DOMESTIC TERROR 2

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MERRI OK

KASH AND BONGINO DESTINED TO FAIL ON THIS

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AN TC 8 26

In April 2026, a federal grand jury returned indictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more than US$3 million in donated funds to people associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations.

Prosecutors allege that the SPLC secretly paid members of those groups to act as confidential informants without telling donors. Eight informants received the money between 2014 and 2023, according to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche.

The SPLC has denied the charges and seeks their dismissal, with lawyers for the group adding that the charges constitute “vindictive prosecution.” The SPLC’s interim president, Bryan Fair, has stated that the informant program “saved lives” and reflected decades of dangerous civil rights work.

Critics of the prosecution at Lawfare, a media site focused on the U.S. legal system, argued that the indictment is among “the most cynical criminal cases ever brought by the Department of Justice.” They noted that the SPLC had no legal duty to disclose the confidential nature of its informant program to donors.

Within hours of the Justice Department’s indictment, I found that white supremacist influencers on Telegram, Gab and other social platforms were celebrating the arraignment. They portrayed the charges as proof that journalists and civil rights groups documenting extremist movements could no longer be trusted.

The indictment became a rallying point to discredit not only the SPLC but the wider body of research on hate groups and political extremism. I believe that these narratives will be used to help justify increasingly radical and, in some cases, violent responses.

Ideological ammunition

Some conservative advocacy groups and right-wing media outlets – including Moms for Liberty and the Daily Signal – immediately stripped the indictment of its legal context. In online posts, they recast it as established proof that the SPLC had been deliberately creating extremist activity rather than investigating it.

A Telegram search I conducted on May 6 identified 22 posts mentioning the SPLC across at least six white nationalist channels. Most appeared within 72 hours of the indictment. The posts did not engage in sustained discussion. They repeated a small set of claims.

The Super Sincere Alpha GOONMAXXING Aryan Sigma Patriot channel wrote: “The SPLC is a hate group.”

Other channels cited the indictment as proof that the SPLC had been paying sources to manufacture the very extremism it claimed to fight. In the White Lives Matter Official Telegram channel, users were urged to “become an activist for your race” while referencing the SPLC as an opposing force.

The similarity across channels and social media is notable. The same framing appeared repeatedly within a short time window. This suggests rapid circulation of a shared narrative across networks rather than independent commentary.

The neo-Nazi, neo-fascist layer

Comments on the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment by members of the Commander George Lincoln Rockwell channel – named for the founder of the American Nazi Party – demonstrate how antisemitic conspiracy theories work, not as explicit rhetoric but as a broader narrative.

Internet discussions portrayed the SPLC as a politically motivated or illegitimate actor. Posts in Patriot Front Updates, for example, circulated allegations of fraud and money laundering while criticizing the SPLC and its efforts to identify and challenge white nationalist activity.

I found that this criticism of the SPLC also became connected to a broader antisemitic conspiracy narrative – one that portrays the organization as operating on behalf of purported Jewish interests rather than simply as an advocacy organization with political and ideological commitments.

These narratives circulated alongside the “great replacement theory,” which falsely claims that shadowy elites are encouraging immigration and demographic change to replace the white population and diminish its political and cultural influence. It’s a conspiracy theory that the SPLC and others have documented as central to contemporary white nationalism.

In this logic, the indictment is not an isolated fraud case – it is evidence that a coordinated network of institutions has been systematically suppressing white identity.

Victimhood as recruitment

Scholars of white nationalism have long identified victimhood narratives as central to that movement’s appeal. By portraying white people as under attack or unfairly displaced, these narratives transform social change into a story of persecution and provide a powerful justification for political mobilization.

My research on white nationalism shows how contemporary extremist movements rely less on formal membership and more on decentralized digital spaces. It is there that narratives, grievances and identities are continuously reinforced.

In these environments, major news events like the SPLC indictment become opportunities.

Why this pattern repeats

Extremist movements have long used mainstream controversies as recruitment opportunities.

Participants often interpret external events through narratives of threat, injustice and persecution. In doing so, they transform moments of controversy into evidence that their worldview is correct.

In the 1990s, for instance, the deadly standoffs between federal officers and the Branch Davidians religious sect near Waco, Texas, and survivalist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, became foundational persecution narratives for militia and Christian Identity movements. These groups saw the sieges as proof that the federal government was hunting gun owners and religious dissenters.

In online extremist communities, these events can become powerful tools for reinforcing group identity and attracting individuals who are searching for explanations or belonging.

With a real-world legal event like the SPLC indictment, extremists can point to government action as evidence that their worldview is being validated. The result is a narrative that appears responsive to current events, even when the connection is shallow or distorted.

Redirected domestic terrorism policy

Legal scholars have noted that the Justice Department indictment fits within the Trump administration’s broader pattern of redirecting domestic terrorism policy away from white supremacist groups.

The Trump White House’s 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy does not mention violent far-right groups as a domestic terrorism threat at all.

That context matters for understanding how the SPLC case landed in extremist spaces: not as an isolated fraud allegation but as institutional permission. The indictment has become a symbol before the evidence has been weighed.

In today’s fragmented digital media environment, symbols travel faster than facts, especially when they confirm what a radicalized audience already wants to believe. I believe the real danger is not that white supremacists believe the SPLC is guilty. It is that the controversy, whatever its legal outcome, has already done its work.

Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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projection fail

lunatic trump manta post kirk shoot

AN 9 25 CLAIM NO SUPPORT

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was Vice President JD Vance’s guest on Monday’s edition of “The Charlie Kirk Show,” just days after the right-wing political commentator was assassinated. The suspected gunman’s motives and political beliefs remain unclear, but the vice president pinned the blame for Kirk’s murder on “left-wing extremism.”

“While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies,” Vance declared, “it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-left.”

IFrame Content

The vice president did not define “lunatics,” but statistics from the Cato Institute show that the vast majority of political violence comes from the far-right.

Guest-hosting for the late organizer and activist, Vice President Vance viewers, “I wanted to zoom out and talk with Stephen [Miller] a little bit, and talk about all of the ways that we’re trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far-left from becoming even more and more mainstream.”

IFrame Content

The vice president—who placed blame at least in part on the left for Kirk’s death—said, “we have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years, and I believe is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet.”

“We’re gonna talk about how to dismantle that,” he continued, “and how to bring real unity, real unity that can only come when we tell the truth and everybody knows that they can speak their mind about the issues of the day without being cut down by a murderer’s gun.”

Miller, who is considered by many—including some highly respected conservatives—a skilled propagandist, on Friday spoke out against what he called left-wing violent extremism.

IFrame Content

“I’ve not shared with anybody, but the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his Creator in heaven was, he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence.”

“That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us.”

“And we are gonna do that,” Miller vowed. “Under President Trump’s leadership, I don’t care how—it could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection—but we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, and that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

IFrame Content

“It has to stop,” he declared, “and my message is to all of the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate? You want us to live in fear? We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile. Because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

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GORKA FAIL

an 525

no lnx

'Sad white boys': Fear as Trump terror adviser shrugs off threat from 'inside the house'

Members of a neo-Nazi group pose with shields during 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, in 2017. (Karla Cote/Flickr)

Jordan Greenand Raw Story May 03, 2025

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz was removed this week but a key Trump counterterrorism official remains in place at the White House — and he's planning a change in strategy to focus on jihadists rather than white supremacist groups that one leading expert said remain a significant domestic threat.

"The call is coming from inside the house," said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. "We all understand why the right doesn't want to tackle domestic violent extremism — it's their base."

The Trump official is Sebastian Gorka, an Anglo-Hungarian-American academic who spent seven months in the first Trump White House as a national security strategist before being removed. Closely connected to Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon, Gorka's far-right views have proved consistently controversial. His return to the White House generated protests from former Trump advisers, who called him names including “conman” and “clown.”

Regardless, Gorka is promising a new policy focused on “killing jihadis,” thereby downplaying, if not altogether abandoning, a Biden-era emphasis on white supremacist threats.

Now deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the National Security Council, Gorka is by his own estimation an expert on “Middle Eastern jihadism, al-Qaida [and] ISIS.” His X biography includes the acronym “WWFY&WWKY,” which stands for “we will find you and we will kill you.”

This week, Gorka wrote for Breitbart News that Trump has “already engineered a complete reversal in American counterterrorism policy.”

Gorka recounted a meeting with Trump and Waltz during the second week of the new administration. Gorka and Waltz laid a map on the Resolute Desk, showing a cave complex in northern Somalia that was being used as a base by ISIS, Gorka said.

“Kill them, and kill them now,” Trump said, according to Gorka. Thirty hours later, he said, the men were in the Situation Room “watching living hell rain down” on the caves.

'Back to the basics'

Speaking last week at Semafor’s World Economy Summit, Gorka said the new counterterrorism plan, expected to be ready in the coming month, will be “utterly, completely” different from the strategy under Joe Biden. Gorka said the new plan will “go back to the basics,” as “the majority of threats we face are jihadi terrorists.”

In his preface to the 2021 National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, Biden highlighted white supremacist attacks: the 2015 massacre of Black worshipers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., the 2018 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh that was targeted for supporting immigrants, and the 2019 slaughter of Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex. by a gunman who echoed the Trump epithet “invaders.”

Though it cited an array of violent ideologies, the national strategy asserted that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (principally those who promote the superiority of the white race) and militia violent extremists are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”

Like other officials in the Trump administration, Gorka has said little if anything publicly about the threat posed by violent neo-Nazi accelerationists, who seek to bring about the collapse of society through mass shootings and industrial sabotage.

But Gorka has in the past downplayed white supremacy. In 2017, as an adviser in the first Trump White House, he told Breitbart, where he was previously a national security editor, that where terrorism was concerned, white supremacy was not a problem. Three days later in Charlottesville, Va. a man who had rallied with the white supremacist group Vanguard America drove a car into a group of peaceful anti-racist protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the attack “domestic terrorism.”

Gorka could not be reached for comment for this story. Lewis, from George Washington University, worried that a national strategy on terrorism that erases references to racial motivation might discourage FBI agents from seeking authorization to investigate white supremacist plots.

“In the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, there is a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the reality, because it would fly in the face of their narrative,” Lewis told Raw Story. “It’s not going to go away. We can put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. There’s still going to be mass shootings, even if we don’t acknowledge that they’re motivated by white supremacy, and the FBI just calls them ‘sad white boys.’

“If anything, the complete inability of the administration to even acknowledge the problem will afford these individuals a more permissive environment to recruit, radicalize and carry out attacks.”

'Growing threat'

In his recent article for Breitbart, Gorka charged that the Biden administration “ignored the growing threat of global jihadism.”

Under the Biden administration, the FBI arrested an Afghan national who allegedly planned a mass casualty attack on Election Day in the name of ISIS. In total, Lewis said, 10 ISIS supporters were arrested in the U.S. in 2024.

On New Year's Eve, a man inspired by ISIS used his truck to attack revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people. Before that, Lewis said, the last lethal jihadi attack on U.S. soil occurred in 2019, when a Saudi airman taking courses at Naval Air Station Pensacola murdered three U.S. sailors.

Since then, avowed white supremacists have carried out mass shootings targeting African Americans in Buffalo, N.Y., resulting in 10 deaths, and Jacksonville, Fla., with three deaths.

In terms of disrupted plots, a review by Raw Story found that since 2021, the FBI has disrupted at least three attempts to attack the power grid by white supremacists affiliated with the Terrorgram Collective, a group recently designated by the State Department as a global terrorist entity. In the same period, the FBI disrupted at least six plots by white supremacists to carry out lethal attacks against police officers and LGBTQ+ people.

Gorka has also promised changes in emphasis on resources used to counter terror groups. For Breitbart, he wrote that the centerpiece of Trump’s counterterrorism approach will be “allowing our special operators, the intelligence community, and the bravest warfighters in the world to deal death to those who have the blood of Americans on their hands or who are plotting to murder our citizens.”

ProPublica, however, has reported that the new administration has cut nearly 20 percent of the workforce at a Department of Homeland Security center responsible for “strengthen[ing] the nation’s ability to prevent targeted violence and terrorism nationwide, through funding, training, evidence-based resources and increasing public awareness across every level of government, the private sector, and local communities.”

NOW READ: Trump’s clown car cabinet is driving off a cliff

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an no lnx

'A boon to far-right extremists': Alarm sounded over new Trump appointee

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025.

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Jordan Green February 27, 2025

Dan Bongino, the right-wing podcast host tapped by FBI Director Kash Patel to serve as deputy director of the agency, has a history of downplaying white supremacist extremism, the violence committed by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and threats against school board members.

Bongino suggested during a podcast recorded in September 2022 that the FBI under former Director Christopher Wray pursued investigations of “white supremacists who are terrorists” because of political pressure from President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland. He did not mention the deadly Buffalo mass shooting carried out four months earlier that year or dozens of neo-Nazi accelerationist terror plots foiled by the FBI that would warrant such a focus.

“Biden and Garland say, ‘We need white supremacist, domestic violent extremists’ — you know, we learned in the Salem witch trials: If you’re looking for a witch, you’re going to find one, even if there isn’t one,” Bongino said.

The statement was made during an interview with Kyle Seraphin, an FBI agent who was suspended after raising questions about an email from FBI leadership flagging threats against school board members and later separated from the agency after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccination.

“The idea that you could have this file on you about what you’re surfing online — not criminal, maybe untoward, maybe nasty — but the fact that this happened because you showed up at a meeting and said something is really horrifying,” Bongino said.

In a second interview with Seraphin that was published the following day, Bongino ridiculed the agency for tasking agents with following up on leads that flooded the FBI from members of the public days after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted Congress’ certification of the electoral vote in the 2020 presidential election.

“You know, I get it — I would have not preferred January 6th turned out differently as well,” Bongino said. “I think any sane person would have. But to take six-figure FBI earners with a set of skills and let them run out all across America taking tips about a guy you met potentially in eighth grade showing up on January 6th sounds a little Orwellian.”

President Trump issued blanket pardons to the nearly 1,600 people charged with crimes related to that Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, but threats from white supremacist terrorists seeking to cause a collapse of society remain an ongoing concern for law enforcement. Last month, the U.S. State Department named the white supremacist group Terrorgram, whose leaders face charges for soliciting the murder of federal officials among other offenses, a specially designated global terrorist entity.

The mass murder of 10 African Americans in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022 underscored the threat posed by white supremacist terrorism, while a car-ramming attack by an ISIS sympathizer that killed 14 people celebrating New Year’s Eve in New Orleans provided a reminder that Islamic extremism also remains a threat. Meanwhile, school shootings in recent months have revealed a bewildering array of motivations that include white supremacy, inceldom and nihilism.

“At a time when the violent extremist threat is as diverse and unpredictable as any time in recent years, unqualified conspiracy peddlers and election deniers are running the FBI,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said in an email to Raw Story. “It is a boon to far-right extremists in particular, who will undoubtedly feel emboldened counting senior officials like Patel and Bongino among their compatriots.”

Bongino did not respond to an interview request submitted to the press office at FBI headquarters.

Similar to Jan. 6, when Trump supporters angered by false claims that the 2020 election was stolen wound up turning on the U.S. Capitol police, violent white supremacists often target law enforcement, along with Jews, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

In one such case, the FBI filed charges against Kyle Christopher Benton, a Washington state man, for unlawful possession of a machine gun, after he posted on social media that he was joining multiple internet chats to encourage other users to commit mass shootings.

