Trump Antifa Order Seen as a Weapon to Attack Left-Wing Speech, Protests
Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said one First Amendment advocate.
The executive order issued by US President Donald Trump Monday evening claimed a legal authority that the president doesn’t have to designate the “antifa” movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that no central group exists to assign the designation to—but rights advocates said Trump’s claims about antifa weren’t the point of the order.
“This isn’t an attack on antifa,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Healthcare. “It’s an attack on our rights.”
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The executive order states that antifa, a portmanteau of the term “anti-fascist,” will be designated a “domestic terrorist organization.” The movement is comprised of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, but has no central organizational structure or leaders. People associated with the movement mobilized in 2017 to oppose the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a nonviolent anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who rammed a car into a group of demonstrators.
In the order, the president pinned blame for a “pattern of political violence” on anti-fascist protesters and organizers and pledged that the executive branch will “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”
The order was written so broadly, said journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, that it suggests “someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist.‘”
The president has ordered US citizens, he added, “to be anti-antifa.”
With no central organization to assign the “domestic terrorist organization” to, said rights advocates, the executive order will likely be used to crack down on a wide range of left-wing protest activity and speech.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was among those who noted that no US law or statute gives the president the authority “to designate anything as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.‘”
All 219 groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, are foreign entities, and the designation makes it possible for people who provide material support to those groups to be prosecuted by the federal government.
“This would appear to have no direct legal effect beyond acting as a statement of policy for the executive branch,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Chip Gibbons, policy director at the First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, said that while the order “is without statutory basis, a close read of the language mirrors existing FBI powers, such as ‘terrorist enterprise investigations’ into ‘anarchist extremists.‘”
“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said Gibbons. “Given the FBI’s current guidelines, which encourage preventative intelligence in the name of counterterrorism, the FBI will have no problem continuing its sordid history of preemptively investigating political speech under the pretext of thwarting terrorism.”
At The Conversation, Dafydd Townley, a University of Portsmouth teaching fellow, wrote that the classification of antifa “as a terrorist organization could have profound effects on the First Amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens.”
“It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification,” Townley wrote.
The designation was announced amid widespread public opposition to many of Trump’s policies, including the deployment of federal troops to US cities to crack down on unhoused populations, immigrant communities, and what the president has claimed is a wave of violent crime—despite statistics showing crime is on the decline in all the cities he’s targeted.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have already responded violently to people protesting raids and arrests of immigrant neighbors, including last week when an ICE agent was filmed throwing US congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh to the ground at a protest in the Chicago suburbs.
“This isn’t about ‘antifa’—whatever that is,” said journalist Erin Overbey on Tuesday. “Trump’s new executive order is written so that anyone protesting against the US government, ICE, or even top politicians can potentially be deemed a terrorist.”
“It’s federal weaponization against free speech and the right to protest itself. Full stop,” she said. “And it’s un-American as hell.”
Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Trump’s New Restrictions on Pentagon Reporters ‘Should Alarm Every American’
Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting,” warned the National Press Club after journalists told of rule changes.
Journalists and defenders of press freedom are expressing alarm and condemnation after the Pentagon, under the command of President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, announced new restrictions on reporters that include pre-approval of stories that include even unclassified material and a new pledge to not publish any material without permissions from government officials.
The New York Times, among the first to report on a 17-page memo detailing the new rules, noted how the “move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public.” The National Press Club (NPC) was quick to rebuke the restrictions as an assault on the public’s right to know and fundamental journalistic freedoms.
“The Pentagon is now demanding that journalists sign a pledge not to obtain or report any information—even if unclassified—unless it has been expressly authorized by the government,” said Mike Balsamo, president of the NPC, in a statement. “This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the U.S. military.”
Balsamo continued:
For generations, Pentagon reporters have provided the public with vital information about how wars are fought, how defense dollars are spent, and how decisions are made that put American lives at risk. That work has only been possible because reporters could seek out facts without needing government permission.
If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.
Independent reporting on the military is essential to democracy. It is what allows citizens to hold leaders accountable and ensures that decisions of war and peace are made in the light of day. This pledge undermines that principle, and the National Press Club calls on the Pentagon to rescind it immediately.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, explained to the Times that the government is prohibited by law from demanding journalists surrender their right to investigate the government in exchange for access or credentials.
“This policy operates as a prior restraint on publication which is considered the most serious of First Amendment violations,” Stern said. “The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret or even a national security threat.”
In comments to the Washington Post, Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, called the new policy part of “the Trump administration’s broader assault on free speech and press freedom.”
Any journalist, she added, “who publishes only what the government ‘authorizes’ is doing something other than reporting.”
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and now a visiting professor at Princeton University, put it this way: “In Trump’s Pentagon, journalists who venture beyond reporting official propaganda now risk having their credentials revoked.”
