Six Verbs
Stephen Miller announced the program to 66 countries. Every verb already has a body attached.
On July 16, the same afternoon the president took the East Room to talk about elections, Stephen Miller stood at the State Department and described what this government is doing to the American left.
The event was called the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted. The Treasury Secretary was there. The FBI director was there. The Education Secretary was there. Officials from sixty-six countries were there. And the White House deputy chief of staff explained, on the record, what a directive called NSPM-7 orders every arm of the federal government to do:
“...directs, for the first time in American history, all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country.”
Six verbs. Each one is now a federal agency’s job description, and each one already has people attached to it.
Stephen Miller said more. He told the assembled diplomats that if you look at any photograph of an antifa demonstration, “not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. They’re all deformed in some way.” He said the leftist “is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.” He asked sixty-six governments to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization.” And he offered a warning about what leftism becomes when it takes power, “It always becomes a gulag, it always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms.”
He said that last part about mass imprisonment of political enemies just three weeks after his government’s prosecutors secured a one-hundred-year sentence against a protester, and four weeks after it indicted fifteen people in Minneapolis, and while his Attorney General holds a new, court-proof power to send any federal prisoner to any prison in America.
The same day as the speech, the State Department announced visa restrictions on members of “Far-Left Terrorist and other aligned groups.”
So let’s go through the verbs and what they’ve done, who they’ve done it to, and, because precision is the only advantage available against people who say “deformed” into microphones, what’s loaded but hasn’t fired yet.
Identify
The doctrine came first and it came in writing.
On September 22 of last year, an executive order designated “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization. Three days later came NSPM-7, the directive Miller cited which instructs Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate “networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence” and lists the ideological markers that indicate a threat. The markers, in the government’s own words:
“anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”
In November, the State Department designated four European groups as foreign terrorist organizations. They are Antifa Ost, the Informal Anarchist Federation, Armed Proletarian Justice, Revolutionary Class Self-Defense. They also posted a $10 million bounty on information about their financing. At the July 16 summit, Rubio said the quiet part on schedule: American counterterrorism has had “a blind spot... when it comes to extremist violence from the political left,” and “there will be more designations soon.”
But what does “designation” legally mean? There is no law that lets the government designate a domestic terrorist organization. The label, by itself, carries no legal force. The power is in the bridge it builds. Once a group is treated as a designated foreign entity, the material-support statute makes almost any aid to it (money, training, “services”) a serious federal crime with no violent intent required. The Supreme Court has upheld that for foreign groups and pointedly declined to extend it to domestic ones. Which is why “antifa,” a tendency, not a membership organization, keeps being described as an interconnected global network. The doctrine needs it to be foreign, so foreign it becomes. A former FBI agent who spent years undercover in terrorism investigations, Mike German, described where this goes:
"This effort to designate left-wing groups as foreign terrorists, using these broad terms like 'antifa,' will allow them to go after people who are not committing violence but who are simply engaging in the political process."
Read the government's own paperwork on the four. Hammer assaults in Germany and Hungary. Letter bombs to Italian institutions. IEDs at Greek government buildings. For the German group alone there were more than a dozen assaults and more than thirty-five injuries. And then the details the intelligence community's own profiles supply.
On Antifa Ost, updated in June: "We have no information that Antifa Ost members have killed anyone or used firearms in their attacks." This is a group whose signature operation was, in the government's description, an assault on "participants in an event honoring the Nazi occupation of Hungary."
On the Italian network, Informal Anarchist Federation: "fewer than 300" members, and a two-decade ledger of listed attacks totaling four injuries.
On the Greek groups, Armed Proletarian Justice & Revolutionary Class Self-Defense: "probably fewer than 40" members in one and "at least four to six" in the other, funded by a bank robbery that netted three thousand euros. Both, NCTC notes, typically warn the media or the authorities before their bombings, "aiming to limit bystander casualties," as one profile puts it. The single death anywhere in these four profiles is a bomb that "detonates prematurely in an apartment" where it was probably being built, killing one person inside.
