New Orleans        A friend and comrade sent me a message over the holidays.  There was an attachment, but I had my mind on other things, so didn’t open it until I was back home.  I’m glad I waited.  It was some scary-ass stuff, basically about how the right is gearing up to come after folks on the nonprofit and progressive side of the street.  Worse, it’s not even from the crazy-as-a-loon wingers, but the conservatives that have access to the coming administration in various forms.  None of this is to say that they will get away with this.  Nor that we should change one iota of our work and practice.  Still, the old scout motto of “be prepared,” is never worth forgetting.

There was a summary, which I’ll share with y’all in digest form.  Much of it is based on several sources like the Heritage Foundation and their people-get-ready-work for the new administration, as well the Capital Research Group.  The warnings also draw on what we have seen over the last year in the way protestors and demands for peace in the Gaza war have been targeted, when they express any support for the Palestinian people and their dire circumstances.

It’s worth understanding that they are shot gunning very broad targets, like virtually all of the infrastructure supporting nonprofits, similar to what we have seen by governments in India and Russia.  House bills 6408 and 9495 have been called “nonprofit killer bills,” because they propose allowing the Treasury secretary to unilaterally revoke the 501c3 tax-exempt status for nonprofits without due process and under vague criteria.  Other recommendations go after environmental groups, Black Lives Matter movements and legal aid organizations like the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The trick is basically as simple as name-calling by alleging that groups are, or are supporting, domestic or other terrorism.  Capital Research unhelpfully recommends revoking the tax status of 159 liberal and left groups as “pro-terrorism,” whatever that means?  These are basically smear and surveillance campaigns directed at groups that conservatives oppose.  Having experienced how the right used Congress to try to broadly block almost 200 organizations as being somehow part of ACORN, and therefore without any hearing or investigation prevented, technically, from any federal funding for the last more than fifteen years, I wouldn’t be too quick to claim that they couldn’t pull this off.  Claiming a constitutional bar against such “bills of attainder” was not effective then, and are unlikely to be any more effective now, given the current judicial system.

Of course, they don’t hesitate to use RICO laws, claiming that organized protests are a form of racketeering similar to drug dealers or the Mafia.  Nor do the ALEC-type operations on the state level hesitate to label environmental, tribal, and community protests against infrastructure developments from power plants to pipelines to whatever as somehow terrorism in order to prevent freedom of speech and assembly.  Outrageous fines and threatened jail sentences are chilling, even if blatantly unconstitutional, especially when they cherry pick judges and jurisdictions where they know a judge will play ball and, with lifetime tenure, cares little if they are reversed later, after the damage is done.

With every threat coming from Trump and his team about deportation, it goes without saying that the right is advocating targeting and weaponizing immigration laws to remove protestors and social change advocates, if they can determine they enjoy a student visa or green card.  Once again, simply forcing someone into the laborious immigration and asylum appeals process is chilling and achieves its purpose of silencing dissent and protest.

Like I said, scary stuff, especially since many of these tools are already in force and battle tested.  There’s no soft landing or easier street for any progressives or their organizations to travel, and the right seems to know it.  Unless we stand together in the coming years, we’ve learned from the ACORN experience, that without solidarity from top to bottom, groups and people can be targeted and picked off, one by one.