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'Fascism Is Here': Rubio, Miller Say More Terrorist Designations Coming for 'Far-Left' Groups
"If you’re not alarmed you’re not paying attention."
Jul 16, 2026
Trump administration officials on Thursday hyped up plans to carry out mass political arrests and prosecutions of people whom it deemed far-left terrorists.
In a speech given at the US State Department, Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff, described left-wing political violence as a "fatal cancer to civilization," and boasted of plans to use state power to suppress people whom he called "political terrorists."
Miller said that the administration would be carrying out this operation under the guidance of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by Trump in September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Miller bragged that "for the first time in American history," NSPM-7 would direct "all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, de-bank, arrest, prosecute these political terrorists that are operating within our country."
Santa Monica Goebbels is doing his weird and creepy gyrations while delivering a speech smearing Democrats as violent radicals pic.twitter.com/PaeDcD55jw
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2026
Miller said that the mass arrest of left-wing radicals was necessary to prevent them from carrying out mass arrests of their own.
"Inevitably, left to its course, it always becomes a gulag," said Miller. "It always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, suffering, in order to establish complete and total control, control through psychological and physical and actual terror."
The social media account of independent progressive publication The Tennessee Holler expressed alarm at Miller's speech.
"Fascism is here," The Tennessee Holler wrote. "If you’re not alarmed you’re not paying attention. 'Left-wing political terrorism' will mean those who oppose the regime—while actual right-wing extremism is allowed to grow and thrive. We are very far off the cliff, folks."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also spoke of the event, noted last year that his department "designated four violent far-left extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations, and there will be more designations soon."
Secretary of State Rubio says there will be more terrorist designations of left-wing groups "soon." pic.twitter.com/RmZjBgQXas
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 16, 2026
The administration's declaration of war against left-wing political violence comes despite decades of research showing that political violence is more commonly carried out by right-wing groups.
A report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, while left-wing political violence has grown since Trump’s first election in 2016, it “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”
The report also noted that violence carried out by left-wing individuals or groups was "remarkably less lethal" than violence carried out by right-wing or jihadist individuals or groups.
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The Trump Admin Wants the Prairieland Sentences to Scare You Into Silence
NSPM-7 is the architecture of a system designed to make dissent unthinkable, but it won’t work.
Jun 29, 2026
Mari Rueda's favorite color is blue, as is, sometimes, her hair. She used to live with two cats, two rabbits, a dog, and her tween child. She was a casual gardener and an enthusiastic karaoke singer in training to be a doula. Des Sanchez Estrada is a tattoo artist, poet, and animal lover who sometimes fostered orphaned baby possums and liked experimenting with vegan cooking. Des and Mari are married. One year into the Trump administration's violent campaign of mass deportation and immigrant roundups, they are facing a combined century in federal prison: 70 years for Mari, 30 for Des. Their crimes? Mari went to a noise demonstration outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. Des moved a box of zines.
On July 4, 2025, Mari joined dozens of others at a noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. Noise demonstrations are a commonly used form of protest solidarity; I've been to a number of them outside metro Atlanta jails over the years. People gather outside carceral facilities and get loud, because the people inside have no other way of knowing that anyone outside is fighting for them. People bang pots and pans, play music, sometimes set off fireworks. The vibes are generally good, until police invariably show up.
Prairieland sits on the discordantly cheery-sounding Sunflower Lane, 40 miles southwest of Dallas. It's a private prison run for profit by LaSalle Corrections, designed to hold 707 people, although it usually cages more than a thousand. Like every ICE detention center, it has a documented record of inadequate medical care, suicide prevention failures, and deaths in custody.
When police showed up to interrupt the July 4 noise demo, things devolved into chaos quickly. One of the responding officers had a gun trained on an unarmed protester who was running away, and Benjamin Song, a former Marine and firearms trainer, acted in a split second: He fired a shot at the officer, who sustained an injury to his neck and was discharged from the hospital hours later. It's obviously a very good thing that this wasn't a fatal shot—but we didn't need to look much further into the future for what Song was fearful of to come to pass. In Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed two protesters within a three-week period this January.
The people who show up outside detention centers, who defend forests and animals, who organize bail funds and drive people to demonstrations, are not doing it because they expect it to be free.
So: one person, acting on their own, fired one shot. The federal government then used it to imprison people in the vicinity, and some who weren't even there at all.
Song received a sentence of 100 years. Mari's 70-year sentence came down after she was convicted of rioting, material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, use and carry of an explosive, and conspiracy to conceal documents for allegedly asking Des to move the box of political literature. Five others who were present received 50 years each for rioting, material support for terrorism, conspiracy to use and carry an explosive, and use and carry of an explosive (which, to be clear, were consumer fireworks, the kind you can buy on the side of the road in most states). For comparison: the longest sentence handed to any January 6 participant before the pardons was 22 years, given to the former leader of the Proud Boys a paramilitary organization that stormed the United States Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election.
I think it's important to name two things here: first, how exceptionally long these sentences are, even on a US-adjusted scale; and second, how this criminalization of protest is not unexpected, it’s just the next mutation of the sprawling policing and incarceration apparatus we've built over decades.
It's not even a unique strategy. In November 1919, in what became known as the Palmer Raids, the Department of Justice arrested more than 4,000 people across the country. Much like the Prairieland defendants, the vast majority were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time—guilty, in the eyes of the government, of possessing radical politics: being Russian, simply being present when others were arrested, attending meetings, holding the wrong beliefs. The government eventually deported 800 of them.
The legal tools on display today are the same ones, just tweaked a bit over the ensuing century. The felony murder doctrine has sent thousands of people to prison for life for deaths they didn't cause. (A notable example that garnered a lot of attention: Ryan Holle lent his car to a friend in Florida, went to sleep, and was convicted of first degree murder when his friend committed a robbery and killed someone). Conspiracy law has been used to prosecute the periphery of alleged drug networks, “gang” affiliations, and social movements for generations. Mandatory minimums have produced sentences that are wildly disproportionate to the underlying conduct for as long as they have existed. The terrorism enhancement applied to the Prairieland defendants—because they had fireworks—has been used to inflate sentences and justify mass surveillance against Muslim communities, environmental activists, and animal rights protesters for decades.
The brutality of these sentences is not particularly shocking to the communities that have been living with police violence and mass incarceration for generations. It is a confirmation of what they already knew—that this is a country willing to sentence an aspiring doula and mother of a 13-year-old to 70 years in a cage for fleeing a righteous protest, while pardoning everyone who stormed the Capitol.
