how this works.
And I don't think any of us on the left should have any credibility when we let that out of our sights.
Absolutely.
Why now?
Like, why, why, why yesterday?
I mean, I think that's something that, you know, we've heard saber rattling towards Iran for, you know, my lifetime, you know, for at least the last 25 years or so.
And, you know, there's a lot of, I don't know, I just see a lot of like dumb shit online of like, you know, well, it's a distraction from the Epstein files.
Is it visible?
I mean, like that kind of stuff.
Okay.
And I guess everything is.
If you believe these people, everything is a distraction from the Epstein file.
I'll start with.
I hate meta-narratives.
I always tell my students, students say, I hate meta-narratives.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, no, you cannot look at one event in the world and say this is your explains it all about how everything functions.
That is unhinged.
And it's what essentially is a step away from useless conspiratorial thinking versus identifying an actual conspiracy that has, you know, been undertaken successfully.
And I'm going to probably sound like a conspiracy theorist a little bit when I tell you what I actually believe about the timing.
But after saying I hate meta-narratives, I think this is super important to understand.
I do think that the Trump regime and several elements within it have been intent on moving the United States much more towards fascism internally for a long time that predates his run.
I do not think that that means this is a finely oiled machine where every single actor is in lockstep with those objectives.
I think that what we see domestically as well as internationally, and this includes very much Iran, is partially influence from actors that have wanted this outcome for a variety of reasons and acted to secure that for quite some time, as well as a perfect storm of factors because of a cluster fuck.
And those come together, right, in alignment in some ways that sometimes for things to, you know, happen.
Yes, we've been after Iran for quite some time.
That's a fact.
There are many different reasons I think that this happened now.
I mean, one of the factors that has, I think, restrained many around Trump and the administration that otherwise would always have the Iran war boner going on is the fact that the MAGA base is so isolationist on one hand and quote unquote America first, no foreign engagement.
So that's been like a constraining force for some of them.
And you look at people like, you know, Lindsey Graham, et cetera, John Bolton, you know, Pompeii, or like the first Trump administration that's always, always salivated with war for Iran.
So this is another issue with the unit, like the unitary cause argument that like we did it because of Israel.
Yes, Netanyahu very much wanted to push, force the U.S.'s hand to go back into a conflict situation for a variety of reasons.
The Epstein files is another thing that drives me crazy because sure, for a lot of people in the administration, it does distract from that.
However, you can't let one cause cloud your vision here because there are multiple other reasons that would speak to doing it now.
And even if it wasn't the sole cause, now there are benefits to be reaped if you leverage that combat operations onset.
What I mean by that is, so this is something very few people have discussed that I've seen anyway.
Shortly after Trump issued that video about the announcement, he also posted on Truth Social that Iran had tried to interfere in the 2020 and 2024 elections.
Now, other nation states try to interfere in other states' elections all of the time.
This is not particularly shocking.
I'm not saying that it's credible or not, but what I am saying is that this is interesting that he decided to post that particular piece of news right after announcing a combat engagement with Iran,
particularly because I think it was a week before, but we started to hear about leaks of a draft executive order about, I think it was in this case, China interfering with elections and allowing the Trump administration and the executive to assert more federal authority over local elections.
And I want to say this, but I'm not certain it has something to do with even like election cancellations because of the national emergency or something to that effect.
But, you know, basically, that is another thing that people should keep in mind.
There's an angle to this that could be used to further allow the federal government to take actions locally to interfere with elections that would contest Trump's power consolidations at the federal level.
That's something that matters.
Also, in terms of the why now, oh man, there was, oh yeah, the vote on DHS funding is coming up.
And one thing, again, I think people are not connecting to all of this is if you look at what right-wing politicians are saying at this moment in time, they are saying Democrat, they're replicating the rhetoric we already talked about about the fifth column within and sympathizing terrorists.
They're saying Democrats don't care about our country and national security because we are at war with Iran.
They have sleeper cells all over the United States.
And they are saying they won't vote for further DHS funding in this upcoming week's vote.
So they're saying that terrorist attacks here that will inevitably happen because of Iran's sleeper cells now being activated because we struck over there.
That's a reason that everybody in the states has to come together and give DHS an ICE and CBP more money.
So these are all factors that are moving parts, but I'm not comfortable saying this is why it happened now.
I don't necessarily think that's so useful.
What I think is more useful is look at how the timing of it happening is being leveraged in other ways that support a broader umbrella objective that's very dangerous to us all.
It's really just, you know, I mean, you know, again, so many like kind of just simplistic answers just kind of come like, oh, it's for this, it's for that.
And it's like, ah, I always feel like these things are multifaceted.
There's always, there's a bunch of spinning plates happening.
And, you know, they pulled the trigger on it because they, I mean, why did they go after Maduro when they did?
