(RealClearPolitics)—FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin revealed in February he existence of a memorandum within the FBI’s field office in Richmond, Virginia, that labeled Catholics as potential domestic terrorists. Last Monday, almost a full year after Seraphin’s disclosure, the House Judiciary Committee released a report on it.
The House committee’s report, titled “The FBI’s Breach of Religious Freedom: The Weaponization of Law Enforcement Against Catholic Americans,” details how the FBI “abused its counterterrorism tools” to target Catholics. But there are some key issues that Capitol Hill—and most media—missed completely.
The FBI stigmatized a vast number of United States citizens as potential “radical traditional Catholic” terrorists based upon the existence of one criminal case involving a man who self-described as such a Catholic. The FBI’s version of the facts, detailed in an “intelligence note,” describes a man who likely suffers from mental illness—hardly a cross section of the Catholic population.
The most shocking aspect of this, one that largely escaped public attention, is that the FBI memo states the subject wasn’t even Catholic. He was taking catechism lessons in the hopes of becoming a baptized Catholic, but he was neither baptized nor confirmed.
The FBI never explained what “threat” the agency sought to “mitigate” by targeting Catholics. The intelligence note offers no history or example of political violence associated with conservative Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass. It simply asserts, baselessly, that they pose a threat as potentially violent domestic terrorists.
Moreover, the FBI’s denigration of Catholics is not limited to Latin Mass worshippers. Rather, the bureau appears to have issues with the Catholic faith in general. The “intelligence note” laments a purported “intelligence gap” when seeking to identify factors leading to violence, “which may include increased religiosity and/or adherence to extreme religious teachings.”
Hence, the FBI literally claims that increasing one’s religiosity makes one a greater domestic terrorist threat.
The FBI never bothered to explain precisely what tenets of Catholicism or “extreme religious teachings” of the Catholic Church lead to political violence because, of course, there are none. Adherents of the faith who embrace extreme Catholic religiosity tend to become nuns in the streets of Calcutta.
The House Judiciary Committee also fails to address the most fundamental issue posed by the FBI’s abuse of Catholics’ civil liberties. The FBI labeled an amorphous and impossibly ill-defined faith community as potential terrorists without pointing to a single historical or current example of a “radical-traditionalist Catholic” associated with any form of political violence, the preeminent and unnegotiable element required by the domestic terrorism statute (18 U.S.C. § 2331).
No political violence = no domestic terrorism. Contrast this to the Black Lives Matter riots that engulfed the United States in the summer of 2020. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project filed a federal lawsuit to force the FBI to provide evidence that the government conducted any investigation of BLM during that season of political violence and domestic terrorism. To date, the bureau has produced no such evidence.
In the pre-woke FBI, it took more than simply labeling a U.S. citizen as a potential domestic terrorist to open an investigation. Back then, the bureau was required first to show that an individual sought to engage in criminally violent or life-threatening acts to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government.
Today’s FBI, however, blissfully bypasses the most fundamental elements of the domestic terrorism violation when it comes to labeling large swaths of peaceful, law-abiding citizens (non-Catholics as well as Catholics) as potential terrorists. According to the Judiciary Committee report, the FBI’s targets are Americans who dare hold such disfavored political viewpoints as “pro-life, pro-family” and “support the biological basis for sex and gender distinction.”
Perhaps the clearest indication that the FBI itself knows it has ventured into constitutionally impermissible territory is its flippant use of a “First Amendment caveat.” The wordy exercise in psychological projection is worth reading in full, especially as this caveat is relied upon in similar exercises elsewhere:
Potential criminality exhibited by certain members of a group referenced herein does not negate nor is it a comment on the constitutional rights of the group itself or its members to exercise their rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The FBI does not investigate, collect, or maintain information on U.S. persons solely for the purpose of monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment.
Obviously, the First Amendment implications of labeling an entire mainstream religious group are top of mind for in-house FBI lawyers. That should have been a cause for pause as opposed to further activity and laughable legalese.
Also, notice the looseness of the term “potential criminality.” The bureau now needs not rely on actual evidence of past criminality to determine threat levels. The standard now appears to be speech alone.
As the FBI continues to invent a new alphabet soup of terminological groupings, such as Radical Traditional Catholics and Racially Motivated Violent Extremist, and to open investigations for activities such as sporting Gadsden or Betsy Ross flags, the agency has reached apex weaponization as an ideological entity as opposed to a crime-fighting one.
Weaponized Modus Operandi
Today’s FBI routinely opens domestic terrorism investigations targeting Americans who never have demonstrated any propensity toward political violence.
These civil liberty violations occur not merely because of inept or corrupt FBI leadership. Ideologically weaponized FBI employees at all levels gravitate toward FBI units, such as domestic terrorism squads, that allow them to indulge their political ideology. Working drugs or health care fraud apparently lacks that satisfying special sauce that working politically charged violations bring for the ideological agent. To such weaponized employees, political dissent in and of itself constitutes a threat to their preferred social order.
This is why virtually all FACE Act prosecutions target pro-lifers, while countless attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches go uninvestigated.
This is why the FBI pointed long arms at pro-life activist Mark Houck’s terrified children.
This is why geriatric grandmothers who committed misdemeanor trespass at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have taken FBI investigative priority over child predators and spies.
This is why a Republican internet prankster was sentenced to seven months in prison (the case is now on appeal) for posting a social media meme joking that Democrat votes might be texted while a Democrat who posted the identical meme suggesting Republican votes might be texted never was bothered by law enforcement.
