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It is important to recognize that the removal of Bovino, and Noem from Minneapolis is a product of the heroic resistance the people of that city have shown in the face of the assault by Trump’s neo-fascist ICE thugs. It is a small victory. But Tom Holman is no step forward as the author explains below. Admin
"Border Czar" Tom Holman
Holman, Bovino, Noem Three Peas in the Same Pod
By Mary Scully
To calm down the volatile situation created by ICE storm troopers in Minneapolis, Trump sidelined Homeland Security head Kristi Noem and removed Gregory Bovino from his role as head of the Minnesota operation. He also shut down Bovino's social media account where he portrayed immigrants as thugs and boasted of his crimes against them. To replace Bovino, Trump sent in Tom Homan, the former head of ICE whom Trump calls his 'border czar', to assume command of ICE in Minneapolis. It's an act that brings to mind the fable of the scorpion and the frog. Like the scorpion, Homan has a malevolent character and history that will bring no security to immigrants but perhaps some solace to the local politicians.
Homan has been with ICE since it was created in 2003 and was brought into federal immigration control in 2013 by then president Obama. He was brought in because as The Washington Post reported in 2017, "Thomas Homan deports people. And he's really good at it." The Obama White House even honored Homan in 2015 with some kind of award for deporting undocumented immigrants. Over his two terms, Obama deported at least 3 million immigrants--more than any other president in US history according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.
Homan's whole white supremacist schtick is the deportation of immigrants. It must be emphasized that it is a wretchedly anti-working class policy because immigrants with means have always been able to immigrate to the US without impediment. It was Homan who cooked up and formally proposed the policy of family separation, of tearing children from their parents and warehousing them in inhumane detention centers to deter people from crossing the border. In that policy, there was no accountability and parents lost contact with where their children were. In other words, Homan is a psychopath.
Homan did well under Obama. He is also the kind of psychopath that ideally suits the ethos of the Trump administration. Trump is a felon with a history of raping young girls. That's why it was no problem to hire a rapist to direct the 'Melania' documentary or to elevate the political status of Homan who in 2024 was caught in an FBI contracts-for-cash sting when he accepted a bag with $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen. He anticipated raking in millions by accepting bribes from border security companies in exchange for government contracts. The FBI sting was a part of investigating the allegations. In 2025, after Trump was elected, his Department of Justice closed down the investigation citing insufficient evidence.
The 'border czar' was not sent to Minneapolis because Trump is reconsidering mass deportations or planning on toning down the assaults on immigrants. It's a temporizing gesture to calm down politicians and make it look like he's retreating somewhat. But Homan will not stop ICE agents from violating immigrant rights or flouting the Bill of Rights and continuing to hunt them down like wild animals. He will probably stop them from killing protesters.
Immigrants are not safe under the tenure of Tom Homan. They will only be safe when ICE is shut down and the Bill of Rights is enforced. That may take a revolution.
We’ve broken lots of major stories about ICE this month, but we’re just getting started (I have more leaked documents than time to write them up!) Help make sure we have the resources to get these stories out by becoming a paid subscriber.
“We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist,” a masked federal agent taunted a protester filming him in Maine last week.
Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s response was firm: “There is NO database of ‘domestic terrorists’ run by DHS.”
There’s just one problem: She’s lying.
Two senior national security officials tell me that there are more than a dozen secret and obscure watchlists that homeland security and the FBI are using to track protesters (both anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian), “Antifa,” and others who are promiscuously labeled “domestic terrorists.”
I can reveal for the first time that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).
Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States. Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.
There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail.
“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watchlist to eliminate confusion, duplication and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” says a DHS attorney intimately familiar with the subject. The attorney spoke on the agreement that their identity not be disclosed.
Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watchlist of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watchlist of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watchlist of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade.
The new domestic-related watchlists—a set of databases and applications—exist inside and outside the FBI and are used by agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol to organize the Niagara of information in possession of the federal government. Collectively, they create ways to sort, analyze, and search information, a task that even artificial intelligence has failed to conquer (so far).
Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.
