MAGA’s 9/11 Is an Assassination

"Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11," says Treasury Secretary

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spills the beans on NSPM-7

Within hours of Charlie Kirk’s shooting last month, politicos in the White House and lawyers at the Justice Department and Homeland Security scrambled to draft up back-of-the-envelope plans for a crackdown on their domestic foes, sources tell me. Illegal immigrants, anti-ICE protesters, leftists, trans people, gamers, Hamas supporters, Antifa; the administration had a hard time pinning down who exactly was the new enemy, so they ended up including them all.

But how to do it? How to destroy the “enemy within”? The answer was to frame the Kirk assassination and political violence generally as a national security problem and not merely one of law enforcement.

Reaching back into the global war on terrorism precipitated by 9/11, Donald Trump’s war has so far unfolded as a messy hodgepodge of gathering intelligence on individuals, “networks” (or even Antifa “cells,” per the Justice Department) and making arrests. This week, homeland security announced that over 2 million “illegals” have left the country. Here too the administration frames the issue as one of national security, referring to “illegal aliens who have invaded our country.”

Though the only other media reference to the Kirk-inspired crackdown appears in a Rolling Stone article, that the murder is at the center of it all seems widely known to national security officials.

As one source close to the White House told me, the gruesome spectacle of Kirk’s bloody assassination was traumatic for the many administration officials who knew him personally; especially Donald Trump, who narrowly survived his own assassination attempt last year. Their anxiety about domestic terrorists walking among us, hiding in plain sight, is in large part attributable to this.

Asked if the murder was traumatic event for MAGA, Mike Howell, a former homeland security official and president of the Heritage Foundation-backed Oversight Project, replied simply: “100%.”

Whereas in the past talk of an enemy within was largely the domain of flamboyant administration figures like Sebastian Gorka, after Kirk’s death, the sentiment spread to the some of the more straight-laced quarters, like congressional leadership figures, as I’ve reported. Now, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a Yale-educated, lifelong Wall Street suit (who, ironically, served as a top executive on a George Soros-owned hedge fund) is joining in, recently calling Kirk’s murder “a domestic 9/11.”

The little-noticed interview with the “Charlie Kirk Show” took place in the marbled “cash room” of the U.S. Treasury building with an American flag in the backdrop. Bessent seemed to be making a policy statement as he described how his Department would now play the same role it once did in dismantling Osama bin Laden’s and al Qaeda’s networks.

Bessent’s remarks provide rare insight into how the Kirk-inspired crackdown is being carried out. The relevant passage is almost a blueprint for the effort and worth reading in its entirety, reproduced below:

HOST:  I come to find out coming to DC that Treasury has taken an active role in an aspect of this, uh, dismantling of the financial networks that are supporting some of these radical left violent groups.

SECRETARY BESSENT:  It’s an ongoing process and I, I will tell you that after 9/11, Treasury became the driving force behind tracking down the networks of terrorist organizations, how they were financed, how, how could this have happened on U.S. soil with these international terrorist organizations.

Where did the money come from? Who were the ultimate funders? And that was on the international side. And Andrew, I will tell you that Charlie’s death is like a domestic 9/11. That we are going to find … it has alerted us to what Charlie knew, that these organizations are working within our borders … 

We are going to, as they always say, follow, follow the money. When you see these, these groups where all the signs match, they have hundreds of the same umbrellas that they’re using … how are they constructed? Because this takes a lot of money, it takes a lot of organization, and we are going to do that. We, we have started to compile lists, put together networks, and, you know, there, there’s a long record here and we, we don’t know how much of the support’s coming in from overseas.

We don’t know how much [is] being supported by US nonprofits … but this is mission critical for us. Now, just as after 9/11 and Osama bin Laden, the ultimate culprit was captured. We are operationalizing this here at Treasury and we are going to track down who is responsible for this.

So Charlie’s death has set this off and we are determined. We are determined not only to honor him, but to keep our country safe and to ensure freedom of speech on both sides.”

The administration’s frantic planning session precipitated by Kirk’s murder was formalized days later in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. Called “NSPM-7” by insiders, the sweeping directive targets radical left “terrorism” by relying on so-called indicators like “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” speech. (I’ve reported on the significance of NSPM-7 here.)

Banking compliance expert Poorvika Mehra told American Banker that NSPM-7 “is basically asking you to follow the money, but within ideological movements, and compliance teams immediately ask which customers put the banks at risk.” She anticipates that banks will respond to NSPM-7 by simply dropping affected clients rather than deal with the headache.

“The lowest-friction option is to quietly exit the entire category,” Mehra said.

Bessent at one point in his interview talks about “what Charlie knew” — alluding to remarks from Trump’s homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller, that was played earlier in the segment. Miller had told Fox News after Kirk’s death:

“The last message Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven, was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence.”

Like the post-9/11 panic, we are sure to see overzealous enforcement, false arrests, mistaken identities, unlawful confinement, misuse of the military, and the creation of a secret force. All are happening right now —up to and including arrests without charges, as I’ve reported — despite astonishingly little coverage by the major media.

Just about the only thing missing from this remastered war on terrorism is a drone assassination campaign; though the strikes on Venezuelan boats are close enough.

— Edited by William M. Arkin