Michael Roberts: Sweden – No Longer a ‘Social Democracy’

Sweden – no longer a ‘social democracy’

by Michael Roberts

Sweden goes to the polls today in an extremely close general election that could see the far right enter government for the first time if the country’s rightwing parties can form a majority.  However, opinion polls show the centre-left opposition alliance ahead, with Magdalena ⁠Andersson of the Social Democrats the favourite to become prime minister again after four years in opposition. But her bloc’s lead has narrowed considerably in the final days of the campaign.

In 2022, the current prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the centre-right Moderates, broke a longstanding taboo to make a deal with the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats (SD), so that his minority coalition could form a government. That agreement gave the SD outsized influence over government policy, especially on crime and immigration, and Kristersson has now gone further, promising ministerial posts for the SD if he is returned to power. In an attempt to win back voters, Andersson’s Social Democrats have also moved to the right on crime, immigration and integration, meaning that a win for the left was unlikely to mean a reform of current hardline policies. In effect, as in Denmark, the Social Democrats have adopted the immigration policies of the right. 

And they have supported the ending of Sweden’s longstanding ‘neutral’ policy in foreign affairs and have enthusiatically supported Sweden’s membership of NATO, becoming one of the most belligerent in supporting the continuation of the war in Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Indeed, the perceived ‘Russia threat’ of invading Europe is a theme of nearly all the Swedish political parties. Andersson told the FT that her top priorities in government were Ukraine and “intensifying co-operation” with European countries – apparently not the cost of living or economic issues.

It was always an illusion anyway about Sweden being the ‘third way’ between untrammelled free market capitalism and command economy autocratic Communism.  The great gains of the Swedish labour movement in the early 20th century have steadily been reversed. Just as in other capitalist economies, the polices of neoliberalism – a reversion to free markets, low taxation for the rich and corporations, cuts in the welfare state and in real wages, rising inequality etc – have been operating in Sweden since the mid-1990s.

Sweden may still have a more ‘equal’ income distribution than the US and the UK, but it is still very unequal – and inequality has been rising the fastest since the 1990s of all advanced capitalist economies. The top 10% of Swedish income earners take home (after tax), 33% of all personal income while the bottom 50% share just 20%.

Wealth inequality is even worse.  In 1980, the top 1% of personal wealth owners took 17.7% of all personal wealth; now they have 22.5%.  The top 10% had 54.4% in 1980; now they have 68.2%.  The bottom 50% of Swedes had just 13.4% of total personal wealth in 1980; now they have more debt than wealth at -10.9%!, such has been the rise in borrowing (mortgages etc)! – WID figures. In Sweden, like in most other Nordic countries, tax reforms over the 1990s have decreased the tax burden for wealthier households, e.g. by decreasing capital taxation and lowering or abandoning wealth taxation. At the same time, there have been cuts in welfare benefits for the poor.

Sweden is no longer an epitome of state provision. The country is one of the world leaders in having public services supplied by the private sector, paid for by the government. About one-third of all Swedish secondary schools are so-called ‘free schools’, with the majority of them run by for-profit companies, while about 40% of primary healthcare providers are privately owned. Their shares are even sold on the stock market.  Public provision has been outsourced to the detriment of quality.  Sweden’s schools have slipped from being one of the world’s best in international ratings to “one of the most mediocre”. The Social Democrats have long been against independent schools being able to make a profit and pay out dividends. But they have never been able to muster a majority to end this.

And then there is immigration. Over 600,000 immigrants from the Middle East have entered the country since the Syrian/Iraq disaster.  Many immigrants are young single men and they have helped capitalist enterprises and the state sector overcome an acute labour shortage for low skilled work.  But the amount of immigrants per head of population is way more than in any other European economy and it has increased pressure on those public services, already suffering from neo-liberal measures. The small towns in Sweden have experienced low wages, poorer services and then were faced with an influx of new immigrants. This was the breeding ground for the Democrats’ racist and nationalist message of ‘Sweden for Swedes’. 

