domestic ctr- terror -ism

SEE DOMESTIC TERROR 2 12 22

REPORT MEMORY HOLED?

see violence

see neo-nazi white supremist/nationalist

see gubmint, see RW etc

AN 8 26 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.

1/19 possibly redumbdent, but intent is to contrast who is getting investigated/ charged and who ain't

see eco-terror econ-terror brown and AA bucket brigade in cancer alley and dapl NatAm

too many disambig nodes? problem is there is legit use and non-; devil term

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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

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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AN 12 25

On my Sirius XM program, I discussed the almost comical hearing this month in which a top FBI official, flanked by dog-killing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, claimed antifa — short for anti-fascist — was the “number one terrorist” threat in the United States. Yet he couldn’t answer repeated questions from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) about where the group’s headquarters are, or how many people are actually in the group:

Michael Glasheen, operations director of the FBI’s National Security Branch, said antifa was the agency’s “primary concern” and “the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing.”Glasheen did not answer a question from the top Democrat at the hearing, U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, about the group’s location. When asked about the number of members, Glasheen said it was “very fluid” and that “investigations are active.”

“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee to say something that you can’t prove,” Thompson said to Glasheen. “I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did.”

Later, Glasheen was asked if the Proud Boys were still on the FBI’s list of domestic extremist organizations — after they were added in 2018, under Trump’s first term — but he didn’t answer, just saying, “We’re in the process right now of changing our categories for domestic terrorism.”

After I played the clips of the exchanges and commented on the ludicrousness of this — and the dangers — Steven from Los Angeles, clearly a MAGA supporter, called the program to disagree with me, claiming antifa is a terror threat he has witnessed firsthand.

Antifa of course doesn’t exist as any organized nationwide group. Some people engaging in protest call themselves ant-fascist, and often take on the name antifa — even carrying banners and other identifiers — but they mostly act independently of others who might use the term to to identify themselves.

The majority of those who call themselves antifa are opposed to violence, per the Department of Homeland Security under the Biden administration. Even if some people have called themselves antifa and have engaged in or inspired violent actions in one place or another during protests (which has happened), that doesn’t mean there’s an organized group engaged in actual organized terror plots.

:{But Steven didn’t get that,

Steven:Okay, so I, um, I disagree with you, uh, living on the West Coast. Whether it’s antifa, whether you want to call it, whatever organization it is. But, I mean, they’ve ruined the streets of Los Angeles. San Francisco is a dump. Um, uh, Oregon is a dump. Uh, Seattle, Washington.MS:Who who did this? Who ruined the streets? What did they do?

Steven: It was. Well, whatever organization you want to call it. Uh, the people that were protesting on the streets.

MS:You said antifa.

Steven: Well, that's who they're supposed to be, right?

After I pressed him on what they’re doing he said that in Portland and other places, “These people are on the streets every day. They're yelling at cars. The traffic is stopped.”

Yelling at cars? Yes, that’s what he said.

MS: Okay, Steven, that's not terrorism.Steven: What is that? Terrorism. The stores are all closed.

MS: No, Stephen, that's not terrorism. You could tell me about vandalism. You could tell me about protests. You could even tell me about rioting, if you want, which we haven't seen.

But a terrorist and a terrorist organization are highly coordinated groups of people with plots and plans to take down the government or send a message to a group of people, and they engage in mass violence, bombings, mass shootings, kidnappings.

Why is our government spending all this money on this? You're telling me about what? Graffiti in Los Angeles?

He went on about how yelling at protests and throwing things — not explaining more — was terrorism.

But then when I brought up actual terrorism — January 6, police officers bludgeoned, the Proud Boys making threats, and the Oath Keepers, per law enforcement, stockpiling weapons at a hotel in Virginia, with a plan to bring them up the Potomac to take the Capitol — he had a very different answer.

Steven: You know what? I don't think we'll ever know the truth of that whole situation.

Oh yeah, it got a little hot from there before I ended the call Listen in and let me know your thoughts!

*Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.

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an 5 25

Salon Reporter Amanda Marcotte says director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is knowingly cultivating violence from supporters of President Donald Trump by inflating the facts of a federal memo on the role COVID-19 disinformation played in domestic terrorism.

Marcotte says Gabbard declassified the memo and took it to the right-wing punditry circuit, pushing the “flat-out lie” that President Joe Biden was labeling Americans as "terrorists" because they opposed COVID-19 mitigation measures like masks and vaccines. The memo does not say this, and Biden did no such thing, says Marcotte, but by pushing this lie, Gabbard is encouraging the kind of radicalization “that does lead to domestic terrorism.”

“For those who bother to read the 2021 memo, the report isn't surprising, but simply stating the obvious fact that far-right extremists ‘threatened or plotted violence against the healthcare sector and state and local government officials’ in 2020,” Marcotte writes.

IFrame Content

The memo anticipated there could be a secondary round of threats in 2021 in response to the COVID-19 vaccine, but it did not equate the U.S. anti-vaccine movement with terrorism. Rather, the memo was careful to identify members of organized militias and white supremacist groups as using anti-vaccine sentiment as an excuse to foment violent threats.

“The average anti-vaccination MAGA rube is not part of this memo,” Marcotte said. “They may be disease vectors, but no, the FBI did not think they were terrorists.”

But that did not stop Gabbard from appearing on Fox News last week and for "using their First Amendment rights" and to label them a "domestic terror threat."

A footnote on Page 4 of the memo declared, "The mere advocacy of political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophical embrace of violent tactics may not constitute violent extremism and are constitutionally protected." Yet Gabbard “keeps shamelessly lying about this,” says Marcotte.

“She retweeted right-wing pundit Michael Shellenberger'sdeclaration that "the Biden administration viewed millions of Americans as a terrorist threat." She also retweeted Cain insisting that the Biden administration labeled ‘some COVID-19 opponents 'domestic violent extremists,' as if it was their views on COVID-19 alone that drew the label.

Marcotte argues the jingoistic wordplay gives cover to an administration declaring its own war on free speech as Trump moves “to arrest people who have broken no laws, simply because they voice opinions he doesn't like.” She is also encouraging more violent extremism by creating a victim narrative in the MAGA community “that extremists can use to justify violence.”

“Her story is that they are innocent people unjustly targeted by the nefarious Biden administration. Having been recast as victims, any violence they commit now can be narrated as 'self-defense' against the imaginary Democrats coming for their free speech rights,” Marcotte said.

Read the full Salon report here.

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3 23 yahoo greg c also https://www.**opednews**.com/articles/East-Palestine-Train-Derai-Democracy_Democracy-History_Real-Democracy_Train-Crash-230309-199.html

Norfolk Southern Corporation train derailment and subsequent hazardous chemical release in and beyond East Palestine, Ohio are the inevitable result of multiple anti-democratic realities.

Many are interconnected and are the same for the roughly 1000 train derailments per year.

Private ownership of railroads

Norfolk Southern Corporation’s record earnings in 2022 benefited its top managers, speculators and investors. Maximizing profits have been prioritized over necessary investments in technology upgrades and worker safety. The Railroad Workers United in response is calling for public ownership of railroads, as they once were in WWI.

Lack of worker power

Strikes are powerful tactics of workers to exert leverage against management on safety issues and fair treatment. Unions representing rail workers have been virtually unable to strike since passage of the Railway Labor Act in 1926, which gives the government, specifically the President and Congress, vast powers to force workers to accept alternative means of resolving disputes.

No community rights

Communities have little authority to control material coming into or even passing through their jurisdictions by trains or trucks if that material can be defined as “commerce,” based on the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Ohio state and E. Palestine officials weren’t even notified the Norfolk Southern train that derailed was carrying vinyl chloride, ethylhexyl acrylate and other highly toxic chemicals.

Corporate campaign contributions

The Railroad industry has poured $85 million into federal candidate campaigns, political parties and outside spending groups since 2002. Norfolk Southern’s political investments have been $17 million since 1990.At the state level, the corporation invested $98,000 into Ohio political races since 2018, with Gov. Mike DeWine (who at first didn’t call for federal assistance following the E. Palestine disaster since he didn’t see a problem) being the largest recipient. At the very least, political campaign contributions buy access to public officials; at worst, buys favors.

Corporate lobbying

The railroad industry invested $24.6 million to employ 265 reported lobbyiststo influence the federal government in 2022 – Norfolk Southern’s portion was $1.8 million. Rail lobbyists and $6 million from the rail industry to GOP campaigns in 2017 effectively reversed requirements that rail cars carrying hazardous flammable materials have modern electronic braking systems. Lobbyists have sought for fewer workers on trains, trains to be longer and heavier, and reduced fines for penalties– as well as against installing modern electronic braking systems, paid sick leave for workers and having to define trains carrying hazardous chemicals like the Norfolk Southern that derailed in E. Palestine as “high hazard,” which would increase additional safety requirements, costs and public notification.

Supreme Court decisions

The High Court decided that corporate entities have the constitutional right to contribute to political campaigns. This has permitted corporations like Norfolk Southern to corrupt the political process favorable to their interests, such as the previously mentioned laws and regulations profitable to railroads, Supreme Court-granted corporate Fourth Amendment search and seizure rights prevent surprise inspections of corporate property like trains meant to protect workers and communities.

Ineffective and/or captured regulatory agencies

Public safety inspections are not only limited by constitutional rights, but by regulatory agency funding. The Federal Railroad Administration, the major railroad regulatory agency, has only 400 inspectors. This has forced the FHA to increasingly allow railroad corporations to inspect their own trains, tracks and signals. The EPA recently announced that its requiring Norfolk Southern to directly test for dioxins in East Palestine. Where’s the public accountability when, in effect, an entity guilty of crime gets to be the prosecutor, judge and jury?

Criminalization of protest

Forty-five states have considered 265 “anti-protest” bills, 39 of which have already passed in 20 states since 2017. Penalties of felonies serve as a deterrent to individuals to attend public events and send the message that those who protest must be extremists. This mindset is reflected in the reaction by federal and Ohio “law enforcement” agencies to therecent visit of whistleblower Erin Brockovich to E. Palestine. A report by the agencies "assesses that special interest extremist groups will continue to call for changes in governmental policy, which may lead to protests in/around East Palestine and/or at the Statehouse in Columbus.”

The East Palestine tragedy is sadly just a symptom of current political realities and calls for fundamental systemic change.

Enacting the We the People Amendment, HJR48 that would abolish all corporate constitutional rights and political money defined as free speech, is urgent. But fundamental self-governance goes beyond the amendment.

Independent people's movements led by individuals who’ve been historically treated unjustly is a prerequisite for how to get real democracy on track – for the very first time.

ref

https://news.yahoo.com/ohio-law-enforcement-links-erin-brockovich-to-potential-for-special-interest-terrorism-threat-in-east-palestine-000636477.html

ohio law enforcement issued a report late last month warning that events planned in East Palestine by the environmental activist Erin Brockovich could prompt a terrorist threat from violent extremists,according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.

Dated Feb. 24 and distributed to law enforcement agencies by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Ohio Statewide Terrorism Analysis & Crime Center Terrorism Analysis Unit Situational Awareness [STACC TAU] report obtained by Yahoo News "assesses that special interest extremist groups will continue to call for changes in governmental policy, which may lead to protests in/around East Palestine and/or at the Statehouse in Columbus.”

The report then singles out the reaction by Brockovich, a whistleblower who helped build a successful lawsuit against the California utility company Pacific Gas and Electric in a case involving contaminated groundwater, to the Feb. 3 train derailment and release of toxic chemicals in East Palestine.

"On 24 February, environmental activist Erin BrockovichUSPER [United States person] is scheduled to be in East Palestine to explain residents’ legal rights. Brokovich has urged the community to use common sense and ask questions. Brockovich is also placing blame solely on Norfolk Southern. The STACC TAU assess this event could potentially increase tensions within the community.”

The report assesses the risk posed by Brockovich and other activist groups that have planned events in East Palestine in the wake of the Norfolk Southern train derailment and the controlled burn of vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic ingredient used in the production of plastic products after the derailment.

“According to the FBI, special interest terrorism differs from traditional right-wing and left-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect widespread political change,” the report states. “Such extremists conduct acts of politically motivated violence to force segments of society, including the general public, to change attitudes about issues considered important to the extremists’ cause.”

Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 6. (NTSB Gov/Handout via Reuters)]

Brockovich, who was played by the actress Julia Roberts in the 2000 film named after her, was in East Palestine on Thursday afternoon to host an event. She did not immediately respond to Yahoo News’ request for comment.

This situational awareness report is highly problematic, said former FBI agent Mike German, who worked on a recent Brennan Center report about issues with DHS fusion centers.

“Obviously, there is no reason to have included Erin Brockovich's name or a description of her advocacy in a law enforcement intelligence report, much less a ‘situational awareness’ report by a state fusion center's terrorism analysis unit,” German told Yahoo News. “Almost all of the activity described in this report is rightly protected by the First Amendment and poses no threat of harm, and therefore should be of no interest to terrorism intelligence units.”

Contacted by Yahoo News, the Ohio Department of Public Safety denied that it had issued a report identifying Brockovich as a possible terrorist threat.

“Erin Brokovich is listed as an ‘environmental activist’ and the brief mention of her falls under the heading of ‘various individuals or groups have responded to the train derailment,’” the Ohio Department of Public Safety’s Jay Carey told Yahoo News in an email. “The fact that she is an ‘environmental activist’ that has ‘responded to the train derailment’ is factual and has been well documented by media accounts. Any inference otherwise is incorrect.”

DHS posted the report on its intelligence sharing platform on Feb. 28, making it available to its more than 150,000 local, state and federal police and other partners nationwide.

“Fusion Centers are state and locally owned and operated centers that actively share, analyze, and operationalize threat-related information between federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, and private sector partners,” a DHS spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. “DHS supports Fusion Centers through the presence of DHS personnel and information sharing technology, but DHS does not run or operate Fusion Centers.”

The report also referred to the environmental group Earthjustice, which, it stated “called on Governor DeWineUSPER to declare a state of emergency," pointing to the "contaminated waterways" and subsequent deaths of thousands of fish.

[Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, right front, speaks to concerned residents as the host of a town hall meeting at East Palestine High School on Thursday. (Michael Swensen/Getty Images)

“Earthjustice works with communities across the country to protect people’s health,” Debbie Chizewer, managing attorney for Earthjustice’s Midwest Regional office, told Yahoo News.

“In East Palestine, Earthjustice is supporting partners that have been exposed to toxic chemicals as they call for much needed resources, monitoring, cleanup of the contamination, as well as protections to prevent disasters like the explosion of a chemical-carrying cargo train in the future.”

The report obtained by Yahoo News stated that East Palestine police and fire department officials reported having received threats but had determined they were not credible. It was not clear, however, why they were mentioned in the report.

“This report should not have described any noncriminal activity, particularly after it stated that the terrorism analysis unit is ‘unaware of any credible direct threats regarding the East Palestine train derailment,’” German said. “This flawed reporting only clogs our national intelligence networks with inappropriate materials that undermine effective counterterrorism and law enforcement analysis, by overwhelming intelligence analysts with unhelpful misinformation that dulls the response to genuine threat warnings.”

Former DHS Acting Undersecretary John Cohen agreed that the inclusion of Brockovich’s name was, as he put it, “a bit problematic,” and said that law enforcement needed to be more careful in describing what is and is not considered a threat.

“When reporting on online or other activity that may be protected speech, authorities need to be very clear how that speech relates to threat-related activities or other public safety issues,” Cohen told Yahoo News. “It’s fine to catalog what different people are saying, but from a law enforcement perspective, they need to be clear where there is a nexus with the need for an operational response.”

an 2 23

A new report from the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism reveals that all extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists. More than four out of five extremist-related murders last year were committed by white supremacist right-wing extremists. The report finds that nearly all extremist-related mass killings were committed by right-wing extremists, and warns the number of those mass murders "is of growing concern."

