I’ve been reporting on mass shootings and school shootings and political violence for longer than I care to think about. And something about this moment feels different. I first noticed it in the summer of 2024, after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. At the time, I assumed the shooter would be someone ideologically opposed to Trump, someone like the man who, in 2017, shot then–House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and three others at a congressional baseball practice. A violent man, as these things often go, for whom politics were so central that they might not excuse the act, but help explain it. Instead, Trump’s would-be assassin was a 20-year-old with a creeping mental illness, few friends and no expressed interest in politics.
I told my editor at the time that the Butler shooting — which killed a firefighter in the audience and critically wounded two others —felt like a school shooting with no school. An aimless young man, marred by mental illness and wasted potential was wearing a YouTuber’s branded T-shirt for his final act: a senseless piece of violence for violence’s sake. Less political statement than performance.
Over the next year, as Trump and his allies framed the attempted assassination as part of a broader political war against him, reporters and investigators failed to uncover any political motive for the Butler shooting. Meanwhile, the shootings continued: at schools, at churches, at religious schools, at the homes of Democratic state lawmakers, in offices and at bars, among other settings.
This string of recent shootings has been followed by a familiar internet and media scramble to assign political meaning to the violence. But since the Butler shooting, there’s been something else, too — a coordinated effort from the federal government to turn these shootings into something more expedient.
After shootings that killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a university in Utah and two detainees outside an Immigration and Customs facility in Dallas, President Donald Trump and conservative media at large have alleged a coordinated terror campaign by the so-called radical left. The realities behind those attacks remain complex and under investigation. But the Trump administration is using these incidents to target their political enemies.
To make sense of it all, I spoke to Ken Klippenstein, an independent journalist who’s been doing some of the clearest reporting on this moment over at his newsletter where he covers national security and politics. He’s spoken with people who knew the shooters, traced their digital footprints, and dug into the Trump administration’s evolving and targeted response. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ZADROZNY: I feel like I’ve seen your byline everywhere the last couple of weeks. I’ve seen you reporting on the backstory of recent alleged shooters, from the alleged Charlie Kirk shooter to the man who shot up an ICE facility in Dallas, to Trump’s pretty terrifying new directive on domestic terrorism supposedly coming from the left.
Mass shootings are ubiquitous, right? They have been for years, but it feels to me like we’re entering this new phase, a new chapter where the complication of the politics and the performance make it really, really difficult. The media is fumbling, not really meeting the moment perhaps, and politicians are eager to weaponize these shootings. So I’m thrilled to have you here to talk about it.
What has your reporting revealed about this moment?
KLIPPENSTEIN: For the reporting on recent shooters in Utah and Texas, I tracked down several of their friends. And I was struck by how similar their accounts were. I’ve been doing investigative reporting for about a decade now, and you pretty quickly learn everybody has a different perspective on something. It’s not necessarily that people are lying. It’s that they’re looking at things from different angles. So I was surprised at the parallels between the different accounts. I thought it was going to be a mess of disagreements over, ‘I thought he was this,’ ‘I thought his politics were that.’ And there was some, but on the question of politics, it was pretty much consensus by all of the friends in both cases that it was absurd, not just to say that these shooters were left wing, but to say that they’re right wing or any wing.
I talked to these friends in both cases, relatively young people in their 20s. They themselves seemed unaware of the broader political landscape, not to say that they don’t know who Donald Trump is, that they don’t know, you know, what MAGA is or who Charlie Kirk is. But beyond that, it was clear that they didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about these things. And in some ways, not only did that describe the friends, but that described the shooters as well. I thought about it, and it occurred to me, that might be the most normal thing about them. Because we live in a country that’s pretty disengaged politically. Only half the country votes during a presidential election, much less state, local and other federal elections. So I think the puzzlement by the media and the attempts to try to jam these shooters into an ideological box was not just misguided, it doesn’t describe what most of the country is like.
It was pretty much consensus by all of the friends in both cases that it was absurd, not just to say that these shooters were left wing, but to say that they’re right wing or any wing.
ZADROZNY: Take me through the reporting.
KLIPPENSTEIN: With the Charlie Kirk story, I was genuinely asking the same question that everyone else was, was how could something like this happen?
