By Bennett T
The United States intends to target socialists for political persecution.
It will investigate them inappropriately, it will charge them spuriously, it will revoke their legal protections, and it will remove them from the United States.
The administration has already sent surveys to researchers and organizations overseas who receive federal funding, and this questionnaire includes questions that note, “Taxpayer dollars must not fund dependency, socialism, corrupt regimes that oppose free enterprise, or intervene in internal matters of another sovereign nation.”
The government has already gone further than that. Ed Martin, the interim attorney general for Washington, DC, has threatened to use the power of his office to target critics of Elon Musk, DOGE, and Tesla.
Elsewhere, Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has been detained without due process, apparently for his role in pro-Palestine protests.
Rumeysa Öztürk was detained without due process for writing a pro-Palestine op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper while she was in the United States on a student visa.
Marco Rubio has revoked hundreds of student visas and has bragged that he will continue to revoke visas of those “whose presence…ha[s] potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for our country.”
Moreover, the United States government has deported individuals, in explicit violation of court orders and without appropriate due process, to a mega-prison operated by the authoritarian regime of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.
Taken as a whole, this demonstrates that the federal government is willing to go far beyond its legal limits in targeting those who express opinions contrary to the administration, and the inevitable endpoint will be the federal government embracing McCarthyism 2.0 with a new focus on removing people from United States soil and detaining them internationally.
However, there is no salvation in division; there is only survival in solidarity.
Victory comes not from denial in the face of the forces arrayed against us; victory comes when the workers of the world cast off their chains.
Now more than ever, it is important to join in supporting and defending your community.