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AN 10 26

A private investigator hired by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office to handle sensitive internal investigations had previously worked for an organization designated as an anti-Muslim hate group and participated in the controversial Cyber Ninjas review of Arizona’s 2020 election, according to a newly unsealed report.

Phoenix New Times reported that the court-appointed monitor's 226-page report on the sheriff's office looked at the way AZ Truthfinder, a company founded by former Gilbert police officer Stephanie Ameiss, obtained a county contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It was discovered that the résumé Ameiss had submitted as part of the bidding process omitted important aspects of her background, such as her six years of experience as lead investigator for Understanding the Threat, an organization founded by the former FBI agent John Guandolo.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Understanding the Threat as a hate group, stating that it was an organization that promoted anti-Muslim conspiracy theories and offered training programs to law enforcement agencies. The group ceased operations in 2023.

The report from the monitor stated that Understanding the Threat had published material that attacked Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Democrats and others.

The report states that Ameiss did not include her participation in the Cyber Ninjas-led investigation into Maricopa County's 2020 election results on her resume. After Donald Trump had lost in the state, the Republican-controlled Arizona Senate engaged Cyber Ninjas to carry out the highly criticized review.

AZ Truthfinder was one of the three companies bidding for the contract to carry out investigations in the situation where conflicts had prevented the sheriff's Professional Standards Bureau from dealing with the cases itself, and the leadership of the sheriff's office had chosen the company less than 24 hours after having looked at the bids.

Axios states that the company has obtained approximately $270,000 from Maricopa County since June 2025. The monitor doubted if the sheriff's office had carried out a meaningful background check before giving the contract.

The report stated that either the 'vetting process' was a sham or the vetting that had in fact been carried out had shown some of the same material that we had uncovered, but they had chosen to ignore it.

The results occur while Sheriff Jerry Sheridan and Maricopa County have been attempting to put an end to the years of federal court supervision which followed a racial-profiling lawsuit brought against the sheriff's office.

Chris Hegstrom, a spokesperson for the Sheriff's department, said to Axios that the agency was going over the report and was still committed to "full and effective compliance" with the court's orders.

The monitor suggested that the circumstances relating to the contract should be referred to a possible misconduct investigation.

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rww

04/07/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

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10 24 rww

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/tpusa-promotes-john-guandolos-call-for-right-wing-activists-to-bully-and-harass-political-opponents/

922

a new film produced by the right-wing youth organization Turning Point USA spotlights radical right-wing conspiracy theorist John Guandolo urging sheriffs to take the law into their own hands and resist federal authority.

Guandolo is a former FBI agent who resigned in 2009 “before the bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility could question him about his sexual liaisons” with a star witness in a government corruption case as well as “with women FBI agents,” according to a report from The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate.

Following his resignation, Guandolo became a radical right-wing conspiracy theorist and anti-Islam activist who now runs an organization called Understanding The Threat through which he trains law enforcement agencies around the country to identify seemingly anyone with dark skin and a beard as an Islamic terrorist. Guandolo is so radical that in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he praised insurrectionists for showing restraint by not publicly executing lawmakers, most of whom he claimed are “traitors” who should be “swinging from a rope.”

But in “The Enemy Within: FBI Whistleblower,” Turning Point USA portrays Guandolo as a brave “FBI whistleblower” dedicated to exposing the “undiscussed network of jihadists and communists that have worked together to undermine America at its root for decades.”

During the documentary, Guandolo discussed his efforts to train local right-wing activists take over their towns, throw their mayors in jail, and ruin the lives of anyone who dares to oppose them. As part of this effort, Guandolo said that sheriffs and average citizens must work together to physically prevent the FBI or federal government from operating in their towns and to drive uncooperative companies out of business.

“Just recently in Texas, FBI raids a guy’s house, saying he was somehow involved in Jan. 6 and all this nonsense. The local sheriff does nothing,” Guandologriped. “And in response to citizens asking the sheriff, ‘Why didn’t you intervene?’ He’s like, ‘Well, it’s out of my hands. It’s a federal matter.’ The answer is it’s your frickin’ county, it’s your jurisdiction, it’s your responsibility! The fact that you’re unprofessional—and the fact that you’re too scared or cowardly to do your duty—that’s the problem. Citizens have to hold their local officials culpable.”