The media very quickly ran with this idea that it must have been a left-wing guy — and I don’t entirely blame them because Charlie Kirk was a very polarizing figure. I can understand why people would say that. I thought in the day and age of social media, there must be a way to find folks who knew him. So I just went around asking people I saw posting about him and said they’d known him, just trying to find as much as I could, not looking for any particular angle, because I honestly didn’t know what I was going to find. By the time I talked to like three or four of suspected shooter Tyler Robinson’s friends, they started sending me messages from their Discord channels. Initially it was reported as though there was just one, but he was in a bunch of Discord channels.
There’s a mystique around Discord and how the media talks about it, but it’s really just like WhatsApp for gamers. It’s just like text messages, video, phone calls. I don’t use it very much, but the few times I have used it, it’s clear that it may actually be less pernicious than other forms of social media because there’s no algorithm that’s pushing stuff in front of your face. It’s literally just chat rooms. It’s kind of like in the ’90s when there were just IRC chats and whoever you invite is who’s in there. That’s it.
ZADROZNY: It seems like people in the media just don’t understand what it is? Like older people haven’t really heard of Discord. So when we learn that a shooter used it, it’s suggested to be linked somehow to the act, like Marilyn Manson or like video games have been. Like Discord is some deep dark website. But no, it’s not.
KLIPPENSTEIN: Totally. The media talks about it as though it’s some kind of fringe subculture. This is a platform that says it has 200 million active monthly users, which is as mainstream as Twitter or any other platform that doesn’t draw the same sorts of reactions from people.
It also occurred to me that I’m someone who spends more time online than I should and even I had problems keeping up with some of the lingo on these chat rooms. And I think what’s happening is — there’s this great word to describe it, what’s happened to social media, it’s entering a new phase. It’s been described as the “splinternet,” where the decline of platforms like Twitter means that there’s less of this consensus reality. Where everyone saw “the thing.”
When I was in high school, remember every year the Super Bowl happened, everybody would watch commercials and we’d all joke about it afterwards? Like the Budweiser frogs? It was like, there’s your meme for the year.
ZADROZNY: Yeah. The blue dress.
KLIPPENSTEIN: That’s increasingly not how the internet works anymore. Discord is small and it’s not the everything platform where you can see what’s going on, so users on it adopt their own lingo. It’s just like any social club. Things can start to become sort of arcane to somebody who’s on the outside. Being online, I knew to come to the alleged shooter’s posts and the inscriptions on bullet casings, with some humility and ask people, what does this mean? What is the subtext here?
I don’t blame people for jumping to conclusions. You could look at the inscription on the shell casings, something with three or five arrows and think, that kind of looks like an antifa symbol.
(Ed: Shell casings recovered at the shooting that killed Charlie Kirk were engraved with cryptic and nonsense inscriptions that prompted speculation online and in the media that the shooter was aligned with far-left extremist groups.)
I can see how you’d get there. But you have to talk to people in these subcultures to understand what it means. I did and they said it was a reference to Hell Divers 2, a video game that they all played.
Again, I spend lots of time online. I had no idea about that reference. So I think about some crew-cut FBI agent having to investigate this who’s like, 50 years old? They’re really in a tough spot here. Then we have an FBI director who is just proactively releasing all these things before they have had any time to process them.
ZADROZNY: Let me ask about that. Jon Stewart recently likened it to a scavenger hunt. There’s a shooting, and then everybody rushes to the computer. And it’s like, power up and find the motive, and put the shooter in a political camp: Is it one of our guys or is it one of your guys? And then it becomes this political weapon. It seems to keep happening.
Your reporting was so nuanced. And that reporting, to me, said: complicated young man does violent thing for reasons that nobody really understands, which is not an expedient political narrative. What were you seeing from your peers and politics?
KLIPPENSTEIN: It just got jammed into this picture, Charlie Kirk and the triggered young people.
The media thinks: Here’s the photo, here’s the writings, we have all the evidence we need. But they haven’t caught up to this splinternet reality, where words can mean a dozen different things depending on which Gen Z subgroup or video game you’re talking about.
Nobody was cheering the assassination according to any of the messages I was sent. They all were shocked.
I knew I didn’t know, so I tried to check with people and ask, “What is this?” That’s what I think was missing from the reporting. I was struck by how few interviews there were from these kids who wanted to talk. They were as upset as anybody, feeling as though the story had been gotten wrong. None of them defended or minimized anything that happened. They were just upset that the picture that they saw was not what they had experienced. And they were worried and alarmed at what it is going to lead to, which is not understanding what happened here so we can prevent it from happening the next time. I was so struck by how sincere a lot of these young folks were. They sent me messages from their group chats the day that Kirk was shot. Nobody was cheering the assassination according to any of the messages I was sent. They all were shocked. But you have the FBI director testifying to Congress that they may be in on it.
