Declassifying the Threat: Biden's Domestic Terror Plan and the Erosion of Free Speech
The question is not whether governments should guard against domestic terrorism. Reasonable people accept that political violence must be deterred. The question is whether, in the name of security, the federal government may distort the concept of terrorism so thoroughly that it becomes indistinguishable from ordinary political opposition. The Biden administration's Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism, though clothed in the technocratic prose of national security, has arguably achieved precisely this distortion. Its key mechanisms create the very threat it claims to neutralize, namely, the erosion of democratic liberty.
Until yesterday, much of this was speculative. But on April 16, 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified the full Strategic Implementation Plan, revealing in stark detail the blueprint the Biden administration followed to reshape counterterrorism policy around the suppression of political dissent. The document confirms what many Americans long suspected: that the apparatus of national security was repurposed to scrutinize, flag, and ultimately silence conservative thought.
Start with a central observation: while the Plan pretends to avoid overt partisanship, its structure and operationalization almost exclusively target right-of-center individuals and organizations. This claim, while contentious, is grounded in the Plan's own language and the pattern of federal conduct since its release. The Plan empowers federal agencies to collaborate with private companies to monitor, suppress, and report alleged indicators of radicalization. But almost all of these "indicators" are indistinct from mainstream conservative speech. I know this personally, because I was included on one of the administration’s lists for allegedly spreading misinformation about the 2020 election. My account was flagged by a government-compiled list and was permanently suspended from Twitter as a result. That is not a theory. It happened.
It happened because the Plan explicitly institutionalized a public-private system of surveillance, censorship, and punishment. The relevant language from Pillar Two of the SIP directs agencies to "share with relevant technology and other private-industry companies, as appropriate and as expeditiously as possible, relevant information on DT-related mobilization indicators, online content, and trends". In plain English, this meant handing over names, phrases, and narratives for review by social media platforms. The predictable result was a mass flagging of dissenting views as disinformation or worse, terror-adjacent propaganda.
To understand the gravity of this coordination, recall the structure of power. The federal government cannot easily ban speech directly. But it can pressure private actors, especially monopolistic platforms, to do the banning for them. This is not a hypothetical concern. In the now-infamous Missouri v. Biden litigation, internal government emails and sworn testimony demonstrated that White House officials, the CDC, DHS, and FBI regularly emailed social media firms with lists of users and content to be deleted or throttled. The justification was always the same: this content might lead to radicalization, or confusion, or distrust in government.
What constituted such dangerous content? In many cases, claims about the integrity of the 2020 election, skepticism of vaccine mandates, criticism of critical race theory, simple mockery of government overreach, and in a number of cases straightforward satire was silenced. These are protected viewpoints under the First Amendment, and in many cases as we know now, they were true. But the Biden administration's plan operates under a different standard, one that treats potential for misunderstanding as synonymous with violence. Thus, any narrative that "undermines trust in institutions" becomes a candidate for censorship.
This is how counterterrorism became a mechanism for censorship.
The irony was that the real threat of political violence is from the left not the right. We must distinguish violence from speech, and threat from dissent. The legitimate concern about domestic terror does not justify the presumption that half the country is sympathetic to insurrection. And yet, Biden's plan and its downstream policies treat patriotic imagery, constitutional skepticism, and right-of-center ideologies as suspect by default.
This suspicion is not abstract. It was codified in the FBI's training materials, leaked in 2022, which included the Betsy Ross flag, the Gadsden flag, and references to the Second Amendment as indicators of domestic extremism. One might have thought that symbols of the American founding would be presumed innocent. But the logic of the Plan flips that presumption. It replaces the old American maxim of presumed innocence with a new doctrine of presumed extremism, provided the subject leans right.
The chilling effect is real. Parents who protested mask mandates were investigated under threat tags created for domestic terror monitoring. Veterans who participated in constitutionally protected protests were labeled "militia-adjacent" and referred to internal threat assessment units. Catholic parishioners who attended Latin Mass were profiled in an internal memo as potentially aligned with racial extremist ideologies. Each of these individuals or groups was swept into the government's dragnet not because they committed acts of violence, but because their views or associations fit an elastic profile of ideological danger.
The philosophical danger here is clear: the conflation of opinion with threat. A government that regards dissent as a precursor to terrorism will inevitably criminalize opposition. This is not the mark of a liberal democracy, but of a security state. The rhetoric of "resilience" and "community cohesion" that adorns the Plan is not a shield against abuse, but a camouflage for it. Terms like "media literacy" and "disinformation" have been laundered into acceptable fronts for ideological control. One need only examine how federal grants have been allocated to nonprofits to develop "resilience" programs that mirror progressive orthodoxy. One such program labeled gender-critical speech as a form of hate that must be "disrupted." The funding was federal, the target was cultural, the intent was plainly ideological.
Even more troubling is the Plan's instruction to coordinate with foreign partners and intelligence agencies to share data on domestic extremist narratives. While the Plan states that this is to identify foreign involvement, the operational implication is a backchannel. Intelligence partners who are not bound by the U.S. Constitution can collect information that American agencies cannot lawfully obtain, then return it to U.S. authorities under the color of foreign intelligence. This is not a theoretical abuse. It is a known tactic, documented in past surveillance scandals and now openly embedded in Biden's counterterror architecture.
Let us be precise. There is no textual provision in the SIP that mandates the censorship of conservatives. There is no memo that says, in so many words, that Trump voters are to be profiled. But the cumulative effect of the Plan’s structure, guidance, and implementation history leads to this outcome. It is a system that incentivizes social monitoring, that encourages platforms to suppress controversial views, and that redefines patriotism as risk. The harm is not merely theoretical. Many of us have lived it.
When my name appeared on a disinformation list created by a federal agency and shared with Twitter, I lost my voice on a platform that served as my primary means of political expression. I had committed no crime. I had advocated no violence. I had merely questioned, as millions of Americans did, whether the 2020 election had been conducted with the fairness and transparency that democracy demands. That was enough to be exiled from the digital public square.
So we must ask again: is the Plan really about security, or is it about control? Is it designed to prevent terrorism, or to prevent resistance to the dominant ideology? The answer is not found in its preambles, but in its predicates. What it causes, what it excuses, and what it permits.
A proper policy must target conduct, not conscience. It must distinguish between action and belief. It must resist the allure of safety bought at the cost of liberty. The Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism does none of these. It replaces standards of justice with categories of suspicion. It harnesses the tools of state power to delegitimize dissent. And worst of all, it does so under the pretense of protecting democracy while actively corroding its foundation: the freedom to disagree.
Counterterrorism cannot be a Trojan horse for political conformity. The republic will not survive the idea that disagreement is danger and liberty is extremism. That is the true threat. And it comes not from below, but from above.
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