In a filing arguing for continued pre-trial detention, the government said that an investigation for domestic violence conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Division in 2019 revealed that Benton operated social media accounts that promoted white supremacist and antisemitic propaganda. Benton’s partner allegedly told investigators that he wanted to shoot up the “alphabet boys” — a common reference to federal law enforcement — or a local police station.

“At a time when FBI agents are facing calls of retribution following the January 6 pardons, the nomination of a podcast host who has repeatedly promoted harmful conspiracies aimed at delegitimizing the FBI sends a dangerous message,” Lewis said.

During his interview with Seraphin in 2022, Bongino charged that the agency “bought into the hype” that the Jan. 6 attack was an event of the same magnitude as Pearl Harbor or 9/11. He went on to accuse agents of “locking up people for a January 6th insurrection — or whatever, grandma, who trespassed — because you don’t like their politics.”

Bongino and Seraphin’s discussion of Jan. 6 focused on trespassing and other misdemeanor offenses. Still, about 608 out of the nearly 1,600 defendants were charged with assaulting law enforcement or obstructing officers during a civil disorder, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Of those, 174 were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious injury to an officer.

Emblematic of the administration’s efforts to whitewash the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the webpage detailing the crimes committed on Jan. 6 was taken down shortly after Trump returned to office. But an archived page itemizes the array of weapons rioters used or carried at the Capitol: firearms; OC spray; tasers; edged weapons, including axes, hatchets, knives and a sword; makeshift weapons, including destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks and stolen riot shields; baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping and reinforced knuckle gloves.

During his appearance on Bongino’s podcast in September 2022, Seraphin outed himself as the source of an email obtained by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). The email from FBI leadership mandates the use of specific threat tags to track “threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers and staff.” Jordan, as the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, seized on the email as proof that the FBI was “using counterterrorism tools to investigate parents,” even though the email doesn’t specifically mention parents.

“Essentially, they’re asking to tag these inbound threats,” Seraphin told Bongino. “And we don’t have time for those kinds of threats. We really don’t. In the real FBI, there’s not time for threats from some guy who’s yelling at the school board…. But it’s very difficult to convince me you would say that this is a real threat that exists all over the country….”

“Right,” Bongino agreed. “Worthy of FBI resources.”

The threats were, in fact, real.

In November 2021, the mayor of a small city in Ohio accused school board members in Summit County of “distributing essentially what is child pornography.” The accusation reportedly resulted in dozens of threats from around the country. Although the county prosecutor declined to file charges against the mayor, she issued a statement that “these allegations were false and caused numerous public servants to be victimized.”

In another incident, a woman protesting a masking requirement told the Page County Public School Board in Virginia in January 2022, “My children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on. All right. That’s not happening. And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready to — I will.”

As an indication of the turmoil surrounding COVID-19 restrictions and books addressing sensitive topics surrounding race and sexuality during that period, ProPublica reported that 59 people were arrested at school board meetings across the country from May 2021 through November 2022, most of them charged with trespassing, resisting an officer, or disrupting a public meeting.

In 2023, Garland reportedly told a House panel that the FBI received 22 reports of threats against school officials, and the agency referred six cases to state and local authorities to investigate.

“So, if I have a file on the CT side — the counterterrorism side — for showing up at a school board meeting and saying something — it may not have been appropriate thing to say, but it certainly isn’t a terroristic threat, you could have this big body of information available for you to make a criminal prosecution easier is where I’m going with that,” Bongino said during his interview with Seraphin. “The building blocks are already there.”

In at least one instance, a counterterrorism investigation did bring FBI agents to a parking lot outside a school board, if not into the meeting room.

Steve Friend, a former FBI agent, testified before a congressional panel that he had been tasked with surveilling an individual at a school board meeting as part of an open counterterrorism investigation. Based on the date of the subject’s arrest — Aug. 24, 2022 — House Democrats surmised that the subject under surveillance was one of four members of a Three Percenter militia called Guardians of Freedom who were charged with offenses related to the Jan. 6 attack. (A fifth would be arrested separately at a later date.)

“So, essentially we just documented the license plates of the people that were parking at the school board meeting who were January 6th subjects, or people that were in the parking lot with them interacting that we thought could be in their sphere of influence, and then we left,” Friend testified.

One member of the militia had boasted on social media on July 2021 that he was “continuing to build my 3% army so I can overthrow the federal government,” according to the charging document, and he said that 80 percent of the local sheriff’s office was “on our side,” but he didn’t plan on “ever seeing the inside of a cell.”

Ultimately, the five members of Guardians of Freedom were convicted of various charges related to their conduct at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and received sentences ranging from two years of probation to five months in prison, only to be pardoned last month by President Trump.

Bongino, who worked as a New York City police officer and later for the Secret Service before becoming a podcaster, has never worked at the FBI.

But he expressed disdain for FBI upper management when Seraphin told him a colleague reported to Peter Strzok, the former deputy director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Strzok, in turn, reported to Andrew McCabe, who served in the role that Bongino now holds—deputy director.

“The trajectory for someone like that is they show up at a field office; they’re there for two and a half years,” Seraphin told Bongino during the September 2022 interview.

“What the hell do you learn in two to three years to be managing cases like yours out in the field?” Bongino scoffed.

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YIKES BONGINO #2

AN 2 25

The Base, a paramilitary neo-Nazi/white supremacist group founded in 2018, was a major target of the FBI and its former director, Christopher Wray, during Joe Biden's presidency. And in 2022, according to The Guardian's Ben Makuch, The Base "seemed to disappear" in the United States.

But Makuch, in an article published on February 24, warns that The Base appears to be "regrouping" in 2025.

"An international neo-Nazi terrorist group with origins in the U.S. appears to be quickly rebuilding its global and stateside ranks, according to information obtained by The Guardian from its digital accounts," Makuch reports. "Founded in 2018, The Base has been the intense focus of a years-long FBI counterterrorism investigation that has resulted in more than a dozen of its members arrested. It has plotted an assassination, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, which made it a proscribed terrorist organization in several countries."

The Base's "regrouping," according to Makuch, "comes at a time when the Trump Administration has made it a policy goal to move away from policing far-right extremism" and the FBI is now under the direction of Trump loyalist Kash Patel.

Makuch reports, "Experts say federal law enforcement ignoring far-right groups such as The Base could expose Americans to increased domestic terror threats…. A flurry of new images on The Base's various social media accounts, some closed and some open, show members claiming to be in the U.S. and across Europe brandishing pistols or military-style rifles and donning the trademark skull mask of the accelerationist neo-Nazi movement — one that demands acts of terrorism to bring down world governments. In one photo, a member is holding a knife and what appears to be a pistol in front of the Base flag in the United Kingdom, while others feature members in Bulgaria, Italy, Belgium and Sweden. "

Steven Rai of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) warns that The Base's activities in the U.S. need to be taken seriously.

Rai told The Guardian, "The Base has released a slow but steady trickle of propaganda over the past several months that has mostly highlighted their presence in Europe, so this shift in focus towards the U.S. should raise alarms. The timing of this shift is particularly noteworthy. While neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like The Base have been on their back foot due to intense law enforcement pressure, which disrupted their most integral organizers and propaganda artists, they may sense an opening with the recent change of administration in the U.S…. Violent extremists are absolutely paying attention to the changes in the national security establishment in the U.S."

Terrorism expert Colin Clarke, who serves as director of research at the Soufan Center, stresses that The Base are well-aware of changes in leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Clarke told The Guardian, "I think groups like The Base, far-right extremist groups that are strategic, have been waiting for the right opportunity before reinvigorating their respective organizations. This means that far-right extremist groups likely perceive the reelection of Trump as a green light to rebuild without fear of arrest or prosecution."

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AN 1 25

NO LNX

alternet-logo

US extremists are rattled by new sanctions against global terrorism group

How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons

Jordan Green January 15, 2025

The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.

The announcement on Monday — one week before President Biden leaves office — justified the designation based on the group “posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism, that threaten the security of United States nationals or national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Terrorgram is an amalgam of the words “terror” and “Telegram,” the latter of which is a social media platform used by members to distribute propaganda.

“This is the first time you’ve seen a white supremacist group that had members or supporters in the U.S. receive the designation,” Seamus Hughes, a researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, told Raw Story.

Two of the group’s leaders, Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho, were indicted last year on charges that included conspiracy, solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists. Two other individuals, Brandon Russell — founder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division — and Andrew Takhistov, who each face federal charges related to plots to attack the power grid, are also linked to Terrorgram.

The indictment against Humber and Allison describes Terrorgram as “a network of channels, group chats, and users on Telegram that promote white supremacists accelerationism: an ideology centered on the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action; and that violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of a white ethnostate.”

Terrorgram is not the first transnational white supremacist terrorist group to be sanctioned by the State Department. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the State Department applied the “specially designated global terrorist” identification to the Russian Imperial Movement, which was implicated in a series of bombings in 2016 and 2017 that targeted refugee shelters in Sweden. Nordic Resistance Movement, a group founded in Sweden, was added to the list last June.

The specific bans designated groups and individuals from holding property and financial interests in the United States, while also prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transactions with them.

Following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Russian Imperial Movement invited the organizers to visit its paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg, according to Nathan Sales, a former Trump administration State Department counterterrorism official who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sales said there is no evidence that the Charlottesville organizers accepted the invitation, but the following month, Russian Imperial Movement leaders traveled to the United States to network with white supremacists, and one posed for a photo with the group’s flag in front of the White House.

“What is most interesting for me is this represents the first time when a designation would have ramifications for U.S. prosecutors,” Hughes said. “There’s not a cadre of Russian Imperial Movement adherents in the U.S., whereas there is a good number of individuals that were drawn to Terrorgram in the U.S.”

Hughes said the designation will give prosecutors the ability to request terrorism enhancements during sentencing.

“It helps for them to tell the story to a jury that this is not just a bunch of angry people online, but an actual terrorist group,” he added.

The designation is also likely to make social media companies more reluctant to allow members and associates to organize on their platforms.

“Because tech companies can face legal risks if they provide services to designated groups or individuals, sanctions can prompt them to sever ties with those listed as terrorists,” Sales testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee back in 2022.

The announcement about the State Department sanction against Terrorgram is already causing ripples of unease across Telegram.

Reacting to the announcement on Monday, a neo-Nazi channel that advertises itself as a source of “tradecraft to evade authorities online,” posted: “We all know we are operating on borrowed time here on Telegram. It is unfortunate, as it is a hell of an app.”

The post went on to say that users should not trust Pavel Durov, the Russian founder and CEO of Telegram, to protect their data.

“We don’t want any of our admins or subscribers to wind up in federal prison over ironically being part of a ‘terror group,’” the post continued. “With no publicly available criteria to determine guilt or association, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It doesn’t make sense to maintain a presence where the enemy has the advantage.”

Prior to the arrests of two American leaders last September, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced charges against two unnamed Ontario men “alleged to have participated in the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division recruiting videos.”

The Canadian arrests in December 2023 followed an 18-month investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That timeframe puts the launch of the investigation roughly in June 2021, the time of the first Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation.

Federal prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and became leaders of the group in the summer of 2022, “after one previous leader was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses and another became aware that he was the subject of a terrorism related investigation.”

Following Humber and Allison’s arrests, three foreign nationals appear to have taken over leadership of Terrorgram. The State Department designation identifies Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira of Brazil, Noah Licul of Croatia and Hendrik Walh-Muller of South Africa as “leaders of the Terrorgram Collective” and “specially designated global terrorists.”

Terrorgram is linked to two other federal prosecutions in the United States beyond Humber and Allison. Russell, the Atomwaffen founder, was arrested in February 2023 and charged alongside codefendant Sarah Beth Clendaniel in an alleged plot to carry out a coordinated attack on electrical substations designed to create a widespread power outage in Baltimore.

While Terrorgram is not directly mentioned in charging documents for the case, a review of Russell’s Telegram chats by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that he forwarded a Terrorgram document called Make It Count to another Telegram user.

Court filings by the government also allege that Russell told an FBI confidential human source that they should use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer. That tactic is recommended in another Terrorgram publication The Hard Reset, which is described by the government as including “detailed information on how to attack a substation, including the use of Mylar balloons.”

The State Department announcement references a planned energy facility attack by Andrew Takhistov in New Jersey last summer without directly naming him.

Takhistov’s charging documents allege that he “claimed to have taken a role in the publication of” The Hard Reset and that he sent a PDF of the document to an FBI undercover employee. Takhistov allegedly praised The Hard Reset as “the only thing you need” to plan a white supremacist terror attack.

Takhistov was active in the Terrorgram group chats, and Humber posted an Audiobook promoting white supremacist murder in January 2024 in response to a request from Takhistov, according to government court filings. Later, according to the government, Takhistov thanked a Terrorgram chat administrator for posting a video “with instructions for using Mylar balloons to commit an attack on an energy facility.”

Lawyers for Takhistov and Russell could not be reached for comment for this story prior to publication.

The State Department announcement listing Terrorgram as a terrorist entity cited the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released in June 2021. The framework highlighted the government’s efforts to assess whether foreign entities could meet the criteria for the “specially designated global terrorist” designation.

“These designations are part of a broader U.S. government effort to address the transnational dimensions of the threat posed by [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist] actors and reflect the Biden-Harris administration’s continued commitment to countering domestic terrorism, which includes REMVE and white identity terrorism,” the State Department said.

The emphasis on tackling white supremacist terrorism under the Biden administration has been embraced by an array of agencies in addition to State, including Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.

The commitment across the federal government to combating white supremacist terrorism under Biden’s leadership built on a growing consensus within the agencies that took hold during the first Trump administration. It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration will maintain the same course.

“In fact, we viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June of 2019, under my leadership, we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists, where it remains to this day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2021.

Wray was appointed to lead the FBI by Trump in 2017.

Kash Patel, who has been named by Trump to replace Wray in the incoming administration, has expressed skepticism towards the government’s focus on “domestic terrorism.”

“Whistleblowers have revealed in multiple ways how the Deep State is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents,” he wrote in his book Government Gangsters. “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data on domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

Asked for clarification on Patel’s views, a Trump transition spokesperson previously pledged to Raw Story that Patel will “protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director.”

---

amy w gmail 6 23

over the past few years requests for respectful speech and factual information have been recast as attacks on free speech just as efforts funded by some of the country's largest corporate interests have begun to genuinely erode citizens' First Amendment rights.

