Equating protest with terrorism: A narrative against dissent

Filed 1h ago · Via Global Voices · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: UNCTAD · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Global Voices traces how U.S. officials, from Trump's 2020 CHOP tweets to Stephen Miller's 2025-26 statements, have repeatedly labeled protesters 'domestic terrorists,' most recently around the fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by Border Patrol officers in Minnesota. Miller and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem framed Pretti as an armed assassin; video appeared to show him recording officers on his phone before being pepper-sprayed, pulled into the street, and shot ten times.

The piece situates this domestically alongside similar rhetoric abroad: Sri Lanka's Wickremesinghe, Tunisia's Saied, Venezuela's post-election crackdown, and the UK's proscription of Palestine Action under terrorism law, which the UN human rights chief warned stretches counter-terrorism statutes over ordinary civil disobedience.

The article also notes Trump's October 2025 troop threat against Portland protests, blocked by a federal judge, and Operation Metro Surge, which deployed over 3,000 ICE and CBP officers into Minnesota and produced, per Trump, more than 4,000 arrests.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Calling a protester a terrorist is cheap and calling him one on camera while the footage says otherwise is cheaper still. The video of Pretti didn't match the press conference, and that gap is the whole story, not a footnote to it. When the label gets used the same way from Seattle to Colombo to Tunis, it stops being an accusation and starts looking like a tool kept in the same drawer no matter who's holding it.

Source: Read the original at Global Voices → Scored: Sergio's Magic Dustbin · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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