"All the extremist-related murders in 2022 were committed by right-wing extremists of various kinds," the ADL’s Center on Extremism (COE) reports, "who typically commit most such killings each year but only occasionally are responsible for all (the last time this occurred was 2012)."

"Left-wing extremists engage in violence ranging from assaults to fire-bombings and arsons, but since the late 1980s have not often targeted people with deadly violence."

The report adds: "White supremacists commit the greatest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists. Again, this is primarily due to mass shootings. Only one of the murders was committed by a right-wing anti-government extremist—the lowest number since 2017."

Last year, COE notes, "domestic extremists killed at least 25 people in the U.S., in 12 separate incidents. This represents a decrease from the 33 extremist-related murders documented in 2021 and is comparable to the 22 extremist-related murders in 2020. It continues the recent trend of fewer extremist-related killings after a five-year span of 47-78 extremist-related murders per year (2015-2019)."

The Associated Press, pointing to the "especially high number" of extremist killings "linked to white supremacy" reports they "include a racist mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, that left 10 Black shoppers dead and a mass shooting that killed five people at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado."

The "main threat in the near future will likely be white supremacist shooters, the report found," The AP adds. "The increase in the number of mass killing attempts, meanwhile, is one of the most alarming trends in recent years, said Center on Extremism Vice President Oren Segal."

In a separate article on that LGBT nightclub mass shooting, Club Q, also published Thursday, the AP reports the "22-year-old accused of carrying out the deadly mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs in November ran a neo-Nazi website and used gay and racial slurs while gaming online, a police detective testified Wednesday."

"Anderson Lee Aldrich also posted an image of a rifle scope trained on a gay pride parade and used a bigoted slur when referring to someone who was gay, Detective Rebecca Joines said."

blindsided Jan 6 b/c routinely ignored?!

just security timeline https://www.justsecurity.org/74138/incitement-timeline-year-of-trumps-actions-leading-to-the-attack-on-the-capitol/

Later reports suggest that DHS officials were directed to make sympathetic statements toward Rittenhouse. It is unclear whether these directions originated at the White House or within the DHS press office, NBC reports.

September 8, 2020: Brian Murphy, a whistleblower in the Department of Homeland Security submits a complaint that claims that the two most senior DHS officials tried to suppress threat assessments of white supremacy because it would reflect poorly on President Trump.

The complaint alleges that acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli wanted Murphy 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.” The complaint also alleges that DHS leadership asked Murphy to “modify intelligence assessments to ensure they matched up with the public comments by President Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups.”

The complaint garners wide media attention.

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.

Tags: Anti-LGBTQ Columbus Proud Boys Proud Boys

12 22

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 16:{th:(style="position:relative;vertical-align:baseline;top:-0.5em"):}: 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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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

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 between 45 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

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 ... ›

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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

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]....

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

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's Rep. 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."

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:

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

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]

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.

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.

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.”

https://theintercept.com/2020/08/27/black-lives-matter-protesters:{-terrorism:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:-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.

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 Coverage:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal;display:block;letter-spacing:0px;margin-bottom:5px;text-transform:capitalize"):}::{Protests for Black Lives:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:block"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;width:420px;float:left;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0px;max-width:420px"):}:

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.

...

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...

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'

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/29/antifa-trump-domestic-terrorism/

fOR WEEKS, President Donald Trump and top advisers like Attorney General William Barr have sought to blame antifa for sporadic violence and rioting during the ongoing Black Lives Matters protests. With little evidence, Trump even threatened to label antifa, an amorphous left-wing movement opposed to fascism, as a domestic terrorist organization.

But the president’s strategy of pinning blame on antifa in quick, broad brushstrokes is undercut not only by constitutional hurdles and conflicting evidence on the ground, but also by a sobering report from his own intelligence officials that calls for an entirely revamped approach to domestic extremism. The analysis from the National Counterterrorism Center, which has not been previously reported, offers an unusually self-critical view of the gaps and weaknesses in combating homegrown terror threats, and it suggests that the focus needs to be on individual actors who break the law, rather than groups.

The report raises [new and ] troubling questions about the government’s ability to head off a major attack from extremists at home. In stark terms, it depicts a system ill-equipped to deal with the rising threat of domestic extremists because of splintered approaches by different agencies.

The report warned bluntly that “there is no whole-of-government [domestic terrorism] threat picture.” Federal officials cannot even agree on what to call violent extremists inside the United States, their efforts are “rarely integrated,” and combating the “potent” threat is not a top priority in some agencies, said the report, which grew out of a high-level summit of government officials and outside experts last fall.

As a result, intelligence officials are hampered by a “lack of analytic research” and formal threat assessments to draw on in their work, the report said, and that gap in valuable intelligence “in turn reinforces the lack of policymaker prioritization.”

The six-page report summarized the key takeaways from a highly unusual two-day conference on domestic terrorism organized last September outside Washington, D.C., by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. It brought together more than 120 experts on the subject, including officials across the federal government, as well as local law enforcement officers, academics, and private-sector analysts.

Joseph Maguire, who was then the acting director of national intelligence, spoke to the group himself and deemed the event a “call to action” to confront the growing domestic terror threat, according to the report.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence refused to comment on the report, and a spokesperson declined to say what steps intelligence officials had taken in response to the findings. The report from the counterterrorism center, which is part of the DNI’s office, is dated January of this year and was posted online by the office in March.

a number of the outside experts invited to participate the conference said that the government’s acknowledgement of shortcomings in identifying domestic extremists was a significant step by an administration that had shown little interest in the problem. But turnover and tumult among Trump’s intelligence advisers make it unclear what changes, if any, may take place as a result of the findings.

“It’s true there’s no whole-of-government approach, and that needs to change,” former Justice Department official Mary McCord, who gave a presentation at the invitation-only conference, said in an interview. “If you’re going to get serious about thwarting domestic terrorism plots, you’re going to have to use more tools than we do.”

The findings come as intelligence officials have been grappling not only with far-right violence connected to the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, but also with conflicting messages from Trump and his top advisers about the real source of the violence.

SINCE THE PROTESTS began, Trump has tried to cast blame on antifa and what he called “a lot of radical left, bad people” for occasional bursts of violence during what have been largely peaceful demonstrations. Beyond threatening to designate antifa as a terrorist organization — a move constitutional scholars say would likely be illegal — he went so far as to fuel a baseless conspiracy theory about a 75-year-old Buffalo, New York, protester badly hurt by police, accusing the injured man of being a covert “antifa provocateur.”

Rudy Giuliani, the president’s private counsel and personal adviser, blamed “antifa, Black Lives Matter, the communists, and their allies” for episodes of violence and destruction around the country in an appearance last week on Fox News.

[pix People, including those with the “Boogaloo” movement, demonstrate against business closures due to concern about Covid-19, at the State House in Concord, N.H., on May 2, 2020.

Photo: Michael Dwyer/AP]

Barr, meanwhile, declared at the very start of the protests that “the violence instigated and carried out by antifa and other similar groups in connection with the rioting is domestic terrorism and will be treated accordingly.” He announced on Friday that he was creating a federal task force to confront “anti-government extremists engaged in indefensible acts of violence designed to undermine public order.” He again pointed the finger at antifa, but this time, he also named a far-right group: supporters of the so-called Boogaloo movement, a white extremist group that envisions a coming “civil war.”

But there is little evidence to back up Trump administration claims that antifa is driving the violence. Instead, law enforcement officials on the ground point mainly to the far-right groups — principally the “Boogaloo Boys” — for stoking violence and rioting.

In Oakland, authorities accused an active-duty Air Force sergeant who declared himself a Boogaloo of ambushing two federal security officers near a protest, killing one and wounding the other. And in Las Vegas, three men aligned with that same white extremist group — all of them military veterans — were arrested at a protest and charged with plotting to detonate Molotov cocktails and stoke violence among the crowds of protesters.

Even before the Black Lives Matters protests, a string of deadly attacks against minorities by white supremacists — including the rampage last August at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which killed 22 people, most of them Latinos — had prompted the FBI and DHS to elevate the threat posed by domestic extremists. The agencies put them on a par with foreign-based terrorist groups like the Islamic State and other Islamist extremists, which have been the dominant focus of counterterrorism officials since the September 11 attacks.

One of the most alarming far-right plots emerged just last week, and like several earlier episodes, it involved an American soldier.

Armed Vigilantes Antagonizing Protesters Have Received a Warm Reception From Police

Federal prosecutors said that a22-year-old Army private from Kentucky named Ethan Melzer aligned himself with a violent neo-Nazi group and sent along sensitive military information about deployment schedules to facilitate an attack on his own unit in Turkey. In private chat messages, Meltzer told members of the neo-Nazi group, known as the “RapeWaffen Division” or “Order of the Nine Angles,” that he wanted to inflict mass casualties and start “a new war,” even if it meant he himself might be killed, according to his indictment. The authorities said that Melzer confessed after his arrest last month and “declared himself to be a traitor against the United States whose conduct was tantamount to treason.”

Investigators with the FBI and the military appear to have had a confidential source within the neo-Nazi group whom they used to find out about the plot as it was being hatched, according to an unsealed affidavit in the case.

But the broad findings from the National Counterterrorism Center report suggest that authorities could be left in the dark about other extremist plots — and unable to head them off — without wide changes to the system.

Trump himself has shown little inclination to go after domestic extremists, even before the recent racial unrest. In one of his most notorious proclamations, he said there were “very fine people on both sides” at the violent neo-Nazi demonstration in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, and after last year’s massacre of 49 Muslims at two New Zealand mosques, he rejected the suggestion that white nationalists were a growing global threat, characterizing them instead as “a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.” At the same time, his administration gutted funding for an Obama-era program called Countering Violent Extremism, meant to head off the radicalization of Americans.

The latest accusations against Trump of fanning racial tensions came this weekend, when he retweeted a video from Florida that included a supporter yelling “White Power!” at protesters. The president later took down the post.

GIVEN THE ADMINISTRATION’S RECORD, “a lot of us were pleasantly surprised that this conference was convened in the first place — it was overdue,” said Brian Levin, who runs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino and helped lead a discussion at the event. “There was a message from the top saying, ‘I get it.'”

But that message has now become muddled, Levin and other participants said, after the Trump administration fired both Maguire, the acting intelligence chief, and Russ Travers, the acting head of the counterterrorism center, within weeks of each other earlier this year. Trump was reportedly furious with Maguire — and questioned his loyalty — for allowing an aide to give a classified congressional briefing about Russian meddling in the 2020 election.

Darryl Johnson, a former senior analyst on far-right extremism at DHS, said in an interview he was optimistic after taking part in the conference that federal officials were determined to develop a more thorough approach to domestic terrorism.But with the recent changeover among intelligence officials, “we’re back to square one, spinning our wheels,” he said.

Johnson, who now runs his own threat-analysis firm, authored a report at DHS in 2009 on the rising threat of right-wing extremism, but the Obama administration retracted it after a fierce backlash from Republicans. He was also involved in DHS’s internal efforts to develop a common “lexicon” to describe political extremists and their ideologies, but that, too, was scuttled.

Johnson said it is clear to him that intelligence officials today are still missing comprehensive and valuable data on violent extremists, even as the threat has risen. “So if you’re not collecting data,” he asked, “how can you have any kind of analysis of what the threat is?”

t.”

Legal conflicts have hindered the effort, as well.

For decades, federal prosecutors have commonly used terrorism laws on the books to charge violent extremists in the United States connected to Islamic or foreign terror organizations, but they have applied the terrorism label much less often when it comes to domestic attacks involving young white, American-born men rather than Muslims of Middle Eastern heritage.

The intelligence report alluded to the dual treatment, saying that the government’s criteria for publicly labeling attacks as “domestic terrorism” is “opaque and inconsistent.” It said that “the U.S. government needs to find a way to increase public trust by being transparent with the public about how [domestic terrorism] definitions are derived, defined, and used.”

“Fusion” centers in each state now bring together local and federal officials to identify public safety and terrorism threats. But these types of cooperative efforts remain fractured, with partners working at “cross-purposes,” the report said, and it encouraged federal officials to work more closely with local law enforcement agencies nationwide and with private technology companies, which “are emerging as the dominant funder of research on violent extremism.” One open-source tool that officials highlighted was identifying locales with “the greatest amount of internet searches related to white supremacy.”

Such tactics carry legal risks, however, because of free speech rights and civil liberties safeguards. For instance, designating a group inside the United States as a “domestic terrorism” organization — as Trump threatened to do with antifa — “could be perceived as government overreach and/or unconstitutional,” the report said.

The FBI, in particular, has a long history of improperly harassing and spying on political opponents and activists under the guise of national security, most notoriously against civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s under then-Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Some officials at the conference argued for trying to expand current laws to carve out a new criminal statute specific to domestic terrorism, bringing more legal powers with it. But Heidi Beirich, a longtime specialist on domestic extremism, argued at the meeting that while federal officials should be focusing more resources on violent white supremacists, new domestic terror laws are unnecessary and could trample on civil liberties.

“When you increase the powers of federal agencies, it can boomerang back and hit activists and marginalized groups, and it doesn’t hit the intended target,” Beirich, who recently co-founded an advocacy group called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said in an interview.

Beirich said the weaknesses that federal officials acknowledged regarding domestic extremists could have been “a turning point,” but she now worries that they will come to nothing because of a lack of political will.

“The threat continues, and we remain with blinders on,” Beirich said. “The next mass attack is virtually assured, and there’ll be nobody who saw it coming.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/fox-news-removes-unethical-digitally-altered-images-of-police-brutality-protests-in-seattle

ok he was there, but a week before?

no lnx pix twt

fox News removes ‘unethical’ digitally altered images of police brutality protests in Seattle

Royalty-free stock photo ID: 1288386304 Tallinn, Estonia - 01/18/2019: Fox News website homepage. Fox News channel logo visible through a magnifying glass.

Written by Roger Sollenberger / Salon June 16, 2020

Fox News over the weekend removed misleading images from stories about protests against police brutality in Seattle from its website after it was revealed they had been digitally altered in a manner which made the scene appear dangerous.

The Seattle Times published a report Friday calling out multiple images from Fox News coverage of the police-free “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ) in the city.

One photo illustration appearing on the Fox News homepage showed a masked man with an assault rifle and tactical vest standing in front of a sign reading, “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.” The outlet did not originally disclose that the photo of the scene and the photo of the armed man had been spliced together using two different photos, which were taken more than a week apart.

The original photo, from Getty Images, shows the armed man in front of a car.

He was digitally placed in front of the entrance sign.

The same image of the man appeared in at least one other image on Fox News’ website, in front of a smashed retail storefront. According to The Times, it was also a combination of multiple images.

“It is definitely Photoshopped,” freelance photographer David Ryder, who took the original photo and published it through Getty images, told the outlet. “To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”

Conservatives, including President Donald Trump, have attempted to sculpt the CHAZ storyline into a political flashpoint. Protesters converted the area into a street festival after police, who teargassed demonstrators, left the precinct in an effort to de-escalate tensions.

Trump tweeted Thursday that “Radical Left Governor [J]ay Inslee and the Mayor of Seattle are being taunted and played at a level that our great Country has never seen before. Take back your city NOW. If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game. These ugly Anarchists must be stooped [sic] IMMEDIATELY. MOVE FAST!”

The mayor told the president, “Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”

Fox News on Friday used a photo of a man running through an urban inferno as a banner image for a group of stories about Seattle under the headline, “CRAZY TOWN || Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol anarchists’ autonomous zone, shake down businesses: cops.”

The photo was unaltered, but it was an AP photo taken May 30 in St. Paul, Minn. Fox News later removed it.

The articles did not notify readers that the photos were altered, and it remains unclear who was responsible for the decision to do so. A Fox News spokesperson did not immediately respond to Salon’s request for comment.

In an emailed statement, a Fox News spokeswoman told The Times: “We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront, both of which were taken this week in Seattle’s autonomous zone.”

However, that statement itself was inaccurate. While the gunman was photographed that week — June 10 — the smashed storefront images were first published by Getty on May 30.