The Prairieland prosecution was underwritten by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), the presidential memo issued in September 2025. President Donald Trump also cited the Prairieland case in an update to his memo designating “antifa”—which literally just means anti-fascist—as a terrorist organization. His memo defines the common threads of left wing terrorism, among other things, as anti-capitalism and opposition to immigration enforcement. It’s being used across the country: in Minneapolis, 15 organizers were indicted in June under NSPM-7 for “overt acts” which included sharing flyers. In Atlanta, two Stop Cop City protesters were federally indicted two weeks ago for conduct from 2022—four years ago!—explicitly as part of the NSPM-7 initiative. In Michigan, pro-Palestine student protesters face federal charges for conduct from 2023. People who carry zines, use Signal, defend land and animals, wear black, or show up outside detention centers are now, under NSPM-7, potential domestic terrorists.
Prairieland was a detention center—our country’s modern answer to a concentration camp—before it was a crime scene.
I watched the Stop Cop City movement—and the state’s violent response to the community’s dissent—unfold in Atlanta. In November 2023, I sat in a courtroom as 57 people churned through arraignment proceedings on a sweeping racketeering case; defendants held neon green numbers and were split into groups of five because the courtroom wasn't big enough to hold them all at once. The rambling, 110-page indictment had charged protesters with criminal conspiracy for things like transferring less than $20 in reimbursement for harm reduction supplies, refusing police commands to exit a tree house, and signing an arrest form with the acronym "ACAB." These, the state alleged, were overt acts in furtherance of a terrorist enterprise. That RICO case eventually collapsed.
Many of the new NSPM-7 cases are not over, so they too may eventually collapse. The Prairieland defendants have pending motions for acquittal and new trial. The Brennan Center has found NSPM-7 to be wholly unmoored, legally. But "eventually" is measured in years of people's lives spent in federal cages.
What happened in Fort Worth last week is a message. The federal government is betting that sentences of 30, 50, 70, 100 years will make the cost of showing up too high. But the people who show up outside detention centers, who defend forests and animals, who organize bail funds and drive people to demonstrations, are not doing it because they expect it to be free. They are doing it because the alternative—a world in which Prairieland and everything it represents goes unchallenged—is unbearable. NSPM-7 is the architecture of a system designed to make dissent unthinkable, but it won’t work. What it will do is hurt people, and the question every organizer now has to answer is: How do we build a movement sturdy enough to absorb that hurt and keep going?
As Marlon Kautz, an Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizer and Stop Cop City RICO defendant, has said: "A plan to avoid repression is a plan to lose." The only meaningful response is to build protest movement infrastructure that can withstand it—through legal defense funds, rapid response networks, the refusal to throw anyone under the bus, the refusal to cooperate with the government, and the sustained work of dismantling the infrastructure that made these sentences possible.
You certainly don't end people’s willingness to protest by making those same people angrier. Prairieland was a detention center—our country’s modern answer to a concentration camp—before it was a crime scene. That's why people were there, and that’s why they'll be back.
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'Criminalizing Dissent': Alarm Grows Over Extreme Prison Terms for Texas ICE Protesters
“Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence," said one attorney.
Jun 26, 2026
Alarm and outrage mounted this week following a federal judge's lengthy prison sentences for a group of activists falsely accused by the Trump administration of being members of a nonexistent "North Texas Antifa Cell," with some observers calling the extreme punishments—including 30 years for moving a box of constitutionally protected pamphlets—a test case for criminalizing dissent.
Eight members of the "Prairieview Nine"—part of a larger group of activists who staged a July 4, 2025 protest outside a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Alvarado, Texas—were sentenced Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Fort Worth to between 30-100 years imprisonment.
Benjamin Song, who was convicted of shooting Alvarado Police Lt. Thomas Gross, was sentenced to 100 years for attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and lesser offenses, including discharging a firearm during a violent crime, conspiracy to use and using an explosive, and rioting. Song, a former US Marine, contends that he shot Gross in self-defense after the officer drew his gun first.
The “explosives” in question were fireworks brought to the July 4 protest to show solidarity with people detained by ICE.
Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Bradford Morris, and Elizabeth Soto got 50 years each for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to use and using an explosive.
Maricela Rueda was sentenced to 70 years for rioting, providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to use and using an explosive, and conspiracy to conceal documents. Those documents were leftist pamphlets protected by the First Amendment.
Rueda's husband, Daniel “Des” Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was hit with a 30-year prison sentence for conspiracy to conceal documents for moving a box full of the pamphlets after speaking with his wife. He did not attend the protest.
Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of former President George W. Bush and a favorite of right-wing judge shoppers, told the court that the lengthy sentences are meant to “send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology” with the defendants, according to one observer of Tuesday’s proceedings.
The Prairieland sentences were more severe than the longest prison term for the average US murderer or rapist, as well as for the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrectionists—all of whom were later pardoned by President Donald Trump—as well as for convicted child sex trafficker and Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
"What happened on Tuesday, it’s shocking to all of us, devastating to the families, 50- to 100-year sentences," Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center at the Muslim Legal Fund of America and lawyer to one of the Prairieland defendants, told Democracy Now! on Thursday. "Those are essentially life sentences for all of the young people in this case, largely of whom were engaged in nonviolent protest at an ICE detention facility."
A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell."
The activists attended a protest and noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas.… pic.twitter.com/QxFMPaGsvj
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) June 25, 2026
Khalid noted that the Department of Justice (DOJ) invoked a rarely used "material support for terrorism" statute that "does not require any connection to a domestic terrorist organization or any kind."
"Any American can be targeted that way now. It does not require ties to antifa or to any domestic terrorist organization," she said. "That’s a dangerous precedent, and what allowed them to stack these charges so high on Tuesday."
The DOJ hailed “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with antifa following... Trump’s executive order designating the group as a domestic terrorist organization in September 2025" in the wake of the assassination of white supremacist influencer Charlie Kirk—which had nothing to do with antifa, a decentralized and leaderless international ideology opposing fascism that's more of a mindset than a movement.
Later that month, Trump also signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), a directive titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” that focuses exclusively on left-wing activities and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Khalid pointed to the pardoned January 6 insurrectionists, who "were involved in rioting, carrying massive arsenals of weapons, lots of discussions ahead of time—that didn’t exist in this case—about targeting law enforcement, wanting to kill members of Congress, [and] actually storming the Capitol."
"So, we have a massive, unwarranted sentencing disparity here," she said. "What happened in the court in Fort Worth was unconstitutional and should concern everybody in this country in the direction that it is taking us."
Mark Osler, a law professor and sentencing expert at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, told The Guardian on Friday that "the 30-year sentence for Estrada is probably the one that for most people will come closest to shocking the conscience, simply because this is an activity that took place after the harm occurred."
"What happened in the court in Fort Worth was unconstitutional and should concern everybody in this country in the direction that it is taking us."
Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, underscored during a Friday interview in an episode of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's Counterspin podcast titled "Criminalizing Dissent" that Estrada "wasn't even at the protest."
"He's somebody who allegedly transported a box of pamphlets because his wife was at the protest," Stern said. "And he believed, according to prosecutors, that the box of pamphlets might implicate his wife... so he was concealing evidence."
