After 9/11, leftist journalists passionately exposed the New York City Police Department doing surveillance of mosques to try to prevent violent Muslim extremism. By contrast, they largely yawned when it was leaked in February that the FBI’s office in Richmond, Virginia, discussed surveilling local Catholic churches to root out potential violent extremism from the “radical Catholics.”
The Biden administration loves the narrative that white conservatives and “Christian nationalists” are the biggest domestic terrorism threat. The FBI’s Richmond office wrote an internal memo, titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.” They reported “high confidence” that they would find Catholic terrorism plotters.
Now House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan’s Weaponization subcommittee reports the FBI relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment and the FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leaderships: “Not only did the FBI propose to develop sources, but it already interviewed a priest and choir director affiliated with a Catholic church in Richmond, Virginia for the memorandum.”
If there were an actual extremist threat — like someone wanting to bomb an abortion clinic — that would be understandable, but no such threat emerged. So why would they be nosing around, interviewing priests and choir directors?
Apparently, it was a Richmond church affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X, which is a breakaway traditionalist group of priests and bishops that presently has no official canonical status in the Church. They can validly celebrate the Mass, but Catholics are discouraged from attending. The FBI claimed, “Richmond’s highest priority DT [domestic terrorism] subject” was a man who “self-identified” on social media as a “radical traditionalist Catholic Clerical Fascist.”
No one to date has identified any violence committed by a “Catholic Clerical Fascist.”
It looks like people are being monitored for their “far-right” religious and political opinions. The report said that the documents obtained by the committee’s subpoena show that “the FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”
The two FBI employees who co-authored the memorandum later admitted to FBI internal investigators that they knew the sources cited in the memo had a political bias — leftist sources including the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Atlantic and Salon.
The FBI withdrew the Richmond memo from all field offices. But now, despite all the problems that the FBI found with the memorandum, Jordan’s subcommittee report notes FBI Richmond still “desires” to get this information out about “radical-traditionalist Catholics.”
On Dec. 5, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray, asking if Catholic choirs were now breeding grounds for terrorism. Wray claimed the FBI does not and will not investigate Americans for exercising their religious liberty. Hawley shot back that this is exactly what the Richmond memo was advocating, probing Catholic churches for swaggering “clerical fascists.”
This is the same Justice Department who raided the home of pro-life activist Mark Houck in the fall of 2022 with a SWAT team of about 25 and pointed guns at the Houck family over an alleged violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. All Houck had done was shove an abortion-clinic volunteer who was harassing his son a year earlier, in 2021. Does this sound like a government that’s a good judge of who’s a violent extremist, or in this raid, did they look like the violent extremists?
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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
Our current FBI leadership goes after Christians, like the San Hedren went after Jesus. Just how do Democrat voting Christians reconcile this in their own spiritual journey to the Christian Truths that set men free in a Chirstian founded nation now undermined by dark foreign secular powers.
John 16:30-33
“Behold, an hour is coming, and has already come, for you to be scattered, each to his own home, and to leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.”
Why is our socially secularized FBI become a part of the prophesized TRIBULATION, most assuredly selectively driving moral Christians from the FBI just as they drive them from representation in government? Do Christians not pay taxes or deserve proper representation in Government, even when a professed Catholic is President who has become a traitor to his race and traitor to his gender, a traitor to his family, a traitor to his former American Democrat party turned socialist, a traitor to his Catholic Church, and most of all a traitor and sell -out to our foreign enemies which makes he and his administration treasonous traitors to their country.
Wake up GOP and take this admin down before we lose this country all together.
AND the bloody first thing trump needs to do. ASSUMING HE WINS in 2024, is to DISBAND the FBI!!!!
The Biden administration loves the narrative that white conservatives and “Christian nationalists” are the biggest domestic terrorism threat.
White conservatives and “Christian nationalists” ARE the biggest domestic threat to the Democrat Party’s Satanic agendas.
i.e. the indoctrinating grade school children as young a 5 years old into the LDBTQ cult, gender confusion, woke philosophy, racism and performing gender changes on children who have not even gone through puberty.
To fully advance the Lying, Treasonous, Demonic, Woke, Socialist Democrat Party cult’s destructive beliefs and agendas is to divide our citizens with hate and promote – racism, open borders, radical feminism, abortion-on-demand, the LGBTQ lifestyle, unfettered sexual identity, transgender, same sex marriage, child indoctrination into sexual confusion and perversions, the pagan Liberal left Democrats must do away with GOD, our Constitution, common sense, morality, Christian values and free religious exercise altogether.
Under the of disguise of Democrats versions of “anti-discrimination.”
IT sickens me hearing all the leftists say “WE thought conservatives backed the blue, no matter what’? BUT WHEN WE See stories like this, time and time again, i can’t understand HOW FOLKS CAN STILL “Back the blue”.
AND more strange, is the # of conservatives i keep seeing say “BUT there still must be Good folks working in these orgs”..
WHERE? Show me them!