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Labor Notes recently released a guide to help organize for the much-anticipated May Day general strike in…2028. It’s useful information, but as the countdown clock on the site shows, still 937 days away. At the rate the Trump administration is moving, there might not be much left of unions by the scheduled date.
The criminally undereported National Security Presidential Memorandum recently issued by Trump looks to crackdown on a whole range of activities, including actions by workers. We’ve mentioned how the administration’s ICE machine is one of workforce engineering: people out and exploitable workers in.
The administration is also increasingly threatening to use conspiracy law to go after those in opposition to authoritarian capitalism in the US or Israel. Since the assasination of Charlie Kirk, Trump asked the Attorney General to investigate individuals who protested him at dinner, instructing her to “look into that in terms of RICO.” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche backed him up, saying such protestors are “part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States,” which justifies Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) investigations.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has also vowed to “dismantle and take on the radical left” through RICO and conspiracy charges.
It might be tempting to dismiss as more of Trump’s bloviating, but the war on the home front seems like one of the few areas where the administration is moving with unified purpose and, unlike the empire’s targets abroad, a foe against which they stand a chance. For all Trump’s faults he knows weakness, and understands all our crumbling institutions can be bought or bullied. RICO is a useful tool against any holdouts, ands there are recent examples of it being weilded successfully.
Perhaps the biggest was the RICO charges against Stop Cop City activists in Atlanta (this was a state case that predated Trump 2.0). The charges against the protestors were recently dismissed on jurisdictional grounds—but not before destroying many of their lives.
Trump, despite also being targeted by Georgia’s anti-racketerring law, is eager to use it against others. In Los Angeles an individual was charged with conspiracy for providing face shields to ICE protestors, and pro-Palestinian protesters, animal activists, and anti-fascist counter-protesters have also faced such charges.
A Powerful Weapon
Steffen Seitz, a litigation fellow with the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project at Denver University’s Sturm College of Law and the author of Conspiracy and Social Movements, offers a reminder of why the vagueness of RICO is such a salient threat to social movements:
Though conspiracy typically requires an agreement to commit a crime and the specific intent to join the agreement and further its unlawful purpose, neither requirement provides meaningful protection against prosecutorial overreach in social movement cases. In fact, both often facilitate guilt by association. To prove a criminal agreement, prosecutors need only offer circumstantial evidence of a tacit mutual understanding, which means that the mere appearance of concerted action is often enough. Every message, social media interaction, and in-person meeting between individuals becomes circumstantial evidence of conspiracy. Solidarity is recast as criminality. Indeed, the deputy director of ICE said as much in reference to dragnet approaches to anti-ICE protesters: “I think we all know that criminals tend to hang out with criminals… And so when we start to build a case, we’re going to be going after everyone that’s around them. Because these criminals tend to hang out with like-minded people who also happen to be criminals.”
Conspiracy’s intent requirement proves equally problematic in social movement cases. Generally, activists do share some intent: a mutual opposition to genocide, the exploitation of animals, or racist policing. Typically in social movement prosecutions, prosecutors foreground and emphasize this shared political purpose as circumstantial evidence of nefarious intent. For example, even though the RICO indictment of Stop Cop City activists acknowledged that “Defend the Atlanta Forest does not recruit from a single location, nor do all Defend the Atlanta Forest members have a history of working together as a group in a single location,” nevertheless, “the group shares a unified opposition to the construction of the Atlanta Police Department Training Facility.” In other words, the indictment frankly admits that what justifies the conspiracy charges—what makes these activists coconspirators—is their shared political goal. In fact, one way to read Trump’s recent order designating “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization” is as an attempt to push law enforcement into targeting otherwise disconnected political actors through conspiracy, based merely on shared political goals.
Additionally, social movements have long been vulnerable to threats of conspiracy, as demonstrated by the prosecutions of labor organizers, Communists during the Cold War, and anti-Vietnam War dissidents. One could argue that contemporary social movements are, for a number of reasons, more fragile than their historical counterparts.
The case against the 61 individuals charged in the Cop City case—whatever one may think about their target and tactics—offers a useful preview of what’s likely coming. While those charged might never be convicted, they are facing up to 20 years behind bars for conspiracy on domestic terrorism. Whether they actually serve any time, the RICO case has already served its purpose.
Cop City opened in May. The conspiracy charges and the killing of one activist successfully suppressed opposition. And it provided a useful warning to others who would challenge the power of the state.
It also tramples all over the First Amendment. As the ACLU notes:
It paints the provision of mutual aid, the advocacy of collectivism, and even the publishing of zines as hallmarks of a criminal enterprise. In doing so, it flies in the face of First Amendment protections for speech, assembly, and association…the indictment haphazardly sweeps many forms of opposition to Cop City, including speech, peaceful protest activities, and minor acts of civil disobedience, into felony violations of Georgia’s anti-racketeering law.
This is what the administration is turning to for those trying to stop US-Israel genocide, anyone opposing masked police snatching people off the streets and out of their homes without warrants, and even individuals who have the temerity to use their First Amendment rights in support of that right. It looks increasingly likely that workers who would dare organize and strike for better pay and working conditions are about to be thrown in the same bucket.
Ken Klippenstein’s major September 27 piece details how Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” will do so:
[It] directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.”
NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”
Terrorists and Conspiracies (Almost) Everywhere
Like the RICO law used against protestors, Trump’s directive is incredibly vague. The directive lists “anti-Christian,” “anti-American,” and “anti-capitalism” opinions among the indicia of terrorism. There are others, which are broad enough so that just about anyone could be labeled anti-American. (One exception to this crackdown on alleged criminal conspiracies is, of course, the prosecution of corporate criminals, which fell to record lows under Biden and don’t look like they’re going to rebound under Trump).
This will prove especially challenging for any groups looking to potentially block weapons shipments to a country committing genocide, for example, as has recently happened in countries like Italy. Those efforts there are being led by unions.
But Trump’s NSPM-7 will make any organized labor action nearly impossible. As we’ve pointed out here at NC, the administration’s actions to this point on immigration can largely be viewed as an effort to engineer a more exploitable and decidedly disorganized workforce. The crackdown on First Amendment-protected speech, while largely wielded against anti-Zionists, also affects labor. This national security goes a step further.
If you’re going to label “anti-capitalism” as terrorism, that could very well mean unions are finished as any worker action will be deemed a threat to the country, smeared as un-American, and as “antifa”-infiltrated terrorism.
It should be noted that ICE is already targeting unauthorized or refugee workers (authorized) who are unionized or organizing. They’re also going after American activists who simply track immigration raids or try to unmask the individuals behind the ICE black masks.
Will they be turned on anti-capitalist American workers next? Let’s take the example of striking Boeing workers in St. Louis. They produce missiles and fighter jets for the US military, along with the Israel Defense Forces, and are preparing production of the next generation F-47. So it would seem they perform a job that fits with the administration’s definition of American values.
The 3,200 workers are on strike for better pay, as well as a shorter path to the top rate. Boeing and the national uniparty didn’t want any disruption to the production of weapons, but also didn’t want to pay the workers. So scabs are being hired to replace them. This was almost certainly done with the backing of both political parties and is a direct challenge to organized labor in a spot it could really cause pain for the empire’s ruling class. The unions have not risen to the moment.
If we imagine for a second that they did, and say, occupy other weapons factories and shut them down, thereby causing even worse shortages in the “arsenal of democracy.” what would happen then?
Would they be slapped with RICO charges for un-American terrorist activity? NSPM-7 defines domestic terrorism priorities to include “civil unrest,” which means the FBI will almost certainly turn its powers to conduct “enterprise” investigations into terrorism or racketeering on those who would challenge power.
And with the administration justifying the wanton slaughter of alleged drug traffickers abroad by claiming links to “designated terrorist organizations” and the increasing use of the terrorism label at home, we’re offered a preview the next decades of the never-ending “war terror.”
Elite Feuds and the Rest of Us
Noticeably absent from the Labor Day speeches by union leadership and Democrat-aligned orgfanization was any mention of the striking workers in St. Louis or the effort to deal a decisive blow to labor through the guest worker programs.
And as Klippenstein noted in his follow-up to the NSPM-7 piece, Congress is simply pretending the directive didn’t happen:
Law firms like Arnold & Porter, WilmerHale, Caplin & Drysdale, Akin Gump, and Elias Law Group swiftly responded to NSPM-7 by issuing guidances explaining the implications for non-profits and other organizations that are among their clientele.
To date though, almost no members of Congress have commented on NSPM-7. I reached out to the following congressional leaders for a statement, but received nothing:
Sen. Chuck Schumer (Minority Leader)
Sen. Mark Warner (Senate Intelligence, ranking member)
Sen. Gary Peters (Senate Homeland, ranking member)
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (Minority Leader)
Rep. Jim Himes (House Intelligence, ranking member)
Rep. Jamie Raskin (House Judiciary, ranking member)
This is wholly unsurprising, as Trump’s national security memorandum will forward the bipartisan priotiies for a uniparty that is anti-worker, pro-Silicon Valley and Wall Street, Zionist and corrupt.
We do see some pushback from the putative opposition in the US in defense of the likes of James Comey, George Soros, Jimmy Kimmel and the whole liberal elite. It’s here the opposition believes it can score political points defending “norms” and freedom of speech while in reality caring only about the safety of their Blue country club.
One former Democrat administration official, Samantha Power, recently piped up…in support of Trump tariffs against India! That was a useful reminder that the back-and-forth politicking we see in the mainstream media is mostly an inter-elite squabble where their tools of culture war and blob regime change operations have now infested their palatial estates. Usually used as tools to divide the working class and detonate countries around the world, they have now come home to roost.
On the exterior we’re stuck with the usual a fight over the empire’s marketing, one in which the woke imperium has quickly retreated since they were never truly committed to the bit. Overlapping with that we see Trump going after those in the Blob who largely succeeded in sabotaging his first term with color revolution tactics at home.
And the elite “resistance” doesn’t much care about freedom of speech for protestors, organizing rights for workers, or any of the victims in the empire’s killing fields abroad.
Anyone who cares about stuff like that is still the enemy no matter which marketing department is running Washington, and they could soon be in the clink targeted for “anti-American” activities.
Union leadership, which only covers about nine percent of US workers, remains largely focused on a May Day 2028 general strike. That sounds like a noble goal, but the problem is that NSPM-7 throws a wrench in those plans with it’s directive to disrupt individuals and groups “before they result in violent political acts.”
If the administration continues to expand guest worker programs and makes good on anti-capitalism pre-crime threats, who will be left in organized labor to go on strike in 2028?