Fox News fully apologized Saturday in an editor’s note accompanying its CHAZ coverage, acknowledging that it “did not clearly delineate” the photo illustrations, which it labeled a “collage.” The site also apologized for falsely attributing the shot of the Minneapolis fire. “Fox News regrets these errors,” the note said.

Talent at the conservative network have attempted to use the Seattle protests as a political wedge issue. For example, primetime host Tucker Carlson accused the people in the zone of advocating segregation.

The network also reported an anecdotal claim from Seattle Assistant Chief of Police Deanna Nollette.

“We’ve heard, anecdotally, reports of citizens and businesses being asked to pay a fee to operate within this area,” Nollette said. “This is the crime of extortion.”

Police Chief Carmen Best later corrected that statement.

“We haven’t had any formal reports of this occurring,” she said, indicating the reports had come from rumors spread on social media.

Though the Seattle protests have at times been home to contentious scenes of unrest — including a cop filmed forcibly removing his partner’s knee from someone’s neck and a man filmed driving into a crowd of protesters and shooting a black man — the CHAZ street scene has been almost entirely peaceful, featuring musical and visual artists, free street food, concerts and movies.

Best said she did not think the officers should have abandoned the precinct, a move which she claims has led to longer 911 response times.

Trump called demonstrators “domestic terrorists” over the weekend and threatened federal action unless local officials “take back” the area. He also falsely claimed that antifa forces had taken over the city.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Interesting how ANTIFA and other Far Left militant groups can take over a city without barely a wimpier from soft Do Nothing Democrat leadership, yet these same weak leaders become RADICAL when it comes to shutting down a state or city and its hard working, tax paying citizens!

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“City officials have not interacted with ‘armed antifa militants’ at this site,” a city spokesperson told CNN.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/propaganda-fox-news-photoshops-gunman-into-stories-about-seattles-autonomous-zone

no pix url

Propaganda’: Fox News photoshops gunman into stories about Seattle’s autonomous zone

Image via Screengrab.

Written by The New Civil Rights Movement June 14, 2020

Legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern noticed that Fox News added a man carrying a military-assault rifle into images of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) on Friday. The CHAZ is a police-free area currently occupied by protesters police violence.

Fox News featured the images on their website without any mention that they had been altered. They placed the exact same gunman in two different photos. In one, the gunman’s left arm had been weirdly cut off in a straight line from the shoulder to the elbow.

Fox claimed that the image of a shattered window in the CHAZ was taken this week, but it seems it was actually taken on May 30.

Mark Joseph Stern

@mjs_DC

Fox News, a totally normal and respectable media outlet, digitally manipulated photos of Seattle’s “autonomous zone” by photoshopping in a gunman. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/ …

View image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on TwitterView image on Twitter

“Given how vigorously Fox News personalities have argued that men toting assault weapons in public are not inherently threatening,” Stern wrote, “it’s curious the outlet digitally inserted a man toting a gun to make the autonomous zone seem more threatening and scary.”

Fox News eventually issued the following editor’s note:

A FoxNews.com home page photo collage which originally accompanied this story included multiple scenes from Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ and of wreckage following recent riots. The collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced. In addition, a recent slideshow depicting scenes from Seattle mistakenly included a picture from St. Paul, Minnesota. Fox News regrets these errors.

Here

barr trump need bogeyman/threat to justify cop violence

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/bill-barr-and-trump-desperately-want-to-blame-antifa-for-violence-but-theyre-coming-up-dry-so-far/

no lnx alex h

President Donald Trump has turned his wrath on Antifa during the George Floyd protests, demanding Antifa be labeled a terrorist organization and accusing the movement of committing acts of violence at demonstrations. But journalists William Bredderman and Spencer Ackerman, in the Daily Beast, threw cold this week on efforts to blame the leftist group.

They found that “none of the 22 criminal complaints representing the first wave of protest charges mention Antifa in any way.”

Calling Antifa a “terrorist organization” is problematic in more than one respect. First, Antifa doesn’t begin to fit the traditional definition of terrorism and doesn’t target innocent bystanders the way that actual terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan have done. Second, Antifa isn’t an organization, but a decentralized movement and collection of tactics.

Bredderman and Ackerman discuss the ideologies of defendants in the protest cases, noting that they range from “anarchism” to the far-right Boogaloo movement — and that none of the charges mention anti-fascism (which is what Antifa stands for). According to retired FBI special agent Mike German, “What it definitely demonstrates is that anti-fascism is not a driving force in the current protest violence.”

Nonetheless, Attorney General William Barr has joined Trump in blaming Antifa for violence at demonstrations. At a press conference on Thursday, Barr told reporters, “We have evidence that Antifa and other similar extremist groups, as well as actors of a variety of different political persuasions, have been involved in instigating and participating in the violent activity.”

Bredderman and Ackerman note some reasons why Trump and Barr’s claims about Antifa are so misleading.

“Despite Trump’s rhetoric about designating Antifa a terrorist organization, Antifa is an ethic rather than an actual group — and even if it were a group, there is no domestic terrorism statute for designating a non-foreign entity as a banned terrorist organization,” Bredderman and Ackerman note. “That’s not stopped a chorus of right-wing voices from fantasizing about state violence against ant-fascist Americans.”

For example, the Beast journalists point out, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas tweeted, “Let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.”

Tom Cotton

@TomCottonAR

US Senate candidate, AR

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.

If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let's see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they're facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.

We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.

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6:29 AM - Jun 1, 2020

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Far-right fear-mongering around Antifa is nothing new. In November 2017, FBI Director Christopher Wray was asked if the FBI was doing anything to counteract Antifa; Wray responded, “We’re not investigating Antifa as Antifa – that’s an ideology, and we don’t investigate ideologies.”

According to German, Trump and Barr are badly misinformed where Antifa is concerned.

“Typically, when we’re talking about Antifa — which doesn’t exist as a group in the way the president imagines — it would make it difficult to associate somebody with a group that doesn’t exist as an organization,” German explained. “They’re imagining something that isn’t real.”

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/qanon-conspiracy-theory-post-about-coronavirus-spreading-social-media

no lnx many

QAnon conspiracy theory post about the coronavirus is spreading on social media

The QAnon conspiracy theory, alreadylabeled a potential domestic terror threat by the FBI, is now also a threat to public health

WRITTEN BY ALEX KAPLAN

PUBLISHED 03/24/20 1:41 PM EDT

A conspiratorial post about the novel coronavirus by “Q,” the central figure of the QAnon conspiracy theory, is spreading throughout social media, harming efforts to convey that the virus is a legitimate danger to public health.

The QAnon conspiracy theory revolves around an anonymous account known as “Q,” and is premised around the claim that President Donald Trump was working with then-special counsel Robert Mueller to take down the president’s perceived enemies, the “deep state,” and pedophile rings. Multiple adherents to the conspiracy theory have been tied to acts of violence, including murders and an attempted kidnapping, and an FBI field office released a memo in May 2019 that listed QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat. The conspiracy theory started on far-right message board site 4chan and later moved to fellow far-right message board site 8chan, which has since relaunched as 8kun. The owner of 8chan/8kun, Jim Watkins, has shown support for QAnon and helped establish aQAnon super PAC. (Beyond the QAnon conspiracy theory, 8chan/8kun has been linked to multiple instances of white supremacist terrorism, including the August 2019 massacre in El Paso, Texas.)

On the evening of March 23, “Q” posted on 8kun’s “/qresearch/” message board about the coronavirus. The post used race-baiting language, referring to the illness as the “China virus,” and implied that the virus was a bioweapon created in order to harm Trump’s reelection chances. (This false conspiracy theory has spread elsewhere on social media.)

Q post coronavirus pix]

Since then, the post has spread throughout Facebook groups and Twitter among QAnon supporters, where it has received thousands of engagements combined, being cited for proof that “the virus is a Cabal weapon” and a “false flag” that “democrats look suspiciously responsible for.”The “Q” post was also able to spread thanks to QAnon apps that are offered on the Google Play Store (which Google profits from).

Q post coronavirus Twitter2

Q post coronavirus Facebook1

Q post coronavirus Twitter3

The “Q” post’s spread comes as supporters of the conspiracy theory have been using social media platforms to spread falsehoods about the virus being some kind of false flag by the “deep state” for population control or a “military operation” to target supposed elites. They have also promoted dangerous false cures for the disease such as drinking bleach.

kpfa morning 1/29/20

https://yyy.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/13/us-listed-climate-activist-group-extremists

https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2020/01/13/us-listed-climate-activist-group-as-extremists-alongside-mass-killers/

a group of US environmental activists engaged in non-violent civil disobedience targeting the oil industry have been listed in internal Department of Homeland Security documents as “extremists” and some of its members listed alongside white nationalists and mass killers, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The group have been dubbed the Valve Turners, after closing the valves on pipelines in four states carrying crude oil from Canada’s tar sands on 11 October 2016 which accounted for about 15% of US daily consumption. It was described as the largest coordinated action of its kind and for a few hours the oil stopped flowing.

The five climate activists, members of Climate Direct Action, cut their way through fencing and turned the valves. The activists notified the energy companies whose pipelines were being disrupted and posted videos of their protest online and waited patiently to be arrested.

aha after charlottesville had to abandon eco-terror threat for a while, but baaaack 120, why? crit infra big pipeline fights brewing?

https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-activists-valve-turners-extremists-2644830392.html

Internal documents from the Department of Homeland Security reveal that non-violent demonstrators targeting the oil industry were classified as "extremists," with some organization members listed alongside known white supremacists, as The Guardian yyy reported.

Five members of Climate Direct Action — Michael Foster, Ken Ward, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Leonard Higgins — have been dubbed the Valve Turnersafter a coordinated effort on Oct. 11, 2016 tocut through fencing and turn off valves on a pipeline in four states. The pipeline carried crude oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries.

The activists alerted the oil companies of their actions, filmed it and waited patiently for authorities to arrive and arrest them, as The Guardian reported. For a few hours, the oil stopped flowing. Those pipelines carried 15 percent of the daily U.S. oil consumption in 2016.

Chargers for three of them were dropped, but Michael Foster, who turned a valve in North Dakota, spent six months in jail and is now on probation. During his trial, prosecutors compared him to the 9/11 terrorists and the Unabomber, according to Common Dreams.

pix Michael Foster pictured with his partner and fellow activist Sue Lenander shortly after being released from a six month prison sentence. [Shut it Down - Climate Direct Action

More recently, the Department of Homeland Security described the Valve Turners as "suspected environmental rights extremists." The Guardian reported that the document, which evaluated domestic terrorism threats from 2018 to 2020, also categorized the group alongside Dylan Roof, the white supremacists who murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina and James Fields, who plowed his car into a group of people protesting a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others.

"Equating mass murder by white supremacists with what Michael and I did is totally obscene," said Sam Jessup, one of the activists named in the documents, in an email to The Guardian. "This whole infrastructure of so-called security has done little more than secure the future of the fossil fuel industry by terrorizing people into silence."

Jessup, 34, was the driver and videographer live-streaming the action in North Dakota while Michael Foster, a former family therapist who lives in Seattle, turned the valve. Foster is the defendant who spent six months in jail.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote an email to The Guardian stating that Homeland Security's framing was "highly misleading because white supremacists are responsible for the bulk of this violence and almost all of the fatalities that result. There is little that environmentalists have engaged in the types of deadly violence that would meet the statutory definition of domestic terrorism, as codified by Congress."

[pix]

The labeling of environmental groups with extremists is mirrored in Britain as well where the activist group Extinction Rebellion was labeled in a document by Counter Terrorism Policing South East alongside banned far-right organizations like National Action and Islamic terrorist organizations, according to the Telegraph.

Extinction Rebellion, which uses non-violent disruptions to business as usual to call attention to the urgency of the climate crisis had a similar reaction as the Valve Turners. They were shocked and appalled.

"How dare they," said climate change group Extinction Rebellion, as the BBC reported.

A spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion said, "Teachers, grandparents, nurses have been trying their best with loving non-violence to get politicians and big business to do something about the dire state of our planet. And this is how the establishment responds," according to the BBC.

Speaking about the Homeland Security document, Carl Williams, executive director of the Water Protector Legal Collective, which has defended Dakota Access Pipeline protestors said to The Guardian, "I think there is a strategy that rightwing forces are using to criminalize dissent. This bulletin shows that dirty hand."

tar sands pipelines activism activists climate action valve turners oil

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/involuntary-celibates-are-an-emerging-domestic-terrorism-threat-as-texas-warns-of-an-incel-rebellion

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Involuntary Celibates are an ‘emerging domestic terrorism threat’ as Texas warns of an ‘Incel Rebellion’

Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story January 12, 2020

Misogynistic men who identify as part of the “Involuntary Celibate” movement are domestic terrorism threats, according to a new report.

The Texas Department of Public Safety included the warning in their 2020, “Texas Domestic Terrorism Threat Assessment” (PDF).

“Although not a new movement, Involuntary Celibates (Incels) are an emerging domestic terrorism threat as current adherents demonstrate marked acts or threats of violence in furtherance of their social grievance,” the report noted. “Once viewed as a criminal threat by many law enforcement authorities, Incels are now seen as a growing domestic terrorism concern due to the ideological nature of recent Incel attacks internationally, nationwide, and in Texas.”

“What begins as a personal grievance due to perceived rejection by women may morph into allegiance to, and attempts to further, an Incel Rebellion. The result has thrust the Incel movement into the realm of domestic terrorism,” the report explained.

“The violence demonstrated by Incels in the past decade, coupled with extremely violent online rhetoric, suggests this particular threat could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types,” the report warned.

“Texas Domestic Terrorism Threat Assessment” by the Texas Department of Public Safety (screengrab)[doc pix]

saw somewhere fbi pulled back on white sup domestic terror b/c knew djt wd not like

note NOT an fbi investigation (but they cc'd wonder if will act)

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/gop-lawmaker-invokes-trump-impeachment-while-refusing-to-resign-from-washington-state-legislature-after-investigators-say-he-engaged-in-domestic-terrorism/

[trms local sheriff not buying academic nature of plan]

1219 an no lnx

GOP lawmaker invokes Trump impeachment and refuses to resign from Washington state legislature after investigators accuse him of ‘domestic terrorism’

Written by Alex Henderson December 20, 2019

Washington State Rep. Matt Shea is so extreme that he’s controversial even among fellow Republicans and the far-right Tea Party, and both Democrats and Republicans in Washington’s state legislature are calling for his resignation following the release of a report accusing him of participation in an “act of domestic terrorism.”

The 108-page report, according to the Spokane Spokesman-Review, was delivered to the Washington House of Representatives on Thursday and was based on a four-month investigation — which found that Shea’s role in the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 amounted to “an act of domestic terrorism against the United States.” The report’s findings are being forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, the report states, “was meticulously planned in December 2015 by conspirators that included Rep. Shea.”

Republican J.T. Wilcox, minority leader in the Washington House of Representatives, said of Shea, “He absolutely should resign. His role as a House Republican is over.”

Rep. Matt Shea has been suspended from any role in the House Republican Caucus. He should resign. He cannot use House Republican staff, he cannot meet with the caucus, his office will be moved. https://t.co/AATHOHuO31

— Rep. JT Wilcox (@jtwilcox111) December 20, 2019

But Shea has so far refused to resign. On his Facebook page, the 45-year-old Republican compared calls for his resignation to the impeachment of President Donald Trump — writing, “Like we are seeing with our president, this is a sham investigationmeant to silence those of us who stand up against attempts to disarm and destroy our great country. I will not back down, I will not give in, I will not resign. Stand strong, fellow patriots.”

The investigation of Shea addressed in the report was conducted by the Seattle-based firm the Rampart Group, which was hired by members of the Washington House of Representatives and is headed by a former FBI agent.

In Washington State, Shea is infamous for his Christianist and anti-Muslim views and his support of armed militia groups. And not unlike Islamists who advocate sharia law, Shea has called for the U.S. to become an authoritarian Christian theocracy.

