New reporting from Ken Klippenstein reveals details of the surveillance of Americans in an effort to prevent “domestic terrorism.” President Trump signed NSPM-7 to target “left-wing political violence.” We’re now learning more about the behaviors they’re watching for.
Klippenstein previously reported on the National Security Presidential Memorandum or NSPM-7. The memorandum seeks to root out left-wing political violence by monitoring indicators of violence. What type of behavior are they watching out for?
- anti-American
- anti-capitalist
- 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.
NSPM-7
NSPM-7 says:
“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.”
From reporting by Ken Klippenstein on Substack:
“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.”
This new directive to root out left-wing “terrorism” using such generalized “indicators” is terrifying—especially when paired with Palantir technology. It looks more like the administration’s effort to attack Trump’s political opponents.