Even in cases that don’t result in criminal prosecution, the FBI’s legally questionable activities can have a punitive effect on law-abiding Americans.
Keep in mind that the FBI’s anti-Catholic intelligence note was uploaded to the FBI’s databases under domestic terrorism file number 266H-RH-2893090. Anyone mentioned in this context case could fall prey to financial ruin in legal fees and soul-crushing anxiety as a result of this baseless domestic terrorism case. Even if they are spared financial and emotional devastation, being falsely labeled as a terrorist in the FBI databases is a grotesque abuse of federal authority—with malicious negative consequences.
When a person noted under that domestic terrorism file number is the subject of a background check in seeking federal employment or to purchase a firearm, or seeks any other form of public benefit that requires an FBI check, it will be noted that his or her identity has been identified in a domestic terrorism case.
This will require additional scrutiny, potentially extended bureaucratic delays, and possible denial of entitled government benefits. The person’s business may be denied contracts without explanation or subjected to unending IRS audits, and may even find himself and employees subject to law enforcement screenings at airports.
The Way Forward
One of the first questions that comes to mind is why it took almost a year for a report from Congress to largely rearticulate what already had been known.
The purpose of congressional oversight is to inform legislation and fix problems that have been identified. Now that the House Judiciary Committee has finished its investigation and released its report, what meaningful accountability measures are being taken to address these abuses? Who has been held accountable? What has changed at the FBI as a result?
Lawmakers don’t seem to understand the urgency. A constitutional republic cannot stand without an even-handed rule of law. If lawmakers fail to deweaponize the FBI, the republic may not survive our generation.
Congress should embrace its oversight responsibilities and force an immediate audit of the genesis of all current FBI domestic terrorism cases. What percentage of cases target conservatives? How many cases involve the targeting of persons who never have demonstrated any propensity to engage in political violence?
Most importantly, who in the FBI is responsible for the bureau’s stomping on the civil liberties of peaceful political dissidents (in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241), and when will he, she, or they be held accountable?
At the beginning of the year, this and much more was what Americans were promised. They were promised a full-scope investigation into the FBI and other weaponized agencies that would stop the weaponization. This effort, to be funded at the same levels as the House’s select committee on Jan. 6, was to be supported by a committee modeled after the Church committee of the 1970s, a massive undertaking that examined abuses across the intelligence community.
In launching that committee, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said:
We want to focus on that because we want it all to stop. We want the double standard to stop. This idea that if you’re a pro-life activist, you’re gonna get your door kicked in, you’re gonna get arrested and handcuffed in front of your seven kids and your spouse for simply praying in front of an abortion clinic and telling the guy who was harassing your son to knock it off.
You’re gonna have the FBI raid your home, but the protests that went on at Supreme Court justices’ homes in the aftermath of the leak of the [Supreme Court’s] Dobbs opinion, oh, no problem there. Americans are sick and tired of it. And what we want, we don’t want to go after anyone. We just want it to stop. And we want to respect the First Amendment to the Constitution that the greatest country in the world has.
That’s what this committee is all about. And that’s what we’re going to focus on. That’s what we’re going to do.
I agreed then, and I agree now. The weaponization of federal law enforcement for partisan purposes is an existential threat to freedom. It needs to stop if we hope to pass along any semblance of America to the next generation.
But vague standards and constant cable news appearances aren’t an adequate measure of success. The only real standard is whether Congress actually deweaponizes the FBI and the other intelligence agencies. And so far, the agencies have skated this entire Congress without any real investigations.
The truth is, this job always has been too big for one existing committee or person. That’s why no real reform efforts are underway, and the FBI continues apace, fully funded and with no accountability. Indeed, the bureau is being rewarded with a massive new headquarters the size of the Pentagon.
Lawmakers have wasted enough time failing to prioritize deweaponization. Americans can’t afford to let them waste more time by failing to unite and make changes. And change is certainly what voters expected in 2022 when they flipped control of the House to the GOP.
Congress already has the information it needs to begin deweaponization efforts immediately. History will judge this Congress by that simple measure, not by its analysis and rhetoric regarding the problem.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
fellating-biden-incessantly, bring it
The FBI, CIA, BATFE, Homeland Security and NSA are far too corrupt and evil at this point for such “de-weaponization” efforts to be of any significant value. All of these agencies should be disbanded and all of their upper leadership (down to the individual Field Offices) should be forever barred from working in law enforcement ever again. The duties of the law enforcement agencies listed should be folded into the US Marshal Service and that agencies responsibilities expanded. The civilian Intelligence Community should be scaled down dramatically and perhaps rebranded as the WW2 equivalent of the OSS. The DIA should pick up the responsibility for the mission of the NSA. That agency should have extensive Oversight provided by Congress.
i am inclined to think… law enforcement should be local. This is only way voters can reach out and provide corrective processes. DC is become an empire.. which is no longer accountable to any voter.. DC’s function should be coordinate through local officials. But have no direct authority over any citizen.
Does the US Constitution authorize a National Police force ? NO ?? Then do the math . Defund the FBI buy abolishing it .
Those Government agencies need to be abolished. They are nothing but commie organizations.
At the very least…they could place UC Agents at Sunday Mass, and have kick into the coffers with buy money. It’d help out a lot, as those raffles and bake sales get old after a while.
Are we a lucky country or what? 🥰
It is modestly surprising they did not invoke Joan of arc as evidence.