That is the threat to Western civilization as the government's own intelligence agencies describe it. Perhaps three hundred fifty people on two continents, one death from their own bomb going off early, and a ten-million-dollar bounty.
Antifa Ost was designated by Orbán's Hungary in September, "following the American model," Orbán said, on a national terrorist list Hungary invented that week, having never had one. The American designation followed in November, days after Orbán visited the White House. Exported, implemented, re-imported as evidence.
Meanwhile, Atomwaffen Division, an American organization linked to five murders, has never been designated anything at all. The summit did not mention right-wing violence once. NSPM-7 does not mention January 6.
One more detail from the Greek profiles. Both end with the boilerplate disclaimer federal agencies attach to domestic-terrorism products: mere advocacy "may be constitutionally protected." That caveat exists to protect Americans. It appears on exactly the two profiles whose designation line ties the group to "the Antifa movement," and on neither page without that phrase. A First Amendment warning label on a foreign terrorist designation tells you whose speech the designation is actually reaching for.
Disclaimer on Foreign “Antifa” Terrorist Pages (NCTC)
“The mere advocacy of or presence in groups that advocate political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophical embrace of violent tactics does not necessarily constitute violent extremism and may be constitutionally protected. Such strong rhetoric and divisive terms should not be assumed to reflect or further violent extremist activity, absent additional information, and should be considered in the context of all applicable laws and policies regarding privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.”
The identifying, meanwhile, hasn't waited for the designations. Last Monday the State Department published a hundred-page report on Cuba naming American citizens as "front groups and fellow travelers" of the regime. A Twitch streamer, the president of the Amazon Labor Union, the mayor of Los Angeles, and a congresswoman's daughter. It also names the Democratic Socialists of America, all while conceding that the group is not "controlled by Cuban agents, per se."
None of this doctrine was improvised at a podium in July, by the way. The blueprint has been sitting in public for two years, published by people who signed their names to it. That paper trail is its own article for another time.
Defund and Debank
On the day NSPM-7 issued, FBI Director Kash Patel said the money verbs in his own voice, “So what we are going to do is follow the money… We are going to properly chase them down like the domestic terrorists that they are.”
J.D. Vance said the government will “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence” and he named the Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation. The Justice Department announced an investigation of Open Society the same day the memorandum came out. The president has repeatedly demanded these foundations lose their tax exemptions.
However, the president cannot revoke a tax exemption, and it is a felony (per 26 U.S.C. § 7217) for him or his senior officials to direct the IRS at a specific taxpayer. So the direction arrives as architecture instead. NSPM-7 orders Treasury’s terrorism-finance office to “identify and disrupt financial networks that fund domestic terrorism,” to issue new Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) guidance to banks, and orders the IRS to “ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised in May, on the joint IRS-FBI probe, “we’re going to have a lot to report.” And the congressional version waits in the wings. H.R. 9495, the bill that would let the Treasury Secretary unilaterally strip a nonprofit’s status as a “terrorist supporting organization” with ninety days to appeal, passed the House in 2024 with fifteen Democratic votes before dying in the Senate.
On August 7, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order called “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” declaring that debanking people over politics is an injustice requiring federal remedy. “Individuals, their businesses, and their families have been subjected to debanking on the basis of their political affiliations.” His Justice Department subpoenaed JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo over closed January 6 defendants’ accounts. His comptroller found nine banks had made “inappropriate distinctions among customers.” Some officials floated using the resulting settlements to compensate January 6 defendants.
The same government, the same year, built the SAR machinery to do the identical thing to the left. Debanking is not the crime. Direction is. When the account belongs to a January 6 rioter, closure is persecution demanding restitution, but when it belongs to an antiwar nonprofit, closure is counterterrorism. One practice, two prices. The exchange rate again.
Where has the money campaign actually landed so far? In two places.
In New York, a federal grand jury convened by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Jay Clayton, authorized by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is investigating Neville Roy Singham on theories of wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. Singham is a Shanghai-based tech millionaire whose fortune funds a network of left organizations. Subpoenas have gone out for the bank records of groups in the network, The People’s Forum, Code Pink among them. Bessent personally pressed the CEO of Goldman Sachs about the donor-advised fund that once routed Singham’s money. Goldman says it closed that fund in early 2024, before any of this doctrine existed.