"Evidence of what?" he continued. "This wasn't a how-to manual... They were zines. They said nothing about this protest, about the Prairieland detention facility, about shooting this police officer... So when they say that he concealed evidence by moving these zines, evidence of what? It's evidence of an ideology. It's evidence of somebody's reading habits."
"And now they're on the same plane as terrorists, as [Islamic State], according to this administration," Stern added. "It's all pretty absurd. But at the end of the day, we have a Constitution that prohibits people from being locked up for what they think, write, or read, as long as they are not inciting imminent violence. So hopefully the appellate courts will reverse these convictions. But the law is only as good as the people who enforce it."
Jeremy Busby, an incarcerated journalist, wrote on the eve of Estrada's trial that the "homespun zines at issue contain no plans for any shooting, and under normal circumstances, they would clearly be deemed constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment."
"But the government’s concealment theory only makes sense if it views merely having the literature as criminal," he argued. “Criminalizing possession of literature is a miscarriage of justice, whether in prison or at a protester’s husband’s parents’ house. If the Trump administration is allowed to send Estrada to prison for the crime of possessing literature, members of society at large can be subjected to the same pernicious rules as the incarcerated.”
Amber Lowrey, the sister of Prairieland defendant Savanna Batten—who was sentenced to 50 years behind bars for material support for terrorism and conspiracy to use and using "explosives" (fireworks)—told The Guardian before Batten's trial that the Trump administration just wants "to make an example of people and silence anyone who... opposes the government."
"They want to silence dissent, criminalize dissent," she added.
Trump administration prosecutors have also invoked NSPM-7 in the case of 15 organizers with the groups Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers, who are accused of impeding the Department of Homeland Security’s anti-immigrant crackdown in Minneapolis, where US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were separately killed earlier this year by ICE and Border Patrol officers.
"We live under a fascist state where ICE agents can murder us with impunity, yet we can go to prison for 50 years for protesting," socialist commentator and journalist Ryan Knight said Thursday on X. "The unjust sentences of the Prairieland protesters violate the First Amendment and infringe on our rights to fight back against a tyrannical government."
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'Major Escalation': Trump Prosecutor Invokes NSPM-7 While Unveiling Charges Against 15 ICE Protesters
National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which President Donald Trump issued last year, explicitly targets left-wing protesters and beliefs.
Jun 17, 2026
Federal prosecutors in Minnesota have struggled to come up with charges that stick as they've indicted dozens of people this year for protesting President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, and observers suggested Tuesday's indictments of 15 organizers would likely fail to convince any court. But with a US attorney explicitly citing Trump's memo threatening to crack down on left-wing protesters, advocates warned the charges were a "major escalation" against First Amendment rights.
US Attorney Daniel Rosen, who was appointed by Trump for the District of Minnesota last year, noted in his announcement of the indictments that Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) last September and that "Joint Task Force Vanguard," an investigative group set up "to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation," had worked on the case.
NSPM-7, as Common Dreams reported last year, was issued weeks after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and focuses exclusively on left-wing and "anti-fascist" activities, mandating a "national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Around the same time, Trump issued an executive order asserting that "antifa," or the anti-fascist movement, had been designated as a "domestic terrorist organization," despite the fact that there is no centralized antifa group and that the president does not have the authority to make such a designation.
The president's directives underpinned the indictment of 15 organizers, including at least one professor and several union leaders and members, who had led direct actions and protests against federal agents during Operation Metro Surge, a crackdown by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies in Minnesota earlier this year.
Rosen said the defendants were members of two Minneapolis-based groups—Direct Action Minnesota and Black Cat Workers Collective—that were associated with "antifa" and were "violently opposed to the enforcement of federal law in our state."
🚨 Feds point to NSPM-7 as basis for charging 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota, alleging ties to "Antifa".
U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen: "Last year, President Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directed the Department of Justice to prioritize… pic.twitter.com/s3uCKCi09V
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) June 16, 2026
Twelve of the defendants were arrested on Tuesday, while one had already been in custody on other charges and two had not yet been detained.
The charges include conspiracy to impede or injure a federal officer, solicitation to commit a crime of violence, interstate stalking, assault on a federal officer, and destruction of government property.
But after examining the indictment, David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, found just one "documented, charged violence by any defendant in the actual indictment against any ICE agent's person": A defendant, William Morgan, "approached one of the agents and knocked the agent's notes out of his hand."
Bier listed the rest of the overt acts included in the 94-page indictment, which he described as a "cobbled together series of basically unrelated incidents or comments, nearly all of it not criminal with a few minor crimes, effectively all nonviolent acts of civil disobedience."
The other acts include "attending meetings," "posting on Facebook and social media about resistance to ICE," "posting flyers advertising direct actions," "conducting after-action reviews," "forming human blockades" at a building used for ICE operations in Minneapolis, and impeding ICE vehicles with sandbags, debris, and vehicles to block roads.
At the press conference Tuesday, evidence presented by Rosen included a Facebook post in which one defendant, Cameron Kennedy, said, "We need to become ungovernable."
Organizers expressed that they were "highly critical of nonviolent peaceful protest," said Rosen.
"Oh," said Bier in response on social media.
Journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News also pointed to a section of the indictment that accuses Isaac Auman Sant of engaging in conduct that "caused, attempted to cause, or would be reasonably expected to cause substantial emotional distress to a person."
"Actual federal charges in Minnesota for hurting ICE agents' feelings," Grim said.
The defendants appeared in the US District Court for the District of Minnesota on Tuesday, where Judge John Docherty said the defendants were being released for the time being and that the conditions for a detention hearing had not been met.
A defendant named Erik Davis, a religious studies professor at Macalester College, told Docherty that according to the indictment, he was being "indicted for holding meetings.”
While the charges were denounced as outrageous by a number of observers, an attorney for one of the defendants, Bruce Nestor, told Democracy Now! that the conspiracy charge "is really an attempt to broaden the net of federal law enforcement and to expand the ability of the federal government to target our movement and to foster repression."
Federal prosecutors have charged 15 Minnesotans for conspiracy to impede or injure immigration officers in Minneapolis earlier this year during President Trump’s so-called Operation Metro Surge. The indictment has linked the defendants to anti-fascist or "antifa" groups. Trump… pic.twitter.com/5eAI1WmUrI
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) June 17, 2026
Adam Federman of Type Investigations said the administration's strategy for cracking down on those who oppose its political agenda appears to be: "Define a loose coalition of activists opposed to the government's immigration policies as Antifa, make the case that Antifa is a terrorist organization, and then prosecute them on conspiracy charges. We're going to see a lot more of this."
The indictment was announced weeks after federal prosecutors dropped all charges against four protesters who had been accused of interfering with ICE agents at a detention center in the Chicago area.
In March, the Trump administration won its first legal victory in its effort to criminalize groups that organize against its agenda when a federal jury convicted eight people of domestic terrorism because they wore all black to a protest outside ICE's Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, where one of the protesters shot and wounded a police officer.