I think is it, you know, is it, you know, like, well, I know nothing about that.
So I'm going to keep my mouth shut about it, you know?
It's very clear that people in this administration, a lot of powerful people in this administration, are actively, they might not conceptualize it this way themselves, but they're actively trying to destroy American democracy.
It's been one unprecedented power grab after another.
They're not quite at the stage where they don't have to worry about midterm elections yet, and midterm elections are looming.
And they're looking at war powers, Insurrection Act, Alien Enemies Act being on the table for them to use.
I mean, people may be overstating the degree to which they can use these, but they have been before this engagement with Iran, for sure.
You're absolutely right.
Yeah.
And it reminds me of what Amy Cesare said about fascism being the tools of empire turned inwards.
Absolutely.
You know, I think, too, we often talk about how fascist and imperialist regimes engage in wars abroad to shore up domestic popular support at home and uncritical, you know, uncritical support of whatever the hell that regime is going to pass.
I think something that's really interesting about this one is that I don't think that it's that kind of situation.
I mean, we're not doing the conventional, you know, conventional military troops being committed on the ground and all of that, right?
I don't think shoring up popular support for a war objective is the aim here, but I think it fulfills the same function of traditionalists, there are traditionally imperialist regimes in that goal.
And to put it another way, it's like they are not concerned.
And they, you know, the administration is not concerned or thinking that it's anywhere near possible to, quote, unite the American public against Iran because of a war effort.
Absolutely not.
I think that they are many actors within, I should say, are more realistic.
Definitely not Hegsteth.
I'm thinking more of Miller.
So diabolical evil geniuses, not, you know, the DY hire of Hegsth.
That's a different matter entirely.
But so, you know, the issue here is the Iran sleeper sells post-9-11 terrorism in the homeland that you have to protect against.
And if you won't help us get the money to protect against that, then you are an aider and a better of a foreign terrorist actor.
And that's very different in terms of how it plays out to shore up support for your fascist regime.
But it's essentially just, you know, different strategy under the same sort of wheelhouse.
So I think that's, yeah, it's a good point.
I think, you know, maybe, again, maybe a little more simplistic is that, you know, Trump also just had kind of a big middle finger in the form of the tariffs not being approved by the Supreme Court.
And we know that Trump likes to interact with the world in very straightforward, simplistic ways.
And he likes to not have to ask for permission or get anybody's assistance on it.
And he has so much more ability, you know, like the imperial presidency just gives him so much more freedom to do whatever the fuck he wants with the American military than he has with domestic policy.
And so if he wants a quick win, he wants, oh, yeah, we'll do a four-week aerial bombing campaign of Taiwan.
And like, yeah, that's just, it's just a, it looks good.
He gets my dickheart.
You know, I mean, that's, I don't know, on some reason, I feel like I don't think that's a nothing.
You know, I don't, I, I, obviously, I don't think that's what's going on, but I don't think that's a good idea.
A lot of people, and I say that a lot of people too, because I've gotten pushback on this.
A lot of people have said to me, well, you know, I mean, the thing is, you can't trust anything that Trump says is the objective is actually the objective because, you know, he's not an irrational actor.
He just does shit because he does shit.
And while I do think that's true, what people miss in that line of analysis is the fact that, well, yes, and the people around him acknowledge the fact that he's very malleable.
And if you play to his ego and you're the last one in the room, you can essentially exploit him for whatever your pre-existing, you know, intention already is.
Trump's Malleable Rationality00:02:25
So I don't think there's any value in throwing up our hands.
And I'm not saying that you were, but I am saying that some people who've used this line to push back against me, I think they are.
Oh, but you can't even, you can't assume that Trump has any logic behind his actions and he just does shit because he does shit.
Okay, are we going to, are we supposed to just give up our hands and go, well, we'll never be able to predict what he's going to do anyway.
You can predict who is around him and what may happen because of who has his ear when he is having a tantrum.
And I think that more than anything else probably explains the timing of this Iran strike set.
I do think it was, you know, on the way anyway in a different time.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
With Trump, there's very definite proximate and distal causes.
The proximate causes are going to be, as you said.
So we can't pretend that's not true, right?
Like I'm not, I don't want anybody to mistake what I'm saying for like Israel didn't play a big role in this.
Netanyahu's immaterial.
Of course, he's very much involved.
And Israel is very much involved, but it's one factor among a more complex set.
And it would be refreshing and lovely if we could break it down to that simple calculation, but it's just one to one.
But he is up there with these other actors in Trump's ear.
Yeah, absolutely.
Trump isn't completely irrational.
If he was completely irrational, then what he did would just be random.
And the things, the effects would tend in all sorts of directions.
They don't.
The effects of his actions always tend towards the same direction, which is his self-interest.
So he's clearly not just completely unpredictable.
You can predict anything.