The report noted that in a document titled “Biblical Basis for War,” Shea “advocated the replacement of U.S. democracy with a theocracy and the killing of all males who do not agree.”

*****

We’ve noted the regime’s past hostility toward investigating white supremacist terrorism. This week, CREW sued the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to turn over documents “that would explain former-DHS Advisor for Policy Katharine Gorka’s involvement in revoking grants combating white supremacy and white nationalism.” Gorka is the wife of Sebastian Gorka, the fascist former deputy assistant to Trump.

Before joining the government, [Katharine] Gorka was a contributing author of Breitbart, a website favored by white nationalists and white supremacists. While Gorka was a DHS official, DHS focused almost exclusively on combating Islamic extremism while reducing or eliminating funding of programs to combat white supremacy. DHS even reportedly considered renaming the DHS Countering Violent Task Force to “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism.”

This comes in the wake of leaked emails revealing that senior White House advisor Stephen Miller, the regime’s point-person on immigration and refugee policy–sent a bunch of white supremacist claptrap to his sources at Breitbart.

*****

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/revealed-the-fbi-is-targeting-immigration-activists

no lnx

Revealed: The FBI is targeting immigration activists

Written by Igor Derysh September 6, 2019

An FBI document obtained by Yahoo News shows that the bureau is monitoring groups that protest the Trump administration immigration policies as “extremists.”

An FBI “external intelligence note” that was sent to law enforcement and government agencies by the bureau’s Phoenix field office in May warns that immigration activists are “increasingly arming themselves and using lethal force to further their goals,” although it offered no evidence of violence.

The memo alleges that “anarchist extremists” are “very likely” increasing the “targeting” of immigration enforcement officers and detention facilities and pose the “risk of armed conflict.” The memo acknowledges that the claims were made with “medium” and “low confidence.”

Even though nearly all evidence cited in the memo refers to nonviolent protests and statements, the document alleges that the “threat” to Arizona “likely will grow” and may be “emboldened” if given an “opportunity for an escalation to violence.”

The memo further claims that some of the groups it described as “anarchist extremists” have “banned firearms or [are] carrying loaded weapons.” No specific evidence that this had actually happened was cited.

“These indicators, if found to be accurate, could cause a change in the confidence levels or in the assessments in general,” the document says.

The evidence cited for the FBI’s claims largely refers to activist websites and social media accounts calling for “disruptions” near ICE facilities.

The allegation that immigration activists are arming themselves appears to refer to comments from “antifa” groups about training members to use firearms. There have been no instances of shootings linked to antifa members. The document also cites a single human source to claim a group planned to provide “armed support of the migrant caravans” in December 2018. There has been no evidence that any group or any individuals actually did so.

Despite this general lack of hard evidence, the memo states that agents assessed that it was “likely” that immigration activists planned to use firearms against the government and right-wing groups, rather than arming themselves for self-defense, even though sources had told the FBI that these groups have “summarily banned the use of firearms.”

The memo was produced by the FBI Phoenix field office and distributed to other agencies. A bureau spokesperson told Yahoo News that the contents of the document offered only the perspective of the Phoenix field office and included nuanced qualifiers.

“These products are intended to be informative in nature,” the spokesperson said, “and as such, they contain appropriate caveats to describe the confidence in the sourcing of information and the likelihood of the assessment. Additionally, when written at a local level, these products will note that the perspective offered may be limited to the field office’s area of responsibility.”

Mike German, a former FBI special agent, told Yahoo News that the memo is evidence of the bureau’s post-9/11 “overreach” in classifying protest groups as terror threats.

“It’s been a feature of the post-9/11 counterterrorism effort by the FBI to focus on nonviolent civil disobedience and to prioritize it,” German said. “For several years after 9/11, the FBI called environmental activists the No. 1 domestic terror threat, even though there’s not a single homicide related to environmental ‘terrorists’ in the United States.”

A 2010 FBI inspector general report criticized the bureau for targeting groups like PETA and Greenpeace, noting that some investigations were “factually weak,” and showed no indication of federal criminal activity.

“In some cases, the FBI extended the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis, and in a few instances the FBI improperly retained information about the groups in its files,” the report said. “The FBI also classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘Acts of Terrorism’ classification, which resulted in the watchlisting of subjects during the investigation.”

German told Yahoo News that even groups like antifa, which have been involved in violent street clashes with far-right groups, would not qualify as terror threats.

“Congress passed a definition of domestic terrorism. It requires illegal activities harmful to human life,” German said. “I’m not aware of any fatal attacks committed by somebody associated with an antifascist movement.”

Nate Snyder, a former Homeland Security and Justice Department official, told Yahoo News that the FBI also erred in linking antifa to anarchist groups and immigration activists.

“Those are three very different groups,” he said.

This federal scrutiny is apparently not limited to activist groups. An NBC San Diego investigation earlier this year found that government authorities are tracking journalists who have covered migrant caravans at the border.

Snyder called the memo a “head scratcher.” In July, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress that domestic terror cases are on the rise, but that most of them involve “white supremacist violence.”

Despite Wray’s testimony, Yahoo News reported last month that the Justice Department had suppressed a report showing that white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terror incidents last year. The Trump administration has also shifted resources and staff away from investigating white supremacist violence, while increasing DHS investigations that have targeted Muslims and other minority groups.

“There are people out there actually harming other people, and that’s where the counterterrorism resources should be devoted,” German told Yahoo News, “not toward people who are simply challenging government policy,”

FBI Told Congress Domestic Terror Investigations Led to 90 Recent Arrests. It Wouldn’t Show Us Records of Even One.

Four days after asking for information on the FBI’s claims of 90 domestic terrorism arrests, we are still waiting. And, frankly, it got kind of weird.

by Fritz Zimmermann

View Story

https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/12/study-shows-two-thirds-us-terrorism-tied-right-wing-extremists

September 12, 2018

Bill Morlin

A new terrorism database analysis shows almost two-thirds of the terror attacks in the United States last year were carried out by right-wing extremists.

Researchers and journalists for the news site Quartz said they used data compiled by the Global Terrorism Database that has tabulated terrorist events around the world since 1970. The database is supported by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), affiliated with the University of Maryland.

“A Quartz analysis of the database shows that almost two-thirds of terror attacks in the (United States) last year were tied to racist, anti-Muslim, homophobic, anti-Semitic, fascist, anti-government, or xenophobic motivations,” its posting says.

The remaining attacks, the web site said, “were driven by left-wing ideologies … and Islamic extremism.”

Globally, terrorist attacks dropped from about 17,000 in 2014 to about 11,000 in 2017, including a 40 percent decline in the Middle East, according to Quartz's analysis of the START data.

But the United States has seen a recent surge in terror-related violence, with 65 attacks last year, up from six in 2006, it said.

In a related post last month, Quartz said of 65 terrorism incidents last year in the United States, 37 were “tied to racist, anti-Muslim, homophobic, anti-Semitic, fascist, anti-government or xenophobic motivations.”

The list includes the August 2017 incident at the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a man drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring many others. The suspect, James Alex Fields, was photographed earlier that day marching with neo-Nazi hate group Vanguard America. Fields has been charged with first-degree murder and is awaiting trial in Virginia. In June, he was indicted on 30 charges of federal hate crimes related to the attack.

The list also includes attacks on a gay bar in Puerto Rico, mosques in Washington, Texas, and Florida and a “vehicle decorated with Jewish iconography in New York,” the posting said.

Quartz said the Global Terrorism Database annual report includes “cases where violence is used by non-state actors to achieve political, economic, religious, or social goals through fear and coercion.”

For example, it said, the database “includes ideologically motivated attacks like the Charleston church shooting, but not ones such as the Aurora movie theater massacre.”

The database also classifies cases according to attackers’ affiliations, such as the Ku Klux Klan. When an affiliation is unknown, the database lists the participant’s ideological identity if it’s known, such as white extremist.

For further reading on right-wing extremist terrorism, check out Terror from the Right, the Southern Poverty Law Center's directory of major terrorist plots and right-wing political violence from 1995 to the present.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/white-supremacists-responsible-for-all-race-based-domestic-terrorism-incidents-in-2018-doj-blocked-report/

no lnx

Explosive report says the Trump admin blocked data revealing that white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement August 9, 2019

The Trump administration has known since at least April that alleged white supremacists were responsible for every single act of race-based domestic terrorism in the U.S. in 2018, yet not only took no action to combat the growing right-wing violent extremism, but actually substantially reduced or even eliminated funding and programs that combat white supremacist extremism, violence, and terrorism – and then blocked the data from reaching the hands of Congress.

“Domestic Terrorism in 2018,” a document (embedded below) prepared by the State of New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security Preparedness, “shows 25 of the 46 individuals allegedly involved in 32 different domestic terrorism incidents were identified as white supremacists,” Yahoo News’ Jana Winter and Hunter Walker report.

That document finds there were “32 domestic terrorist attacks, disrupted plots, threats of violence, and weapons stockpiling by individuals with a radical political or social agenda who lack direction or influence from foreign terrorist organizations in 2018.”

The report was “circulated” throughout the U.S. Dept. of Justice “and around the country in April just as members of the Senate pushed the DOJ to provide them with precise information about the number of white supremacists involved in domestic terrorism.”

The Justice Department, under President Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General Bill Barr, refused to hand over the data or the document to Congress.

Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in January of 2019 had already compiled a report, announcing that, “Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Every 2018 Extremist Murder in the U.S., ADL Finds.”

ADL reported that “Right-wing extremists were linked to at least 50 extremist-related murders in the United States in 2018, making them responsible for more deaths than in any year since 1995, according to new data from the ADL.”

1995 was the year domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, slaughtering 168 people and injuring more than 680 others.

“The tally represents a 35 percent increase from the 37 extremist-related murders in 2017,” ADL reported, “making 2018 the fourth-deadliest year on record for domestic extremist-related killings since 1970. Last year saw the highest percentage of right-wing extremist-related killings since 2012, the last year when all documented killings were by right-wing extremists.”

Why the Dept. of Justice and the White House blocked the data from reaching Congress is now yet another investigation Congress should take up.

Here’s the document the DOJ refused to hand over to Members of the House and Senate:

Domestic Terrorism in 2018.pdf by Kelli R. Grant on Scribd

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/23/politics/fbi-white-supremacist-domestic-terror/index.html

CNN)

The FBI has seen a significant rise in the number of white supremacist domestic terrorism cases in recent months, a senior FBI counterterrorism official said Thursday.

The official said the FBI has been grappling with the rise of domestic threats while international terror threats have remained constant with the fall of the ISIS caliphate in Syria.

The domestic terror cases generally include suspects involved in violence related to anti-government views, racial or religious bias,environmental extremism and abortion-related views.

The FBI wouldn't provide specific numbers to quantify the increase of in the number of white supremacist domestic terrorism cases. Unlike international terrorism investigations, domestic terrorism cases pose thornier issues for the FBI because of First Amendment protections. The US doesn't have a domestic terrorism law and no government agency designates domestic groups as being terrorist organizations. That means many cases the FBI calls domestic terror-related end up with a variety of charges for violations of laws related to guns or even other state charges.

In 2017, there were about 150 arrests on charges the FBI classifies as domestic terror, and about 120 in 2018. The official said the FBI is on course to match or exceed those numbers this fiscal year.

Overall, the FBI has about 5,000 terrorism-related investigations open, including 850 related to domestic terrorism, according to the official. About 1,000 are related to ISIS or other affiliated groups, and another 1,000 are for homegrown violent extremism.

Reflecting law enforcement concern over the issue, earlier today at a hearing Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan called "white supremacist extremist violence" a "huge issue" and called it an "an evolving and increasingly concerning threat."

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/08/white-supremacist-domestic-terrorism-fbi-justice/

harder to track nomenclature cats

TUESDAY, during a House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., described a death threat she and fellow Muslim Rep. Ilhan Omar had received in the mail. “A good Muslim is a dead one,” the letter had read. The hearing, called “Confronting White Supremacy: Adequacy of the Federal Response,” featured the FBI’s Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Michael McGarrity. Tlaib wondered why threats like the one against her and Omar don’t qualify as domestic terrorism. “We get so many of them, and I keep asking, ‘What happens? What happens to these individuals?’” She asked McGarrity, “How is that not enough to fall under domestic terrorism?”

In the U.S., there is no criminal charge specifically for “domestic terrorism.” For example, white supremacist James Fields Jr., who killed Heather Heyer with his Dodge Challenger at the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was described as a domestic terrorist; even racist then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the attack met the definition of “domestic terrorism.” Yet he was convicted for hate crimes, not on terror charges.

Instead of being a legal category, “domestic terrorism” is used by federal law enforcement as a framework to organize and describe cases and investigations. But thanks to a recent shift in how the FBI classifies its domestic terror categories, the answer to Tlaib’s urgent question, “what happens” to white supremacist threats, writ large, is all the harder to discover.

Over the last decade, the FBI classified domestic terrorism cases using 11 categories, including a specific grouping for white supremacists. At the end of April, the FBI and Justice Department revealed to Senate Judiciary Committee staffers that a new classification system was now in place, employing only four categories: racially motivated violent extremism; anti-government and anti-authority extremism; animal rights and environmental extremism; and abortionextremism.

The “racially motivated” category is the most problematic one. Under an administration that has made a point of drawing false equivalences between deadly white supremacist violence and anti-racist dissent, the FBI’s category collapse is as unsurprising as it is disconcerting.

The new nomenclature reflects the Trump administration’s ideological commitment to enabling white supremacists.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. Yet the distinct and deadly threat of white supremacist violence is now unnamed and merely folded into the too-broad “racially motivated extremism” category. That category folds in “black identity extremism” — an FBI category conjured in 2017 to make the unsubstantiated claim that black organizers fighting against racist police executions were a national security threat.

The new nomenclature reflects the Trump administration’s ideological commitment to enabling white supremacists. But the new classifications are more than semantic: They render it impossible for the public, or even elected officials, to know whether the FBI is dedicating resources to investigating the very real threat of white supremacist terror or if those resources are going toward the harassment of Black Lives Matter and civil rights activists. Only the former use of government time and money would be justified, but both cases would fall under “racially motivated extremism.”

EARLIER THIS MONTH, the FBI’s inability to distinguish white supremacist, far-right terror cases in its data was made clear during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing. During his testimony, McGarrity, the same FBI official questioned this week by Tlaib, was asked by House members how many current domestic investigations were targeting white supremacists. He couldn’t answer with any specificity, save to say that 50 percent of current investigations related to the “racially motivated” category and that the “majority” of these involved white supremacists. Another 40 percent of investigations, he said, related to “anti-government” extremism, without delineating whether targets were right- or left-wing groups. So, while we can know that 90 percent of current domestic FBI investigations involve supposedly “racially motivated” or “anti-government” cases, we can’t know to what extent the agency is abusing these “terror” categories to persecute anti-racist activism and civil rights struggle — as federal law enforcement has historically done.

...

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/29/headlines/trump_admin_disbanded_domestic_terror_unit_amid_rising_far_right_violence

latest white nationalist killing comes after the Department of Homeland Security disbanded its domestic terrorism unit last year,reassigning its analysts to other departments. DHS says the threat of “homegrown extremism” has been significantly reduced, but in a review of 50 murders committed by extremists in 2018, the Anti-Defamation League found 49 came at the hands of right-wing extremists, with white supremacists alone accounting for 39 of the murders.

Topics:

intercept series

https://theintercept.com/series/the-threat-within/

green scare

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/ecoterrorism-fbi-animal-rights/

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/

https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/state-domestic-terrorism-laws/

no lnx many

FEAR OF A BLACK HOMELAND

The Strange Tale of the FBI’s Fictional “Black Identity Extremism” Movement

Olajuwon Ali Davis, center, stands with his hands raised on Canfield Drive in Ferguson on the night of Aug. 9, 2014, hours after Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson. Photo: David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Polaris

Alice Speri

March 23 2019, 5:31 a.m.

