A murder is about to go down, right in front of us. The victim will be someone who had not been known to have done anything wrong their whole life, right up the moment they are shot by the military during a demonstration. But in that very moment, they will be revealed to have been a violent criminal with a record as long as Elon Musk’s outstretched arm. They had to be executed.

President Trump will be happy to take credit for the hit, having already shown nothing but contempt for over half the citizens he was elected to serve. In truth, he is contemptuous of all of us, every last one, but he’ll spin sugar for the chumps eager to help keep him in power, until he doesn’t need them anymore. They merely need to be instructed who to hate. The list is long, and now includes, in addition to the initial beta-test group of desperate migrants seeking asylum: transgender youth, drag queens, anyone using pronouns the state does not approve, eggheads, scientists, Muslims, non-white Africans, environmentalists, Canadians, Democrats, liberals, nasty women, and on and on. If you’re short of time or attention, swishy or brownish will do.

Trump’s state terrorism project is flowering, soon to bear fruit. Many people don’t recognize it because they don’t feel personally threatened yet. What is terrorism, anyway? Some believe so-called “hate crimes” should not have legal status, reasoning that murder (for instance) is already against the law, and there’s no way to tell what’s in someone’s mind.

But there’s a difference between a regular crime and a hate crime. And we prove it to ourselves every time we read about a crime. We read just far enough to find the name of the victim, and if that name can be reliably associated with a group we don’t belong to, we breathe a sigh of relief, we move on. But if the victim seems to be of our tribe, we are frightened. And that’s the difference. A murder might have one victim. A hate crime has legions.

Currently the United States of America is engaging in hate crime wholesale: kidnapping on a massive level. People are vanishing off the street. People are being disappeared. If they do show up again, they’ve been recast for the cameras costumed as violent thugs: shaven, chained, heads bowed. We are not moved to find out who they are or what they may have done. We’ve branded them and packed them away to be beaten or murdered elsewhere. Some of them are citizens. Some of them are undocumented. Some are in the legal process of seeking asylum. Some of them are just brownish. Or unlucky.

And this means that all across the country entire communities of hard-working, decent people are now living daily in fear, because they are the victims of our President’s hate crime, his state-sponsored terrorism. It doesn’t matter that they’ve done nothing wrong and never will do anything wrong. Word’s gotten out. You don’t have to be guilty. They’ll just make it up.

Good people are rising up to protest the treatment of their neighbors. People are massing. Anyone considering joining these demonstrations has already heard the instructions: no violence. No vandalism. If someone in your midst looks to be causing trouble, they might be a plant. Everyone sit down on the ground immediately to expose the troublemakers. Stay calm. Stay united.

But it doesn’t matter to the President’s band of terrorists that there is no violence to quell, to make an example of. They’ll provoke it, they’ll engineer it, they’ll flat-out fake it. Already the memes are flying in the wake of the Los Angeles protests featuring a photo of police cars on fire with the caption: Don’t tell me they’re non-violent. “This is not peaceful,” Ted Cruz added when he shared it. That photograph is five years old. But still useful.

It’s all part of the plan from a President who tried to publicly shame the president of South Africa using a video falsely claiming to represent a graveyard of murdered white farmers. A President who justified the kidnapping of Abrego Garcia by displaying—in the Oval Office—obviously photoshopped photos of his tattooed hand. A President who doesn’t think we need scientists to predict tornadoes when a Sharpie will do the job. A President who blames Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war with Russia, FFS. This man doesn’t care about truth. Or peace. Or you, or me. He wants power.

Stand up.