You may be a terrorist and not know it

Are you a domestic terrorist? In its recent policies, the Trump administration describes the term so vaguely that your ideas and behavior could easily make you a suspect.

Are you “anti-American,” “anti-capitalist,” or “anti-Christianity”? Do you harbor “extreme” views on gender, race or immigration? Are you “hostile” toward those holding “traditional views on family, religion and morality”? Do you consider yourself “anti-fascist”?

If so, you may be displaying the “common recurrent motivations and indicia” of domestic terrorists, according to National Security Presidential Memorandum/​NSPM-7 issued last fall.

Vague ideas

These views — perfectly legal in America — are so vague that the FBI can investigate just about anyone it wants. Maybe that’s the point.

After all, the Trump administration considers support for trans rights, DEI initiatives, and liberal migration policies to be extreme positions. Whether or not one agrees with those views, they are not inherently extreme or dangerous.

Even if they were, the Constitution does not bar Americans from discussing dangerous or even extreme ideas or from advocating for them. “Anti-Americanism” and the rest are terms easily subject to manipulation by unscrupulous leaders and ambitious prosecutors, as we’ve known since Sen. Joseph McCarthy used the terms to threaten his political enemies in the early 1950s.

In practice, FBI agents will determine whether your speech constitutes a dangerous indicator of violence. As recently revealed by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, the Trump administration’s latest budget request claims that the FBI is already “integrating intelligence, operational support and financial analysis to proactively identify networks” it considers threatening and working to “disrupt” them.

Abused rights

Woodrow Wilson prosecuted hundreds for sedition, including a major presidential candidate, for opposing American intervention in World War I. Congress had approved the Sedition Act in 1918 and the Supreme Court upheld it before changing its standard years later.

Over many decades, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI hounded and abused thousands of suspected communists, anti-war protesters and civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King.

The Biden administration opened FBI assessments into parents who decried their local schools’ mask, lockdown and vaccine mandates. It pressured social media companies to censor millions of Americans who posted dissenting views about COVID or harrowing accounts of vaccine injuries, many of which turned out to be true. It pushed Facebook to suppress the ideas of renowned scientists who rightly questioned poorly conceived COVID policies.

Like Trump, Biden asserted that “domestic terrorism” was a grave threat to the nation. But his Justice Department defined the term differently. It focused on right-wing extremism, “anti-authority” activists and “election denialism,” and prosecuted hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants who had committed mere misdemeanors on hyped-up felony charges.

To its credit, the Trump administration ended many such Biden programs. To its shame, the administration has failed to learn broader lessons about the importance of civil liberties. NPSM-7 is a prime example.

Obvious harms

The harms are obvious. Applying loose terms such as “domestic terrorism” to ideas invites those who don’t like the ideas to abuse those who articulate them.

Those who occupy high government positions — who are usually the ideologues from both political parties — gain power to investigate Americans who merely disagree with their policies. The louder and more effective the opposition, the more likely it will come under scrutiny.

Dissident views and political protest become targets of state repression. Those on the frontlines of law enforcement may come to see their fellow citizens as threats, merely for exercising their Constitutional rights. Abuses like the killings in Minneapolis are the result.

Yes, some protesters in some incidents have edged close to Constitutionally unprotected actions. But existing criminal law is enough to deal with political violence.

The greater danger to our public life is the threat to the Constitutional freedoms of all Americans, whatever their politics, from the vaguely defined thoughtcrimes attached to the bogeyman of “domestic terrorism.”

Clifford Bob is professor emeritus of political science at Duquesne University. He is finishing a book titled “The Fear Industrial Complex.”