The Threat Within

The only connection between the men referenced in the FBI’s “black identity extremism” report, besides their race, is a thread of anger at police violence.

HOURS AFTER POLICE Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown on a quiet suburban street in Ferguson, Missouri, Olajuwon Ali Davis stood with a few dozen people on that same street. As the impromptu candlelight vigil that August night in 2014 turned into a historic wave of nationwide protests against police violence, Davis, wearing a black Malcolm X T-shirt, was among the first to lift his hands in surrender, as Brown was rumored to have been doing when Wilson shot him.

Within days, the gesture became the symbol of a movement for police accountability and racial justice the nation had not seen since the civil rights era. And the refrain protesters began chanting that night — “Hands up, don’t shoot” — would soon be replaced by one that would echo across the country for years to come: Black lives matter.

Davis, who was 22 at the time, kept showing up as the protests grew larger and angrier, and as scores of law enforcement descended on Ferguson wearing riot gear and firing tear gas. Days after Brown’s death, during a short-lived break in the looting and police violence, Davis was photographed wearing all black and directing traffic; the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense,which he had joined on the heels of Brown’s killing, was keeping the peace.

Days later, Davis emailed a local reporter who had covered the NBPP’s peacekeeping efforts to thank him for portraying “the true nature and the intent” of the party, which, despite taking its name, is not affiliated with the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. “For the record we the NBPP and its local chapter members have and never [sic] promoted acts of violence towards anyone or any establishment or businesses,” Davis wrote to the Riverfront Times, a St. Louis weekly. “True enough there are people so angry that they show their pain and emotions with aggression towards cops and frankly anything that they can get their hands on. But let these few not distort the genuine peaceful intention and benevolence of the NBPP.”

Three months later, Davis and another young man named Brandon Orlando Baldwin were arrested in an FBI sting and accused of planning to plant bombs, kill officials connected to the Brown case, and blow up St. Louis’s iconic Gateway Arch.

BALTIMORE, MD - APRIL 22: Ten-year-old Robert Dunn uses a megaphone to address hundreds of demonstrators during a protest against police brutality and the death of Freddie Gray outside the Baltimore Police Western District station April 22, 2015 in Baltimore, Maryland.]

Gray, 25, was arrested for possessing a switch blade knife April 12 outside the Gilmor Homes housing project on Baltimore's west side. According to his attorney, Gray died a week later in the hospital from a severe spinal cord injury he received while in police custody. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Ten-year-old Robert Dunn uses a megaphone to address hundreds of demonstrators during a protest against police brutality and the death of Freddie Gray outside the Baltimore Police Western District station in Maryland on April 22, 2015. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images]

Ideological Make-Believe

Three years later, the FBI listed Davis’s case in a secret memo warning of the rise of a “black identity extremist” movement whose members’ “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans” spurred what the FBI claimed was “an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement.” Although Baldwin was convicted of the same crimes, the FBI report inexplicably only mentioned one suspect.

The “black identity extremism” report was prepared by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, part of the bureau’s Counterterrorism Division, and was distributed to scores of local and federal law enforcement partners across the country. Although Davis and Baldwin were not charged under anti-terrorism laws, they do appear to be the first individuals retroactively labeled by the FBI as “black identity extremists.”

The FBI report was written six months into the Trump administration — as white supremacist groups felt emboldened by support for their ideology seemingly coming from the very top of the government — and was released only a week before the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white nationalist ran down and killed Heather Heyer. When the report was leaked to Foreign Policy later in 2017, it prompted fierce and widespread criticism from activists, civil rights advocates, and lawmakers, many of whom accused the FBI of reverting to the surveillance and sabotage of black activists that had defined its activities in the civil rights era.

Critics called the report’s contents “fiction,” “fantasy,” “weak” and “irresponsible.” Several noted that it seemed designed to distract attention from the reality of police abuse against minorities. “The feds have invented a title — BIE — and linked it to a handful of episodes of violence,” wrote Andrew Cohen, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. “To deflect legitimate criticism of police tactics, to undermine a legitimate protest movement that has emerged in the past three years to protest police brutality, the FBI has tarred the dissenters as domestic terrorists, an organized group with a criminal ideology that are a threat to police officers.”

“Whenever you create an assumption that somebody poses a physical threat to law enforcement, that provides incentive for law enforcement to shoot first and ask questions later.”

The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, which includes leaders of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, called for the classification to be eliminated. “This assessment resurrects the historically negative legacy of African American civil rights leaders who were unconstitutionally targeted and attacked by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies for seeking full U.S. citizenship under the law,” the group wrote in a statement.

Yet even more worrisome than the report’s political implications is the immediate threat to life that labeling someone a “terrorist” can pose, especially as the FBI has no way to monitor what law enforcement departments do with the reports it distributes. For many black people, already accustomed to being uniquely vulnerable to police violence, the fear is that being viewed as potential terrorists for expressing legitimate political grievances might give police license to target them even more intensely than they already do.

“Not only can they go after these people with surveillance, but they can then justify using the most aggressive, violent tactics,” said Justin Hansford, a St. Louis activist and law professor who heads the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University. “Whenever you create an assumption that somebody poses a physical threat to law enforcement, that provides incentive for law enforcement to shoot first and ask questions later.”

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2017, shortly after the report was leaked to the press, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the FBI investigates as domestic terrorism only cases involving federal crimes that include the use or attempted use of violence in furtherance of political or social goals. “We don’t have that, we don’t investigate,” Wray said. “It doesn’t matter whether they are right-wing, left-wing, or any other wing.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray arrives to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC on December 7, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / MANDEL NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) FBI Director Christopher Wray arrives to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on oversight of the FBI in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 7, 2017. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images]

“We take respect for the First Amendment very seriously, and in this context, as in every other domestic terrorism context, we want to be very clear with people, and all the American people, that we do not investigate rhetoric, ideology, opinion, no matter who might consider it extremist,” he added. “What we do investigate is when rhetoric, ideology, opinion takes that next step into the category of federal crime and of particular violence.”

At the hearing, Wray said that the “black identity extremism” report was based on both open-source information and ongoing FBI investigations. He also said, citing no specific numbers, that the bureau had “about 50 percent more” investigations of white supremacists than it did of “black identity extremists.” In subsequent meetings with lawmakers, he said he was unfamiliar with any investigations of “black identity extremists.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for the FBI wrote that the agency “does not police ideology.” The bureau, she added, will only initiate an investigation if there is an allegation of a federal crime or a threat to national security. “Our focus is not on membership in particular groups but on criminal activity,” the spokesperson wrote. “When an individual takes violent action based on belief or ideology — and breaks the law — the FBI will enforce the rule of law. The FBI cannot initiate an investigation based solely on an individual’s race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or the exercise of their constitutional rights, and we remain committed to protecting those rights for all Americans.”

The FBI declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about how various ideologies are presented, downplayed, or emphasized in threat assessment reports that the agency routinely circulates to law enforcement, or about how those reports might impact surveillance and policing of targeted communities, regardless of the threats they pose. At the 2017 Judiciary Committee hearing, as well as at a second hearing before the same committee in June 2018, Wray also failed to address those questions.

“My big concern is that local law enforcement will misinterpret that and will clamp down on people exercising their First Amendment rights,” Rep. Karen Bass, one of the report’s fiercest critics in Congress, told him at the first hearing.

[FERGUSON, MO - AUGUST 13: Police stand watch as demonstrators protest the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown on August 13, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer on Saturday. Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, is experiencing its fourth day of violent protests since the killing. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Police stand watch as demonstrators protest the shooting death of teenager Michael Brown on Aug. 13, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo. Photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images]

It’s unclear how the “black identity extremism” report has been used by local law enforcement agencies. But if the threat is as serious as the FBI report implies, that hasn’t turned into successful federal prosecutions. According to The Intercept’s analysis, Davis and Olajuwon’s case was the only federal prosecution of individuals the FBI considers to be “black identity extremists” that resulted in a conviction. By comparison, the analysis found that 268 right-wing extremists were prosecuted in federal courts since 9/11 for crimes that appear to meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism, even though the Justice Department applied anti-terrorism laws against only 34 of them.

While several news reports referred to the case of Christopher Daniels, a Texas activist who advocated for the rights of black gun owners, as the first known prosecution of a “black identity extremist,” the FBI appears to have retroactively used that label to refer to individuals it started surveilling as early as 2014, on the heels of the Ferguson protests. Daniels, who also went by the name Rakem Balogun, was indicted of a weapons offense months after the release of the FBI report, but a judge dismissed the charge last May. The FBI declined to comment on any of these cases, as well as on the origins of the “black identity extremist” label.

“This was literally picking six random events and then imagining a movement around them.”

None of the other five individuals referenced in the FBI’s 2017 report were federally prosecuted. They include three black men who attacked and, in two cases, killed, police officers in New York, Baton Rouge, and Dallas, though the FBI’s report fails to connect their actions to any specific group or clear ideology. A man who shot at two police stations in Indiana in October 2016 and another who drove his car toward three police officers in Arizona in September 2016 — both of whom were prosecuted on state charges — also appear to have acted independently of any groups or discernible ideology. Three were killed by police on the scene.

Davis himself, while he had recently joined the New Black Panther Party, was found to have plotted the St. Louis bombings without the group’s knowledge or support. And he was also known to police as a devotee of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a black variation of the overwhelmingly white sovereign citizen movement, a domestic extremist ideology well known to the FBI.

The only connection between the six men referenced in the report, besides their race, is a thread of anger at police that is common among tens of thousands of Americans who never committed or intended to commit acts of violence. “In all of them, there is no connection to any national movement; the cases are not linked in any way,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent and a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. “This was literally picking six random events and then imagining a movement around them.”

“This is not just a failure of an intelligence product, but a dangerous intelligence product,” German added. “It spreads misinformation rather than intelligence.”

Olajuwon Ali Davis (left) was one of a small group of people who went into the Ferguson Police Department to speak with Lt. Craig Rettke on the night of Aug. 9, 2014 hours after Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson Police officer Darren Wilson. Davis one one of two men charged with federal weapons charges, and who also allegedly had plans to bomb the Gateway Arch, and to kill St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson. (David Carson/Post Dispatch/Polaris) /// Olajuwon Ali Davis, far left, was one of a small group of people who went into the Ferguson Police Department to speak with Lt. Craig Rettke on the night of Aug. 9, 2014, hours after Michael Brown was shot and killed by Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson. Photo: David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Polaris]

The Bomb Plot

On November 21, 2014, three months after Brown’s killing, Davis and Baldwin were arrested in an FBI sting and indicted in federal court on weapons charges, accused of making false statements to buy guns at a Cabela’s store where Baldwin worked.

Three days later, a grand jury declined to charge Wilson for Brown’s death. As protests once again engulfed St. Louis, news outlets citing unnamed law enforcement sources reported that Davis and Baldwin had bought what they thought was a pipe bomb and had plans to buy two more from undercover agents, and that they intended to blow up the city’s celebrated arch and kill St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson. In a packed courtroom, the friends and families of the accused dismissed those accusations as “lies,” while the New Black Panther Party’s national leadership called them a “FRAME UP attempt.” Davis’s wife, who was pregnant and due in two weeks, fainted in court and went into early labor.

The most explosive allegations against Davis and Baldwin were not detailed in the original court filings. But in a revised federal indictment filed months after their arrest, the two were charged with additional crimes, including attempting to “damage and destroy, by means of explosives, a building, vehicle and other property.”

If the court documents were light on detail, the press coverage was not.In the heated atmosphere that followed the Ferguson protests, many news outlets hyped the story, writing headlines that mischaracterized Davis and Baldwin as affiliates of the “Black Panthers,” and letting anonymous law enforcement sources drive the narrative around their alleged scheme. The press picked on the story’s most salacious details: Davis and Baldwin had planned to buy more bombs, several outlets reported, but had been unable to do so because they were waiting for funds to be disbursed to “a girlfriend’s” EBT card — a detail, presumably leaked by law enforcement, that turned out to be false.

According to their nearly identical sentencing plea agreements, Davis and Baldwin, who met during the protests over Brown’s killing, discussed acquiring guns and bombs and wanting to organize Ferguson protesters to “be like an army.” Baldwin told an FBI informant that he wanted to “build bombs and blow things up.”

“We are at war, you understand, bro,” he told the informant. According to Baldwin’s plea, Davis “put it out there that he was a terrorist” — a reference that appears to have been scrapped from Davis’s own plea. The Gateway Arch, which according to earlier accounts had been the pair’s main target, was never actually mentioned in conversations recorded by law enforcement, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Pastor Spencer Booker, of the St. Paul A.M.E. Church, addresses the crowd at a press conference where a boycott and protest of Black Friday shopping was announced by the Justice for Michael Brown Leadership Coalition in St. Louis on Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2104. In addition to the boycott leaders called for mass demonstrations at shopping centers. Pictured to the far left is Olajuwon Ali Davis who is one one of two men charged last week with federal weapons charges, and who also allegedly had plans to bomb the Gateway Arch, and to kill St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson. (David Carson/Post Dispatch/Polaris) /// Pastor Spencer Booker addresses the crowd at a press conference, where a boycott and protest of Black Friday shopping was announced by the Justice for Michael Brown Leadership Coalition in St. Louis on Nov. 12, 2014. Olajuwon Ali Davis, far left, participated in the public announcement. Photo: David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Polaris]

For their part, law enforcement officials conceded that it was unlikely that Davis and Baldwin would have been capable of executing a bomb plot, and that it was unclear how they would have made it through airport-style security at the arch; nonetheless, they painted the duo as a dangerous threat.

Richard Callahan, then-U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri, said in a statement after the guilty plea that the disruption of the plot days before the grand jury’s rejection of charges against Wilson “undoubtedly saved lives. Luckily for all of us, we’ll never know just how many.” But that seemed to contradict an earlier interview, in which he had said that a lot of Davis’s and Baldwin’s ideas were “totally unrealistic and impractical, and we didn’t include [in the indictment] all of the things they rambled on about, to not sensationalize the case or make it more than it is.” Callahan did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Kenneth Tihen, a lead prosecutor in the case, declined to comment.

Davis and Baldwin pleaded guilty to explosives and gun charges in June 2015, and in September 2015 they were sentenced to seven-year prison terms. (Davis’s father told The Intercept that before their plea, prosecutors had threatened his son with the possibility of 30 years in prison.)

At sentencing, Davis called his actions “reckless, irresponsible and just stupid.” Baldwin’s attorney said on behalf of his client that Baldwin also apologized for “his stupidity.” Davis’s attorney did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment; Baldwin’s declined to comment. Davis and Baldwin, who are currently in prison, could not be reached for comment.

But those close to them maintain that their ordeal was a classic case of entrapment.

“They wanted to set an example through my son to show that we are onto you all. The FBI, the federal government, is onto you activist people. We’re watching you; this can happen to you too.”

“He was tricked,” Henry Davis, Olajuwon Davis’s father, told The Intercept. “They wanted to set an example through my son to show that we are onto you all. The FBI, the federal government, is onto you activist people. We’re watching you; this can happen to you too.”

Henry Davis said that FBI “agents” befriended his son during the Ferguson protests, then offered him money, marijuana, and hotel stays. They later moved into his apartment complex and spent weeks hanging out with him, talking about “the resistance.”

His son, he said, felt obligated to do what they asked. “They pretended to be part of the whole movement, said that they wanted to be down,” Henry Davis said. He added that FBI agents gave his son and Baldwin the money they used to buy the guns, claiming that they couldn’t buy the weapons themselves because of felony records. But the same agents later insisted that Davis and Baldwin pay for the pipe bombs with their own money. That should have made his son suspicious, Henry Davis said.

“I’m not trying to justify his actions, because I’m ashamed, and I’ve expressed my disappointment to my son,” said Henry Davis. But, he added, “Olajuwon never had the intention of harming anyone. He’s actually harmless. … They got him.”

