Executive Disorder: Non-Banning A Non-Organization

*Apologies for dragging J. M. Barrie into this nonsense; the Cottingley Fairies were already nonsense, though.*

As you may have heard, yesterday the regime declared Antifa to be a domestic terrorist organization.

There is just so much stupid going on here.

Let’s just look at the two completely imaginary parts:

“domestic terrorist organization” isn’t a real thing, legally
“Antifa” isn’t a real thing either, legally

Basically, they declared a thing that does not exist to be part of a category that also doesn’t exist.

Heckuva a job, folks.

There actually is a legal category called “foreign terrorist organization”, which is probably where these loons got the idea for this, but those obviously have to be actually foreign so that’s not gonna help. They’re also designated by the State Department, not executive order.

They also have to be organizations in at least some sense, which “Antifa” is certainly not; they don’t have to be corporations or anything that formal, but there does have to be some form of identifiable collective entity involved.

Which “Antifa”, being just a generic term for “anti-fascist”, does not have

And, in theory at least, a “foreign terrorist organization” has to actually be involved in terrorism, though the State Department has historically not been very rigorous on that point. Needless to say, even the Department of Justice says that “far-left extremists” account for only a small percentage of “ideologically motivated attacks” in the United States.

Or at least, the DOJ did say that until last week, when that report quietly disappeared from its web site.

Zero out of three is actually pretty bad, even for this regime.

This whole thing is, obviously. nonsense.

Obviously.

Just as there is no real emergency to justify emergency tariffs, and there’s no real crime wave or insurrection anywhere in the U.S. to justify domestic military deployments.

But, as with those other hallucinations from the Trump administration, there will almost certainly be State actions taken based on and justified by this nonsense.

And that actually is a problem.

We need a mechanism to prevent government by hallucination.

(Or, as is more likely in these cases, government by outright fabrication.)

We do already have an organization that’s responsible for deciding if the government has legit reasoning behind its actions; that’s part of what the courts are for, even if they’re way too slow these days to actually be useful for this kind of thing.

But we also need some organization that is responsible for evaluating the factual basis of State actions like these, that can report quickly to the judiciary on whether there’s any basis for an executive branch claim.

Maybe it would be a good job for the Congressional Research Service?