And how those around him are packaging and forcing their interests into an argument for his interests and how that can spin.
I hate the use of rational actor as a label for analysis of these things because there's a hell of a lot of moves that are quite rational by people we would think of as irrational because they act like unhinged lunatics, like the commander-in-chief, for example.
Yes.
Yeah, I know, absolutely.
So, on the subject of the tools of anti-terrorism policing legislation, et cetera, and the tools of imperial repression, et cetera, being turned inwards towards the domestic population.
Tools Of Repression00:15:32
Just connecting directly with what you were saying before.
How did they try to discredit the people that they murdered in the streets?
They called them terrorists.
They had that line scripted beforehand.
It was instantaneous.
Yes.
Yes.
Absolutely.
Well, it makes me very upset that Prairie Land has been so overlooked in terms of the headlines and headlines in general, but especially among leftists, those with a leftist political orientation.
And initially, that's what I wanted to talk about on this episode.
But with the outset of war on Iran, we had to tackle that too.
And it's another thing that serves to erase what's happening in Prairie Land, and it shouldn't because it's incidentally, and not incidentally to me, very, very much inextricably intertwined.
But yeah, I mean, I sorry, so just to just kind of, you know, kind of get us moving in that direction.
You suggested this to me as a story.
It's like, oh, I want to cover this Prairie Land 19 thing.
And I was like, I'm sorry, what again?
You know, it was sort of a, you know, I Googled it and I'm like, oh, yeah, I have vaguely heard about that.
And then I thought, well, I miss things, you know, because I'm just focused on my own little world.
And I, you know, I was started to work a new job and everything.
And I'm, you know, doing this stuff.
And I'm like, well, let me go back and look and see what.
And I'm like, I did, I didn't miss it.
It's just, it hasn't been covered.
And so the thing is, though, the thing is, it's not that you're too busy or you're distracted that has made you miss Prairie Land or any of us.
It's partly because of the imperatives of the national security state and how the terrorism label and definitional statutes and crime prevention, et cetera, play out.
Before we get into that, can you just kind of give us for the audience just like a little two-minute, like, what, what do we mean when we talk about Prairie Land?
I mean, the hardest part of this because I'm going to be very, very reductive when I sum it up because otherwise I will go on one of my tangents and we'll be here for eight hours.
When if you want to cover this, we should do another episode soon that's specific to Prairie Land.
I would love to.
Absolutely.
basically on on July 4th, there was what was supposed to be in the words of the defendants, there was supposed to be a protest against ICE in Alvarado, Texas at the ICE detention facility there.
And they conceived of it as a noise protest.
They had fireworks that they brought with them.
And in short, there was a signal group that had organized this of activists that had connections to a socialist gun club.
Um in the area i'm not sure how many of them did, how many of them didn't.
There was a discussion about whether or not they should bring um weapons with them, because the rationale on the part of one of the actors was, you know, the cops are less likely to be as confrontational, or something to that effect, when you are armed.
And many participants brought weapons, but they left them in their car.
In any case, there was vandalism of the facility and a couple parked cop cars, if i'm not mistaken.
But and this again is very reductive, I would urge everybody to go to the the Prairie LAND UM Support Committee website for um an explanation of this and trial notes etc.
But essentially, in the the, the fracks that you could say that resulted from um some of the fireworks, at a certain point um, there was uh a cop that was shot and grazed in the neck um by one of the participants in in um the demonstration planning who.
Then there was a manhunt for him, etc.
But um, in any case, it's very complicated because the state's narrative of events is that everybody that participated in the signal chat and organized the protest is part of like a domestic terrorism, Antifa conspiracy, even people who did not go to the demonstration at all.
Um those that like, there's one person on trial for essentially removing someone from a signal chat and that was the protocol of the activist organization in the first place?
I mean activity on signal because it's encrypted and you can delete messages, is it's?
You know, the absence of evidence?
Um axiom that you have right.
The absence of evidence is taken as actual evidence of conspiracy because they tried to remove it.
There's Person on trial for moving a box of zines and artwork, and that is considered material support the way it's being prosecuted.
It's very, very unclear, though, how the government is pursuing each one of these people and why.
If you look at the actual records, that again, this goes back to what we were talking about with domestic terrorism versus foreign terrorism and the fact that, you know, despite the reality that Trump has no power to designate Antifa as a domestic terror organization because there's no ability for a president to designate anyone a domestic terrorist organization.
I mean, he has.
Kash Patel tweeted that this was the first domestic terrorism Antifa case.
I think Pam Bondi did as well.
And here's another element to this: there is no ability to charge people on a federal level with terrorism as a crime because terrorism at the federal level, again, because of the First Amendment, is a definitional statute and a sentencing enhancement, not a crime itself.
On the state level, and this is so dangerous, several states have taken it upon themselves to define terrorism however the hell they want at a domestic level and pursue it accordingly.
