"We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations," said Joe Kent. "We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists."

Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who is Donald Trump’s pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, completed 11 combat deployments during the War on Terror. The combat left scars. In 2019, an ISIS suicide bomber killed his wife, a Navy cryptologist and linguist, in Syria. By the time he returned home, his worldview had shifted: Kent came to believe, as I wrote in a 2022 profile, that his early tours in Iraq gave him a “special gift of clarity.” He understood how quickly a society could come undone.

After this, Kent went from apolitical to active. The Black Lives Matter and antifa protests in Portland during the summer of 2020 triggered fears for him that the United States could similarly implode. Everything, he felt, was crumbling. He and his two young boys quickly left the city for rural Washington.

“We need to treat antifa and BLM like terrorist organizations. We need to use the tools of the federal government, the FBI, the US Marshals—go after them like organized criminals and terrorists,” Kent said in a 2021 conversation with the podcaster Tim Pool about the group’s leaders. “So, when we start arresting these guys and charging them with federal terrorism charges, that’s going to take away a lot of the incentive to go out and riot.”

  • andrew_bidlawEnglish
    8•5 hours ago

    They look jealously at Russia that named LGBT an extremist org, and the overreach in law coupled with targeted execution you mention is very characteristical of the state top figureheads of the right like to visit and promote. In a form of a proverb it supposedly dates back to 19th century (russian), although it’s not clear who really wrote that and when. What is known though is that today it’s what every henchperson whishes as it favors everyone loyal to it, guarantees kids and friends getting into cozy positions and denies interest of (pocketed) media and services as long as you toy the line.

    • Flying Squid
      5•4 hours ago

      And they don’t even have to do that here. They can just declare every queer person to be a member of antifa. Because there is literally no definition of who is a member of antifa since it is not an organization.

      • andrew_bidlawEnglish
        3•4 hours ago

        There’s a ritual of finding an antifa with a gas chamber. If the person survives the gas chamber, they are an antifa and should be killed, and if they are not, they are just a casualty of the culture war antifas waged on the world as we know it.

        • Flying Squid
          3•4 hours ago

          This seems complicated. Can’t we just go back to what they did in the old days- seeing if they’re not guilty of being antifa if you drown them and they don’t die?

          • andrew_bidlawEnglish
            4•4 hours ago

            Modern problems and modern solutions. But to be trully modern, it would need to be a trap in a cask of a cybertruck with microplastics air dispenser nearby that gives you achivements at every 5% percent of your body becoming a fiberflesh matter. Tasteless, weightless particles flowing to choke every bloodflow and shut down every organ, all under cheap gaming RGB lighting flickering ignogant of your high and lows, indifferent to you struggle to breath in one time more.