John Whitehead's Commentary

“When they came in the middle of the night, they terrorized the families that were living there. There were children who were without clothing, they were zip tied, taken outside at 3 o'clock in the morning. A senior resident, an American citizen with no warrants, was taken outside and handcuffed for three hours. Doors were blown off their hinges, walls were broken through, immigration agents coming from Black Hawk helicopters ... This is America.”—Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson

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.

Whether through counterinsurgency tactics abroad or domestic militarization at home, the pattern is the same: dissent is rebranded as danger, and those who resist government narratives become subjects of investigation.

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.

What this means, in practice, is that 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.

According to local news reports, agents arrived in Black Hawk helicopters, trucks and military-style vans, using power tools to breach perimeter fencing, destroying property to gain entry, and zip-tying family members—including children—as they were separated and escorted from the building.

The imagery is unmistakably martial: a domestic operation staged and executed with battlefield methods.

This “everywhere war” lands on a country already saturated with domestic watchlists and dragnet filters.

Federal agencies have leaned on banks and data brokers to run broad, warrantless screens of ordinary Americans’ purchases and movements for so-called “extremism” indicators—everything from buying religious materials to shopping at outdoor stores or booking travel—none of which are crimes.

The point isn’t probable cause; it’s preemptive suspicion.

At the same time, geofence warrants and other bulk location grabs have exposed who went where and with whom—scooping up churchgoers, hotel guests, and passersby across entire city blocks—while a sprawling web of fusion and “real-time crime” centers ingests camera feeds, social posts, license-plate scans, facial recognition, and predictive-policing scores to flag “persons of interest” who have done nothing wrong.

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.

Consider the secret phone-records dragnet operated for more than a decade across multiple administrations—formerly “Hemisphere,” now “Data Analytical Services.”

By paying AT&T and exploiting privacy loopholes, the government has gained warrantless access to more than a trillion domestic call records a year, sweeping in not only suspects but their spouses, parents, children, friends—anyone they might have called. Training on the program has reportedly reached beyond drug agents to postal inspectors, prison officials, highway patrol, border units, and even the National Guard.

This is how a surveillance apparatus becomes a governing philosophy.

A presidency armed with NSPM-7 can fuse that kind of dragnet data with interagency “threat” frameworks and ideological watchlists, collapsing the wall between intelligence gathering and political control.

This is how tyrants justify tyranny in order to stay in power.

This is McCarthyism in a digital uniform.

Joseph McCarthy branded critics as Communist infiltrators. Donald Trump brands enemies as “combatants.”

The mechanism is the same: redefine dissent as treachery, then prosecute it under extraordinary powers.

For those old enough to have lived through the McCarthy era, there is a whiff of something in the air that reeks of the heightened paranoia, finger-pointing, fear-mongering, totalitarian tactics that were hallmarks of the 1950s.

Back then, it was the government—spearheaded by Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee—working in tandem with private corporations and individuals to blacklist Americans suspected of being communist sympathizers.

By the time the witch hunts drew to a close, thousands of individuals (the vast majority innocent of any crime) had been accused of communist ties, investigated, subpoenaed, and blacklisted. Careers were ruined, suicides followed, immigration tightened, and free expression chilled.

Seventy-five years later, the same vitriol, fear-mongering, and knee-jerk intolerance are once again being deployed against anyone who dares to think for themselves.

All the while, the American police state continues to march inexorably forward.

This is how fascism, which silences all dissenting views, prevails.

The silence is becoming deafening.

What is unfolding is the logical culmination of years of bipartisan betrayals of the Bill of Rights, from the Cold War to the digital panopticon

What once operated in the shadows of intelligence agencies is now openly coordinated from the Oval Office.

For decades, presidents of both parties have waged a steady assault on the Constitution. Each crisis—Cold War, 9/11, pandemic—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.

What distinguishes it is not merely scale but centralization: the government has moved from piecemeal encroachments to a bold, centralized framework in which the White House claims the prerogative to oversee surveillance across agencies with virtually no external checks.

Oversight by Congress and the courts is reduced to a fig leaf.

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.

From red-flag seizures and “disinformation” hunts to mail imaging, biometric databases, license-plate grids, and a border-zone where two-thirds of Americans now live under looser search rules, the default has flipped: everyone is collectible, everyone is rankable, and everyone is interruptible.

That is how a free people become reduced to databits first and citizens as an afterthought.

The constitutional stakes couldn’t be higher.

The Fourth Amendment promises that people shall be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. That promise is empty if the President can authorize the government to sweep up data, monitor communications, and track movements without individualized warrants or probable cause.

The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, association, and press. Those protections mean little if journalists fear their calls are tapped, if activists believe their networks are infiltrated, or if citizens censor themselves out of fear.

Separation of powers itself is on the line. By directing surveillance policy across government without legislative debate or judicial review, the White House is usurping authority never meant to rest in a single set of hands.

The risks are not hypothetical.

COINTELPRO targeted civil rights leaders and dissidents. The NSA’s bulk collection swept up millions of innocents. Fusion centers today track and analyze daily life.

