Titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” the memo alleges that “common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The document gives law enforcement wide latitude to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” engaged in behavior the administration opposes, as well as nonprofit organizations that fund them. It also orders law enforcement to “question and interrogate” people “regarding the entity or individual organizing such actions and any related financial sponsorship of those actions prior to adjudication or initiation of a plea agreement.”

Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman, who teaches at Columbia Law School, told Robert Tait and Aram Roston of The Guardian that an executive order cannot create new crimes, and Timothy Snyder noted that the memo nonetheless “undoes the basic tradition of American liberty and law, which is…that we are individuals to be judged on the basis of what we do as such. This memo, quite to the contrary, begins from the premise that the world is governed by mysterious, invisible entities to which individuals can be arbitrarily associated by the power of the government, thereby making those individuals guilty and subject to prosecution and punishment.” It makes responsibility collective, thus enabling the government to target everybody. “The groups that will…be targeted will be groups that are concerned with things like counting the votes, human rights, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.”

All this, said Snyder, is both a “big lie” and a cliché. Authoritarians always say the country is facing an emergency and that their opponents are “terrorists.” It’s a cliché to say “there’s a mysterious, bottomless, organization that we have to chase to the ends of the Earth and break all the rules to find. That’s what they always say.”