Administration officials have alluded to all of this, though contrary to the Hollywood idea of some all-seeing eye, actual government watchlists are more a patchwork system of lists and applications, each of which might have individual justification or even legitimate purpose to aid law enforcement but overall form the basis for massive violations of American civil rights.
“One thing I’m pushing for right now … we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding and assault, we’re going to make them famous,” Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, told Fox News earlier this month.
Watchlists in general fly in the face of the spirit of the Constitution and the protections it’s supposed to embody against unreasonable search and seizure, and relating to the right of privacy.
“The very essence of the ‘list’ is its secrecy and its lack of any opportunity for the listed to be heard,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter said of a Justice Department list of subversives during the Red Scare. “It is the shrouding of the process in a veil of secrecy that is the most offensive to our democratic traditions.”
Now, the national security community has developed an interlocking set of lists and applications that are secret not just to the public but opaque to most who toil in the federal agencies themselves. Asked about the watchlists, a Border Patrol agent recounted to me how they punch their data into their own proprietary application, not really knowing what happens after that.
Again, these watchlists aren’t the all-seeing eye of Sauron that many imagine. They’re more like the compound eye of a fly, a fragmented array of lenses (over 3,000 per eye in the common housefly!) that collectively form a mosaic. That mosaic—the ability to unify all the disparate lists into one master picture—doesn’t yet exist, sources tell me. That, however, is the direction we’re going, especially with software packages like Palantir that can be customized to aggregate all that is collected.
“We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement,” says McLaughlin. “Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.”
Impeding federal law enforcement has emerged as the Trump administration’s primary justification for actions against people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
As part of its new effort to support its operations in places like Minneapolis and Los Angeles, the Homeland Security Department, working with the Justice Department, has started more methodically tracking what it calls “aggressive protesters.” According to one senior official, this is a new designation the agency uses to describe the supposed threat posed by people on the streets.
Both Good and Pretti were considered aggressive protesters; in Good’s case, for criticizing ICE officers while operating a vehicle; and in Pretti’s case, getting up close to immigration officers while filming them.
Alex Pretti filming a Border Patrol agent
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alluded to the term in a recent CNN interview, saying: “He [Alex Pretti] was not protesting peacefully—he was screaming in the face of ICE, he had a phone up right into ICE’s face. You tell me: is that protesting peacefully?”
When the CNN host pointed out that Pretti wasn’t violent, Blanche actually agreed, but went on to argue that there’s a third category for protest that is neither violent nor peaceful.
“I did not say that he was violent,” Blanche interjected, adding: “I said that he was not protesting peacefully.”
When I asked civil liberties experts what might be the legal justification for the expanded watchlisting, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program director said that NSPM-7 and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 5 memo implementing the presidential directive “might be their justification.”
Under the Privacy Act, Levinson-Waldman explains, the government is prohibited from collecting and retaining information about Americans exercising their First Amendment rights. There can exceptions to that, but the question is whether DHS and FBI have articulated which exceptions they believe apply here.
The DHS lawyer, who helped to reveal the many secret watchlists and applications that are now being built and used to create the new American dragnet, says that sorting out the data being collected—rather than some explicit order to collect the data—is what’s driving the process.
“We over collect and everyone agrees we should create this or that list or application to wrestle the information to submission lest we miss something important,” the lawyer said. “So the data people do their thing and pretty soon you actually have Big Brother.”
A senior intelligence official, who confirmed the existence of the watchlists described earlier, characterized the problem another way.
“Lists of this and that—this social media post, that video taken of someone videoing ICE, the mere attendance at a protest—gets pulsed by federal cops on the beat to check for criminality but eventually just becomes a list itself of criminality, with the cops thinking that indeed they are dealing with criminals and terrorists.”
“Watchlists, and the whole watchlisting process, should be as transparent as possible, not the other way around. If we don’t explore more why all of these secret lists exist, even more of an environment of paranoia on the ground and more tragic killings.”
Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
Michael Jochum
This is where we are now: a sitting member of Congress is physically attacked in public, at a town hall, in her own city, in front of her constituents, with a syringe of unknown liquid, and the White House responds with silence, smears, and conspiracy theories. Ilhan Omar is sprayed with a brown liquid by a grown man who walks straight up to her in Minneapolis, is tackled by security, arrested, booked, and instead of presidential condemnation, moral clarity, or even the bare minimum of human decency, we get Trump sneering that she probably staged it herself. Not even a dog whistle anymore, just a bullhorn of cruelty, stupidity, and moral rot.
Let’s be absolutely clear about the atmosphere this administration has engineered: months of dehumanizing rhetoric, racist caricatures, open contempt for Somali immigrants, public mockery of Omar by name, calling her community “garbage,” calling them “low IQ,” describing Somalia as not even a real country, accusing “Somali gangs” of terrorizing Minnesota, threatening protected status, ranting about them at Cabinet meetings, humiliating them on international stages, and turning an entire immigrant community into a political punching bag. This is not policy. This is incitement culture. This is narrative grooming. This is how you teach unstable people who already hate to feel justified, righteous, and heroic in their violence. This is how stochastic terrorism works, you don’t give the order, you create the permission structure.
And then it happens. A syringe. A public attack. A live-streamed assault on a congresswoman at a community meeting held in the shadow of another tragedy, the killing of ICU nurse Alex Pretti by federal officers, and the president of the United States responds not with leadership, not with condemnation, not with unity, not even with restraint, but with mockery, denial, and lies. “She probably had herself sprayed.” That’s the level of degeneracy we’re dealing with. A sitting president blaming the victim of a political attack. A man who has spent years calling Omar a fraud, a traitor, an outsider, and a target, now pretending innocence while soaking in the chaos he creates.
This is the ecosystem of violence Trump has cultivated: demonize, dehumanize, discredit, deny. Rinse and repeat. When violence follows, he shrugs, smirks, and pours more gasoline. His administration doesn’t govern, it radicalizes. It doesn’t lead, it provokes. It doesn’t protect, it targets. And every racist insult, every “low IQ” jab, every dehumanizing slur, every public humiliation of Somali immigrants, every lie about Omar is a brick in the road that leads directly to moments like this.
Ilhan Omar stood back up, unhurt, defiant, resilient, and said she wouldn’t be intimidated. Good. But the fact that she had to is the indictment. The fact that we’re watching elected officials get physically attacked while the president fuels hatred and mocks the victims is the indictment. The fact that entire communities are being painted as criminal, stupid, subhuman, and disposable by the highest office in the country is the indictment.
This isn’t politics anymore. It’s moral collapse. It’s leadership failure. It’s state-sponsored cruelty. It’s a culture of incitement masquerading as governance. And the most obscene part is the gaslighting afterward, the pretending that Trump’s words don’t matter, that rhetoric isn’t real, that dehumanization doesn’t translate into action, that violence just “happens” in a vacuum.
It doesn’t. It’s built. It’s fed. It’s cultivated. It’s encouraged. And it is owned.
You don’t get to spend months attacking a woman, her faith, her ethnicity, her community, her legitimacy, her humanity, and then act surprised when someone decides to act it out physically. You don’t get to poison the well and pretend the water didn’t make people sick. You don’t get to light the match and deny the fire.
This is what Trump’s America looks like: violence normalized, cruelty excused, racism mainstreamed, victims mocked, and leadership replaced by spite. A president who doesn’t calm the country, he destabilizes it. Who doesn’t protect communities, he weaponizes hatred against them. Who doesn’t condemn violence, he metabolizes it.
And a nation watching, horrified, grieving, angry, exhausted, knowing exactly where this came from, even as the man responsible keeps pretending his hands are clean while they drip with rhetorical blood.
Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition
There is one important point I want to make. Do not limit your criticism or blame solely to the degenerate serial sexual abuser and felon Donald Trump. This is a crisis of the system. It has been ongoing no matter which Wall Street party is in power. The US Congress is as guilty as Trump or the fascistic Noem for this murder and many before it including the millions that have died due to US capitalism's predatory wars. There was a general strike in Minneapolis in 1934. It would be a historic moment for US workers and the world for the second one to occur and call on all US cities to follow suit.
