Donald Trump’s new security directive labels anti-capitalist beliefs as a predictor of political violence. The irony: left-wing structural analysis actually pushes people away from lone-wolf attacks and toward mass organizing for change.

Donald Trump’s designation of antifa as a domestic terrorist organization last week was a perfect encapsulation of both the administration’s authoritarianism and its clownishness. Anyone old enough to remember the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 should get a chill when they hear government officials throwing around the word “terrorism.” That term tends to function as an all-purpose hall pass to justify encroachments on civil liberties.

The executive order used a catchall term to condemn a vague set of actors to an uncertain fate. It was almost as if, with great fanfare, the president had promised to extrajudicially execute vampires by exposing them to sunlight.

A far more serious and disturbing move, around the same time, attracted far less notice. Trump signed a national security policy memorandum called “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” known as NSPM-7. Such national security directives are far less common than executive orders. Where the latter tend to direct day-to-day government operations, the former can set sweeping new policies across the federal government’s military, law enforcement, and intelligence bureaucracies. As the name NPSM-7 indicates, this is only the seventh such directive Trump has issued since taking office.

See, Jacobin Magazine