A recent surge in organized political violence is undermining the rule of law in this nation. A Presidential Memorandum signed recently by President Donald Trump offers hope for stopping it.
Charlie Kirk and former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman are dead. Other high-profile figures, such as Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, have barely survived assassination attempts. Since 2020, riots, looting, firebombings, arson, and attacks on police officers have engulfed cities, causing billions in property damage and multiple deaths. In July, a coordinated ambush on an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, left a police officer injured. A few weeks ago, a gunman killed and injured multiple people at an ICE facility in Dallas. Law enforcement personnel are being doxxed and threatened daily.
Repeated attacks and efforts like these do not come out of nowhere. Masses of people do not coincidentally decide to cloak themselves in black, brandish weapons, and attack law enforcement officials at the exact same time and place as one another. This requires organization, coordination, and funding. To deny this is to deny reality.
To address this reality, Trump has signed a Presidential Memorandum titled, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” The memorandum establishes a National Joint Terrorism Task Force ordered to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt” not only individuals committing acts of terrorism, but also the “networks, entities, organizations” and “funding sources” that support them. The president also ordered the task force to work with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Treasury Department, and the Internal Revenue Service to track down these groups and their sources of funding.
Trump has been widely criticized for this order. Billionaire George Soros’s Open Societies Foundation released a statement condemning the task force. The Foundation characterized it as a politically motivated infringement on civil liberties. These concerns are understandable, but they are addressed explicitly in the memorandum itself.
The memo explicitly requires the task force’s actions to be “consistent with applicable law,” which includes protections for legitimate free speech and peaceful protest. It furthermore prohibits any existing statutes or agency authority from being overridden. All enforcement actions recommended by the task force would require action from the Department of Justice. Should this occur, accused individuals or groups would retain their legal rights, such as presumption of innocence until proven guilty before a court of law.
In the American tradition, free speech is a natural right, but it has never protected injurious speech such as libel, sedition, threats, and incitements of violence. It also has never protected those who support and fund violence. These uses of speech infringe upon the rights, safety, and well-being of the American people. If our government is to be just, it must secure the American people’s natural rights through the rule of law. Without this, there is no liberty. It therefore cannot be passive in the face of the current mass violence.
The federal government has the opportunity to fight these wrongs by coordinating federal, state, and local agencies and authorities. Clearly, the federal government’s current approach isn’t working. Trump’s task force promises something new: By targeting the networks and funding that undoubtedly exist, it presents an intelligent and preventative strategy that may not have been tried before.
As with every exercise of state power, the public and press should scrutinize the task force’s actions. A healthy jealousy for our rights is necessary to keep the nation free, but it need not prevent our authorities from securing those same rights via the rule of law. Trump’s action against the horrors we are seeing unfold is needed. Hopefully, the creation of the task force will mark the beginning to the end of them.
Josiah Jones is a junior studying politics. He serves as the president of the Hillsdale College Republicans.