If you are in a union and are not in a political battle for the transformation of these organisations that our ancestors built, a transformation to remove the class collaborationist clique that has captured the leadership, you are failing your membership and the working class as a whole. You are failing your children and grandchildren.
Any local union leadership that claims to be in opposition to the status quo must call for a unity with all workers at home and abroad, unity with our communities, the unorganised and immigrants, undocumented or not. Working people have the power, we have the ability to confront this big business offensive and build a better world that every worker regardless of background desires.
The demand to assimilate into British culture carries a peculiar weight, for it begs a question that is rarely answered satisfactorily: what, precisely, is this culture you must join? To claim there is none is not a denial of history or tradition, but an observation of its fundamental character. British culture is not a finished portrait to be admired and replicated; it is a living
palimpsest, constantly being written over, with old lines faintly visible beneath the new.
For centuries, the very idea of Britishness was forged through incomers and influences. The Romans, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans did not arrive to find a pristine, static culture. They each brought their language, laws, and customs, which tangled with what was there before to create something new. The British culinary staple of fish and chips was born from Jewish immigrant traditions. The language itself is a magnificent ragbag of stolen words and adapted grammar. To speak of an unchanging British culture is to ignore the tumultuous, creative process that built it.
Today, the paradox becomes stark. When communities are challenged for their supposed incompatibility, which Britain is the benchmark? The pastoral nostalgia of the village green? The post industrial grit of the mill towns? The bustling, globalised reality of its major cities? The culture of the pub, but not the curry house that now stands beside it? The culture of queueing, but not the vibrant street festivals that transform those same orderly streets? This selective nostalgia often elevates a narrow, romanticised version of the past, one that never truly existed for the majority, and weaponises it against the present.
Perhaps the only consistent threads in the British tapestry are not specific practices, but meta qualities: a capacity for absorption, a pragmatism forged on an island, and a famously complex relationship with change itself, characterised by both resistance and gradual acceptance. Even the celebrated British ‘sense of humour’ revolves around the subversion of expectation and the puncturing of pomp. Is it not, then, profoundly un-British to demand rigid cultural conformity?
The true provocation lies in flipping the question. Instead of asking what British culture is, we might ask what it does. Its function, throughout history, has been to adapt. The screaming about compatibility, then, often reveals less about the culture being defended and more about anxiety in the face of that inevitable evolution. It is a fear of losing a comforting, if fictional, monoculture in a world of plural identities.
To be British in spirit, then, may be to participate in that ongoing argument, to add your verse to the poem without needing to erase the lines above. It is to understand that the culture is found not in a checklist of traits, but in the shared, often messy, and contested space of creating a society together. The demand to assimilate into a phantom is a dead end. The invitation to help shape what comes next, however, is the most British tradition of all.
We’ve seen this coming. The rhetoric has been sharpening for years, and now the machinery is in motion. What began as insult—Democrats labeled as communists, Antifa, radicals—has morphed into a governing logic. The opposition is no longer just wrong; it is framed as dangerous, disloyal, un-American. The phrase “Hate America” has shifted from slur to strategy.
This is not just about name-calling. It’s about preparation. The machinery once aimed at migrants at the border has turned inward to target citizens. The same infrastructure—surveillance networks, detention centers, rapid-response units—is being repurposed for domestic repression. Anthropology teaches us that the state is not only a legal entity—it is a cultural presence, experienced through disruption, silence, and fear. Repression begins not with law, but with the quiet normalization of threat.
National Guard deployments are framed as public safety, but the intent is clear: punishment and intimidation staged for effect. These are not responses to crime; they are rehearsals in control. Legal cover is being sought not to protect rights, but to test the courts—how far can executive power stretch before it snaps? The goal is habituation: to make the presence of armed force in civic life feel routine. The state enters the neighborhood not through policy, but through performance.
October 18 is being framed not as a day of dialogue, but as a test of obedience. Protests are planned nationwide, but already the framing is hostile. Organizers are being branded as part of the “enemy within.” The phrase “Hate America” is being weaponized—not to describe foreign threats, but to smear domestic dissent.
Anthropology of ritual shows that public punishment serves to warn, to intimidate, to shape behavior. The protest becomes a stage, and the crackdown a script.
