The Trump Regime’s Concentration Camps Aren’t Just for Immigrants
Those still in denial that the Trump47 regime is fascist – worse than merely “authoritarian” or oligarchic – might want to look at the administration’s United States Counterterrorism Strategy (hereafter “USCS”), issued four weeks ago. Written primarily by Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s Christian fascist and Hungarian-American “senior director of counterterrorism,” the document makes clear the regime’s desire to exterminate domestic dissent through state terror.
“We Will Find and Kill You… Left Wing Extremists”
In this dark paper’s cover letter, Trump channels Orwell by promising “Peace through Strength” and says this to “terrorists of any kind”: “[you] will not be allowed any safe harbor here at home” and “if you hurt Americans, or are planning to hurt Americans, We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”
Who are these “terrorists of any kind”? Across the USCS, three top terrible culprits are identified and intermeshed with each other: the classic (“legacy”) post-9/11 menace of Islamo- terrorism/jihadism, with no distinctions made between Sunni and Shia; Latin American “narco-terrorism,” supposedly allied with jihad; and domestic “left-wing extremism,” the latter charged with a nefarious “ideological” and “civilization”-weakening war on “traditional American values.”
NSPM-7: Targeting Thoughts Ideas “Antithetical to Freedom and the American Way of Life”
The USCS targets a fearsome menace, tied in with global threats, and identified broadly with criticism of US society/culture: “ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life.” Gorka invokes a specter haunting “our sacred homeland:” “violent left-wing extremists who have adopted radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our Republic was founded.”
It’s important to understand how broadly the fascists atop the US state frame the “radical left” ideas they describe as a grave danger to Americans’ security. What are these “radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our Republic was founded”? We can refer here to Trump’s Gorkyan National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7), issued last September 25th : “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government, extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”[1]
NSPM-7 chillingly identified all these “terrorist” thought crimes with the supposed menace of “antifascism.” (Yikes— didn’t the United States lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a war against fascist regimes during the second great inter-imperialist war of the last century?)
(Five days after issuing NSPM-7, Trump told 800-plus US generals and admirals he’d ordered to Quantico, Virginia from across the American Empire that the nation’s leading adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning all his domestic political critics and opponents. Trump told the brass that the “homeland’s” Democratically-run majority nonwhite cities should be used by the US military as “training grounds” for US wars abroad.)
The Myth of a Leftist National Intelligence Community
“Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at schoolboard meetings, Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates,” the USCS proclaims, “this Administration will continue to prohibit the [U.S.] Intelligence Community from being used politically against innocent Americans. As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies. In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national Counterterrorism activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent. We will do the same with the state sponsors of such groups and those governments undertaking lethal plots on U.S. soil or against Americans anywhere.”
That is a wild passage, advancing:
· The outrageous paranoid-style notion that the CIA and the broader US intelligence networks have been part of a left globalist assault on decent, God-fearing American “conservatives” and Christians.
· The myth that the US is undergoing a leftist assassination wave.
· The false description of the fascist youth leader Charlie Kirk’s assassin as “a left-wing extremist.”
· The false description of “Antifa” as (a) an organization and (b) “an international organization” (!), thereby linking the supposed dire domestic left threat with global threats.
· The unsupported and dangerous claim that domestic US left groups are sponsored by foreign governments, designed to paint “homeland” dissent and free speech as treason.
The UCSC preposterously claims that there is “a new and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red Green alliance.’”
Orwellian Claims of Reality-Based Apolitical Nonpartisanship
“Our counterterrorism operations will be executed apolitically and founded upon reality-based threat assessments,” the Gorka manifesto claims, and “not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us. Further:
“We will not permit the weaponization of America’s unparalleled CT capabilities for partisan purposes and in contravention of every American’s God-given rights. The fact pattern under the Biden Administration was clear: individuals at the highest level of the U.S. Government used their significant powers to politically target individuals in the interests of those they favored, wanted to keep in power, or to help win elections. Millions of Americans have lost confidence in the rectitude of the most powerful elements of our Federal government; the national security apparatus of the United States. That confidence can only be won back when counterterrorism is executed uninfected by politics, and if those who used their counterterrorism powers as a weapon against the innocent pay the full judicial cost for their crimes against the civil rights of innocent Americans.”
