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Biden Admin Singled Out ‘Pro-Life, Pro-Family’ Americans as Terrorists, 17,000-Page Report Explains

December 28, 2024/in Abortion, Culture War, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, Policy, Politics, Religion, Socialism, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Family Research Council

During its four years in office, the Biden-Harris administration conducted a whole-of-government attempt to surveil, censor, and possibly imprison conservative Christians — and the FBI acted as “a witting participant” in their harassment campaign, a massive new government report details.

The Democratic administration’s attempt to harass “pro-life, pro-family” citizens takes up a significant part of the 17,019-page report, which the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government released on December 20. The efforts included painting concerned parents and “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as incipient domestic terrorists.

“The Select Subcommittee revealed and stopped the FBI’s effort to target Catholic Americans because of their religious views, detailed the Justice Department’s directives to target parents at school board meetings, stopped the Internal Revenue Service from making unannounced visits to American taxpayers’ homes, caused the Justice Department to change its internal policies to respect the separation of powers and limit subpoenas for [l]egislative [b]ranch employees, and highlighted the vast warrantless financial surveillance of Americans by federal law enforcement,” states the report, which proved so sprawling it had to be released in four parts.

“The report underscores the risks posed by a weaponized federal government,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in an email sent to The Washington Stand.

Biden ‘Misused Federal Law’ to Go after Concerned Parents

Perhaps the most heavy-handed weaponization of government undertaken by the Biden-Harris administration came when it declared war on mothers and fathers who objected to having their children indoctrinated in the public school system. After teachers unions and liberal authorities closed in-person classes in government schools, parents realized the extent to which activists had smuggled critical race theory and extreme gender ideology into the curriculum. Soon, they began voicing their objections to the local school board.

“As the radical left pushed its woke agenda on America’s children, parents across the country started speaking out at school board meetings against critical race theory, unscientific mask mandates, transgender ideology in the classroom and bathroom, and anti-America curricula. Concerned parents were vocal and unafraid in their opposition to this indoctrination,” states the report. “The National School Boards Association (NSBA) and the Biden [a]dministration, however, could not abide this growing parental rights revolution and colluded to create a pretext—articulated in an October 4 memorandum from Attorney General [Merrick] Garland — to use the federal law-enforcement apparatus to silence parents.”

The report documents how Democrats “worked with education special interests to generate” the underlying basis of the directive. Specifically, the Biden administration “colluded” with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) beginning in October 2021 and “misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes.” The FBI conducted 25 “Guardian assessments,” including investigating a mother because she belonged to a “right-wing mom’s group” and a father because “he rails against the government.”

“No one I spoke with in law enforcement seemed to think that there is a serious national threat directed at school boards,” one U.S. Attorney told the subcommittee.

Yet the investigations followed the memo, which Biden’s Justice Department released one month before the 2021 Virginia governor’s election. The Democratic state elected Republican Glenn Youngkin, who promised to give parents greater control over education. In their debate, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

“Despite federal law enforcement’s task to protect all Americans, the Biden-Harris [a]dministration pursued a two-tiered system of justice. … [T]he FBI singled out Americans who are pro-life, pro-family, and support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction as potential domestic terrorists.”

‘Radical’ Catholics or Radical Abuse of Government?

Whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed the existence of a memorandum written by the FBI’s Richmond office describing an alleged tie between terrorism and “radical-traditionalist Catholic” Christians. Despite the lack of evidence to support the allegation, this purported link would allow federal agents to spy on members of a Christian denomination, remotely or in person.

The “FBI’s own internal review identified errors at every step of the drafting, review, and approval of” the document. “FBI employees could not define the meaning of ‘radical-traditionalist Catholic’ when preparing, editing, or reviewing the memorandum. Nevertheless, this single investigation became the basis for an FBI-wide memorandum warning about the dangers of ‘radical’ Catholics,” notes the report. “The two FBI employees who co-authored the memorandum later told FBI internal investigators that they knew the sources cited in the memorandum had a political bias — sources including the Southern Poverty Law Center, Salon, and The Atlantic.”

Basing a proposed infiltration of Latin Mass parishes on such a flimsy intelligence product proves that “the FBI abused its counterterrorism tools to target Catholic Americans as potential domestic terrorists and that there was no legitimate basis for the memorandum to insert federal law enforcement into Catholic houses of worship,” investigators conclude. By the time public outcry led to a public apology, the FBI had already interrogated a priest and choir director, “relied on at least one undercover agent to develop its assessment, and the FBI even proposed developing sources among the Catholic clergy and church leadership.”

In other words, the FBI planned to place undercover informants inside churches.

“The FBI was a witting participant in the [a]dministration’s anti-parent endeavor,” the report concludes, but abusing the rights of U.S. citizens became an all-of-government undertaking. Although “the FBI has targeted its employees who hold conservative viewpoints, investigated parents at school board meetings, and sought to invade the sacred spaces of Catholic churches in the name of fighting ‘domestic terrorism,]” such “abuses are not limited to the FBI,” says the report. “Federal agencies including the IRS, the Treasury Department, and other Justice Department components like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), have misused federal funds to target Americans.”

The report also notes the government’s attempt to “prebunk” the Hunter Biden laptop story, the first-ever FBI raid on the home of a former President Donald Trump and subsequent acts of lawfare against him by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office, government harassment of Elon Musk and Twitter (now known as X), mistreatment of whistleblowers, and the financial surveillance of American citizens.

The report’s 12,757-page appendix chronicles the subcommittee’s hearings, letters, subpoenas, depositions, and transcribed interviews.