To show up, to speak, to dissent—each is recast as betrayal. Assembly becomes a threat, speech a mark of disloyalty, dissent a form of treason. Those in power present themselves as patriots and their opponents as enemies of the state. Participation itself is not only discouraged—it is criminalized.
The strategy is to divide America and persecute opponents. This is tyranny dressed up as governance. Civil rights are hollowed out, the Constitution treated as optional. Republicans, for the most part, seem to have received the memo. The silence is telling. The complicity is chilling. Repression does not produce clean lines. It produces victims—many of them unexpected.
When the social fabric is torn, it is not only the opposition that bleeds. Repression does not stop at partisanship; it sweeps up the innocent, the apolitical, the well-meaning. Your aunt, who was at the demonstration, who gives to Greenpeace because she’s against killing whales, is arrested and charged with belonging to a terrorist group. Is this really what we want? It is where we seem to be going. This is how repression works: it recasts dissent as disloyalty.
This is the anthropology of belonging. Citizenship is not just a legal status—it is cultural recognition. Repression redraws who counts as a citizen. Protestors are not merely punished; they are reclassified. The state decides who belongs and who doesn’t. That’s how exclusion works: not through formal bans, but through public warnings. Power doesn’t always declare its enemies—it performs them.
This isn’t bureaucratic drift—it’s choreography. Office closures, arrests, and rhetorical smears aren’t incidental—they’re staged. The point is not only to act, but to be seen acting. The state performs authority in ways meant to intimidate, to isolate, to instruct. The target isn’t just the protestor—it’s the bystander, the colleague, the neighbor who now hesitates. That’s how fear is cultivated: not through sweeping decrees, but through visible consequences. Power doesn’t just reside in law—it circulates through expectation, through silence, through the quiet recalibration of civic life.
The spectacle of control is deliberate. Office closures, delayed checks, suspended grants, and protest arrests are presented as proof that only one person can restore order. Governance becomes theater, with suffering turned into a civic performance. Anthropology of the state reminds us: power is not only visible in moments of violence—it is felt in the rhythms of fear.
What is at stake is not simply policy but the fabric of democratic life. When the rhythms of protest and civic participation are turned into instruments of control, government stops being a shared institution and becomes a weapon. Power works not only through force, but through the reshaping of trust, habit, and expectation. Americans are being taught to trade the expectation of rights for the uncertainty of favors. Citizenship is reduced to conditional obedience.
As the federal government begins to implement President Trump’s new national security directive to investigate the so-called radical left as domestic terrorists, a little known FBI organization, located in an affluent and leafy suburb of Northern Virginia, is at the center of it all.
Based in Vienna, just seven miles from CIA headquarters, the Threat Screening Center has a secret budget and a classified personnel count. The nondescript cluster of glass-fronted buildings has no sign out front. Even the identity of its director — FBI executive Steven McQueen, I’m told — isn’t public. (Until now.)
Behind a black fence and manicured berms, the Threat Screening Center maintains the federal government’s terrorist watchlist, created in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Today the FBI-run center is chewing on National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), Trump’s sweeping policy directive that formally directs the national security state to root out left-wing political violence by monitoring so-called indicators of violence, like “anti-Christianity,” “anti-capitalism” and “anti-Americanism,” as I’ve reported.
Though the text of NSPM-7 is public, the Threat Screening Center’s watchlisting process is a black hole. Even the criteria for how people end up on it is secret.
When Donald Trump took office, terrorist watchlist contained records of approximately 1.1 million persons, the overwhelming majority of whom were foreigners. Of that number, according to government documents I reviewed, under 6,000 (roughly half of one percent) were “U.S. persons,” defined both as American citizens and permanent residents.
A well-connected intelligence official tells me that most are Muslims suspected of desire or intent to commit “lone-wolf” attacks.
“The idea of a domestic watchlist, made up solely of radicals without foreign connections, left or right wing, is basically wrong,” the intelligence official said. He explained that many individuals might be the subject of specific investigations relating to violations of law, and there are a number of mechanisms by which the government keeps tabs on them to discover indicators of violence (and foreign connection) but up until Trump, a watchlist for Americans had never really gotten much traction.