From the outside looking at this, I could see why you might jump to that conclusion. But if you actually look at the messages, there’s no evidence of that. They seemed as shocked as the rest of the country.
ZADROZNY: Were they worried that they were going to be rounded up in this investigation and charged?
KLIPPENSTEIN: That seemed like one of half a dozen things that they were frankly traumatized by. They’re having to come to terms with almost like the death of a friend who they thought they knew. One friend of Robinson’s told me, it makes him wonder if he knows anybody. It just sounded like PTSD to me. These kids are like 22 years old, very young, just entering adulthood and now having to contend with, as the FBI director said in testimony to Congress about a week ago, that they’re going to investigate every single member of every single one of these chat rooms.
In some respects, he did have political attitudes. He was described to me as a bi man who had a trans partner and cared strongly about LGBT rights and didn’t like what Charlie Kirk had to say. Charlie Kirk was very consistent in saying he regards transgenderism as a mental illness, which obviously a lot of people take issue with. So that was a political dimension, but I couldn’t find anything outside of that.
ZADROZNY: Speaking of easy narratives, I want to pause on the bullet casings. In the case of the Dallas ICE shooting, within hours of the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel was calling the attack ideologically motivated and posting a photo to his X account of unspent ammunition collected from the rooftop. On one of the bullets written in blue ink was, “ANTI-ICE.”
There is this obvious point people on the right make: “He wrote it on the bullets — what more do you want?” Kayleigh McEnany basically said. And yes, there’s a point to that. But in the case of Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter, the inscriptions were so clearly meant to mess with the media. In his texts, he even said so. (Robinson texted his roommate that the “messages are mostly a big meme,” and that he might “have a stroke” if they were read aloud on Fox News.) That was sort of the point … for the LOLs, right? Can you explain the point of this kind of ironic humor?
KLIPPENSTEIN: This is endemic in the case of the Dallas shooter, he was a stronger example of this kind of nihilistic approach to humor. The joke there is supposed to be the disjunct between the seriousness of the action and then some throwaway line that you would send off to one of your friends in a text message at 2 a.m. The culture is very subtle and I spend plenty of time on Twitter, so I have some awareness of it, but it’s specific to games, and other things. That’s why this whole approach of, we’re just gonna bear down on, as Kash Patel said in his testimony, we’ve gotta get the messages from Discord — it’s not gonna be neatly packaged into one corner of the splinternet or one platform or even one group. This is why the intelligence community exists. They need to corroborate it with human intelligence. It’s understood that you’re going to miss the subtext if you’re just going off of what the specific words are.
You can see this in one’s day-to-day life. Just pick up your phone and look at text messages to friends. If some random person saw those, they would probably come to different conclusions than you intended when you were sending these things, right? Because they’re not going to know the way that you joke and so on and so forth.
ZADROZNY: Yeah, for sure. You just mentioned nihilistic humor. Does that play into nihilistic violent extremism, the FBI’s terrorism classification that replaced the Biden-era focus on Jan. 6-style anti-government extremism?
KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, I won’t pretend not to be proud that I was first to report on this. It’s the Trump administration’s designation.
ZADROZNY: When I first heard the term though, if I can just say, I kind of turned my nose up at it. Like I didn’t know whether to necessarily believe it. It seems like an effort to distract from the fact that most political violence comes from the right.
KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, a study was actually removed from the Justice Department website that showed that. What could be described as left-wing cases have certainly increased in the last couple of years, but there’s still a clear disjunct between the two. It is the far right groups responsible for the most domestic violent extremism. I think it’s pretty widely accepted in the counterterrorism literature.
ZADROZNY: Ok, so now regarding nihilistic violent extremism, I feel like I’m wrong and maybe it is a thing and they were right to classify it as such?
