It really was their Reichstag Fire
This is chilling and I think we’re just at the beginning. Rolling Stone reports that after the Kirk killing the White House quickly saw their opportunity to go after their political opposition and immediately drafted plans to begin the crackdown.
The memos and legal justifications leaned heavily on the infrastructure and the statutes left behind from George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror. Trump administration aides and attorneys talked among themselves about how the Kirk slaying made it clear they needed a new “war on terror,” in their words, but one launched and branded by Donald J. Trump, and aimed straight at the homegrown domestic enemies of MAGA world. It came at a moment when the administration was already throwing around the “terrorism” label widely as it tried to accomplish its most extreme goals, from blowing up boats of alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean to revving up its militarized deportation operations.
In the earliest moments of Team Trump’s rapid-fire drafting process in mid-September 2025, administration officials say, names that kept coming up in the revenge-minded deliberations included: antifa, America’s disparate anti-fascist movement; the liberal-donation processor ActBlue; megadonor George Soros; the anti-Trump organizing group Indivisible; a variety of pro-immigration and Know Your Rights organizations; and the anti-war group CodePink, whose activists recently protested Trump at a restaurant. And, of course, administration officials couldn’t help themselves from brainstorming new ways to try to target the American trans community.
[…]
“We need to use our anti-terrorism laws, our RICO statutes, our conspiracy statutes — we need to use every tool in our law enforcement arsenal to crush these left-wing terrorists legally, financially, and politically, and to cut off their funding sources, and throw them in prison,” Mike Davis, a conservative attorney close to Trump, tells Rolling Stone. “George Soros, and the octopus of his left-wing organizations, must be investigated. NGOs importing and harboring illegal aliens must be investigated. Nobody is above the law. I’m very excited for these Democrats to face criminal probes for their real crimes.… Justice is coming — and justice is best served cold.”
May I just take a moment to address those of you who’ve been following me for years? You will recall that I always said, “if you build it, they will use it” referring to the erection of the surveillance state and assault on civil liberties. The great irony, of course, is that that was the “deep state” we were all warning about, not this silly evocation of the name for anyone who isn’t a MAGA sycophant.
Anyway, I digress. The article says that there were quite a few people in the White House who “felt something was off” about all this since Kirk was obviously killed by yet another lone wolf psycho and the groups they were targeting were run-of-the mill non-violent liberal groups. But I guess they just shrugged and went along with it.
Read the entire article if you can. It lays out much of the program of repression that’s just beginning. It doesn’t get to the immigration and deportation strategy and the escalating street violence that’s being perpetrated by DHS and associate agencies. There’s only so much space. But it’s all connected. Stephen Miller’s ongoing tantrums this weekend make that crystal clear:
Guess who he’s going after next?
What say you John Roberts?
Oh, never mind. He’s already bent the knee as have the rest of that Supreme Court majority. And they were all happy and privileged to do it.