Thought Crimes: The Knock on the Door Has Arrived

The pre-crime apparatus is no longer theoretical. Americans are now being prosecuted for meetings, messages, and protest activity…

Back in April I wrote here about what I called the Department of Thought Crimes, the pre-crime apparatus the Trump regime had quietly stood up inside the FBI and DOJ to hunt for Americans who might someday break a law because of what they believe.

Ken Klippenstein first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7,” which is apparently the basis for these arrests. It identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or tradwives.

At the time the whole thing still had a science-fiction quality to it, like something out of Minority Report. The watchlists were growing and the task forces were being briefed, but the knock on the door hadn’t yet come for ordinary people doing ordinary things like showing up to a protest. That part was still theoretical.

It isn’t theoretical anymore.

This week in Minneapolis, federal prosecutors arrested and indicted fifteen people for conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers during the ICE sweep which the administration had branded Operation Metro Surge.

And the U.S. Attorney announcing the charges, a Trump appointee named Daniel Rosen, explicitly cited NSPM-7, the memorandum I warned you about, noting that Trump had signed it last September and that something called Joint Task Force Vanguard had built the case.

The document I told you was a loaded gun is now being fired, and it’s being fired at our neighbors.

The libertarian Cato Institute’s director of immigration studies, David Bier, actually sat down and read the ninety-four-page indictment, and he found exactly one act of charged violence against any agent’s person in the entire document. One.

A man named William Morgan reportedly knocked an agent’s notepad out of his hand. That’s the sum total of the “bloodshed.”

Everything else in those ninety-four pages, Bier wrote, was a cobbled-together pile of mostly unrelated and almost entirely nonviolent acts of civil disobedience.

The “overt acts” the government is treating as terrorism include attending meetings, posting on Facebook about resisting ICE, putting up flyers advertising protests, holding after-action reviews to talk about how a demonstration went, and forming human blockades outside a federal building.

— One of the fifteen, Erik Davis, is a religious studies professor at Macalester College, and he stood in front of the judge and pointed out that according to the government’s own indictment he was essentially being charged for holding meetings.

— Another defendant’s great crime, highlighted by Rosen himself at the press conference, was a Facebook post that read “we need to become ungovernable.”

— A third, as journalist Ryan Grim noticed, is accused of conduct that “would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress” to an ICE agent. We now have federal charges in Minnesota, in part, for hurting an ICE agent’s feelings.

Jay Kuo has done a similarly comprehensive deep-dive into the indictments that’s worth a read here, as did Lisa Needham, who calls it “a frontal attack on the right to protest” here. And as Wendy Lawrence points out:

“These charges rest on a legal fiction. Congress never empowered the government to brand a domestic group terrorist, and reserved that label for foreign groups under a 1996 law. The Supreme Court protected association with lawbreaking groups in Claiborne Hardware, 1982. Membership cannot carry a felony, and the conspiracy count inherits that flaw.”

When reporters asked MAGA prosecutor Rosen the obvious question, whether any agent had actually been injured by any of these people, he wouldn’t answer it. He simply told them that whether or not anybody suffered bodily harm “is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime.”

So nobody got hurt, the government won’t even claim anybody got hurt, and that’s beside the point. What matters now is the meeting you attended, the post you wrote, and that the company you keep offends the officers and prosecutors who answer to Dear Leader.

And they’re proud of it, following Trump’s lead.

When Harvard Kennedy School presidential historian David King noted that Trump’s authoritarian behavior was much like “Alexander the Great, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamburlaine, Napoleon and, more recently, Hitler, Mao, and Stalin,” Trump screenshotted it and wrote “Presidential Historian Dave King — Sounds good to me!”

Back in January, federal officers shot and killed two Minneapolis protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. As Congresswoman Ilhan Omar pointed out, not one of those officers has been charged with anything — in fact, the feds are refusing to turn evidence of the crimes over to state authorities — but the same Justice Department somehow found the time and the manpower to haul fifteen protesters into federal court for putting up flyers and linking arms in protest of those killings.