And you get it used as a way to coerce plea agreements by overcharging defendants for a variety of reasons.
I mean, the material support in many cases in Prairie Land has been, you know, the fireworks are considered material support, which is very interesting and laughable, not as much as the actual box of zines.
But in any case, so like states like Texas, for example, have a lot of laws on the books for domestic terrorism that don't exist at a federal level, differ wildly from state to state.
I think there's about 30 states that have domestic terrorism as an actual crime.
But in any case, there are several different levels of obfuscation when it comes to how and why the Prairie Land defendants are being pursued and the secrecy with which they are being pursued.
I mean, one reason that you haven't heard about the trial also is that the judge in the case has taken what seems like every effort to make sure that outside media does not have access to the proceedings.
I mean, he took over Voir Diere himself and after declaring a mistrial in the initial rounds of jury questions before the jury was seated.
And then he moved the journal or the public access room, the overflow room, and the trial is happening in Fort Worth.
And the judge moved the overflow room for journalists to cover the case to Dallas in a facility that's over half an hour away.
And the live stream in Fort Worth keeps going out.
So journalists in Dallas have no ability to cover what the hell is happening in Fort Worth as the trial proceeds.
So there are so many different layers of secrecy here in what's actually going on.
And to tell you the truth, we're in such uncharted territory as far as how domestic terrorism cases are prosecuted, where and why, that I'm really lost in terms of the letter of the law in the indictments and what the government is using as a rationale for each defendant.
There were initially 19 people charged.
Several of them have pled guilty to material support and are testifying for the state.
Again, it's so broad that I need to spend probably a couple of weeks to really, really dig into it.
But the fact of the matter is this isn't just outside my wheelhouse.
We're in completely uncharted territory.
And that is me saying this as somebody that has a lot of direct experience with terrorism cases.
So there's a number of factors at different levels for different reasons that have gone into preventing this from being the center of public focus and discussion.
And, you know, the reverse should be true because it's so dangerous to us all.
Yeah, it's interesting to me because even my like right-wing sources are not like, you know, I mean, you know, there was, there was that whole like Antifa town hall, not the town hall, but the big White House meeting.
And I think it was in March when, you know, it was like all these, all these right-wing influencers get up there with Poso and, you know, Andy Norden has these.
They arrested the girlfriend of the founder.
The girlfriend of the founder of Antifa.
And I'm like, who?
I wonder who that is.
I can't imagine.
You know, but you hear like the Charlie Kirk shooter is, you know, Charlie Robinson.
It's like he's, you know, sorry, there's a term that gets used.
I'm going to use it once just to say it.
Trantifa, yeah, yeah.
So you hear that just all the time over on that, in that space.
And, you know, it's surprising.
I mean, I guess if there has been like this media blackout, you know, as you say, and that makes a lot more sense to me.
I'm just surprised that if this is like this big federal case that they're like using these dark mechanisms.
If it's something where they actually are charging Antifa with terrorism, you would expect to see that from the Posos of the World and the Megan Kelly's and all that sort of thing.
And I'm not seeing it.
I mean, it's just in the end.
Would you, though?
Would you?
Because think about it this way.
If there's a locus of the idea of domestic terrorism legal repercussions out there, is it more useful to fixate on that?
Or is it more useful to fixate on protests against ICE, who has admitted on camera many times their arrangements about adding people to a domestic terrorist database, right?
Is it more useful to frame all of your opposition as sympathetic to a terroristic viewpoint that endangers the United States?
Or is it more useful to focus on the case of 10 people on trial in Texas that you really don't care about beyond the shock value of the initial headline?
You know, I think that factors in.
And I want to point out something very, very key that you bringing up, Charlie Kirk and the Antifa panel, the White House, the Andy No, et cetera, to me, it strikes me as very significant.
So domestic terrorism, something that even existed as a definitional statute in the states before the Patriot Act, right after 9-11.
Even though, like I said, again, at the federal level, you still cannot prosecute for that specifically, according to the law.
But one thing I think that's very, very, very significant, you know, the Patriot Act came out very, very quickly on the heels of 9-11.
A lot of the criticism of Patriot Act, in addition to the, you know, eradication of civil liberties as a result of it, was the fact that it had clearly been pre-drafted in advance of something happening to justify it.
And I would like to remind everyone that, you know, the right wing has referred to Charlie Kirk's death as, quote, our 9-11.
And I'm going to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but bear with me for a second here, because very shortly after Charlie Kirk was murdered, NSPM 7, that Trump directive on domestic terrorism and its indicators, and Antifa as a terrorist organization, was released.
And the immediate right-wing establishment response to Charlie Kirk's death was, among other facets, was to target the left as inherently violent and a threat to the state and needing domestic terrorism laws and regulations pursued against them as a group.
