Are You a Domestic Terrorist?

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Back in September, the Trump White House issued a memo that now has been largely forgotten, but that may very well define the future of protest in America. In the president’s memorandum on “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” Donald Trump lays out a definition of domestic terrorism, and of the domestic terrorist, intended to encompass just about every left-of-center person in America. 

This memo is not new, but it has new salience given the events of the past month, as armed, anonymous agents of the state have taken over and terrorized an American city. 

They’ve killed Americans and seen no consequences or even investigations. Instead, the administration has investigated the murder victims, their families, their friends, and their political fellow travelers. It has called all of them the same thing: domestic terrorists.

Here is how this administration defines domestic terrorists:

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties. Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Here’s who that pulls in:

• Anyone who suggests Trump, his administration, or his policies are authoritarian. This regime believes they have the right to behave like fascists, but calling them fascists is an act of violence.

  Vice President JD Vance, who once called Trump “America’s Hitler,” now says, “If you want to stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”Stephen Miller has repeatedly accused liberals of “incitement” for suggesting that this administration’s policies are authoritarian: Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), he claimed, was engaging in “pure incitement” when she compared ICE to slave patrols; Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) comparing ICE to the modern-day gestapo is “vile anti-American language [that] can only be construed as inciting insurrection and violence;” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) telling Stephen Colbert that we are living under an authoritarian president “incites violence and terrorism;” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) calling for mass protest “could be construed as inciting violence.”This is important, because criticism is legal under the First Amendment; inciting violence or insurrection is not. Miller understands this. And he’s trying to broaden the definition of “incitement” wide enough to encompass criticism of this regime.

  Journalists and historians have repeatedly observed that Trump uses the language of fascists, despots, and other authoritarians, comparing people he dislikes to insects and vermin and garbage, saying that immigrations are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and arguing “They’re not human; they’re animals.”

  Under this memo, observations like these are dangerous ones. It’s not the actions of the authoritarian that are waging “a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties;” it’s the people who criticize the authoritarian’s dismantling of democratic institutions, his quashing of constitutional rights, and his evisceration of fundamental American liberties.

• Democratic Socialists, anyone who criticizes American capitalism, and any liberal who wants a more robust social welfare state. Accusing liberals of being commies is a conservative tactic that predates Trump by about a century. But Trump and his followers have taken it to a new level.

  There are of course actual anti-capitalists in America, and holding that view is their constitutional right. There are also a lot of capitalism critics in America — people who don’t necessarily want to go full Communist, but wouldn’t mind if America were a little more like Denmark, with affordable healthcare and a stronger social safety net.In Trump’s telling, these people are anti-capitalist turncoats. And so are any of his opponents: Those who criticized him for absconding with classified documents he left in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom are “communists” who can’t get away with this, he told supporters. Kamala Harris, he said, was a “communist.”

  Last year, Stephen Miller took the podium in the White House press briefing room and went on a truly unhinged rant about “communist woke culture” destroying America. And the broader MAGA right has a deep obsession with “cultural Marxism,” which is basically just a bunch of different progressive ideas — including feminism, anti-racism, and queer theory — that they think are a globalist (read: Jewish) plot to undermine… something. Point being, targeting “anti-capitalists” is very much about targeting anyone who expresses any dissatisfaction with America’s lack of social support or our economic conditions.

• Religious minorities and those who criticize right-wing Christians. Not long after he was sworn in to his second term in office, President Trump released a memo on “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” Evidence of this alleged scourge — in a country where every president and the overwhelming majority of national elected officials has been a Christian or at least pretended to be — included the Biden Administration recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility.

  This administration’s definition of “anti-Christianity” tars as “anti-Christian” an enormous number of religious Christians — just those who are not part of the fundamentalist white Evangelical sets that largely support Trump.Criticizing religious bigots, or religion itself, is indeed protected speech and expression. But according to this administration, it might also be evidence of domestic terrorism.

• Those who might question the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency. Donald Trump was elected fair and square. I don’t like that fact, but he is the legitimate president of the United States. He would not be the legitimate president of the United States, though, if his 2020 attempts to subvert the results of a free and fair election had succeeded.

  We don’t yet know what kinds of shenanigans Trump and his team will pull with the upcoming midterms and possibly with the 2028 presidential election, but this seems to be setting the stage to punish anyone who either rightly objects to election meddling, or who does what Trump and his own supporters did in 2020 and questions legitimate election results.

