daryl johnson d h s

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.hughmcdermott.com/how_the_political_right_bullied_the_us_department_of_homeland_security_into_ignoring_the_threat_of_right_wing_extremism">http://www.hughmcdermott.com/how_the_political_right_bullied_the_us_department_of_homeland_security_into_ignoring_the_threat_of_right_wing_extremism</a></font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">oz</font></div><div><h2 style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 13.5px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.1; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">How the Political Right Bullied the US Department of Homeland Security Into Ignoring the Threat of Right-Wing Extremism</font></h2><div class="byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 1px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">POSTED BY <strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;">DR HUGH MCDERMOTT MP</strong> ON FEBRUARY 09, 2016</font></div><div class="byline" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top; text-transform: uppercase; letter-spacing: 1px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;" /><div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="">After right-wingers freaked out about a report detailing the rise in right-wing extremism, Homeland Security effectively dismantled a unit tasked with tracking it.</font></span></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font></em></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In the wake of the terrorist attack in Norway by right-wing Christian extremist Anders Breivik, conservative media pundits rushed to vilify anyone who brought up the underlying far-right ideology that fueled Breivik’s violence.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The uproar that follows any suggestion that right-wing extremism is on the rise works to silence the conversation about the danger of right-wing militancy. According to disturbing revelations by a former US Homeland Security Intelligence Analyst, the consequences of this dynamic extend to the highest branches of the US government.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b>For six years, Darryl Johnson headed a Department of Homeland Security team tracking domestic extremist groups. Now Johnson, who is no longer with DHS, says that conservative furor over the report's findings pressured Homeland Security to abandon reporting on and monitoring the rising threat of right-wing extremism for the past two years.</b></font></p></div><div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In April 2009, DHS issued an intelligence assessment, co-authored by Johnson, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment." The document was one of many threat assessments shared between DHS and state and local law enforcement agencies to keep them apprised of potential and looming threats, and warned of a surge in right-wing extremism due to the election of the country's first black president and the economic recession.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b>Although the report was intended only for distribution to law enforcement agencies, it was immediately leaked to the media causing a political firestorm among conservative pundits, who wrongly suggested that it labeled all conservatives as potential terrorists.</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DHS initially defended the report, but within days caved to political pressure and practically disowned it, with Secretary Napolitano apologizing to the American Legion for the report's mention of military veterans. But DHS did more than just publicly buckle under the political weight of conservative critics. According to Johnson, the department effectively dismantled his intelligence team following the right’s uproar.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an in-depth interview published in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;">Intelligence Report</em>, Johnson reveals the level of sway the political right had in thwarting intelligence work on right-wing extremism. He says DHS deliberately mischaracterized the report as unauthorized, even though it had passed through proper channels and instituted restrictive policies that brought the important work of his unit to a virtual standstill. As a result, Johnson left DHS in dismay and was followed by almost all the members of his team, leaving a single analyst where there had been six. In comparison, there are at least 25 analysts devoted to tracking Islamic terrorism.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When questioned about Johnson’s claims -- which have been confirmed by current and former department officials in the Washington Post – DHS officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have repeatedly disputed his account and insist that the level of activity by right-wing extremist groups has remained consistent over the past few years. In addition, they claim the perception of increased extremist activity may be due to increased awareness of the threat by the government and the public. But the numbers beg to differ.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right Wing Extremism on the Rise</font></strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Johnson’s report was consistent with data from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which finds that hate groups topped 1,000 for the first time since SPLC began counting such groups in the 1980s. The most dramatic growth was seen in antigovernment "Patriot" groups — militias and other extremist organizations that see the federal government as their enemy — which came roaring back to life over the past year after more than a decade out of the limelight. SPLC's Intelligence Project identified 824 anti-government "Patriot" groups that were active in 2010, up from just 149 in 2008.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Mark Potok, director of SPLC's Intelligence Project, these groups are driven by resentment over changing racial demographics, which he describes as, "The idea that the country is becoming less white every day and in fact the prediction by the census bureau that whites will lose their majority about the year 2050 in the United States is very important. Virtually every white supremacist in America knows that date." Other drivers include frustration over the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and propaganda aimed at various minorities.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Potok told AlterNet that events following the 2009 DHS report have proved it to be prescient.<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;" /></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In May 2009, just one month after the report’s release, an anti-abortion zealot murdered Dr. George Tiller in Kansas. In June 2009, neo-Nazi James von Brunn murdered a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In March 2010, nine members of a Michigan militia were charged with seditious conspiracy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruction in connection with an alleged plot to murder police officers.