Individual journalists, including veteran reporters who have covered the Pentagon for years or decades, also chimed in.
Konstantin Toropin, the Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press, expressed alarm and dismay at the new restrictions.
“The Pentagon, which has claimed to [have] aspirations of being the most transparent in history, is once again cracking down on basic press access,” Toropin said in a social media post. “Denying access to the Pentagon makes covering our military, our troops, and our actions abroad harder. Full stop.”
Toropin said the rule forbidding the unapproved release of unclassified material, sometimes marked with the acronym “CUI,” is “an incredibly broad and ill-defined rule that could be easily abused.”
As his colleague Brian Everstine, the Pentagon editor at Aviation Week, noted:
At a time when Trump is being accused of severe abuses of power, including a series of attacks on alleged illegal drug runners in the Caribbean Sea, which international law experts have condemned as ”extrajudicial executions,” further restrictions on the ability of journalists to report on the internal workings of the president’s military operations are seen as particularly dangerous.
Barbara Starr, who worked as CNN’s chief Pentagon correspondent for many years who is now a senior fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication, Leadership and Policy, told ABC News that the entire effort “is extremely troubling because it’s being done in an era of unprecedented public hostility from the secretary of defense to the news media.”
Original article by Jon Queally republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Trump Threatens to Strip Broadcast Licenses for Networks Giving Him ‘Bad Press,’ Ramping Up His ‘Campaign of Censorship and Control’
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
(Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says the commission “doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him “bad press” may have their broadcast licenses taken away.
The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressured ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me,” Trump told the press gaggle. “I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they’re 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity… I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do,” the president continued. “If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called “distorted” content.
It is unclear where Trump’s statistic that networks have been “97% against” him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks “haven’t had a conservative on in years.”
But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says “the FCC doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was “weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel,” as part of a “campaign of censorship and control.”
National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC’s decision to ax Kimmel.
Gomez said that with Trump’s intimidation of broadcasters, the “threat is the point.”
“It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it’s so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable,” she said. “And so they don’t want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation.”
Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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“Fascist tactics will never deter me”: Mahmoud Khalil remains defiant in the face deportation order
Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
A US immigration judge has ordered the deportation of pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria or Syria. In an order dated September 12, Louisiana Judge Jamee Comans leaned into Trump administration allegations that in his permanent residency application, Khalil failed to disclose his work with UNRWA and the Syria Office at the British Embassy in Beirut, along with his ties to a pro-Palestine student group at Columbia University. Comans thus denied Khalil’s application for a waiver of removability, a legal order that waives a particular ground for deportation, permitting an individual to stay in the United States, and ordered his deportation – in what her ruling states as “the interests of this country.”
“It is no surprise that the Trump administration continues to retaliate against me for my exercise of free speech. Their latest attempt, through a kangaroo immigration court, exposes their true colors once again,” said Mahmoud Khalil in response to the ruling. “When their first effort to deport me was set to fail, they resorted to fabricating baseless and ridiculous allegations in a bid to silence me for speaking out and standing firmly with Palestine, demanding an end to the ongoing genocide. Such fascist tactics will never deter me from continuing to advocate for my people’s liberation.”
Khalil’s team has already moved to challenge Comans’ order. On September 17, Khalil’s lawyers submitted a letter to the federal court in New Jersey which is overseeing Khalil’s civil rights case, explaining that Khalil will challenge Comans’s order.
“When the immigration prosecutor, judge, and jailor all answer to Donald Trump, and that one man is eager to weaponize the system in a desperate bid to silence Mahmoud Khalil, a US permanent resident whose only supposed sin is that he stands against an ongoing genocide in Palestine, this is the result,” said Ramzi Kassem, co-director of CUNY CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), one of the organizations part of his legal team, which includes the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Dratel & Lewis, Van Der Hout LLP, and Washington Square Legal Services. “A plain-as-day First Amendment violation that also puts on sharp display the rapidly freefalling credibility of the entire US immigration system.”
“We will win”: Khalil continues activism for Palestine
Since his release in June, Khalil has not once shied away from continuing his advocacy for Palestine. Only days after leaving an ICE detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, Khalil appeared on the steps of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Harlem, only blocks away from his alma mater of Columbia University. Khalil answered questions from the press while surrounded by hundreds of his fellow Columbia student activists and supporters from the pro-Palestine movement. When a journalist asked him what his message was to students who might be afraid to speak out based on what happened to him, Khalil firmly said “We will win.”
Khalil also attended and spoke at the Peoples Conference for Palestine in August, where he said again, “the Palestinian liberation movement is winning.”
“The fact that I was targeted by the highest officials and levels of this country means that we are winning.”
Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.