KLIPPENSTEIN: Well, I would affirm your first instinct because it’s complicated. There are ways in which, particularly in Robinson’s case, he didn’t fit the loner, anti-social, profile. I was surprised to hear from friend after friend that he was a nice guy. Introverted, but he would enjoy going to parties and socializing with others. People described him as funny, reliable, a good friend. I couldn’t find a negative word about him. On Facebook, his mother was supportive and he was getting good grades and got a full ride at college, which got turned into its own narrative. Again, the media saying, how could someone have thrown all this away? I asked his friends, why did he drop out? There were commentators saying ‘oh, and then he goes to college, he must have gotten radicalized.” I talked to his friends and no, he dropped out almost immediately. And I said, why is that? Is that a sign of something going wrong? They said, ‘what do you mean? People drop out of school all the time.’ And it occurred to me, that’s absolutely true. This happens all the time. That’s not particularly remarkable.
ZADROZNY: Charlie Kirk dropped out of school.
KLIPPENSTEIN: In one way after another, I realized I have to check my assumptions here because this guy does not fit what I thought it did. So going back to your initial point, I think there are ways in which the shooters have been nihilistic, for example, one of the bullets at the Kirk killing that read, “if you read this, you’re gay.” That evinces a lack of belief in the inherent value of human life: that you could kill someone and just make some offhand joke like that. On the other hand, friends described him to me as someone who was reliable, who was there for them. I wouldn’t describe that as nihilism.
The FBI category of nihilistic violent extremism deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten.
So I think you’re right to be hesitant. Just like with politics, I would say the shooting was political or had a political dimension, but it wasn’t partisan. And so I guess I would look at the question of nihilism. People can have nihilistic impulses or nihilistic strains along with other things that they care about. So it’s just much more complicated than any of the reporting or any of these threat categories.
The FBI category of nihilistic violent extremism deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten. FBI Director Kash Patel said that there’s been a 300% increase in domestic terrorism cases opened by the FBI, a “large chunk of which” are nihilistic violent extremism cases. So this is central to the Trump administration’s approach to counterterrorism and it’s gotten almost no attention.
ZADROZNY: And we don’t know about those investigations, correct?
KLIPPENSTEIN: Exactly. You can look at some cases, stomach-turning awful child abuse groups for example, but that’s just what has been brought to court. Other investigations are ongoing. The FBI will spend years on investigations before they bring charges. So that’s a very astute point and one that I wish people would look at. What you’re seeing now is not necessarily what’s going on behind the scenes.
ZADROZNY: What about Dallas? KLIPPENSTEIN: In the case of Dallas, Joshua Jahn, 29 years old. I think he and Robinson are being portrayed as the same kind of person. There are similarities, but I think there were more differences. Namely that Jahn was not a personable guy. A lot of people disliked him. He was, from a very young age, off-putting and really into offensive humor and kind of an edgelord. That’s a term for an online person who is into edgy nihilistic jokes. Jahn got really into 4chan. ZADROZNY: The worst website on the internet. KLIPPENSTEIN: It’s just like this sewage. It’s a forum with anonymous accounts, so behind masks people say and do all these anti-social things. So former friends, some who had known Jahn since middle school, told me that a couple years ago after he dropped out of college, he just withdrew and got really into gaming and really into 4chan. By the third time I heard this, I said, ‘I’m having problems finding people that were still friends with him,’ not had been friends with him. One friend says, ‘you’re not going to have any luck,’ because he completely withdrew into a shell and just kind of merged with this internet world and ceased all social interaction, except maybe with his immediate family. They said he was heavily influenced by 4chan and the humor and once it started bleeding into his day-to-day life, people found it really off putting. It was kind of sad because as a younger person, you could see the seeds of someone there, but it was more playful and innocuous. To give you an example, somebody sent me a video that he had posted to his YouTube channel, where he’s like 12 at the time and he does kind of a spoof or a parody of those tech reviews and he’s kind of making fun of it. Like, ‘Oh, do you spend too much time online? Just delete all your accounts. Everything solved!’ You could see how he’s always been someone who enjoyed making teasing things, but it took on a darker tone after high school. He gets into these social media websites, and … again, I don’t want to reduce it to that. But he seemed like this rejected guy who kind of embraced the meaninglessness. So I think in the Dallas case, the nihilism category makes a lot more sense. Because when I saw what was written on the bullets, ‘anti-ICE,’ I thought, OK, this is probably like an anti-ICE left-wing guy. But I find three of his friends, and every single one of them said there’s no way that he was being sincere when he wrote that. Each of them said, ‘this is classic, Josh,’ doing something to rile people up and what could rile people up more at this point in time in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder than something explicitly political and anti-Trump? It’s almost like you’re describing an accelerationist, but not to throw the country into a race war, just to piss people off. So in a sense it’s political, but not in the way that people think. What all of his friends said was that he was contemptuous of authority in general, of government in general, of politicians, a kind of vaguely libertarian bent, but not really paying very close attention to the details discussed with both parties, which again, is probably true of the majority of the country. ZADROZNY: It’s almost like you’re describing an accelerationist, but not to throw the country into a race war, just to piss people off. KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah. ZADROZNY: But now the federal government is calling these shootings the work of far-left radicals. And according to the Trump administration, these shooters, seemingly along with people online who might say mean things about ICE or Charlie Kirk, are part of a far-left radical apparatus doing terrorism. And this new narrative might have real teeth. Let’s talk about National Security Presidential Memorandum Number 7 that you wrote about. Ken, you’re a pretty cool guy. You’re of the internet. You’re pretty unflappable. But reading your piece, about this directive issued by the president last week, titled, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” it felt like you were very flapped. In this new directive, Trump names a bunch of different recent violent events, including the shooting of Charlie Kirk and his own attempted assassination in 2024. He says this kind of violence is connected and isn’t — as I think your reporting actually shows — a series of isolated incidents. Trump’s directive cites “sophisticated, organized campaigns,” as the source of the violence, and writes that a new law enforcement strategy is needed. So what is this? And why is it different from everything else that Trump has signed since he’s returned to office? KLIPPENSTEIN: NSPM-7 refers to national security presidential memorandum and the seven is that there’s only been seven of them. This NSPM-7 authorizes the vast counterterrorism apparatus established after 9/11, what are called Joint Terrorism Task Forces made up of FBI agents and local law enforcement who, like the military deployments, can be operationalized and activated by the White House, without the approval necessarily of the state legislature or governor. But unlike the military, these JTTFs, as they’re called, can engage in direct law enforcement activity. And what was particularly alarming to me was what exactly they’re being activated to do. There is at least one JTTF in every state, they number in the thousands. And when you’re doing counterterrorism, historically we’ve largely focused on foreign terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS. This is another part that’s been misreported. I see a lot of people saying, you can’t actually designate domestic groups as terrorists, so therefore, this is more of Trump’s idiocy and it’s just theater. That just means you can’t charge them with terrorism in court. It doesn’t mean the FBI can’t treat something as terrorism in regards to opening investigations, surveillance, running human sources, things like that. And that’s the worrying thing. When you approach something from the counterterrorism lens, rather than just the ordinary law enforcement one, which, you know, makes perfect sense to if someone’s committing violence, sure, send law enforcement. The idea of counterterrorism is essentially pre-crime. It’s that you want to pre-empt an attack before it happens, which the memorandum says. It says prevent attacks before they occur. So what you do then is you have to monitor what are called indicators, behavioral indicators. And so it has a list of indicators that they say are supposed to indicate the likelihood of a crime. And it’s really frightening because they are so mainstream and descriptive of millions and millions and millions of Americans in the U.S. They are things like anti-Christian thought, anti-capitalism… ZADROZNY: Anti-Americanism. Like, really broad stuff. KLIPPENSTEIN: Yeah, and I’m just looking at it like, this is the thing to hit the panic button over. ZADROZNY: Well, what you’re saying is that the president of the United States has handed a homework assignment to thousands of investigators embedded in local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and said, I want you to go investigate our political enemies. This is what you should be focused on in terms of terrorism, right? KLIPPENSTEIN: Exactly. The agencies like the FBI put a huge amount of resources towards establishing counterterrorism priorities. And all of this is overlapping with the end of the global war on terror. As Al Qaeda and ISIS sort of recede from focus, in comes domestic terrorism and Donald Trump is trying to define what that is. And we see what his definition is. Within minutes of every shooting, he’s like, “this is the radical left” before we even know anything. And now we know how they’re going to go about doing it. A presidential memorandum is a sweeping sort of strategy statement telling everyone, this is our main focus now. You figure out in your respective agencies how you’re going to implement that, but this is the big picture thing. And these memoranda, again, the previous one was classified, NSPM 6, we don’t actually know what it was. So this is very different from an executive order, all of which are public. Historically, they’ve created political controversy. In the case of