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">On May 20, 2010, two West Memphis Arkansas police officers were shot to death during a routine traffic stop by a father-son duo of “sovereign citizens,”</span> a group of US residents who believe the government has no authority over them. West Memphis Police Chief Bob Paudert, whose son was one of the officers killed, told me that prior to the loss of his son, he had never heard of sovereign citizens, nor had any other law enforcement officials he spoke to about the matter. After some digging and research he discovered that his son's murder was not an isolated incident, and in fact sovereign citizens were responsible fordozens of police officer deaths around the country.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paudert was particularly surprised to learn that the Sovereign movement is estimated at 300,000 people strong and growing, which is why he was disappointed in the federal government's failure to alert state and local law enforcement that such a threat existed. Paudert says he is absolutely positive that had they been alerted and trained to recognize sovereign citizens, “my son would still be alive today."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Conservatives Throw a Temper Tantrum</font></strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The loudest outcry came from the right-wing shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh, who claimed that Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama were "portraying standard, ordinary, everyday conservatives as posing a bigger threat to this country than al-Qaeda terrorists or genuine enemies of this country like Kim Jong-Il."  Sean Hannity warned his Fox News viewers that “if you have a pro-life bumper sticker on your car, if you have an 'America is overtaxed' bumper sticker, if you have a pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker, they're viewing you potentially as a radical.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>In possibly the most deranged interpretation, conservative blogger Michelle Malkin</b><span style="font-weight: inherit;"> wrote that the report was a “hit job on conservatives” and “one of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of propaganda I’d ever read out of DHS. I couldn’t believe it was real….the piece of crap report issued on April 7 is a sweeping indictment of conservatives.”</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In a sad sort of irony, Johnson told SPLC that the conservative media personalities who misinterpreted and attacked his report “would have been shocked to know that I personify conservatism. I'm an Eagle Scout. I'm a registered Republican. I'm Mormon. In fact, I was helping the Boy Scouts with a fundraiser when I heard the report being attacked on the news."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Outrage over the report's findings quickly spread to Congress, where several conservative lawmakers demanded the ouster of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Among them was Rep. John Carter, R-Tex., who remarked, "We shouldn't even give her the respect of letting her resign. She should be fired by the administration for accusing honest, American citizens — because of their political beliefs — of being domestic terrorists."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The self-described conservative and Christian non-profit Thomas More Law Center went even further and filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano on behalf a Michigan-based anti-abortion group, claiming the DHS report was all part of a conspiracy between the Obama administration and liberal groups to violate their constitutional rights.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The section of the report that stirred the most controversy referred to “disgruntled military veterans” and cautioned that “rightwing extremists would attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans to boost their violent capabilities.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This did not sit well with David Rehbein, the commander of the veterans' organization American Legion, who wrote in a letter to Secretary Napolitano, “To continue to use McVeigh as an example of the stereotypical disgruntled military veteran is as unfair as using Osama bin Laden as the sole example of Islam.” Had Rehbein actually read the full report he would have discovered that this specific concern was based on factual data collected by the FBI.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="font-weight: inherit; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The DHS assessment cited a July 2008 report by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division under the Bush administration, titled “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel since 9/11.</span><span style="font-weight: inherit;">” </span><b>Based on its findings the 2008 FBI report observed that “some returning military veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have joined extremist groups,”</b><span style="font-weight: inherit;"> and that “military experience is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement as the result of recruitment campaigns by extremist groups and self-recruitment by veterans sympathetic to white supremacist causes.” Furthermore, based on analysis of FBI case files from October 2001 to May 2008, the report identified 203 military personnel or veterans who were active members in white supremacist organizations during that period.</span></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It's not surprising that conservatives threw a fit. What's disturbing is that these conservative complaints prompted DHS to withdraw the report.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pretending the Threat Doesn’t Exist</font></strong></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I spoke with Johnson, who has been following right-wing extremism in a professional capacity since the early ‘90s. Upon the Democratic nomination for president of then Senator Obama, Johnson says that based on his experience and expertise, he immediately recognized that "this would be a huge recruiting tool for groups like white supremacists, militia extremists, sovereign citizen extremists, those extremists groups that are on the fringes of the right of the political spectrum, which we refer to as right-wing extremists in the counterterrorism community."