Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified a bombshell Biden administration document this week, a blueprint for combating “domestic terrorism,” an umbrella term encompassing parents who attended school board meetings or Catholics who favored the traditional liturgy. This 2021 document, called the Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism, reveals a coordinated effort to target political opponents under the guise of national security. Its policy framework appears designed to silence and marginalize conservative viewpoints through a combination of speech monitoring, censorship, financial punishment, and gun control measures that threaten constitutional protections.
It totally and disturbingly disregards the difference between lawful expression and criminal intent. It explicitly directed the Justice Department, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security to monitor “incidents of concerning non-criminal behavior.” Whereas law enforcement normally monitors criminal acts or behaviors that demonstrate a clear intent to commit a crime, this directive ordered authorities to target lawful behavior. By equating lawful speech with extremism, the plan set a dangerous precedent for suppressing speech.
The document is both a necessary reminder of the Biden administration’s eagerness to suppress political dissent, and it is no surprise. In 2022, the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Symbols Guide flagged symbols such as the Gadsden Flag, the Betsy Ross Flag, and “2A” references as possible indicators of “Militia Violent Extremists.” This enabled the FBI to target and spy on vast swaths of the population for engaging in legal and mainstream political speech.
Who would the Founding Fathers consider “enemies” of America and its values: those waving revolutionary-era patriotic flags and defending the right to bear arms, or central government officials abusing their authority to stifle dissent?
In 2023, whistleblowers revealed that authorities had targeted two specific groups of people as possible domestic terrorists: parents who attended school board meetings to protest leftist ideological content in the classroom and “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics.”
In May of that year, FBI whistleblower Stephen Friend testified to Congress that he’d been directed to conduct physical surveillance at school board meetings in Florida, where parents protested the use of highly sexualized learning material and the promulgation of critical race theory in schools. It is not illegal to speak at school board meetings, especially when the content of the speech is mainstream in American culture. Indeed, 2024 election exit polls revealed that voters overwhelmingly agreed that schools had become breeding grounds for ideological indoctrination. But the Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism led authorities to treat these mainstream and nonviolent parents no different than radicalized jihadis or neo-Nazis.
The so-called “Radical Traditionalist Catholics,” as they were called in a leaked 2023 FBI document by the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office, received much the same treatment. The memorandum, titled Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology, suggested that Catholics who adhere to traditional Latin Mass and hold traditional views related to sexuality and the sanctity of life could be prone to extremist violence. Following the leak, the FBI disavowed the document, claiming that it came from a single field office and didn’t meet agency standards. Former Director Christopher Wray testified that the report was withdrawn and that the FBI does not target people based on religion. But Gabbard’s declassification of the Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism reveals that the Biden administration deliberately expanded surveillance to include religious belief under the guise of counterterrorism.
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This pattern of targeting lawful behavior reveals a broader assault on constitutional freedoms. Congress should investigate this overreach and hold those responsible for eroding constitutional protections to account.
The targeting of political opponents during the Biden administration, including law-abiding patriots, betrays core principles of our republic. Free speech in the form of legitimate political dissent must not be stifled, lest America lose the spirit of its founding and its enduring character.