• Immigrant rights advocates, racial justice activists, LGBT activists, and feminists. In my view, the most telling and troubling ideologies included on the list of potential domestic terrorism motivators are “extremism on migration, race, and gender.

  It is absolutely true that extremism on migration, race, and gender have fueled significant acts of violence and terror in the United States: the Tree of Life synagogue massacre at the hands of a virulent anti-Semite who believed Jews were bringing migrants in to take over America; the Mother Emanuel AME massacre in which white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers; the Buffalo, NY grocery store mass shooting in which a different white supremacist murdered 10 Black people; the Isla Vista killings carried out by a misogynist incel; the thousands of violent attacks on abortion clinics, including several murders, carried out by people (mostly men) who oppose women’s rights.A great many acts of domestic terrorism have been carried out by people with extremist views on migration, race, and gender. But almost all of those terrorists held right-wing views on those issues.

  This administration is instead claiming that it’s people who support immigrants’ rights, advocate for racial justice, and believe in gender equality who are the potential terrorists — and it’s these groups the Trump administration is watching and investigating.

• Feminists. Sure, feminists may have been captured in the above, but Trump singles them out for good measure, branding as potential terrorists those who demonstrate “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

  This is, of course, shockingly ahistorical: Traditionally, “American views on family, religion, and morality” have never been monolithic. The founders argued about all three quite a bit, especially religion and morality. The American family has never been perfectly nuclear (when the Heritage Foundation trumpets the number of children begat by the Founding Fathers in its proposal to save America by saving the family, one wonders if they’re counting the children born to enslaved women who were impregnated by the men who had total control over their lives and bodies and routinely raped them).

  We are in the midst of an enormous antifeminist backlash, and this administration and its intellectual leaders are floating ideas I never expected to hear in my lifetime: that employers should discriminate against women “to support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage”; that women should not be able to leave their marriages; that, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted, the 19th Amendment should be repealed and women should no longer be allowed to vote.

  These views, they say, are the traditional American ones, in defense of the American family. Do you find them abhorrent? Do you think women should vote and have jobs? Well — you know what that makes you.It’s worth noting here, too, that this strategy has already been used in the smearing of Renee Good and her family. Good was married to a woman, and her widow is now being investigated by the Trump administration. She is, by definition, not in a “traditional American family” — something this administration sees not only as suspect, but as potentially terroristic.

The administration has assembled a National Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in charge of investigating and prosecuting not just people who commit actual crimes, but those who “radicalize” others, as well as “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors.” 

The JTTF is directed to identify “any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts.” In other words, if bad actors burn down a building during a Black Lives Matter protest, the entire racial justice movement is at risk — and any organization that offered support of that protest might find themselves investigated or criminally charged.

You can see how this might be used against those organizing in defense of their immigrant neighbors, or against ICE’s invasion of their cities. You can see how this might be used to quash any dissent to this regime.

If you’re reading this column, you are probably not among the large population of Americans who live within the normal realm of the dual state and who choose to ignore what’s happening on the other side (thank you). Maybe you are a US citizen, or otherwise a person who would be unlikely to find themselves in this administration’s crosshairs. Maybe you are one of the many white people who understands the privilege your skin color affords, and are showing up on the street in ways that are much riskier for people more likely to be seen by ICE agents as “outsiders” (thank you).

What I am trying to tell you is that, while you might be one of the safe(r) ones right now, you also have an interest in protecting yourself here. 

This administration is placing more and more people into “the prerogative state,” the realm of the dual state “where the rule of law does not exist, where citizens can be killed with impunity, where you — even you, who thought you were invulnerable — can become a target,” as Sigal Samuel put it in Vox, summarizing a theory developed by German Jewish political scientist Ernst Fraenkel. 

Or, per University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq, “this prerogative state does not immediately and completely overrun the normative state. Rather, Fraenkel argued, dictatorships create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.” But these two states do not stay in some kind of parallel equilibrium. “Over time, the prerogative state would distort and slowly unravel the legal procedures of the normative state,” Huq writes, “leaving a smaller and smaller domain for ordinary law.”

What I am trying to tell you is that, while you might be one of the safe(r) ones right now, if this administration remains unchecked, you, too, will find yourself unprotected.

As a service to our readers, we curate noteworthy stories through partnerships with outside writers and thinkers. Jill Filipovic is a journalist, lawyer, and author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. 

This column has been adapted from her substack with the author’s permission.