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When it was clear that Barack Obama would win, Johnson became worried about the "potential radicalization factor" that would ensue following the election of America's first black president. "It would agitate people to go beyond their mainstream and law-abiding protest activity to more criminal activity and violence because people would see that these 'enemies' so to speak, these minorities in America are actually integrated in society and they’re actually fulfilling the American dream."</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of this prompted the drafting of the report in the early months of the Obama administration.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He chose to go public because “the conditions that existed back in 2008 and 2009 when we drafted this document still persist today….the climate in this country from a political standpoint and economic standpoint has not changed. The economy is still sluggish, unemployment’s still flirting with 10 percent, and there’s this anti-government sentiment and agitation out there in this country. That’s one thing that concerns me is that we’ve had two years now where these people have been boiling in this environment that could possibly agitate somebody to carry out a violent act.”<em style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;" /></font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mark Potok told AlterNet that DHS’s handling of the report's criticism was “nothing more than an act of political cowardice,” but it doesn’t change the report’s disturbing accuracy.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a detailed and unsettling list of major terrorist plots and racist rampages that have emerged from the American radical right in the years since Oklahoma City, a pattern Potok says continues to this day. That prompted SPLC’s president, J. Richard Cohen, to send a letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano two months ago, urging her to reassess the level of resources that DHS is devoting to the threat of non-Islamic domestic terrorism.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The letter highlights several recent examples of thwarted attacks, one of which occurred this past January, when a neo-Nazi activist was arrested for planting a bomb along an MLK Day parade route in Spokane, Washington. That same month, another neo-Nazi was arrested on his way to the Arizona-Mexico border and later charged with possessing explosive devices packed with ball bearings – to “maximize human carnage,” as a federal prosecutor put it. In March, authorities arrested five members of a militia in Alaska and charged them with plotting to murder or kidnap police officers and judges if their leader, who was then fleeing prosecution on weapons charges, were arrested or killed. Unfortunately, Secretary Napolitano has yet to respond to SPLC’s letter.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That the right’s outrage over the report managed to influence the Department of Homeland Security should raise alarm bells for anyone who is concerned about homegrown extremism. It's frightening that the US government bowed to political pressure. The atrocity that took place in Norway is a reminder of the brutality that ideological extremists are capable of dishing out.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Johnson, Anders Breivik "was under the radar, he acquired relatively unsophisticated weaponry and was able to go and target people that he opposed because of his ideology and beliefs and was able to kill close to 80 people, and it was done effortlessly. He didn’t go to some place in Pakistan and learn how to build a bomb.  He learned how to do this on the Internet, and he was able to acquire these materials legally. And I know for a fact that that is going on here in this country, people are stockpiling weaponry.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Potok believes the right’s ability to silence the conversation about right-wing extremism will have fatal consequences, warning, “The danger of pretending this movement doesn’t exist is that it will grow more and more deeply entrenched in our society and more dangerous. There’s an immediate criminal danger. Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 men women and children in 15 seconds. It absolutely could happen again. It hasn’t because we are lucky and because law enforcement has done a fine job overall.”</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 18px 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 25.2px; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Similarly, Daryl Johnson fears that, "These incidents are starting to add up. Yet our legislators, politicians and national leaders don't appear too concerned about this. So my greatest fear is that domestic terrorists in this country will somehow become emboldened to the point of carrying out a mass-casualty attack, because they perceive that no one is being vigilant about the threat from within. This is what keeps me up at night."</font></p><div style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><span style="font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: top;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: top;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Rania Khalek is a progressive activist</font></span></span></div></div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
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</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">wapo</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">Homeland Security Department curtails home-grown terror analysis</font></font></font></font></div><div>By R. Jeffrey Smith June 7, 2011</div><div>
</div><div>The Department of Homeland Security has stepped back for the past two years from conducting its own intelligence and analysis of home-grown extremism, according to current and former department officials, even though law enforcement and civil rights experts have warned of rising extremist threats.</div><div>
</div><div>The department has cut the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous state and local law enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups, the officials and others said.</div><div>
</div><div>The decision to reduce the department’s role was provoked by conservative criticism of an intelligence report on “Rightwing Extremism” issued four months into the Obama administration, the officials said. The report warned that the poor economy and Obama’s election could stir “violent radicalization,” but it was pilloried as an attack on conservative ideologies, including opponents of abortion and immigration.</div><div>
</div><div>In the two years since, the officials said, the analytical unit that produced that report has been effectively eviscerated. Much of its work — including a digest of domestic terror incidents and the distribution of definitions for terms such as “white supremacist” and “Christian Identity” — has been blocked.</div><div>
