'Shocked' civil rights groups alarmed by Trump official's plan to 'embrace state violence'

Advocates for civil and constitutional rights were sounding the alarm on a Trump official's plan to combat groups deemed far-left extremists by the administration.

"A lot of people are very shocked by the language about left-wing extremists, anarchist extremists," said Chip Gibbons, the policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, in a Saturday article by the Guardian.

Gibbons was reacting to a memo by President Donald Trump's counter-terrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, that called for labeling millions of Americans as terrorists, including groups that identify as left-wing, anti-Fascist and Anarchist.

"It is very shocking," Gibbons told The Guardian, but he wasn't alone in his feeling.

Nadia Ben-Youssef, the advocacy director of the Center of Constitutional Rights, said the strategy that Gorka laid out "openly embraces state violence and political repression," according to The Guardian.

"The document follows in the Trumpian tradition and that of the broader right-wing movement by explicitly articulating an extremist worldview," Ben-Youssef told the Guardian. "It overtly dehumanizes communities, and lauds executive action that has violated the constitution and international law."

She added that Gorka's plan laid out in the memo would create "a vengeful executive unbounded by law" and said that it should "only be understood as a political project to criminalize dissent, demonize migrants, target Muslim communities, and label transgender people and their allies as acceptable targets of marginalization, repression and violence."