The rise of the Swedish Democrats follows the pattern of so-called populism that we have seen in Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and other EU countries, as well as with Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US.  It is the product of the failure of capitalism to deliver after the end of the Golden Age in the mid-1960s, but particularly after the global financial crash, the Great Recession and the ensuing Long Depression. Swedish capitalism, somewhat like Germany (only as a much smaller economy), has experienced a slowdown in economic growth in the last few decades and particularly since 2008.

Whichever political bloc – left or right – wins a majority in a new parliament, it will change little. 

Ken Klippenstein: Nonbinary Gender Extremism?

 Nonbinary Gender Extremism?

The White House has a new target. But who’s the real extremist? Ken Klippenstein Sept 3 2026

Sebastian Gorka

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I am baffled that White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka gets so little attention from the media.

It isn’t for lack of material, which is a rare blend of both cry-laugh funny and substantively alarming. Gorka is like a theater kid version of Henry Kissinger, the same inflated ego but with a flair for the flamboyant: bragging he’s stacking terrorist bodies “like cordwood” after receiving "eternal justice" from the Trump admin’s "hammers of hell”; his convertible with a vanity plate “ART WAR” in reference to Sun Tzu; the Hercule Poirot pocket squares and mustachios. 

Amusing as it all is, the theatrics are in service of a worldview that regards just about anyone who might look out of place in his beloved Hungary (where his parents are from) as some kind of threat to Western civilization. 

The Trump administration has already sought to stigmatize transgender people as a hotbed of violent extremism, as I reported on last year. The U.S. government’s official national counterterrorism strategy, authored by Gorka earlier this year, explicitly mentions “extreme gender ideologies” as an example of a “violent secular political groups” that will be prioritized for “identification and neutralization,” as shown below.

Screenshot of pages 5-6 of the National Counterterrorism Strategy

Gorka’s fingerprints are also on Trump’s national security order NSPM-7, which directed federal agencies to root out extremism on “gender,” among other things deemed hostile to “traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” But the document does not explain how exactly it defines extremism on gender, leading some to think it was just a war on trans people. 

Gorka recently suggested that it goes farther than that.

In a little-noticed interview on Rabbi Michael Barclay’s podcast last month, Gorka warned of the “internal threat” to America, listing “mentally imbalanced transgender, nonbinary extremists” among them. (Nonbinary refers to people who identify as neither male nor female.) 

That is the first ever reference to non-binary extremism by a national security official, as far as I can tell.

Here’s Gorka’s full remark in context:

“Whether it’s jihadists, whether it’s cartels bringing in fentanyl, killing, you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans, whether it’s members of the DSA who wish to get rid of the presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court. You know, whether it’s the external threat or the internal threat, whether it’s the mentally imbalanced transgender, non-binary extremists who literally walk into a Catholic church and murder little children at the Annunciation Church.”

Gorka is referring to the August 27, 2025 attack on Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. Robin Westman, 23, fired more than a hundred rifle rounds through the church’s windows during an all-school Mass held to mark the first week of classes, killing two young children — before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The FBI investigated it as an act of domestic terrorism.

But the shooter was transgender, not non-binary. Westman, who had legally changed names in 2019, left behind videos and writings that prosecutors said expressed hatred toward nearly every group imaginable. The acting U.S. attorney put it more bluntly: the shooter “appeared to hate all of us.” I’m hard pressed to see how Westman’s gender identity had anything to do with it. 

In fact, I tried to find any evidence of a record of non-binary violence, and the only case I could come up with is the Zizians.

The Zizians are a small offshoot of the Bay Area “rationalist” cult that formed around the writings of Jack “Ziz” LaSota, and they have been linked by prosecutors to six killings across California, Pennsylvania and Vermont — among them a Border Patrol Agent shot during a Vermont traffic stop in January 2025. Maryland prosecutors last year described LaSota as the leader of an extremist group. Many of the group’s members are transgender or other nonconforming genders.

The group is definitely dangerous and extreme in their views; but those views are fixated on things like veganism, artificial intelligence and theory of mind stuff — not gender.

The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates roughly 2.1 million American adults as transgender — about 0.8 percent of the country — and puts nonbinary adults at around 1.2 million. This is the population Gorka has folded into a category alongside cartels and jihadists.

