FBI Raids Catholic Family After Teen Posts "Offensive" Memes In Group Chat

This anecdote was shared on the Gab podcast about a family who asked for help on GiveSendGo crowd funding site. Their campaign on the website has since been taken down by the family in question.

Our family has unexpectedly incurred very substantial for us legal expenses as the result of an aggressive investigation against our 15-year-old son for posting offensive memes in a private group chat. While the investigation resulted in juvenile probation and a minor misdemeanor conviction for breach of peace, our home was raided by the FBI and we were forced to come up with thousands of dollars in non-refundable bail money and legal fees. We're a working class family that lives paycheck to paycheck and bankruptcy is a near certainty. It will be a struggle to keep our home without help. Our difficulties began in early 2023. Our 15 year old was homeschooled and working in the office of my father's family business during the day when my father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. In addition to running a business, my father was responsible for the full time care of my 93 year old grandmother, who lived in an in law apartment at his home. My father very abruptly became too ill from chemotherapy to work full time or care for my grandmother, and a large portion of the responsibility for this fell on my son, until I can get home from work every day. It was a very stressful time, compounded by several unrelated deaths in the family that happened in the same time period. None of our children, including my son, had been raised with cell phones or unrestricted internet access. It became necessary for him to have a phone so he could communicate while he was alone at my father's house caring for my grandmother, and so we reluctantly allowed him to have a cell phone. He spent a lot of time alone with nothing to do but wait and think, and the cell phone became a welcome distraction. His interest in history and theology led him down a rabbit hole where he was recruited into group chats targeting teenage traditionalist Catholics with extreme political content. We later learned that these chats were being closely monitored and possibly operated by FBI agents as part of an ongoing effort to investigate traditional Catholics that was downstream of a broader domestic investigation spurred by the events of January 6th. My son is very stoic, so we had no idea any of this was occurring. He dutifully assisted my father during the day and went home in the evening while I took over my father's house. Unbeknownst to us, he was being drawn deeper and deeper into these chats and go to into doing things like taking pictures of himself in public wearing ski masks and to print out memes and leave them on picnic tables. They would ask him if he had access to guns. He would go to target shooting under the supervision of my brother, who lived in the in-law apartment at our home and owned firearms Then encourage him to sneak photographs of the guns and post them. Ironically, our legal troubles began when he had an attack of conscience and abruptly deleted all of his chat apps. He later told us that he felt using social media was a coping mechanism and it had been affecting his mood and ability to sleep. The FBI panicked and made the assumption that he must have connected to a terror cell in real life and gone dark ahead of some potential violent act. There was no such plan and they had no evidence of one, but it didn't stop them from spending two weeks fabricating illegal pretence for a search warrant for our home. At 10pm on a Sunday evening, we were dragged out of our home at gunpoint, handcuffed and locked in a van while they searched our home for evidence of this imagined plot. Having found no such evidence, they seized my brother's firearms and had my son hospitalized on mental health pretenses. We didn't learn until that night the scope of the investigation or the amount of time and resources expended on my son. We know him to be kind and conscientious and a boy who is active in his community and church. He is a volunteer firefighter and an altar boy. He said some things that we aren't very happy with and showed a severe lack of judgment in his associations, but the response seemed disproportionate. It soon became clear that there was no grants, conspiracy or imminent danger, and the FBI lost interest. But we have admired in the aftermath ever since. There was a DCF investigation that went nowhere but required us to go to daily appointments for months. The state brought criminal charges against my son that were eventually disposed of but required a legal battle that lasted months. When his charges were disposed of, my brother and I were charged for allowing my son to target shoot based on the assumption that we must have somehow known he was involved in political extremism online. It seems unlikely to amount to much, but it has cost us over $20,000 that we do not have. So far, I have been reluctant to seek help, but the threat of losing our home has become very real. I work with the homeless for a faith-based nonprofit organization and my brother manages a family-owned butcher shop. My wife stays at home in homeschools our younger children while managing a small homestead. We are paying legal bills by not paying other bills. Our credit is extended as far as it can go so our kids can have Christmas. The mortgage is a few weeks behind and we have zero breathing room for any unexpected expenses. At this point, our son is racked with guilt and believes himself to be a fall for our dire financial straits. While it is very humbling for me, as someone who has always provided for others, to ask for help, I notice some time necessary, and that time has come.