A Modest Proposal for Pre-Criminalizing Everyone Who Doesn’t Clap Hard Enough

By now, you’ve probably heard that anti-capitalism is a gateway drug to terrorism. Right up there with marijuana leading to heroin, or reading Camus leading to wearing a beret, a man-bun and disappointing your parents. The Trump administration, in its infinite wisdom, sublime inspiration and its seventh National Security Presidential Memorandum, has helpfully compiled a list of dangerous thoughtcrimes that predict your likelihood of committing political violence. Anti-capitalism makes the cut. So does anti-Christianity, anti-Americanism, and make sure you are sitting down for this : having opinions about gender that aren’t “traditional.” Enough.

Orwell would be proud, though presumably he’d also be under surveillance for his anti-capitalist leanings and that whole 1984 business, which definitely counts as “anti-American” if you squint hard enough and drink the right amount of state-issued Kool-Aid.

But let’s not single out America for this particular face-plant into authoritarianism. The war on dissent is global, spreading through Western democracies like a viral TikTok Chicken Banana, except instead of teenagers doing coordinated moves, it’s governments doing coordinated crackdowns on anyone who dares suggest that perhaps, just perhaps, things could be better. Or that the emperor is a dangerous fool.

The Pre-Crime Casino: Place Your Bets

Welcome to the new counterterrorism paradigm, where Spielberg’s (2002) Minority Report is less dystopian warning than operational manual. Trump’s NSPM-7 doesn’t just investigate crimes; it investigates the probability of crimes based on your ideology.

The Joint Terrorism Task Forces; 4,000 members strong, drawn from over 500 agencies; are now tasked with identifying threats “before they result in violent political acts.” It’s preventative policing meets psychic hotline. “I’m sensing… yes… you’re thinking critical thoughts about border policy.

It’s your whole vibe. Security will be with you shortly.”

Here’s where it gets really absurd: the very analysis that makes you less likely to commit violence is now evidence that you might. As Marx explains in Das Capital, structural analysis means you understand that:

“individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories.”

Translation: shooting a CEO doesn’t end capitalism any more than shooting a McDonald’s cashier ends the Big Mac. The system remains. The exploitation continues. The fries are still overpriced.

Trotsky, in his 1911 essay “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism,” laid it out even more plainly: individual acts of violence “belittle the role of the masses in their own consciousness” and lead only to “disillusionment and apathy” when the wheel of exploitation keeps turning. In other words, understanding how power actually works makes you organize unions, inspire solidarity, not build bombs.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? They’re not actually worried about bombs. They’re worried about unions.

The Ministry of Irony Announces Its Dissolution

Let’s examine the sheer comedic genius of the Trump administration’s logic here. They’re surveilling anti-fascists while claiming those anti-fascists are the real threat to democracy. It’s like watching an arsonist fire the smoke alarm for being too loud.

The memorandum begins by invoking the assassination of Charlie Kirk; tragic, yes, but two weeks later, still no evidence the shooter had any coherent political ideology or organisational ties. No matter! We’ve got a narrative to construct here. String together that killing with the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting, add some assassination attempts on Trump and Kavanaugh, toss in some protests against ICE, and baby, you’ve got yourself a vast left-wing terror conspiracy stew. ANTIFA, ANTIFA, ANTIFA: say it often enough and it becomes a real and pressing danger.

It’s the JFK assassination theory approach to policymaking: connect enough dots and you can draw any picture you want. Preferably one that justifies deploying the entire national security apparatus against people who think healthcare should be free and billionaires should pay taxes.

Meanwhile, what got memory-holed faster than a celebrity’s racist tweet? The Department of Justice report showing that since 1990, far-right extremists committed 227 events killing more than 520 people, compared to 42 far-left attacks killing 78. The report was quietly removed from the DOJ website the week before NSPM-7 dropped. Nothing to see here, folks. Just spring cleaning. In autumn.

The January 6 coup attempt? Not mentioned. The armed militia movements? Radio silence. The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the casual calls for civil war at your local school board meeting? Apparently those are just high-spirited expressions of patriotic fervor, like setting off fireworks, except the fireworks are zip ties and gallows.