</div><div>Multiple current and former law enforcement officials who have regularly viewed DHS analyses said the department had not reported in depth on any domestic extremist groups since 2009.</div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Strategic bulletins have been minimal, since that incident,” said Mike Sena, an intelligence official in California who presides over the National Fusion Center Association, a group of 72 federally chartered institutions in which state, local and federal officials share sensitive information. “Having analytical staff, to educate line officers on the extremists, is critical.…This is definitely one area” where more effort is warranted by DHS.</span></div><div>
</div><div>Similar frustration was expressed in interviews with current and former officials at fusion centers in Missouri, Virginia and Tennessee. <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Daryl Johnson, formerly the senior domestic terrorism analyst at DHS and a principal author of the disputed report, confirmed in an interview that he left in frustration last year after his office was “gutted” in response to complaints.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Other reports written by DHS about Muslim extremists … got through without any major problems,” Johnson said. “Ours went through endless reviews and edits, and nothing came out.”</span></div><div>
</div><div>The threat of Islamic-related terrorism in the United States has by all accounts captured the most attention and resources at DHS since it was formed in 2002. But a study conducted for the department last October concluded that a majority of the 86 major foiled and executed terrorist plots in the United States from 1999 to 2009 were unrelated to al-Qaeda and allied movements.</div><div>
</div><div>“Do not overlook other types of terrorist groups,” the report warned, noting that five purely domestic groups had considered using weapons of mass destruction in that period. Similar warnings have been issued by the two principal non-government groups that track domestic terrorism: the New York-based Anti-Defamation League and the Alabama-based<b> Southern Poverty Law Center.</b></div><div><b>
</b></div><div><b>An annual tally by the latter group of what it calls “Terror From the Right” listed 13 major incidents and arrests last year, nearly double the annual number in previous years; the group also reported the number of hate groups had topped 1,000 in 2010, for the first time in at least two decades.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Citing the complaints that Johnson first made in an SPLC quarterly, the group’s president, J. Richard Cohen, wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano this week requesting a reassessment of resources devoted to “the threat of non-Islamic domestic terrorism.”</div><div>
</div><div>Authorities this year have arrested neo-Nazis who allegedly planted a bomb along the route of a Martin Luther King parade in Spokane, Wash.; arrested six members of an Alaska militia who allegedly plotted to kill state troopers; arrested a Wisconsin man for planning to kill Planned Parenthood workers; and on May 29 arrested a Florida man who claimed to be part of the burgeoning “sovereign citizen movement” after he sprayed a market with AK-47 fire.</div><div>
</div><div>A spokesman for DHS, Adam Fetcher, declined to say if the department agrees that the threat of domestically inspired terrorism is increasing or how many analysts are presently assigned to the issue, calling that a sensitive intelligence matter. But he said the evolving risk of group or individual violence is “reflected in our briefings and products over the past year.”</div><div>
</div><div>A senior department official provided by Fetcher, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence practices, confirmed that “the number of analysts on a daily basis has decreased somewhat, compared to what it was two years ago.” But the official disputed claims by several current and former DHS officials that only two analysts — including one who is a contract employee — now study the issue full-time.</div><div>
</div><div>DHS’s caution or avoidance, as its critics claim, may partly stem from worries that aggressive intelligence operations could be seen as civil liberties violations. A DHS official explained that “unlike international terrorism, there are no designated domestic terrorist groups. Subsequently, all the legal actions of an identified extremist group leading up to an act of violence are constitutionally protected and not reported on by DHS.”</div><div>
</div><div>The official added that the FBI — not DHS — is “the primary lead for the federal government” on domestic terrorism. But Johnson, the former DHS analyst, said that if the FBI is the only agency to disseminate detailed reports on domestic extremist groups, “you’ve lost a separate set of eyes that could be looking at this before it develops into a criminal matter.”</div><div>
</div><div>When the DHS report on “rightwing extremism” was leaked, Napolitano — who Johnson and other officials say had requested the report and heard a briefing in advance on its conclusions — initially defended it, saying “we must protect the country from terrorism whether foreign or homegrown.”</div><div>
</div><div>But after 20 conservative groups sponsored ads calling for Napolitano’s ouster, she said it was disseminated without regular review, and apologized to the American Legion for its warning that veterans could be targeted by militias for recruitment.</div><div>
</div><div>The DHS civil rights office subsequently was granted veto rights over all DHS reports on domestic terrorists, Johnson said.</div><div>
</div><div>Johnson and others said intelligence reports on the resurgence of militia groups in Michigan and Kentucky are among those being withheld by the agency, which he said was “screening for politically sensitive phrases or topics that might be objectionable to certain groups.”</div><div>
</div><div>Multiple briefings for state and local officials on extremist groups such as the sovereign citizens movement — composed of those who reject American legal supremacy — were also blocked, according to internal DHS messages.</div><div>
</div><div>David Hawtin, who retired last month as a domestic terrorism analyst at the Tennessee Fusion Center, said “the pendulum has swung to a point where we are missing nodes of connection because there is no obvious crime on the front end.”</div><div>
</div></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">wapo no lnx</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">I warned of right-wing violence in 2009. Republicans objected. I was right.</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></div><div>White nationalists have only gotten more dangerous since then.</div><div>
</div><div><b>By Daryl Johnson</b></div><div>August 21, 2017</div><div>Eight years ago, I warned of a singular threat — the resurgence of right-wing extremist activity and associated violence in the United States as a result of the 2008 presidential election, the financial crisis and the stock market crash. My intelligence report, meant only for law enforcement, was leaked by conservative media.</div><div>