The documents show that a grand jury exists, subpoenas for bank records exist, and that no one there has been indicted. The politicians say it shows a Chinese-directed funding conspiracy. A characterization built, so far, almost entirely from one network’s reporting and congressional press releases. Foreign-agent registration cases are notoriously hard and grand juries are not findings. If indictments come, I’ll read them. Until then, this verifiably is the federal government subpoenaing the banking records of antiwar organizations because of who funds them.
And in Montgomery, Alabama, which is further along. On April 21, a federal grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center itself on eleven counts of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to launder money. The alleged scheme involves the SPLC covertly paying people inside the Klan and Aryan Nations with donor money. The government calls this financing extremist leaders while the SPLC calls it the confidential-informant program it has run since Klansmen bombed its offices in 1983. Paying secret informants inside violent organizations is, of course, the FBI's own everyday method. The bureau had severed its partnership with the SPLC in October. Six months later it delivered the indictment, built with IRS criminal investigators.
The Acting Attorney General announced it with a sentence worth noting: "The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence." A prosecutor stating the ideological purpose of his own charge, on the department's letterhead. By Blanche's own televised account, the investigation predated this administration and was closed without charges. They reopened it. Three days later, the president supplied the mission statement in writing. If the allegations are proven, "the 2020 Presidential Election should be permanently wiped from the books and be of no further force or effect!" The money verbs and the election machine. One project, per its owner. The SPLC pleaded not guilty and its motion to dismiss for vindictive prosecution, Abbe Lowell among counsel, is pending. Trial opens October 5, in Montgomery, the city where the organization was founded to sue the Klan.
Meanwhile, the org chart is shifting. Clayton testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on July 15 as the nominee for Director of National Intelligence. The committee advanced him last Tuesday, 9-8, even after he declined to tell senators that Biden won the 2020 election, allowing only that Biden was 'certified' the winner. The full Senate votes this week. If he's confirmed, the prosecutor personally running the investigation into the left's money (who will not affirm the result of the election his new agencies are charged with protecting) will run the nation's spy agencies instead.
The Southern District didn't wait for the Senate. On July 8, a week before Clayton's hearing, the office announced that James McDonald had begun supervising the office’s work. McDonald was also one of the president's personal lawyers on the appeal of his felony convictions until his nomination last month. The Justice Department's announcement lists every line of his résumé except that one.
Disrupt
The Minneapolis indictment is ninety-four pages long, and contains more than one hundred Signal messages.
Signal is encrypted. The messages of Direct Action Minnesota’s members appear in a federal charging document anyway, including a reference to two defendants exchanging “approximately 20 connected Signal calls,” phrasing that strongly suggests the government got inside somebody’s physical phone. Patel had already explained how the investigation began. On the podcast of right-wing personality Benny Johnson, where he announced that the FBI opened it in response to an X thread by the far-right influencer Cam Higby, who claimed to have "infiltrated" the Signal groups activists used to track ICE vehicle movements. "We immediately opened up that investigation." An influencer's post on Saturday. A federal criminal probe by Monday. Announced to a podcast host before any court saw a charge.
That’s the “disrupt” and “identify” apparatus in operation. Not informants in a union hall, but the contents of organizers’ encrypted chats, reverse-engineered into a conspiracy. The ACLU of Minnesota warned prosecutions of observers and protesters “should be carefully scrutinized for retaliatory motives” because they “can chill people from exercising those same rights.” That chill, per everything above, is the deliverable.
The War Room
The machine doesn't only point at activists. The week of the summit, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Patel ran a leak hunt from a West Wing "war room," collecting their own officials' phones by hand. Build a tool that reads phones and it reads whatever phones it's handed. Today its own staff. The rest of the doctrine says whose next.