Gorka and company are obsessed with any sexual (and political) identities that don’t embrace guns, God (his God), and a Czarist love of the old world. 

He put this bluntly in his appearance on Barclay’s podcast, saying: 

“The question of our age is very simple: Does the West have the will to fight and defeat those who wish to destroy our civilization?”

The “West” that he’s referring to is threatened, Gorka says, not just by those who believe things he doesn’t agree with, but also by those who don’t believe in anything. That’s Gorka’s definition of groups like sexual predators, not as criminals, but as another extremist group invented under Trump: the “nihilist violent extremist,” which I reported on last year.

Just this week, the FBI announced the first-ever minor to be federally charged for “nihilistic violent extremism” — a 17-year-old from Maine, found to have committed acts of juvenile delinquency including conspiring to sexually exploit a child, distributing child sexual abuse material, cyberstalking and interstate threats. The Bureau says it is now investigating more than 500 “NVE” operatives nationwide, a number it says is on the rise, up from 350 investigations last December.

FBI press release

While the teenager’s crimes obviously merit criminal prosecution, does this really rise to the level of a terroristic threat to national security? 

Gorka thinks so. What is bizarre about this official with President Trump’s ear is that this extremist can chatter on without anyone in the press noticing. He’s a high-level government official!

Society, Gorka says, is in “a war to the death where only one side can win: the forces of light and goodness, or those who really are working for the destruction of our civilization.”

It’s pretty obvious who the real extremist is here.

Ken Klippenstein. Leak: Democratic Org “Anti-Extremism” Project Targets Left

Leak: Democratic Org “Anti-Extremism” Project Targets Left

Ken Klippenstein August 14th 2026

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Third Way, a prominent Democratic lobby group in Washington, has a new multi-million dollar effort to “combat extremism” on the “far-left,” an internal staff email leaked to me reveals.

“[E]xtreme far-left voices gaining purchase over the past year … represent a sharp break from a traditional left wing in American politics,” the July 23 email says. This break, the email continues, has led to the rise of a faction that is both “radical” and “illiberal” — figures like Zohran Mamdani — pursuing a government like authoritarian Cuba.

“When some folks hear ‘socialism’ they think of Scandinavia, but what the activists behind the DSA are advocating for is closer to Cuba,” the email says, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America.

Cuba!

	Leaked email 4.45KB ∙ PDF file
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The irony is that Third Way, sharply critical of the Trump administration, is echoing it perfectly. In fact, the email was sent just days before the release of a State Department report alleging Cuban influence on the American left, mentioning such frightening subversives as Ben Cohen (founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, as I reported at the time.

Also, earlier that month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio led an international summit on “political terrorism” also targeting the left, even introducing a new term: “Far-Left Terrorism.”

It’s not a war against Trump or MAGA or the Republicans in 2028. It’s not against disinformation or foreign influence; that was yesterday’s panic. It’s not against anti-semitism, or the impact of social media, or guns. It’s not even against violence in general.

It’s a war against other Democrats (socialists specifically), and what Third Way labels far-left “extremism.” That sure sounds more like the FBI and homeland security than a “center left … organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” as it describes itself

This isn’t just someone running their mouth in an email, either. The author, senior vice president of Third Way, Lanae Erickson, is announcing an organized and sustained effort to defeat the supposed new extremist threat.

As the email says, “we are launching a strategy to drive awareness of these threats to the party, including adding to our team by hiring a Director of Anti-Extremism to help us make the case against these noxious ideas and recruit many others to do the same.” 

The goal, the email continues, is to “create a counterweight to the forces pushing more Democrats to embrace extreme and illiberal ideas.”

Third Way’s president, Jonathan Cowan, alluded to the plan last week.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” Cowan told the New York Times, describing a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028. This week, Third Way posted a job announcement for a director to head its “Anti-Extremism” project, corroborating the email.

Screenshot of new Third Way job announcement

Beyond the Washington rhetoric, Third Way is saying that if your political views aren’t vanilla, you’re an “extremist.” That’s national security’s polite word for terrorist, once a reference to Muslim Americans and would-be revolutionaries but now applied to any American citizen who dares to venture away from Party talking points.