</div><div>A political backlash ensued because of an objection to the label “right-wing extremism.” The report also rightly pointed out that returning military veterans may be targeted for recruitment by extremists. Republican lawmakers demanded then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano rescind my report. The<b> American Legion</b> formally requested an apology to veterans. Some in Congress called for me to be fired. Amid the turmoil, my warning went unheeded by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, the Department of Homeland Security caved to the political pressure: Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. <b>By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.</b></div><div>
</div><div>Since 2008, though, the body count from numerous acts of violent right-wing terrorism continued to rise steadily with very little media interest, political discussion or concern from our national leaders. As this threat grew, government resources were scaled back, law enforcement counterterrorism training was defunded and policies to counter violent extremism narrowed to focus solely on Muslim extremism. Heated political campaigning by Donald Trump in 2016 pandered to these extremists. Now, right-wing terrorism has become the national security threat which many government leaders have yet to acknowledge.</div><div>
</div><div>[The Trump administration is showing white nationalists it won’t fight them at all]</div><div>
</div><div>The mere existence of so many heavily armed citizens filled with hate and anger toward various elements of American society is troubling enough in its own right. They number in the hundreds of thousands. More troubling is the violent convergence now underway within right-wing extremist movements — sanitized with the label “alt-right.” Largely under the media radar, disaffected extremist groups with long histories of squabbling have been independently pooling resources, some even infiltrating our government through the outreach efforts of <b>right-wing extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriff’s and Peace Officers Association.</b> Over the past year, we’ve witnessed political violence erupt between right-wing extremist protesters and counterprotesters at pro-Trump rallies in Minnesota, Washington, California and now Virginia. This rebranded alt-right extremist movement has the ultimate goal to disrupt civil society, undermine government institutions and pick which laws — if any — they will abide by, and what supposed “justice” they will administer on their own authority. </div><div>
</div><div>But the story, in a very real sense, didn’t begin in 2017. As with the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges during the 1990s, the 2014 Bundy standoff in Nevada and the 2016 Malheur National Wildlife Refuge siege in Oregon have served not only as recruitment opportunities for anti-government and hate groups, but they also serve as a radicalization facilitator. Why? Because extremists in the 2014 and 2016 standoffs were allowed to take up arms against the federal government and threaten law enforcement officers without suffering any legal consequences.</div><div>
</div><div>[Not punishing the Bundys for the Nevada standoff led to the occupation in Oregon]</div><div>
</div><div>More recently, the renewed debates over Confederate monuments, same-sex marriage and Black Lives Matter has reinvigorated alt-right extremists to mobilize toward a more radical fringe element capable of violent action at any moment. Of further concern, a new generation of “charismatic leaders” within the white supremacist movement has emerged after Trump’s election, creating an opportunity for disparate groups to unite under one banner.</div><div>
</div><div>Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, militia extremists, and other radical right-wing zealots march side-by-side at pro-Trump rallies across the country. Trump’s endorsement of the border wall, the travel ban, mass deportations of illegal immigrants — these ideas were touted on white supremacist message boards merely 10 years ago. Now they’re being put forth as official U.S. policy. Such controversial plans have placated white supremacists and anti-government extremists and will draw still more sympathetic individuals toward these extremist causes along with the sort of violent acts that too often follow, like Charlottesville.</div><div>
</div><div>Rhetoric from the president has further emboldened the alt-right. After the violence in Charlottesville, former KKK leader David Duke welcomed President Trump’s remarks: “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa.” Similarly, other white nationalists praised the president for not attacking them.</div><div>
</div><div>[When white supremacists strike, police don’t always strike back]</div><div>
</div><div>America finds itself overwhelmed with domestic terrorist attacks, increased terrorist plotting and the emergence of new polarizing political issues. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has not only failed to implement an effective strategy to combat right-wing terrorism; it is afraid to even raise the subject in public for fear of political backlash or contradicting its narrow-minded terrorism narrative (e.g., terrorism only comes from Muslims).</div><div>
</div><div>Extremists no longer hide anymore. They number in the hundreds of thousands and are extremely well-armed. The political apparatus and the news media appears confused in their reporting of the scope of the domestic terrorist threat — some ignoring it completely. When 9/11 happened, the government made an effort to connect the dots beforehand, but failed because of a lack of communication among agencies. In this case, the government isn’t even trying — and worse, it appears to be enabling the threat to flourish.</div><div>
