By ERWIN FREED
National Security Policy Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7) makes explicit the anti-speech, anti-democratic, anti-worker mood of the big billionaires and their political puppets. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was shamelessly used by his political allies and so-called friends to give “rationale” to a document that criminalizes the vast majority of U.S. residents’ political, cultural, and social beliefs.
Released Sept. 25, NSPM-7 directs the FBI’s shadowy “Joint Terrorism Task Force” (JTTF) units to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals” that can be indicated by “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
As journalist Ken Klippenstein has pointed out since breaking the story (reprinted in Truthout, Sept. 29, 2025), mainstream news and Democratic Party politicians have been extremely slow and hesitating in first noticing and then speaking against NSPM-7. In one of the first and only mainstream investigations into these developments, Reuters journalists identified nine liberal organizations specifically targeted by the White House. These included Soros’s Open Society Foundations— ActBlue, Indivisible, and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). Even in that otherwise sober article, the authors do not reference NSPM-7 by name.
Statements by many high-level GOP and MAGA spokespeople show that they are attempting to shape a political narrative that rationalizes strict control of liberal organizations. Notably, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, called Oct. 18 No Kings Day demonstrations “Hate America rallies” and characterized attendees as “anarchists, Antifa advocates, [and] pro-Hamas.” The latter characterization has a double effect. On the one hand these statements obscure the fact that being anarchist, an Antifa advocate, or pro-Hamas is not illegal. On the other, by framing No Kings Day in this way, the far right is pressuring liberal organizations like Indivisible to draw a hard line between themselves and people who hold more left-wing views. The administration is hoping that instead of rallying against repression, middle-class Democratic Party activists will begin to engage in red baiting or at least look the other way.
National Security Policy Memorandums have a long history in the bipartisan construction of mass surveillance and militarized political policing. Similar memos and legal opinions, often completely secret, gave the green light for NSA surveillance of virtually all phone and internet use in the United States. By putting this one out publicly, the Trump administration is making clear to all real and imagined opponents of its hyper-reactionary, pro-austerity, and anti-labor program that they are objects of police harassment, infiltration, and disruption.
Under Trump, the FBI, ICE, and other federal agencies are openly working to implement and rationalize the measures laid out in the right-wing Project 2025 document that laid out perspectives for Trump’s presidency. The ruling class has staffed all important offices with supporters of the “unitary executive,” while arranging mass surveillance, and cutting whatever welfare programs and workers’ protection that remains. In order to push through these incredibly unpopular and destructive policies, capital is mobilizing the state to repress the working class and youth and terrorize entire cities under the guise of “deporting illegals” and “fighting crime.”
The basic justifications for surveillance and anti-democratic policing are baked into U.S. ruling-class propaganda, including the media and education system. Combatting “anarchism” and “communism” has been the justification for red squad tactics for as long as there have been police in this country. Creating the myth of “violent extremists” threatening an imaginary “capitalist order” papers over the everyday violence of poverty, underdevelopment, and racist policing felt by working class communities, particularly women and Queer, Black, immigrant, Indigenous, and disabled people within those communities.
The U.S. ruling class feels compelled to use such naked forms of political repression and official corruption because the country is facing imperial decline. Profitability was on the decline well before even the COVID pandemic, and the United States is unable to compete with China in many sectors and places internationally. Domestically, big capital is attempting to give itself additional space for accumulation by drastically slashing the public sector, attempting to restart a version of the Braceros program, and put every union in the country on the defensive.
In order to push through these drastic changes, the ruling class is trying to intimidate people against protesting and to lay down more “national security” infrastructure. NSPM-7 is one part of a long history of the so-called global war on terror. That same “war” is what produced ICE and developed all of the technologies of social control currently being used by the Trump administration.
While the attacks are very real, so are the possibilities of building public and broad opposition to them. No Kings Day on Oct. 18 was one of the largest single days of action in U.S. history. Cities that directly faced military occupation turned out hundreds of thousands of people. ICE is facing daily opposition everywhere in the country.
The basic methods and tactics of building this opposition are not new to the U.S. working class. Ernest DeMaio, head of the United Electrical Workers Midwest District 11, headquartered in Chicago, gave one such example from his own life during the height of McCarthyism: “The big scare was in 1952 in Chicago. On September 2, we struck the International Harvester chain. That’s the day I was called by HUAC. The strike was set for midnight. At nine a.m., I’m in the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some three thousand of our guys took off from the picket line, surrounded the courthouse, and, as I was being sworn, stormed the courthouse, singing…”
Building a labor movement that responds to attacks from the state with mass mobilization has the possibility of creating the self-organization and independence necessary to win real political demands. This means keeping track of, exposing, and organizing against every attempt to further limit the democratic rights of the working class.
Photo: Protest in Minneapolis in 2010 against FBI raid on antiwar groups. (Craig Lassig / AP)
