1). “Trump Team Prepping New Strategy for Domestic Terrorism: Goodbye January 6, hello 'Hands Off' protesters”, Apr 10, 2026, Ken Klippenstein, Ken Klippenstein, at < https://www.kenklippenstein.
2). “Trump's Counterterror Czar Proposes Terror Charges for Political Opponents: Either you love America or you don’t, he says”, Apr 16, 2026, Ken Klippenstein, Ken Klippenstein, at < https://www.kenklippenstein.
3). “Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist 'Extremists': New national counterterrorism strategy vows to “cripple them before" crimes are committed”, May 06, 2026, Ken Klippenstein, Ken Klippenstein, at < https://www.kenklippenstein.
4). “New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson: Administration deems anti-Trump right wingers terrorists”, May 12, 2026, Ken Klippenstein, Ken Klippenstein, at < https://www.kenklippenstein.
5). “No, You’re The Terrorist, You Terrorist!”, May 12, 2026, Van Jackson, UnDiplomatic, at < https://www.un-diplomatic.com/
~~ recommended by desmond ~~
Introduction by desmond: Now, that the President and his coterie of Billionaires and CEOs have returned mostly empty-handed from their fruitless visit to China; looking all the more like supplicants to the Chinese Political; they can turn back to one of their most important tasks – defeating the 2/3 of the U.S. Population that hates them. Luckily for them, unlike in Iran, the American left-liberal population is mostly unarmed and does not shoot back when attacked. Item 1)., “Trump Team Prepping ….”; Item 2)., “Trump's Counterterror Czar ….”; Item 3)., “Insane Pre-Crime Strategy ….'”; and Item 4)., “New Counterterror Strategy ….”, all discuss the development of the Trump Regime's domestic political strategy, namely criminalizing dissent and resistance and making opposition to their agenda a “thought crime”. These 4 Items shine a light on the Fascist Operative Sebastian Gorka (who purchased a bogus Ph.D. from a diploma mill, according to an account I read a few years ago). Item 5)., “No, You’re The Terrorist, ….”, takes a similar look at the attempt to brand any resistance as “terrorism”. With a Federal Government that is attempting to buy large Warehouses to use a “concentration camps” and that continues to fund ICE lavishly building up its number of personnel we clearly face an attempt to implement harsh fascist control over the U.S.
We will see whether or not this sort of takeover can succeed with economic conditions squeezing Americans to a nearly unprecedented extent, widespread obvious corruption certainly on a scale never seen before, and the U.S. tied to Israel in a war that cannot be won and that will continue to drain the U.S. and to severely damage the Strategic position of the U.S. in Europe and East Asia.
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Trump Team Prepping New Strategy for Domestic Terrorism
The Trump administration is quietly drafting a bold new strategy for combating terrorism that targets a wide range of perceived foes, from Tesla vandals to everyday protesters, intelligence sources say.
White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka is leading the effort, which covers both foreign and domestic strategies. Gorka recently boasted that the president has “done a 180 on our counterterrorism policy.” He’s also been quite candid in comparing his political opponents to terrorists, as I’ve written about.
The domestic focus derives from the view that foreign control, antisemitism and a conspiracy against Donald Trump are behind everything from Gaza protests to Planned Parenthood. White House insiders firmly believe that protestors are being “paid” to disrupt the Trump agenda, the same sources say.
“I think when they catch these people, you'll find they're paid by highly political people on the left," President Trump said last month. Attorney General Pam Bondi echoed the view, saying, of Tesla vandals: “If you're funding this, we're coming after you.”
Gorka and his team see America as a complex battlefield, where illegal immigrants, drug runners, sex traffickers, and money launderers have had free reign over the past four years. Now he wants to drop the hammer.
In an interview with Breitbart this week, Gorka decries “the feckless lack of leadership that was the Biden administration” when it came to dealing with those who threaten America or its allies.
To demonstrate its 180, the White House has already conducted strikes in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia that it describes as more timely and intense than previously, long-identified potential attacks on “high value targets” that it claims were languishing on Biden drawing boards.
Gorka brags about the ease with which he and his team have gotten Donald Trump to change direction.