If your book contract gets canceled because you help white supremacists break into the Capitol? That's an attack on free speech. A university decides not to host your talk after receiving thousands of complaints from students? Violation of the First Amendment! But the First Amendment never guaranteed reach, nor did it promise us that Americans can say whatever we like without risk of being embarrassed or mocked, trolled or even canceled. What it did promise was that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

It seems like a whole lot of conservatives have misplaced their pocket Constitutions, because while they talk about being "forced" (by whom?) to use a person's preferred pronouns as an infringement on free speech, Republican state governments have been rapidly criminalizing protest. While they wring their hands about the chilling of free speech on campus because this or that talk gets canceled, states are passing book bans and universities are getting rid of their entire history departmentslest anyone utter the words "critical race theory." Harassment of those who study disinformation is way up the past year because the word has been recast as censorship. This week, for example, Rep Jim Jordan was demanding emails and meetings with leading disinformation researchers, the latest in a flurry of records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits designed to harass academics who study disinformation. Jordan and his allies are being helped in their crusade by anti-climate-action activists like Michael Shellenberger, who have their own reasons for wanting to muddy the water on what constitutes disinformation, especially as social media platforms fall under increasing pressure to tamp down on the spread of outright falsehoods. In his March testimony to the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Shellenberger—who has moved in his career from PR guy for big green groups to "firebrand" co-founder of ecomodernist thinktank the Breakthrough Institute to champion for nuclear energy to climate skeptic, gubernatorial candidate, solver of the homelessness problem (spoiler alert: he didn't solve it) and now, finally, "journalist" who claims to have broken the Twitter Files story—Shellenberger wrote:

:{":{The censorship-industrial complex pressures social media platforms to}:

censor content relating to climate change and energy. I speak from experience as someone who has been attacked by an ongoing censor-and-discredit campaign that has been waged against me since I wrote a viral article in June 2020 to announce the publication of my book, Apocalypse Never. In response to my article, multiple think tanks quickly and falsely claimed to have “debunked” its contents. Those fake debunkings became the basis for Facebook to censor my posts, even ones that don’t have to do with climate change, to this day."}:

There's a lot to unpack here. First off, it seems pretty clear that Shellenberger's move to rebrand himself as a journalist is not just about trying sit at the cool kids table—he's trying to secure what he perceives to be the greater First Amendment rights of the press. I'm sure he's probably trying to use it to get access to various public records, emails, etc for free as well (anyone can file a Freedom of Information Act request, but if you're not a journalist you might be charged; even if you are a journalist it's likely you'll pay a fee to receive records, but it's generally less). Then, let's talk about how Facebook has always censored ads and sponsored posts related to climate change, for a start, as "political." I don't recall Shellenberger ever having anything to say about that. As for the debunking of his book. I started to make detailed, footnoted corrections of his book and stopped about halfway through because I had more than 50 pages worth of corrections, so it's hard to believe that all of the many debunkings of his work are false. But according to Shellenberger, it is censorship to call something inaccurate. Who's to say what's "information" or "disinformation" after all? The truth is in the eye of the beholder.

Except...we have long-standing systems for coming to collective understandings of truth. The peer-review process, for example, runs academic work through multiple rounds of review before it can be published in an academic journal. And one peer-reviewed study does not a truth make! That study needs to be challenged and replicated. Lots of other studies need to deliver the same or at least very similar results for something to venture into the domain of "fact."

These fragile men perceive any criticism of them as censorship, yet see nothing wrong with coordinated harassment campaigns against academics whose work they don't happen to like. But it's not just ridiculous and hypocritical, it's also dangerous. One of the key steps on the path to authoritarianism is to shake people's faith in experts, to blur the lines around fact, to make reality seem surreal.

The choose-your-own-truth direction that America has taken in recent years shares a lot in common with the beliefs of early colonialists there, who were by and large Calvinists, a particular type of Puritan that scoffed at the need for priests and bishops and embraced instead the idea that each individual should interpret the Bible for themselves.

As the manufactured "culture war" rages on, it provides cover for America's bend toward authoritarianism. Citizens are being jailed for peaceful protest. At Cop City,protestors were arrested—and even killed—and all:{ 42 were charged with domestic terrorism for sitting in trees. Organizers who arranged bail funds for the arrested protestors werearrested themselves and charged with money laundering and charity fraud. All those who have been arrested in conjunction with the protest are still waiting to see whether racketeering (RICO)charges will be leveled against them for organizing a protest. Yes, those are the laws created to deal with the mob, being applied to protest.}:

Meanwhile, the Altanta City Council approved the facility despite countless hours of public comment in opposition to it.

Critical infrastructure laws have now been passed in 20 states, with more proposing them all the time. Domestic terrorism charges, which carry a sentencing enhancement that can land people in jail for a decade or more, have become frighteningly common for peaceful, non-violent protests. Climate protestors who put water soluble finger paint on a display case at the National Gallery were charged last week with conspiring to commit an offense against the United States. It's the most straightforward and flagrant violation of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." Anyone who's genuinely concerned about free speech as opposed to securing their own right to comfort or to expand their control of others should be very worried about it.

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4 23 deep state FBI catholic BS

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/power-grid-substations-accelerationism-white-nationalism

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hate designation has been powerful, thus retaliation, flak get hvy over target xian homophobes really pissed? also dom terror ~ nazi, j6? mass shooter? so rubber glue

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-figures-attack-fox-news-over-dominion-lawsuit-revelations

mma 3 23

March 5, 23 people, including a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild, were charged with domestic terrorism after an intense demonstration against a planned police training facility in Atlanta. Tom Jurgens, an employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center who was there as a legal observer with the National Lawyers Guild, has been the target of a right-wing media smear campaign claiming that the SPLC condones violence and has colluded with antifa.

Far-right activist Andy Ngo posted about the SPLC connection to one of those arrested on Twitter on March 6, and prominent right-wing media figures including Tucker Carlson and Jack Posobiec picked it up.

The confrontation with police occurred during a music festival held as part of a week of action in opposition to “Cop City,” a $90 million facility that many say was approved largely absent community input. Atlanta is already a highly policed area, and the facility will uproot parts of a culturally significant forest that is one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces in a predominantly low-income, Black area.

According to police, hundreds of activists broke away from the concert and breached the site of the project. Footage from the construction site appears to show construction equipment on fire while protesters threw rocks and fireworks at police. Music festival attendees and community organizers alleged that arrests were made “indiscriminately” at the festival, which was about a mile away from the training facility and occurred an hour after the action took place. According to an attorney for some of the defendants, there has yet to be a charge for arson or interference with government property and arrest warrants cited evidence such as activists simply having mud on their shoes.

Police initially arrested 35 people. In response to Jurgens' arrest, SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang said in a statement:

“Tom was performing a public service, documenting potential violations of protesters’ rights. We are outraged that police officers present at the protest refused to acknowledge Tom’s role as a legal observer and instead chose to arrest him.”

Right-wing media are trying to delegitimize SPLC by suggesting it condones hate and violence and falsely claiming the group helped coordinate the event:

Tony Perkins, president of the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Center, told Newsmax host Chris Salcedo that the SPLC is “in bed with antifa”: “What's so bad about this is that you have the Southern Poverty Law Center that is anti-law enforcement, anti-government, they’re in bed with antifa, but yet they hold themselves out as being the definer of groups that are anti-government. … This isn't the fox guarding the henhouse; this is the fox living in the henhouse, dining on chicken.” Newsmax, The Chris Salcedo Show, [3/7/23]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) told Fox host Sean Hannity that antifa members are “the ground troops of the Democrat party”:“You wouldn't be surprised to find out that the Southern Poverty Law Center, their own attorney, was one of them. This is who the Democrat party is. They are domestic terrorists, and antifa needs to be held accountable. And the Department of Justice better start doing their job.” Fox News, Hannity, [3/7/23]

Dinesh D’Souza called the SPLC a hate group: “The SPLC is itself a hate group, but a hate group on the side of the left. And so they promote violence. … Very often when you’ve got these rioters on the streets, you’ve got lawyers with the SPLC and other groups running around with the rioters and their idea is to quote ‘collect evidence’ that can be used to defend these people if and when they are arrested.” Salem Podcast Network, The Dinesh D’Souza Podcast, [3/7/23]

Former Georgia Rep. Jack Kingston falsely alleged that SPLC coordinated the attack: “The Southern Poverty Law Center was the group that apparently coordinated that. That's who the lawyer worked for. I do think he should be disbarred, but it was actually an orchestrated attack.” Newsmax, Wake Up America, [3/7/23]

:{:{New York Post }:reporter Jon Levine implied that the Biden administration and SPLC turn a blind eye to :{domestic terrorism: }:“Let’s just put the shoe on the other foot here, Maria. Can you imagine if 23 Proud Boys were arrested for attacking a gender reassignment clinic in Atlanta? I mean, we’d already have — President Biden would probably already be down there giving a speech.” :{Fox Business, Mornings with Maria:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:, [3/7/23]}:

:{Former Georgia Rep. Vernon Jones said the FBI should investigate the SPLC:“I would like to see the FBI investigate the Southern Poverty Law Center, because he [Jurgens] cannot be the lone wolf, the lone actor. … And if they were to delve into that organization, who's supposed to be about anti-hate, which this really, they reflect on, this individual reflecting so much hate, I think they'll find where not only has it been funded, but you’ll see others that have been involved in this prior to this incident and other incidents.” :{Newsmax, :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:John Bachman Now, [3/7/23]}:

The New York Post wrote that the SPLC “lost its moral standing” by refusing to call antifa a hate group.New York Post, [3/6/23]

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton: “So is SPLC officially a domestic terroristgroup?” Twitter, [3/6/23]

Libs of TikTok:“The Southern Poverty Law Center called me a terrorist for posting a flyer of a publicly available drag show. Turns out one of their attorneys is an Antifa member and was arrested for domestic terrorism. It’s always projection with them.” Twitter, [3/6/23]

Fox News host Tucker Carlson and anchor Trace Gallagher said SPLC propogates hate and attacks its political opponents: Carlson said SPLC “exists solely to destroy the lives of anyone who stands in the way of the Democratic Party.” Gallagher claimed the center has “long been accused of monitoring hate while propagating hate” and that it defines hate as “anything SPLC disagrees with.” Fox News, Tucker Carlson Tonight, [3/6/23]

Newsmax host Rob Schmitt said people like Jurgens want to “kill you and destroy your country.”:“These are all a bunch of angry white kids that still live at home at the age of 28 and hate capitalism. … One is allegedly an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, the same organization which the FBI’s Richmond division recently used as a source for equating traditionalist Catholics to violent extremists.” Newsmax, Rob Schmitt Tonight, [3/6/23]

Human Events editor, neo-Nazi affiliate, and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called the legal observers an “antifa degenerate.”: “Here is a photo of the 23 Antifa degenerates arrested for Domestic Terrorism in GA last night after torching gov’t equipment and throwing rocks at cops. 1 of them is a lawyer for the SPLC. Sponsor? Almost all are from out of state. Proof that Antifa is a nationwide terrorist organization.” Truth Social, [3/6/23]

Lauren Witzke, a far-right political activist and president of the Stew Peter Network, posted to Gab an image of Jurgen’s LinkedIn profile: “An SPLC staff attorney was arrested and charged with domestic terrorism at last night’s #Antifa ‘Stop Cop City’ riot in Atlanta. Now It’s time to shut down the ENTIRE SPLC terrorist operation.” Gab, [3/6/23]

Far-right troll Eoin Lenihan:“Highly significant! An SPLC attorney arrested in Atlanta last night for terrorism. The SPLC is currently the biggest ally of Antifa relying on their hacked materials & doxes of individuals for their “hate watch” list. The SPLC actively hires Antifa “researchers” & “journalists”… Twitter, [3/6/23]

Andy Ngo, who has covered the protest extensively on social media and accused legal observers of “helping antifa in the violent conspiracies,” has also acknowledged his disdain for SPLC based on the center’s criticism of him. The center has called out Ngo for trafficking “in politically charged disinformation,” accepting money from a Polish cultural center for giving an anti-antifa speech in Warsaw, and being friendly with the far-right Hungarian government.

Ngo’s fixation on antifa and SPLC has helped spur responses from lawmakers. In 2021, his coverage of clashes between the Proud Boys and left-wing activists in Portland, where he was allegedly attacked by demonstrators, was an impetus for Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) bill to designate antifa as a terrorist organization. On March 8, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced similar legislation to declare antifa a terrorist organization, and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said he wanted to open an investigation into the FBI’s reliance on SPLC to identify extremist threats.

This is not the first time right-wing media have come after SPLC

SPLC is a legal advocacy organization that focuses on civil rights and is widely considered to be an authoritative voice on extremism. The center identifies and tracks hate groups and has helped law enforcement and the FBI respond to them.

The center has drawn the ire of right-wing media for calling out hate speech from conservative groups in the past. In 2017, FoxNews.com promoted the false accusation that SPLC added a conservative writer to a “hate list,” when it simply noted that she has been a guest on a radio show produced by the anti-LGBTQ hate group Family Research Council. FRC and other hate groups have united to smear SPLC for accurately labeling them as such. FRC’s official position is that “homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large” and “is by definition unnatural.”

In 2012, FRC tried to blame SPLC for a shooting that took place at its office because the shooter was allegedly motivated by FRC’s anti-LGBTQ hate group label. At the time, FRC President Tony Perkins doubled down on hateful rhetoric saying SPLC needs “to be held accountable, and they need to be stopped before people are killed because of their reckless labeling and advocacy for homosexuality and their anti-Christian stance.” Perkins also used the Atlanta incident to denounce SPLC for Jurgens’ presence at the protest. [twt fitton]

there’s a good reason why legal observers are necessary at protests

Opposition to Cop City has already proved fatal. In January, Manuel Terán, a young activist who opposed the project, was killed by Atlanta police under suspicious circumstances. Police maintain that Teran was to blame for the confrontation and shot an officer first.

It’s not uncommon to have legal observers at protests, particularly when tensions between law enforcement and demonstrators are high. According to the New York City Bar Association, the “work includes documenting arrests, use of force, intimidating display of force, denial of access to public spaces like parks and sidewalks, and any other behavior on the part of law enforcement that appears to restrict demonstrators’ ability to express their political views.”

Legal observers have helped protect the rights of protesters in the past. For example, according to The Intercept:

Collecting the names of people arrested at protests is the first step toward ensuring that they have legal representation. During the mass arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention, those names allowed lawyers to secure a habeas corpus writ for hundreds of protesters who were unlawfully detained by the NYPD, sometimes for days, without access to lawyers.

Legal observers have also been punished for their work in the past. In 2021, 12 legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild sued the New York Police Department, alleging the department violated their constitutional rights at a 2020 protest in the Bronx. Even though the NYPD patrol guide says legal observers are entitled to be present, the observers allege they were prohibited from carrying out their function and even met with violence. In fact, New York City just agreed to pay more than $20,000 each to hundreds of individuals who were trapped by police and attacked with batons and pepper spray during that same protest.

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https://boingboing.net/2022/12/26/another-power-substation-attack-left-more-than-14000-without-power-in-washington-state-and-theyre-still-calling-it-vandalism.html

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12 22 rww

a holiday drag story time event was canceled in Columbus, Ohio, after the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremist groups showed up in force.

Red Oak Community School and the First Unitarian Universalist Church had advertised its “Holi-Drag” story time charity event for kids last month. Shortly after, members of the Proud Boys announced plans to disrupt the event, Right Wing Watch first reported.

On Saturday, scores of Proud Boys dressed in the signature black and yellow uniforms and members of Patriot Front, some of whom were armed, rallied outside of the First Unitarian Universalist Church, which was hosting the event. Alleging that the story time event amounts to “grooming”—the rhetoric at the heart of recent political attacks on LGBTQ people—the Proud Boys held signs with messages like, “Groomers make Santa sad” and “Groomers go home.” Another read “Proud Boys Story Hour Today’s Book Death of the West Chapter 9,” in an apparent reference to a book authored by far-right activist Pat Buchanan, who fearmongers about immigrantsreplacing “America’s white majority.”

Other videos show Proud Boys members dancing to the “YMCA,” the unofficial LGBTQ anthem, and a police officer acknowledging that he high-fived a Proud Boy because he had complimented his mustache.

