By standards from the far left in the San Francisco Bay Area, Casey Goonan crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV was partially burned by an incendiary device on the UC Berkeley campus. The bush caught fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to break a glass office window and throw a firebomb at a federal building in downtown Oakland.
But thanks to a series of communiqués in which Goonan claimed he carried out the attacks in the summer of 2024 in solidarity with Hamas and the East Bay native's anarchist beliefs, federal prosecutors said Goonan “intends to promote” terrorism, in addition to facing a felony charge for using an incendiary device. Gunan's original charges did not include terrorism charges, notably. In late September, U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, who was called a “domestic terrorist” during the hearing, to 19 1/2 years in prison plus 15 years of probation. Prosecutors also asked that he be sent to the Bureau of Prisons prison where he is being held. Communications management divisions, it is a highly restrictive designation reserved for what the government calls “extremist” prisoners who have committed crimes or are involved in terrorism.
Although Goonan's case dates back to the Biden administration, it provides a glimpse into the approach the Justice Department may take in President Donald Trump's upcoming offensive on the left, which was formalized in late September. Presidential National Security Memorandum No. 7 (NSPM-7)decree targeting anti-fascist beliefs, opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and criticism of capitalism and Christianity as potential “indicators of terrorism.”
In addition to Gunan's alleged admiration for Hamas (listed as a terrorist organization since 1997) and co-founding of the organization True Leap, tiny anarchist publishing houseThe 35-year-old African American studies doctor's background has another feature that the Trump administration and its allies are targeting: Goonan identifies as transgender. While NPSM-7 names “extremist migration, race and gender” as an indicator of “this pattern of violent and terrorist tendencies,” the Heritage Foundation has attempted to link gender fluid identities to mass shootings and is calling on the FBI to create new, false information. classification of domestic terrorism Transgender Ideology Inspired Violent Extremism, or TIVE.
Meanwhile, the executive order orders a refocusing of the US security state's sprawling post-9/11 anti-terrorism apparatus on neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists and other far-right figures who have been extremely responsible for much of the political violence of the past few decades, as well as against anti-ICE, anti-fascists, and the administration in general. Along with potentially violent actors, NSPM-7 directs federal law enforcement to scrutinize nonprofit groups and charities involved in funding organizations that espouse amorphous ideologies ranging from “support for the overthrow of the United States government” to expressions of “hostility toward those who hold traditional American views of family, religion, and morality.”
“NSPM-7 is a natural culmination”radicalization theory“as the core of the American approach to counterterrorism,” says Mike German, a former FBI agent who spent years infiltrating violent white supremacist groups and left the Bureau in response to a shift in terrorism strategy after 9/11. Herman explored the trajectory of radicalization theory in his 2019 book: Destroy, Discredit and Divide: How the New FBI Harms Democracy.