“The danger,” one senior intelligence official told us, is that the team preparing the strategy are all warfighters, seeing America as no different than the Middle East.
When then-President Joe Biden issued the first-ever National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism in 2021, it was a response to January 6, basically casting the MAGA rioters as terrorists threatening the very survival of American democracy.
Biden’s 2021 strategy was itself alarming, casting as threats all kinds of Americans, including social media users, gamers, and students. In fact, the strategy led to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security establishing a backchannel with social media and gaming companies like Roblox, Discord and Reddit in order to monitor communications and map networks, approaches it had long used overseas.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published this week sheds light on the government’s domestic terrorism strategy, from Biden to the present, alluding to the online element in particular:
“Most of the threat assessments [of the last four years] we reviewed, as well as the 2021 Strategy, indicate that domestic terrorists increasingly rely on online platforms, such as gaming and social media platforms, to radicalize and mobilize their views … Similarly, the 2021 Strategy notes that domestic terrorists use internet-based communications, such as social media, file-upload sites, and end-to-end encrypted platforms, which can amplify threats to public safety …”
Now, the rewrite of the National Strategy document is shaping up to comport with Trump’s view of the country, the GAO hints and others say, rescinding the previous approach and altering the focus of counterterrorism actions over the next four years. That includes focusing more on Trump’s political opponents and framing petty crimes taking place at day-to-day protests as terrorism.
Counterterrorism is a fancy way for the government to refer to the business of pre-crime. Designed to prevent attacks before they happen, counterterrorism doesn’t need a crime on which to predicate its activities. Counterterror personnel are not law enforcers investigating a crime after it has occurred. They look for predictors of an attack. This process of divination partially relies on so-called “mobilization indicators,” characteristics that could move people to carry out acts of extremist violence.
Ever had a heated argument expressing sympathy for Luigi Mangione or HAMAS? Or bought military-style tactical equipment? Or withdrawn from family? If so, you meet the government’s criteria listed in its 2021 “Mobilization Indicators” booklet, a document intended to help local and state police to spot a terrorist.
These criteria might strike you as creepy because, as the booklet itself concedes, “many of the mobilization indicators included in this booklet may also relate to constitutionally protected activities.”
As part of the Trump administration’s push to bring the National Counterterrorism Strategy in line with its own worldview, the National Counterterrorism Center in February issued a new behavioral indicators report geared towards those in the education sector. That supplement to the 2021 initial indicators report follows earlier Biden-era updates dealing with threats to the technology and defense sectors, as well as critical infrastructure protection.
“So-called Tesla terrorism and potential anti-Trump violence is driving new articulations of the threat,” the senior intelligence official says. The big difference now is that Trump, rather than Biden, is in charge.
The White House is already arresting and attempting to deport foreign students who it says participated in protests that did damage to America. They even have a policy in place to spy on their social media accounts, as I recently reported, hunting for their own list of terrorism indicators.
Trump, his Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have all called violence against Tesla vehicles, dealerships and equipment terrorism. Patel during his swearing in vowed to put on “the world’s largest manhunt” against “anyone that wishes to do harm to our way of life and our citizens.”
In describing Biden’s National Counterterrorism Strategy, the GAO points out that four years later, the full extent of the measures taken to implement the strategy are still not publicly known. The GAO says that “officials from DHS, DOJ, and State told us that the classified implementation plan includes some additional guidance for classified activities”; and that “DHS and DOJ officials told us that they conduct additional activities to respond to the 2021 Strategy that are classified.”
Though now cast in the role of Trump statesman, speaking with his faux Kissinger accent and donning pocket squares and cufflinks, Sebastian Gorka, numerous officials tell us, is also a gun nut and war enthusiast who loves Israel and hates everything and anything Biden. Secret operations are central to Gorka’s view of the world. He has taken to vociferously thanking special operators and intelligence people, and even the government of Pakistan, for doing their jobs.
“Characterize the enemy, disrupt the internal workings of conspiratorial actors, eliminate the leadership, all of the strategies against al Qaeda and ISIS are being brought home in thinking about a new domestic strategy,” the senior intelligence official says.