On Dec. 3, the day of planned event, Cheryl Ryan, the school’s manager announced its cancellation. Taking the church’s stage decorated by kids who had planned on listening to stories that afternoon, she said the school had canceled the event after an internal debate over “how this community could be best protected.” Ryan saidshe called the Columbus Police and was initially told they could hire a special duty officer “who may or may not show up because they’re understaffed,” while a “community defense team” they hired felt uncomfortable with a police presence. Ultimately, the event was canceled when the performers said they were uncomfortable performing without a police presence.

“The world is getting more and more unsafe for the LGBTQ community; the attacks are constant and getting worse,” Ryan said. “The fact that we not able to successfully host this simple event shows the extent of the damage. We have to do better.”

“I implore this community’s leaders to consider how this could’ve gone differently,” she said at another point in her speech. “How will they do better for next drag story time the Proud Boys threaten to show up at again, which they will.”

“You’re damn right we will. That’s a promise,” the Official Cape Fear Proud Boys responded in a post on Telegram, painting her speech as “unconditional surrender.” “Not once did she acknowledge the groomers who are truly responsible for the Proud Boys showing up. If you don’t want Proud Boys outside your drag event, don’t invite children.”

“We will be watching, and We. Are. Everywhere,” read another Telegram post by the Proud Boys Ohio.

In another post, The Columbus Proud Boys gloated over a video of a woman who said that her little sister is a drag queen and called her for fear of her safety after the Proud Boys came to Columbus. She also said that the Proud Boys were harassing businesses that had hosted drag shows. The Columbus Proud Boys shared the video with the caption, “She forgot to say ‘and everyone clapped!’”

One commentator responded to the video with a meme that stated, “KILL IT WITH FIRE.”

For its part, the Columbus Police disputed the school’s account that they were absent and said they tried to work with the school and the church. On Monday, the police chief issued a message to the community after an officer was seen high-fiving a Proud Boys member, claiming that the dialogue team member’s action “was not done to show solidarity but to diffuse a tense situation.”

“I along with the officers in the department stand fully with the LGBTQ+ community. No one should be intimidated, harassed, or threatened just because of who they are or whom they love. As a division historically, we know there has been a disconnect between members of this community and our department. We have worked and will continue to work hard to strengthen those relationships,” Police Chief Elaine Bryant said. “We will not stand for extremist groups to come into this city and cause violence.”

Department of Homeland Security issued a new bulletin last week that added the LGBTQ community to groups under threat of potential domestic terror attacks. That followed the shooting at a LGBTQ night club in Colorado in which five people were killed and 25 others were injured.

The cancelation of the Columbus drag story time stands in stark contrast to others that have proceeded with police support amid right-wing extremists’ vows to disrupt them. In Lakeland, Florida, right-wing extremists rallied outside a drag charity event, holding Nazi flags, shouting profanities, and recording attendees. Police were called in, and the show went on. DeShazo, the host and a performer of that event, told local news station WFLA that he was satisfied with how Lakeland Police responded to the incident.

“I think they did well at being neutral but also making sure we were safe and they came in several times to check on me and check on our people. So I’m happy with the way they responded,” said DeShazo. ...Anti-LGBTQ

[](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

Proud%20Boys

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[SOME BAK](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

Proud%20Boys

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[12 22 EDIT BD](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

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[The “rule of three” is one of those informal guidelines that help us journalists decide whether an event is newsworthy. If something occurs three times, it’s probably a trend. Trends are newsworthy.](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

Proud%20Boys

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[Trends can be fads, but three rifle attacks on critical infrastructure in less than 10 years – two this week alone – isn’t a fad. That goes double since the attacks appear to correlate with another political trend, which is wider and greater social acceptance of trans people.](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

Proud%20Boys

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[Even as GOP-dominated state legislatures move to restrict trans rights, more than 500 municipal governments are moving the other way, opening cities to greater equality and freedom. Two hundred major urban centers and 50 state capitals have enacted or are set to enact laws, policies and services inclusive of the LGBT-plus people.](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

Proud%20Boys

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[READ MORE:](https://www.rightwingwatch.org/organizations/columbus-proud-boys/

Proud%20Boys

===)FBI investigating five power substations attacked in Pacific Northwest strikes similar to North Carolina

That’s democratic politics. It never stops. But neither does the political violence that erupts in reaction to democratic politics. The more Americans perceive trans people as people, rather than subhuman perversions, the more political violence we can expect.

Hence the nature of the ongoing right-wing insurgency.

It’s not a fad

Two electrical substations were damaged Saturday in Moore County, North Carolina, knocking out power in more than 37,000 homes.

In what police said was an “intentional” and “malicious” attack, a person or persons “open fired” on the transformers, leaving behind more than two dozen shell casings from a “high-powered rifle.”

Investigators initially said there was no evidence linking the attack to “a local drag show that had been targeted with threats of violence and calls to cancel the show in recent weeks,” reported USA Today.

There’s still no hard evidence linking the events, but investigators appear now to be broadening their perspective, setting the attack, according to CNN, “in context with the growing tensions and armed confrontations around similar LBGTQ+ events across the country.”

They are looking at “writings by extremists on online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure” as well as “a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events by domestic extremists.”

CNN reported that paramilitaries have for the last two years used online forums to discuss attacking critical infrastructure, including the power grid, and to encourage individuals to act. These paramilitaries “posted documents and even instructions outlining vulnerabilities and suggesting the use of high-powered rifles.”

A government report from 2013 determined that attacks on 17 transformers in Silicon Valley were the result of sniper fire. More than 100 bullets were expended over 20 minutes, leaving scores of thousands without power and costing the public utility $15 million.

The Seattle Times reported today the investigation of at least five rifle attacks on electrical substations in Washington state. The damage was similar to the damage in North Carolina. Authorities there said it was a “deliberate physical attack,” though the newspaper reported it was unclear whether they caused service disruptions.

That, my friend, is three related events. It’s not a fad.

It’s a trend.

“Normal reality”

It’s also an example of the friction between democratic politics and an established political order (white power) that refuses to yield to democratic politics. That friction can be healthy, but more often than not in this country a consequence of it has been political violence.

It bears repeating at this point that the greatest locus of friction was probably when Americans elected their first Black president. Given that white power was “normal reality” to most white Americans, Barack Obama’s ascendance was a perversion of the natural order.

I don’t find it surprising that a person or persons fired on 17 electrical substations after Obama was reelected in 2012. If democratic politics couldn’t stop “normal reality” from being turned upside down, political violence was justified in returning us to “normal reality.”

But the attack on critical infrastructure was, in 2013, an outlier.

Most of the political violence we have seen since then has been inflicted on people. As I have said before, every shooting massacre is a reaction to white people’s perceived loss of racial status. There have been so many mass shootings, in fact, that if they happened anywhere else in the world, they would be called an insurgency.

If the attackers were Black or brown, yes! Then that’s an insurgency! But we don’t call it that. Most people in this country are white and most white people can’t see a political insurgency in front of them, even when it erupts in schools, even when it mows down children

Property over people

Maybe that will change given this new trend.

This is America, after all. Here, the rights of property have historically superseded the rights of people, as is evidenced by Republican legislators bent on outlawing gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, banning certain trans-related books in public schools and forbidding the discussion of LGBT-plus topics in the classroom.

All of that is jim-dandy, as is the massacre of innocents, but taking out the power supply? That crosses the line. Crosses! The! Line!

There’s no hope for gun control as long as the Republicans don’t want it – and they won’t want it when the status quo is mere mass death.

The Republicans, however, are the party of property, of business, of old white people. Power outages cost time. Time costs money. And money is the entire point of living a once-only existence on Earth.

I’m not the only one who sees a crack in the GOP’s united front. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said Tuesday:

“When we look at all the money that’s being lost by businesses here at Christmastime, when we look at threats to people in nursing homes having lost power, hospitals having to run off generators and not being able to do certain kinds of operations at this point – all of those are deep concerns here, and we can’t let this happen” (italics mine).

I’m not holding my breath, but if this new trend gains some momentum, we might see a few Republicans actually stand up to the paramilitaries among them and put an end to this insurgency.

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an ah 12 22

For many years after 9/11, pundits in right-wing media scoffed at the idea of white supremacists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Christian nationalists and far-right militia groups posing a major terrorist threat in the United States. Law enforcement’s anti-terrorist resources, they argued, should be focused solely on fighting radical Islamists.

Liberals and progressives would respond that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) has a long history of domestic terrorism, including attacking African-American churches (such as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963). In the 1980s, according to federal prosecutors, neo-Nazis planned to dump 200 pounds of pure cyanide into the municipal water supplies of New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C. in addition to blowing up natural gas pipelines in states ranging from Texas to Illinois. Prosecutors estimated that if the attack on the water supplies in those cities had been successful, at least 400,000 people would have been killed.

The claim that white supremacists and white nationalists do not pose a major terrorist threat in the U.S. is not a view embraced by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to Newsweek reporter William M. Arkin, the FBI is “conducting three times (more) domestic terrorism investigations than it was five years ago, with 70 percent of its open cases focused on ‘civil unrest’ and anti-government activity.”

Targets of far-right white terrorists in recent years have ranged from African-Americans (the Mother Bethel AME Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015) to Jews (the Tree of Life Synagogue attack in Pittsburgh in 2018) to Latinos (a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019) to gays. A gunman’s attack on Club Q, a gay club in Colorado Springs, on November 19 left five people dead and others injured. And anti-gay hate crimes have been on the rise.

In North Carolina, two Duke Energy substations were attacked by gunmen in early December, resulting in over 40,000 people in Moore County losing electricity. Police, as of Monday morning, December 5, have not identified a motive in the attack,but the attacks occurred during a drag show in Southern Pines, North Carolina that Christian nationalists were railing against. One of them is activist Emily Grace Rainey, who was part of the “Stop the Steal” demonstrations in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.

Online, Rainey posted, “the Moore County Sheriff’s Office just checked in. I welcomed them to my home. Sorry they wasted their time. I told them that God works in mysterious ways and is responsible for the outage. I used the opportunity to tell them about the immoral drag show and the blasphemies screamed by its supporters. God is chastising Moore County.”

When the drag show lost electricity following the attack on the energy substations, it continued by candlelight. Security was quite heavy at the event, according to WRAL News, because the performers and organizers feared violence.

Reporting in Newsweek, Arkin explains how FBI agents distinguish between “hate crimes” and “domestic terrorism.” An FBI report issued in October said, “A hate crime is targeted violence motivated by the offender's bias against a person's actual or perceived characteristics, while a DT (domestic terrorism) incident involves acts dangerous to human life that are in violation of criminal laws and in furtherance of a social or political goal."

Notably, nearly two years after the fact, investigations into individuals who participated in former President Donald Trump's January 6th insurrection are taking up a substantial amount of the Bureau's resources.

Arkin reports, “Of 2,700 open cases, where an individual or group of individuals has been designated domestic terrorists by the FBI, almost a third relate to the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol or subsequent political activity connected to it. Since then, the counter-terrorism agencies have also focused on the transnational links of domestic individuals and groups — an approach that provides the intelligence agencies more authority to conduct surveillance and intrusive collection of information."

The Newsweek reporter adds, “Domestic terrorism investigations are being conducted in all 50 states and in all 56 FBI field offices, the FBI says, with more than double the number of investigators assigned to domestic terrorism work since January 6…. The FBI uses five categories to describe violent extremism: racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists (RMVEs), including white supremacists; anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists (AGAAVEs), including everyone from militias to Antifa; violent extremism associated with ‘civil unrest’; animal rights/environmental violent extremists; and abortion-related violent extremists.”

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an 12 22

More than 40,000 people in Moore County, North Carolina lost electricity in early December after gunmen attacked two Duke Energy substations. Law enforcement, both local and federal, have been investigating the incident and haven’t determined who was behind the attack or why. But one thing is for certain: Attacking electrical grids is very much in keeping with the extremist playbook.

Journalist Zachary B. Wolf, reporting on the attack for CNN’s website on December 5, lays out some reasons why electrical grids are an “attractive target” for extremists and terrorists.

“The motivation behind an attack on the electrical grid in a North Carolina county remains a mystery,” Wolf explains. “But the method — apparently coordinated attacks on multiple substations — exploits a vulnerability that has long been a source of concern for authorities warning about domestic terrorism. Just last week, the Department of Homeland Security renewed a national bulletin to warn of attacks on critical infrastructure.”

The CNN reporter continues, “The details of this particular story are only starting to come into view, although Moore County, North Carolina, remains plunged in darkness. The FBI has joined the hunt for answers into how attacks on substations left around 40,000 without power over the weekend. In a Sunday news conference, the county sheriff described the attacks as ‘intentional’ and ‘targeted,’ but had no reason why the person or persons involved would choose the place.”

At the Duke Energy substations, gunfire damaged the transformers. And Duke reps have said that it will be Thursday, December 8 before power is restored to the 40,000 Moore County residents who have been without electricity.

Carol Haney, mayor of Southern Pines — a North Carolina town that has been without power — described the attack as domestic terrorism.

Haney told CNN, “It is just a horrible, horrible terrorist, in my opinion, act. Cowardly.”

John Miller, who focuses on national security matters for CNN, explains why electrical grids in the United States are vulnerable and why terrorists and extremists — including white supremacists and neo-Nazis — consider them an appealing target.

On “CNN This Morning,” Miller told his colleagues, “The challenge is most of these places are outdoors, most are in remote areas, and most of them are available for attack from a long distance…. Their theory is that if you identify the key nodes and you knock out one and they divert power to the next one, and you knock out the next one and the next one, a domino effect can actually start to topple the national grid and plunge the nation into darkness and chaos.”

Attacking infrastructure and depriving Americans of electricity, heat or gas is not a new tactic for terrorists and white supremacists. Back in the 1980s, according to federal prosecutors, neo-Nazis planned to blow up natural gas pipelines in states that included Texas and Illinois. And they also planned to dump 200 pounds of pure cyanide into the municipal water supplies of New York City, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

In April 2013, sniper fire knocked out 17 transformers in Northern California’s Silicon Valley. And in 2020, white supremacists in Idaho faced conspiracy charges for trying to damage transformers in that state.

Former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Juliette Kayyem, now a national security analyst for CNN, notes that the attack in Moore County required some sophistication.

According to Kayyem, “You don’t just drive by these places and know where to shoot. (Investigators) will be looking at the potential there was either casing or someone who knew the area, the facilities and knew where to shoot. These aren’t drive-by incidents.”

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an 6 22

judge shot by ex-con (politicall? trms says reflect deterioration of rule of law, links to prev white pwr, no convict of sedition, got guns back except machine)

n alliance of right-wing extremists and hardcore Donald Trump supporters has come together since the Jan. 6 insurrection, and law enforcement officials are gravely concerned.

The confederation was predictable -- and was indeed predicted -- by Homeland Security officials, who are no less alarmed to see how emboldened extremists have become since the insurrection caused their numbers to swell with new recruits, reported The New Yorker.

“On Jan. 6, we had neo-Nazis hanging out with a bunch of otherwise just MAGA people,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as DHS assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention during the Trump administration. “That’s an opportunity to recruit.”

Some of the U.S. Capitol rioters awaiting trial at the District of Columbia jail have formed an almost "cultlike" bond while locked up, and another former DHS official said that could be seen as symbolic of the alliances forming among disparate extremist groups after the former president's loss.

“One of the things that make the current threat environment complicated for law enforcement and intelligence is the blending that occurs,” said John Cohen, who served as DHS acting chief of intelligence during the first year of Joe Biden's presidency. “People who may have come from very different ideological backgrounds or somewhat different ideological backgrounds are coalescing around certain things.”

