How Trump team’s own 'stupidity' sabotages key administration goal: experts

An author of multiple books documenting the lengths that the United States government has gone to suppress leftist political movements throughout its history drew parallels with the current administration’s war on the left, according to a report in Salon. And he argued the current administration's anti-left rhetoric is all "bluff."

Aaron Leonard, who wrote "Menace of Our Time: The Long War Against American Communism” and “Heavy Radicals: The FBI’s Secret War on American Maoists," said "the MAGA shock troops have set their sights on the political opposition."

"Elise Stefanik, the MAGA congresswoman from New York, has called New York City’s mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a ‘raging antisemitic communist,’” Leonard said.

“The FBI in the 1960s was clipping any files about anti-semitism in the Soviet Union and trying to popularize that in the U.S. because the [Communist Party USA] had a fairly large cohort of Jewish Americans," he noted.

Conor Gallagher, who worked with Leonard on multiple projects, said that current efforts at repression lack the “subtlety and sophistication” of historic counterintelligence efforts such as those by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

"You see all these ICE agents walking around with masks, the whole point is the idea of being able to hide their identity. But for Hoover, the whole point is that you didn’t even know there were the people doing these sorts of things. The idea is that all this was done behind closed doors,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher also noted similarities between historical precedent in which the government violates the law in its actions and, in turn, their targets break the law in response. "This then becomes grounds for government action against the targets," he said.

“You see this a lot, especially people who were mourning and coming to the defense of [MAGA influencer Charlie] Kirk after his assassination. So many people are talking about what is right and moral, and how you don’t talk about people like this, and it’s wrong to say these things. And these are people who were doing the exact same thing a week before. I think we could point out that being hypocritical, but I’m not even sure they realize their hypocrisy,” Gallagher said.

It is important to note, Gallagher said, that most of the country disapproves of governmental crackdown on dissenters.

“There is a basis to push back and defeat this, because it’s such a large swath of population, it’s so unpopular. If you actually think about the majority of the country doesn’t want what the government is doing,” he said.

Gallagher said that in an authoritarian government people "should not comply with the administration’s edicts and efforts."

Political organizer Scott Crow agrees. “It is a 100 percent bluff. It just creates another bogeyman for them to fire up their base. Because really, when Stephen Miller says that s—— he’s talking to a very limited amount of people in the United States. He’s not talking to the majority of people in the United States,” he said.

“They don’t have the resources, time, money and people to do this stuff and so, and I’m even gonna go out on a limb and say that even now, because of DOGE and the stupidity that’s the federal government right now, that they even have less resources,” Crow added.

Crow said to ignore the noise. “Do the thing. Whatever people are doing, don’t stop doing it. Just resist,” he said. “That’s what I would say. Don’t believe the hype."