FBI Director Kash Patel
President Trump's budget request to Congress contains the largest counterterrorism spending increase in years — and buried inside it is a new FBI-led center dedicated to “proactively” hunting Americans the government classifies as so-called domestic terrorists.
The new center and funding boost represent the implementation of Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), the sweeping federal order I’ve been covering since it was signed last September.
Though public opposition to ICE succeeded at forcing the administration to back down in Minnesota — even firing both Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino — the FBI is doubling down its domestic terrorism obsession.
Now, Trump’s budget request reveals, the FBI runs a dedicated “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center”; with personnel from 10 federal agencies, it is busy “proactively” identifying domestic terrorists motivated by any of the following beliefs:
“anti-Americanism,”
“anti-capitalism,”
“anti-Christianity,”
“support for the overthrow of the U.S. Government,”
“extremism on migration,”
extremism on “race,”
extremism on “gender,”
“Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,”
Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on “religion,” and
Hostility towards those who hold traditional views on “morality.”
Graphic depicting FBI budget request
In other words, if your political views are practically anything other than MAGA, you’re on notice, courtesy of the FBI.
The new center combats these supposed threats “by integrating intelligence, operational support, and financial analysis,” the budget request says.
Its creation appears to be inspired by the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — an event that reportedly precipitated the formulation of NSPM-7 in the first place — according to the budget request, which alludes to “heinous assassinations” having “dramatically increased.”
The budget request also singles out social media as some kind of breeding ground for domestic terrorism, saying:
“Domestic terrorists exploit a variety of popular social media platforms, smaller websites with targeted audiences, and encrypted chat applications. They use these platforms to recruit new adherents, plan and rally support for in-person actions, and disseminate materials encouraging radicalization and mobilization to violence.”
Good thing millions of law-abiding Americans don’t use those!
In his testimony to Congress, FBI Director Kash Patel said that he would investigate every single person on the Discord channels used by accused killer Tyler Robinson. But leaked screenshots of those same Discord chats that I obtained, as well as interviews I conducted with its participants, made clear that these chats were about gaming, not politics.
This was far from Patel’s only overreach. Shortly after Kirk’s death, he announced the Bureau was investigating “the possibility of accomplices,” vowing to run down all “theories and questions” about outside involvement — including a possible foreign nexus.
Patel would later conclude that there was no evidence for any of it, but by then, baseless theories about an Israeli government role in Kirk’s death had proliferated across social media. Joe Kent, Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director until his resignation last month, reportedly tried to investigate these claims while in government, and has since echoed them publicly.
Maybe these guys should’ve taken their own advice about the perils of social media.
It’s hard to overstate how much the FBI is focusing of domestic terrorism under Patel and the Trump administration. Yet the media have barely covered NSPM-7, let alone the FBI shift.
Shortly after Kirk’s death, FBI Director Kash Patel testified to Congress that he was overseeing a 300 percent increase in domestic terrorism investigations.
And in the first months of the administration, the FBI replaced the 9/11-inspired Terrorist Screening Center with the “Threat Screening Center.” As I reported at the time, the new mission broadened the scope to include “all national security threats,” which ostensibly was expanded to accommodate increased focus on transnational criminal organizations. Now the threat screening center oversees multiple terrorist watchlists that separate international terrorists, transnational criminals, and purely domestic “threats.”
Then there’s the fact that the FBI’s domestic terrorism watchlist is growing, as I reported last year.
Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.
The public might have won the battle of Minneapolis, but the White House hasn’t given up on its domestic terrorism fixation, even after virtually every official has walked back claims that Renee Good and Alex Pretti were “domestic terrorists.”
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— Edited by William M. Arkin
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