“These are warfighters, and proud of it,” the official adds. “They are exactly the wrong team to revise our national strategy for what happens inside the United States.”
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Trump's Counterterror Czar Proposes Terror Charges for Political Opponents
White House counterterror czar Sebastian Gorka said today that Americans who are not on board with the Trump administration’s immigration policy are “on the side of terrorists."
“It's really quite that simple,” Gorka said in a little-noticed interview with Newsmax. “We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists.”
He didn’t stop there, going on to say this is tantamount to “aiding and abetting” — which he called a crime under federal law.
“And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them?” Gorka continued. “Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
Wingnut as his theory may sound, Gorka is not some marginal figure. As Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the White House and Deputy Assistant to President Trump, he’s currently leading the effort to produce a new national strategy for countering domestic terrorism, as I reported last week.
So could Gorka’s intensely partisan worldview be turned into government practice?
Well, the Trump administration has already taken the unprecedented step of formally designating a variety of “transnational criminal organizations,” gangs and drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. With that in place, all the administration would have to do to turn Gorka’s rhetoric into reality would be to claim that critics of Trump’s immigration and deportation policies are providing them with “material support.” Though this felony crime was intended originally to prosecute direct financial and other overt forms of support for al Qaeda, the concept grew to include supposed “crimes” like providing legal counsel. (See Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which was soundly criticized for being an FBI backdoor to entrap non-criminals.)
All of this is taking place as numerous Democratic members of Congress have expressed support for one such alleged “terrorist” — former Maryland resident Kilmer Abrego Garcia — whom the Trump administration asserts (without proof) was a member of MS-13. Senator Chris Van Holland of Maryland this morning even traveled to El Salvador, where Abrego Garcia was deported, in an attempt to meet with him after expressing opposition to his removal.
Could Van Holland’s mission and protests on behalf of others be spun into charges of providing material support for terrorism?
Gorka seems to think so.
“It's quite telling that we have Democrats on Capitol Hill, not just the lunatics who are torching Tesla dealerships in acts of terrorism themselves, saying, ‘Oh my gosh, the rights of this individual!’” Gorka says of Garcia. “You mean the terrorist who came here illegally?”
From Tesla vandals and now Democratic members of Congress, the Trump administration seems intent on casting a wider and wider net in its new domestic war on terrorism. While the media’s focus is understandably on migrants and deportees, Americans are increasingly coming into the crosshairs. Donald Trump has even mused about giving American citizens the El Salvador treatment.
And despite what you might hear in the mainstream, there are plenty of federal law enforcement people who think like Gorka, including in the FBI and the counterterrorism community. I know because I talk to some of them! They’re just waiting for the green light.
Gorka's worldview, other than his adoration of Donald Trump, is not easy to divine. (I’ve tried.) What’s clear is that his articulation of America First is bizarre, arguing that there is only one America, and that that version of America is the only one worth protecting and preserving.
“The taxonomy of politics in America is dead,” Gorka says. “It's not left and right. It's not even Republican or Democrat. There's one line that divides us: Do you love America or do you hate America?”
It’s a throwback to George Bush’s 9/11 rhetoric that “you’re either with us or against us,” a simplistic formulation that fell by the wayside as his America descended into a quagmire of regime change and nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Gorka’s view seems to be an America First policy in which “America” is whatever he says it is. That’s worse than Bush, but it portends the same outcome: the expansion of a domestic fight that not only pours gasoline on the fire but also expands the battlefield so broadly that the America he claims to loves so much is greatly weakened.
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Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists"
The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.
The language is contained in the White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy. It is the first National Strategy to be unveiled since 2021, when the Biden administration issued its document. The Strategy identifies the “left-wing,” “anti-Fascists,” “Anarchists” and “radically pro-transgender” ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.
The Strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration. The document makes clear he got his wish. Gorka called the Strategy “my life’s work,” and apparently waxed so poetic in previous drafts that his superiors told him (by his own account): “Cut it down, Gorka!”