What is worse, it used to be the case that when the government or the administration, whether Obama or Bush, used the word “extremist” they were always careful to include a qualifier: “violent extremism.” That meant that physical violence (actual or intended) was necessary to get one labeled a terrorist.

Back during the Obama years, there was “countering violent extremism.” Then from Trump’s first term to Biden, there was “domestic violent extremism.” The FBI’s threat categories carried it too — “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism.” They are all imperfect and ugly labels, but the “violent” qualifier at least maintained a pretense that there was a threat of physical harm. And pretended that the threat label wasn’t questioning free speech or association.

Now it’s just “extremism” — one word. Third Way is joining the Trump administration in dropping the violence qualifier. It’s enough to just have the wrong beliefs; wrong, that is, in the eyes of the Party apparatus in Washington.

When I asked Third Way this week how it defines this “extremism,” spokesperson Kate DeGruyter said that the effort “is aimed at the DSA itself, not at liberal Democrats” — though it wasn’t clear how they define “liberal Democrats.” Asked who gave Third Way the $15 million for this project, DeGruyter’s only response was: “This a new effort and we are in the process of fundraising.”

Before Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan primary to run for Senate as a Democrat, Cowan, the Third Way president, issued an open letter and op-ed directly targeting him as a member of DSA despite his never having been a member of the organization and explicitly describing himself as a “capitalist.” (Third Way tells me it now supports El-Sayed, presumably because he’s since won.)

Three members of Congress are DSA members or describe themselves as democratic socialists — Senator Bernie Sanders and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — along with the mayor of the country's largest city, Zohran Mamdani. You may have heard of them.

The Times reported that Third Way’s new campaign would go after both self-described democratic socialists and candidates like El-Sayed, whom Cowan at the time accused of running a DSA-style campaign without the membership card. So because DSA is too narrow, Third Way has done exactly as the FBI would do: it has expanded the definition of the threat category. The war is against members of DSA and people who espouse DSA positions or use DSA tactics, or just socialists, or just “far-left extreme voices and forces,” as Third Way says, or even more broadly people with “politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric.”

Politically toxic ideas and offensive rhetoric? That sounds like me and half the people I know. 
I call top bunk at the Third Way reeducation camp!

Third Way is all but an arm of the Democratic Party. It’s run by former administration officials — Cowan was chief of staff at the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton — and exists to supply the party’s leadership with the language that leads to the talking points that become the way elected Democrats describe the country and their own voters.

As for what this all looks like in practice, Third Way provided a preview this week in its remarks on Francesca Hong’s campaign for Democratic candidate to be Governor of Wisconsin.

“She’s not a real person,” Yemisii Egbewole, a Senior Fellow at Third Way and former Biden White House official, told Mark Halperin. She added an implication of mental illness, saying Hong is “deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy some of her own beliefs.”

The goal, with the “extremist” label, is thus to make anyone who doesn’t conform with the vanilla politics of Washington seem not just idiotic but insane. It’s a real-life One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and if your beliefs aren’t something you’d see on cable news, the nurse would like to see you.

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Ken Klippenstein. FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism

FEMA’s New Mission: Domestic Terrorism

The disaster response agency forgets the weather, embraces pre-crime

Ken Klippenstein July 28th 2026

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency, often criticized for its inadequate response to natural disasters like wildfires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, has been assigned a new mission: “domestic terrorism.”

Now FEMA is shelling out grant money to state and local authorities to build up capacity to carry out pre-crime operations against “organized political violence,” as one FEMA information bulletin I obtained says.

The bulletin, dated July 9, instructs local authorities to prioritize “domestic terrorism” in their grant applications. Titled “Implementation of National Security Presidential Memorandum-7…,” the document echoes President Trump’s emphasis on rooting out suspected domestic terrorists before an attack takes place.

To head off these attacks, the bulletin tells states what to buy: training to spot “social media-based indicators,” analysts to monitor “online behaviors and digital footprints,” and teams for “managing persons of concern whose behavior indicates a potential trajectory toward domestic terrorism.”