“Let’s look at what that looks like in reality,” Guandolo continued. “When the FBI shows up at a citizen’s home, whether they’re given a head’s up or [not]—now, if they’re given a head’s up, the sheriff immediately calls local FBI and says, ‘No, you’re not doing that. Before you do anything in my county, I want to see it. And if you show up without notifying me, I’m going to put 20 deputies in front of this guy’s house, and you’re not going in. And we will physically block you because it’s wrong. And we’ll call citizens that we work with in the community, and we’ll have 100 or 200 of them out there because what you’re doing is wrong, and I’m not going to tolerate it. And by the way, I’m the law in this county, not you.'”

“What you’re doing is unjust, and so we’re not going to allow it in our county,” Guandolo added, “You can do that with the banks that are doing financing of these groups. ‘Hey, you want to finance communist China through [Black Lives Matter]? Then your bank will shut down in our county. We’re shutting this branch down, so if you want to operate, then you need to shut this off. You’ve got two hours.’ And there are a lot of ways to do it, a lot of ways to make people unwelcome. And if that makes people listening or viewing what we’re doing right here uncomfortable, then all I would ask is, that’s fine that you’re uncomfortable, get out of the way because there’s a war on, and we don’t need you in the middle if you’re not sure what’s actually going on." [vid]

guandolo echoes talking points put forth by extremists like Richard Mack, the founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, which teaches that “the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the president” and urges local law enforcement to resist federal authority. This false idea that the sheriff holds supreme authority has increased in popularity among right-wing activists who would like to see sheriffs conduct more audits of the 2020 presidential election and be more involved in future elections.

This film—and Turning Point USA’s heroic portrayal of the extremist Guandolo—is noteworthy for another reason: It shows just how far to the right the youth organization has become.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/michael-flynn-teams-up-with-radical-far-right-activist-john-guandolo/

michael Flynn Teams Up With Radical Far-Right Activist John Guandolo

By Kyle Mantyla | July 21, 2022 

John Guandolo is right-wing conspiracy theorist and anti-Islam activist so radical that in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he praised insurrectionists for showing restraint by not publicly executing lawmakers, most of whom he claimed are “traitors” who should be “swinging from a rope.”

After leaving the FBI in disgrace in 2009, Guandolo founded an organization calledUnderstanding The Threat, through which he trains law enforcement agencies around the country to identify seemingly anyone with dark skin and a beard as an Islamic terrorist.In recent months, Guandolo’s organization has begun offering training sessions for right-wing citizens on how to take over their towns, arrest their mayors, and destroy the lives of anyone who objects by publicly humiliating them, getting them fired from their jobs, and forcing them to move away.

Guandolo and his team are leading just such a training session at an undisclosed location this week. According to an email Guandolo sent to Understanding The Threat subscribers, right-wing conspiracy theorist and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn is participating in the July 19-21 session:

The training promises to “organize communities into operational forces to identify roots of corruption & dismantle the hostile networks behind it, and re-establish a Republican form of government at the local level.”

Flynn has been a subject of scrutiny for the House Jan. 6 committee, which last week revealed Flynn’s participation in a December 2020 meeting with former President Donald Trump in which he spewed voter fraud conspiracy theories and urged Trump to seize voting machines. That same month, Flynn also urged the former president to declare martial law. When questioned by the committee whether he believed the violence on January 6, 2021, was justified, Flynnpleaded the Fifth Amendment.

Tags: John Guandolo Michael Flynn Understanding The Threat

splc islamo

...Another anti-Muslim figurehead involved with CNP is Frank Gaffney. A former Ronald Reagan administration staffer, Gaffney has since become one of the most prolific anti-Muslim propagandists in the country. He is gripped by paranoid fantasies of foreign entities such as the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating and supplanting the U.S. from within. Gaffney founded the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy and now serves in an executive chairmanship role at the group.