"Prairieland was exhibit A," said Federman on Tuesday. "My guess is that we will get to the end of the alphabet before this administration runs its course."
US Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) noted that the federal officers who fatally shot two Minneapolis protesters, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in January have not been criminally charged.
"While the killers of Renée Good and Alex Pretti walk free, the DOJ is busy bringing bogus charges against protesters," said Omar. "The administration thinks intimidation will make us back down. They keep learning the same lesson: Minnesotans don't scare easily. We organize for our rights."
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Fox News Defines Most Americans as Anti-American
In declaring contemporary social movements and the people who support them anti-American, Fox News is essentially designating the majority of Americans as official enemies under Trump's NSPM-7.
Jun 04, 2026
One of the secret strengths of right-wing propagandists is their ability to say a few words that are so wrong on so many levels that they take an essay to untwist. Case in point: a recent Fox News post on Facebook. Summarizing a longer article on contemporary political movements, the post reads in full:
Anti-Israel agitators. Climate activists. Communist groups.
Experts warn a growing activist network united by anti-American sentiment—and in some cases China-linked funding networks—is now targeting America’s AI infrastructure and industrial power.
Fox News Digital found many of the same movements protesting side-by-side across the country, including groups opposing new AI data centers over energy and environmental concerns.
“What all of these protests have in common… is that anti-American trend within them,” Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua told Fox News Digital.
While disguised as serious findings from a scholarly exposé about subversive trends in America, the article mostly just lumps together all the usual enemies of corporate, far-right interests and labels them all “anti-American.” Even as pure propaganda, it’s unsubtle and uncreative.
But with the Trump administration’s recent issuance of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7)—a sweeping memo that tries to connect beliefs like these to terrorism and calls upon law enforcement to treat them accordingly—such propaganda now carries more sinister implications.
What unites them is that they are enemies of one aspect or another of the fascist techno-petro-state the Trump administration is attempting to cement. And they all have very real, very valid reasons to hold their positions.
Taken together, the groups in question make up a significant majority of the American population. What unites them is not anti-American sentiment. What unites them is that they are enemies of one aspect or another of the fascist techno-petro-state the Trump administration is attempting to cement. And they all have very real, very valid reasons to hold their positions.
Anti-Israel Agitators
Labeling critics of US-Israeli policy “anti-Israel agitators” is meant to dismiss them as irrational, antisemitic extremists—and, according to Fox News, anti-American. While there’s no room in this article to litigate the issue of Israel-Palestine, suffice it to say the reality is far more complex.
Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza over the last two and a half years, combined with decades of abuse of Palestinians leading up to the terror attacks of October 7, has made them a global pariah. Making matters worse, the US government has given billions of dollars to fund that genocide and provided bipartisan diplomatic cover for it. In addition, many believe—because Trump administration officials have suggested as much—that Israel goaded President Donald Trump into our unpopular, costly, disastrous war with Iran.
All this adds up to a steadily worsening public perception of Israel, with 60% of US adults now having an unfavorable view, according to Pew. Which begs the question: Can 60% of Americans be anti-American?
Climate Activists and Communists
Perennial foes of the big business interests Fox News and the Republican Party represent, neither climate activists nor communists, sadly, have a significant presence in contemporary American politics. But Fox News would never miss an opportunity to put such scary words in front of their audience.
The idea here, to the extent that there is one, is that concern for the climate limits our energy and defensive options, weakening us as our biggest rival, China, is ascendent. Of course there are ulterior motives. One of the biggest goals of the right-wing project is to simply shut down all green energy, as President Trump essentially did in 2025, so that he and the oil tycoons who prop him up can benefit.
There’s nothing anti-American about wanting clean or renewable energy. The Constitution doesn’t mandate that we be a petrostate. It’s also largely agnostic on the question of economic organization. Labeling environmentalism or leftist economic beliefs anti-American is an attempt to shut down the debate before it can happen—lest the American people choose a path that inconveniences the mega rich who are harming the environment and hoarding all the money.
AI Data Center Opponents
Tech oligarchs and corporate pundits repeatedly insist that America needs to win the AI race against China, virtually no matter the cost. But the American people are not yet on board. According to Gallup, 70% of Americans oppose AI data center construction in their communities. And this is largely a bipartisan consensus, with Republicans being only slightly more supportive of data center construction.
Either way, sticking the anti-American label on data center opposition is a tough sell for Fox News. The environmental cost and resource drain of data centers is already impacting communities. At the same time, tech oligarchs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are frighteningly candid about how AI, which compiles our accumulated knowledge and then sells it back to us in the form of slop, is intended to permanently displace the workforce. There is no serious plan in place to support the millions of people they’re threatening to make unemployed.
No surprise, then, that the massive push for this technology is meeting resistance all over the country. Even in conservative states like Utah, not widely known as a hotbed for political activism, residents are demanding that Big Tech be held accountable for their reckless AI ambitions.
The Chinese Anti-American Subversion Theory
The full article throws together more scary bad guys: “Agitators united by Chinese money, hate for America target data centers… linking environmental, Islamist, and far-left political movements… Climate activists, anti-Israel protesters, and other activist movements with very different agendas have become strange bedfellows united by a shared disdain for America and funding from China.”
The accusation that any of these causes are backed by “Chinese money” is loose and largely unsubstantiated. The article names one accused funder, as if supporting causes was a crime in and of itself: Neville Roy Singham, an American expat who now lives in China. And the only justification that any of this is “anti-American” comes from vague warnings about falling behind China (which, by many metrics, we did long ago) and the fact that China dominates much of the green energy market—all the more reason, one would think, to invest in our own.
Guilt by association can be an effective propaganda technique, though. If Fox can connect all these disparate causes under the banner of anti-Americanism and Chinese subversion, they can encourage their audience to reject any sympathies they may be tempted to feel with such movements—in case they don’t want a data center in their county, say, or they see what’s been done to Gaza.
The Danger of Being Labeled Anti-American Under NSPM-7
In declaring all these causes and the people who support them anti-American, Fox News is essentially designating the majority of Americans as official enemies under NSPM-7. According to NSPM-7, “anti-Americanism” is part of a cabal of threats, along with anti-capitalism; anti-Christianity; “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Each of these beliefs is now treated as an indicator of violent, terroristic inclinations. As such, falling under any such label carries with it the threat of surveillance, investigation, prosecution, and other potential law enforcement actions.
Exactly how, where, and when NSPM-7 has been or will be used is still tough to know. That’s part of what makes it so dangerous: The language is so sweeping that, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of New York, it could target “pretty much anyone who isn’t a MAGA faithful.” The purpose here is to clearly define what a proper American ought to believe, to chill any dissent with that agenda, and to lay the groundwork for criminal investigations of any American who’s uncooperative.
As things continue to break down in this country, and as Trump continues to become more emboldened even as his approval rating tanks, it’s not hard to imagine him weaponizing his corrupt FBI to go after, say, a data center protest organizer. Actually, this may already be happening: leaked reports, covered extensively by Wired, claim that multiple US agencies are already monitoring what they call “anti-tech extremism.” Such so-called extremism apparently includes activities as banal as photography and other constitutionally protected activities.