So I cannot help, but I'm not saying so-and-so killed Charlie Kirk, or this was, you know, like the regime killed Charlie Kirk to make this happen.
It's not at all what I'm saying.
I'm not even remotely interested in getting into that.
What I am saying is that you don't buy Candace Owens that, you know, actually was Erica Kirk who made all this.
Oh my God.
And of course, Israel is behind it all.
I mean, like, my big thing here is, you know, there was an objective, it still is, and there was before, among many, many actors in the administration of wanting to consolidate fascist power in the executive as it is now and those around them.
And no doubt there had been plans for this quite some time.
I will tell you too, that I can't go into much more than just a very, very superficial statement here, but I was tipped off about the existence of a particular domestic terrorism database in August or August around August,
September by somebody in a position to know and the possibility, shall we just say, of being included on it, which is laughable and horrifying because I just write things, you know, but that's who they go after.
So there's been so many signals and signs that this administration had been interested in finding legal ways to curb dissent through the weaponization of that label for quite some time.
And I think Charlie Kirk's assassination was one of those moments, right, where it's the perfect moment and the perfect storm that just coincides with things that there was always going to be something.
And this was just the thing, you know, like it's, you know, they were buying their time until a thing happened and then like they can they can suddenly they have it all they have it all queued up and ready to go.
I mean, I you're completely correct.
I remember at the time reading books about the, reading articles about the Patriot Act.
And, you know, the bunch of the Patriot Act is like, you know, it modifies particular like phrases and certain laws.
It's like it's very targeted to like change, you know, to allow to suddenly, like, this is not like some sweeping, this is a very like technically oriented document that had been for years.
And I can only imagine that that's kind of, you know, these guys, they've been licking their lips waiting for the occasion for the excuse to do this.
And, you know, remember Charlie Cook just gives them the ability to do so.
So go ahead, yeah.
Nicely.
I think something that bolsters what you said is look at Project 2025 and the objectives and aims outlined within that.
One very interesting thing, more people should get out and Google NSPM 7 and read Ken Klipenstein's sub-stack about this issue in particular, but also more generally, just the war on dissent and domestic extremism slash terrorism broadly.
Indicator Criteria Debate00:06:25
But in any case, if you read the text of that presidential decree, the indicators for domestic terrorism, an indicator here is a term from the field of security and terrorism.
And it's reflective of the fact that unlike policing, traditional policing in the United States, the field of terrorism and national security is preventive in justification and orientation.
So you're not trying to pursue people that have done bad things.
You're trying to intervene before the bad thing and the crime occurs, which opens you up to a whole set of obviously civil liberties issues.
So, where that becomes really, really important here is that the term indicator means who am I going to look for because they're more likely to be violent or conduct a politically violent criminal act before it happens.
The indicators used by NSPM 7 are so clearly exactly what Dan pointed out with Patriot Act zeroing in on certain terms and reflective of how terrorism's malleability makes it ripe for abuse from the very beginning.
So, anti-Christian beliefs put you, those are an indicator for domestic terrorism and extremism.
Extremism on gender, extremism on religion, extremism on migration, anti-capitalist sentiment, anti-Christian sentiment, and anti-American sentiment.
Now, I mean, we can laugh at that because it is hilarious.
However, I mean, I'm just going through going ding, ding, ding, ding.
Oh, well, yeah.
Yes, I mean, but the thing is, the thing is, yes, we can look at that and say, ding, ding, ding, it's me, because I talk about that stuff all the time.
But, you know, more generally, anybody that is a MAGA actor, like take Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Her critiques now put her right in the crosshairs of that domestic terrorist indicator.
Whether or not, like, I mean, personally, I've never liked her.
I don't think she's redeemed herself by accidentally being right now.
But the point being, by their own criteria, they being the state and the administration, someone that was a very close ally who is now critiqued to them for what she believes herself fits into what they're using to target the far left.
So that again comes back to the point of we're all just next against the wall, you know.
And that criteria can be used against anybody that they want because it is so vague.
It might first and foremost be targeted towards political dissent from the left, but it's coming for anybody the moment you step out of line.
And the criteria therein absolutely demonstrates that.
And you can see that in action in the Prairie Land case directly.
They're using possession of anarchist literature as evidence of involvement in a domestic terrorist cell.
Essentially, in my mind, you know, there's trans people that are on trial.
In my mind, no doubt, it's not ridiculous to think, oh, you know, they invoked a trans person existing as being, quote, extreme on gender.
You know, that's how that flexibility stuff works.
Now, right now, are they going to go after people who advocate shock therapy as religious conversion for queer people?
You know, no, that's fine right now.
But what if an administration that was, I mean, I don't even want to say left because there is no left, you know, in terms of institutional left in the States, but, you know, a Democratic shitlib administration took over, extremism on gender would mean something completely different.