The killers walked free and the leafleteers get indicted, just like happened to Sophie and Hans Scholl of the White Rose Society in 1930s Germany. If you want a single image that captures what NSPM-7 is actually for, that’s it.

This is also not the first time, and Minnesota won’t be the last. In late May a federal jury in Spokane convicted three anti-ICE protesters on conspiracy charges, the first prosecution of its kind in the history of the Eastern District of Washington, even though no agent was injured and prosecutors couldn’t show the three had so much as spoken to one another before the protest.

One of them is a combat veteran of Afghanistan, and his father, a retired Army intelligence officer who served in the same war, said simply that they’d been treated as “guinea pigs” to frighten other Americans out of exercising rights the Constitution guarantees.

And back in March the administration notched its first big win in Alvarado, Texas, where eight people were convicted of domestic terrorism essentially for showing up to a protest dressed in black, after a separate individual shot and wounded an officer there.

Adam Federman of Type Investigations watched all of it and boiled the playbook down to a sentence:

“Define a loose coalition of activists opposed to the government's immigration policies as Antifa, make the case that Antifa is a terrorist organization, & then prosecute them on conspiracy charges.”

Prairieland, he said, was exhibit A, and he expects this regime to “get to the end of the alphabet” before it’s finished. “We’re going to see a lot more of this,” he added.

You might take some comfort in the fact that these cases keep falling apart, and you’d be half right. Roughly a third of the original Metro Surge charges have already been dismissed, and prosecutors just quietly dropped all charges against four protesters near Chicago.

But don’t mistake legal weakness for harmlessness, because a conviction was never really the point: I’ve written about this dynamic for years, both here and in The Hidden History of Big Brother in America.

When the government can drag you out of bed at gunpoint before dawn, seize and download your computer and phone, freeze your checking and savings, and march you in front of a federal magistrate — even on phony, trumped-up charges like they did to Jim Comey and apparently are doing here — the process itself is the punishment whether they obtain a conviction (or even make it to trial) or not.

Most people don’t have the stomach or the bank account to fight it, so they take the plea, stop going to protests, and tell their friends to stay home too. That’s not a flaw in the strategy. That is the strategy.

We’ve seen this movie before, and not just in the rightwing McCarthy hearings my parents’ generation lived through. This is the method Trump’s mentor Vladimir Putin has perfected, criminalizing dissent not with one dramatic crackdown but with vague “extremism” and “conspiracy” laws that let the state arrest random peaceful protesters one at a time, quietly, until the streets empty out on their own.

You don’t need to imagine a secret phone call between Mar-a-Lago and the Kremlin to recognize the technique, because Trump has never bothered to hide his admiration for the men who govern this way. Although Trump and Putin do seem to have hour-long phone conversations about every two weeks; the last one was Sunday.

When I lived in West Germany in the 1980s, I visited the old East German state and learned how they’d turned an entire society into informers, neighbor watching neighbor, not because most people were true believers in communism but because most people were afraid of having their lives disrupted. (There’s a brilliant movie about it: The Lives of Others.)

The genius of that system was that it almost never had to make mass arrests. It only had to make a handful of them, visibly enough, that everyone else learned to police themselves. NSPM-7, signed conveniently in the weeks after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and aimed squarely — and exclusively — at the left, is built to do exactly that.

As Ukraine and Hungary have both proven in the recent past, the one thing a machine that runs on fear cannot survive is a population that refuses to be afraid.

Call your senators and your representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them to publicly condemn NSPM-7 and these unAmerican conspiracy prosecutions, and to demand hearings on the FBI’s pre-crime task forces.

Back the lawyers doing the unglamorous work of defending these people through the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild.

The entire purpose of NSPM-7 is to make you decide that peacefully standing on a sidewalk with your fellow citizens isn’t worth the risk. Prove them wrong.

And if this helped you understand what’s happening, please share it widely and send it to someone who still believes this growing police state can’t reach them. The Hartmann Report goes only as far as you carry it, and sunlight is still the one thing these people can’t indict.

Louise’s Daily Song: “The Knock on the Door has Arrived”

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.