What was once shocking—the idea that the government might listen in on every phone call or sift through every email—is now treated as the price of living in modern America.

If those older, less centralized programs were abused, why would NSPM-7—with broader reach and weaker oversight—be any different?

This is not speculation. We have seen this progression before.

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued reports on so-called “rightwing extremism” that swept broadly across the ideological spectrum. Economic anxiety, anti-immigration views, gun rights advocacy, even the military service of returning veterans were flagged as potential red flags for extremism.

The backlash was immediate, and DHS was forced to walk back the report, but the damage was done: dissenting views had been equated with dangerous plots.

That same playbook now risks becoming institutionalized under NSPM-7, which consolidates ideological profiling into a White House-directed mandate.

Imagine a journalist investigating corruption within the administration. Under NSPM-7, their sources and communications could be quietly monitored.

Imagine a nonprofit advocating for immigration reform. Its donors and staff could be swept into a database of “domestic threats.”

Imagine an attorney representing a controversial client. Even attorney-client privilege, once considered sacrosanct, could be eroded under a regime that treats dissent as subversion.

These scenarios are not alarmist—they are logical extensions of a system that places no real limits on executive discretion.

With NSPM-7, the line between foreign and domestic surveillance blurs entirely, and every citizen becomes a potential target of investigation.

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.

We must insist that surveillance be subject to the same constitutional limits that govern every other exercise of state power. We must demand transparency. We must pressure Congress to reclaim its role and courts to enforce constitutional duty. Most of all, we must cultivate a culture of resistance.

The Bill of Rights is not self-executing; it depends on the vigilance of the citizenry.

Civil liberties groups have already sounded the alarm, warning that NSPM-7 authorizes government-wide investigations into nonprofits, activists, and donors. Law scholars call it a dangerous overreach, a program as vague as it is menacing. Even law firms, normally cautious about critiquing executive power, are voicing concern about the risks it poses to attorney-client privilege.

When so many diverse voices converge in warning, we should pay attention.

And yet warnings alone will not stop this juggernaut, because NSPM-7 is not simply about technology or data collection. It is about power—and how fear is weaponized to consolidate that power.

If we are silent now, if we allow NSPM-7 to pass unchallenged, we will have no excuse when the surveillance state tightens its grip further.

When ideas themselves become a trigger for surveillance, the First Amendment loses.

America has entered dangerous territory.

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 U.S. District Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan cautioned in a recent ruling: “The government’s arguments paint with a broad brush and threaten to upend fundamental protections in our Constitution. But ours is not an autocracy; it is a system of checks and balances.”

Those checks only function if we insist on them.

With congressional Republicans having traded their constitutional autonomy for a place in Trump’s authoritarian regime, the courts—and the power of the people themselves—remain the last hope for reining in this runaway police state.

Cognizant that a unified populace poses the greatest threat to its power grabs, the Deep State—having co-opted Trump and the MAGA movement—is doing everything it can to keep the public polarized and fearful.

This has been a long game.

The contagion of fear that McCarthy once spread with the help of government agencies, corporations, and the power elite never truly died; it merely evolved.

NSPM-7 is its modern form, and Trump a modern-day McCarthy.

That anyone would support a politician whose every move has become antithetical to freedom is mind-boggling, but that is the power of politics as a drug for the masses.

That anyone who claims to want to “Make America Great Again” would sell out the country—and the Constitution—to do so says a lot.

That judges, journalists and activists are being threatened for daring to hold the line against the government’s overreaches and abuses speaks volumes.

One of Trump’s supporters sent an anonymous postcard to Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee assigned to a case challenging the Trump administration’s effort to deny full First Amendment protection to non-citizens lawfully present in the United States. The postcard taunted: “Trump has pardons and tanks… What do you have?”

Judge Young opened his opinion with a direct reply: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works in a specific case.”

The judge then proceeded to issue a blistering 161-page opinion that hinges on the language of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“No law” means “no law,” concluded Judge Young,

In other words, the First Amendment is not negotiable.

Non-citizens lawfully present in the United States “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”

This is the constitutional answer to NSPM-7’s everywhere-war logic.

When a president declares anything a battlefield and anyone a combatant, the First Amendment answers back: No law means no law.

It is not a permission slip the government can offer only to favored citizens or compliant viewpoints. It is a boundary the government may not cross.

So the question returns to us, the ones Judge Young addressed: “What do we have, and will we keep it?”

We have a constitutional republic, and we keep it by holding fast to the Constitution.

We keep it by refusing the normalization of the Executive Branch’s extraordinary overreaches and power grabs.

We keep it by insisting that dissent is not danger, speech is not suspicion, and watchlists are not warrants.

We keep it by demanding congressional oversight with teeth, courts that enforce first principles, and communities that resist fear when fear is used to rule.

In closing, Judge Young quoted Ronald Reagan’s warning, issued in 1967: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation  away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.”

Reagan’s words would be flagged under NSPM-7, but it doesn’t change the challenge.

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.

WC: 3118

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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