Arrest and Prosecute
In 562 Years, I wrote about fifteen people charged after a Fourth of July protest outside the Prairieland ICE detention center in Texas, where an Alvarado police officer was shot. On June 23, that case delivered sentences for the people involved. Benjamin Song, one hundred years. Maricela Rueda, seventy. Her husband, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, thirty for two federal counts for moving a box of zines and poetry out of the home they shared after her arrest. Five more at fifty years each. For the trial group alone that’s four hundred fifty years. The judge went on record with, “The defendants’ violence and terrorism is an assault on Democracy.” The defense, on the record, with the only number that matters for scale, stated that the average January 6 sentence was twenty-six months.
The Justice Department called it the first antifa terrorism sentencing since the designation. And Patel, announcing it, recited the doctrine in miniature stating that the FBI remains committed to “identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country.” The verbs with bodies attached. Appeals are filed.
Minneapolis is the sequel, and it shows the doctrine reaching past violence entirely. On June 16, fifteen members of Direct Action Minnesota were indicted for conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers. Blanche called their ICE-watching “an unrelenting campaign of harassment and violence.” The U.S. Attorney, Daniel Rosen, insisted, “These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did.”
The indictment then quotes, at length, more than a hundred things they said.
Fourteen pleaded not guilty on July 1. Their attorney, Bruce Nestor, a past president of the National Lawyers Guild, described who the government actually swept up with, “All 15 of the defendants are members of the community, active in mutual aid, union members, workers, neighbors... The point of this is to spread fear to try to divide us.” The same office dropped similar protest cases just weeks before for lack of evidence and prosecutorial misconduct. The cases may collapse but the charging continues.
The Word They Didn't Use
On Thursday, Vance Boelter was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus forty years for assassinating Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and attempting to murder Senator John Hoffman and his family. The system worked: caught in two days, maximum sentence, no complaint about the outcome. The complaint is about a word. His six federal counts (stalking, murder, firearms) contain no mention of terrorism. The government that headlined a "domestic terrorist" sentenced to nineteen years for burning a police car, that announced Prairieland as "the first antifa terrorism sentencing", processed the era's actual political assassin without reaching for the word once. he government's own sentencing memo says he killed to 'shift the balance of power' in a divided legislature and still nobody reached for the word. Five days after Boelter's guilty plea in June, the same U.S. Attorney's office indicted fifteen Minneapolis activists as a terror conspiracy for tracking ICE vehicles, on the contents of their Signal chats. The word isn’t a measure of violence. It measures direction.
The Seventh Verb
There is a verb Miller didn’t say, because it comes after the sentence: designate. Not for an organization this time, but a cell.
On May 6, the Bureau of Prisons quietly rewrote its classification manual, the impersonal point-score system that decides where every federal prisoner is housed, to declare that the Attorney General may personally “designate or redesignate the place of a prisoner’s imprisonment.” Any prisoner to any prison. No criteria, no appeal, and, by the statute’s own closing line, no review by any court. The only publicly known beneficiary of this kind of discretion so far is Ghislaine Maxwell who was moved to a minimum-security camp after her interviews with Blanche. Senator Whitehouse has demanded records of every exercise of the power since May 6 with no answer.
Where could such discretion send a political prisoner? The destination already exists. The Bureau’s Communication Management Units hold prisoners in near-total communications isolation. Established during the Bush years, the two units ration monitored calls to minutes and no contact visits are allowed. The environmental activist Daniel McGowan was placed in one, and litigation later pried loose the reason: his political writings. The courts’ final answer, in the Center for Constitutional Rights’ challenge, was that prisoners have no protected liberty interest in avoiding the units at all.
So the destination exists, the discretion now exists, and the review does not. The fired pardon attorney who spotted the rule change, Elizabeth Oyer, stated the implication flatly: “Under this rule, Blanche could direct the Bureau of Prisons to put anyone who opposes the Trump Administration in a maximum security prison.” If any of the fifteen in Minneapolis are convicted, the man whose department charged them picks the prison. The fifteen in Texas aren’t waiting on an ‘if.’ Their cells are already his to choose. Personally. Unreviewably.
Loaded and Fired
As for the ledger of where we are at and where we are going.
