DHS has targeted activists since its inception.

The first time my organizing ended up in DHS “terrorism research” dossiers, Obama was president.

What's new here is the connection between this DHS Big Brotherism & presidential threats to invade Dem cities right before elections. https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1290442648411672577

As I have been shouting pretty much daily from the rooftops, Barr and Trump are actively seeking a pretext to launch Portland-style invasion of opposition stronghold cities.

They know classifying antifascist protesters as terrorists is their best bet. https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1288491555024703488

As I have said repeatedly, the big thing getting in their way is the fact that to legally classify antifascists and BLM as terrorists, Trump and Barr and the GOP would have to make it legally possible to classify domestic groups as terrorist organizations.

The problem for Trump and Barr is that many far right groups, especially militias, actually *are* literal terrorist organizations that do things like bomb buildings and shoot up churches and plot the murders of electeds.

The GOP has fought long and hard to keep domestic groups exempted from the Patriot Act and other laws that effectively strip anyone labelled a "terrorist" of their Constitutional rights and protections, because they don't want to piss off their militia-friendly base.

MAGA would absolutely revolt if Barr opened the door to Democrats taking that domestic terror classification and using it to push the feds to run with it against militias.

The FBI in particular has been begging to crack down on militias for years, believe it or not.

So Trump and Barr can't just go "okay we're going to use legal means to strip Antifa of their rights as terrorists."

Not as long as Antifa is considered domestic.

That's why so much of Barr's rhetoric around U.S. Antifa even before this story broke has involved attempts to link it materially to other antifascist movements abroad.

If Barr can make the legal case that U.S. Antifa is actually a subchapter of a foreign terrorist organization, he can get his legal Antifa terror designation without having to worry about opening the window for militias getting classified legally as terrorists.

This gambit couldn't be more obvious.

Just look at the most prominent individual named in the dossier so far: Brace Belden. https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1290384673789673472

Brace is very much *not* Antifa.

He's actually closely tied to red-brown alliance "what if we could be Nazis and Communists at the same time!" third positionists like the Red Scare podcast hosts.

He's done SS flag photoshoots with one of them, ffs.

As I said before, DHS monitoring activists is nothing new.

If this was just a report on Brace from after he came home from Syria, it would be reasonable to say, "well, that's DHS, that's their deal."

Listen, Brace is an actually terrible person who does SS flag photoshoots, advocates for the murder of Jews, accuses his critics of being pedophile Epstein plants, and literally bragged about committing war crimes in Syria to Rolling Stone.

He is not a hero for the left.

None of this is news, though.

Like, at all.

That Rolling Stone article where Brace poses with guns, brags about urinating on piles of corpses and skulls, and is like "oopsie, did a war crime, my b"?

It's from February 2017.

If DHS or any branch of the feds actually gave a shit about any of this or saw this asshole's war tourism cosplay for their allies as an some sort of problem, they literally had him in print confessing to war crimes.

They didn't act because they didn't see it as a problem.

They had zero interest in any of that shit because they understood that it had literally no impact on US security, and literally nothing to do with Antifa or terrorism.

There are many reasons it was immoral and ugly behavior, but "terrorism" it wasn't.

It wasn't until after Trump realized he could use BLM protest and Antifa as an excuse to illegally invade Portland and announce plans to do the same in other Democratic-majority cities that they decided Brace of all people was an Antifa terrorist.

It wasn't until three months straight of plunging approval ratings that Trump's administration suddenly decided that Brace's war tourism was a problem and also Antifa.