Cohen said the unit he oversaw has picked up some disturbing and unmistakeable patterns.

“Anti-government militia, hardcore white supremacists, and even people more from the anarchist movement have come together,” Cohen said. Their goals are explicit: “assassination of elected officials, and violent activities to resist government activities or programs.”

Cohen pointed to a white supremacist's recent mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo as an example of this escalating threat.

“In my 38-plus years of law enforcement, this is the most complex threat environment I’ve ever seen,” Cohen said. “We have unacceptable levels of violence by people who are influenced and inspired by content they see online.”

“I am really f*cking concerned about where we are," he added.

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an 5 22

senate Republican Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota immediately poured cold water on a just-passed House bill to help fight rising domestic terrorism, in the wake of his past weekend’s massacre of ten Black people in Buffaloby a self-avowed white nationalist and antisemite and a California church shooting deemed a “politically motivated hate incident” by local law enforcement.

The House bill passed with all Democrats and just one Republican voting for it. 203 Republicans voted against the legislation that would establish new offices across three federal agencies to help identify and combat domestic terrorism. Three of the Republicans who voted against the legislation are original co-sponsors of the bill, and many who voted for a very similar bill two years ago voted against this bill Wednesday. The final tally was 222-203.

CNN’s Manu Raju reports Senator Thune, the second-most-powerful Senate Republican, is “skeptical the domestic terrorism bill that passed the House will get 10 GOP senators,” which it would need to pass, assuming all 50 Democrats vote for it.

He noted that it was a ‘pretty party-line vote.’ Said he had not studied the details of the bill yet but noted the outcome in the House makes him think it is ‘largely a partisan bill.'”

Republicans have a long history of blocking any attempt to curtail or get out in front of preventing domestic terrorism, despite – or because of – the vast majority of extremist-related murders are committed by right-wing extremists.

Republicans’ opposition to addressing right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism goes back at least as far as 2009, when, as Wired reported, “an analyst at the Department of Homeland Security focusing on far-right extremist groups” published this report about the danger of right-wing extremism. Outrage was so dramatic DHS was forced to retract it.

In 2016 Politico reported Congressional Republicans also in 2009 “succeeded in pushing to shut” down a DHS program, an intelligence unit “called the Extremism and Radicalization Branch.” Its mission? “Studying and monitoring sub-sections of the population for potential signs of ideological and political radicalization.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/05/fbi-underestimates-white-supremacist-threat/

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an 10 21

two members of a neo-Nazi paramilitary group were officially declared terrorists in a federal case in MarylandMonday, according to Winnipeg News reporter Ryan Thorpe.

Defendants Patrik Mathews and Brian Lemley Jr. appeared for a joint sentencing hearing in which prosecutors attempted to add a terrorism sentencing enhancement onto the case. Doing so dramatically increases the time the men would spend behind bars.

The men were convicted of planning a bombing attack in Richmond, Virginia but the plot never occurred because law enforcement thwarted it. The prosecution asked for a 25-year prison sentence, but the unsealed sentencing memo quotes the defense attorney calling it, "grossly disproportionate." The excuse was that the terrorist attack never happened.

The judge agreed with the prosecution, ultimately deciding that the men met the standards to be charged with the terrorism enhancement for sentencing.

This is the most recent example of a terrorism sentence in the United States, at a time Americans are asking questions about whether Jan. 6 attackers could be considered terrorists. While the U.S. Patriot Act redefined "domestic terrorism," Section 802 never created a new charge of "domestic terrorism." It makes the sentencing part of a trial the only real option to give additional punishments for acts of domestic terrorism.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/terror-plot-election/

jon s salon

Two California men disgruntled by Donald Trump's election loss have been charged by the Justice Department for attempting to blow up the California Democratic Party's headquarters in Sacramento.

The development, revealed in a newly unsealed indictment on Thursday, centers on Trump supporters Ian Benjamin Rogers and Jarrod Copeland, both of whom believed their attack would spark a "movement" to enlist an army of followers to their cause. Having settled on a plan of attack last December, Rogers asked his partner:"Do you think something is wrong with me how I'm excited to attack the [D]emocrats?"

The plan developed over the ensuing weeks, prosecutors alleged.

On January 4, just two days before the Capitol riot, Copeland told Rogers that he was excited to "become outlaws for real" if the 2020 election was certified in President Biden's favor.

Following the riot, Rogers sent Copeland a flurry of texts. "REVOLUTION," he wrote. "I'm f---ing juiced!!!!!" he said, adding: "I'm bout to throw my gear on and drive around andpunish [sic] sombitces."

"Sad it's come to thisbut I'm not going down without a fight," Rogers later added. "These commies need to be told what's up."

Days following their exchange on January 11, Napa County Sheriff's deputies arrested Rogers. Authorities seized between45 and 50 firearms, including a number of assault rifles, machine guns, and three pipe bombs. Law enforcement also found approximately 15,000 rounds of ammunition.

At Rogers' personal place of business, law enforcement found copies of "The Anarchist Cookbook" and a "Homemade C-4 A Recipe for Survival," as well as "U.S. Army Improvised Munitions Handbook."

This week, the FBI also arrested Copeland, who attempted to scrub his text exchanges following his friend's arrest. Prosecutors noted that Copeland had joined the military back in 2013, but was twice arrested for desertion. Following his "other than honorable" discharge from service, Copeland joined the Three Percenters,a far-right, anti-government militia – several of whose members were indicted by grand jury last June for participating the Capitol riot.

"Copeland's membership in an anti-government militia, and his motivations for planning these attacks are relevant because they are not fleeting or the product of a single, but past, perceived affront," prosecutors said in court documents. "His sentiments are deeply felt and long-standing and reflect a [sic] believe that the government is illegitimate."

Last October, one of the suspects involved in a failed plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was determined to be the second-in-command of Three Percenters' Wisconsin branch. A Three Percenter was also arrested three years earlier over a failed plot to detonate a car bomb attack on a bank in Oklahoma City. The plan was inspired by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

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not domestic?

https://www.alternet.org/2021/05/customs-and-border-protection/ lawyer mex

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an me 521

A national terrorism alert was released on Friday to warn about the possibility of extremists striking as COVID-19 restrictions easing in various states across the country.

According to ABC-13, the latest National Terrorism Advisory System alert released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) serves as an extension of the previous warning of possible civil unrest before the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. The previous alert regarding Jan. 6 was set to expire on Saturday, May 15.

While the alert does not offer details about any isolated threat, it warns of "potential danger from an increasingly complex and volatile mix that includes domestic terrorists inspired by various grievances, racial or ethnic hatred and influences from abroad," per the publication.

Those types of threats are said to have intensified since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic due to "conspiracy theories and deepened anger at the government in some quarters over the shutdown of the economy."

"Violent extremists may seek to exploit the easing of COVID-19-related restrictions across the United States to conduct attacks against a broader range of targets after previous public capacity limits reduced opportunities for lethal attacks," the bulletin said.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas weighed in on the latest alert and the present-day terroristic threats in the United States. "Today's terrorism-related threat landscape is more complex, more dynamic, and more diversified than it was several years ago," Mayorkas said.

In wake of the growing concerns about domestic terrorism, DHS has incorporated a new domestic terrorism monitoring division within its Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Approximately 7.5% of the federal agency's grant funding has been designated for monitoring terroristic threats.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/extremist/

theconv

after President Joe Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021 without any violent incidents, many in the United States and worldwide breathed a sigh of relief.

The respite may be brief. The ingredients that led an incensed pro-Trump mob to break into the Capitol and plant pipe bombs at other federal buildings on Jan. 6 remain.

Several U.S. security experts say they now consider domestic extremism a greater threat to the country than international terror. According to my research on political violence, the U.S. has all the elements that, combined, can produce a low-intensity terrorist conflict: extreme polarization and armed factions willing to break the law, in a wealthy democracy with a strong government.

Terror can thrive in affluent democracies too

Chronic domestic terror is not the same as civil war.

In the modern era, civil wars usually take place in poor countries where the government is too weak and unstable to maintain control over a sprawling, often mountainous territory. Rebels take over swaths of the country and seek to replace the authorities in those areas. This is happening in Afghanistan, India and Nigeria, to name a few places.

In the United States, one of the world's more powerful nations, armed factions have a hard time permanently seizing land. Several dramatic standoffs between fringe extremists and American authorities – including the 1993 Waco siege and the Bundy family's 41-day occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016 – ended poorly for the extremists.

A huge asymmetry of power between the state and armed factions prevents militants from openly battling to usurp its authority, as rebel groups like the Taliban do and the American Confederates did. It forces armed groups to act underground, hiding among the general population. Because democratic states cannot, at least on paper, openly violate human rights by systematically persecuting militants or torturing prisoners...It limits the number of operations they can sustain, meaning thinner ranks than full-fledged insurgencies and fewer overall fatalities than in civil wars. And although all rebels may dream of...Che Guevara-style guerrilla adventures – heroically liberating "the people" from tyranny – in practice, militants working underground cannot avoid resorting to quintessential terrorist tactics such as bombs, shootings, bank robberies and kidnappings....Red Brigades, for example. In the 1970s, this far-left organization aimed at overthrowing the capitalist system, but the Italian state was too strong. So the group resorted to terrorism. For two decades, the Red Brigades carried out a low-intensity campaign that killed perhaps 500 people, mainly with bombings and assassinations. They used violence .

In reaction to this communist violence, far-right groups like Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari responded with indiscriminate attacks, including a no-warning 1980 train bombing in Bologna that killed 85 civilians. They sought to create a level of disruption so high that it would...justify military intervention against the "enemies of the state" – a fascist coup d'etat.

Both sides lost. There was no insurrection, no intervention. Italian democracy prevailed.

Lone wolf terror

The U.S, too, has experience with coordinated domestic terror.

Throughout the early 20th century, the Ku Klux Klan waged vicious campaigns against Black Americans in the South. As the ebbed in the late 1960s, radical Marxists like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army emerged, using violence to oppose American military intervention in Vietnam and push for racial equality.

Between 1969 and 1981, these two groups – one predominately white, the other Black – conducted some 200 attacks, from bank robberies to prison breaks. Fifteen people were killed, most of them security officers.

The FBI engaged in heavy-handed repression, particularly against Black militants. And Americans had scant interest in far left-wing goals like helping the oppressed peoples of the world. Both groups dwindled without much fanfare.

U.S. history has also featured a smattering of fringe, lone wolf terrorists, from the Unabomber on the left to the Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph on the right. This trend has recently accelerated, with a deadly new massacre each year. Individual white supremacists, in particular, have attacked immigrants and people of color, in Charleston, South Carolina, El Paso, Texas and beyond.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks hate crimes, 2019 was one of the deadliest years for "domestic extremist-related killings" since 1970, with 42 victims in 17 separate incidents.

Trump's militias

Attacks characterized by lone wolf perpetrators have the advantage of limiting legal scrutiny on the extremist milieu. But with coordination, armed campaigns can scale up to do much more damage.

To overcome the lone wolf stage, disparate militant groups must organize around a common theme that gives coherence to their violence. Trump's electoral defeat gave his : the myth of a stolen election.

The Trump presidency emboldened a...cabal of armed groups with a far-right agenda. Seeing their leader out of power will only grow this feeling of frustration. So will new repression of the far right, in the form of and social media clampdowns.

With Democrats controlling Washington and elections perceived as rigged, American far-right groups may believe further violence is the only way to counter what they see as federal overreach.<...history shows their chances of succeeding are negligible. But this won't stop them from trying.

Luis De la Calle, Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and Associate Professor in Political Science, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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Meet the GOP extremist who has already announced a challenge to ... ›

These 5 far-right extremist groups could pose a national security ... ›

Why Extremism Hasn't Sunk the Right - Alternet.org ›

Far-right extremists at each other's throats over fears of who has turned informant: report - Alternet.org ›

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Extremist | Definition of Extremist at Dictionary.com ›

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see Qanon

domestic violence FBI

https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/420379775-fbi-conspiracy-theories-domestic-extremism.pdf pm dl 720

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hmmn/ but fusion ctrs got $ and rewarded for tracking EF! dapl, green occupy?

aha: invis hand free mkt is impoverished systemic "thinking" bottom line (a little knowledge is dangerous) b/c it is too radical an exclusion of factors, often the ones that can't be quantified,eg of fail

raw story

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/capitol-riot-2650416088/

On Tuesday, writing for The Daily Beast, former CIA officer Jeff Stein highlighted some of the root causes of the "massive" intelligence failure that prevented a meaningful effort to stop the Capitol riot from happening.

Reports suggested that the FBI had alerts of "war" at the Capitol just a day before it all unfolded — and yet many federal and local officials who should have been prepared were caught off guard.

"Nobody here needs to be reminded that far-right fringe groups and untold tens of thousands of delusional pro-Trump fans had been lighting up their social-media redoubts and chat-room hideouts for weeks with excited talk of marching on Washington to reverse the election results," wrote Stein. "The red lights were screaming, as the all too common saying goes.Just days before the Jan. 6 insurrection calamity, I talked to a regional D.C. intelligence official who claimed with quiet confidence to be on top of it all. In retrospect, it reminds me of the walk I took with a CIA friend in August 2001, when he told me the agency was expecting Osama bin Laden to hit us big time any day."

One of the big causes of the problem, wrote Stein, is that the culture at the intelligence and law enforcement agencies prioritizes "statistical accomplishments" that can be quantified — and preventing an insurrection is not easily quantifiable, so there aren't enough resources put into it.

"As former FBI agent Harry Gossett told me a few weeks ago,investigative resources are 'doled out based on statistical accomplishments,' such as the number of 'subjects identified, indictments, arrests, convictions, fines, savings, recoveries, etc,'" wrote Stein. "If the squad investigating bank embezzlements, for example, can show hard numbers on money saved, it's going to get a bigger budget. In contrast, Gossett said, 'counterintelligence squads were measured by defections, recruitments, and intelligence take. Their cases rarely went to court.' Can't show money saved there."

You can read more here.

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nb white nat'l supreme terms commonly used to describe trump and insurr (1st reporter that used forced to resign back in the day?)

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-violence-2650079928

During the past two years, U.S. counterterrorism officials held meetings with their European counterparts to discuss an emerging threat: right-wing terror groups becoming increasingly global in their reach.

American neo-Nazis were traveling to train and fight with militias in the Ukraine. There were suspected links between U.S. extremists and the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was training foreigners in its St. Petersburg compounds. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 had denounced a “Hispanic invasion" and praised a white supremacist who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and who had been inspired by violent American and Italian racists.

But the efforts to improve transatlantic cooperation against the threat ran into a recurring obstacle. During talks and communications, senior Trump administration officials steadfastly refused to use the term “right-wing terrorism," causing disputes and confusion with the Europeans, who routinely use the phrase, current and former European and U.S. officials told ProPublica. Instead, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security referred to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism," while the State Department chose “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism."

“We did have problems with the Europeans," one national security official said. “They call it right-wing terrorism and they were angry that we didn't. There was a real aversion to using that term on the U.S. side. The aversion came from political appointees in the Trump administration. We very quickly realized that if people talked about right-wing terrorism, it was a nonstarter with them."

The U.S. response to the globalization of the far-right threat has been slow, scattered and politicized, U.S. and European counterterrorism veterans and experts say. Whistleblowers and other critics have accused DHS leaders of downplaying the threat of white supremacy and slashing a unit dedicated to fighting domestic extremism. DHS has denied those accusations.