[pix Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, testifies during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Hatewatch first reported on Gaffney’s CNP membershipin the publication of the group’s 2014 roster. He is listed as a “Gold Circle Member” in CNP’s September 2020 membership roster. Gold Circle Members pay a yearly fee of $10,000, as shown by nomination documents. Like Gabriel, Gaffney’s listed interests at CNP include “Radical Islam.”

Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2016, candidate Trump used data from a shoddy survey commissioned by the Center for Security Policy to justify his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The survey was done by The Polling Company, Kellyanne Conway’s company.Conway served as Trump’s senior counselor and was a member of CNP’s executive committee from 2014 to 2015, tax records show.

Like other anti-Muslim and far-right actors, CNP has begun to frame China as a new Cold War-style adversary. Gaffney and his group are active in stoking alarmism about the supposed threat from China. At a CNP conference in August 2020 in Arlington, Virginia, the coalition’s sister lobbying arm CNP Action, Inc., hosted a panel titled “Reckoning with China: Action Steps,” according to a leaked copy of the agenda obtained by the watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy. The panel featured Gaffney as a participant.

Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a right-wing activist who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is also a CNP member and counts “Radical Islam” among her interests. In 2013, Mother Jones reported Ginni Thomas and Gaffney were part of another right-wing strategy group known as Groundswell.

CNP has also included Islamophobic figures in its orbit and network. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn,Trump’s former National Security Adviser who was later pardoned by the former president after lying to the FBI, has ties to CNP, though he is not listed as a member. Flynn spoke at a CNP Policy Counsel event in July 2016. His name is also associated with a CNP Zoominfo account, as uncovered by investigative researcher Brent Allpress, suggesting Flynn might be involved more formally with the coalition. Flynn has a history of expressing anti-Islam sentiment, once calling the religion “a cancer.” In 2016, ACT for America advertised Flynn serving on its board of advisers. He was also a keynote speaker at ACT’s 2016 conference in Washington, D.C.

In September 2017, longtime anti-Muslim figurehead David Horowitz (who is not listed as a member) spoke at a CNP conference in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The theme of the event and Horowitz’s presentation was “Mapping the Left.” Horowitz heads the eponymously named David Horowitz Freedom Center, a hate group known for spreading anti-Muslim sentiment and helping fund other Islamophobic projects such as Jihad Watch and FrontPage Magazine. Once a leftist in the 1960s, Horowitz now tries to smear his former political affiliation as being totalitarian.

Dr. Mark Christian is listed as a member of CNP’s Board of Governors, which carries an annual fee of $6,000. Christian runs the anti-Muslim hate group Global Faith Institute, a group that peddles Islamophobic conspiracy theories while claiming to advocate for “the victims of Islam.” Christian is a former Muslim who converted to Christianity. He joins a cottage industry of former Muslims now disparaging their former faith. Christian is willing to associate with extreme figures in the anti-Muslim network, such as the former FBI agent turned anti-Muslim hate figureJohn Guandolo. Christian subscribes to the conspiracy theory that Islamic Sharia law is slowly “creeping” into American society.

“Islam has infiltrated all aspects of our life: our schools, churches, media, courts, military and our government,” reads a 2017 Global Faith Institute email to supporters. “Every day we are losing more of our freedom because of creeping sharia law.”

Christian did not answer a request for comment.

CNP’s rosters reveal the membership of other figures known for spreading Islamophobic rhetoric. One isfar-right historian William “Bill” Federer,who treads in Islamophobic and anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theories. According to the watchdog and research group Right Wing Watch, Federer once claimed that an “atheist homosexual gay agenda movement” will “open up” the U.S. “to move into an Islamic future.” Federer has been featured at events such as the Values Voter Summit, an annual conference put on by the Family Research Council. Brigitte Gabriel has also spoken at the Values Voter Summit in recent years, including 2018 and 2019. Family Research Council’s executive vice presidentJerry G. Boykin is also a member of CNP.