The Kafka Protocol: A User’s Guide

Franz Kafka, who knew a thing or two about arbitrary bureaucratic persecution, would recognize the landscape we’re building. In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority for an unspecified crime. The process itself is the punishment. The uncertainty is the weapon.

NSPM-7 operates on the same principle. What exactly constitutes “anti-American” sentiment? Who defines “extremism on gender”? How do you prove you’re not having the wrong thoughts about capitalism when the FBI agent scrolling through your Twitter feed has decided that retweeting Jacobin articles makes you a terrorism indicator?

The beauty is in the vagueness. You can’t defend yourself against “indicia” of radicalization. You can’t prove you won’t commit a crime you haven’t committed. You’re Schrodinger’s terrorist: simultaneously innocent and suspicious until an agent with a security clearance opens the box and collapses the wave function into an investigation.

Over 3,000 nonprofits have signed an open letter opposing this directive. Major law firms; those bastions of radical leftism; are warning their clients to prepare for politically motivated probes. WilmerHale, Patterson Belknap, and Arnold & Porter are basically writing legal briefs that translate to:

“Yeah, this is some McCarthyite bullshit, and you should be very afraid.”

The IRS has been directed to ensure no tax-exempt organizations are “directly or indirectly” financing political violence, which sounds reasonable until you realize that “political violence” now includes “civil disorder.” Protest outside an ICE facility? That’s on the list. Organize a sit-in? Domestic terrorism. Donate to a bail fund? Congratulations, you’re now a terrorism financier. Hope you like audits!

The Transatlantic Mutual Assured Repression Society

But America isn’t innovating here; it’s franchise-building. The UK has been pioneering thought-crime prosecution for years now. British police have literally shown up at people’s doors for “non-crime hate incidents”; which is Orwellian bureaucratese for “you said something someone didn’t like, no law was broken, but we’re here to intimidate you anyway.”

France has used its sweeping anti-terrorism laws to prosecute climate activists and union organizers. Germany has deployed state surveillance against leftist groups with the kind of enthusiasm it used to reserve for reunification celebrations. Canada invoked the Emergencies Act against truckers, then discovered—oops—that giving the government emergency powers to freeze bank accounts might be a *tad* authoritarian. Who knew?

Across the democratic West, the pattern is consistent: existing counterterrorism infrastructure, built with bipartisan support after 9/11 to fight foreign threats, gets repurposed to fight domestic dissent. It’s mission creep meets scope creep meets feature creep, except the feature is totalitarianism and nobody asked for the update.

Counter-terrorism police in Western Australia regularly follow, raid homes and offices of Disrupt Burrup Hub activists protesting against fossil fuel projects, spending hours combing through computers, phones and personal belongings. When activists went to the home of Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill in August 2023, counter-terrorism police were already inside before the activists arrived.
Anti-terrorism laws have been used in many countries against environmental activists who are not terrorists. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says Australia has one of the highest rates of climate protest arrests in the world at 20%

NSW laws could see people charged with 2 years prison time and $22,000 fines for chanting or holding placards near places of worship, and give police power to shut down protests near such locations says The Human Rights Law Centre.

The genius of modern repression is that it doesn’t require jackboots or midnight knocks. It requires bureaucracy. Forms. Watchlists. De-banking. IRS audits. Loss of tax-exempt status. It’s not a gulag; it’s a compliance nightmare. You’re not disappeared; you’re just financially ruined and socially destroyed. Much more civilised.

The Comedians’ Dilemma: When Satire Becomes Documentation

George Carlin used to joke that the government doesn’t want a population capable of critical thinking.

“They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking,” he’d say. “They want obedient workers.”

If Carlin were alive today, his entire corpus would be exhibit A in a terrorism investigation. Anti-American? Check. Anti-capitalist? Double check. Hostile to traditional values? The man did seven words you can’t say on television. Clearly radicalized.