	FEMA Information Bulletin 273KB ∙ PDF file
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Some form of the word indicator — indicators, indicative, indicates — appears ten times in the eight-page FEMA bulletin. It is a favorite euphemism of law enforcement because it obscures what’s really happening: pre-crime. Indicators are something a person said or did that an officer has been trained to read as a sign of a crime that hasn't happened and may never happen. Under this approach, the old requirement that evidence of a crime come first before any investigation is replaced by a forecast. It’s vibes-based law enforcement, divination but with the imprimatur of national security respectability. And while it’s mostly only been used against real, organized foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS, it’s now being deployed against Americans.

To give you a sense of just how central pre-crime is to this approach, consider the following grant proposals the FEMA bulletin calls for:

• Learn “the latest tactics and trends used by domestic terrorism actors in order to recognize indicators prior to an attack.”

• “Prepare and train communities to identify and report threatening or concerning behaviors that may be indicative of larger threat plotting and/or activity.”

• Conduct “Surveillance and counter-surveillance training to detect pre-operational casing and hostile surveillance of domestic targets.”

As for why any state or local government would entangle itself in such fraught activities, a second document I obtained — from FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security — explains why. It contains a not-so-subtle warning to authorities that don’t adhere to the new domestic terrorism priority, saying:

“Failure to meet NPA [National Priority Areas] spending requirements will result in a hold on affected funds until compliance issues are resolved.”

Screenshot of Homeland Security Grant Program Notice

	Homeland Security Grant Program Notice 1.29MB ∙ PDF file
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That second document, a Department of Homeland Security grant program notice, is a $1 billion shopping list of available federal money. But there’s a catch: thirty-five percent, it says, must go to terrorism prevention. Another thirty percent is allocated for five designated Department of Homeland Security priorities:

1. “Supporting Border Crisis Response,” 

2. “Enhancing Election Security”

3. “Supporting Homeland Security Task Forces and Fusion Centers”

4. “Enhancing the Protection of Soft Targets/Crowded Places”

5. “Enhancing Cybersecurity”

The priorities track the president's own preoccupations. Just this month, Trump gave a primetime address claiming China had compromised the 2020 election. The “border crisis response” priority, meanwhile, points states straight at ICE's 287(g) program — which, as I've reported, turns local law enforcement into bounty hunters by paying them to do immigration enforcement, including bonuses tied to how many people they find. The “Homeland Security Task Forces” priority refers the new federal-local strike forces Trump created by executive order on his first day back in office to hunt cartels and enforce immigration laws. 

And the “crowded places” priority has its own ghost: the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, shot in front of a crowd at a university event last September.

That murder is what precipitated all of this. Three days after signing an executive order declaring “Antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, Trump issued NSPM-7 on September 25, 2025 — a national security order that opens with a reference to Kirk’s murder and builds a counterterrorism program meant to prevent the next one.

NSPM-7 asserts that political violence in America “does not emerge organically” but is the product of “sophisticated, organized campaigns.” It identifies the common threads it wants investigated: “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” 

Until now, NSPM-7 has largely pointed at federal machinery, like the FBI and IRS. But a brief section toward the bottom of NSPM-7 reaches down to your county sheriff. It orders the homeland security secretary to develop grant programs to pay local law enforcement to go after domestic terrorism.

Screenshot of NSPM-7 order

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Washington knew this would happen, long before Trump entered the White House. 

FEMA was created in 1979 as an independent agency. But after the 9/11 attacks, in 2003 it was folded into the new counterterrorism-focused Department of Homeland Security. FEMA’s preparedness functions and grant programs were pulled out and scattered across the department.

That September, the undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response sent Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge a seven-page memo warning that the reorganization would cripple America's ability to respond to disasters. He was overruled. Two years later came Katrina.

By October 2012, a bipartisan congressional investigation reported that the Department of Homeland Security could not say how much it had spent on fusion centers (the state and regional intelligence hubs, built after 9/11, where local police, federal agents and analysts pool information). DHS’s own estimates ranged from $289 million to $1.4 billion. The intelligence coming out of them was “of uneven quality,” the Senate concluded, finding it “oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens' civil liberties." 

