Why I Am More Afraid Every Day

Our democracy is more and more endangered as Trump gathers his private army, builds a nationwide network of political prisons, erodes civilian oversight of the military, seizes control of ballots in numerous urban areas, and much more. This is deadly serious and demands alert status from every citizen, along with Paul Revere 2.0 commitments to help alert your friends, neighbors and colleagues. 

Attached is Keep Our Republic’s newest analysis of the administration’s work to declare that most critics (civil rights activists; environmentalists; the ACLU; Democratic activists; women’s groups, etc.) should be treated as terrorists under an emergency government that will be led by Stephen Miller. 

This is extremely serious and dangerous, and you must recognize this reality. Do not whistle past the graveyard. 

Please read the attached and follow the thread of what is being done to subvert your democracy.  It will survive only if citizens band together, speak out and resist.  

Tim Wirth

The List You're Not Allowed to See

Somewhere inside the Department of Justice, there is a list. It contains the names of American organizations that the federal government has designated as domestic terrorist organizations. The list has been updated every thirty days since January 2026. Its contents are classified. No organization on it has been notified of its inclusion. No process exists to challenge a designation. And when a member of Congress asked the Attorney General to share the list with the legislative branch, she was told no.

You are not allowed to know if you are on it.

This is not a hypothetical. It is not a warning about what might happen if we are not vigilant. It is a description of what is happening now, in the seventh month of a presidential memorandum that most Americans have never heard of.

National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 — NSPM-7 — was signed on September 25, 2025. It directs the Attorney General to investigate and designate domestic organizations as "domestic terrorist organizations." It cites no statute. It cites no constitutional provision. No federal law authorizes the designation category it creates. The President simply declared, by memorandum, that this power exists — and then built a government around it.

The inventory of what has been constructed is staggering. A permanent interagency center — the NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center — staffed by personnel from ten federal agencies, with its own budget line and a mandate to "proactively identify" domestic targets. A $166 million budget increase and 328 new federal positions dedicated to the effort, with "gender extremism" listed alongside "anti-Americanism" and "anti-Christianity" as categories of domestic terrorism. A joint FBI-IRS command center using tax enforcement against nonprofit organizations. Two hundred Joint Terrorism Task Forces directed to investigate activists and their funding sources. A warrantless surveillance channel through FISA Section 702, opened by designating "antifa" as a transnational intelligence priority.

And this week, the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center — the organization that first documented the white nationalist ties of the man now running this entire apparatus.

That man is Stephen Miller. On August 25, 2025 — one month before NSPM-7 was signed — Miller appeared on Fox News and said: "The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization." One month later, he was put in charge of coordinating the federal campaign to prosecute domestic terrorist organizations. The person who publicly labeled a major American political party a terrorist organization was given operational authority over the machinery for designating and prosecuting terrorist organizations.

Five days after signing NSPM-7, the President stood before 800 generals at Quantico and told them that Democrats "are bad people" and "vicious people that we have to fight, just like you have to fight vicious people." He announced the creation of military "quick reaction forces" to "quell civil disturbances." When six Democratic lawmakers later released a video reminding military personnel of their duty to refuse illegal orders, the President accused them on Truth Social of "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!" His Justice Department then tried — and failed — to indict two United States senators for seditious conspiracy.

I want to pause here and ask the reader to consider what we have just described. A secret list of domestic enemies. A permanent bureaucracy to hunt them. A budget to fund it. A surveillance apparatus to monitor them. A tax enforcement arm to defund them. A rhetorical framework in which the opposition party is a terrorist organization and elected members of Congress are seditionists deserving of death. And a demonstrated willingness to use lethal force against a civilian — Alex Pretti, a VA nurse shot dead in Minneapolis while filming an ICE operation — followed by the application of the word "terrorist" to justify it after the fact.

At what point do we stop calling this a policy disagreement and start calling it what it is?

The most important thing to understand about NSPM-7 is that it does not stand alone. It is the bottom layer of a three-tiered emergency architecture. NSPM-7 operates day-to-day, building the lists and conditioning the enforcement apparatus. Above it sit the national emergency declarations — statutory mechanisms that broaden executive power when the President decides the moment has arrived. And above those sit the Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs: pre-drafted executive orders, held in classified storage for seven decades, never reviewed by Congress, understood to authorize the suspension of habeas corpus, mass detention, martial law, and the seizure of communications infrastructure. The President alone activates them. No notification is required. No court reviews them in advance.

Each layer normalizes the next. If you are already running a domestic terrorism apparatus with no congressional oversight, declaring a national emergency to expand it feels like a modest step. And if you are already operating under a national emergency, activating a PEAD feels like one more signature.

This administration has already demonstrated the principle. Executive Order 13848, signed in 2018 to authorize sanctions against foreign election interference, became the legal basis for a draft order — circulated at the highest levels of the White House after the 2020 election — directing the military to seize voting machines nationwide. The order was never signed. But the architecture was there, waiting to be repurposed. Emergency machinery does not care about the intent of the people who created it. It cares about the intent of the people who control it.

There is one remedy, and the window for it is closing. The Supreme Court can act before a crisis — through a declaratory judgment establishing that PEADs cannot suspend habeas corpus without congressional authorization, that military detention of civilians requires statutory authority, and that Congress must be notified before these instruments are activated. The Court can move in days when it chooses to. It decided Bush v. Gore in three days. It resolved the Pentagon Papers case in fifteen. But it cannot decide a case no one has filed. And after activation — when a shadow government has deployed to hardened bunkers and the normal judiciary may no longer be the functional seat of authority — may be too late.

The ACLU is drafting model executive orders for governors. The Brennan Center is filing FOIAs. Members of Congress are being turned away when they ask to see the list. These are signs of a system trying to resist with the tools of normalcy against an apparatus designed to operate outside of it.

Seven months. A secret list. A permanent bureaucracy. A $166 million budget. Two hundred task forces. A surveillance backdoor. A dead nurse labeled a terrorist. A refusal to rule out killing Americans on the basis of that secret list. And the man running it called your party a terrorist organization on national television before he was handed the keys.

The machine is built. It is running. The question is no longer whether it could be misused. The question is what it was built for.