The Machine We May Never Shut Off, By George Christensen

On 25 September 2025, President Donald Trump signed a document that could change the relationship between the U.S. government and its citizens permanently.

In fact, it likely will impact non-U.S. citizens in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union (EU).

Buried behind the bland title, "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence," is a memorandum that orders certain federal agencies to "investigate, disrupt, and dismantle" networks tied to political violence, including action "before they result in violent political acts," according to the text. It is not just a response to the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk. It is the legal blueprint for a system of predictive surveillance and political targeting that will outlive any single administration. And if history tells us anything, this is how it starts.

President Trump's new memorandum orders federal agencies to pre-emptively target political violence, laying legal groundwork for predictive surveillance.

The move includes officially (and rightly) designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist group and empowers agencies like the DOJ, FBI, IRS, and DHS to dismantle domestic networks.

However, Oracle and Palantir are central to the operation, offering real-time surveillance and data fusion capabilities that track citizens' digital and financial behaviour.

The system risks redefining radicalism through AI models rather than evidence, enabling prosecution based on perceived affiliations or behavioural patterns.

Though built by a conservative president to combat left-wing violence, the surveillance regime will outlast him and could one day be turned against his own supporters.

Before the criticism, some praise: The White House also issued an order designating 'Antifa' as a domestic terrorist organisation. And rightly so. Antifa uses violence to intimidate, disrupt, and coerce political outcomes, which is the very definition of terrorism.

The tired excuse that Antifa is merely an ideology with no leadership is a fiction pushed by the same media that spent years whitewashing its crimes. Anyone who's looked closely knows that each jurisdiction has identifiable ringleaders, and it doesn't take undercover agents to find them. Cut the head off the snake, and unlike Islamist terror cells, the radical Left's street thugs don't grow back, they wither and die.

Critics argue there is no statutory mechanism for a terrorist organisation designation under U.S. law, but the threat that Antifa poses is real, organised, and domestic. The concern is the method by which the Trump administration is opting to take them on. And this brings us back to the presidential memorandum, "Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence."

That memorandum directs the National Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)-led enforcement web, to "investigate, disrupt and dismantle" domestic networks that foster radicalisation and political violence.

Under the memorandum, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is ordered to prosecute associated crimes "to the maximum extent permissible by law." The Treasury is tasked with tracking and choking off funding networks. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is instructed to ensure that no tax-exempt entity, foundation, or nonprofit is "directly or indirectly financing" political violence. The IRS Commissioner is directed to ensure no tax-exempt entity finances domestic terrorism and to refer such organisations and officers to the DOJ. The Attorney General is given the authority to designate domestic groups as terrorist organisations under federal law, giving the executive sweeping discretion to declare enemies inside the homeland.

Every federal agency with investigative authority is empowered to act. The FBI. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Treasury. IRS. All of them. And what do they need to execute a strategy like this? Not tanks. Not drones. Just data. Lots of it.

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That is where Oracle and Palantir come in.

Oracle's Government Cloud carries FedRAMP High (a top-level U.S. government security certification for handling sensitive unclassified data such as law enforcement, health, and financial records) and U.S. Intelligence Community authorisations, and it hosts TikTok's U.S. user data under Project Texas (which is the Chinese social media platform's plan to keep all U.S. user data on ring-fenced U.S. servers to address national-security concerns.)

Larry Ellison's Oracle empire runs the cloud infrastructure for major federal platforms. Its servers store everything from banking and medical records to video feeds and law enforcement databases.

Ellison has made no effort to hide his vision: continuous video surveillance through upgraded body cams, real-time uploading, and artificial intelligence (AI) analysis. Ellison told analysts Oracle has redesigned police body cameras to be always on and AI-monitored, adding that "the truth is, we don't really turn it off" and that citizens would be "on their best behavior."

While Oracle captures the data, Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, helps the state make sense of it. Its software is already embedded in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), DHS, ICE, and a growing list of federal and state agencies.

Palantir's Gotham and Foundry platforms are designed to do exactly what this memorandum demands: pull in fragments of digital data, join the dots, and generate intelligence reports. That means tax records, immigration history, chat logs, location data, travel manifests, flagged financial flows, all fused into a real-time profile of individual citizens and groups, and run through algorithms for scoring, sorting, and prediction.

Freedom of Information Act records and contracts reveal that Palantir's platforms underpin ICE's Investigative Case Management and the new $30m 'ImmigrationOS' project. an AI-driven system to identify, prioritise, and track non-citizens across the entire enforcement process (from leads to detention and removal).

This is not theory. This is happening now. The machinery exists. The directive has been signed. The partnership between federal law enforcement and Silicon Valley's most powerful surveillance firms is already in motion.

When the memorandum talks about stopping networks "before" political violence occurs, this is how it will be done: not by watching individuals with open warrants, but by watching associations, ideological affiliations, donation patterns, behavioural data, and pre-emptively flagging them.

It is one thing to prosecute criminal conspiracies. It is another to define "radicalisation" and "intimidation" through the lens of predictive modelling. It is one thing to track financing for a planned bombing. It is another to order the IRS to comb through the books of political nonprofits to "refer such organisations" for prosecution based on indirect ties, pattern analysis, or mere perception.

The legal thresholds are being lowered. The technological capabilities are growing. The result is a surveillance regime that does not just look for wrongdoing, it looks for the wrong types of people.

And here is the bitter irony: It is being built by a president we support. A president that, if I were American, I would have absolutely voted for. Thrice. A president who has rightly called out the violent tactics of the radical Left.

We understand why he has done it. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, after the ICE riots, after the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots, and after years of masked thugs calling for blood in the streets, action was needed. But there is a line between defending the country and laying down the digital rails for a system that can and will be used against the very people who put him in power.

Once this machine exists, it does not go away. Once the IRS builds the audit triggers, they stay built. Once Palantir trains the models, they keep learning. Once Oracle's cloud fills with live surveillance data, it is always on.

The next president, possibly a left-wing Democrat who rages that "MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy" (like Joe Biden did), will inherit it fully operational. What starts today as a tool to dismantle Antifa becomes, tomorrow, a weapon aimed at churches, homeschoolers, gun-rights groups, dissident media, and traditional Americans of every kind.

The United States has spent 20 years turning its counterterrorism infrastructure inward. From the Patriot Act's warrantless wiretaps, to state-run fusion centres that track political activity, to mass digital surveillance programs collecting phone and internet records on millions, the state has perfected the art of justifying domestic spying through the language of safety. Now it has learned to predict threats using the language of data. It no longer needs evidence. It needs models. It no longer needs probable cause. It needs probable risk.

And this system will not stop at the U.S. border. Oracle and Palantir already operate internationally. Their software and services are embedded in the UK, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Intelligence alliances like Five Eyes ensure that even if one country maintains legal safeguards, the others can fill in the gaps. A model deployed in Washington today will be licensed, refined, and deployed in Sydney, Ottawa, London, and Brussels tomorrow. No vote. No debate. No escape.

This is the moment to speak plainly. We are on the verge of institutionalising a real-time surveillance regime with the full backing of the White House, the federal agencies, and the most powerful tech billionaires on Earth. It has been signed into motion not by a radical socialist or deep state actor, but by a conservative populist president acting under pressure and grief. That is not an accusation. It is a warning.

Because if even our side is willing to build this machine, then who will ever dismantle it?

https://nationfirst.substack.com/p/the-machine-we-may-never-shut-off