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A new report from Newsweek has revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is tracking and cataloging the movements of a demographic of Americans that they deem to be associated with extremism.
In this case, the “extremists” in question are American voters who support the candidacy of President Donald Trump.
Newsweek’s report on the matter also included comments from the FBI, which told the outlet, “The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI’s goal is to detect and stop terrorist attacks, and our focus is on potential criminal violations, violence and threats of violence. Anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism is one category of domestic terrorism, as well as one of the FBI’s top threat priorities.”
The lengthy scoop from Newsweek pointed out that in the wake of Jan. 6, 2021, “the FBI co-authored a restricted report,” which ultimately defined antigovernmental extremism as “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.”
This seems to suggest that mere political alignment could be enough to define someone as an extremist group or individual.
In another statement to the outlet, an anonymous FBI officer stated that “yes, in practical terms,” the FBI’s definition for antigovernmental extremists “refers to MAGA, though the carefully constructed language is wholly nonpartisan.”
The FBI’s reported focus on tracking MAGA supporters comes after intense scrutiny of the agency at the behest of Americans who have lost faith in United States federal branches.
Republicans in the House of Representatives, for example, have launched deep-dive investigations into the level of alleged targeting or censorship that has taken place over the past few years at the hands of federal agencies like the FBI and the Department of Justice.
Previously, the FBI also caught major heat for getting caught spying on Catholic churches and parishioners after a leaked memo from the Richmond Field Office compared American Catholics to domestic terrorists, as reported by RSBN.
Newsweek’s report chillingly noted, “The revelations that some Trump supporters are being specifically targeted by the FBI fits with accusations from among them that the Bureau has them in its sights and is the political tool of a repressive deep state in Washington, D.C., bent on preserving the hold of the political establishment at the cost of democracy.”
