Nina-Bytes: Trump’s COINTELPRO Looms Into Focus
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McCarthyism, COINTELPRO, and the Trumpenreich
I’ve been pretty open about my belief that anyone still arguing that the Trump regime is not fundamentally fascist in nature is engaging in one form of motivated reasoning or another, but I still think it’s important to remember that this particular fascist movement remains firmly grounded in American historical, ideological, and cultural experiences at its very core. While I maintain that it is in no way inappropriate to compare the Trump regime to Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany when the Trump administration is very clearly emulating strategy and tactics from the rise of European fascism during the interwar period, the ominous reality is that Downmarket Mussolini and his minions also have a plethora of other fascist study guides to borrow from, featuring rhetoric, legal arguments, and repression techniques already tested at home, and carved by fear, repression, and violence into the collective memory of American society. Indeed, almost every aspect of the Klepto Kaiser’s fascist agenda, and the methods by which the regime is attempting to conduct it, has an administrative precedent in US political history, although that precedent will almost always come from the most reactionary and objectively shameful activities our government has ever engaged in. Frankly, you don’t have to take my word for it on this one: Trump regime minions on your television and Justice Department lawyers in court openly admit as much on the regular.
As a result, there can be no doubt that Trump minions like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi are cribbing from America’s white supremacist, anti-labor, anti-civil rights history, with a particular focus on the Second Red Scare, the Nixon administration’s war on Civil Rights activists and student protestors, and the Bush administration’s War on Terror. This synthesis of reaction, oppression, and executive overreach has allowed the Trump regime to create what many identify as a “new form of McCarthyism”, empowered by the legalist logic and nativist, white supremacist sentiments underpinning America’s “counterterrorism” apparatus, mass surveillance systems, and the national security state. By freely applying the broad and ultimately legally-nebulous “terrorist” label to protestors, student activists, and undocumented migrants, this administration has already sought to render the judiciary and even the entire US Constitution, irrelevant.
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and a fascist Trump regime seeking to enshrine an executive branch dictatorship is fully aware that civil society will eventually understand what they’re doing, and fight back. To prevent this they need a skeleton key to enable the active suppression and criminalization of dissidents, opposition groups, and civil rights activists that the fascist right broadly classifies as “the radical left.” Unfortunately, if recent work by researchers and journalists to connect the dots between policy planning and repressive state action in the second Trump era is any indication, the regime has already found that key in legally conflating opposing a genocide with supporting Hamas, and is doing so by design in yet another fascist scheme brought to you by the architects of Project 2025. If the opening salvos of Trump’s war on American civil society can be describes as a “new McCarthyism” then I think it’s fair to say that the Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” can be best understood as the Trump regime’s “new COINTELPRO.”
For more details, let’s take a look at this May 23rd, 2025 article by Schuyler Mitchell writing for Truthout:
Project Esther Is a McCarthy-Era Blueprint for Crushing the American Left
“Mainstream coverage of Project Esther has largely framed the document as an effort to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. It’s important to emphasize, however, that the threat Project Esther poses to the left more broadly is not a byproduct — it’s part of the plan’s core design. The text lays bare the McCarthyist nature of this political moment and underscores the urgent need for the left to mount a multipronged, coalitional defense.
At the center of Project Esther’s crosshairs are the people and organizations it dubs the “Hamas Support Network,” or HSN, though there’s no evidence that the entities it’s targeting actually support Hamas, or that they are even organized in any sort of a network. The playbook proposes a slew of recommendations for dismantling this fictional network, including deporting international students, purging pro-Palestine faculty from educational institutions, defunding organizations, increasing criminalization and promoting social ostracization of people that speak out in support of Palestinian rights. “Within the United States, the HSN receives the indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,” Project Esther claims.”
It goes without saying that nobody actually inside the Trump administration is likely to admit that they’ve downloaded the rhetoric, legal arguments, and operational techniques from Project Esther for use against anti-genocide protestors and the regime’s political enemies more broadly, but any fair-minded study of how the regime has approached suppressing its ideological opponents across a very wide spectrum of American society makes it abundantly clear that they have. Folks, after four months of watching the Trump regime pretend we’re at war with a gang, try to seize control of Ivy League Universities to fight a bespoke Zionist definition of “antisemitism,” and argue that opposing a genocide is “materially supporting terrorism,” I think we’re past the point of presuming that these fascists aren’t serious about the plans they wrote down and are clearly enacting now that Trump is president. Project Esther is the logical extension of every argument ghouls like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Seb Gorka have been making on your television for weeks. Of course the Trump regime has adopted it wholeheartedly.
This then brings us to the ominous reality so very few observers in the media seem to be grasping, namely that targeting the anti-genocide, pro-Palestine movement is merely the tip of the fascist spear in the Trump regime’s war on dissent and political opposition. The rhetoric, suppression techniques, and legal arguments that are being deployed against foreign anti-genocide student protestors as we speak are easy to replicate while targeting more or less the entire oppositional left in America, including milquetoast NGOs, aid groups, and likely even “liberal” political organizations like the Democratic Party. The broad and extremely vague nature of our terrorism laws leaves room for the Trump regime to label almost anyone a member of a terrorist organization, and define material support for that organization in any way they please. The authors of Project Esther are very clear that they consider opposition to capitalism, or the American state as embodied by the Trump administration, to be valid targets for those designations. If anti-genocide protest is “materially supporting Hamas,” then funding migrant support work is probably “materially supporting narco-terrorist gangs,” and speaking out against the US government can be “materially supporting” any group of “bad guys” around the globe that do the same. The possibilities for targeted, legalized repression are quite literally endless.
By conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Americanism, or opposition to state actions as materially supporting terrorists the United States defines as enemies, these nazis intend to use Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) investigations and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) prosecutions to dismantle every aspect of organized resistance to Trump’s fascist agenda under the guise of fighting “terrorism,” and they are being quite clear that they consider opposition to capitalism and the American state to be fair game under that rubric. The situation becomes even more ominous when you realize how hard the regime and the broader fascist Republican Party have already worked to poison the discourse and pave the way to enact Project Esther, and expand its principles to target all political opposition to the fascist agenda. This is a government that has already defined anti-genocide protestors, asylum seekers, and Tesla vandals as “terrorists.” Trump has previously labelled sanctuary cities as criminal, Democrat-controlled cities as “anarchist districts,” and anarchists themselves as terrorists. In Republican-controlled Georgia, RICO charges have already been used to target forest defenders, and the Kelpto Kaiser himself tried to employ the Insurrection Act during the 2020 nationwide George Floyd protests. Trump’s Justice Department is currently investigating Act Blue, the GOP is threatening “radical left wing” judges, and ICE Gestapo goons are arresting Democratic Party congressional representatives. Regardless of whether or not Trump and his minions are willing to cop to it, I think it’s safe to say Project Esther is already here.
In light of all that, what makes anyone think there is a bottom here at all? If crafting a new McCarthyism and enacting his own version of COINTELPRO gives Donald Trump the fascist dictatorship he’s clearly trying to forge, why would anyone assume that isn’t precisely the plan going forward, especially given that the fascist GOP as a whole appears to be actively enacting that plan already? This isn’t going to stop with college students, anti-genocide protestors, or anti-state dissidents, and the liberal establishment would do well to remember that the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism kicked off a massive purge of primarily Democrat “communist sympathizers” in American political and public life. The ghosts of authoritarian American anticommunism, antiterrorism, and our pre-existing police state have crafted the perfect weapon for Trump to destroy his opposition, and only a fool would bet he doesn’t intend to use it.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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