Reviewing thirteen months of fusion center reporting, investigators found nothing that uncovered a terrorist threat and no contribution to disrupting an active plot. Of 610 reports, 188 were never published, many because they lacked useful information or risked violating civil liberties protections. Among the reports flagged: a Muslim community group's book recommendations, parenting advice, and a motorcycle club's pamphlet advising members to be polite to police during traffic stops.

Fourteen years later, the machine is being handed a mandate to watch digital footprints for indicators of anti-American sentiment.

FEMA, meanwhile, has absorbed roughly a 14 percent workforce reduction since January 2025 while managing more than 300,000 projects across more than 600 open disaster declarations.

Even in my little corner of the world, in Wisconsin, I can see how desperately the country needs a functioning disaster response agency. Yesterday afternoon a tornado came through the Fox Valley, about a hundred miles northeast of where I live. The National Weather Service issued a Particularly Dangerous Situation warning, a designation it saves for the worst of them. Video of what it left behind is heartbreaking and all over social media today: homes torn open, everything inside gone. 

I’m sure the people who lost their homes will be relieved to know that they’re safe from domestic terrorism.

What is needed now is the thing FEMA was actually created to do, done by a civil agency neither militarized nor given over to an anti-political terrorism agenda. Instead we see a climate-change denying, domestic terrorism-obsessed administration creating its own disaster, with a do-nothing Congress standing idly by.

It’s insane how little media coverage stories like these get. Help me do more of them by becoming a paid subscriber (or chipping in via my GoFundMe here).

Ken Klippenstein: Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

 Minnesota “Antifa” Terrorists Charged

Federal prosecutor can't explain why or who Antifa is

Ken Klippenstein June 23 2026

U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen

NSPM-7 is a scandalously under-covered story, please subscribe so I can cover it more

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Last week’s federal indictment of 15 anti-ICE protestors in Minnesota as alleged “Antifa” members — and thus domestic terrorists — is a masterclass in how the FBI is now practicing “pre-crime,” arresting normal citizens beforethey commit a crime, or without regard to whether they’ve committed a crime at all.

It is one of the first cases where presidential national security memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) has been explicitly referenced by the Justice Department as directing arrests, a new practice that began this month. U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen said that the directive established Joint Task Force Vanguard to “prioritize politically motivated violence,” which to the Trump administration of course means its opponents. The directive, Rosen, also said, directs federal investigators “to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.” 

Rosen was asked at the press conference how the Justice Department defines Antifa, and basically had no answer. “What is Antifa goes beyond, goes beyond, I think, the scope of what this indictment is,” he replied. “But what I can tell you is that we have plenty of people that self-identify in that way, and you might wanna ask them that question.”

And as to whether anyone was actually hurt, here too Rosen stumbled. “Whether or not they actually, at the end of the day, caused bodily harm is not the measure of whether or not they committed a serious federal crime,” said, sounding like a kid who hadn’t done the homework being called on in class.

In other words, the federal government is prosecuting a group it cannot even define.

The Trump administration’s war on its opponents finds its solid form in the war on Antifa. Because President Trump “designated” Antifa as a terrorist group, “counterterrorism” rules apply. Think of the modern day FBI objective as preventing another 9/11: that is, following the doctrine of the past two decades, which is to stop an attack before it happened.

Though they don’t say it explicitly, Task Force Vanguard is in the business of pre-crime. Under NSPM-7, the feds require no crime to actually have been committed. They only need “indicators.” The indicators are broad enough to sweep in millions of Americans: “anti-Americanism,” “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration,” as I’ve previously reported.

Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism “Indicators”

KEN KLIPPENSTEIN · SEPTEMBER 27, 2025

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’…

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Antifa as an indicator is absurd. At protests I’ve covered over the past couple of years, when I asked people what they thought of Antifa, the answer I heard again and again — from moms, from grandpas — was “I’m Antifa!” Some of the protestors were being playful, some were being defiant. But what they didn’t mean was that they were part of some organization as Washington imagines it. When I asked them why Antifa, the answer was universal. They are anti-fascist, which in non-national security terms is what they thought the word simply meant.