Boykin has a track record of making anti-Muslim remarks, once claiming Islam should not be protected by the First Amendment. Boykin used similar rhetoric in a 2014 news briefing for Policy Counsel, a CNP publication and speaker series to inform the public on a “wide range of topics” and “variety of opinions.” Boykin goes heavy on the anti-Islam rhetoric in the article, which touches on the rise and activities of the terrorist group ISIS at the time. Boykin took issue with former President Barack Obama’s attempts to not conflate the terrorist group with a religion of around 1.8 billion people.

“I think most Americans have figured this out,” Boykin said. “When you say Isis [sic] is not Islam the rest doesn’t really matter because if you are laying out a strategy that doesn’t start with an understanding of your enemy and who you are up against and what motivates him to do what he does the rest doesn’t matter.”

Boykin adds elsewhere: “One of the mistakes that we make about Islam is that only 16% of Islam is actually a religion.” He claims the rest is a legal, geopolitical and military system. Claiming Islam is not a religion – or only part one – is a well-tread trope deployed by Islamophobic figures. “But only 16% is an actual religion,” he said. “And we make the mistake of thinking that it’s exactly like Christianity. It is not.”

CNP’s Policy Counsel includes a disclaimer that views expressed in the articles are not always representative of the coalition. “These views should not be construed as the views of the Council for National Policy, as an attempt to aid or hinder the enactment of any legislation, or as an intervention in any political campaign for public office,” the disclaimer reads.

However, as CNP papers brought to light by Documented reveal, the coalition has advocated for policies steeped in Islamophobia.

Turning interest into action

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6 22 rww

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/whatever-it-takes-john-guandolo-trains-right-wing-activists-to-ruin-the-lives-of-anyone-opposing-their-agenda/

john Guandolo is right-wing conspiracy theorist and anti-Islam activist so radical that in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he praised insurrectionists for showing restraint by not publicly executing lawmakers, most of whom he claimed are “traitors” who should be “swinging from a rope.”

Now Guandolo is holding trainings for right-wing activists across the country to teach them how to identify the “bad guys, “enemies,” and “communists” in their local communities, flush them out, and throw them in jail, if necessary. During an appearance on “The Amber May Show” last Wednesday, Guandolo—a disgraced former FBI agent who now runs an organization called Understanding The Threat—revealed more about the content of these training sessions.

For a mere $15,000, Guandolo explained how he teaches activists to not only identify and remove “hostile operators” from the local government, but also to “publicly humiliate” anyone who opposes their efforts, get them “fired from their jobs,” and force them “to move out of the community.”

“Our ‘Into Action’ training program that I created about five years ago is specifically targeted at training citizens,” Guandolosaid. “The goal is to show citizens how to organize a team at the county, local level, identify hostile operators—individuals and organizations—in your local community, flush them out, and reestablish a republican form of government at the local level.”

“It’s a three-day program,” he continued. “We just need at least 50 people. It’s $295 a seat, which is a bargain, and we will literally organize you as a team. We will show you how to research the bad guys in the community. We will give you an overview of what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and [we show creative ways] on how to identify these people and render them ineffective in the government or in your community, whether they’re in the government or they’re not, whether they’re a businesspersonor someone that’s hostile.”

“The communities we’ve trained around the country are really able to do a lot of very good things,” Guandolo bragged. “Whether it’s literally flushing bad guys out, forcing them to move out of the community, or make them go underground, or get them fired from their jobs. Any of those things. Publicly humiliate them to render them ineffective. Whatever it takes. This is a war.”

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/throw-your-mayor-in-jail-john-guandolo-is-training-right-wing-citizens-how-to-take-over-their-towns/

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/maga-or-antifa-the-right-wing-war-for-control-of-the-insurrection-narrative/

no lnx many vids

MAGA or Antifa? The Right-Wing War for Control of the Insurrection Narrative

Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | January 4, 2022

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a battle broke out for control of the narrative regarding the events of that day. The battle was not between the left and the right, but rather between varying factions of the right-wing movement, as a variety of MAGA activists sought to shape the narrative about what had unfolded at the Capitol. Would they take pride in the Trump loyalists storming the Capitol, or would they baselessly blame the insurrection on left-wing insurgents?