“Currently we face three major types of terror groups,” the Strategy says, listing “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs,” “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”
"Counterterrorism" itself is a propaganda term, sanitizing the actual practice: pre-crime, which aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs. (I've written about the Bureau’s pre-crime push at length.) The Strategy doesn't bother hiding it. It promises to "Identify terror actors and plots before they happen" and to use "law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent."
The Strategy also hints at a crackdown on pro-Palestinian groups. In a section laying out “five functional aspects of the current CT environment” beyond the previously named three categories, it warns of “New and deepening alliances between the far-left and Islamists, i.e., the ‘Red-Green’ alliance” — a phrase borrowed from conservative discourse to suggest a conspiratorial alignment between the American left and radical Islam.
The “Red-Green alliance” term has been pushed by Israeli think tanks like the Reut Group — which defines the term as “the nexus between radical progressive groups to Islamists organizations” — and picked up by right-wing U.S. news outlets. The framing is designed to recast pro-Palestinian activism as a front for jihadism.
The Strategy proposes employing the same tactics used to map out jihadi networks like al Qaeda against Americans here at home, promising “rapid identification and neutralization” of the supposed threat. This is exactly the technique that Gorka and other top Trump officials like Kash Patel cut their teeth on during the post-9/11 global war on terror — experience that I previously warned they would lean heavily on.
Per the document:
“In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”
National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) defines the threat as those espousing “anti-American,” “anti-Christian” and “anti-Capitalism” viewpoints. The new National Strategy uniquely identifies “radically pro-transgender ideologies” as terrorists, adding yet another threat group to the federal government’s targeting.
As I reported last year, the FBI in response to Charlie Kirk’s murder was preparing a war on what it considers transgender “extremism,” based on my sources. That report was subject to endless fact-checks asking how I knew this — something I can’t answer without burning my sources — and whether I was spreading panic in the transgender community. The counterterrorism strategy affirms my reporting, explicitly pointing to “the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies” as part of its justification for the new targeting.
The Strategy is, in important respects, Charlie Kirk’s strategy. Within hours of his September 10, 2025 murder at Utah Valley University, White House, Justice, and Homeland Security officials scrambled to draft a sweeping domestic crackdown, as I previously reported. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the killing “a domestic 9/11,” vowing his department would now do to American political networks what it once did to al Qaeda’s in going after their finances.
Charlie Kirk was not just an ally of the new terror hunters. Trump reportedly considered the 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder part of his “extended family,” in his words, with a direct line to the Oval Office that few others enjoyed. The President credited Kirk with delivering young voters in 2024, posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom on what would have been his 32nd birthday, and used his February 2026 State of the Union to mourn “my great friend Charlie Kirk,” with Kirk’s widow Erika seated in the chamber as a special guest.
Kirk’s death resulted in the issuance of NSPM-7, on which much of the new counterterrorism Strategy is built.
The new Strategy also leans heavily on grievances about the “weaponization” of counterterrorism powers under prior administrations to justify a sweeping expansion of those same powers. It cites past FBI controversies — surveillance of “conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia,” “parents standing up for their children at school board meetings,” and investigations of “Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates” — as the rationale for what it calls a previous “radical shift” in U.S. counterterrorism.
In other words: abuses of counterterrorism authorities against the right have now become the grounds for unleashing those same authorities against the left.
The Strategy anticipates this reversal and tries to inoculate against it. “Our counterterrorism powers will not be used to target our fellow Americans who simply disagree with us,” it insists, before going on to describe a regime that does precisely that — provided the disagreement is categorized as “extremism.”
Except that’s exactly what it does!
The strategy includes a foreword by President Trump that emphasizes its unparalleled focus on the homeland: “my Administration has put an unprecedented focus on dismantling threats to the American homeland in our Hemisphere.”
The global war on terror has come home.
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New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson
Two right-wing figures — Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes — have been named by the White House as possible domestic terrorists, according to the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official.
Sebastian Gorka, himself a former right-wing influencer turned National Security Council principal, has been making his rounds on conservative media, explaining the meaning and purpose behind the President’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy (which I reported on previously).