It’s awfully bold of Fox News to declare the majority of Americans anti-American. Such is the potency of right-wing propaganda’s complete disregard for nuance, truth, or morality. To untangle the minds of the people who consume this stuff on a regular basis, and actually believe it, is a thoroughly challenging project that will likely take generations.
With politics as heated as they are right now, and so close to getting even further out of hand with directives like NSPM-7, it’s important to reiterate the obvious: Not only are environmental protection, support for Palestine, and anti-AI activism legitimate and well-reasoned, they’re also all perfectly American.
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Trump’s New 'Counterterrorism' Strategy Is a Sweeping Attack on Domestic Dissent
The administration is using national security as a pretext to target protesters, civil rights groups, and vulnerable communities. Here is how we fight back.
May 15, 2026
On May 6, 2026, the Trump administration released its latest conspiracy-laden attack on “the left,” this time in the form of a “counterterrorism strategy". While laughably lacking in evidence or regard for laws, the “strategy” will have serious, deadly consequences. It sets our country’s counterterror apparatus and racist, anti-Muslim goals against the Global South, Europe, and all those here at home who have the nerve to demand their rights and oppose full-fledged autocracy.
In this post, I will focus on the domestic implications, although the global impacts are both frightening and impossible to fully separate, as the strategy conflates everything from domestic resistance movements to people with disfavored ideologies to drug trafficking with international terrorism.
The strategy is authored by Sebastian Gorka, a known anti-Muslim bigot whom former counterterrorism officials pan as “ill-informed” and a “huckster.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that this so-called “strategy” is basically a cocktail of fearmongering and post-9/11 playbook, but on steroids. It incorporates and expands on the president’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which casts a sweeping set of dissenting views as (domestic) terrorism, plays up fears of a “new alliance” between leftists and “Islamists,” and completely ignores the documented threats of right-wing and white supremacist extremists.
This is all hauntingly familiar. For generations, federal agencies have surveilled, monitored, and targeted Black, immigrant, Muslim, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indigenous, and other people of color, using surveillance as a tool of intimidation and enforcement that deepens racial inequities instead of making people safer.
Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.
For example, the strategy promises to wield massive law enforcement, surveillance, and other counterterror powers to “map” and "neutralize" groups it describes as "anti‑American, radically pro‑transgender, and anarchist." In the post-9/11 era, the New York Police Department attempted to map all Muslims and their institutions in the Tri-State Area, for which Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C. successfully sued in 2012. We have long seen our community and sacred spaces violated by informants and oppressive surveillance.
The document also states that the US government will "[i]dentify terror actors and plots before they happen,” (emphasis added) which sounds dystopian, but is the same false logic underlying the notorious Countering Violent Extremism program that targeted American Muslims in the post-9/11 era.
In Gorka's reported comments to the press, he doubled down on targeting "ideology” and preventive policing: “We see a threat… we will crush it, whether it is the cartels, the jihadists, or violent left-wing extremists like antifa and like the transgender killers, the non-binary, the left-wing radicals.”
These practices have caused lasting trauma and generational impact for Muslims, stifling our religious and political expression and wrecking intra-community trust. Now the government is wolfishly expanding while few seem to notice. Gorka himself said, “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us, which is delicious.”
A Sweeping Attack on Dissent
Indeed, the breadth of attacks on protesters, dissenters, and civil rights organizations is overwhelming. A few examples:
- This administration slandered Renee Good and Alex Pretti as domestic terrorists after its own officers shot each of them dead in broad daylight, contravening overwhelming bystander and video evidence.
- Prairieland case: Eight anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protesters were convicted of material support for terrorism; raided; and had their flyers, zines, and use of encrypted chats cited in the indictment as evidence of their connection to terrorism.
- “Domestic terrorist” database: In January, an ICE officer told a legal observer, “[W]e have a nice little database, and now you're considered a domestic terrorist." When pressed at a congressional hearing, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons denied that a database of American “domestic terrorists” exists, but in a subsequent hearing, former Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to deny it.
- In late April, federal prosecutors indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented violent white supremacists for decades.
Communities that have historically borne the brunt of government overreach will once again suffer the greatest harm. But this sweeping attack on dissent affects everyone, threatening the foundations of our free society.
What can we do?
Make noise: Call attention to the harms of this counterterror “strategy.” Its release during congressional recess let it fly under the radar, although Ranking Member of House Homeland Security Committee Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) noted its lack of strategy and called again for a hearing with officials. Other elected officials should likewise take action to condemn this latest attack on dissent, demand transparency about its implementation and adherence to the Constitution, and protect our rights.
Congress also has an immediate opportunity to curb vast surveillance powers enabled by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Section 702. Congressional leadership has so far blocked bipartisan efforts to pass a warrant requirement for searches of people in the US, and before accessing our intimate details through data-broker purchases. Lawmakers have until June 12 to enact basic protections for people in the US. This counterterror strategy—along with the recent whispers of its potential use against right-wing dissenters from Trumpism—shows exactly why we must urgently rein in the government's massive counterterror arsenal, starting with 702’s warrantless spy power.
Demand that local governments refuse to cooperate with the federal government, divest and remove surveillance technology, and withdraw from Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF’s), which deputize local law enforcement to do the feds’ bidding and share information pursuant to its permissive interpretations of federal law.
Collectively, we must continue to demand our rights: to protest, to speak, to commune, and to live free from Big Brother—especially Big Brother with a gun. Remember: The overwhelm we feel isn’t an accident; it’s tactical. Refuse to allow the administration’s intimidation tactics to succeed. Our mass, unapologetic refusal to comply, is what’s truly “delicious.”
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Trump Counterterrorism Strategy Puts 'Anti-Fascists' on Par With ISIS, Al-Qaeda
"The global War on Terror has come home."
May 06, 2026
The Trump administration on Wednesday released an official counterterrorism strategy that puts "anti-fascist" organizations on par with terrorist organizations such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda.
In outlining its strategy, the document argues that the US faces three "major type" of terrorist threats: "Legacy Islamiast Terrorists," such as al-Qaeda and ISIS; "Narcoterrorists" that sell illegal drugs; and "Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists."
When it comes to the purported domestic left-wing threats, the document says the administration will "prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist."
"We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home," the document adds, "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."
The document makes no mention of the threat posed by members of right-wing groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, many of whom received pardons from President Donald Trump in 2025 for their role in violently storming the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
A report published last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, while left-wing political violence has grown since Trump's first election in 2016, it "remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers."
Journalist Ken Klippenstein reported on Wednesday that the strategy "is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration."
Digging into the details of the document, Klippenstein said it was essentially a strategy for prosecuting "pre-crime," which he noted "aims to build cases against people for what they might do, most ominously based on speech or beliefs."