In 2019, a top FBI official told Congress the agency devoted only about 20% of its counterterrorism resources to the domestic threat. Nonetheless, some FBI field offices focus primarily on domestic terrorism.

Former counterterrorism officials said the president's politics made their job harder. The disagreement over what to call the extremists was part of a larger concern about whether the administration was committed to fighting the threat.

“The rhetoric at the White House, anybody watching the rhetoric of the president, this was discouraging people in government from speaking out," said Jason Blazakis, who ran a State Department counterterrorism unit from 2008 to 2018. “The president and his minions were focused on other threats."

Other former officials disagreed. Federal agencies avoided the term “right-wing terrorism" because they didn't want to give extremists legitimacy by placing them on the political spectrum, or to fuel the United States' intense polarization, said Christopher K. Harnisch, the former deputy coordinator for countering violent extremism in the State Department's counterterrorism bureau. Some causes espoused by white supremacists, such as using violence to protect the environment, are not regarded as traditionally right-wing ideology, said Harnisch, who stepped down this week.

“The most important point is that the Europeans and the U.S. were talking about the same people," he said. “It hasn't hindered our cooperation at all."

As for the wider criticism of the Trump administration, Harnisch said: “In our work at the State Department, we never faced one scintilla of opposition from the White House about taking on white supremacy. I can tell you that the White House was entirely supportive."

The State Department focused mostly on foreign extremist movements, but it examined some of their links to U.S. groups as well.

There was clearly progress on some fronts. The State Department took a historic step in April by designating the Russian Imperial Movement and three of its leaders as terrorists, saying that the group's trainees included Swedish extremists who carried out bombing attacks on refugees. It was the first such U.S. designation of a far-right terrorist group.

With Trump now out of office, Europeans and Americans expect improved cooperation against right-wing terrorists. Like the Islamist threat, it is becoming clear that the far-right threat is international. In December, a French computer programmer committed suicide after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to U.S. extremist causes. The recipients included a neo-Nazi news website. Federal agencies are investigating, but it is not yet clear whether anything about the transaction was illegal, officials said.

“It's like a transatlantic thing now," said a European counterterror chief, describing American conspiracy theories that surface in the chatter he tracks. “Europe is taking ideology from U.S. groups and vice versa."

The Crackdown

International alliances make extremist groups more dangerous, but also create vulnerabilities that law enforcement could exploit.

Laws in Europe and Canada allow authorities to outlaw domestic extremist groups and conduct aggressive surveillance of suspected members. America's civil liberties laws, which trace to the Constitution's guarantee of free speech spelled out in the First Amendment, are far less expansive. The FBI and other agencies have considerably more authority to investigate U.S. individuals and groups if they develop ties with foreign terror organizations. So far, those legal tools have gone largely unused in relation to right-wing extremism, experts say.

To catch up to the fast-spreading threat at home and abroad, Blazakis said, the U.S. should designate more foreign organizations as terrorist entities, especially ones that allied nations have already outlawed.[long]....

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/white-supremacist/

alexh

Although terrorist attacks by far-right white supremacist and white supremacist groups existed long before the Trump era, the last four years have found such groups emboldened. And according to Associated Press reporter Amy Forliti, one plot that white supremacists had in mind for the Summer of 2021 involved attacking power stations in the southeastern United States.

Forliti reports that in an affidavit that was "mistakenly unsealed," the FBI alleges that an Ohio-based teenager and informant said he wanted the white supremacists to fast-track their plot if President Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. In addition to winning 306 electoral votes, President-elect Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 7 million in the popular vote.

The NBC News reporter explains, "The teen was in a text group with more than a dozen people in the fall of 2019 when he introduced the idea of saving money to buy a ranch where they could participate in militant training, according to the affidavit, which was filed under seal along with a search warrant application in Wisconsin's Eastern U.S. District Court in March. The documents were inadvertently unsealed last week before the mistake was discovered and they were quickly sealed again."

Forliti notes that the teenager "also shared plans with a smaller group about a plot to create a power outage by shooting rifle rounds into power stations in the southeastern U.S. The teen called the plot 'Lights Out,' and there were plans to carry it out in the Summer of 2021, the affidavit states."

The teenager, according to Forliti, allegedly received a text from a white supremacist in Texas who said, "Leaving the power off would wake people up to the harsh reality of life by wreaking havoc across the nation." [NOVEL? TERROR?]

"The affidavit says the Ohio teen also spoke numerous times about creating Nazi militant cells around the country like those of the neo-Nazi network the Atomwaffen Division," Forliti explains. "Atomwaffen Division members have promoted 'accelerationism,' a fringe philosophy espousing mass violence to fuel society's collapse. More than a dozen people linked to the group or an offshoot called the Feuerkrieg Division have been charged with serious crimes in recent years."

Jennifer Thornton, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of Ohio, told NBC News that she couldn't offer more information about the plot but said, "we want to emphasize that there is no imminent public safety threat related to this matter."

The Trump era has seen some vicious attacks by White racists, from a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on August 3, 2019 aimed specifically at Latinos to the October 27, 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. And earlier this year, a combination of white nationalists and militia extremists, according to the FBI, planned to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and possibly kill her.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/house-homeland-security-chairman-and-others-are-pushing-for-an-fbi-report-on-white-supremacist-terror-threat-journalist

alex h

For decades, much of the right-wing media has emphasized the threat posed by violent Islamist extremists while downplaying the terrorist potential of far-right white supremacist and white nationalist groups. But that doesn't make the latter any less dangerous. And one Democratic congressman who is sounding the alarm is Mississippi'sRep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee and wants to know why an FBI report on white supremacists is four months late.

In an article published this week, journalist Spencer Ackerman — who specializes in national security matters for the Daily Beast — notes that theFBI "has failed to produce a legally required report detailing the scope of white supremacist and other domestic terrorism, despite mounting concerns that the upcoming election could spark far-right violence." That report was supposed to be released in June, and according to Ackerman, Thompson is demanding answers.

"I would hate to think that they are reacting to President Trump's machinations about his dislike for senior leadership in the FBI," Thompson told the Daily Beast. "This report probably would not be viewed favorably by this administration. That, I think, precipitates the report not being released by November 3."

Thompson told the Beast that the American public "needs to know who the real, documented terrorists in this country, based on the FBI's intelligence, really are…. I think (FBI Director Christopher Wray) understands that if he wades too far in the water around this subject, he might drown — or get fired, to be honest."

Trump has had a lot to say about antifa in recent months but precious little to say about white supremacist and white nationalist groups.Conservative Elizabeth Neumann, a former U.S. Department of Homeland Security official under Trump who has been active in the group Republican Voters Against Trump and has endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for president, had been sharply critical of his treatment of the issue. Neumann has stressed that Trump has spent way too much time talking about Antifa while downplaying the terrorist threat that white power groups pose. And like Thompson, she would like to see an in-depth FBI report on the threat.

Neumann told the Beast, "I have no doubt the FBI is on top of any number of cases of this. I have confidence that the FBI is likely to thwart a lot of these attempts."

Neumann and Miles Taylor — another conservative ex-DHS official who has been active in RVAT and is supporting Biden — both believe that white supremacist terrorism isn't a high priority for the Trump White House.Taylor told the Beast, "The bottom line from the White House was they didn't want us to talk us about domestic terrorism because they worried that if we talked about right-wing extremism, we would alienate many of the president's supporters."

According to Thomson, the Trump White House is putting the public at risk by downplaying the dangers of white supremacist and white nationalist terrorists.

The congressman told the Beast, "The White House, members of Congress, other outside groups, are saying, 'These radical Muslim groups, these radical left-wing groups — we gotta do something about them.' Well, it was clear that when you talk to professionals, these weren't the most dangerous, nor from a numerical standpoint — the statistics were going in the opposite direction. We're still having these incidents occur, but the ideology and the individuals perpetrating them lean more toward the right-wing philosophy. And I think, when that hit, it kind of took the fire out of the domestic-terrorist conversation."

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/ex-homeland-security-official-describes-how-trump-suppressed-efforts-to-fight-white-supremacist-terrorism

On CNN Wednesday, former Trump administration national security staffer Miles Taylor outlined how the president's soft spot for white supremacy — put on full display at the previous night's presidential debate — carried over into federal policy.

"You previously told me President Trump didn't prioritize white supremacist violence or domestic threats in general," said anchor Wolf Blitzer. "How did that become clear in your meetings with him and your work deep inside the Trump administration?"

"I'll tell you this," said Taylor. "From the beginning of the Trump administration, we had a sense that the numbers were going in the wrong direction. By the numbers, I mean, the number of terrorist plots we were tracking in the United States. When we first came in, ISIS was the big threat. That was obvious to everyone. There was a surging threat from violent extremist groups here domestically, primarily focused on white supremacy. And that was a big concern for us. The FBI and our own DHS analyst came to us and said this is worrying."

"We went to the White House and said the numbers are heading in the wrong direction," said Taylor. "The response we got was the president put his head in the sand. The president and his senior advisers did not want to pay attention to the threat. They didn't want to talk about the threat. They told us to not use certain terms having to do with the threat, such as 'right-wing extremism' and at the end of the day they refused to actually include this in any meaningful way in the national counterterrorism strategy. The message from the white house to us could not have been clearer. It was, do not focus on this, do not prioritize this."

"I'm glad to say the secretaries that I served … didn't listen to that. They did prioritize the threat," added Taylor. "But it's important that the White House care because the White House can muster a whole of government response against a threat like this. The White House never did, and as a result, we have named cities that remind us how bad the threat actually got. Charlottesville. El Paso. We could go on down the list. Those events happened in part because our government wasn't as focused as it should have been on the threat."

Watch below:

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/when-politicians-use-hate-speech-political-violence-increase/

politicians deepen existing divides when they use inflammatory language, such as hate speech, and this makes their societies more likely to experience political violence and terrorism. That's the conclusion from a study I recently did on the connection between political rhetoric and actual violence.

President Donald Trump is not the only world leader who is accused of publicly denigrating people based on their racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds.

In the 2019 parliamentary campaign in India, politicians from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party targeted Muslims as part of a widespread electoral strategy to galvanize Hindu nationalism. Similarly, in the 2019 Polish election, incumbent president Andrzej Duda made demonization of the LGBT community as well as foreigners the centerpiece of his successful reelection campaign.

Hate speech has also figured prominently in the recent rhetoric of political leaders in a variety of countries including Russia, Colombia, Israel, Egypt, Ukraine, the Philippines, Italy, Greece, Sri Lanka and Iraq.

These remarks are not just empty rhetoric or political theater. My research shows that when politicians use hate speech, domestic terrorism increases – in the U.S. and in other countries.

Indeed, since the beginning of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, domestic terrorism has more than doubled in the United States. During the Obama administration's two terms, the U.S. averaged 26.6 incidents of domestic terrorism per year, according to the Global Terrorism Database. The most active year, by far, was 2016, which saw 67 attacks, more than double Obama's overall average. During the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency, 2017 and 2018 – the latest year for which data are available – domestic terror activity stayed that high, with 66 and 67 attacks, respectively

[graf]

polarizing politics paves the way

Hateful rhetoric targeting minority groups is an established technique to unify and mobilize political supporters and to delegitimize and dehumanize political opponents. Hate speech by politicians also serves to deepen political polarization.

More polarized societies are especially susceptible to bouts of political violence and terrorism when politicians use hate speech. Examples include Weimar Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, which featured assassinations of leftist politicians and street brawling by Nazi partisans; Argentina in the 1970s during the so-called “Dirty War" in which government-backed right-wing death squads fought with left-wing political movements who themselves engaged in terrorism; and Turkey in the late 1970s early 1980s, when ultranationalist right-wing organizations and leftist opposition movements attacked each other.

When taken to an extreme, hateful rhetoric by political leaders can precipitate civil wars and genocides, as was the case in the 1990s in Rwanda, where Hutu extremists used anti-Tutsi radio broadcasts to foment widespread violence.

Examining the data

For my analysis, I used statistical data on domestic terrorist incidents from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, and major party figures' use of hate speech in about 150 countries between 2000 and 2017 from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

I tried to determine the relationship between politicians using hate speech and the number of domestic terror attacks the country experienced the following year. Other elements can affect domestic terrorism, so I factored into my analysis each country's political system, its gross domestic product per capita, its population size, its degree of ethnic and linguistic diversity and its level of media freedom.

To further distinguish political violence that was specifically produced by hate speech, I also factored in how much domestic terrorism the country had experienced in previous years and whether or not the country was experiencing a civil war.

[graf]

violence climbs when politicians speak with hate

What I found is that countries where politicians frequently weave hate speech into their political rhetoric subsequently experience more domestic terrorism. A lot more.

Countries such as Costa Rica or Finland, where the data show politicians “never" or “rarely" employed hate speech, experienced an average of 12.5 incidents of domestic terrorism between 2000 and 2017. Countries where politicians were found to “sometimes" use hate speech in their rhetoric, such as Belgium or Cyprus, experienced 28.9 attacks on average.

However, domestic terrorism was quite frequent in countries whether politicians used hate speech “often" or “extremely often." Such countries, including Iraq, Russia, Turkey and Sudan, experienced an average of 107.9 domestic terrorist attacks during that period.

What public figures say can bring people together, or divide them. How politicians talk affects how people behave – and the amount of violence their nations experience.

James Piazza, Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science, Pennsylvania State University

This article is republished from The Conversation

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https://theintercept.com/2020/09/10/fbi-sting-boogaloo-hamas/

...The Boojahideen case did something rare: Over the years, the FBI usually uses foreign terror plots to coax would-be adherents of these foreign groups, whereas in the Boojahideen case, the FBI linked up domestic extremists with a foreign terror group. Under the Justice Department’s normal modus operandi — using something of a double standard — right-wing domestic terrorists do not face terrorism charges.

Still, the use of stings involving foreign-terror plots is still unsettling to some law enforcement and rights experts. Human Rights Watch hascritized these stings for often targeting “those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent.” The FBI has long defended its practices by saying that stings allow federal law enforcement to find would-be terrorists before real terrorist groups have the opportunity, but, as in the Boojahideen case, the threats often seem to be concocted by the FBI out of whole cloth in order to initiate charges.[ex fbi at brennan]

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/19-years-after-9-11-americas-biggest-terrorist-threat-is-far-right-white-supremacists-who-love-trump/

it was 19 years ago, on September 11, 2001, that the United States suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. Almost 3000 people were killed when members of the terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked four airplanes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and one of them into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Although the 9/11 terrorist attacks underscored the dangerous fanaticism of far-right Islamist groups, countless Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have ignored or downplayed another terrorist threat from the far right — white supremacy and white nationalism — and that threat is alive and well in the Trump era.

Time and time again, Fox News and others in the far-right media have encouraged Republicans to believe that Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria) and Boko Haram have the market cornered on terrorism. Fox News will cover white supremacist attacks, but in a calmer way; when Islamists carry out terrorist attacks, Fox News’ message is, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” And anti-Islam extremists like Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer and his ally, Pamela Geller, would have us believe that the terrorist threat posed by white supremacists and white nationalists and the terrorist threat posed by Islamist groups are in no way comparable. But one need only look at the history of white supremacist terrorism to realize how ignorant that claim is.

To be sure, the Islamist ideology of ISIS and al-Qaeda — which is anti-democratic, anti-feminist and anti-gay — is something that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation should keep a close eye on. But it’s important to stress that groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda are by no means typical of Islam on the whole; countless Muslims, as even President George W. Bush acknowledged, reject that ideology. And when it comes to terrorism, the claim that white supremacists are white nationalists are somehow less dangerous than radical Islamists is ludicrous.