So that I want to say, and I also want to say when you talk about the Iran context and how it implicates things like Prairieland, we need to not forget that, you know, there is a huge conflict going on because of Anthropic and the DOD and Palantir and the DOD, and AI used for surveillance on the domestic front, and the Pentagon pretending that that's not happening.
So none of these things are detached from one another.
And I think, you know, that it absolutely comes into play with Prairieland.
I just don't think that focusing on Prairieland helps the MAGA establishment or the far right because it's much more beneficial if you paint everybody left of them as fitting in that category versus focusing on this case.
But we should be focusing on it and highlighting it because it's a great example of how all of us are next, every single one.
That's fascinating because I do say where Daniel's coming from, on the surface, it does look like the kind of case that they would jump on, like flies on ship, because it's a bunch of Antifa people and trans people and anarchists who, you know, according to their narrative anyway, they all ganged up and ambushed the police and shot a policeman in the neck.
Doesn't seem to be what they're doing.
Remember, they don't like the police.
They don't like the police.
They don't like the state.
They like it being used against their enemies, right?
So does it really help them to focus on this?
Because, you know, I mean, things come out during trial.
For example, one of the prosecution witnesses on the stand, I think two days ago in the Prairie Land case, and if you're following it, you can look at the docket and the documents that, court listener, it's actually United States versus Arnold et al. is the name of the actual case.
But a prosecution witness who is, I believe, a police officer working police officer or what, I mean, law enforcement of some type.
I cannot remember specifically what.
They were on the stand, and one of the defense attorneys on cross asked them about their statement because their statement had allegations of, you know, I think, among others, seeing more people at the facility than was actually, you know, present according to the line of defense.
And the police officer on the stand or law enforcement agent said they had never seen that written statement before.
They don't know who prepared it for them.
That's a huge problem, you know, because they also said they didn't see as many people as the statement alleged that they saw, and they don't know who came up with that statement for them.
So it's not going to benefit people like Poso to focus on a trial of so many people with such thin charges when they could easily go after and are going after anybody that disagrees with them and just smearing them all over the place, you know, in my mind.
The Dynamic of Blatant Lies00:10:56
Yeah.
I see that logic.
I mean, I honestly, I think Poso would just make it up.
He makes so much shit.
It's like, you know, he doesn't need the facts to be on his side.
I mean, our vice president straight up said about the whole inventing immigrants eating pets, right?
Yeah.
He said on CNN, I don't care if I have to make something up.
If that's what's going to get us media attention, that's what I'm going to do.
And that's the post-truth, post-post-truth reality that we live in because of this group.
Like, they don't care if it's true.
They're not trying to lie and be believed.
They have the power to lie and not give a shit.
And that's what they're doing.
Yes, they don't lie to deceive.
They don't lie because they expect to fool you.
They lie to tell you that it doesn't matter what you think.
They lie to tell you that they can lie to your face and there's nothing you can do about it.
To me, it reminds me of like, there's an assessment of Syria that this amazing political scientist, Lisa Wadin, did under Bashar al-Assad's father.
It's fantastic, but she refers to this dynamic in authoritarian societies as acting as if.
And what that means is that, you know, everybody knows that the regime propaganda is bullshit, right?
Everybody knows.
But there is sort of a social contract wink-wink that you're supposed to perform belief in.
And so for me, the interest of the regime and just blatantly lying is it's a loyalty test to their base, right?
It's not about convincing the base.
It's about making them dance.
Yes, it's about for them, it's about signaling their membership of the in-group, their membership of the identity.
And the more grotesque, morally or factually, the thing that you're being asked to put your name to to perform belief in, the better, because it's a costlier signal for you to perform so that it's more meritorious in the eyes of the rest of the group.
And the more they push that dynamic.
Sorry, go on.
No, I think that is such an excellent genius point, too, because you know what you're describing also?
How child soldiers are created by non-state armed groups.
I've done a lot of work with ISIS child soldiers, like former child soldiers from Syria and Iraq.
And the thing is, I mean, there's a whole different set of elements in the sense that your brain isn't fully developed before 25.
So why child soldiers are used in a lot of conflicts is if you want to fuck up someone and get their loyalty for life, you've got to do it when they're young.
And the reason for that is when you make people who cannot understand agency at a young age participate or witness acts of moral injury, right?
Acts that are so for exactly what you're describing.
They do not understand that they were coerced and did not have a choice, but they do understand that that participation makes them outside of society forever.
They are seen as monstrous and irredeemable, and there's no incentive to leave because society doesn't want them.
And even though this is a different dynamic in terms of degree when it comes to child soldiers, right?
What you hit on is absolutely brilliant in terms of raising the cost of affiliation and thereby sort of trying to prevent defectors, right?
Because everybody's hands are bloody and they've shot their credibility.