At the end of his analysis, Klippenstein warned that the document makes clear "the global War on Terror has come home."
The counterterrorism strategy document builds on the framework established by National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by Trump in September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
Rights groups have for months been sounding the alarm about the implications of NSPM-7, which they said could be used to initiative a widespread crackdown against the Trump administration’s critics.
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When Thought Becomes Record in the Age of AI
How a court footnote, retention orders, interagency data sharing, and the government's own words reveal what happens when we pour private thought into a chatbot.
Apr 18, 2026
Last month, a sentence went viral claiming that if you type into a chatbot, the FBI can get everything. The claim was too broad. The truth may be narrower, and worse.
Worse, because what is at stake is not some dramatic collapse of privacy. It is a daily practice so ordinary that most people do not even register it as exposure. Thought leaves a protected setting, enters a consumer platform, becomes a record, and then falls under rules the user did not write and will almost never see. Catastrophes announce themselves. Habits do not. Habits become infrastructure before the public notices what has changed.
This essay walks through six documents: a footnote, two preservation orders, an executive order on interagency sharing, a national security memorandum, and a budget request. Read one by one, each can be minimized. Read together, they describe an apparatus already in motion, and a desk already inside it.
A conversation is something you have. A record is something someone else keeps. The text box in front of you now performs both functions at once. It feels like conversation. It can become record.
I. The First Shift: When Thinking Starts Looking Like Disclosure
In United States v. Heppner, decided in the Southern District of New York on February 17, 2026, Judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote in a footnote: "But even if certain information that Heppner input into Claude was privileged, he waived the privilege by sharing that information with Claude and Anthropic, just as if he had shared it with any other third party."
Read that again, slowly. Speed helps disguise the act.
What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
The footnote does not say the attorney-client relationship dissolves because a chatbot exists. It says something narrower, and more unsettling. Whatever Heppner himself carried out of a protected setting and voluntarily shared with Claude could lose privilege the way material shared with any other third party can lose privilege. The room remains protected. What leaves the room may not.
That is old doctrine meeting a new habit. The danger lies in the habit's ordinariness. A doctrine once applied to deliberate disclosure becomes harsher when the third party is a text box millions of people treat as an extension of private thought.
People use consumer chatbots to think through problems, including legal ones. They paste in memos, summaries, draft language, and questions they cannot yet frame in legal terms. Some of that material originated with counsel. Some did not. Not every exchange is privileged. That is not the point. The point is that the text box does not sort those categories for the user, and the user often does not sort them either. The platform feels intimate, immediate, and close enough to thought that the act often does not register as disclosure.
That is the shift. Most users do not believe they are sharing protected material with a third party. They believe they are working privately through a problem. The platform may not honor that distinction. The court may not honor it. The state may not honor it either.
The Heppner footnote may not survive appeal, but the pattern it marks does not depend on its survival. Carpenter v. United States points in a different direction on digital third-party records. A split among district courts is already visible. But appellate uncertainty is not protection in the meantime. Courts sort doctrine on one timetable. Institutions build systems on another. Retention practices, routing rules, and interagency structures can harden before doctrine settles.
The legal tracks must stay distinct. Privilege is not work product. Work product is not Fourth Amendment privacy. Privacy is not retention. Retention is not acquisition. Acquisition by warrant is not acquisition by administrative subpoena or interagency sharing. The sequence that follows does not require those categories to collapse. It requires only that, in practice, they begin to converge in ways that steadily weaken user control.
A ruling declaring that every chatbot exchange destroys privilege would trigger immediate alarm. A footnote this quiet does not. That is why the narrower reading is worse. It marks an ordinary act, repeated every day by people who think they are thinking privately when, in legal effect, they may be disclosing.
The public paraphrase overstated the law. The law understated the habit. Once that shift comes into view, the next question follows: What happens when the record no longer belongs to the person who created it?
II. The Record Leaves Your Hands
The Heppner footnote did not arrive alone. It arrived inside a pattern. The pattern matters more than the sentence.
Courts are sorting several adjacent questions the public keeps collapsing into one. One week before Heppner, in Warner v. Gilbarco, the Eastern District of Michigan rejected the claim that using ChatGPT to work through litigation material automatically destroyed work-product protection. Roughly six weeks later, Morgan v. V2X in the District of Colorado widened the split rather than closing it, recognizing Rule 26(b)(3) protection for AI-assisted material prepared by a pro se litigant while still imposing disclosure obligations and cautioning against uploading confidential information into mainstream AI systems.
Read together, these cases do not settle AI in the abstract. They suggest that courts are sorting channels, control, supervision, and institutional setting. Where the law sees counsel, protective orders, and defined litigation materials, it can still imagine a protected path. Where it sees voluntary disclosure into a consumer platform outside counsel's direction, the protection thins. A law firm inside a controlled environment gets one reading. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription gets another. Ordinary users behave as though the boundary were settled in their favor. It is not. Uncertainty does not reduce the risk. It enlarges it.
Then the preservation orders deepen the problem. Once material becomes platform record, the user no longer controls the baseline that governs how long it exists or when it can be reached.
People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not.
On May 13, 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, Judge Ona Wang entered a preserve-and-segregate order covering a vast population of user logs. On January 5, 2026, Judge Sidney Stein affirmed production of a 20 million de-identified log sample. His reasoning matters as much as the scale. He wrote that users' privacy interests in that material were weaker than in wiretapped phone calls because the users had voluntarily disclosed the contents to a platform that retained them in the ordinary course of business.
The point is not that one company lost a fight. The point is that deletion baselines can change outside the user's control. They can change in litigation the user is not party to, in a courtroom the user has never heard of, without notice to the person whose records are being kept. The later announcement that the broad preservation obligation ended does not erase that point. It confirms it. The baseline moved once. It can move again.
Even if the Heppner footnote falls on appeal, the preservation and retention architecture does not fall with it. Privilege doctrine is one track. Retention defaults are another, governed by platform terms, contract law, litigation holds, and administrative process. The constitutional fight may proceed in one courtroom while the records keep being kept in another.
Retention exposure is not uniform across users. When OpenAI's broad preservation obligation was in effect, it excluded Enterprise accounts, Edu accounts, and API customers who had contracted for Zero Data Retention. The organizations and professionals with resources to buy safer configurations could obtain them. Ordinary users on consumer accounts could not.
That stratification is a structural feature of the platform layer, not an accident of one lawsuit. Law firms can buy protected configurations. A person at a kitchen table with a monthly subscription cannot. Before the first subpoena arrives, before the first interagency route opens, before any category written into National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) is applied to anyone, the exposure is already stratified by who can afford which tier. That stratification will track the sorting that follows.
Retention is not government acquisition. It is the prior condition that makes acquisition possible. People still imagine their chat history exists inside a promise. It does not. It exists inside a current default, and defaults are fragile. A judge can change them. A litigation hold can change them. A production order can change them. The user often learns that only after the fact, if at all. Once a record can be kept, the next question is how it begins to move.
