The MAGA Campaign to Suppress Dissent

With each passing day of the Felon's regime I feel as if I am watching a re-run of Hitler's rise to power or the measures to crush dissent in Putin's Russia, Xi's China or Orbán Hungary.  Anyone who criticizes the corrupt authoritarian agenda or believes in the rights guaranteed to citizens under the Bill of Rights, especially the right to free speech, is increasing the potential target of revenge and/or violence. All of the repression and violation of constitutional rights is couched in the guise of fighting crime or "leftist extremists."  Never mind that the vast majority of political violence comes from the political right and its supporters or that lawless corruption is most rampant in the White House and the Felon's cabinet of oligarchs or ideologues. Frighteningly, Charlie Kirk's murder is being used by the Felon's and vicious members of his regime as an excuse to ramp of repression and crush or intimidate dissent.  Just as frightening is the seeming effort on the right to link Kirk's shooter to gays and transgender influences - indeed, some LGBT activist I know are openly discussing the potential need at some point to emigrate from the USA, something I may yet consider depending how threatening things become, although with children and grandchildren in this country, the decision is much more complicated.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon/MAGA campaign to crush dissent:

The horrific murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk inspired politicians on all sides to call for calm. “The time for unity, the time for peace, it is now,” Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said. Fellow Republican Senators James Lankford, Thom Tillis, and John Curtis offered similar bromides, and Utah Governor Spencer Cox urged every American to “always forgive your enemies”  . . . . . This is the sort of rhetoric that American politicians typically resort to in the aftermath of political violence. But when it came from Republicans, they were promptly attacked from the right.

“If You’re Not Focused on Fighting Left-Wing Violence, Step Aside,” a Federalist headline demanded. “If I hear an elected Republican say the phrase ‘political violence’ or ‘both sides’ I’m going to scream,” wrote Shashank Tripathi, a co-host of the Ruthless podcast.

Such criticism is in line with the [Felon’s] president’s. [The Felon] Donald Trump, who granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people associated with the January 6, 2021, riots, has made it plain that he is not opposed to political violence. The only threat worth combatting, he insists, is left-wing violence. . . . . Trump did not call for unity. Instead, he exploited plausible concerns about left-wing extremism by accusing the “radical left” of stoking the kind of rage that leads a young man to commit murder.

But blaming the left exclusively for violence is not just a rhetorical flourish from a pugilistic president. Instead, it is a pretext, a justification for what appears to be coming next. Trump and his supporters are promising to exploit the tragedy of Kirk’s assassination to undertake a sweeping government crackdown on the left. His targets include civil society, opposing politicians, the news media, and even late-night comics such as Jimmy Kimmel, a special fixation for the television-addled president, whom ABC just yanked off the air for comments he made about Kirk’s suspected killer on his show.

The idea of using government power to harass and break up the American left has been floating around right-wing circles for years. The national conservatives, a growing faction of Republicans who favor illiberal use of state power to crush their enemies, have been longing to turn the government into a weapon of vengeance. But these ambitions had been on the fringe of the party. Now they are in the White House.

In his first term, Trump’s authoritarian impulses were curbed by the conservative institutionalists in his administration. This time, he has no such constraints. . . . . Kirk’s murder has provided the party’s extremists with a galvanizing event that could tamp down internal opposition to suppressing the left, at least temporarily.

The administration claims that its proposed crackdown is about public safety, about disrupting a domestic terrorist network for the sake of public order and the preservation of the republic. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Stephen Miller vowed in an appearance on Kirk’s livestream show on Monday. . . . . But Miller’s desire to delegitimize the political opposition preceded the assassination. Weeks before Kirk was killed, Miller said on Fox News, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

Likewise, while Trump and his supporters have defended Kimmel’s suspension as a response to his comments about the Kirk shooting, Trump seemed to predict this turn of events on Truth Social in July: “The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone.”

To escape the ire of Trump and the far right, elected Republicans needn’t directly endorse right-wing violence; they just can’t criticize it. (Regarding January 6, for instance, support and silence are the two acceptable Republican postures.) The administration has also made it clear that conservative lawmakers must refrain from holding all Americans to the same standard of conduct.

Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s most influential advisers, summed up the administration’s ambitions. “I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is,” she wrote on X, “and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”

The emotional pinnacle of Vance’s sermon came when he decried a column in The Nation criticizing Kirk’s ideological legacy. . . . . The Nation column did not call for Kirk’s murder. To the contrary, its author, Elizabeth Spiers, wrote, “I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.” But that hardly seemed to matter to Vance, who went on to claim that The Nation receives funding from two well-known progressive foundations: “Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie’s death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer.”

There was something sinister in Vance’s charge that these foundations enjoy a special subsidy. Donations to nonprofit organizations are generally not taxed—an exclusion that applies to all nonprofit organizations. Vance seems to be using the pretext of terrorism to float the possibility that the federal government will selectively target nonprofits on the left.

Note that Miller reserved the final punishment, imprisonment, for those targets who have broken the law. Other targets, apparently, will lose their “money” and “power” regardless. Miller is someone who speaks deliberately and with some precision, a trait that makes his regular bouts of autocratic fury all the more unnerving. The administration and the movement that he represents are describing a far-reaching campaign against the political left, coupled with an effort to suppress dissent on their own side. If Miller is saying he will punish targets who have broken no law, he likely means to do just that. Unity, or even calm, is the last thing this administration seeks.