President Carter, he issued the same type of memorandum around nuclear strategy, basically beefing up our nuclear strategy with regard to the then-USSR. And this led to huge protests. And I just … it’s surreal to look at this and see lots of concern from ordinary people, but nothing on the part of Washington or the political elite who are in the crosshairs of this stuff. Trump is saying we are going to look at NGOs and nonprofits. And you go and look at these so-called radicals. It’s like George Soros and Democrat funders. This is pretty mainstream stuff. And legal experts and law firms are sending guidance saying progressive groups should be paying attention to this because of who it’s targeting. ZADROZNY: Do you think the lack of much attention has to do with the public-ness of the memo? When Trump telegraphs so publicly what his intentions are or says something that seems like in another era would be mainstream news, now its just like, oh well, that’s the way that it is. Doing things in plain sight robs it of scandal. KLIPPENSTEIN: Well, there’s so much secrecy. All we have is the memorandum. We don’t have the implementation order and these kinds of things. In part, because Congress doesn’t push them to release it, but also because so much stuff is classified and there’s so much intrinsic secrecy. ZADROZNY: I wonder if this is going to be a sort of ‘tap the sign’ story for you. What do you imagine that this memo might look like in practice? KLIPPENSTEIN: Well, we already saw our first sign of it. It’s crazy how quickly they were to jump on this. One thing you cannot say about the Trump administration is that they move slowly. Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo citing the National Security Memorandum throughout. In it, it describes the unprecedented threat to ICE officers as they’re carrying out their deportations and proposes an ICE protection task force. And so it’s basically like you were saying earlier, this is sort of permission to all these agencies everywhere to start creating stuff around this new authority. It’s subtle and it doesn’t have clear instructions, but it’s throwing the doors open for them to interpret it as they will, to expand resources, expand surveillance, and turn their efforts away from other things. This is explicitly pointed at Americans … You can’t say that the Trump administration isn’t candid about things. They’re blaring this everywhere. The enemy is here. ZADROZNY: Do you think that the memo will extend to surveillance, to infiltration of protest movements? KLIPPENSTEIN: Definitely. Again, counterterrorism is different from ordinary crime fighting. Typical legal process is: someone has committed a crime, you go and find out how you can prove that they committed the crime and then you file charges. With counterterrorism, you want to prevent it. And in some cases that can make sense. In the case of 9/11, in the case of, God forbid, a dirty bomb or a biological weapon or something, I can see why you would want to do the sorts of things that you need to do to prevent that from even getting close to happening. In that case, you will have undercover FBI agents going online pretending to sell maybe nuclear fissile material to people so you can identify who’s looking for these things and then pre-empt the attack. I can see an argument for that. In the case of antifa, a window gets broken or Tesla cars are set on fire. I think you can approach that with a legal process commensurate to the threat, which is not pre-crime, which is not heading off the attack. But in any case, this is the way they’re doing it. So the question is, how do you prevent something that hasn’t happened? By definition, that means you’re monitoring what people are saying and thinking because the thing hasn’t happened yet. By definition, it means you’re monitoring speech. And if you look at the document, ordinarily, these things have disclaimers about first amendment activity remaining protected, blah, blah. NSPM-7 doesn’t say anything like that. I’ve never seen a memorandum of this sort that doesn’t have some sort of disclaimer like that. This is explicitly pointed at Americans. At an event this week at Quantico with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump referred to “the enemy within.” They’re making it abundantly clear. You can’t say that the Trump administration isn’t candid about things. They’re blaring this everywhere. The enemy is here. We consider the Democrats the enemy. I can’t think of how many more ways they can say that to get the point across. And what we’re seeing with this memorandum is they’re operationalizing it. ZADROZNY: Ken, thank you. Where can we follow you and read more of your reporting? KLIPPENSTEIN: My pleasure. I run the substack at kenklippenstein.com. I’m pretty sure that’s the only Ken Klippenstein. KLIPPENSTEIN: Well, we already saw our first sign of it. It’s crazy how quickly they were to jump on this. One thing you cannot say about the Trump administration is that they move slowly. Attorney General Pam Bondi released a memo citing the National Security Memorandum throughout. In it, it describes the unprecedented threat to ICE officers as they’re carrying out their deportations and proposes an ICE protection task force. And so it’s basically like you were saying earlier, this is sort of permission to all these agencies everywhere to start creating stuff around this new authority. It’s subtle and it doesn’t have clear instructions, but it’s throwing the doors open for them to interpret it as they will, to expand resources, expand surveillance, and turn their efforts away from other things.
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York. Recommended