III. The State Has Already Built the Routes
On March 20, 2025, the White House issued an executive order with a title that sounds like office management: "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos." The word "silo" sounds bureaucratic and dull. That is part of its function. It makes a structural change sound merely administrative. The key word is "eliminating."
Taken on its own, the order does not compel any single disclosure. Yet it plainly directs movement. It tells agency heads to ensure that designated officials receive full and prompt access to unclassified records, data, software, and IT systems. It authorizes sharing and consolidation within and across agencies. It calls for unfettered access to comprehensive data from state programs that receive federal funding, to the maximum extent consistent with law. The order treats the seams between agencies not as safeguards, but as obstacles. Boring language often carries the heaviest load because it is designed to pass without alarm. Usually, it does.
Administrative routing does not require a courtroom. It does not require a warrant. It requires an interagency agreement and a technical connection. Once that connection exists, records move under rules the user does not see, into hands the user did not anticipate, for purposes the user was never asked to weigh. Quietly at first. Then routinely. Then as a matter of course.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases.
That matters more when other forms of process reduce friction further. Washington Post reporting in February 2026 described the Department of Homeland Security's use of administrative subpoenas at volumes that experts and former staff estimated in the thousands or tens of thousands. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) litigation, including Doe v. DHS, added specific challenged cases to that pattern. Administrative subpoenas are not new. What matters is their operational use: speed, breadth, and limited front-end judicial review.
A system that can demand material quickly behaves differently from one that must persuade a judge before the process begins. A system that does not require a judge at the front end is not meaningfully slowed when a judge at the back end issues a clarifying opinion three years later. By then, the records have moved, and the institutional lesson has been learned.
The warrants aimed at journalist Hannah Natanson reveal the same pattern from another angle. Their significance is not that journalists are uniquely vulnerable. It is that Natanson's case was legible. She had a national byline. Her case could be read, tracked, and contested in public.
Most cases will not look like that. Most people caught in expanding process will be organizers, students, immigrants, and members of communities sorted first under every previous expansion of federal attention. They will not have a national employer or a legal defense fund. Their names will not trend. Their records will still move. The unreadable cases are the condition. The visible ones are the narrow window through which the rest of us glimpse it.
Names matter less than architecture. Replace any one official and the route still exists the next morning. The Information Silos order still stands. The subpoena posture still matters. The warrant machinery still works. Personnel matter. Architecture matters more.
Once a state can create records, keep them, and move them with reduced friction, it no longer waits passively for events to arrive in fully formed cases. It gains the practical ability to sort, correlate, and escalate before the public sees any full story. From there, the next question is unavoidable: What kinds of people has the state already told itself to look for?
IV. The Categories Are Already on the Page
The most revealing documents in this essay are not leaked. They are posted. The apparatus does not need secrecy for the first stages of this work. It can describe itself in public because the public rarely reads primary documents until the output becomes undeniable.
Start with NSPM-7, issued on September 25, 2025, under the title "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence." Read that title carefully. "Domestic terrorism" is one phrase. "Organized political violence" is another. The memorandum joins them into a single operational field. A category this wide gives agencies room to sort more conduct, posture, and association than the public usually imagines when it hears the word "terrorism."
The FBI's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request, submitted in March 2026, translates that field into administrative appetite. On page 13, the request states that violent conduct in the United States commonly relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. That ideological enumeration is the budget's own language. NSPM-7 supplies the broader "investigate, prosecute, and disrupt" frame within which it operates. The categories are framed in terms of political disposition and affiliation rather than completed acts.
Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for.
Appetite alone does not move records. A vehicle does. The same request names it: the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center, composed of personnel from 10 agencies, which the budget says will integrate intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors.
That phrase matters. Proactive identification of networks is not the same as investigating a specific act after a complaint, a tip, or an arrest. The language moves upstream, away from completed acts and toward recurrent motivations, indicia, and network mapping. When the categories guiding that work are framed in ideological and cultural terms, network mapping does not remain confined to the individuals at any given node. It extends outward. That is how categories begin to function as engines. Broad markers, interagency routes, and a budget request for advance identification: That is the combination now on the page.
These documents do not prove that every citizen who holds one or more of these views is already under active federal investigation. They prove something serious enough. They show that the administration has formalized a broader operational category than most citizens realize, paired it with interagency movement of information, and requested funding for proactive identification under that category. The concern is not a proven dragnet. The concern is that the categories, routes, and funding streams are now broad enough to normalize sorting before a complete individualized case exists.
Kash Patel's name appears on a cover page. Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Todd Blanche occupy familiar nodes of power. Those offices matter. But the signature is not the explanation. It is the citation. The explanation is the architecture written into policy, budget language, and routing authority. That architecture will outlast the current roster, and most of the litigation currently aimed at one footnote inside it. Once categories are written, routes are built, and funding is requested, somebody meets them first.
V. Broad Powers Never Land Evenly
In American practice, that somebody is rarely random. Broad security language rarely falls evenly. It reaches certain communities first, long before the public agrees on what the category means or whom it is for. That is not incidental to the history. That is the history.
The recent treatment of students and faculty involved in campus Palestine solidarity shows the first mechanism clearly: label before case. Visa revocations, detention, and removal proceedings have moved ahead of any settled public showing of unprotected conduct. The label comes first. The individualized case comes later, if it comes at all. That is what proactive identification looks like when policy language leaves the page and lands on a life.
The Stop Cop City prosecutions show the second mechanism: association widening exposure. Protest activity, bail funds, and mutual aid networks were drawn into racketeering and domestic terrorism frames that stretched beyond any single completed act. Once the state begins to map relation, exposure no longer stops where conduct stops. It moves through contact, support, and nearness itself.
The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
Standing Rock shows the third mechanism: records and suspicion moving across institutions. Federal agencies, state police, and private contractors shared surveillance functions across the very seams liberal legal culture likes to treat as safeguards. The point is that, in practice, observations, records, and suspicions moved across a cooperative field. The Information Silos order does not invent that logic. It removes more of its friction.
The post September 11 surveillance of Muslim American communities shows the oldest mechanism: population sorting before any specific act. Whole communities were subjected to preemptive scrutiny because of religion, association, and presumed risk. That template did not disappear when the emergency rhetoric faded. It remained ready for new technologies, new authorizations, new words, and new enemies.
Taken together, these examples reveal recurring forms, not isolated abuses: label before case, association widening exposure, records moving across institutions, populations sorted in advance. None of this depends on a future court adopting the broadest possible reading of Heppner. The apparatus already knows how to work on bodies, files, and communities.
What is new is not the appetite to sort, but the route by which sorting begins. The newest entry point into an old machinery does not arrive with sirens or boots at the door. It arrives as invitation. It arrives as convenience. It arrives as a blinking cursor.