Between grandiose monologues about his vision of a crusade to save Western civilization from “anti-American” and “anti-Christian” extremism, Gorka let slip that the administration’s war on “domestic terrorism” isn’t just aimed at the left. It targets anyone who isn’t in line with the broader MAGA agenda. While Trump’s national security directive NSPM-7 explicitly singles out the left with its list of so-called terrorism indicators, many of them could describe people on the right as well.
The new Counterterrorism Strategy, Gorka’s brainchild, identifies three groups as priorities for the administration: narco-terrorists, Islamist terrorists, and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists.” Nowhere in the document does it mention right-wing extremists; and while that may have led those on the right to believe they are immune, Gorka’s remarks make clear that they are not.
Asked by Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow if there’s any “right-wing terror” or “right-wing extremism” threat, Gorka replied by pointing to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and streamer Nick Fuentes — both of whom have become vocal critics of the Trump administration — arguing they aren’t actually conservatives anyway. Here’s the exchange:
MARLOW: “ I wanna get your thoughts on any right-wing terror … Do you regard it as a threat at all or anything that's important to be considering right now?”
GORKA: “…I'm not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I'm not sure that means you're part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they're not conservatives, what's left?”
Gorka’s charge that Carlson lauds Sharia law is, to put it lightly, ridiculous.
Here’s what Carlson actually said:
CARLSON: “But you go to a country like Japan or the Emirates or Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and you see that when people are self-confident, when they’re really pleased with what they’re doing, and they believe their system is the right system — that self-confidence results in a kind of welcoming attitude. So you'll be sitting at dinner in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and you'll say, you know, I just, I'm really kind of pro-Jesus, like I'm a Christian. They’ll be like, ‘That’s so great!’
HOST: And they don’t have the same beliefs?
CARLSON: No, they’re Muslims. It's a country governed by Sharia law! — [laughs] — I mean, and they're like, ‘That's great!’
Is Carlson naive for mistaking his Four Season’s experiences in whatever Gulf monarchy with an egalitarian society? Absolutely. But “lauding Sharia law?” Come on.
I’m an absolutist when it comes to free speech, for the right and the left (and anyone inside or outside that spectrum). Gorka as a government official has no business sticking his nose into whether people define America in the same way he does.
And let’s be real: none of this is actually about extremism. It’s about the fact that Carlson, like Fuentes, recently broke with Trump — bitterly — over the Iran War. That's the real offense. So now they’re being cast as extremist threats. But to avoid alarming conservatives, the administration can't just say that — it has to first strip them of their conservative credentials, redefine them as something foreign-affiliated and dangerous, and then go after them.
That’s how the terrorism two-step works: the Trump administration just asserts that a right-winger isn’t really a right winger and then it can say it doesn’t target right-wingers. This is literally the No True Scotsman fallacy (No Scotsman puts sugar in his tea / But Ian from Glasgow does / Well, no true Scotsman does). That, in a nutshell, is how NSPM-7 can be weaponized against the right without calling it that.
You don’t have to like Carlson or Fuentes (who says things like “I love Hitler” and is easy not to like) in order to see that. Consider, for a moment, the rhetoric that likely fueled Gorka’s freakout.
Carlson has called Trump’s Iran war “the single biggest mistake Trump, or any American president, has made in my lifetime.” He has slammed the strikes as “reprehensible and immoral,” insisting the war “doesn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way” and suggesting it happened “at the behest and then the demand of Israel.”
When Trump ordered strikes on Iran, Fuentes said in a social media post: “NO WAR WITH IRAN. ISRAEL IS DRAGGING US INTO WAR. AMERICA FIRST.”
You can imagine why Fuentes feels so strongly about Israel.
Taken together, that’s the substance Gorka is trying to launder out of the “conservative movement” by redefining Carlson and Fuentes as something else: in Carlson’s case, a Sharia fan.
At this point you might be wondering why none of this has been reported — a question big mouth Gorka answers in an interview with actor-turned-media commentator Dean Caine about the National Counterterrorism Strategy. Gorka beams about how little negative coverage the media have given the Strategy, calling it “delicious.”
Gorka said:
“I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy. 50 articles were written that day about the press call. Only one of them from those putzes at Politico was even slightly negative... We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”
Here Gorka is mostly right — the media really have been asleep at the wheel on this story.