</div><div>The Islamist militants who brought down the World Trade Center’s twin towers 16 years ago (or the ones who rammed their vehicles into pedestrians in London, Paris and Barcelona recently) had no domestic constituency. Their acts weren’t enshrined instantly on social media or obliquely heralded by the president, duly elected representatives or rationalized by media ideologues dead set on preventing a political backlash. The terrorists I have dedicated my life to stopping have had all that going in their favor. This is more than a formula for disaster. It virtually invites the disaster upon us.</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><a href="https://www.wired.com/2012/08/dhs/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.wired.com<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">/2012</span>/08/dhs/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span class="lede" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 14px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; letter-spacing: 0.08em; text-transform: uppercase;"> JOHNSON HAD </span>a sinking feeling when he started seeing TV reports on Sunday about a shooting in a Wisconsin temple. "I told my wife, 'This is likely a hate crime perpetrated by a white supremacist who may have had military experience,'" Johnson recalls.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was anything but a lucky guess on Johnson's part. He spent 15 years studying domestic terrorist groups – particularly white supremacists and neo-Nazis – as a government counterterrorism analyst, the last six of them at the Department of Homeland Security. There, he even homebrewed his own database on far-right extremist groups on an Oracle platform, allowing his analysts to compile and sift reporting in the media and other law-enforcement agencies on radical and potentially violent groups.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But Johnson's career took an unexpected turn in 2009, when an analysis he wrote on the rise of "<a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">Right-Wing Extremism</a>" (.pdf) sparked a political controversy. Under pressure from conservatives, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repudiated Johnson's paper – an especially bitter pill for him to swallow now that Wade Michael Page, a suspected white supremacist, <a href="https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/temple-attacks/" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">killed at least six people</a> at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. For Johnson, the shooting was a reminder that the government's counterterrorism efforts are almost exclusively focused on al-Qaida, even as non-Islamist groups threaten Americans domestically.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"DHS is scoffing at the mission of doing domestic counterterrorism, as is Congress," Johnson tells Danger Room. "There've been no hearings about the rising white supremacist threat, but there's been a long list of attacks over the last few years. But they still hold hearings about Muslim extremism. It's out of balance." But even if that balance was reset, he concedes, that doesn't necessarily mean the feds could have found Page before Sunday's rampage.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Johnson left DHS in April 2010 after "they dissolved my team,</b>" he says. Had he still been at DHS, he says he would have published an analysis calling attention to a growing number of attacks on mosques, which he thinks could serve as a "warning" to Sikh communities that are often mistaken for Muslim ones. But finding so-called "lone wolf" terrorists like Page is a challenge no matter their motivations, since they operate outside established extremist cells and often don't have criminal records, making it difficult for law enforcement or homeland security officials to spot them.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now a <a href="http://www.dtanalytics.org/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: transparent; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">security consultant</a> in the Washington D.C. area, Johnson used to work for DHS' analysis shop, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). He supervised a team of six analysts studying what he calls "domestic non-Islamic extremism." It's a telling term: the DHS employed as many as 40 analysts who looked at al-Qaida and other jihadist groups' inroads into the homeland.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Johnson ran everything else. One person on his team worked on the threat from anarchists; another, the threat from animal-rights extremists. Still others looked at anti-abortion radicalism, white supremacy and radical environmentalism</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">. They were supplemented by analysts at the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; but outnumbered by the literally thousands of analysts, operatives and other counterterrorism officials throughout the government who focus on jihadism. "Salaries were our major budget item," he recalls.</span></font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Then, in April 2009, Johnson warned that the election of the first African-American president, combined with recession-era economic anxieties, could <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/14/federal-agency-warns-of-radicals-on-right/print/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">fuel a rise in far-right violence</a>. "DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities," he wrote.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And so began a brief media firestorm. Conservative writers feared that the DHS was demonizing – even, potentially, criminalizing – mainstream right-wing speech. "<a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/16/right-wing-extremism-alarm/?page=all" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">It's no small coincidence that [Secretary Janet] Napolitano's agency disseminated the assessment just a week before the nationwide April 15 Tax Day Tea Party protests</a>," pundit Michelle Malkin speculated in the <span style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Washington Times</span>. Others objected that Johnson's report unfairly stigmatized veterans.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">It surprised Johnson. An Eagle Scout leader from northern Virginia in his early 40s, Johnson became interested in counterterrorism in his teens,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> after an Arkansas standoff between federal authorities and a millenarian group called </span><a href="http://vault.fbi.gov/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword%20The%20Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20/" target="blank" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">The Covenant The Sword And The Arm of The Lord</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">, which stockpiled weapons and explosives to bring about Armageddon. "I was always fascinated with why people use religion to justify violence and believe the world was ending – and had a role to play in hastening that end," Johnson said.</span></font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Stung, DHS responded by cutting "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/homeland-security-department-curtails-home-grown-terror-analysis/2011/06/02/AGQEaDLH_story.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled numerous state and local law enforcement briefings, and held up dissemination of nearly a dozen reports on extremist groups</a>," the <span style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Washington Post</span> reported in June 2009.