“Is Ken Klippenstein, or any other American dissenter on the watchlist?” the official asks rhetorically. “No, and there really is no legal way for such a person to even be surveilled, let alone watchlisted, without legal predicate” — that is, without evidence that that the person has committed, or is about to commit, a crime.
“You might think that ‘about to commit’ is a loophole, but up until NSPM-7, it wasn’t,” the intelligence official said. He went on to explain that a combination of post-Watergate reforms, Congressional actions after mass-surveillance and Snowden revelations, and the FBI’s own rules, had created a web of limits.
“Until now,” he said.
Unfortunately the official continued, changes made under President Obama and Biden paved the way for the Trump expansion. First was the addition of transnational organized crime to the watchlist and second was an affirmation that the terrorist watchlist wasn’t just about terrorists anymore.
“At least not terrorists as defined by al Qaeda or ISIS,” the official said.
Then in the final weeks of the first Trump administration in 2021, the FBI quietly changed the name of the Terrorist Screening Center to the Threat Screening Center to formalize the expanding mission. But when Biden came into office just days later, the Bureau quietly changed the name back. This back-and-forth was never reported.
Then in March of this year, the Trump administration announced with little fanfare that the Terrorist Screening Center would (again) change its name to the Threat Screening Center. The reason, the administration said, was that threats had evolved beyond familiar terrorist organizations — to encompass a broader range of “national security threats” not further explained.
“As national security threats continue to evolve, the TSC has expanded beyond terrorism watchlisting and screening to address other national security threats,” the announcement said. “With expanding and growing threats, we are reflecting that in our name … The name change is a signal to the American people that the TSC is a powerful tool that can be used to fight all national security threats.”
“We’re expanding the watchlist,” FBI director Kash Patel added to the announcement. “This change will assist our law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners as we all work together toward the goal of crushing violent crime within our borders.”
In May, in a rare public reference to the Center, Patel announced that he had spent a weekend there and that beefing it up the Center one of the first things he did after becoming FBI director.
“One of the first things we did when I was sworn in as director was to strengthen the TSC’s focus on border security, in addition to growing threats abroad,” Patel said on X. “Our team has done tremendous work in this area.”
Included in Patel’s post were photos of him at the Center alongside its then-director Michael Glasheen.
Kash Patel with TSC’s then-director, Michael Glasheen (center)
Within days, Glasheen was reassigned and a new head of the Threat Screening Center appointed. The new director, I’m told, is the FBI’s former deputy assistant director Steven McQueen, a longtime counterterrorism hand.
Kash Patel standing next to new TSC director Steven McQueen
Asked for comment about the name of the director, the budget, and the number of people working there, the FBI declined comment, citing the government shutdown. (This despite the fact that the FBI is completely exempt from the shutdown, according to the Justice Department.)
Screenshot of DOJ’s FY 2026 contingency plan
“During the current lapse in appropriations, FBI operations are directed toward national security, violations of federal law, and essential public safety functions,” the Bureau told me.
Patel, in the announcement of his visit, went on to describe the Center’s mission as circulating watchlist information across the government “so that we’re better equipped to crush violent crime” — an objective that the Trump administration seems to be emphasizing more today than ever before.
Shortly after the murder of Charlie Kirk, Patel testified to Congress that he had overseen a 300% increase in domestic terrorism investigations. A large chunk of that increase, he said, is comprised of cases under the new designation “Nihilistic Violent Extremism,” a broad category that the administration plans to use to go after perceived adversaries, as I’ve reported.
At the Oval Office signing of NSPM-7, Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller made clear that the target of the directive (and the national security apparatus it is directing) was the political left.
“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism.”
Over the past several days, Miller has gone even further, labeling everything from shootings lacking any clear partisan motive to attempts to physically obstruct ICE as terrorism.
“There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country,” Miller said this weekend. “The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks.”
Doing that is a logistical feat, with the Threat Screening Center playing a central role.
