“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.” George Orwell 1984
For twenty years I carried a badge, and for much of that time I built the kind of cases that take patience.
I commanded the Investigative Services Division of the East Providence Police Department and spent years working narcotics, including an assignment with the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force alongside the FBI and DEA.
That work taught me how you take apart a criminal network the right way. You start with a crime. You follow the evidence, the money, and the associations outward from that crime until the whole enterprise is exposed.
What you never do, if you want the case to hold up and the badge to mean anything, is start with what a person believes and work backward to find a crime to fit.
That is why National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 troubles me, and it should trouble anyone who has actually done this work.
Let me be clear about the violence, because it is real. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was an atrocity. So was the murder of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband. So were the attempts on the president’s life, the 2022 plot against Justice Kavanaugh, and the killing of a healthcare executive on a Manhattan sidewalk.
Attacks on federal officers and facilities are crimes, full stop. No honest person waves that away, and no serious investigator wants those networks left alone.
But a strategy has to match the facts, and here the facts are stubborn. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan shop, compiled a list of 750 attacks and plots dating back to 1994.
The finding that made headlines is that 2025 was the first year in more than three decades in which left-wing attacks outnumbered far-right attacks.
Read the next sentence, though, the one that rarely gets quoted.
That rise came off a very low base.
Over the past decade, left-wing violence killed 13 people. Right-wing violence killed 112. Jihadist attacks killed 82. Fourteen people died in a single attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day of 2025, more than every left-wing attack in this country over the previous nine years combined. The 2025 surge the memo leans on amounts to roughly five incidents.
A directive serious about political violence would follow that evidence wherever it led.
This one does not.
It never mentions January 6, 2021, which by any professional definition is political violence.
It says nothing about the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, Patriot Front, or the Klan, groups with documented records of organized violence.
Instead, it names a single ideological target and builds an enforcement machine around it.
Look at how it defines the threat. The memo lists anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and anti-Americanism, along with views on immigration, race, and gender, as indicators that a person or group may commit terrorism.
Read that again the way a cop would.
Those are not crimes. They are opinions, protected by the First Amendment as surely as the opinions I happen to find wrong.
The moment you make belief the trigger for an investigation, you have inverted the rule that separates legitimate police work from a political enemies list.
I never got to open a file on a man because I found his politics offensive. I needed a predicate, an actual crime. This memo supplies the ideology and invites agents to go find the predicate later.
And it hands that job to serious tools. Joint Terrorism Task Forces, the Treasury, and the IRS are pointed at the funders and nonprofits behind disfavored movements.
The follow-up memo from the Justice Department in December ordered a five-year review of files and stood up task forces of counterterrorism prosecutors.
When you aim the counterterrorism and financial-surveillance apparatus at advocacy groups defined by their politics, the chilling effect is not a side effect. It is the mechanism.
A tool built to police belief does not care which belief.
Joe Broadmeadow
I spent my career arguing that police power is legitimate precisely because it is disciplined by evidence and by the Constitution, not by who happens to sit in the White House.
Thirty-one members of Congress and the Senate’s top Democrat have warned that this memo puts that discipline at risk.
You do not have to share their politics to see the danger.
The next administration inherits this machinery, and it will point it at whoever it decides is the enemy.
A tool built to police belief does not care which belief.
Investigate the crime. Follow the money. Dismantle the network. I spent twenty years doing exactly that, and I still believe in it. But you start with conduct, never with a creed. Get that backward, and you are no longer protecting the country from political violence. You are handing political power a new weapon and calling it law enforcement.
Here’s the link to the official document. Read it for yourself and imagine an administration in power with a different political orientation.
Leave a Reply