This is classic Orwellian reality inversion – the hyper-partisan and arch-political Trump fascist regime[2] pretending to be nonpartisan and apolitical and absurdly accusing the Biden Department of Justice’s (DOJ) prosecutions of the fascist, neo-Confederate January 6 putschists with “leftist weaponization” of the law against “innocent” God-fearing Americans. In reality, no US presidency has done more to politically weaponize the DOJ than Trump47.
Contrary to its declared commitment to “reality-based threat assessments,” moreover, the USCS ignores the basic empirical fact that most acts of political terrorism and violence on US soil are committed by the far-right, not the left[3].
Insufficiently Fascist Europe and Mythical Latin American Narco-Jihadism
The USCS’s reflections on the international scene are equally messed up. In its section on Europe, the Gorka document accuses European states of violating “free speech” and advancing terrorism with lax immigration restrictions – with a leftist policy of “open borders.” This is code language for the Trump regime’s support of neofascist European parties and for white supremacist nativism. (The Biden administration is accused of “open borders,” suggesting that it let terrorists into the US in the same way as the insufficiently nativist Europeans.)
“In a textbook Special Operations mission in support of federal law enforcement,” the USCS further claims:
“the illegitimate leader of Venezuela, a cartel boss in league with terror-sponsor Iran and its terror proxy Hezbollah, was apprehended and brought to the United States to face justice for his crimes against Americans. The connections between the cartels and Jihadi terrorism are rooted in the massive drug revenues that fund terrorist organizations and transnational criminal networks and enable their operations against the United States. Operation Absolute Resolve proves that the ‘Trump Corollary,’ the blueprint for a modern Monroe Doctrine, is already the reality in our Hemisphere.”
This is crazy shit. It is preposterous to claim that the criminally kidnapped Venezuelan head of state Nicolas Maduro was a “cartel boss in league” with Tehran and Hezbollah as part of a global narco-Jihad conspiracy to attack America. The charge is paranoid-style fantasy meant to justify the brazen, mass murderous “gunboat diplomacy,” replete with more than 100 extrajudicial executions – imperialist terrorism – that the Trump fascist regime has brazenly resurrected in the Caribbean, the Eastern Pacific, and Latin America.
“The Most Persecuted People on Earth”
“The plight of the most persecuted people on Earth has been ignored for too long,” Gorka writes. Further:
“While America is not a neocolonial power set on shaping African nations in its image, we will not permit terrorist groups operating on the continent to massacre Christians with impunity. With the decisive action President Trump recently took in Nigeria, he made it clear that the slaughter of Christians will not go unchecked. As President Trump said on Christmas Day in 2025: ‘I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was.’”
This is nuts. The world has seen what genocidal Israel and its sponsor the United States have done to the people of Gaza. Calling Nigerian Christians “the most persecuted people on Earth” is a wacky and telling reflection of the Christian fascism that informs the Trump Amerikaner world view. And since the “most persecuted people on Earth” are not white, they cannot get the special refugee status that the white supremacist Trump regime now provides exclusively to those white Afrikaners – heirs of white supremacist and fascist apartheid – who claim without evidence to be victims of ant-white racism in post-apartheid South Africa.
“Our Sacred Ground”
The USCS claims “to sustain and defend our people and way of life, from our sacred ground, incredible natural and human resources, and unparalleled wealth powered by limitless innovation to a historic work ethic that have made us the greatest power on Earth.” That is a remarkable statement of Christian nationalist chauvinism, replete with imperial parasitism masquerading as the protestant work ethic!
“Or Any Future Threats”
“For the 25th Anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks,” the USCS says, “President Trump has affected a complete revision of how we defeat threats to America predicated on national sovereignty and civilizational confidence and the objective of destroying the groups who would kill Americans or hurt our interests as a free nation. This applies to cartels, Jihadists, left-wing violent extremists, state actors and state sponsors, or any future terror threat.”
This is a chilling statement. It merges the mythical menace of leftist “homeland” terrorists — identified with broad-brush opposition to “traditional American values” and with “antifascism” — with terrorist cartels, “Jihadists,” and “state actors and sponsors.” Domestic dissenters are painted as enemies of freedom and even as undoers of American and Western (white and Christian) “civilizational confidence!”