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to Johnson, his former team now consists of a<b> single analyst tasked with tracking all domestic non-Islamic extremism. His database has been shuttered.</b></font></p><figure class="image-embed-component" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 50px 0px; vertical-align: baseline; outline: 0px; max-width: 100%; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="component-lazy loaded" data-component="Lazy" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="image-group-component" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><img src="https://media.wired.com/photos/5932c0912a990b06268ac7eb/master/w_640,c_limit/3494862575_f1003205ec_z.jpg" srcset="https://media.wired.com/photos/5932c0912a990b06268ac7eb/master/w_300,c_limit/3494862575_f1003205ec_z.jpg 300w, https://media.wired.com/photos/5932c0912a990b06268ac7eb/master/w_400,c_limit/3494862575_f1003205ec_z.jpg 400w, https://media.wired.com/photos/5932c0912a990b06268ac7eb/master/w_532,c_limit/3494862575_f1003205ec_z.jpg 532w, https://media.wired.com/photos/5932c0912a990b06268ac7eb/master/w_600,c_limit/3494862575_f1003205ec_z.jpg 600w, https://media.wired.com/photos/5932c0912a990b06268ac7eb/master/w_640,c_limit/3494862575_f1003205ec_z.jpg 640w" sizes="(min-width: 1200px) calc(100vw - (100vw - 1132px) - 300px - 50px - (50px * 2) - 150px), (min-width: 900px) calc(100vw - 300px - (50px * 2) - 100px), (min-width: 600px) calc(100vw - (50px * 2) - 100px), calc(100vw - (20px * 2))" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: block; height: auto; max-width: 100%; width: 532px;" /></div></div><figcaption class="caption-component" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 18px; margin: 16px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; outline: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div class="caption-componentcaption" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px 8px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font><p style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; display: inline;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RBerteig</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p> </div><div class="caption-componentcredit-container" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block; position: relative;"><span aria-label="Photo attribution" class=" ui-camera icon icon--16" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px auto; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; display: inline-block; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: 16px; height: 16px; width: 16px; opacity: 0.6; transform: translateY(4px); background-image: url(" images="images" icons="icons" ui-camera-black.svg="ui-camera-black.svg"><cite class="caption-component__credit" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-style: normal; font-variant: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 0px 8px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; letter-spacing: 0.08em; text-transform: uppercase;">/FLICKR</cite></span></div></figcaption></figure><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Asked for comment, DHS disputed Johnson's claim that it gives non-Islamic extremism short shrift.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"The Department of Homeland Security protects our country from all threats, whether foreign or homegrown, and regardless of the ideology that motivates its violence," spokesman Matt Chandler told Danger Room. "we face a threat environment where violent extremism is neither constrained by international borders, nor limited to any single ideology. This is not a phenomenon restricted solely to any one particular community and our efforts to counter violent extremism (CVE) are applicable to all ideologically motivated violence. DHS continues to work with its state, local, tribal, territorial and private partners to prevent and protect against potential threats to the United States by focusing on preventing violence that is motivated by extreme ideological beliefs."</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Johnson, who has written <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Right-Wing-Resurgence-Domestic-Terrorist/dp/1442218967?tag=w050b-20" target="blank" rel="nofollow" data-amzn-asin="1442218967" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: transparent; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">a forthcoming book about far-right extremist groups</a>, concedes that the definition of "right-wing" in his product was imprecise. In retrospect, he says he should have clarified that his focus was on "violent" right-wing organizations, like white supremacists, neo-Nazis and so-called Sovereign Citizens who believe the U.S. government is an illegitimate, tyrannical enterprise. Much like mainstream Muslims denounce terrorism and object to over-broad analysis <a href="https://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: transparent; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">portraying Islam as an incubator of extremism</a>, so too do mainstream conservatives denounce neo-Nazis and white supremacists and dispute that those groups are authentically right-wing.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nor does he think DHS should ignore Islamic extremism. "It just needs to be more balanced," Johnson says. New York congressman "Peter King has held three hearings in the past year on Muslim extremism," he says, referring to the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, "but he's yet to have a single hearing on right-wing extremism when there's been a lot more activity."</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Indeed, since Johnson released his ill-fated report, the Wichita, Kansas, abortion doctor <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/31/george-tiller-killed-abor_n_209504.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">George Tiller was assassinated</a>; a security guard was killed when a gunman with neo-Nazi ties went on <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-10/justice/dc.museum.shooting.suspect_1_white-supremacist-jews-and-blacks-von-brunn?s=PM:CRIME" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">a shooting spree at the U.S. Holocaust Museum</a>; the FBI arrested members of a <a href="http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-07-18/news/os-informant-exposed-hate-group-osceola-20120718_1_race-war-undercover-informant-osceola" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">Florida neo-Nazi outfit tied to drug dealing and motorcycle gangs</a>; a man was charged with attempting to <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/arrest-made-mlk-bomb-plot-spokane-washington/story?id=13096278#.UCFm-chrNl8" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">detonate a weapon of mass destruction</a> at a Spokane, Washington march commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday; and several mosques around the country have been <a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2012-07-19/justice/justice_tennesee-mosque-lawsuit_1_controversial-mosque-new-mosque-islamic-center" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">vandalized or attacked</a> – including a <a href="http://www.statesman.com/news/nation/joplin-mosque-razed-by-fire-month-after-arson-2429501.