The conviction of an anarchist offers a grim foreshadowing of Trump’s war on the “left.”
by By the standards of hard-left San Francisco Bay Area crime, Casey Goonan’s crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV was burned by an incendiary device on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. A bush caught fire after Gunnan unsuccessfully attempted to break through the office’s glass window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in downtown Oakland.
But thanks to a series of statements in which Goonan claimed to have carried out the summer 2024 attacks in solidarity with Hamas and the anarchist beliefs of East Bay residents, federal prosecutors alleged that Goonan intended to “promote” terrorism, an additional felony for using an incendiary device. Goonan’s original charges did not specifically contain terrorism charges. In late September, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, who was called a “domestic terrorist” at trial, to 19 1/2 years in prison and 15 years of probation. Prosecutors also asked that he be sent to a prison facility that includes communications management units, a highly restricted assignment for inmates the government says are “extremists” with crimes or terrorism-related affiliations.
Although the Gunnan case began in the Biden administration, it offers a glimpse of the approach the Justice Department may take in President Donald Trump’s upcoming attack on the “left,” which was formalized in late September in National Security Presidential Memoranda (NSPM-7). as “potential indicators of terrorism”.
In addition to Goonan’s alleged admiration for Hamas — a terrorist organization since 1997 — and co-founding True Leap, a small anarchist publisher, the 35-year-old African-American studies doctor’s biography includes another feature that has been targeted by the Trump administration and its allies: Goonan’s transgender people. While NPSM-7 cites “extremist migration, race, and gender” as indicators of “this pattern of violent and terrorist tendencies,” the Heritage Foundation has attempted to link gender identity to mass shootings and is calling on the FBI to create a new and absurd domestic terrorism classification called “Transgendered Ideology, VETIOLTI-InTient.” slow
Meanwhile, the executive order directs the post-9/11 U.S. security government’s sprawling counterterrorism apparatus to shift away from neo-Nazis, Pride Boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and other far-right actors who have been largely responsible for much of the political violence of the past few decades, and to target ICE, government opponents, and major dissidents. Along with potentially violent actors, NSPM-7 directs federal law enforcement to investigate nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations that fund organizations that support amorphous ideologies, from “advocating the overthrow of the United States government” to expressing “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views of family, religion, religion, and morality.”
Mike German, a retired FBI agent who spent years infiltrating the top violent white supremacist groups and left the bureau in response to the shift in terrorism strategy after 9/11, says: “NSPM-7 is the natural culmination of ‘radicalization theory’ as the basis of America’s approach to counterterrorism.” In his 2019 book, German explored the path of radicalization theory. Disrupt, discredit, and divide: How the new FBI is harming democracy.