So their only chance of proximity to power is to maintain loyalty.
And that is absolutely how authoritarian systems operate.
So sorry, I just was so thrilled to hear you say that.
I'll shut up now for a moment.
No, no, no.
Thank you.
I'm quite happy to be praised all evening.
Please carry on.
I'm wondering what you think about.
I mean, it does seem to be that Trump is losing support among the populace.
I mean, I know you can't trust polls, but polls are indicative of something, especially when they all seem to point in the similar direction.
And they do seem to be pointing in the direction that Trump's support is cratering.
And individually on policy after policy, people are less supportive, even on what are supposed to be his signature policies.
Now, one of the key points of fascism, as opposed to just authoritarian government or Bonapartism or whatever you want to call it, is that it's a right-wing counter-revolution in the presence of popular support.
It's not necessarily the majority, but it's a large degree of popular support, which they do seem to be losing.
So I wonder if you have any thoughts about what effect that's going to have on the dynamic.
And this is going to make me sound sort of conspiratorial, but one element of precisely what you're discussing, right?
The difference between an authoritarian system and a fascist authoritarian system per se is by definition, fascism's tendency to stigmatize particular populations and, you know, write them as the enemy.
And so one thing that could, I'm not saying it did, but could factor into the timing of the Iran strikes is that, you know, people can attack me for this all day and I don't care.
I actually believe this is very much the truth.
Muslims are the easiest population to say whatever you want about with no pushback whatsoever.
And they're doing precisely that with the Somalis in Minnesota.
Yes.
Well, yes, and also critiques of Mamdani.
And also, mind you, if you look at Stephen Miller's statements and the establishment, also the statements of every MA and right-wing leader that wants to point to anyone left of MAGA as someone that supports terrorism, right?
Terrorism in their articulation, whether that is trans people by existing and their families or not, you know, denying them all support, right?
Or people that agitate on, agitate, I mean this in a good trouble sense, I hope that's obvious, on behalf of undocumented folks, that is, again, to them aiding and abetting an invasion.
Now, people, look at what they're saying right now about opposition to Iran and how that is being coded.
Great example is Nancy Mace, who, you know, we all have hopefully our thoughts about Nancy Mace.
Nancy Mace actually tweeted an image of Khamenei and tagged Ilhan Omar and Rashida Fla'ib and basically said, I'm so sorry about your loss, which is that shit crazy on a number of reasons or on a number of levels.
I mean, and, you know, God, everybody is a newbie on everything on social media when it hits the news, but like the bar is below hell when it comes to entry on Middle East-related topics.
I mean, you know, Ilhan and Flaib are Sunni Muslims.
And yes, there's stuff to be said about Iran exporting revolution, anti-imperialism, all of that.
But, you know, that ignorance towards Muslims broadly and tying them to support for terrorism in a Muslim-coded part of the world also functions to solidify the in-group, out-group boundaries here.
And so to me, I think, you know, the fascist element of particular populations that are ethnic and ethnic and racially coded fits very, very well and conveniently here in terms of Trump's losing popular support in the polls, yes, but what is the one group that you can absolutely just go after with zero pushback, even among people that describe themselves as liberals, right?
It's Muslims.
You know, look at anybody that brings up anything related to the left and Trump, and you'll see, well, you, you, like, you anti-genocide people are the ones that are responsible for electing Trump because Muslims didn't care, you know, all that crap that you get.
That's right.
Muslims in table in Michigan are responsible for all of this.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it's a tricky, thorny, complicated subject.
And I want to laugh about it, but I can't because, you know, I mean, I will tell you frankly, I didn't want to vote for Harris at all.
And to me, what's going on in Abagaza is absolutely, I don't have the words for it.
And I did not want to vote for her because of that stance, right?
Because if what I consider genocide is not my breaking point, what is?
Yeah.
However, I did vote for her.
And I did so for the same reason I do in terms of, you know, vote blue no matter who, most of the time in presidential elections, because of the Supreme Court.
I don't feel good about that.
I don't think I know if I would have done it differently.
But it wasn't a simplistic, a simplistic decision because none of this is, right?
But I'm also just so disgusted by any and everyone who responds to a random Muslim with, you didn't vote for, like, you're the reason that Trump is in power because you people didn't, you know, I mean, you, you abstained and it's your fault.
Like, come on.
And the implication that, well, well, you guys deserve being bombed then.
You know, I said that to Muslims.
I can't cosign, you know, Harris.
I saw, like, all over my feed when I would talk about like these moral quandaries.
Like, for me, people would say, I hope you all get deported.
And ha ha ha, leopards will eat your face.
And that's, that's the supposed left, right?
I mean, so I think in terms of Trump losing support, that in a strategic sense, and this doesn't mean I morally endorse it in any way, shape, or form, but there is some logic in going after a Muslim country.