Gorka’s reference to “any future threat” combines with his targeting of “anti-American” ideas and people who are “planning to hurt America,” and his pledge to “map” dissenting groups to raise the chilling totalitarian specter of pre-emptive policing and punishment of Americans’ thoughts.
Note to US-American leftists and to liberal and centrist Democrats and even many moderates and anti- or non-Trump Republicans: if you think the giant concentration camp network that the Trump regime and its private for-profit mass incarceration partners (GEO Group, CoreCivic and others) are expanding across the nation is just for non-white immigrants, think again. If allowed to consolidate and cement its rule, this fascist regime intends to lock up dissenters, critics, and opponents of all colors, nationalities, cultures, parties, and classes. You can take this to mean that you should keep your mouth shut and cower, thereby becoming complicit in the fascist takeover and makeover of American government and society, or you can do the right thing and join a movement to remove the fascist regime from power this summer[4], before it’s too late. As Refuse Fascism observes, “once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights. No matter how it comes to power, fascism is never legitimate. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”
NOTES
+1. For the Trump regime: “terrorist anti-Americanism” includes any critique of US foreign policy (imperialism); “terrorist anti-capitalism” includes any call for reform or regulation of the profits system; “terrorist anti-Christianity” includes any call for the separation of church and state; “terrorist extremism on migration” includes any opposition to the Trump regime’s round-up, detention, torture, and deportation of immigrants; “terrorist extremism on race” includes any defense of Black civil and voting rights and any reference to the horrible record and impacts of Black chattel slavery and Native American genocide in US history; “terrorist extremism on gender” includes any support for abortion rights, trans rights, gay rights and equal pay; “terrorist hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” includes any critique of or even expressed discomfort with patriarchy, Christianity, national exceptionalism, and messianic militarism. Regarding the alleged criminality of advocating “the overthrow of the US government,” here is some interesting language from the United States’ founding document, written 250 years ago: “It is the Right of the People to alter or abolish [despotic government], and to institute new Government….when a long train of abuses and usurpations …evinces a design to [implement] absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…”
2. New Jersey state police and federal agents guarding Delaney Hall, Mein Trumpf’s fascist concentration and torture camp (one of many across the country) in Newark, New Jersey, were recently filmed standing in front of “Trump 2020” and “Troops for Trump” banners adorning the facility, where 300 prisoners have undertaken a hunger strike to protest miserable conditions.
“[Domestic political violence] analysts say the most obvious hole [in the USCS] is the omission of violent far-right movements… For example, on Sept. 10, the same day conservative youth leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated at an outdoor event in Utah, a 16-year-old gunman who was steeped in online forums for white supremacy and mass-shooter fandom opened fire at a Colorado high school, critically wounding two students before killing himself. The [USCS]is concerned only with the kind of violent extremism the White House ascribes to Kirk’s alleged shooter, who is labeled a violent left-wing ‘radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.’ Terrorism analysts say the attack motives do not appear so clear-cut…Just last week, a lawsuit related to a deadly shooting last year at Florida State University revealed that the gunman had used ChatGPT to explore ‘his interests in Hitler, Nazis, fascism’ and other far-right topics…In a social media post, Jacob Ware, a terrorism researcher who has written extensively about the militant right, called the case a “friendly reminder that the #Trump administration’s new United States Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention far-right violent extremism.”
4. I am not talking about the rigged elections coming this November, which the MAGA regime and party of January 6 have no intention of letting “normally” occur or honoring if they don’t go their way. Pointing people to the savagely time-staggered elections and Congressional seatings (in January of 2027), and the dismal Democratic appeasement party as the fix to this nightmare is like telling someone in the middle of a heart attack to make sure to go to their regularly scheduled check-up with a really bad and sick doctor who may not even be alive in five months! The public approval of the debased, demented, deranged, and demented Orange Fascist Pig whose regime is moving rapidly to destroy life on Earth is now an incredible 25 points underwater (60% disapproval vs. 35% disapproval) and in recent polls on Liberals be like “ooh, maybe we’ll will have a slight Dem majority in the US House in six months.” We should instead take this to mean the moment is ripe for millions in the streets on a regular basis demanding removal of the regime now, before it’s too late.