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">Missouri mosque that burned to the ground on Monday</a>, which had been attacked before.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As <span style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Salon</span> recounts, the FBI has been warning for years that far-right racialist organizations might be <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/fbi_right_wing_terror_is_real/?utm_medium=twitter" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">interested in suicide terrorism</a>. Peter Bergen, a longtime chronicler of al-Qaida, wrote on Tuesday that <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/07/opinion/bergen-terrorism-wisconsin/index.html" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">far-right domestic terrorism rivals and might eclipse the threat</a> of homegrown jihadism.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a press conference on Monday, FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Teresa Carlson acknowledged that Page, the perpetrator of the Sikh temple assault, "had contact with law enforcement in the past," but that contact didn't rise to the level of sparking an active investigation. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing extremist groups, has apparently <a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/alleged-sikh-temple-shooter-former-member-of-skinhead-band" target="_blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; border-width: 0px 0px 3px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: solid; border-left-style: initial; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(180, 231, 248); border-left-color: initial; border-image: initial; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration-line: none; transition: background 0.15s cubic-bezier(0.33, 0.66, 0.66, 1) 0s; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: transparent; box-shadow: rgb(180, 231, 248) 0px -4px 0px inset;">had Page on its radar</a> for some time.</font></p><p class="paywall" style="box-sizing: border-box; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 14px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; word-break: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Johnson doesn't contend that more resources would necessarily have stopped Page from attacking the Sikh temple. Lone-wolf terrorists are hard to spot. What the government should do instead is broaden its counterterrorism focus beyond just jihadis. "It needs to be more balanced," Johnson says. "It's frustrating to see these types of incidents ongoing."</font></p></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">DN 11/18  atomwaffen</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...<strong times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" box-sizing="box-sizing" border-box="border-box">A.C. <span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">THOMPSON</span>:</strong><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"> James Mason was kind of an obscure figure in the neo-Nazi movement. </span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px">He had been involved with the American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell, he had been involved with other neo-Nazi groups but he was not really a main player. Mason’s deal is he says,</span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px"> </span><span times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" letter-spacing="letter-spacing" px="px" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">“Hey, we’re not going to create Nazism, fascism in America through the ballot box. We’re not going to do it through politics. We’re not going to do it through political protest. We’re going to do it through the gun. And the way that we’re going to do this is terrorism, assassination, acts of hyper-violence and just general chaos. We’re going to collapse the system and then we will take charge.”</span></font></div><p style="margin: 30px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that message, which he promulgated in a newsletter called <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Siege</em> throughout the '80s, has been adopted by this new generation of white supremacists who say, “Yeah, that's what we want to do. That’s the most extreme thing we can do. Let’s do it.” And they have sort of adopted him as their guru, as their intellectual eminence.</font></p><p style="margin: 30px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">AMY</span> <span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">GOODMAN</span>:</strong> How important are these people? How many are there? <b>And let’s go back, A.C., to when President Obama first came into office, this report on the threat of white supremacy and domestic terrorists that was squelched by right-wing congressmembers who demanded it not be released.</b> Is this what they were tracking?</font></p><p style="margin: 30px 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">A.C. <span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">THOMPSON</span>:</strong> Yeah. This is exactly what they were tracking. I think we should say also it was retracted eventually by the Obama administration. Yeah, that is when this<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">whole thing starts ticking up–2008, 2009. You see resistance to the first African American president in this country.</span> You see dissatisfaction from veterans coming home from wars that have been very hard on them, and they’re returning to a disastrous economy and having difficulties fitting in, in some cases. And you see anger about potential gun control legislation.</font></p><p style="margin: 30px 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.2px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What has happened since then is all of these things have ticked up, they’ve escalated and now we’re in a much more dangerous place than even <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Daryl Johnson at <span class="caps" style="box-sizing: border-box;">DHS</span></b> was predicting at that time. One of the things that he predicted is he said, “Look, I’m concerned that these returning veterans will get involved with these groups. We have seen it in the past. It may happen again.” And that is exactly what has happened.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 30px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: -0.2px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">===</font></div></div></div></div>