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You’ve probably never heard of NSPM-7. And you most certainly never heard of NSPM-6 — because it was classified.
But President Trump openly published National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, on WhiteHouse.gov, ordering the full force of the U.S. government to target individuals who display “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality” — all in the name of counterterrorism.
Yes, that’s a real national-security directive that guides the FBI, DHS, Treasury, and Defense. It’s still sitting in plain sight on the official White House website — and it appears designed to go after Trump’s opposition, or really, any free speech that doesn’t adhere to the Trump agenda. It comes on the heels of the designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.
The sweeping memo orders agencies “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.”
Independent investigative journalist
, who first spotted it, told me he almost couldn’t believe it was real. For two full days, no one — not the cable networks, not the major papers — noticed. And still, so little has been reported on it. Klippenstein said I was one of the most prominent journalists to interview him about it — which is exactly why we need to support this kind of independent journalism.“Their Own 9/11”
“The Trump administration perceives—this is what I’m told by people in the national security apparatus that works with them—they felt the [Charlie] Kirk assassination to have been their own 9/11,” Klippenstein said. “And they’ve responded to it in the same way, where we’re going to unleash this huge system to prevent the next attack.”
That means joint terrorism task forces — repurposed toward American citizens.
From “Terrorists” to “Threats”
Under NSPM-7, the Terrorist Screening Center created in response to 9/11 was quietly renamed the Threat Screening Center. It sounds bureaucratic, but it’s a seismic shift: terrorists are now just one subset of national-security threats. The new language widens the government’s surveillance aperture to include Americans with political views that deviate from “traditional American views.”
“The system has always been secretive,” he said. “We have never known who’s on the watch list or even the criteria for the watch list. But that was deemed necessary after 9/11 because the threat at the time was seen to be so great that we need to do this. But those authorities were never given up. And now they’re being applied to a new set of suspects and they’re Americans.”
The Human Cost: FBI Visits and Arrests Without Charges
Klippenstein detailed several cases in which protesters were detained or interrogated under this new framework — from an ICE protester in Arizona who received a surprise FBI visit, to a Chicago man with a legal concealed-carry permit at a “No Kings” protest who was labeled an “armed Antifa terrorist,” held and interrogated for a day in an ICE facility with no charges filed.
The effect is chilling: one protester told Ken he skipped the recent “No Kings” demonstration because he was too afraid after an FBI knock at his door.
Powered by Palantir and AI
Klippenstein also warned of the AI surveillance infrastructure rapidly expanding under Trump’s direction. He described DHS’s new “AI Corps,” which is deploying Palantir-style data systems across ICE and Customs & Border Protection — software capable of sweeping social-media sentiment analysis and flagging ordinary speech as suspicious.
“It’s like having this eye of Sauron,” he said, “that can just look around and see anything immediately and so there needs to be strong guardrails in place.”
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What comes next is even more chilling.
Below the fold, I break down:
Who is working on the Trump administration’s secret watch list.
What Ken Klippenstein uncovered about the domestic surveillance system now expanding.
And how Congress has been kept in the dark — even members of the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.
Subscribe to read the full story and watch my interview with independent investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein →
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