Like, it's a lot harder to make the case among like, you know, shitlibs that aren't aware of their own bigotry than it is, say, with Maduro, right?
I mean, like, there's a lot of, oh, anti-commie, blah, blah, blah, all of that.
But like, there's way more pushback when it comes to a non-Muslim country, period, and non-Muslims as a group.
And I think we cannot afford to ignore that aspect to this.
And it fits right in with your question about his plummeting poll numbers, you know?
I wouldn't say it drove the decision because I don't know.
I have no idea.
But I will say that, you know, using the decision to shore up support and to, again, like to flash back to arguing for Democrats to support DHS funding and all of these other, you know, fact and emphasizing Iran's role in messing with elections, right?
There are all these different aspects to this engagement that, you know, we're never going to be able to identify actual causality with precision and in such a limited sense that it is more useful than looking at the outcomes and to what agendas and ends are the impact of combat operations with Iran being put now,
Goodbye For Now00:02:00
because that tells you a lot more in terms of why it's useful and to who it's useful than who ultimately pulled the tricker on the plan in the first place.
Even though I think it was in the works for a long time, I mean, well before Trump, honestly, in different ways, but that's kind of a different story.
No, I agree.
Yeah.
I can't.
I think that I think that's the podcast, honestly.
I think I'm done.
Yeah, like 100% agree.
Did I just like ruin it all for you?
You're like, hands up.
I think I've thrown my hands up.
I'm done dealing with this.
No, no, not at all.
No, believe me.
No, no.
No, that's just, that's just so well said.
I mean, obviously, you know, I feel like, I feel like we could keep going for hours.
Have so much more to say about all this.
We're just going to have to invite you back in a few weeks and talk some more.
Thank you guys for having me again.
This was a blast.
Oh, thank you for coming on.
It's been great.
And please tell the audience where they can find you just in case they don't already know.
I am on all social media platforms, and Substack is at MS, not MS30, MS Entropy, so Ms. Entropy.
So you can find me on Blue Sky and Substack and X and wherever.
Running my mouth.
Great.
And a very, very lovely follow as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Highly recommended.
And with that, thanks for listening, everybody.
And we will be back very soon with another episode.
And until then, goodbye.
Yeah, I was just going to make the joke that, you know, like, well, obviously that just means because 90% of these brown people in these countries, they just want to, they just want to impose real law on Americans.
That's the whole thing.
Oh, totally.
Islam In Star Wars00:02:53
They hate freedom.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, of course, I'm in Britain and we're already under Sharia law.
We're already ruled by the Caliphate.
Because of the kebab shops.
That's right.
Yeah, we let them in and they took over.
So it's not so bad, actually.
I love one more thing before we go.
One of the things that Charlie Kirk used to say, like, you know, what is the Green-Red Alliance, the Islamic Communist Alliance.
And then ultimately, all Democrats are just controlled by the Green Red Alliance.
Dude, that's exactly what I'm talking about within the national security state argument about the Democrats.
And one last thing, too, that's really just infuriates me about the discourse on Iran that people always forget.
Like the regime itself and the world erases the role of leftists in protesting the Shah and basically ushering in the revolution because the revolution in 1979 in Iran was not an Islamic revolution from the job.
No, no.
Mainly, yeah, like it was hijacked.
That's something that gets erased on all sides about the oppression of the Islamic Republic against its people and the way the rest of the world treats it too.
And I think that's just fucking rhetoric from Trump about, oh, the people of Iran should rise up.
It's so disgustingly hypocritical.
The effect of bombing that country and incinerating their children in their elementary schools, you think that's going to make them come out onto the streets in support of America?
And not only that, but like, do you think that they forgot about Sabak or Masadip in all of this?
Mossadegh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we have, we have in this country.
Nobody knows.
Nobody knows about the coup in the 50s.
One of my favorite political anecdotes is Tony Blair comes into government and he's talking to his civil servants.
And somebody says something about, well, we can't do that because it might offend the Iranians and they don't like the British.
And Tony Blair says, oh, why?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
I can't.
I mean, I wish I couldn't.
Like, I have so many thoughts because, like, Senator Mullen in the States was on TV talking about, yeah, like the Jude was talking about how everybody's been repressed by the Ayatollah thinking, I don't know, maybe he thinks it's a first name.
Since 1979, he doesn't realize the motherfucker died in 89.
You know, like, he thinks it's the same guy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And these, these are the ones with the power to destroy a country.
You know, it's disgusting.
Yeah.
But these people, they don't know anything.
They're like children talking about Star Wars.
You know, they might as well be talking about the emperor in Star Wars.
It's ridiculous.
Again, I think a big part of this is like you can say whatever the fuck you want about Muslims because no one cares.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Get a free pass.
It's very, it's very similar in this country, I'm afraid.