That confusion has produced mishaps that would be funny if the stakes weren’t what they are — like the time federal law enforcement was convinced it had identified the “leader of Antifa,” who turned out to be some random guy in Portland, as I reported.

U.S. Attorney Rosen announced at his press conference:

“Today, a federal indictment was unsealed charging 15 defendants with conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers and other charges related to efforts of two Minneapolis-based Antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law in our state. The defendants are members and associates of Direct Action Minnesota… These defendants have been charged not for what they said, but for what they did. They all joined an agreement, a conspiracy, to interfere with lawful immigration enforcement operations.”

“Conspiracy” sounds to me like an awful lot like civil disobedience or free speech. Note, for instance, that the most vivid piece of evidence Rosen actually presented to reporters was a video of one defendant, Kyle Wagner, using violent rhetoric — speech — which sits awkwardly beside Rosen’s insistence that nobody was being charged “for what they said.”

NSPM-7 was signed in September 2025, three days after Trump’s executive order designating Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. It directs the government to disrupt networks supposedly “animated” by beliefs that include anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, and “extremism on migration.” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s implementation memo — titled “Ending Political Violence Against ICE” — pointed that apparatus squarely at people accused of impeding immigration enforcement. Joint Task Force Vanguard is now the enforcement arm with a much broader target.

In its zeal to arrest and convict its political opponents, the Trump administration has so far been unsuccessful. In January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly announced that ICE had survived “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in north Minneapolis, suggesting protestors were directly threatening law enforcement officers. What she described as federal officers “ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat them with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” forcing one officer to fire “a defensive shot,” ended up being two Venezuelan DoorDash drivers with no violent records.

Then the video surfaced. City surveillance footage showed a scuffle lasting about 12 seconds, with no snow-shovel beating; a shovel sat on the ground the entire time. Authorities had the footage within hours of the shooting. Prosecutors didn’t bother to watch it until weeks after they’d charged the men and put an agent’s sworn account in front of a judge. In February, Rosen’s own office moved to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning they can never be refiled — citing evidence “materially inconsistent” with the affidavit. A federal judge agreed. Two ICE agents were placed on administrative leave for apparently lying under oath. 

Minneapolis’s police chief offered the epitaph: the agents “hung themselves.” 

This was no one-off. The local CBS affiliate in Minneapolis combed throughcourt filings and found at least 18 Minnesotans whose assault-on-an-officer cases were dropped, with a judge dismissing charges for 15 of them. The sworn affidavits of a single ICE agent turned up in roughly ten of the dismissed cases. In one case Rosen himself moved to drop charges, the defendant said federal agents had shackled him to a hospital bed for days without access to his phone.

Another case collapsed after a judge found that Bondi had publicly named arrested protesters in a social-media post — violating the court’s sealing order and, the judge wrote, “likely” several Justice Department policies.

And the pattern isn’t confined to Minnesota. In Chicago’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” prosecutors charged the “Broadview Six” — a group that included a Democratic congressional candidate and a Democratic candidate for the state legislature — with conspiring to “impede” an ICE officer outside a detention facility. A federal judge tossed the case over prosecutorial misconduct, including allegations of jury tampering and misleading the court.

Of 22 prosecutions in the Chicago area under the federal impeding-an-officer statute, 16 have been dismissed or never reached indictment, according to a Chicago Sun-Times tally cited by CNN.

In Los Angeles, the government has lost all five such cases that reached trial — five straight acquittals.

None of this is slowing down the White House. “Trump Administration Delivers Another Crushing Blow to Antifa Terrorist Network,” the White House announced with the Minnesota arrests. The release details federal cases against “Antifa” individuals in states including Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, Washington, New Jersey, California, and Indiana.

Trump spews and the machinery of government plods along behind. Yes Noem, Bondi, and Kash Patel can tweet as if there is both a threat and the feds are quickly responding, but Task Forces have to iron out their budget and their letterheads before they can get to the X (née Twitter) on-ramp.

Rosen closed by calling political violence “a national scourge in our times.” Not gas prices. Not rent. Not the cost of healthcare. Or childcare. That’s what you get when the imperatives of “national security” are allowed to set a society’s priorities — especially once “national security” has been redefined to mean almost anything the government wants it to.

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