By the standards of the San Francisco Bay Area’s hard left, Casey Goonan’s crimes were unremarkable. A police SUV partially burned by an incendiary device on UC Berkeley’s campus. A planter of shrubs lit on fire after Goonan unsuccessfully tried to smash a glass office window and throw a firebomb into the federal building in downtown Oakland.
But thanks to a series of communiques where Goonan claimed to have carried out the summer 2024 attacks in solidarity with Hamas and the East Bay native’s anarchist beliefs, federal prosecutors claimed Goonan “intended to promote” terrorism on top of a felony count for using an incendiary device. Goonan’s original charges notably did not contain terrorism counts. In late September, US District Court Judge Jeffrey White sentenced Goonan, whom they called “a domestic terrorist” during the hearing, to 19 and a half years in prison plus 15 years probation. Prosecutors also asked that he be sent to the Bureau of Prisons facility that contains a Communications Management Units, a highly restrictive assignment reserved for what the government claims are “extremist” inmates with terrorism-related offenses or affiliations.
Although Goonan’s case began under the Biden Administration, it offers a glimpse of the approach the Department of Justice may take in President Donald Trump’s forthcoming offensive against the “left,” formalized in late September in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), an executive order targeting anti-fascist beliefs, opposition towards Immigrations and Customs Enforcement raids, and criticism of capitalism and Christianity as potential “indicators of terrorism.”
In addition to Goonan’s purported admiration for Hamas—a designated terrorist organization since 1997—and cofounding of True Leap, a tiny Anarchist publisher, the 35-year-old doctorate in African-American Studies’ biography includes another trait being targeted by the Trump administration and its allies: Goonan identifies as a transgender person. While NPSM-7 cites “extremism migration, race, and gender” as an indicator of “this pattern of violent and terroristic tendencies,” the Heritage Foundation has attempted to link gender-fluid identity to mass shootings and is urging the FBI to create a new, specious domestic terrorism classification of “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE.
The executive order, meanwhile, directs the American security state’s sprawling post-9/11 counterterrorism apparatus to be reoriented away from neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and other extreme right-wing actors that have been overwhelmingly responsible for the majority of political violence in the past few decades, and towards opponents of ICE, anti-fascists, and the administration writ large. Along with potentially violent actors, NSPM-7 instructs federal law enforcement to scrutinize nonprofit groups and philanthropic foundations involved in funding organizations that espouse amorphous ideologies, from “support for the overthrow of the United States Government” to expressing “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
“NSPM-7 is the natural culmination of ‘radicalization theory’ as the basis for the American approach to counterterrorism,” says Mike German, a retired FBI agent who spent years infiltrating violent white supremacist groups and quit the Bureau in response to its post-9/11 shift in terrorism strategy. German explored radicalization theory’s trajectory in his 2019 book, Disrupt, Discredit and Divide: How the New FBI Damages Democracy.
Radicalization theory attempts to establish a logic of progression by terrorists from introduction to a particular ideology through political and social activism, ending with targeted violence.
“When I worked domestic terrorism in the 1990s, the ‘radicalization’ theory was discredited, and it was resurrected after September 11,” German says. The theory centers on excising “bad ideas” from the broader political body and neutralizing the voices of dissident figures who may inspire and possibly radicalize others—which, according to sentencing filings, is precisely how federal prosecutors view Goonan.
