The New Red Scare: Trump's War on the American Left

Yeah.

So there's a couple parts to this.

I think Brett mentioned like sort of the big picture, but at, at the moment we're seeing a pretty intense amount of federal scrutiny towards groups that would, you know, varyingly be understood as left-wing groups in the United States.

And I think to start to think about how it is that this is being constructed and sort of some of the legal basis for it, looking at NSPM7 is kind of a useful starting framing.

So that's the National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, I believe is what that stands for, which was released by Trump on September 25th, 2025.

And as I talk about NSPM7, I do wanna try to be very careful here, 'cause there's a lot of stuff in NSPM7 that sounds very new and is getting talked about as rather exceptional.

But I think when you look at some of the more concrete, uh, legal analysis of NSPM7, the thing that you see again and again is that it's actually really building on existing legal frameworks within the war on terror that go all the way back to Bush, and that frankly were strengthened by Obama and Biden as well.

So I want to say that up top, 'cause I think it's important for us to understand that what's happening now isn't completely unprecedented.

Rather, an existing framework that has been established for federal repression is sort of being retooled and pointed in a different direction, and I think that's helpful for thinking about what it is that the government is trying to do here and sort of what the scope of it is.

So all of that said, broadly, NSPM-7 declares Antifa to be a domestic terrorist organization.

Now, one of the difficulties with this is that it is quite ambiguous what this means from a legal perspective.

There is no domestic terror registry in the United States.

There's no law that's been created that establishes that.

And while, you know, domestic actors can end up on terror watch lists in the United States, the idea that a purely domestic organization can itself be a domestic terror organization really has no legal basis.

This is why, going all the way back to Bush, anti-terror statutes in the United States really do focus primarily on what we call FTOs, or foreign terror organizations.

And immediately after the signing of NSPM-7, actually, you can see that the Trump administration declared multiple European anti-fascist groups to be foreign terror organizations.

So they're still orienting towards that.

But despite that lack of a legal framework, NSPM-7 does say that, you know, the federal government conceptualizes Antifa to be a domestic terror organization.

Again, those on the left are probably familiar with the fact that Antifa does not represent a singular organization.

It's really more of a label applied to a whole bunch of rather independent groups who sometimes have overlapping tactics and strategies in opposition to fascism.

But the federal government is speaking about it as if it is a discrete organization.

So NSPM-7 makes that declaration, and it basically says that there are a number of characteristics that the federal government needs to be looking for in political actors in order to determine whether or not they are potential domestic terror threats.

That involves, uh, anti-Zionist positions, what they call anti-American, anti-Christian, and radical pro-transgender values.

There's this long list that is included in this memorandum of who they are focused on.

And again, from a strictly legal perspective, all of those are opinions which are protected by the First Amendment.