I say “mostly” because I wrote a negative story about the Strategy, which he apparently didn’t notice. Maybe he’ll notice this one.
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No, You’re The Terrorist, You Terrorist!
Sebastian Gorka was counter-terrorism czar during the first year of Trump 1.0, but got shitcanned as swiftly as he had been hired. Don’t call it a comeback. In America, anyone (who’s a bootlicking white man willing to serve evil) can Forrest Gump their way to success. Back in the fold of Trump 2.0, Gorka just authored the White House’s new “counter-terrorism strategy.”
People who study counter-terrorism—not my people, btw—called it “largely slop,” “utterly unhinged,” and an “exercise in gaslighting, partisanship and obsequiousness.” It’s notable mostly because it targets leftists as a priority, building on NSPM-7. That’s both flagrantly anti-democratic and a waste of resources. Ken Klippenstein is all over this if you want to read more about the genuine threat posed to all of us if the language in the document is to be taken seriously.
What I want to draw attention to though is the absurdist way in which anyone who takes peace, democracy, or equality seriously is being designated a threat.
In an interview rolling out the document, a reporter from the right-wing Daily Caller asked Gorka about the Iran war and whether that will cause more terrorism. Even MAGA journalists apparently understand that if you want to prevent terrorism, you ought to avoid actions that precipitate terrorism. Gorka replied by calling that a “Low T approach” and accusing anyone who thought that way of being “testicularly challenged.”
I’m as unsurprised as I am embarrassed for this pudgy Dracula wannabe. You see, Gorka was a D-list celebrity cartoon character during his previous stint in government. So much so that he was actually on that Cameo app. I’ll never forget a delicious piece Dan Nexon wrote back in 2017 just roasting Gorka’s lack of expertise in anything at all: “Sebastian Gorka May Be a Far-Right Nativist, but for Sure He’s a Terrible Scholar.”
And yet.
To call Gorka’s counter-terror imaginary a farce is at once obviously true and terrifying in its real-world consequences. You can feel that in your bones when you read about how CT operations work now. The LA Times just had a piece depicting the cold-blooded, Palantir-enabled illegal assassination of someone in Lebanon:
every time Ahmad Turmus looked up, it seemed to be circling over him, like an all-too-patient bird of prey. So when the phone rang as he was visiting family one Monday afternoon in February, Turmus wasn’t too surprised that the person speaking accented Arabic was an Israeli military officer.
What surprised him was the question. “Ahmad, you want to die with those around you or alone?”…
When he hung up, his face changed, family members told The Times. He told them the Israelis were after him, and that they should leave the house and let him die alone. They pleaded with him to try to escape, to give him some disguise so he could leave.
But Turmus refused. He went to the door. “They know my face. There’s nothing we can do against this,” he said. His wife was walking in as he left, but he didn’t acknowledge her, family members said, so she wouldn’t try to stop him. He got in his car, started it up, and drove off. Less than 30 seconds later came the shriek of the two missiles that lanced through Turmus’ car.
The piece reads like lethality porn—propaganda trying to subtly terrorize us with tales of Israeli and US tech-enabled ruthlessness. But it vivifies what we’re up against.
Anyone struggling for human liberation—or even just a less shitty world—has to contend with the power and unaccountability of the modern national security state. The techniques perfected during the War on Terror were limited by scope and capacity—fascist targeting of certain types of brown-and-bearded people, but not everyone. Targeting everyone wasn’t even possible.
Gorka’s mangled understanding of the world solves for the scope limitation, ensnaring anyone who’s not a fellow bootlicker. AI, meanwhile, solves for the capacity problem, allowing for the surveillance, control, and repression of anyone, at scale, and with ever-shifting criteria for targeting.
We have not only let our national security states act with impunity; we have allowed them to get way too powerful. Now, an unqualified racist, ignoramus with deep sexual insecurities is providing strategic direction to the most lethal oppression machine ever known and laughing at us all as he gives interviews to an overly credulous, despot-laundering media apparatus.
Do you see a problem here?
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