To objective outside observers, it was clear that supporters of former President Donald Trump had violently stormed the Capitol in an effort to intimidate members of Congress into refusing to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Threats of violence had filled social media and calls for war and revolution were ubiquitous at right-wing rallies in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6. As such, it was no surprise when MAGA activists immediately began praising the “patriots” who stormed the Capitol in the days after Jan. 6.

For example, just two days after the insurrection, radical right-wing anti-Islam activist John Guandolo praised the insurrectionists for showing remarkable “restraint” by not summarily executing the “traitors” in Congress.

A few days later, Guandolo asserted that those who condemned the insurrection were “enemies of the republic” and should be “swinging from a rope because these are traitors to the country.”

QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine was equally proud of the “patriots” who ransacked the Capitol. Lorraine, who had been covering the Jan. 6 events for radical conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars network, filed a report on her way back to Texas in which she gushed that she had “never felt more pride in my heart and soul than yesterday.”

Lorraine lashed out at those in the MAGA movement who were already trying to distance themselves from the insurrection by falsely blaming the attack on the Capitol on left-wing activists. “No one should be blaming antifa for what happened,” Lorraine said. “American patriots did this. And it’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.”

Likewise, Brandon Straka, a speaker at the Jan. 5 so-called Stop the Steal rally who has since pleaded guilty to joining the mob storming the Capitol, took to Twitter on Jan. 6 to shame conservatives who weren’t supporting “freedom loving Patriots” storming the Capitol.

“Be embarrassed & hide if you need to- but I was there. It was not Antifa at the Capitol. It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic because literally nobody cares about them. Everyone else can denounce them. I will not,” Straka wrote on Twitter, according to a criminal complaint.

Not everyone agreed with Lorraine and Straka’s assessment. Even as Trump loyalists fought Capitol police, right-wing conspiracy theorists like Lin Wood and Mark Burns took to various social media platforms to claim that “antifa”—conservatives’ shorthand for anti-fascist activists—was behind the attack. Fox News personality Laura Ingraham—whom the House select committee revealed to have pleaded with Trump’s chief of staff to get Trump to tell his supporters to go home on Jan. 6—went on her show in the hours following the attack to claim “antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson echoed similar messages.

Perhaps nobody better illustrates the “blame antifa” camp than former Rep. Michele Bachmann. Just hours after the insurrection, Bachmann was baselessly declaring those who breached security and ran loose through the Capitol were actually left-wing “rabble-rousers paid to put together a coup.”

In the following weeks, Bachmann repeatedly insisted that the attack on the Capitol was actually carried out by “the progressive left.”

“It is my opinion that this was a theatrical event that the progressive left put on,” Bachmann said. “The individuals who were the instigators, who brought this about, these were agitators brought in to create this problem. I believe it was specifically done to rebrand Donald Trump as being an insurrectionist and a leader of a terrorist movement. I also believe that this was done to rebrand the Make America Great agenda—because remember, that was considered extremely popular by about 80 million Americans—so they wanted to rebrand Make America Great as an evil thing and those of us who supported Donald Trump and that agenda as evil and terrorists.”

By July, Bachmann was claiming that MAGA activists had nothing to do with the events of Jan. 6 and that left-wing activists dressed in black clothing had been bused in to attack the Capitol.

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“There were some bad actors who had climbed up … and they actually were pounding on the glass,” Bachmann claimed. “Now, a normal person doesn’t do that. A normal person would never think to pound on the glass. I’ve seen the videotape of the first 14 people who went into the building. They were all dressed in black. They look like they’d been trained as warriors, the people who went in. This was clearly a planned event; that was not the Trump supporters who were around the building. What my conclusion was on-site is that this was nothing short of a coup.”

