Bob Barr: Feds Determined To Label Conservatives ‘Thought Criminals’

     

Former Congressman Bob Barr has slammed as “frightening,” “bizarre,” and “insidious” a new study funded by the Department of Homeland Security with lists ‘liberty lovers’ as right-wing terrorists, noting that the federal government is determined to re-define legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes.

As we reported last week, a study produced by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland with the aid of $12 million dollars in DHS funding characterizes Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority,” and “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

The report lists numerous other political ideologies which would normally be considered as American as mom and apple pie as extremist beliefs, including people who consider themselves “anti-global,” Americans who believe their “way of life” is under attack, those who consider themselves “fiercely nationalistic,” and people who “believe in conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty.”

Former Georgia Congressman and staunch liberty advocate Bob Barr responded to the story by warning that it provides a “frightening” and “bizarre” example of how “government officials seem to have become increasingly distrustful of individual liberty.”

Barr pointed to a previous document produced by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) which listed his own supporters, as well as Ron Paul voters and people who display political bumper stickers as potential terrorists, to illustrate how framing constitutionalists and conservatives as extremist radicals is a disturbing meme being circulated by the political class.

“The report may appear innocuous, but it is not. It offers a carefully scripted but insidious analysis of Americans who happen to hold certain philosophical or political views, many of which are common among conservatives and libertarians,” writes Barr, quoting the Infowars story which highlighted how the study was all part of the “rush to denounce legitimate political beliefs as thought crimes.”

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