Ken Klippenstein

And then when you look at federal law enforcement like Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, who's the country's top cop, operationalizing this and creating an ice protection task force.

Again, you can go online and see that directive.

It's publicly available.

and she cites as its um inspiration nspm7 as its authority that it's based on as nspm7 you see that they are acting on this this is not just words and it's not just trump

It's a huge deal, not just because of the language that you were just quoting directly from the memo saying that it considers as indicators of future terrorist acts, anti-Christian sentiment, anti-government, anti-traditional family.

Some of these groups, I don't even know what they mean, anti-gender.

I mean, this is descriptors that would cover millions and millions of people in this country.

And basically what that is doing, again, it's not an executive order.

It's a

National Security Presidential Memorandum is often classified.

We're talking about NSPM 7.

NSPM 6, we don't even know what it is because it's classified.

There are very few of them.

And the reason for that is because these are sweeping strategy statements that basically tasks the entire federal government

to pursue a specific strategic goal over the remainder of the administration.

And what this one did was it told basically federal law enforcement, all of those indicators that I was just describing, pay attention to those, make terrorism cases around those, and how this is gonna be interpreted by the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies across the country is that if you make cases around this articulated priority set around these indicators of terrorism, so-called,

you're gonna get promoted, you're gonna get more resources for these things.

And so this is a big picture, 10,000 foot view look at what the administration is prioritizing going forward.

It is not the day to day of a lot of the executive orders that we've seen where they tend to focus more on small bore stuff, more on kind of ordinary daily government conduct.

This is the strategy document telling them, hey guys, this is what we're gonna be about for the next three years.

They have criteria and they have not just the list, but the terms that they use to add people to the list.

Your presence on the list isn't even known by the person.

All of this is happening in secret.

So they can see what people are doing, but the public can't see what it is that they're doing.

Now, historically, they focused on foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, groups for which you could at least make an argument that it makes sense to have this kind of an aggressive approach.

But in the case of the Trump administration,

They are convinced, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said this weekend, she said she thinks that Antifa poses the same kind of threat and is just as, quote, dangerous as those foreign terrorist organizations that I was just describing, despite the fact that it's not even clear it exists as an organized entity.

And that's not my judgment.

That is the judgment of Trump's first choice for FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom he appointed in 2017.

um so they're bringing this huge counterterrorism apparatus this post 9 11 monolith and dropping the hammer on this group which isn't clear that it exists and it is not just trump it is his administration officials as well he has the senior director for counterterrorism sebastian gorka who's also constantly saying things along these lines you just quoted stephen miller they're not particularly quiet about any of this i think that part of the reason that it hasn't gotten the attention

that it deserves is because it just sounds so crazy that I think people think that either you're being hyperbolic, even though all of this is quoted directly from that memorandum.

I'm not editorializing here.

This is all in government records that you can go online and find.

I think that is part of the reason that it hasn't got the attention.

Another part is so much of it is happening in secret, the watch listing authority that we described not being one that goes out and says, hey, here's who we're looking at, but you get clues.

FBI Director Kash Patel in testimony to Congress several weeks ago said that there is a 300% increase in domestic terrorism cases.

That is a huge increase.

And so what it is that constitutes that, we don't know because he hasn't said.

Senator Alyssa Slotkin, she's on the Armed Services Committee in the Senate, she had some good questions about this where she asked the Trump administration nominee,

for Pentagon Senior Counsel, she said, hey, this list that you have, not just for foreign terrorist organizations, but domestic groups too, this is all happening in secret.

Are you going to tell us about it?

He basically didn't answer.

But we are just getting one sign after another that this is happening.

It's not just the memorandum.

It's not just something Trump said.

You mentioned another example of something that's already happened, which is that major law firms, respected law firms in Washington,

are instructing their clients to start comporting themselves, to start speaking differently so that you don't run afoul of this memorandum and have your tax status attacked.

Have the Treasury Department look at your cash flows as it's actively doing right now in response to this memorandum.

It tells the Treasury Department, go and look at organizations that might be supporting

groups engaged in that list of indicators that I described earlier.

And as a result of that, these are not just hard left groups.

These are, according to these legal advice that I'm describing, these organizations giving to mainstream group, mainstream liberal and democratic organizations tell them, hey, you guys have got to make sure that you don't run afoul of this.

That's going to have a chilling effect on speech.

And that's something that we're already seeing happening.

In addition to that, just one day after the memorandum was issued, Attorney General Pam Bondi

issued a directive creating a anti-ICE crimes task force to protect ICE.

And throughout that directive, she cites NSPM 7.

So those are just two examples of what we have seen already in terms of material effects of this order.

The question is how much farther it's gonna go.

And to what extent it's going to activate what are called joint terrorism task forces, mostly established after 9-11, exist in all 50 states, represent thousands of federal agents.

To what extent is this going to operationalize those folks to go after the indicators that I was describing before?

Because unlike the National Guard deployments, the military is constrained by what's called posse comitatus.

So they're really limited in terms of what they can do.

That's why you see these ridiculous videos of them just wandering around picking up trash because they're really limited what their authority is.

But these Joint Terrorism Task Forces, they do not have those limitations on them and they can do and go places that the military can't.

And so I would say that's the next big question is to what extent is this memorandum going to task those Joint Terrorism Task Forces with going and doing and investigating the list of indicators I was describing before?

Well, Trump says so many crazy things that don't materialize that I'm sympathetic to the view that, oh, you can't just go off of something that Trump is saying.

but again this is not just something that uh trump is saying you mentioned the speaker of the house mike johnson who compared the upcoming no king's protest this weekend to um i think he said pro-hamas and and you know terrorist groups so this is something that is solidly within the mainstream of the uh political leadership of the party in addition to that um the second highest ranking republican official in the house steve scalise

called it something like the American hating protest.

And then third top official in the House also compared it to terrorism.

So this is something that's being echoed throughout the administration.

When Trump says stuff that is something that you can just chalk up to Trump's flamboyant rhetoric, that is often something that you'll see he says, and it's not really reiterated by other principal figures within, in the case of national security, within the national security apparatus, his appointees.

and certainly congress but that's not the case here they're all talking like that to give you just one other example um secretary of homeland security uh christy noem said recently that they had arrested the girlfriend of uh the leader of antifa and again

The judgment of the intelligence community and Trump's own FBI director as recently as a couple of years ago was that there was no such organized group.

It's an idea.

It's like saying the Internet Hacking Collective Anonymous has a leader.

It doesn't work that way.

So there's a lot of... I think there's...

an abundance of indications here that this is something that the Republican Party in large part is taking seriously.