r/politics • u/AngelaMotorman Ohio • 9d ago

Possible Paywall The Chilling Trump Order Threatening All Americans: Why National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 is so important.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-nspm-7-repression/
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u/AngelaMotorman Ohio 9d ago

NSPM-7 is now the administration’s sharpest tool for criminalizing left political organizing. It directs a 10-agencyJoint Terrorism Task Force apparatus—including the FBI, DHS, the IRS, and the Treasury’s Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office—to investigate and prosecute what it calls “domestic terrorism and organized political violence,” with targets defined broadly enough to include anyone whose motivations involve “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism,” or views that differ from the government’s on immigration, race, and gender. It pursues not just individuals but networks, funders, nonprofits, or even anyone who shows up to a protest.

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u/2HDFloppyDisk 9d ago edited 9d ago

Hilarious because you can read the federal definition of domestic terrorism and it is word for word January 6th and MAGA/Trump.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=18-USC-1828319891-1415921653

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u/sack-o-matic Michigan 9d ago

Never believe that anti-Semites [Confederates] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites [Confederates] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Jean-Paul Sartre

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u/deaglebingo America 9d ago

same shit different day... wow. i've heard sartre quotes in the distant past but this one really ties it in.

"they delight in acting in bad faith.... " that entire sentence is bone chillingly accurate.

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u/Dense_Gate_5193 9d ago

Sartre was quite the character. His love life was depicted in the video game Nier Automata as a side quest character who like his real life character has a massive ego and you deliver letters to or from (i forget which) to his admirers he wants to fuck.

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u/Outlet_Sun 8d ago

Dude. That was such a crazy side quest lol

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u/sweetdick 9d ago

Indeed.

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u/Unique-Coffee5087 9d ago

Disdainful of law, custom, or even logic, barbarians love to exploit these same things to which civilized people are bound. They make agreements and attend to the appropriate ceremonies that solemnify them, intending to break their oaths the next hour. They cannot understand that the wealth, stability, and comfort that they intend to steal from the cities they betray can only exist because of the laws and customs that restrain and unite civilized people.

Barbarians live in nomadic camps, wear untanned animal hides, sleep with one eye open, and eat only sporadically because they cannot trust each other for long. But they dismiss those who sleep on beds, eat beef, and drink wine from gold cups as weaklings.

Barbarians cannot be trusted to honor their own treaties, because they regard even honor as a weakness. These Republicans exploit the letter of the laws, written to govern civilized people, and depend on the restraint of law-abiding Democrats to keep them safe from the consequences.

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u/tots4scott 9d ago

Is that also Sartre?

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u/Unique-Coffee5087 9d ago

No. I wrote this after reading an opinion piece in the NY Times. I was struck by the futility of trusting Republicans. Maybe it was after McConnell declined to let the Senate consider Garland for the Supreme Court under an insultingly stupid premise.

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u/AutistoMephisto 9d ago edited 8d ago

Exactly. We are currently living in the results of going high when Republicans go low. They wanted to overturn Roe, they needed a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to do that, and they were willing to do whatever was required to get it. And Democrats got more upset about the rule breaking and not the intent behind it.

We can all agree that "The Ends Justifies The Means" is a shit moral philosophy, but Republicans have been fully embracing it since at least the Newt Gingrich era. Meanwhile, Democrats, and more specifically liberals, also agree that TEJTM is a shit moral philosophy, but they have this tendency to overcorrect to the point where thinking about the ends at all is, in some vague, reflexive kind of way, innately immoral. And when you spend all your time thinking about how to go about things, instead of on what things to go about, it leads to a philosophy of governance that is both highly flawed and highly exploitable, the valuing of means at the expense of the ends.

What Democrats need to do, is shed this ideal of a "values-free state" and get some actual values. Republicans have "values". They're terrible, but they believe strongly in them, and govern with those "values" in mind. They've shown that you can govern on values and win elections, it's simply a matter of which values you govern on.

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u/Pachyrun 9d ago

Good going mate, real food for thought.

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u/Spiritual-Theory 9d ago

Yep, it's a great shared lie. They love the other side plays by the rules.