“We Will Find You”

The White House quietly released a new U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy this week. The foreword, signed by President Donald Trump, concludes with, “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

The following pages outline a “radical shift” in focus. “The terrorist threat has changed,” it says, and is much closer to home. A new domestic enemy has emerged, which the Trump Administration defines as “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” and those “who have adopted radical ideologies antithetical to the principles upon which our Republic was founded.” 

The document lists as a priority “the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

It goes on: “We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.”

Perhaps, at this point, You are thinking: “Melina, what’s this got to do with me? I may be ‘secular,’ but none of those other things.”

And so I would refer You, my friend, to page 10: “The Trump Administration is in large part defined by a return to common sense which dictates that some things are more important than others…” 

It could be the most self-aware sentence ever uttered within this White House. 

Some things are more important than others. Like, for instance, that You, Me, and thousands of this organization’s members — and millions more Americans — are secular, which is “bad.” Or that many more are Muslim and Sikh and otherwise not Christian and still more specifically not Christian Nationalist, which is, they believe, the only good, true, and beautiful thing to be. In their view:

• If You do not believe, as they do, that our nation was founded as a Christian one, You are a blasphemer. 
• If You advocate, as we do, for the separation of church and state, You are an anti-American heretic.
• And if, on this week’s National Day of Prayer, You did not “recommit to our magnificent birthright of faith,” I am sorry to say this regime considers You something to be ‘defeated,’ an ‘evil force of atheistic communism.’

You see, it doesn’t matter that we aren’t violent anarchists or radical Marxists. They either don’t know or care what those words mean. Some things are more important than others.

In honor of the National Day of Reason, it stands to reason that they have decided the less-important thing — the thing that comes second in a ‘Certain Americans First’ strategy — is anyone and everyone with a different way of thinking.

My intention here is not to cause panic, but to inspire vigilance. Democracies don’t die overnight. Classes of citizens don’t lose their freedoms all at once. Cults count on a more gradual process of normalizing increasingly extreme demands. Despots depend on convincing the public that fewer and fewer people deserve to be treated as fully legitimate participants in society. 

This document is yet another step towards othering us secular Americans and undoing the progress toward equality our movement has made over six decades.

While I can’t offer many assurances about what’s to come, I can tell you our team at American Atheists is working overtime to defend our rights thanks to the generous and ongoing support of members and donors like You. 

And I remain hopeful that, together, we will overcome these efforts to portray nonbelief as something dangerous and that we will, one day, achieve our vision of an inclusive future where people of all faiths and none can participate fully and without fear.

In solidarity,

Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communication & Policy Engagement