Mike Pompeo’s success at gaining a place within Trump’s new inner circle is a highly ominous development. A development that ought to make everyone within dissident politics redouble our operational security efforts, and make contingency plans for scenarios of aggressive state violence. This great need for concern is only tangentially related to Trump, who’s not the core reason why these threats have appeared; the threat comes from the deep state, which was going to advance Pompeo’s dangerous agenda regardless of how the election went. Pompeo’s re-entry into the politics of the executive branch, though, forewarns which kinds of maneuvers our government is going to carry out next.
We can get a sense of what Pompeo and his deep state partners intend to do from how he’s talked and acted over the years. In 2016, Pompeo said about Edward Snowden that “I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence.” In 2017, he said that the CIA was going to become “a much more vicious agency.” That same year, he discussed kidnapping and murdering Julian Assange. The consistent theme was an eagerness for violence, in the same category as when Hillary Clinton suggested assassinating Assange with a drone or laughed about the vicious murder of Gaddafi. And the logical conclusion of these ideas is to take the foreign wars home, treating Americans the same way the United States treats its targets abroad.
Pompeo’s vision for total bloody warfare against dissent wasn’t fully realized during his time as CIA director and Secretary of State, but it did manifest in certain ways. The first Trump administration worked to ensure that Assange remained within inhumane conditions; it appointed the torturer Gina Haspel as CIA director when Pompeo left the position; it brought about the violent arrest of Gerry Condon, the anti-imperialist who was trying to get food into the besieged Venezuelan embassy in 2019. The only reason why the war on the USA’s people didn’t fully come into being was because the empire’s collapse wasn’t yet at a stage which allowed for this. The imperial state didn’t feel sufficiently desperate, and hadn’t created enough precedents for a purge against its domestic enemies. We are much closer to that point now. The wing of our ruling class that aligns with Hillary Clinton just tried to install its preferred candidate Kamala Harris, and then needed needed to abandon that plan. It had a second plan ready, though: to send Pompeo into the second Trump White House, and use him as a tool for advancing the counterinsurgency.
“We are at the point Edward Snowden described as ‘turnkey tyranny,’” wrote Ray McGovern in response to the bloody police action at the Venezuelan embassy. “Until now it has been an almost imperceptibly gradual process, like the proverbial frog in boiling water. Of course, this has happened before.” McGovern talked about how even prior to 9/11, “the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Not to mention the U.S. Constitution…when this illegal surveillance program began, it had nothing to do with terrorism, an issue that did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11…So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program’ was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us.”
This is the kind of tactic we can expect our government to use during the next stage: quietly expand the attacks against the USA’s people, letting the empire start new wars which precipitate larger assaults on liberty. When Pompeo went on stage at a Trump rally within the last hours before the election, he was there on a mission to make sure that this internal war would be carried out.
For the last four years, the Biden administration has been advancing its own version of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program.” Called “Countering Domestic Terrorism,” its supposed purpose is to stop white supremacist violence, but its real target is anti-imperialists. In the last year, Palestine supporters have become the primary group which CDT seeks retribution against, and Pompeo’s assignment is to use “turnkey tyranny” for suppressing anti-Zionist speech. He’ll take full advantage of the tools that the previous unelected officials have created, bringing us towards the crackdown’s end goal: to bypass the courts, and wantonly eliminate whoever the state sees as a threat.
The U.S. government has been assassinating its own people for many generations; during the civil rights movement, it took the lives of numerous targeted Americans, from MLK to Fred Hampton. Since the War on Terror began, this practice has been brought back in an updated form; under Obama, the U.S. used a drone to extrajudicially execute the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, along with his sixteen-year-old son. (Under Trump, Awlaki’s eight-year-old daughter was then murdered in the same way). The Pompeo wing wants to normalize this kind of brutality within the United States, making it so that the state can assassinate any American it wants wherever it wants. And there is precedent for our government bombing U.S. neighborhoods, as Philadelphia’s police department did in 1985 to combat a Black liberation group. All these ultraviolent deep state actors need is a new false flag, one that has enough narrative power to create the conditions for a major offensive maneuver. And the deep state has settled on a strategy for bringing this next big operation into being.
This strategy is a new one; it replaced the old plan of installing Harris, and then instigating right-wing violence. Because the Democratic Party had become too politically weak, with a great amount of Arab voters having abandoned it over the Gaza genocide, the election managers pivoted to backing Trump. Just prior to the election, it got revealed that Trump liked to play games of sexual assault with Jeffrey Epstein, who confirmed in a 2017 interview that Trump was a close friend of his. Yet the legacy media outlets didn’t aggressively emphasize the story, like one may have expected them to. The deep state’s officials decided to use Epstein as a means for controlling Trump through blackmail, rather than as a means for making him lose. They let Trump win by a large margin, and without any immediate violent blowback; that will come later.
The feds plan to orchestrate a leftist version of January 6, mobilizing “antifa” anarchists to commit terrorist acts. The narrative managers will use this to demonize Palestine supporters, justifying the next crackdowns. Washington will carry out a provocation against China, instigate a new big war, and label the pro-Palestine movement as a Chinese plot. The imperialists won’t be able to defeat China, any more than they’ll be able to stop Zionism from collapsing. But they still have the ability to imprison, or even exterminate, a massive amount of their political enemies within the core. We must shift our focus towards making sure our organizations can keep operating amid these next attacks. Trump’s failures will bring many in the MAGA base to disillusionment, and the Democratic Party’s collapse has already put us in a better place. But we’ll only be able to take advantage of these things if we can avoid being eliminated, both as a movement and in a physical sense.
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