Baldwin’s father, Berlin Baldwin Jr., also told The Intercept that his son was caught in a trap. “If you believe in what you hear on TV, yeah, you would think he was a terrorist,” he said. The elder Baldwin readily admitted that his son made a mistake and committed a crime, but added, “He is not no terrorist. They just went after somebody and wrapped him up in it. And he’s none of what they’re saying. Just none of that stuff is true.”

Daniels, the Dallas gun activist who federal authorities tried and failed to prosecute as a “black identity extremist,” put it more bluntly. “A lot of people in this movement are not fully developed and mature individuals,” he told The Intercept, noting that he himself had staved off entrapment attempts by law enforcement. “If I go to any white college in America and talk to a whole bunch of 20-year-olds, and be like, ‘Hey man, I got some grenades, would you like to buy some?’ — somebody’s going to buy them. It’s like offering a gun to a baby.”

“Moorish” Citizens

Brandon Orlando Baldwin appears to have been politicized by the protests over Brown’s killing. Three days after the shooting, Baldwin changed his Facebook profile picture to one of himself wearing a black beret — a symbol of the Black Panthers — and in the following months, his social media posts alternated between enraged comments about police brutality and pictures of himself with his young daughter.

[baldwin-1553005534 Brandon Orlando Baldwin and his daughter. Photo: Courtesy of the Baldwin family]

In one post about the proliferation of videos showing police abuse, he wrote, “Stop filming and start blow’n they fuckin heads off… or beaten they Ass with they batons… When r we gonna really say enough is enough and stop turning the fuckin cheek for ppl who wouldn’t turn on the water if yo Ass was on fire.” In October 2014, a month before his arrest and while he was already under FBI surveillance, he posted: “I wonder how many of my Followers are FEDS.”

To his family, Baldwin’s arrest came as a shock, his father told The Intercept. His parents had not even known that he had started going to the protests in Ferguson until a family friend told his father that he had seen him on TV. “I immediately called him and said, What the hell are you doing?” Berlin Baldwin Jr. said.

“He might have been a protester, but he’s not an activist,” the senior Baldwin added, arguing that his son was young, naive, and new to the world of protests and activism. “To me and the family, we feel that he was brainwashed. … It was just a big mistake in his life, thinking that he was joining something that was important, being young.”

Davis had a longer history of political engagement. He had been a valedictorian in high school and won a full scholarship to the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he was studying economics, his father told The Intercept. Davis was also a promising actor, and in 2013 he starred in an award-winning independent film that was released last year. “The story surrounding his arrest and crime aren’t a full picture,” Robert Herrera, the film’s director, said in an interview. “I think people would have a hard time reconciling who they see on screen versus what they read about him — and I think that is something to think about when you read about all the young minorities out in this country who are considered irredeemable criminals.”

“The bureau’s fever dreams of leftist subversion have undermined American efforts for social justice.”

In college, inspired by an African history class, Davis learned about the Moorish movement, a group that’s grown considerably in recent years, whose beliefs are a mixture of sovereign citizen ideology — a historically right-wing and white supremacist ideology whose adherents reject the legitimacy of government institutions — and devotion to the Moorish Science Temple of America. The senior Davis, who is a vocal Trump supporter and hopes the president will pardon his son, had dreamed that Olajuwon Davis would become the first black secretary of the Treasury. But to his father’s horror, Davis joined the Moors, dropped out of college, and moved back to St. Louis. “The Moors convinced him that he was too black and too powerful to work for the government,” his father said.

Because they reject government authority, including that of law enforcement, sovereign citizens are perceived by police agencies as a top threat. But the FBI’s “black identity extremism” report, while noting “sparse evidence” of a convergence of sovereign citizen extremism and Moorish beliefs, said that the connection is clearest in the production of fraudulent personal identification documents. “Not all self-identified Moors are sovereign citizens, and not all sovereign citizen Moors engage in violence against law enforcement or other illegal activity,” the FBI conceded in the report.

Davis filed an “Abjuration of Citizenship” document with the Moorish nation movement, according to the Anti-Defamation League, and declared himself an “aboriginal indigenous Moorish national of Northwest Amexem,” the Moorish name for North America.

He carried a Moorish ID and said he had been tased and arrested in 2013 after attempting to make a “tax-free” purchase at a gas station using the ID. In social media posts, he described St. Louis as a “Slave Capital in a Slave State!” and the Gateway Arch as a “Symbol of Our destruction and demise.” According to his father, Davis met out-of-state members of the New Black Panther Party after Brown’s killing and was quickly recruited to lead the group’s local chapter. He befriended two FBI informants shortly thereafter.

[moorish-id-1553005721 A screenshot of the Moorish ID that Olajuwon Ali Davis shared in a YouTube video where he discussed sovereign citizenship. Screenshot: The Intercept]

The older Davis said his son did not realize that he was being framed, but the younger Davis indicated in social media posts that he knew he was under surveillance. “Family and Friends, every day I got Caucasians following me in SUV trucks,” he wrote on Facebook two days before his arrest. “Please be advised that if you show any signs of noncompliance with this Devil they will try to assassinate you.”

In prison, Davis has been taking classes, reading Paulo Coelho novels, recording himself reading books to his children, and volunteering to support fellow inmates who were placed on suicide watch, he wrote last year in a letter to the judge who sentenced him. “I recognize that my incarceration was due to my failure to adhere to the principles of unwavering faith and affirming peace in thought and in action,” he wrote. “My imprisonment has given me the chance to once again develop a perspective that is sound and humane.”

Egregious “Bothsidesism”

As protests over Brown’s killing intensified in Ferguson and spilled across the country over the next months and years, so did the FBI’s scrutiny of protesters. In November 2014, days before the Ferguson grand jury’s decision and Davis and Baldwin’s arrest, the bureau circulated an internal bulletin warning law enforcement of “Potential Criminal Reactions to Missouri Grand Jury Announcement.” Two years later, after protests against police brutality had engulfed Baltimore, Chicago, and several other cities, the FBI again issued an intelligence bulletin, warning that “Black Separatist Extremists’ Call for Retaliation in Response to Police-Involved Incidents Could Incite Acts of Violence against Law Enforcement.”

By 2017, the FBI had given this presumed threat a new name: Black Identity Extremism, or what the bureau claimed was a growing, violent, and racially motivated movement targeting law enforcement. Filled with innuendo and stereotypes, the 12-page report that first introduced the label was written so imprecisely that the very definition of a “black identity extremist” was left grammatically incomplete, making its meaning unclear:

The FBI defines black identity extremists as individuals who seek, wholly or in part, through unlawful acts of force or violence, in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society and some do so in furtherance of establishing a separate black homeland or autonomous black social institutions, communities, or governing organizations within the United States.

The report also explicitly connected its analysis to the Ferguson protests, focusing on incidents of what it called “premeditated attacks against law enforcement officers since 2014.”

“The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since [Ferguson] have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity, within the BIE movement,” it noted, adding that agency had “high confidence” in its assessment. “The FBI further judges it is very likely BIEs proactively target police and openly identify and justify their actions with social-political agendas commensurate with their perceived injustices against African Americans, and in some cases, their identified affiliations with violent extremist groups.”

Hansford, the activist and professor, told The Intercept that law enforcement took legitimate grievances about a broken system as personal attacks against them, and fabricated a nonexistent threat to repress criticism. “The Black Lives Matter protesters and other black protesters oftentimes are protesting the police themselves, so it’s a situation of self-interest where [police] feel personally attacked,” he said. “The problem is there really hasn’t been a major [African-American] group that has in any way, shape, or form been a tangible threat to law enforcement, physically, since the Black Liberation Army,” Hansford added, citing a militant black nationalist group active in the 1970s. “It’s been over 40 years.”

Lawmakers also condemned the report. In addition to Wray’s meetings with the Congressional Black Caucus and testimonies about it at two separate House Judiciary Committee hearings, Bass memorably grilled then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the report’s claims at a different committee hearing. Sessions said he hadn’t read the report and couldn’t name an African-American organization that had committed violence against police. Moments after Bass asked him whether he considered the Ku Klux Klan to be “white identity extremists,” Sessions quipped that the names of any white supremacist groups were “not coming to me at this moment.”

Despite a barrage of criticism the FBI did not retract or amend the report. Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2017, Wray said that the FBI would not “withdraw intelligence assessments based on public outcry.” Appearing before that committee again, in June 2018, he offered no answers to some legislators’ questions about who exactly had written the report and based on what premises, but he said that their feedback “prompted us to go back and take a very hard look at how we are bucketing the different categories of domestic terrorism.” “I think it’s been a useful learning experience for us,” Wray said, “and I expect we will see some changes in how we do things going forward.” Still, to date, the FBI has issued no clarification or amendment to the report.

But the “black identity extremism” report wasn’t the only one the FBI produced that year warning about the threat posed by a nonexistent ideological group. As Jezebel reported in January, the FBI in 2017 issued a similar alert about what it called “pro-choice extremists.”

In a one-page memo obtained via public records request by the government transparency group Property of the People, the FBI lists the new category of made-up extremists along actually existing “pro-life extremists” under the common banner of “Abortion Extremism Ideology.” As was the case with “black identity extremism,” the FBI concedes in the report that its own evidence for claiming that such an ideology exists is scant. “Only one pro-choice extremist has been prosecuted,” the report notes. “And that person acted independently and without any direct affiliation to a pro-choice group.”

As Jezebel notes, that is a reference to Theodore Shulman, who served three years in prison for harassing and threatening to kill two leaders of the anti-abortion movement. The only killing of an anti-abortion activist came at the hands of a mentally ill man who had also killed someone else that day, and that showed no signs of being motivated by ideology.

The documents obtained by Property of the People also give a sense of how these reports might be put to use by law enforcement. In one email published by the group, a Washington state sheriff shares the FBI material with his staff with the following warning: “Attached is the latest and greatest about groups we should be aware of. Some of them operate in Eastern Washington.”

Property of the People called the equation of imaginary “pro-choice extremism” to the real “pro-life extremism,” whose adherents have murdered at least a dozen doctors and abortion providers, “an especially egregious case of ‘bothsidesism.’”

“The term ‘terrorist’ is so nebulous, it’s so abstract. Anything they don’t like, they’ll call terrorist.”

“The FBI has a long, sad history of targeting progressive movements as threats to national security,” Ryan Shapiro, the group’s executive director, told The Intercept. “From the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements to the animal rights, anti-fascist, pro-choice, and Black Lives Matter movements today, the bureau’s fever dreams of leftist subversion have undermined American efforts for social justice.”

The FBI has also done little to address criticism that while it has long warned of the “persistent” threat posed by white supremacist groups — and even investigated white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement, as The Intercept has reported — it has grossly undercounted the violent incidents stemming from white supremacist ideology. While a May 2017 FBI report argued that “lone actors and small cells” within the white supremacist extremist movement “will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence,” that report minimized the level of violence coming from these individuals, listing only “one lethal and five potentially lethal attacks” carried out by white supremacist extremists in 2016 and omitting, for instance, the case of Brent Ward Luyster, a neo-Nazi who murdered three people in 2016 while under FBI investigation.

Between 2008 and 2017, “right-wing extremists” were responsible for 274 murders — more than 70 percent of all murders carried out by domestic extremists, according to a review by the ADL. And of 34 extremist-related murders in 2017, 59 percent were related to right-wing extremism,including 53 percent involving individuals who explicitly espoused white supremacist views. But many of those cases were rarely discussed by officials in terms of domestic terrorism, nor were the accused charged under anti-terrorism laws, even though they appeared to be motivated by a clear ideology.

Instead, as The Intercept’s analysis revealed, the Justice Department applied anti-terrorism laws against only 34 of 268 right-wing extremists it prosecuted for crimes that appear to meet the legal definition of domestic terrorism — while also targeting 17 environmental and animal rights activists with anti-terrorism laws.

“They view terrorism through a distorted lens that overemphasizes nonviolent acts by groups opposed to government policy over acts of violence against marginalized groups here in the United States,” said German, the former FBI agent, referring to the agency. “The language is intentionally malleable because they want to include certain acts and exclude other similar acts, depending on who is committing them or who the victim of the crime is.”

“The reason they’re able to do this is because the term ‘terrorist’ is so nebulous, it’s so abstract. Anything they don’t like, they’ll call terrorist,” echoed Hansford, the activist and law professor. “They will always resist having a more precise definition of terrorism because they want to use it as a tool to basically go after whoever they want to go after.”

[Members of an FBI evidence response team work at the scene of the attack on police officers in Dallas, Saturday, July 9, 2016. A peaceful protest over the recent videotaped shootings of black men by police turned violent Thursday night as gunman Micah Johnson fatally shot several officers. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) Members of an FBI evidence response team work at the scene of the attack on police officers in Dallas on July 9, 2016. Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP]

The FBI’s “BIE List”

In addition to the case of Davis and Baldwin — which the FBI report inexplicably describes as involving only one unnamed suspect — the “black identity extremism” report mentions the deadly shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge in the summer of 2016. Those shootings followed the police killings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, which were caught on video and reignited the national outrage sparked by Brown’s killing two years earlier. The report also lists nonfatal attacks on police in New York, Indiana, and Arizona.

But despite the FBI’s efforts to group the incidents together, there is no evidence that the perpetrators knew each other, belonged to any common groups, or subscribed to the same set of beliefs. Instead, the cases present a mix of resentment toward police, anger at the treatment of minorities, and mental health issues. At least two of the men referenced had expressed sovereign citizen beliefs: one was a Muslim convert who had shown fascination with jihadi violence, and two were military veterans who had sought treatment for symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. In many cases, the ideologies that law enforcement has attributed to them appear to have been based on FBI agents scrolling through comments the men had made on social media.

Three of the six referenced in the report were killed before their motives could be tested in court. Micah Johnson, who on July 7, 2016, shot and killed five law enforcement officers and wounded several others at a Dallas protest against police violence, told police negotiators before being killed in a standoff that “he was upset about recent police shootings and white people, and expressed a desire to kill white people, especially white officers,” according to the FBI report. The report notes that Johnson had “searched and liked social media pages of BIE and black separatist groups” and “appeared to have been influenced by BIE ideology.” It also cites news reports saying that he had been “ousted from a local BIE group for being too radical.” It’s unclear what groups the FBI was referring to, since “black identity extremist” organizations do not exist.

Gavin Eugene Long, who shot six Baton Rouge police officers on July 17, 2016, killing three, had used “black separatist rhetoric” on social media and in a manifesto he left behind, in which he described his actions “as a necessary evil … in order to create substantial change,” the FBI report notes, adding that Long had also declared himself a “Moor,” changed his “slave” name to a Moorish name, and was carrying a Moorish identification card at the time of his death. In videos and tweets posted shortly before the shooting, Long had praised Johnson, the Dallas shooter. He added, if “anything happens to me … don’t affiliate me with anybody.”

The cases present a mix of resentment toward police, anger at the treatment of minorities, and mental health issues.

Both Johnson and Long were military veterans. Johnson had sought treatment for anxiety, depression, and hallucinations after returning from Afghanistan in 2014, according to the Veterans Health Administration, and he had reportedly told doctors that he heard voices and mortars exploding, and that he had panic attacks and nightmares. Long, who served with the Marines in Iraq between 2008 and 2009, had told doctors that he experienced symptoms of PTSD, though his ultimate diagnosis was “adjustment disorder with depressed mood.”

The FBI report also lists the case of Zale Thompson, who attacked four New York police officers with a hatchet in October 2014, injuring two. According to the report, Thompson had tattoos that “indicated he was affiliated with a black separatist extremist group” and “pocket litter indicating he may have been associated with another black separatist group.” The FBI report cites “law enforcement reporting” as its source, but doesn’t mention that Thompson also appeared to have become fascinated by Islamic State propaganda videos and jihadi rhetoric.