Lenny Bruce got arrested for obscenity. Today he’d get flagged for radicalization. Bill Hicks’s critique of American foreign policy? Domestic terrorism indicator. Richard Pryor’s commentary on race? Extremism on race. The entire lineage of American political comedy; which is to say, the parts that actually matter; would trigger NSPM-7’s algorithm faster than you can say “First Amendment.”

This is what authoritarianism looks like in a society that can’t admit it’s authoritarian. We don’t ban dissent; we just investigate it. We don’t punish thought; we just monitor its indicators. We don’t suppress speech; we just ensure that exercising it comes with consequences severe enough to make you think twice.

The Long March Through the Institutions (to Shut Them Down)

Stephen Miller, the man who looks like a Bond villain drawn by someone who’d never seen a Bond film; announced that this is:

“the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left-wing terrorism.”

The pride in his voice was palpable. Finally, government efficiency! All of government, working together, focused on a common goal: suppressing political opposition.

The mechanism is elegant in its totalizing scope. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces do the investigation. The Treasury tracks financial networks and pressures banks to file Suspicious Activity Reports. The IRS audits nonprofits and revokes tax exemptions. The State Department handles foreign agents. The Attorney General prosecutes “to the maximum extent permissible by law.” Everyone gets a piece of the action. It’s a whole-of-government approach to making sure nobody asks uncomfortable questions about why Amazon pays less in taxes than a kindergarten teacher.

And it’s working. Nonprofits are already scared. Major philanthropic organizations have been named as targets. The Southern Poverty Law Center; which spent decades tracking actual terrorism from actual white supremacist groups; is now itself under threat for the crime of noting that actual terrorists exist and tend to be right-wing.

The chilling effect is the point. You don’t have to arrest everyone. You just have to arrest enough people, investigate enough organizations, freeze enough assets, revoke enough tax exemptions. Pretty soon, people start self-censoring. They stop donating to causes that might be too political. They stop organizing. They stop speaking out. Mission accomplished.

Conclusion: The Banality of Digital Authoritarianism

Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil; how ordinary people, following procedures, can participate in monstrous systems. Today’s authoritarianism is banal in a different way. It’s paperwork. It’s algorithms. It’s watchlists and audits and “compliance reviews.” Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy. They’re just following the directive. Implementing policy. Executing the memorandum.

But here’s the thing about structural analysis; the very thing that’s now criminalised; it teaches you to see systems clearly. NSPM-7 isn’t about stopping terrorism. The data proves right-wing violence dwarfs left-wing violence by nearly 7-to-1, yet the directive mentions only the latter. This isn’t about safety. It’s about power.

It’s about crushing opposition before it can organize effectively. It’s about preventing the kind of mass movements that structural analysis leads to movements that might actually change things. Because if there’s one thing that terrifies the powerful more than violence, it’s organized masses demanding justice.

The war on dissent isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s dressed in bureaucratic language and national security jargon. It’s justified by cherry-picked incidents and threat inflation. It’s enabled by surveillance infrastructure governments built to fight foreign terrorists and are now deploying against domestic critics.

And the most terrifying part? It’s working. Not because it’s legal; Georgetown Law professors and the ACLU are already shredding its constitutional basis. Not because it’s effective at stopping violence; the FBI’s own data contradicts the premise. But because it’s procedurally smooth. It plugs into existing systems. It uses established agencies. It doesn’t require new laws or dramatic powers. It just requires redefining who the enemy is.

The war on dissent succeeds because it doesn’t look like war. It looks like policy. And policy, as we’re learning, can be far more dangerous than violence. It lasts longer. It spreads wider. And it normalizes faster than you can say “I thought this was a democracy.”

Swift had his modest proposal about eating Irish children. Mine is simpler: if Trump’s America is going to criminalise thought, let’s at least be honest about it. Replace the Statue of Liberty’s plaque.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free provided they have no criticisms of capitalism, Christianity, or American foreign policy, and promise not to think too hard about systems of oppression.”

Less catchy, perhaps. Naturally. But more accurate.

And accuracy, in the war on dissent, is the first casualty.