Month: September 2025

You are probably Antifa, or more correctly, antifascist. I’m sure I am. That is a bad thing in 2025 Amerika. You, too, may be a “domestic terrorist.”

I came to that conclusion after reading Jeff Scarlet’s recent post, Rubber Glue Fascism, on his Substack titled Scenes from a Slow Civil War. It is “a close reading of NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-7: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Jeff writes: “I don’t like sending traffic to this White House, but you should read it… ”   Yes, you should, unfortunately.

“First, there’s the form: an executive memo instead of an order. Even as this memo goes into much deeper detail than [the September 22] executive order designating an amorphous anything called ‘antifa’ as a “terrorist organization,” the memo, as a form, is looser, free of the need to cite constitutional authority. And yet it retains the ‘force of law‘—perfect for the president who says ‘it’s not illegal if it saves the country.’“

Common Dreams calls this argument legal nonsense.

“From the memo:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies — including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them — is required.

What is a domestic terrorist?

“The following instruction expands the definition of ‘terrorist acts’ from doxing and violent threats—both of which could reasonably be construed as such, and both of which have been pursued by powerful regime allies—to include also ‘trespass’ and ‘civil disorder’:”

The Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder. This guidance shall also include an identification of any behaviors, fact patterns, recurrent motivations, or other indicia common to organizations and entities that coordinate these acts in order to direct efforts to identify and prevent potential violent activity.

Later: “These terms bring under the ‘terrorism’ umbrella a nonviolent action as simple as, say, sitting in front of an ICE entrance. Or, for that matter, just chanting from the sidewalk.”

Sidebar:  Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, claims that simply calling FOTUS authoritarian “incites violence and terrorism.”

Back to Jeff Sharlet – “Then there’s this instruction:

The [Treasury] Secretary shall provide guidance for financial institutions to file Suspicious Activity Reports and investigate indicia of illicit funding streams to ensure such activity is rooted out at the source and referred for law enforcement action, as appropriate.

“Have you ever donated to a left organization with a credit card? Get ready. This doesn’t mean they’re coming for you. It means that if, for some reason, they want to come for you, you’re already cooked. That little rectangle of plastic in your wallet’s been turned into a weapon to be used against you.”

This falls into the fascist—er, I mean, questionable—behavior of this regime, um, administration. Defense Secretary Hegseth requires a new ‘pledge’ for reporters at the Pentagon. He wants journalists to report only the news he approves. And why is he summoning generals and admirals to Quantaco? Will it be a rally-the-troops message or something more sinister, such as redeployment to American cities? Sonce FOTUS is also attending, who knows?

After all, FOTUS has directed Hegseth to “provide all necessary Troops to protect war-ravaged Portland [OR] and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.” Per WaPo: “The action escalates a campaign to use the U.S. military against Americans that has little modern precedent.” 

Writer

I want to note Jeff Sharlet’s bona fides. He’s a Dartmouth professor who is “the New York Times bestselling author or editor of eight books. His latest is The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (2023), a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Nonfiction, one of The New York Times’ 100 Books of the Year, and a New Republic book of the year. 

“In 2020, he published This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers. ‘Gorgeous,’ says The New York Times, ‘[t]he book ingeniously reminds us that all of our lives — our struggles, desires, grief — happen concurrently with everyone else’s, and this awareness helps dissolve the boundaries between us.’ Sharlet’s other books… include The Family — the basis for a 2019 Netflix documentary series, The Family, of which he is narrator and executive producer.” 

I’ve known Jeff since he was six, and though I lost track of him for several years, I’ve been tracking him online for at least the last 15 years, and even had breakfast with him in 2024. 

What now?

Jeff Sharlet isn’t the only one worried. Garry Kasparov in The Atlantic wrote: “About a month into [his] second term, I began warning that the Putinization of America was well underway. Now, after a summer of National Guard deployments in American cities, crackdowns on protests, massive layoffs of federal workers, purges of anyone deemed disloyal in the FBI, immigration raids on workplaces, and unfettered self-dealing, [he] and his administration seem more erratic, unpredictable, and chaotic than ever. But, beneath the breaking-news barrage, we can trace the thread of advancing authoritarianism.”

Jeff had no solid suggestions about the next steps. Quoting his friend, journalist Sandhya Dirks: “‘I have been thinking/trying to write about the language of the far right, the way it has seized so much of the vernacular of civil rights. And also this ‘rubber glue’ rhetoric—I’m like rubber, you’re like glue—(describing the right’s stochastic terrorism and very real violence as if it’s happening to them, rather than what they are doing)… It’s now the moment when that rhetoric becomes policy, law, rhetoric fully backed by power.’

“‘Rubber glue fascism.'”

“I’ve been sitting here for a while now, trying to think of some way to bend this post toward some thin edge of hope. I don’t have a happy ending. I don’t really have an ending at all. Maybe that can stand in for good news: this bad news isn’t yet the end.”