Finally, the report listed the cases, though not the names, of Damoine Wilcoxson and Marc Laquon Payne. Wilcoxson was sentenced to 37 years in Indiana state prison after shooting at two Indianapolis police stations in 2016, leaving behind delirious handwritten notes saying, “White must die.” Payne was accused of plowing his car into three officers in Arizona that same year. Authorities indicated that Payne, who has pleaded not guilty and is facing trial later this year, was impaired at the time and that his motives were unknown, but the FBI report notes that Payne’s social media accounts “indicated that he was tied to a BIE group and a Moorish group and that he was angry over police shootings since at least the killing of Brown in 2014.”

But while the FBI stretched its definition of “black identity extremism” to include a disparate series of disconnected cases, white criminal suspects’ connections to extremist groups are often discounted, German said. “There’s evidence that the shooter in Las Vegas had expressed some anti-government views that are in line with some far-right groups, but you don’t see this rush to say he was a far-right extremist and to attribute those deaths to far-right extremism in the United States,” he said, referring to the massacre of 59 people at a country music concert in 2017. “That’s where the politics of this kind of approach are very damaging and divisive in American society, because they do tend to reflect political views rather than the threat of violence.”

[Rakem Balogun photographed near his home in Dallas, Texas. Rakem Balogun, photographed near his home in Dallas, Texas. Photo: Allison V. Smith]

Rakem’s Story

The case of Rakem Balogun is often characterized as the first attempted federal prosecution of a “black identity extremist” since the FBI report about the supposed ideology. Balogun is a Dallas-based former Marine and a member of Guerrilla Mainframe, a pan-African group with a broad agenda ranging between universal health care and the abolition of the U.S. Constitution. He was also a member of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, which promotes the Second Amendment rights of African-Americans.

Balogun, whose legal name is Christopher Daniels, was arrested in December 2017, when officers in riot gear pulled him and his 15-year-old son out of their house and forced them to stand outside in the cold, handcuffed and in their underwear. Balogun spent the next five months in jail on a single illegal firearms possession charge, while prosecutors tried and failed to paint him as a domestic terrorist. At his detention hearing, where Balogun was denied bail, an FBI agent testified that he had been under surveillance for two years, since video of him at an open-carry rally against police brutality circulated online, including on the right-wing conspiracy site InfoWars.

The video shows protesters, including Balogun, chanting, “The only good pig is a pig that’s dead” and “Oink oink, bang bang.” Balogun’s Facebook page “openly and publicly advocates violence toward law enforcement,” the FBI agent said. On the first anniversary of the July 2016 Dallas police shooting, Balogun posted several comments that appeared to celebrate shooter Micah Johnson. “Today one year ago one Black Man brought Dallas Pig Department to their knees,” he wrote.

Today, Balogun says he always suspected that he was being watched. “Anybody that knows a little bit about the history of black activism would know that once you become politically involved as a black person, especially as somebody who counters popular politics, that you will be watched,” he told The Intercept months after a judge ordered his release. “I don’t mind having an audience. I’m not doing anything illegal and I don’t advocate for anything illegal.”

“The thing about it is, a lot of mature black nationalists, militants, are not into the concept of going to war with the police or the state or anything of that nature,” he added, noting that he espouses what he called “scientific revolutionary socialism,” and that he believes in an individual’s right to self-defense.

Ultimately, the case against Balogun hinged on an accusation that he was prohibited from owning a gun due to a 10-year-old misdemeanor conviction for domestic assault in another state. Prosecutors tried to convince him to take a plea deal, he said. “Their plan was for me to be weak and sign for six months, and to feel guilty for being a black activist who promotes a culture of self-defense and self-preservation in a white nation. … That’s really the crime,” he told The Intercept. He refused to take a deal.

Balogun, who has long been an advocate for gun rights, said he’s used to the double standard applied to black gun owners. Perhaps the most infamous example of that is Philando Castile, who was killed by a police officer during a traffic stop, which his girlfriend streamed on Facebook Live. Castile was a legal gun owner and told the officer he had a gun, but he was shot anyway while reaching for his license as ordered. Balogun told The Intercept that while police officers are generally friendly with open-carry demonstrators in Texas, black open-carry demonstrators routinely receive more hostile treatment.

A federal judge ultimately dismissed the gun charge against him, but Balogun lost his job and home, and missed his newborn daughter’s first months while he was in jail. He says he is now considering legal action to obtain whatever surveillance material the government may have gathered on him. Wray said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in June 2017 that he was not familiar with Balogun’s case.

Babu Omowale, a founder and director of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, told The Intercept that he is sure Balogun was not the only member under surveillance. The group, which is named after a co-founder of the Black Panther Party, is mostly made up of former members or the New Black Panther Party who have focused their activism on gun rights and self-defense in the black community, mostly staging open-carry rallies, neighborhood patrols, and in one case, counter-demonstrating as an anti-Muslim group rallied outside a Dallas mosque.

“We see them sitting outside of our meetings, watching us, but it’s not going to stop us from organizing our people,” said Omowale, referring to the FBI. “We’ve known about it since the 1960s, when J. Edgar Hoover was over the counterintelligence program where he sought out black leadership.”

At a rally outside the U.S. Courthouse October 29, 1969, Dr. Benjamin Spock, background, listens to Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panther party. It was part of a protest against the trial of eight persons accused of conspiracy to cause a riot during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. (AP Photo/stf) At a rally outside the U.S. Courthouse on Oct. 29, 1969, Fred Hampton, chair of the Illinois Black Panther Party, speaks at a protest against the trial of eight people accused of conspiracy to cause a riot during the Democratic National Convention in 1968. Photo: AP]

COINTELPRO 2.0

The FBI’s leaked memo, as well as evidence that had already emerged that the FBI was targeting black activists for surveillance, drew widespread comparisons to the notorious COINTELPRO, a program aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, and sabotaging the civil rights, anti-war, and black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. “Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the original ‘Black Identity Extremists,’” a HuffPost column noted. Several people called the FBI report “COINTELPRO 2.0.” The FBI itself referred to the civil rights era in its 2017 report, retroactively applying its new “black identity extremist” label to the now-defunct Black Liberation Army. “BIEs have historically justified and perpetrated violence against law enforcement, which they perceived as representative of the institutionalized oppression of African Americans,” the report argued. “BIE violence peaked in the 1960s and 1970s in response to changing socioeconomic attitudes and treatment of blacks during the Civil Rights Movement.”

Under the COINTELPRO umbrella, the FBI went from tracking King’s every move and attempting to smear him, to surveilling Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, including by obtaining a floor map of his apartment, before Chicago police shot about 90 rounds into the apartment in 1969, killing Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark. At the same time, they routinely failed to intervene as white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan engaged in a sustained campaign of violence against civil rights activists and African-Americans.

The FBI report noted that between 1970 and 1984, the Black Liberation Army was involved in at least 38 criminal incidents, including 26 armed assaults, three assassinations, four bombings, and four hijackings and hostage-takings — half of them targeting law enforcement officers. But it made no reference to law enforcement violence against black activists, including the 1985 bombing of the Philadelphia headquarters of black liberation group MOVE, that killed 11 people.

Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee in November 2017, Wray called COINTELPRO “one of the darker moments in FBI’s history.” “It’s something we are not proud of, but it’s also something we have learned from,” he said. But when Rep. Cedric Richmond asked him why the FBI’s building continued to be named after J. Edgar Hoover — COINTELPRO’s infamous architect — Wray replied, “Like most people, he’s complicated.”

The “black identity extremism” report was hardly the first FBI effort to revive the tactics of COINTELPRO. In 2012, German, then at the American Civil Liberties Union, obtained public records revealing that the FBI had come up with yet another label to target what they claimed was a growing threat: “black separatist” domestic terrorism. Then, as now, the more recent violence driven by black nationalist ideology dated back decades, but the FBI included new warnings in its terrorism training materials that inexplicably connected the growing size of the black population in states like Georgia with a growing domestic terror threat. (As the ACLU noted at the time, the FBI had around the same time also invented what it called “American Islamic Extremists.”)

“The government has always kept an eye on black people because they want to keep us in a certain social order.”

“You would hope that a law enforcement agency learns from its past mistakes,” said German. “I think that’s where the biggest failure is, that there are enough parallels to how the FBI reacted to protests in the 1960s and 1970s that should have dissuaded them from adopting similar approaches again.”

But rather than learning from the past, it seems that the FBI is trying to maintain its old ways under a different name. While the ideologies that the terms “black separatism” and “black identity extremism” purport to represent would appear rather different, the FBI has recently folded both into the latter category, documents reveal. In an internal email exchange obtained by Property of the People and shared with The Intercept, Michael F. Paul, an official with the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, wrote to colleagues that the bureau had updated its definition of “black separatist extremism” in order “to broaden it beyond simply those seeking ‘separatism,’” he wrote. “The threat or movement has simply evolved,” Paul added, “and many are seeking more than/other than separation.”

Shapiro, of Property of the People, said the reclassification aimed to cast an even wider net on black activists at a time when police accountability, rather than separatism, was their priority. “Black Lives Matter isn’t a separatist movement, and the FBI wanted to expand its surveillance of black activists and communities,” he told The Intercept.

“With ‘black identity extremism,’ the FBI has expanded its ‘black separatist extremist’ category to also designate groups like Black Lives Matter a security threat,” he added. “The ‘BIE’ classification is the FBI’s bureaucratic umbrella for targeting as terrorists black people who expose the daily terror against their families and neighborhoods perpetrated by unaccountable killers in blue.”

To many black activists, that’s a familiar story.

“The government has always kept an eye on black people because they want to keep us in a certain social order,” said Omowale, of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. “The term ‘black identity extremist’ may be a new term, but the way that the government operates is nothing new. They’ve been doing it since we’ve been in this country, since black people, even slaves, tried to organize for some type of freedom.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22082018/pipeline-protest-laws-felony-free-speech-arrests-first-amendment-oklahoma-iowa-louisiana

prolly 2x, no lnx pix

How Energy Companies and Allies Are Turning the Law Against Protesters

In at least 31 states, lawmakers and governors have introduced bills and orders since Standing Rock that target protests, particularly opposition to pipelines.

By Nicholas Kusnetz

AUG 22, 2018

A version of this ICN story was published in the Washington Post.

The activists were ready for a fight. An oil pipeline was slated to cross tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma, and Native American leaders would resist. The Sierra Club and Black Lives Matter pledged support.

The groups announced their plans at a press conference in January 2017 at the State Capitol. Ashley McCray, a member of a local Shawnee tribe, stood in front of a blue "Water is Life" banner, her hair tied back with an ornate clip, and told reporters that organizers were forming a coalition to protect native lands.

They would establish a rural encampment, like the one that had drawn thousands of people to Standing Rock in North Dakota the previous year to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The following week, an Oklahoma state lawmaker introduced a bill to stiffen penalties for interfering with pipelines and other "critical infrastructure." It would impose punishments of up to 10 years in prison and $100,000 in fines—and up to $1 million in penalties for any organization "found to be a conspirator" in violating the new law. Republican Rep. Scott Biggs, the bill's sponsor, said he was responding to those same Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

The activists established the camp in March, and within weeks the federal Department of Homeland Security and state law enforcement wrote a field analysis identifying "environmental rights extremists" as the top domestic terrorist threat to the Diamond Pipeline, planned to run from Oklahoma to Tennessee. The analysis said protesters could spark "criminal trespassing events resulting in violence." It told authorities to watch for people dressed in black.

An FBI team arrived to train local police on how to handle the protest camp.

McCray recalls a surveillance plane and helicopters whirring above the Oka Lawa camp. Demonstrators were pulled over and questioned on their way in or out, though the local sheriff said people were only pulled over for violating traffic laws.

In May the governor signed the bill to protect critical infrastructure. Merely stepping onto a pipeline easement suddenly risked as much as a year in prison.

"That was really pretty successful in thwarting a lot of our efforts to continue any activism after that," McCray said.

Oka Lawa never drew the kind of participation and attention that made the Dakota Access Pipeline a national cause, and the Diamond Pipeline was completed quietly later that year.

McCray has since channeled her energy toward politics, running for a seat on the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates the energy industry. But even as a candidate, McCray says, she now watches her words and her Facebook posts, afraid of being implicated as a conspirator if someone were to violate the law, even if she doesn't know the person. "I don't feel safe, honestly," she said.

Ashley McCray speaks at a protest in Oklahoma. Credit: Johnson Grimm-Bridgwater/Oklahoma Sierra Club

Ashley McCray says Oklahoma's new law has made protesters think carefully about what they have the freedom to say. Credit: Johnson Grimm-Bridgwater/Oklahoma Sierra Club

Across the country, activists like McCray are feeling increasingly under assault as energy companies and their allies in government have tried to turn the law—and law enforcement—against them.

In Louisiana, which enacted a similar law in May, at least nine activists have been arrested under the new law since it went into effect on Aug. 1. In one incident, three people were pulled off a canoe and kayak after they maneuvered the boats on a bayou to protest construction of an oil pipeline. The arrests were conducted by off-duty officers with the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections who were armed and in uniform, but at the time were working for a private security firm hired by the pipeline developer.

Dozens of bills and executive orders have been introduced in at least 31 states since January 2017 that aim to restrict high-profile protests that have ramped up as environmentalists focus on blocking fossil fuel projects.

In addition to Oklahoma's infrastructure bill and similar legislation enacted in two other states, these bills wouldexpand definitions of rioting and terrorism, and even increase penalties for blocking traffic. Twelve have been enacted, according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. The bills have all come since the election of President Donald Trump, who openly suggested violence as a way to handle protesters on the campaign trail, and once in office called the nation's leading news organizations "the enemy of the American people."

At the same time, law enforcement and private companies have conducted surveillance on campaigners, while some federal and state officials have suggested pipeline protesters who break laws be charged as terrorists. Corporations have hit landowners and environmental groups with restraining orders and hundred-million-dollar lawsuits.

Some pipeline opponents have conducted dangerous and illegal stunts, cutting pipelines with oxyacetylene torches or closing valves. But most protests have been peaceful. If they've broken laws by trespassing, activists say, they've done so as part of a tradition of civil disobedience that stretches to the nation's colonial roots.

"All of the social progress we've made has depended, over the entire history of this nation, from the very beginning, on that ability to speak out against things that are wrong, things that are legal but should not be," said Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law. "This country, for all its failing, has long respected the importance of that. These bills put that fundamental element of our democracy in jeopardy."

In an Age of Terrorism

The modern environmental movement sprung out of mass protest, when millions took to the streets for the first Earth Day in 1970. In the decade that followed, civil disobedience emerged as a core tactic as greens joined with anti-war protesters to launch anti-nuclear campaigns.

The movement returned to those roots with its fight to stop the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Beginning in 2011, activists staged sit-ins ending in arrests that galvanized the movement and drew national attention to what had been the mundane work of building pipelines.

Across the country, people began physically obstructing fossil fuel infrastructure. Protesters blocked train tracks carrying coal and oil in Washington state, halted trucks at the gates of a gas storage facility in upstate New York and kayaked in front of an oil rig in Seattle. This was before hundreds were arrested at Standing Rock.

In the absence of a clear federal energy plan, fossil fuel projects effectively became the policy, locking in oil, gas and coal infrastructure—and their greenhouse gas emissions —for generations. They became the focus of environmental groups, who found common cause with tribes and landowners fighting to protect their land and water. The groups launched campaigns that delayed or blocked several major coal export facilities, pipelines and other projects, costing energy companies millions or even billions of dollars.

To push back, the industry turned to its supporters in government.

Soon after Oklahoma's critical infrastructure bill passed last year, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) used it to write model legislation for other states.

In at least six more states, lawmakers introduced similar bills that would impose steep penalties for trespassing on, or tampering with, pipeline property and other infrastructure. Two were enacted this year. Two others are pending.

Map: 6 States That Considered Legislation Targeting Pipeline Protesters

In Wyoming, one bill was openly proposed on behalf of energy companies. In other states the ties are barely hidden.