VI. The Text Box Is the Last Voluntary Step
That cursor sits in a text box. That is where the sequence begins, not in a courtroom, not in a budget request, not in a raid after the fact. It begins here, at the tips of your fingers.
Once the record leaves your hands, the rest unfolds elsewhere: in retention policies you did not write, in orders you will never see, in routes built to reduce friction, in agencies already widening the categories through which they read the public. What felt private a moment ago enters systems that are not private at all.
By this point, the sequence should be visible. Ordinary use turns thought into record. Record is kept under terms the user does not control. Kept records travel along routes designed to reduce friction. They enter a state that has already begun defining, in public, the kinds of subjects it intends to sort before complete individualized stories arrive. None of those steps depends on whether one district court footnote survives appellate review. Each proceeds under its own authority and on its own timetable.
Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
That is why civic literacy now matters at a different level. It is one of the few ways a citizen can see the structure before its output reaches him in a form he can no longer mistake. By the time most people encounter the apparatus as event, surprise is no defense. The route already existed. The category already existed. The records already existed.
That is also why the answer cannot be private caution alone. No defensive posture at one desk can interrupt an architecture built at the level of routes, retention, and category. The venues where architecture is contested are collective: civil liberties litigation at organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; investigative reporting willing to read the documents before the output reaches the front page; and legislative pressure aimed at retention, at sharing, and at the scope of process. That is where the sequence can still be slowed. That is where it can still be narrowed. That is where it can still be broken.
The point is no longer just to be cautious at the desk. The point is to understand what the desk now connects to. Once thought becomes record, and record becomes retainable, movable, sortable, the problem is no longer private. It is structural.
The text box may feel like a place to think. It is also becoming a place where thought changes hands.
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White House Budget Details FBI Office Dedicated to Spying on Those Who Oppose Trump's 'Extremist Agenda'
"If your political views are practically anything other than MAGA, you’re on notice, courtesy of the FBI," said journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Apr 07, 2026
Along with cutting environmental, housing, and health programs and proposing an increase of nearly $500 billion in military spending, President Donald Trump's new budget proposal shows how the White House "wants to use taxpayer dollars to spy on those who oppose its extremist agenda," one Democratic congresswoman said Monday evening.
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Penn.) was referring to the budget's description of a new FBI center that is already working to root out what the White House broadly defined as "domestic terrorism" in a federal memo last year.
As independent journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote this week, buried in Trump's budget request—which includes $12.5 billion for the FBI to invest in counterterrorism efforts and other spending—is the White House's latest assertion that "domestic terrorists... pose an elevated threat to the Homeland."
"In recent years, heinous assassinations and other acts of political violence in the United States have dramatically increased," reads the budget's section on domestic terrorism. "Commonly, this violent conduct relates to views associated with anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility to those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and mortality."
The views described echo National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the memo signed last September that directed federal agencies to develop a national strategy to "investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence" in order to stop violent attacks before they happen.
But despite the administration's singular focus on groups and individuals who hold left-wing, anti-capitalism views and subscribe to belief systems other than Christianity, the National Institute of Justice found that since 1990, 227 attacks motivated by right-wing views killed 520 people, while far-left groups carried out 42 attacks that killed 78 people. The NIJ study was removed from the US Department of Justice website shortly after the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk—an event that Trump explicitly blamed on left-wing groups without evidence, and which came weeks before the signing of NSPM-7.
The budget proposal explains that as a result of NSPM-7, the FBI recently created the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center (JMC), which is run by personnel from 10 federal agencies.
"The JMC is working to counter domestic terrorism and organized political violence by integrating intelligence operational support, and financial analysis to proactively identify networks and prosecute domestic terrorist and related criminal actors," reads the proposal.
Scanlon is one of a small number of elected Democrats who have spoken out about NSPM-7 in congressional hearings and media interviews.
"If anyone can be labeled a domestic terrorist for speech opposing this administration, our First Amendment rights are under grave threat," said Scanlon recently.
Klippenstein noted that the budget document describes social media platforms and encrypted communications apps as being used by "domestic terrorists" to "recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”
FBI Director Kash Patel told Congress that anyone who used the Discord channels used by Tyler Robinson, who was accused of killing Kirk, would be investigated by the agency.
Klippenstein noted that the FBI's domestic terrorism watchlist, which as of last September listed about 5,000 US citizens, reportedly "is growing."
"If your political views are practically anything other than MAGA, you’re on notice, courtesy of the FBI," Klippenstein wrote.
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Trump FBI and IRS Team Up to Probe US Nonprofit Groups for 'Domestic Terrorism' Links
"This is repression carried out by the state for electoral purposes. It's about stamping out your objections to their autocratic aims," said one critic.
Mar 18, 2026
A Wednesday CBS News report claimed that the FBI and Internal Revenue Service are "forming a new initiative to investigate nonprofit organizations over suspected possible links to domestic terrorism."
According to CBS News, the new initiative is the agencies' response to a December memo written by Attorney General Pam Bondi requiring the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse "extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment."
A government official told CBS News that the FBI-IRS initiative would focus on "exploring potential funding streams at nonprofits that support domestic terrorism or political violence."
But Tom Brzozowski, former domestic terrorism counsel at the DOJ's National Security Division, told CBS News he was concerned by the broad scope of investigatory activities outlined in Bondi's memo, and he questioned whether the DOJ had established the proper predication to justify amassing a list of nonprofit groups to be targeted in a criminal probe.
"If you're going to pull down information and retain it in a government data set, you have to have predication to do that," Brzozowski emphasized, "especially if you're looking at it through an investigative lens."
Bondi's December memo was written in response to National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Donald Trump in September that demanded a "national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts."
Rights groups have for months been sounding the alarm about the implications of NSPM-7, which they said could be used to initiative a widespread crackdown against the Trump administration's critics.
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of Campaign for New York Health, wrote that news of the FBI-IRS initiative was a "periodic reminder that Trump’s DOJ changed the indicators of domestic terrorism to include pro-immigrant, pro-LBTQ, anti-Trump, and anti-capitalist speech."
Journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote that the FBI's initiative with the IRS shows it's "trying to criminalize dissent over protecting against Islamic and antisemitic terrorism that Trump has stoked with his illegal war" against Iran.
Journalist Diego Fonseca noted that going after nonprofit groups has long been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes seeking to consolidate power.
"[Salvadoran President Nayib] Bukele has treated nongovernmental organizations as 'foreign agents,'" Fonseca observed, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán "has a 'Transparency Law' targeting civil society orgs. Left or right, it’s the authoritarian playbook: round up and paralyze any possible criticism."
Matt Ortega, a Democrat running to represent California's 14th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives, warned that the FBI-IRS initiative was a sign of a widespread crackdown against political opposition.
"They called Alex Pretti a 'domestic terrorist' and only backtracked because witnesses had NFL-like coverage of the incident," Ortega wrote. "This is repression carried out by the state for electoral purposes. It's about stamping out your objections to their autocratic aims."
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