This tome comes as the latest in a series of devastating reports chronicling the rampant corruption of the Biden-Harris administration and its enablers burrowed deep into America’s bureaucratic infrastructure. Earlier this month, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its 520-page report titled “After Action Review of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Lessons Learned and a Path Forward” found nearly every COVID-19 conspiracy theory was true.

The voluminous report represents the full body of research the subcommittee has undertaken since the House of Representatives formed the 20-member investigative body, comprised of 11 Republicans and nine Democrats, in February 2023. The subcommittee acted as part of the House Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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Conservative Groups Respond to Getting Left Off SPLC ‘Hate Map’

June 8, 2024/in Culture War, Elections, Featured, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics/by Family Research Council

The Southern Poverty Law Center released its annual list of “hate groups” and “antigovernment extremist groups” Tuesday, and many conservatives say they are disappointed to be left out.

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has squandered its credibility on hate. It gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, but it took the program it used to monitor the Klan and weaponized it to smear conservative and Christian groups as “hate groups,” placing them on a map with Klan chapters.

The SPLC is currently facing a defamation lawsuit that has made it to the discovery process. A former employee called this a “highly profitable scam,” and some conservatives consider landing on the SPLC’s “hate map” to be a badge of honor.

The “hate map” includes many prominent organizations, such as Alliance Defending Freedom, which has won multiple Supreme Court cases; Moms for Liberty, which has mobilized a parental rights movement across the country; prominent immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies; and many more.

Some of these organizations advised Donald Trump when he was president, a fact the SPLC uses to smear Trump while still suggesting these are fringe “hate” and “antigovernment” groups—because they oppose the SPLC’s agenda on education, LGBTQ issues, immigration, or other causes.

Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, which represents more than 2,000 Orthodox Jewish rabbis in American public policy, quipped that he was crestfallen to see the latest “hate map.”

“I called it last year — in a speech before Moms for Liberty, I mentioned they were added, and I said I’m very offended,” Menken told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “CJV also supports parental rights, traditional values, and religious liberty, so why won’t they list us as a hate group?”

The New Tolerance Campaign, a group that calls for equal standards of tolerance in opposition to the woke agenda, is also conspicuously absent from the SPLC’s “hate map.”

“The SPLC’s hate and extremist lists have included a group that argued cases before the Supreme Court, an Irving Kristol Award winner, and a brain surgeon who later became a Cabinet secretary,” New Tolerance Campaign President Gregory Angelo told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “It’s clear the New Tolerance Campaign needs to step up our game if we have any hope of making the cut next year.”

Angelo was referring to Alliance Defending Freedom, the scholar Charles Murray, and neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who became secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2017. Although Murray and Carson don’t appear on the “hate map,” the SPLC had put both men on its “extremist list.” (The SPLC removed Carson from the list in 2015.)

While Angelo noted the prominence of SPLC targets, others mentioned the fact that the organization’s “hate map” inspired an act of domestic terrorism.

“Southern Poverty Law Center’s actions have resulted in acts of domestic terrorism, yet this extremist group sanctimoniously claims to know what ‘hate’ is? What a pathetic joke,” Penny Nance, CEO and president of Concerned Women for America, told The Daily Signal on Wednesday.

“CWA has been in SPLC’s crosshairs in the past but it seems they are incapable of keeping track of all the Americans who believe in God, faith, family and in our constitutional principles,” Nance said. “We are still the majority in the country, no matter how hard SPLC tries to slander and shame us.”

Nance was referring to a shooting in 2012. A terrorist targeted Family Research Council, a conservative Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C., for a mass shooting after finding the group on the SPLC “hate map.” The building manager foiled the terrorist’s plan, but was shot and wounded in the process. The SPLC condemned the attack but has kept Family Research Council on its “hate map” ever since.

The SPLC repeatedly has attacked Concerned Women for America as “anti-gay” since 2010, but has never put the group on the “hate map.”

Jennifer Lahl, founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, noted that prominent critics of gender ideology such as herself have landed on the “hate map.”

The SPLC’s 2023 “hate map,” released Tuesday, includes organizations of doctors who oppose experimental transgender medical interventions euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming care.” The doctor groups Do No Harm, Genspect, Partners for Ethical Care, and the Society for Evidence-Based Medicine, or SEGM, appear on the “hate map.”

“It is very confusing to me who the SPLC selects to be targeted as hate groups on their map,” Lahl told The Daily Signal. “What is their exact selection criteria?”

“Our organization has produced three documentaries focused on the debate around medicalizing those who feel as if they might have been born in the wrong body,” Lahl said. “Our book ‘The Detransition Diaries’ highlights the history of the scandal of ‘gender affirmation therapy’ and dares to allow those who have detransitioned to have a platform to speak and tell their stories.”

“Perhaps we have flown under the radar and need to make much more noise calling medical professionals to account so we can get our badge of honor,” she added. “I would be happy to be included within the ranks of SEGM, Genspect, and Do No Harm.”

These conservatives consider the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to be a joke and inclusion on it to be something like a badge of honor, but the Biden administration doesn’t appear to be laughing. SPLC leaders and staff have visited the White House at least 18 times under President Joe Biden, and multiple federal agencies—including the Justice Department and the Department of Education—have taken briefings on “hate” from the smear group.

The Biden administration should realize what these conservatives have long known — the SPLC’s “hate map” is little more than a partisan tool of defamation and fundraising. It is a laughingstock, and it became worse when the SPLC put an openly gay group on the list of “anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.”

Sadly, it seems the administration has no sense of humor.

This article originally appeared in The Daily Signal.

AUTHOR

Tyler O’Neil

Tyler O’Neil is managing editor of The Daily Signal.