A government-funded database, led by the University of Maryland and ostensibly established to track “radicalization,” is targeting a major pro-life group as “terrorists.”
Students for Life of America (SFLA), which has 1,400 chapters at campuses across the country, “appears under a ‘Terrorist Group’ label in the raw dataset,” according to a Monday article in The College Fix.
The database, called the “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States” (PIRUS), was funded in part by grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security’s Center for the Study of Terrorism and Behavior (CSTAB). According to the project’s website, PIRUS is a “quantitative dataset of individuals in the United States who radicalized to the point of violent or non-violent ideologically motivated criminal activity, or ideologically motivated association with a foreign or domestic extremist organization from 1948 until 2021.”
The PIRUS database overwhelmingly targets “right-wing” offenders, with more than 1,700 identified compared to fewer than 550 labeled “left-wing.” Ideological subcategories include tabs for “anti-abortion,” “Christian identity,” and “anti-LGBT” but not for far-left radical abortion groups such as those behind the attacks on pregnancy centers or threats to Supreme Court justices.
“We are very concerned about government-funded programs engaging in viewpoint discrimination as they attempt to insinuate that there may be future harms from peaceful pro-life people,” Kristi Hamrick, a spokeswoman for SFLA told the Fix.
According to LifeSiteNews, a pro-life website, “The PIRUS database lists two individuals associated with SFLA who match the description of student members
