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aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

After vanquishing Twitter with the Excaliber of Executive Orders, the IMPOTUS is setting his sights on dragons, as reported in Common Dreams [commondreams.org]:

Civil liberties advocates and progressive voices threw up immediate flags of alarm on Sunday afternoon after President Donald Trump threatened to officially designate "ANTIFA"—a moniker that stands for anti-fascist but is not, as informed people were forced to point out, an actual organization—as a "terrorist organization."

In recent years, the term ANTIFA has become a broad stand-in phrase used to describe certain left-wing activists—including some anarchist and anti-fascist groups or networks. As protests and uprisings have occurred in cities nationwide over recent days in the wake of last week's killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Trump and other officials have blamed so-called "Antifa instigators"—mostly without providing any solid evidence—with stoking violence or carrying out property destruction.

After Trump tweeted Sunday that "The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," critics immediately saw it as a blatant effort to use the authority of such a designation as a way for Trump to target lawful and constitutionally-protected free speech and the right to assemble.

Yes, it would be illegal, but as Tricky Dick Nixon said, slightly before resigning in disgrace, "It's not illegal, if the Pepsident does it".

"Terrorism is an inherently political label, easily abused and misused," ACLU declared in reaction to Trump's tweet. "Let's be clear: There is no legal authority for designating a domestic group. Any such designation would raise significant due process and First Amendment concerns."

Progressive journalists like Ben Norton and Jeremy Scahill also sounded warnings, calling it a "terrifying" and worrying escalation against the right to dissent.

This is terrifying. Understand what is happening here: Antifa is not an actual organization; it's a decentralized group. There are no "Antifa leaders."

So now the US government will have the "right" to imprison anyone for "terrorism," if it just claims they're part of "Antifa." https://t.co/0h4eOAP94z [t.co]

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 31, 2020

Carrying milkshakes, with or without a mask, soon to be illegal.

While some critics smirked at the idiocy of the president's initial threat on Twitter—"What an idiot," said one—others warned that the implications of Trump following through on such a threat would be very serious.

"Trump," warned Scahill, "is going to use this order against the label of ANTIFA to dramatically escalate the use of force and expand domestic spying against protesters and targeted communities inside the [United States]."

Glenn Greenwald, Schahill's colleague at The Intercept, said Trump's threat was "as incoherent as it is dangerous," and warned that 'the only possible outcome, if it is more than just a Twitter scream, is increased domestic repression, surveillance, and the quashing of dissent: the classic case of exploiting disorder for authortarian ends."

Hopefully it is nothing more than a Twitter scream, the impotent protest of a pathetic poltroon in the Presidency, and something that America's Constitution will prevent.

Original Submission