This Trump Executive Action Is One of the Most Alarming We’ve Seen So Far

Take a close look at the language buried within those sentences. It’s calling on law enforcement to go after those who are trying to “change or direct policy”—something any political organization does. Which policies? The document makes this clear as well. The “common threads” of these “domestic terrorist” groups “include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” as well as “extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The document calls for “a National Joint Terrorism Task Force” and “local offices” (“JTTFs”) to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities and organizations” that “foment” these ideas “before they result in violent political acts.”

Read literally (and why shouldn’t it be?), this is a national security memorandum—signed by the president of the United States—that essentially outlaws what George Orwell called, in a famous work of speculative fiction, “thought crimes.”