Volunteers for military service must swear to defend the United States from enemies both foreign and domestic. Recently, this oath caused an estimated two thousand veterans to support water protectors at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Those veterans responded to actions they saw as militarized state terrorism against peaceful citizens. By ignoring these veterans and restarting construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines, the Trump administration has endorsed that same state terrorism.

Trump’s administration, which was highly influenced by White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, now contains many people with questionable connections to the invasion of Iraq. If we are not careful now, they might take us into another risky conflict.

James Mattis, Erik Prince, and the recently resigned Michael Flynn, are all well known for their connections to war profiteering and other war crimes like extrajudicial killings and torture. Bannon has also succeeded in politicizing the National Security Council to an obscene degree, which flies in the face of extremely important U.S. military traditions. Maybe, a more immediate example is necessary to qualify as “terrorism” though. How about the Berkeley riots on February 1st, 2017?

Bannon is a militaristic opportunist, and Milo Yiannopoulos is not simply a person with fringe ideas. He is a pawn of Bannon’s propaganda machine, Breitbart News. The spectacle engineered at UC Berkeley had very clear goals, to equate opponents of Yiannopoulos’ with “threats to national security” so that increased force can be authorized against dissent.

But don’t take my word for it, according to Charlie Nash of Breitbart News, “Milo and the David Horowitz Freedom Center have partnered to launch a campaign against ‘sanctuary campuses’…The campaign will be launched with [the February 1st, 2017] speech from Milo at UC Berkeley.”

Given Bannon’s connections to Breitbart, protesting Yiannopoulos is easily interchangeable with rioting against the White House itself. The intent is to sow more derision, and distract everyone from the tenth amendment issues at the core of sanctuary policy debates. Their style is somewhat indirect, but Bannon and the Trump administration are domestic terrorists nonetheless.

Of course, our current conflicts with ISIL abroad pose a great threat that should not be ignored. Their methods of direct violence and relentless propaganda are certainly more extreme than the examples we have observed from the Trump administration thus far. However, this does not mean the new administration gets a free pass to do whatever they want in the name of “national security”. Admittedly, a direct comparison is imperfect, but there are considerable commonalities.

Bannon and the Trump administration are promoting a culture of violence and derision, which has led to the destruction of private property and the loss of social capital both at home and abroad. The Trump administration Bannon connection and ISIL are two sides of the same coin because they all want war. Unless it drastically changes course, this Trump administration must be understood as just as great a threat to our national security.