When the government can label anyone or anything an enemy in order to wage war, we are all in danger.
That danger is no longer theoretical.
In the same breath that the administration touts lethal military strikes against Venezuelan boats in Caribbean waters, federal agents are conducting coordinated militarized raids on homes in Chicago, rappelling down on apartment buildings from Black Hawk helicopters, dragging families out of their homes, separating children from their parents, and using zip ties to immobilize them—even citizens.
The message—spoken and unspoken—is that the government is on a war footing everywhere: abroad, at sea, and now at our front doors.
This “everywhere war” depends on a simple redefinition: call it a war, and the target becomes a combatant. Call the city a battlespace, and its residents become suspects.
What the White House is doing overseas to vessels it deems part of a terrorist network (without any credible proof or due process), it is now mimicking at home with door-kicking raids, mass surveillance, and ideological watchlists.
With the stroke of a pen, President Trump continues to set aside the constitutional safeguards meant to restrain exactly this kind of mission creep, handing himself and his agencies sweeping authority to disregard the very principles on which this nation was founded—principles intended to serve as constitutional safeguards against tyranny, corruption, abuse and overreach put in place by America’s founding fathers.
Take National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), for example.
NSPM-7 directs a government-wide campaign to “investigate,” “disrupt,” and “dismantle” so-called domestic threats, ordering agencies to pool their data, resources, and operations in service of this agenda.
What makes NSPM-7 so dangerous is not only its declared purpose but its breadth and secrecy. There are no clearly defined standards, no meaningful transparency, and no external oversight. The public is told only that the government will protect them—by watching them.
Yet the danger is not only in what the government hides, but in what it chooses to see.
Even more troubling is the way “threats” are defined.
What is being sold as a campaign to disrupt left-wing conspiracies has expanded to include ideology, rhetoric, and belief.
Clearly, this is not just another surveillance program.
NSPM-7 is a framework for rebranding dissent as a danger to be quashed.
The government has a long history of using vague definitions of “extremism” to justify ever-expanding control. Once dissent is rebranded as danger, every act of resistance can be swept into the government’s dragnet.
NSPM-7 merely formalizes this cycle of suspicion.
It also resurrects an old playbook with new machinery—COINTELPRO, digitized and centralized. The tools may be different, but the logic—neutralize dissent—is the same, now scaled up with modern surveillance and stitched together under executive direction. From there, the apparatus needs only a pretext—a checklist of behaviors, viewpoints, associations and beliefs—to justify recasting citizens as suspects.
For years now, the government has flagged certain viewpoints and phrases as potential markers of extremism.
To that list, you can now add “anti-Christian,” “anti-capitalist,” and “anti-American,” among others.
In practice, sermons, protests, blog posts, or donor lists could all be flagged as precursors to terrorism.
Under this policy, America’s founders would be terrorists. Jesus himself would be blacklisted as “anti-Christian” and “anti-capitalist.”
Anything can be declared a war, and anyone can be redefined as an enemy combatant.
The definition shifts with political convenience, but the result is always the same: unchecked executive power.
The president has already labeled drug cartels “unlawful combatants” and insists the United States is in a “non-international armed conflict.”
The raids in Chicago and the White House’s evolving attitude towards surveillance confirm what follows from that logic: this war footing is not confined to foreign shores. It is being turned inward—toward journalists, political opponents, and ordinary citizens whose beliefs or associations are deemed “anti-American.”
By anti-American, this administration really means anti-government, especially when Trump is calling the shots.
This is how dissent gets relabeled as danger: by surrounding every American with the presumption of guilt first, and constitutional safeguards—if any—much later.
When merely looking a certain way or talking a certain way or voting a certain way is enough to get you singled out and subjected to dehumanizing, cruel treatment by government agents, we are all in danger.
When the president of the United States and his agents threaten to “intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country”—i.e., those who don’t comply with the government’s demands, we are all in danger.
When the police state has a growing list of innocuous terms and behaviors that are suspicious enough to classify someone a terrorist, we are all in danger.
Today it is drug cartels. Yesterday it was immigrants. Tomorrow it could be journalists, political opponents, or ordinary citizens who express views deemed “anti-American.”
With NSPM-7, the Trump White House is not merely amplifying surveillance power—it is institutionalizing a regime in which thought, dissent, and ideological posture become the raw material for domestic investigations and suppression.
Make no mistake: this is an unprecedented escalation in the government’s war on privacy, dissent, and constitutional limits.
For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis became an excuse to concentrate more power in the executive branch.
The Patriot Act normalized warrantless surveillance. The FISA courts gave secret cover for dragnet spying. The NSA’s metadata sweeps exposed millions of Americans’ phone records. Predictive policing and geofencing warrants turned smartphones into government informants.
Each measure, we were told, was temporary, limited, and necessary. None were rolled back. Each became the foundation for the next expansion.
Against this backdrop, NSPM-7 emerges as the next, more dangerous iteration.
This is how liberties die: not with a sudden coup, but with the gradual normalization of extraordinary powers until they are no longer extraordinary at all.
It is the embodiment of James Madison’s nightmare: the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the same hands.
Unless “we the people” demand accountability, NSPM-7 will become the new normal, entrenched in the machinery of government long after this administration has passed.
A government that answers only to itself is not a constitutional republic—it is a rogue state. And NSPM-7, far from securing our freedoms, threatens to extinguish them.
Unchecked power is unconstitutional power.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the hard work of defending freedom rests as always with “we the people.”
Let’s get to it.
Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.
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