Becoming “Ungovernable”

The Status Kuo

06/17/2026

Conduct that would be entirely unremarkable in any other civic context—coordinating volunteers, raising money, holding meetings and traveling to share information—has been reframed as overt acts of a criminal conspiracy, all because the object was to resist federal immigration enforcement.

The Trump administration has been explicit about its intent. An executive order signed by Trump titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” directed the Justice Department to treat left-wing activism as an organized terrorist conspiracy. It declared that political violence “does not emerge organically” but is instead “a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns.”

The label of “conspiracy” is now being attached to any left-leaning group engaged in direct action. The Brennan Center for Justice, analyzing NSPM-7 shortly after its release, concluded that the directive was “ungrounded in fact and law” and that acting on it would threaten “any person or group holding any one of a broad array of disfavored views with investigation and prosecution.” The 15 Minnesotans charged Tuesday are the latest proof of concept, meant to chill organizing against the federal government across the country.

Minnesota’s labor movement built one of the most robust and celebrated civic responses to a federal enforcement action in recent memory. It developed food distribution networks, stood up a rapid response system, and held a general strike that shut down a major American city for a day in negative-30-degree windchill. That is a real threat to the White House’s authoritarian goals and, seen in that light, the charges, while deplorable, are unsurprising.

Whether the charges survive judicial scrutiny is a separate question. Given the record of the prior prosecutions, there is ample reason for skepticism and a clear need for close scrutiny.

Survival in court may not be the White House’s primary objective. The legal process itself, as these defendants and the Broadview Six before them have learned, is the punishment. Arrests, bail conditions, legal fees and public branding as “antifa”—all of it accrues before a single day of trial, and all of it is meant to deter others from attempting the same resistance.

But there is a high cost to the White House, too. By filing these charges and reopening the wound of Minneapolis, the Justice Department is reminding Americans of the brutality and fascism of this regime at a time when Trump’s popularity is at a nadir. And for a party that has long railed against censorship and thought policing, there is the strong stench of hypocrisy.