Louisiana state Rep. Major Thibaut, a Democrat, introduced a bill that followed ALEC's model by adding pipelines to a list of critical infrastructure facilities. When he presented it to a Senate committee in April, he brought Tyler Gray, a lobbyist for the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. During the hearing, Gray answered most of the questions. At one point, he leaned over to Thibaut to recommend that he accept an amendment. Neither Thibaut nor Gray responded to requests for comment.

Gov. John Bel Edwards signed it into law in May, after an amendment removed the threat of conspiracy charges.

Iowa enacted a law that makes "critical infrastructure sabotage" a felony. Lawmakers in Wyoming and Minnesota also approved critical infrastructure bills this year, but the governors there vetoed the legislation. Similar bills are pending in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The bills may get their first test soon in Louisiana after the arrests of the three activitists on the bayou. Activists had been conducting tree-sits and other actions for weeks and were careful to stay off the pipeline easements once the new law took effect, said Cherri Foytlin, an activist organizer in the state. The three who were taken from their boats, for example, claim to have been in navigable waters, which are supposed to be public. The definition of what's navigable has been the subject of much debate and legal wrangling in the state, however, and the off-duty officers pulled the activists off their boats to arrest them.

"It was really scary," said Cindy Spoon, one of the activists, in a video posted to Facebook. "They grabbed my wrist, grabbed my waist and they started to pull one of my arms behind my back and put me in a stress position."

The local district attorney has not yet formally filed charges. If the case proceeds, the activists will challenge the law itself, said William Quigley, a professor at Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans who is representing them pro bono. They could face up to five years in prison if convicted.

Two more incidents occurred over the weekend involving activists who had erected a stand high in the trees to block construction. Quigley said the group had permission from property owners to be on the land. But deputies with the St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Office arrested six people, including a journalist. The property is co-owned by hundreds of parties, and some of them have not signed easement agreements with Energy Transfer Partners, the primary owner of the pipeline.

The St. Martin Parish Sheriff's Office did not return requests for comment on the weekend arrests.

"I think this shows how ridiculous this law is if this is the way it's going to be applied," Quigley said.

The legislation is not without precedent. Since 1990, nearly a dozen states have passed bills known as "ag-gag" laws that prohibit surreptitiously recording inside feedlots and breeding facilities. Many came after exposés of horrific conditions and animal abuse. Three of those laws were subsequently overturned by courts.

But environmentalists and free speech advocates say the new bills are part of a broader effort to recast environmental activists as criminals, even terrorists.

For example:

In May 2017, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers published a blog post about activists who vandalized pipelines, under the headline: "Pipelines Are Critical Infrastructure—and Attacking Them Is Terrorism."

Last year, Energy Transfer Partners filed a federal lawsuit against Greenpeace and other groups seeking hundreds of millions of dollars. The complaint accuses some of the nation's leading environmental organizations of operating an "eco-terrorist" conspiracy at Standing Rock. (A judge dismissed the case against one of the defendants last month, but has yet to rule on a motion to dismiss the case against Greenpeace.)

Another industry group launched a database to track "criminal acts on critical energy infrastructure," claiming eco-terrorism incidents were on the rise.

In Congress, 84 members wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions asking if protestors who tamper with pipelines could be prosecuted as domestic terrorists. Sponsors of the state pipeline bills have also invoked terrorism.

Supporters of the bills say they do not suppress lawful protests.

"There's a legal process to stop something," said Oklahoma state Rep. Mark McBride, who sponsored another bill that assigns civil liability to anyone who pays protesters to trespass. "But if you're chaining yourself to a bulldozer or you're standing in the way of a piece of equipment digging a ditch or whatever it might be, yes, you're causing harm to the project and to the person that's contracted to do that job."

Advocacy groups say the bills are unnecessary—trespassing and vandalism are already unlawful, and protesters who have disrupted operations have largely been charged under existing statutes. They fear the legislation uses a handful of dangerous incidents as a pretext to intimidate mainstream advocates and target more widespread acts of peaceful civil disobedience, like temporarily blocking access to a construction site. Several environmental and civil liberties organizations are now in talks about how to respond to the industry's actions.

"The clear attempt there is to bring environmental justice, environmental advocacy organizations into a realm of criminal liability," said Pamela Spees, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents activists in Louisiana. "They're basically trying to silence and minimize the impact of environmental organizations."

Afraid to Speak Up at the Pipeline Crossroads of the World

Ever since the state's first gusher began spurting crude in 1897, oil has dominated life in Oklahoma. Today, it is home to fracking pioneers, including Continental Resources. The town of Cushing, the self-dubbed "pipeline crossroads of the world," is a critical oil trading hub. "Environmental activist" is not a badge many wear openly in Oklahoma.

Dakota Raynes spent the past few years at Oklahoma State University writing his dissertation about how people have responded to a fracking boom that's literally shaken the state. As drillers began injecting more wastewater into wells from 2010-2015, the number of earthquakes jumped more than 20-fold to 888.

Raynes interviewed dozens of activists, lawmakers, regulators and ordinary citizens. He found that almost everyone is reluctant to speak publicly against the industry. They fear neighbors or colleagues or parents of their children's friends will catch wind and shun them. Raynes said he's attended events with activists who have returned to their cars afterward to find screws driven into tires.

"Many people read Oklahoma as a hostile context in which to engage in any kind of pro-environmental work," he said. "And they all link that back to the phenomenal amount of power that the oil and gas industry has, both as a cultural force, as a legal force, as a political force."

Standing Rock changed that deference, said Mekasi Camp Horinek, a member of the state's Ponca tribe.

Thousands of protesters traveled to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation in North Dakota to speak out against construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Thousands of protesters from across the country traveled to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation in North Dakota to speak out against construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 and 2017. Police set up armed blockades and at one point turned water cannons on protesters in sub-freezing weather. Credit: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Horinek grew up on tribal land near an oil refinery and a factory that produces carbon black, a sooty petroleum product. He blames the facilities for contributing to disease and deaths in his community. When the call came to join the resistance at Standing Rock, he became a leading organizer. (The Ponca's ancestral land in Nebraska lies in the path of the Keystone XL pipeline, another project he's fought.)

"I think the state of Oklahoma felt threatened and was worried that people would rise up," he said about the critical infrastructure bill. "And they should be."

Horinek says he remains undaunted, but he said the new law had an immediate effect on others.

People were suddenly threatened with long prison terms if they crossed onto pipeline property. "That definitely weighs heavy on a person's thoughts," he said.

Oklahoma has 39 American Indian tribes, most forced to move there during the Trail of Tears in the 19th Century, and indigenous activists led the fight against the Diamond Pipeline. "They can't risk a six-month sentence for trespassing. Who's going to take care of their kids, their parents, their grandparents?" he said.

Biggs, the state representative who sponsored the bill, now works for the federal Department of Agriculture. He declined to comment for this article. The Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association also declined to make anyone available for an interview.

Activists say the bill was a clear assault.

Map: 31 States That Have Proposed Laws Targeting Protests

The Sierra Club has a policy against engaging in civil disobedience. But the bill's conspiracy element—which says a group can be charged with 10 times the fines given to a person who violates the provisions—worries the organization's Oklahoma director, Johnson Grimm-Bridgwater. He was among those who spoke at the 2017 press conference. While Grimm-Bridgwater says participating in a press conference should qualify as constitutionally protected speech, there's no telling how a prosecutor might apply the new statute.

"The law is punitive and is designed to create friction and divisions among groups who normally wouldn't have a second thought at working together," he said.

Brady Henderson, legal director for the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said there's widespread concern in both liberal and libertarian circles about the law, and he's fielded questions from several nonprofits about the conspiracy clause.

The ACLU in Oklahoma is considering legal challenges, but may have to wait until a district attorney tries to use the new law. Still, Henderson said, the language is so broad that it can apply to almost anything.

"By equating those kinds of things together, essentially political speech on one end and on the other end outright terrorism," he said, "the bill is a pretty gross instrument."

Protesters Under Surveillance

As activists were fighting the Diamond Pipeline in Oklahoma, Energy Transfer Partners was planning another oil pipeline at the southern end of its network.

The Bayou Bridge pipeline is slated to run from Texas to St. James Parish, Louisiana, already home to many petrochemical facilities. Along the way, it crosses through the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest river swamp and a center of the state's crawfish industry.

Environmentalists were alarmed by the risks the project posed to residents of St. James Parish and the swamp's fragile ecosystem. And they quickly felt as if law enforcement agencies were working against them. For one thing, some officials openly supported the project. Joseph Lopinto, now Jefferson Parish sheriff, spoke at a hearing last year on behalf of the National Sheriffs' Association and urged regulators to approve the pipeline.

Anne Rolfes, an organizer of the pipeline resistance and founder of the advocacy group Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said activists also suspected they were being watched.

During the protests at Standing Rock, a private security company hired by Energy Transfer Partners had compiled daily intelligence briefings and coordinated with local law enforcement, as detailed in reports by The Intercept.

Rolfes' group this year also obtained a handful of documents through a public records request that indicate state officials were tracking their efforts.

One state police report from November said the agency sent an investigator from its criminal intelligence unit to a hearing where activists had allegedly planned a protest, and that a local sheriff's office planned to send a plainclothes officer. Rolfes said no protest was planned; activists merely intended to speak at a public hearing.

In the following months, an intelligence officer with the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness sent two emails to colleagues describing environmental groups' priorities, quoting Rolfes' newsletter and an article about the groups and adding a photograph of her.

Louisiana State Police declined to comment. Mike Steele, a spokesman for the state Homeland Security Department, rejected the notion that his agency spies on activists. He said this type of open-source tracking was similar to what they conduct ahead of football games or festivals. "We do that with any type of event, because safety is the number one concern," he said.

Energy Transfer Partners spokeswoman Alexis Daniel issued a statement saying, "any claims that our company or our security contractors have inappropriately monitored protestors in false." It's unclear what surveillance, if any, the company or its contractors have deployed in Louisiana. Energy Transfer Partners has also been accused of spying by a family in Pennsylvania.

Anne Rolfes speaks at a protest in Louisiana in 2017. A similar photo of her from the same event was circulated by a law enforcement agency. Credit: Julie Dermansky

Anne Rolfes, founder of the advocacy group Louisiana Bucket Brigade, speaks at a protest in 2017. A similar photo of her was circulated by a law enforcement agency. Credit: Julie Dermansky

Rolfes said Louisiana officials are treating activists like criminals. "We're going to be followed while we participate in the democratic process?" she said.

The arrests in August of the three protesters on boats who were detained by off-duty officers only deepened the activists' feelings that the state and energy industry were working against them. While the arresting officers were working as contractors, they wore their state uniforms and badges and carried weapons.

Spees, with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said the incident represented a problematic melding of public and private authorities. After the industry-supported bill was enacted by the state, she said, state employees acted on behalf of an energy company to detain activists under the new law.

"It's as though they've become the hired hands for private oil companies and pipelines companies," she said.

Activists in Virginia, where two gas pipelines are drawing protests, have also been tracked by that state's Fusion Center—which shares information across agencies to combat terrorism and crime—according to a report by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In Washington state, a local sheriff's office has monitored activists opposed to a major pipeline project that connects with Canada's tar sands, sharing information with that state's Fusion Center, documents obtained by The Intercept show. Protest groups there already tried to block tanker traffic associated with the project, and local authorities have conducted trainings to prepare for mass protests.

The nation's intelligence community has a dark history of tracking political movements, including the FBI's COINTELPRO, which snooped on Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. Earlier this decade, FBI agents monitored opponents of the Keystone XL pipeline, according to The Guardian, and the bureau had at least one informant at Standing Rock.

Even if local law enforcement agencies today are doing little more than collecting news articles and other open source information, covert surveillance risks equating political protest with criminal activity, said Keith Mako Woodhouse, a historian at Northwestern University who wrote a book about radical environmentalists.

"It gives a sense that law enforcement is, if not on the side of, at least more sympathetic to the industries and practices that are being protested," he said. "Presumably they're not surveilling the energy companies."

Pipeline companies have cultivated that relationship. They have reimbursed state law enforcement millions of dollars for providing security for their projects in North Dakota, Iowa and Massachusetts, for example. Most major pipeline companies also run charitable campaigns that have contributed millions of dollars to local emergency responders and other agencies and groups along their routes. The National Sheriff's Association, in turn, supported the Bayou Bridge and Dakota Access pipelines while it called protesters "terrorists."

A Worrying Trend

Over the past decade, the sense of urgency around climate change has intensified. Scientists say there is little time before the planet is committed to potentially devastating warming. The only practical way to avoid that is to largely eliminate fossil fuel use over the next several decades.

The government's response has been minimal, "so the next step is civil disobedience," said Woodhouse, the historian. "And if anything, it's surprising that it hasn't happened sooner and at a greater scale."

Woodhouse said efforts to suppress environmental protest trace back to the rise of radical environmental groups in the 1980s and `90s, when public officials slapped names like "eco-terrorism" and "ecological terrorism" on activists who vandalized equipment or animal testing facilities.

Now, Woodhouse said, environmentalists are threatening one of the country's most powerful industries. Some advocates say the new push against activists seems more widespread and unabashed.

"I think there is a very worrying trend—and the trend is on both sides of the political aisle to be perfectly frank and candid—a trend of trying to suppress political speech that you don't agree with," said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition.

"I think a lot of people feel a lot more threatened than they have in a long time," he said, "and I think that's true on all sides of the political spectrum. And when people feel threatened, they tend to lash out."

ICN reporter Georgina Gustin contributed to this story.

2/19 AN

Denouncing the database as “an illegal boondoggle,” a civil rights organization on Wednesday is calling for a congressional probe after the FBI admitted it lied for years when it insisted federal authorities do not share the so-called terrorist watchlist with private entities.

In fact, as the Associated Pressfirst reported, the federal government has shared the controversial Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) with 1,441 private entities including universities, detention facilities, and hospitals.

The list, created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, may contain as many as a million names and, according to civil rights groups, the names are placed there on dubious grounds.

From AP:

The government’s admission comes in a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in Alexandria by Muslims who say they regularly experience difficulties in travel, financial transactions, and interactions with law enforcement because they have been wrongly added to the list.

Following the challenge brought by the Washington D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga, according to AP, “ordered the government to be more specific about how it disseminates the watchlist” because “the plaintiffs are entitled to the information to try to prove their case that inclusion on the list causes them to suffer ‘real world consequences.'” The government responded earlier this month with the list of entities, though it did not say how they then use the TSDB.

“The indiscriminate dissemination of the watchlist is but the latest indication that the federal government’s watchlisting system is an illegal boondoggle,” said CAIR litigation director Lena Masri in a statement. “We call on congressional leadership to investigate the private sector dissemination of watchlisting information that stigmatizes the innocent and makes none of us safer.”

vs cardillo?

https://www.democracynow.org/2018/5/23/the_new_cointelpro_meet_the_black

In Texas, a black activist says he is the first person to be targeted and prosecuted under a secretive U.S. surveillance effort to track so-called black identity extremists. On December 12, activist Rakem Balogun awoke to armed FBI agents storming his Dallas apartment. He was then jailed for nearly six months without the possibility of bail as the FBI investigated him for “domestic terrorism,” in part because of his Facebook posts criticizing police brutality. He was released earlier this month, after U.S. attorneys failed to prosecute him. For more, we speak with Rakem Balogun, who was released earlier this month after being jailed for nearly six months. And we speak with Malkia Cyril, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice and a Black Lives Matter Bay Area activist.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we end today’s show in Texas, where a black activist says he is the first person to be targeted and prosecuted under a secretive U.S. surveillance effort to track so-called black identity extremists. On December 12th, activist Rakem Balogun awoke to armed FBI agents storming his Dallas apartment. He was then jailed for nearly six months without the possibility of bail as the FBIinvestigated him for “domestic terrorism,” in part because of his Facebook posts criticizing police brutality. He was released earlier this month, after U.S. attorneys failed to prosecute him.

...

domestic ctr- terror -ism

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