Fired: roughly five and a half centuries of prison time in Texas. Fifteen indicted in Minneapolis on the contents of their encrypted chats. A grand jury in New York holding the bank records of antiwar groups. An eleven-count federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, trial set for October. An IRS-FBI funding probe the Treasury Secretary brags about. Visa bans on “aligned groups.” Four foreign terrorist designations with a ten-million-dollar bounty behind them. And an American heir who funded Palestine-solidarity groups, detained in Spain on a U.S. material-support warrant, the first donor anywhere in the doctrine's reach. His extradition is pending.
Loaded: the domestic designations Rubio promised “soon,” none issued. The tax-exemption revocations the vice president promised with a felony statute in the way, none executed. The debanking of the left that NSPM-7 mandates on paper, no confirmed account closure yet. The Attorney General’s prison power, no known use against a political prisoner. Yet.
Every item that moves from the second list to the first is a story. I’ll be watching, and here is the calendar to watch with me.
This week - the full Senate votes on Clayton, the SDNY prosecutor who would not tell the committee who won in 2020, taking custody of the intelligence community.
July 22 - a court report is due in the ACLU's challenge to Florida's announced designation of CAIR, the lead name on a state slate that also includes antifa itself. Note that the entire federal architecture, including the antifa order, NSPM-7, the six verbs, has not been challenged in court by anyone.
Late August - Spain's High Court rules on the Chambers extradition. The first test of whether the summit's 'global campaign' can actually make a foreign government hand over an American for funding the left.
October 5 - United States v. Southern Poverty Law Center goes to trial in Montgomery.
And the day Rubio’s “soon” arrives - the material-support bridge opens, and the lawful end of this doctrine (donors, zine-movers, list-keepers) comes into reach.
The Architect’s Confession
In July 2021, the president of a conservative legal foundation reviewed the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism and issued a warning. Under the pretense of combatting domestic violent extremism, he wrote, the government risked “serious abuses of power” that “could be arrayed against American citizens, potentially just for having conservative or traditional beliefs. In other words, this could become a speech code to enforce progressive orthodoxy.” He warned against “Orwellian suppression,” and filed Freedom of Information Act requests to drag the machinery into daylight.
The foundation was America First Legal. Its president was Stephen Miller.
Read his 2021 warning again with the nouns changed. A government using the labels “domestic terrorism” and “domestic violent extremism” to target Americans for their political and religious beliefs, ideology turned into a marker, and the surveillance apparatus aimed inward at protected speech. Every objection Miller raised is a mechanism Miller now runs. The “anti-Christianity” marker written into NSPM-7, the Signal messages pulled from activists’ phones, the material-support bridge reaching donors and zine-movers. He even reached for the same tool now being used against his own department. In 2021 he filed FOIA requests to expose a domestic-terror strategy. Today it is Senator Whitehouse filing FOIA requests to expose his. I don’t have to argue with Stephen Miller because Stephen Miller already did.
Who Catches You
The state’s six verbs are funded by the Treasury. The defense against them is funded by potluck, and it is holding, but barely, and only where people show up. The Prairieland families run a support committee for the fifteen in Texas, the Minneapolis defendants have a legal defense fund, the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense program staffs the arraignments, and the Center for Constitutional Rights has been suing over the cages at the end of this pipeline since before it had a name. Pack the courtrooms. Arraignments are public, and a full gallery is a message juries and judges receive. Fund the lawyers. When the pretrial dates post in Minneapolis, be a body in the room.
The government wants you to memorize an acronym: NSPM-7. Learn names instead. Benjamin Song. Maricela Rueda. Savanna Batten. Zachary Evetts. Fifteen in Texas, fifteen in Minnesota. Thirty people processed so far by six verbs and a doctrine that calls their politics a deformity.
They have the verbs. Make sure we keep the nouns. The neighbors, the funds, the lawyers, the rooms.
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Look we all know that dictators spy on and try to eliminate any opposition. So now Trump will direct the full force of the government he has captured to go after us. The problem is there’s too many of us. The resistance is the people of America refusing to buckle to an incompetent out of control president. I suspect things will get worse as the midterms arrive. We must be ready to stand up and protect each other.
Holy hell this is terrifying. I have no words.