White nationalists and white supremacists have carried out one terrorist attack after another in the Trump era.

item: in August 2019, more than 20 people were killed after a racist gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas and killed more than 20 people, mostly Latino. His motivation was to combat “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Item: in October 2018, a white supremacist/white nationalist gunman attacked the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people simply because they were Jewish.

Item: in 2018, domestic terrorist and Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc mailed a series of pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, including Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Item: in 2019, white nationalist Christopher Hasson, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, was arrested on gun and drug charges and — according to law enforcement — was planning a terrorist plot against critics of Trump. Hasson’s hit list, investigators said, ranged from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to media figures like CNN’s Chris Cuomo and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough (a former Republican congressman and Never Trump conservative).

Item: at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, neo-Nazi James Fields, Jr. rammed his vehicle into a group of counterdemonstrators and killed activist Heather Heyer. Fields was sentenced to life in prison.

Item: federal investigators have accused Steven Carrillo, a member of the far-right Boogaloo movement, of fatally shooting a security officer in Oakland on May 29.

But despite all that, Trump and his sycophants have downplayed the terrorist threat that white supremacists and white nationalists pose in the United States. Trump’s analysis of terrorism is painfully flawed. While he is correct that radical Islamists are a threat, Trump’s claim that left-wing Antifa is a terrorist movement is absolute nonsense: Antifa, for all their militant rhetoric, do not carry out the type of attacks that ISIS or the Ku Klux Klan are known for and do not fit the definition of terrorists. And Trump seriously downplays the threat posed by white nationalist extremists like QAnon and the Boogaloo movement (which calls for a race war).

Elizabeth Neumann, a conservative Republican who formerly served as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, has announced that she plans to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in November — and one of the main reasons is the fact that Trump has been downplaying the white nationalist/white supremacist threat. During a recent interview with National Public Radio, Neumann explained that for too long, Trump was uncomfortable with the term “domestic terrorism.”

Neumann told NPR, “The irony is that when (Trump) finally was comfortable with using the word domestic terrorism, it was in the context of Antifa and trying to exploit or sell a story that the looting and the violence that we have seen somewhat associated with peaceful protests is Antifa. And yet, if you look at the arrests that have occurred in the protests of the summer, it’s the Boogaloo movement — or it’s an association with QAnon. It’s the right side of the spectrum; it is not Antifa.”

Of course, white supremacist terrorism didn’t start in the Trump era. The Ku Klux Klan has been carrying out terrorist attacks for generations. But in the Trump era, white supremacists and white nationalists feel empowered by his racist rhetoric.

One of the most idiotic talking points one sometimes hears in the right-wing media is that the KKK are liberals. Never mind the fact that the KKK have a long history of targeting liberals and progressives for terrorist attacks.

The way to honor the memories of the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks is not by promoting Islamophobia. President George W. Bush, for all his blunders, was spot on when he characterized al-Qaeda as a disgrace to Islam. The victims of 9/11, 19 years later, are honored by showing compassion for the victims of terrorist attacks in general — included those killed or injured by white nationalist and white supremacist supporters of President Donald Trump.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/7-bombshell-allegations-in-a-damning-new-trump-administration-whistleblower-report/

a new whistleblower complaint from U.S. Department of Homeland Security employee Brian Murphy released Wednesday provided a slew of provocative and disturbing allegations of criminal behavior and abuse of authority within the Trump administration.

The document was released by the House Intelligence Committee, and it actually summarizes numerous previous complaints that Murphy, the principal deputy under secretary for the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, has previously filed with the inspector general.The complaint alleged that he has since faced professional retaliation from his superiors because of his previous allegations, despite the fact that he is protected from such actions by federal law.

While the retaliation is condemnable on its own, most striking are the series of allegations the complaint described. It paints a picture of a department completely warped by the president’s distorted priorities and determined to cater to his whims and prejudices, regardless of the facts —sometimes putting the country in danger.

Here are seven key details:

1. Murphy said he was illegally directed to manipulate intelligence assessments to support aggressive border policies.

On or about October 29, 2018, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that instructions from Mr. Taylor and Ms. Marquadt had been issued for Mr. Murphy to ensure the intelligence assessments he produced for Secretary Nielsen’s review supported the policy argument that large numbers of KSTs were entering the United States through the southwest border. Mr. Murphy declined to censor or manipulate the intelligence information, viewing it as an improper administration of an intelligence program, and stated to Mr. Glawe that doing what was being requested would constitute a felony.

2. The complaint makes a compelling case that former DHS Secretary Kirtjen Nielsen repeatedly and deliberately lied to Congress to exaggerate the threat at the border.

Murphy said that the secretary purposely tried to blur the distinction between “Known or Suspected Terrorists” (KSTs) and other categories of migrants, thereby misleadingly suggesting the border posed a greater threat of terrorism than it actually does. Even after he explained these distinctions to Nielsen, Murphy said, she consistently misled Congress about the matter:

Prior to Secretary Nielsen’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 20, 2018, Mr. Murphy attended a preparation session that went over the information within the proposed testimony. During that session, Mr. Murphy sought to clarify for Secretary Nielsen the distinction between a KST and a Special Interest Alien (“SIA”). An SIA is a term of art created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection meant to describe a category of migrants who come from countries where there is a significant terrorism threat but regarding whom there is no individualized basis for suspecting the person is themselves a terrorist. An SIA does not constitute a KST.

Notwithstanding the clarification provided by Mr. Murphy, he has a good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen subsequently provided on December 20, 2018, regarding KSTs constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. This assessment formed the basis of the anonymous OIG complaint Mr. Murphy submitted on November 2, 2018. On January 9, 2019, without consulting with Messrs. Glawe or Murphy, DHS issued a document – apparently crafted by Messrs. Wolf and Taylor, and Ms. Marquadt – entitled “Myth/Fact: Known and Suspected Terrorists/Special Interest Aliens”. The document contained erroneous information regarding the number of KSTs and SIAs encountered along the southwest border.

On March 5, 2019, Mr. Murphy participated in another preparation session with Secretary Nielsen, this time in advance of her testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security. Messrs. Wolf and Taylor were also present. During the session, Mr. Murphy provided Secretary Nielsen with documentation reflecting that the number of documented KSTs crossing the southwest border only consisted of no more than three individuals, not 3,755 individuals as she had previously attested to in her testimony on December 20, 2018. 3 Mr. Wolf and Mr. Taylor responded by saying Secretary Nielsen should claim the details were classified, state any KST crossing was one too many and deflect away from addressing the significant discrepancy in the data. Mr. Murphy advised Secretary Nielsen that he did not believe that was appropriate, and noted that the few “known” KSTs who were apprehended were derivative contacts, in so much as they merely had a name or phone number of a person who was known to be in contact with a terrorist. At that point, Mr. Murphy was removed from the meeting by Mr. Wolf. He then informed Messrs. Glawe and Hanna what transpired that evening.

It is Mr. Murphy’s good faith belief that the testimony Secretary Nielsen delivered on March 6, 2019, regarding KSTs again constituted a knowing and deliberate submission of false material information. Mr. Murphy outlined that assessment in his anonymous May 13, 2019, OIG complaint.

3. Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli illegally tried to distort intelligence reports he viewed as too favorable to asylum seekers, claiming they were concocted by the “Deep State,” the complaint said.

In December 2019, Mr. Murphy attended a meeting with Messrs. Cuccinelli and Glawe to discuss intelligence reports regarding conditions in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. The intelligence reports were designed to help asylum officers render better determinations regarding their legal standards. Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed the intelligence reports and he presented them to Mr. Cuccinelli in the meeting. Mr. Murphy defended the work in the reports, but Mr. Cuccinelli stated he wanted changes to the information outlining high levels of corruption, violence, and poor economic conditions in the three respective countries. Mr. Cuccinelli expressed frustration with the intelligence reports, and he accused unknown “deep state intelligence analysts” of compiling the intelligence information to undermine President Donald J. Trump’s (“President Trump”) policy objectives with respect to asylum. Notwithstanding Mr. Murphy’s response that the intelligence reports’ assessments were consistent with past assessments made for several years, Mr. Cuccinelli ordered Messrs. Murphy and Glawe to identify the names of the “deep state” individuals who compiled the intelligence reports and to either fire or reassign them immediately.

After the meeting, Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Glawe that Mr. Cuccinelli’s instructions were illegal, as well as constituted an abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program.

4. Under Secretary David Glawe was reportedly almost fired by Trump after he testified about the threat posed by Russian election interference.

In approximately September 2018, Mr. Glawe testified in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Mr. Murphy was not present during the testimony. Immediately following that hearing, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that he had been “challenged” by Republican members of the Committee regarding Mr. Glawe’s confirmation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Mr. Glawe was subsequently summoned to the White House a few days after his testimony. Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that Secretary Nielsen had warned him that President Trump had demanded Mr. Glawe be fired. However, Secretary Nielsen and White House Chief of Staff, John Kelly, had convinced President Trump to “give Glawe another chance”. After that meeting at the White House, Mr. Glawe informed Mr. Murphy that while he (Mr. Glawe) would continue to support him on most matters he (Mr. Murphy) was on his own when it came to election interference assessments.

5. Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf told Murphy to stop reporting on Russian interference and to focus on China and Iran, which Murphy believed “would put the country in substantial and specific danger,” the complaint said.

In mid-May 2020, Mr. Wolf instructed Mr. Murphy to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien. Mr. Murphy informed Mr. Wolf he would not comply with these instructions, as doing so would put the country in substantial and specific danger.

6. Officials were concerned that discussing the threats posed by white supremacists and Russian intelligence operations would reflect badly on Trump, and they preferred that Murphy’s team work on “violent ‘left-wing’ groups” like “antifa.”

These changes would clearly better match Trump’s preferred rhetoric, though not reality.

In March 2020, Mr. Murphy’s team at DHS I&A completed a Homeland [Threat] Assessment (“HTA”). Completion of the HTA was a requirement set forth by Acting Secretary Kevin McCleenan prior to his departure from DHS. Mr. Murphy was intimately involved in the editing and crafting of the HTA. Following its completion, the HTA was distributed by Mr. Glawe to Messrs. Wolf, Cuccinelli, and Gountanis. Shortly after the distribution, Mr. Glawe was informed that further distribution of the HTA was prohibited due to concerns raised by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding how the HTA would reflect upon President Trump. Two sections were specifically labeled as concerns: White Supremacy and Russian influence in the United States. Mr. Murphy stated to Mr. Glawe that this constituted an abuse of authority by Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli, and Mr. Glawe concurred with that assessment.

In May 2020, Mr. Glawe retired, and Mr. Murphy assumed the role of Acting Under Secretary. In May 2020 and June 2020, Mr. Murphy had several meetings with Mr. Cuccinelli regarding the status of the HTA. Mr. Cuccinelli stated that Mr. Murphy needed to specifically modify the section on White Supremacy in a manner that made the threat appear less severe, as well as include information on the prominence of violent “left-wing” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to make the requested modifications, and informed Mr. Cuccinelli that it would constitute censorship of analysis and the improper administration of an intelligence program.

…

During multiple meetings between the end of May 2020 and July 31, 2020, Mr. Murphy made protected disclosures to Messrs. Wolf and Cuccinelli regarding abuse of authority and improper administration of an intelligence program with respect to intelligence information on ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups operating throughout the United States. On each occasion, Mr. Murphy was instructed by Mr. Wolf and/or Mr. Cuccinelli to modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and “anarchist” groups. Mr. Murphy declined to modify any of the intelligence assessments based upon political rhetoric, and advised both officials he would only report accurate intelligence information as collected by DHS I&A.

7. Classified material

Much of what is concerning about the complaint is what it doesn’t mention. At several points, the complaint makes clear it can’t repeat the substance of allegations regarding DHS officials because the material involved is classified. This is particularly concerning because other parts of the complaint indicate that officials abused the classification system to cover up embarrassing or inconvenient facts.

Additional point: One interesting point to note is that Murphy tried to push back on some reporting that was critical of DHS because it supposedly implied falsely that DHS was collecting intelligence information on journalists and reporters.

Murphy claims this didn’t happen. Putting aside the particulars, this detail in the report may be seen as bolstering Murphy’s credibility. Defenders of the administration will likely argue he’s a disgruntled employee trying to hurt Trump and DHS, but it’s notable that he seems to be willing to defend the department when he thinks the facts have been unfairly reported. This suggests Murphy is someone who cares about getting to the truth, rather someone who is trying to hurt the president and the administration no matter the cost:

To be unequivocally clear, the press reporting was significantly flawed and, in many instances, contained completely erroneous assertions. For example, DHS I&A never knowingly or deliberately collected information on journalists, at least as far as Mr. Murphy is aware or ever authorized. There were, to be sure, efforts to track publicly available media reporting that included information that had been leaked from the U.S. Government, including publicly-accessible posts by journalists on social media, but DHS I&A did not seek authorization to and was not engaging in surveillance of journalists’ private data.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/this-ex-trump-official-is-exposing-the-presidents-complicity-in-far-right-terrorism

Alex Henderson September 2, 2020

no lnx

Many of President Donald Trump’s allies have downplayed the threat that far-right white nationalist and white supremacist groups pose from a domestic terrorism standpoint. But conservative Republican Elizabeth Neumann, who served as assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is warning that such groups do, in fact, pose a major threat in the United States — and Trump, according to Neumann, is inciting such groups.

Neumann, who voted for Trump in 2016 and served in DHS under his administration, recently came out in support of former Vice President Joe Biden in an ad by Republican Voters Against Trump. And during an interview with National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep, she stressed that Trump is encouraging extremist groups when he should be condemning them.

Neumann told NPR:

If you had a very clear voice at the top, from the president, from other senior leaders in the Republican Party, denouncing this and warning conservatives — warning Republicans — that these groups are trying to recruit you based on things that might sound like a typical conservative belief, but behind it is this insidious, ugly, evil thing, if we had more clear voices talking about it — it would somewhatinoculate people from that recruitment and that radicalization. But instead, we have the opposite effect. We have the president not only pretty much refusing to condemn, but throwing fuel on the fire, creating opportunities for more recruitment through his rhetoric.

…

He uses rhetoric to scare people. This is a known psychological tactic that if you get people to fear, they tend to follow you to the solution of ‘How are we going to save ourselves?’ And his answer is, ‘It’s me. If you vote for me, I will save you,’ … Well, for some people, the way that they think that they need to protect themselves, it’s more than just a vote for a president. It’s ‘let me go kill people.’

One of the worst terrorist attacks of the Trump era occurred on August 3, 2019, when a white nationalist gunman killed more than 20 people in El Paso, Texas, targeting his victims simply because most of them were Latino. Neumann, during the NPR interview, argued that the attacker was influenced by Trump’s rhetoric.

“When you see the El Paso attacker, his manifesto was citing language and rhetoric that comes from the president’s campaign rallies about an invasion from Mexico and how we’ve got to protect our country,” Neumann told NPR.

She compared the growth of the dangerous far-right movement to the development of ISIS:

“They borrowed from ISIS’s playbook and they learned how to radicalize people online,” she says. In the post-Sept. 11 United States, domestic extremists also adopted an emphasis on smaller attacks that could be carried out quickly with limited planning. What Neumann saw was “the pivot to bring your own weapon to the fight, use whatever you have: a knife, a gun, a vehicle, vehicle ramming,” she says. “We’ve seen a number of vehicle rammings this summer, in fact.”

