Hot take: The U.S. was justified in monitoring the SSPX (not the FSSP though) — two infographics I found attached)

I know this isnt a popular take, but going off what’s in these two infographics, I think the Feds, us govt, have reason to keep an eye on the SSPX world.

To be clear about what I’m aaying not that every SSPX priest is criminal obviously, tho they are schismatic and not Catholic. I think that when investigators watch people they’re already concerned about move they should be able to look at subcultures like the sspx packed full of conspiratorial thinking about the system, and a belief that Russia’s war in can be seen in Russia-friendly terms i dont it’s paranoid to treat that milieu as worth a look for surveillance.

The fbi-sspx infographic shows the Richmond memo wasn’t aimed at real “Catholics.” It named traditionalist spaces, SSPX chapels included, as places where subjects under investigation might be contacted, observed, or quietly embedded. You can maybe object to that on civil-liberties grounds but it’s not that diff from what fbi did to MLK and I think sspx is easily we can all agree actually bad unlike MLK. Anyways if the question is just whether the government had *any* reason to think some of these spaces might touch extremist or anti-state cases, the Russia sspx infographic shows it.

So the infographic lays out a worldview published in an SSPX official manner it’s basically a geopolitical read of Ukraine that lines up with the major Russian narrative porpganda point for point about NATO provocation as justification, Maidan as a US-EU coup, Russian speakers in the Donbass as a persecuted people needing rescue (major fake russian propagnda point), crimea absorbed through a referendum is somehow a legit thing and not ankluss 2.0, Western arms to Ukraine as morally wrong, Biden and Boris Jonson as the ones who ruined peace eforts.

Like monitoring isn’t breaking up ur religious liberties or banning, persecuting, or criminalizing. If the state sees a religious or political subculture where people of investigative interest may turn up, and where a strongly anti-Western, Russia-friendly moral analysis is circulating in public, some level of watching is understandable.