“It might not be immediate, how the FBI creates the protocols and rules to create a whole new category of people to watchlist,” the intelligence official told me. “But as the Joint Terrorism Task Forces take up the charge at the local level, they will look to the TSC to internally organize and administer the new category of threats, even as the administration continues to misuse the term ‘terrorists.’”
There’s a near total media blackout on NSPM-7. Investigations like these are time consuming. Help me expose the biggest threat to civil liberties since the PATRIOT Act by becoming a paid subscriber.
With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’s being referred to as “NSPM-7” by administration insiders.
“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism,” Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance.
To the extent that the major media noticed the directive at all, they (even C-SPAN!) incorrectly labeled it an “executive order,” like this week’s designationof “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization.
Come on, C-SPAN
It’s hard to overstate how much different NSPM-7 is from the over 200 executive orders Trump has frantically signed since coming back into office.
An executive order publicly lays out the course of day-to-day federal government operations; whereas a national security directive is a sweeping policy decree for the defense, foreign policy, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus. National security directives are often secret, but in this case the Trump administration chose to publish NSPM-7 — only the seventh since he’s come into office.)
Previous national security directives have been controversial, even politically earthshaking. In 1980, for example, President Jimmy Carter signed the Top Secret Presidential Directive 59 (“PD-59”) directing new nuclear warfighting policies that persisted until the end of the Cold War. When revealed, PD-59 caused a public furor.
Declassified copy of PD 59 | Carter Library
Similarly, President George W. Bush signed a series of classified national security directives after 9/11, the most famous of which authorized NSA’s unlawful domestic intercepts, a directive that wasn’t publicly revealed until four years later.
In NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.”
NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”
In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report.
The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indica” (indicators) of violence:
anti-Americanism,
anti-capitalism,
anti-Christianity,
support for the overthrow of the United States Government,
extremism on migration,
extremism on race,
extremism on gender
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and
hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.
“The United States requires 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,” the directive states (emphasis mine).
A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.
Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover “radicalism.” (Contrary to other national security documents all during the post-Watergate era, NSPM-7 doesn’t even mention the First Amendment or the fundamental right of Americans to organize and protest.)
The focus on speech is evident throughout NSPM-7. The directive says that political violence is the result of “organized campaigns” that often begin (with the left) dehumanizing targets in “anonymous chat foras, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.”
To give a sense of how broad this formulation is, Trump’s earlier designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist group was accompanied by a White House fact sheet singling out people who “celebrated” Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December. As I wrote at the time, this describes a lot of Americans!
Trump’s new national security memorandum also alludes to Mangione but adds to it even larger categories of potential targets.
NSPM-7 is fundamentally a law enforcement directive, and it dispenses with the complications of using the active duty military or the National Guard in pursuit of political violence. It directs the Department of Justice to focus the FBI’s approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) to the new mission. The FBI network of task forces comprises over 4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers (or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies, including special agents, police officers, intelligence analysts and surveillance technicians. First established in New York City in 1980 to systematize FBI and NYPD cooperation, today there are task forces around the country, including at least one in each of the FBI’s 55 field offices.
For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level. States, cities, and local police have already signed Memoranda of Agreements with the feds to fight terrorism and officers are already assigned as task force officers.
NSPM-7 says the JTTFs “shall investigate” potential federal crimes relating to “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.” It authorizes the JTTFs to investigate individuals, organizations, and funders “responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct.”
“The Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder,” NSPM-7 says. Civil disorder?
I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda. Yes, it repeats the word “violent” over and over to purport only to go after citizens who are moved to take up arms, but it also directs monitoring and intelligence collection to map and target the new “evildoers,” to borrow a Bush label he took from the Bible just days after 9/11.
The partisan focus couldn’t be more obvious.
“The real problem is this: since Charlie [Kirk] was murdered — a friend of mine, assassinated — nothing’s changed on their side,” White House counter-terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka told Newsmax after NSPM-7 was signed. “Not one leader —not one left wing thought leader, member of Congress, Senator — nobody has said we distance ourselves from the violent rhetoric.”
“The left refuses to rid themselves of the justification for violence,” Gorka continued, “and as such, President Trump is taking measures to protect us from the violent rhetoric that becomes snipers and bullets.”
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