But the White House was reluctant to name the threat directly.

“[If] we use the term ‘domestic terrorism’ or we talk about the white supremacist language, that seems to derail things at the White House,” she said.

Trump and his allies have been making the baseless claim that the Antifa movement is a source of domestic terrorism. But Antifa, for all their militant rhetoric, do not engage in or encourage the type of attacks favored by either white nationalist and white supremacist groups or radical Islamist groups like al-Qaeda, Boko Haram or ISIS (Islamic State, Iraq and Syria).

Neumann told NPR: “If you look at the people that have been arrested for” acts of violence recently, “by and large…. it’s the Boogaloo movement, or it’s an association with QAnon. It’s the right side of the spectrum. It is not Antifa….. The threat of domestic terrorism is not from Antifa. It is from these right-wing movements.”

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https://theintercept.com/2020/08/27/black-lives-matter-protesters:{-terrorism:(style="background-color:#ffcc66ff"):}:-felony-charges

prOSECUTORS AND LAWMAKERS in several states have responded to mass protests against police brutality by charging demonstrators with committing felonies, including terrorism charges. The trend of criminalizing protest has been on the uptick since the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access pipeline at Standing Rock, during and after which numerous states upped charges for protests “near critical infrastructure” as felonies.

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Since 2016, 14 states have enacted new laws to restrict the right to peaceful assembly,a**ccording to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks related state and federal legislation. But in the wake of the nationwide movement in support of Black lives, numerous states have increased the severity of criminal penalties for protesters along political lines and are prosecuting them more aggressively, as demonstrations continue with no sign of slowing down.

just last week, following more than 60 days of demonstrations outside the State Capitol, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a law that made it a felony to participate in some types of protests, including camping out overnight on state property.Charges for the same activity were previously classified as a misdemeanor. In Tennessee, people convicted of felonies lose their voting rights — making the new law a tool for disenfranchisement.

Earlier this month, police in Muscatine, Iowa, apprehended two people they say were attempting to drive a vehicle into the city Public Safety Building and got stuck on a planter. They charged both men with numerous counts, including terrorism. That follows an Oklahoma district attorney’s pursuit ofterrorism chargesagainst five young people, including three teenagers and two people in their 20s. The fourth-term prosecutor also threw felony charges at numerous other people in relation to protests and damage to local and police property in late May.

The terrorism charges reveal a “false equivalency between people who kill, and people who commit acts of property damage,” said Kate Chatfield, policy director at the Justice Collaborative, a policy and media organization focused on mass criminalization and incarceration. “Maybe not a great thing.”

“To say that the power of the state will be wielded in this way against political enemies is incredibly frightening,” Chatfield said, drawing a parallel to the post-9/11 era, when many people who had never committed an act of violence were prosecuted for terrorism. “Let’s not ignore the fact that we have a history of this in this country. A very recent history. And a continuing history, unfortunately.”

The nationwide protests prompted by George Floyd’s killing have continued through the summer, though at a lower intensity over the last month — before picking back up this week. Streets across the country swelled with demonstrators after police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot 29-year-old Jacob Blake in the back seven times, in front of his children. Blake is paralyzed from the waist down, his father told the Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday. Protesters burned down a state Department of Corrections building on Monday. The following night, armed white members of a militia group organized counterdemonstrations to protect local property. Video footage from Kenosha shows the militia members chatting with the police. Shortly after the video was captured, one member of the militia shot and killed two protesters, and left a third in serious condition. Police arrested 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse in Illinois on Wednesday and charged him with first-degree intentional homicide.

“When you hear our president talk about Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization, or antifa as a terrorist organization, it is the kind of thing that — his statement holds no weight in law, but it sends a message to prosecutors like this that they’ll be supported,” said Thomas Harvey, justice project director at the Advancement Project, a non-profit civil rights group. “And even more frighteningly, I think it sends a message to people like the militia members we saw in Kenosha, and gives them the state and the latitude to commit even more violence than what we see on a daily basis in this country against black and brown folks.”

IN SOME STATES where police have charged protesters en masse with felonies, prosecutors have swiftly dropped them, calling into question the reasoning behind the original charges.

In Louisville, Kentucky, police arrested 87 protesters who had staged a sit-in on the lawn of a home belonging to state Attorney General Daniel Cameron last month — part of an ongoing call for accountability in the killing of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old EMT whom three Louisville police officers shot at least eight timesinside her home in March. (The officers were acting on a no-knock warrant in connection with a suspect who did not live at Taylor’s residence. The police department fired one of the three officers who were involved in June. Local activists including Louisville Black Lives Matter worked with Taylor’s family to develop a list of demands, including firing, charging, and convicting the three officers.) Three days later, Jefferson County Attorney Mike O’Connell dismissed the felony charges and said his office would consider misdemeanors and other violations for prosecution at a later date. On Tuesday, Louisville police arrested another 68 protesters and charged them with obstructing a highway and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.

Earlier this month in Washington, D.C., police arrested 41 protesters in the Adams Morgan neighborhood on charges of felony rioting and assaulting police officers. The Metropolitan Police Department said in a tweet on August 14 that it only arrested people “engaged in rioting behaviors.” Between May 30 and June 1, District police arrested more than 100 people on charges of burglary, destroying property, and violating curfew, including at least 40 charges of felony rioting.Prosecutorsdropped most of the charges in both sets of arrests.

In Salt Lake City on Friday, a judge droppedpossible life sentence charges facing protesters who poured paint, broke windows, and posted signs at the District Attorney’s Office building, reducing some charges to lower-class felonies and misdemeanors. In June, West Valley police and FBI agents arrested two men in Salt Lake who had allegedly threatened officers and were headed to protests armed with multiple weapons. Prosecutors later charged one man with terrorism.

Also in early June, police officers in Columbia, South Carolina, arrested more than 80 protesters and charged three men with instigating a riot, typically a low-level felony or misdemeanor.

Elected officials participating in the protest have also been caught in the crackdown.In Portsmouth, Virginia, on Monday, sheriff’s deputies delivered a summons charge to the vice mayor, after a resident pressed misdemeanor criminal charges against her for calling on the Portsmouth police chief to resign. Earlier this month, police brought felony charges against the Virginia State Senate pro tempore, a local school board member, local NAACP leaders, and public defenders for injury to a monument and conspiracy, in relation to the destruction of confederate statues in June.

Federal authorities have also carried out their own crackdown on demonstrations, arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon, and New York City in recent months. The FBI has opened some 300 domestic terrorism investigations since late May. Last year, according to the agency, most federal arrests for domestic terrorism involved white supremacy, though the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit has also investigated a fictional “black identity extremists” movement. The FBI has also quietly investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement in recent years, The Intercept reported.

AMONG THE MOST serious recent charges against protesters are those of terrorism in Oklahoma. There,Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater charged three teenagers and two other people in their 20s with terrorism related to their alleged activity during protests in late May.

“We found it especially inappropriate — and unconstitutional — because it was made with the explicit purpose of silencing protesters who are standing up for Black lives,” American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma Staff Attorney Megan Lambert told The Intercept, regarding the recent terrorism charges. “We didn’t even see terrorism charges for the Murrah bombing,” she added, referring to the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City.

Read Our Complete CoverageProtests for Black Lives

The terrorism charges, which were filed in June and July, stem from allegations that protesters set fire to a sheriff’s van and caused damage to a local bail bond business. Last month, Prater charged two other teenagers with terrorism in connection to demonstrations at the end of May, bringing the total to five. The DA also charged multiple people with rioting, assaulting officers, andat least five others for incitement to riot for painting murals in the city’s downtown area in June.

Oklahoma Democratic Party Chair Alicia Andrews, the ACLUof Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City Black Lives Matter founder and Executive Director Rev. T. Sheri Dickerson slammed Prater’s move, saying that the charges of terrorism were far too harsh. During a press conference early last month, Andrews said she didn’t condone vandalism or destruction of property but that Prater was using the charges to silence protesters. “‘Use your First Amendment right in a way that we don’t like, and we will ruin your future.’ These charges are an attempt to send a message, ‘We’re tired of hearing about Black lives,’” she said.

Prater took office in 2007 and is currently serving his fourth term as DA. His current term ends in 2023.He started his career in law enforcement at age 19 as a deputy sheriff, according to his bio. “These people are speaking out against violence that Prater himself has largely been complicit in,” Lambert said. “This is just another example in a pattern from David Prater’s office of upholding white supremacy.” Prater’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Last May, Prater declined to charge officers who killed 17-year-old Isaiah Lewis, who was in the middle of a mental health crisis when police shot him in Edmond. Over the last few months, local activists have brought renewed attention to Lewis’s killing, which has been a focus of some demonstrations in the area. Other cases have gotten less attention, Dickerson pointed out. Derrick Scott, 42, died last May after being apprehended and restrained by Oklahoma City police. In video footage of the arrest released in June, Scott tells officers he can’t breathe and asks them repeatedly to give him his medicine. An officer replies, “I don’t care.”

“The Scott family is not receiving any justice,” Dickerson said, adding that Scott’s killing was eerily similar to Floyd’s. Earlier this month, police shot 32-year-old James Harmon in the head, saying that he had a weapon in his hand (Oklahoma is an open-carry state). Harmon is still in the hospital.

“Systemic racism, institutional racism, and white supremacy is so deep-rooted,” Dickerson said, agreeing with Lambert’s characterization of Prater’s office. “There’s really nothing more Oklahoman than that.”

“This was a state that was formed basically for them to literally lump Natives and Blacks here together,” she said. “And so it has always been very intentional and deliberate, for us to be victims of what I consider state-sanctioned violence and state-targeted violence.”

For the Oklahoma City teens and young adults facing terror charges, “what’s next is they fight for their lives,” Lambert said. The statute carries a maximum of life in prison. “Many of these charged protesters are young teenagers. … So they are facing spending their entire lives in prison simply for, in some cases, attending a protest to try and hold police accountable.” Criminal defense attorneys are still working to get those charges dropped or significantly reduced.

“Some of the young people were saying, ‘We should go to Kenosha and stand with the young people there,” Dickerson said. “And I was like, ‘How do you choose?’”

DHS Takes to the Streets

Four days after Floyd's murder, amid street protests in Oakland, California, an officer for the Federal Protective Service was gunned down and killed outside the federal building he was guarding. Cuccinelli called the killing of the DHS agency officer "an act of domestic terrorism," and pledged that the department would take an active role in response to the violence.

"We will stand behind our law-enforcement officers here in the department and all over America," he said.

Six weeks later, when two men were captured and charged in the Oakland assault, federal prosecutors detailed evidencethat the men were associated with a right-wing extremist group, the Boogaloo Boys, and that they had taken advantage of the chaos of the anti-racism protests to stage their assault. That fact was lost in the executive order Trump signed on June 26, expanding DHS authority to respond to "anarchists and left-wing extremists." Trump directed DHS to provide personnel to assist in the protection of "federal monuments, memorials, statues or property."

Within days, DHS officers were deployed to Portland, Oregon, where Black Lives Matter protests had continued into July, stoked by tensions that have raged for years between leftists and white extremists in the city. [pix]

The conflict escalated with the arrival of the federal officers, and while many protesters were peaceful, others in the crowd tossed fireworks at officers and pointed high-powered lasers at federal agents, temporarily blinding them. Agents clubbed protestors with batons, used tear gas to disperse the crowds, and forced protestors into unmarked vans to detain them for questioning. An unarmed 26-year-old protesterwho was holding a radio over his head suffered a fractured skull and brain injury when a DHS officer shot him in the forehead with a rubber bullet.

DHS compiled and distributed to law enforcement "intelligence reports" on journalists who were covering the clash in Portland, a practice Wolf halted after The Washington Post reported on it. Politico later reported that the intelligence-gathering on journalists occurred after Cuccinelli relaxed the civil liberties oversight process at the agency.

ref

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-defendants-charged-murder-and-aiding-and-abetting-slaying-federal-protective-service

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Two Defendants Charged with Murder and Aiding and Abetting in Slaying of Federal Protective Service Officer at Oakland Courthouse Building

Defendants Allegedly Opened Fire on Unsuspecting Officers Guarding Courthouse at Federal Building As Public Demonstrations Continued Only Blocks Away

At a press conference held this morning at the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse in Oakland, the Department of Justice announced that murder and attempted murder charges have been filed against Steven Carrillo, the alleged gunman in the May 29, 2020, drive-by shooting that resulted in the death of Protective Security Officer David Patrick Underwood and injuries to a second security officer. The Department of Justice also announced aiding and abetting charges against Robert Alvin Justus Jr., the driver of the vehicle from which Carrillo is alleged to have attacked the guards.

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The charges against Carrillo and Justus were brought in two criminal complaints, one filed against each defendant. According to the complaints, at approximately 9:27 p.m., on May 29, 2020, a white Ford Econoline-style van parked directly across the street from the federal building in Oakland on Jefferson Street. The van was parked facing the guard post where Officer Underwood and his partner that evening stood guard to protect the building. The van was on the southeast corner in the spot closest to the intersection with an unobstructed view of the guard post. Shortly after the van parked, a man emerged from the driver’s seat and walked around the area conducting reconnaissance for approximately ten minutes. Then, at approximately 9:43 p.m., the exterior lights of the van turned on and the van moved north on Jefferson Street toward the guard post. The passenger-side sliding door opened, and Carrillo allegedly fired multiple rounds from a firearm toward the guard post, killing Officer Underwood and injuring his partner.

The incident set off an eight-day manhunt that came to a crescendo after a witness reported an abandoned white Ford van in Ben Lomond, Calif. The van reportedly contained what appeared to be ammunition, firearms, and bomb-making equipment and an effort apparently was made to alter the van’s appearance with spray paint and a wheel covering to disguise a missing hubcap. Nevertheless, evidence from the van, led deputies from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office to Carrillo’s residence inBen Lomond. There, Carrillo allegedly opened fire on the deputies when they arrived at his property, killing one deputy and injuring a second. During the attack there was also an explosion on the property.

The complaints describe a subsequent odyssey during which Carrillo was shot and fled the scene initially on foot, and then by carjacking a vehicle on a nearby highway. The chase came to an end when, still bleeding from his hip, Carrillo was taken into custody.

Additional evidence was recovered at Carrillo’s Ben Lomond residence included an AR-15-style short-barreled rifle fitted with a binary trigger that fired one round of 9mm ammunition at the pull of the trigger and another round at the release of the trigger. The rifle was fitted with a silencerthat suppressed the sound of gunfire from the rifle. In addition, Carrillo appears to have used his own blood to write various phrases on the hood of the car that he carjacked. The phrases relate to an extremist ideology that promotes inciting a violent uprising through use of militias.

Cell phone records from Carrillo’s phone identified Justus as a person with whom Carrillo may have been communicating in the days leading up to the drive-by shooting attack in Oakland. On June 11, while the FBI had Justus under surveillance, travelled to the Federal Building in San Francisco, met with the FBI, and was thereafter arrested for his involvement in the shooting, including hisrole as the driver of the vehicle.

The charges contained in the criminal complaints areallegations only. Carrillo and Justus are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/23/revealed-how-the-fbi-targeted-environmental-activists-in-domestic-terror-investigations

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2019/nov/25/keystone-xl-protests-pipeline-activism-environment

no lnx pix

Keystone XL: police discussed stopping anti-pipeline activists 'by any means'

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