Despite the initial elation experienced by many MAGA activists in the wake of the insurrection and the endless praise for the “patriots” who had carried it out, the right-wing narrative about the events of Jan. 6 eventually solidified once the reality of the situation began to set in. As hundreds of Trump-loving activists began to face arrest and conviction stemming from their actions on that day and the disgrace the insurrection began to stain the MAGA movement, parts of Trump’s base and the former president himself collectively embraced the baseless belief that the entire thing had been a “false flag” orchestrated by left-wing groups.

So complete has the collective brainwashing been that even those who had initially celebrated the attack on the Capitol reversed course.

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John Guandolo, who initially praised the insurrectionists for showing remarkable “restraint” by not summarily executing the “traitors” in Congress, now claims that he was outside the Capitol during the events on Jan. 6 and saw “several busloads” of “antifa people and non-patriot hostiles” mixing with the crowd and entering the Capitol.

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“It makes you wonder what is actually going on,” Guandolo said. “We know what’s going on. What happened on Jan. 6 was the surrender of the republic and the takeover of the republic.”

John Guandolo | ReAwaken America Tour Dallas

Likewise, DeAnna Lorraine, who was on the ground at the Capitol during the insurrection and initially declared that she could not have been prouder about what happened, completely changed her tune and began insisting that the insurrection was a “false flag” operation set up to “trap” Trump supporters and provide justification for their persecution.

Lorraine eventually so thoroughly repudiated her initial support for the “patriots” who carried out insurrection that she ultimately began spreading a conspiracy theory that police officers who had been in the Capitol that day—several of whom have since died from suicide—were being murdered by the “deep state” to cover up the truth about the events of Jan. 6.

A new NPR/Ipsos poll released Monday shows how deeply this narrative has burrowed its way into the public’s beliefs.. According to the poll, nearly one-third of Republicans falsely say the attack on the Capitol was carried out by “opponents of Donald Trump, including antifa and government agents.”

Of course, this entire narrative shift regarding the events of Jan. 6 raises the question of why MAGA and the GOP have been intractably opposed to the efforts by the House select committee to investigate the attack. After all, if Jan. 6 was nothing but a “false flag” operation carried out by left-wing operatives for the purpose of discrediting Trump and his supporters, wouldn’t Trump and his supporters want that truth to be exposed?

Tags: Brandon StrakaDeAnna LorraineJohn GuandoloMichele BachmannCapitol Insurrection

AN

Wednesday, the Dallas Morning News reported that the Tarrant County Republican Party will be meeting with the leader of an anti-Muslim hate group on December 29, less than two weeks before their upcoming January 10 vote on whether to remove county GOP Vice Chairman Shahid Shafi for being a practicing Muslim:

John Guandolo, a former FBI agent and founder of the Dallas-based group Understanding the Threat, trains police and other officials on dealing with the perceived threat of Muslims in the United States.

Guandolo has made statements equating all Muslims with terrorists and tweeted a picture of an unidentified Southwest Airlines employee earlier this year, calling the man a jihadi. His Twitter account was suspended in October after he claimed that Democrats were to blame for an attack that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Understanding the Threat as a hate group.

Lest there be any speculation that the timing of these events is a coincidence, emails obtained by the Texas Observer show a Republican precinct chairman saying county officials "need to learn the truth" before taking the vote on Shafi.

By all accounts, Shafi, a trauma surgeon at Baylor Scott & White Health and Southlake city council member, is a hardline conservative who has served at several Texas GOP state party conventions. But a small contingent of Republican activists has been pushing for his removal anyway. Chief among them is Dorrie O'Brien, a GOP precinct chair in Grand Prairie affiliated with the anti-Muslim hate group ACT for America. O'Brien has repeatedly claimed, with no basis whatsoever, that Shafi is connected to terrorist groups and plans to take over the United States and impose Sharia law.

Many Texas Republicans are pushing back on the campaign to oust Shafi, including Land Commissioner George P. Bush, outgoing state House Speaker Joe Straus, and Travis County Republican Chairman Matt Mackowiak.

The fight is leading to rifts in the Texas GOP, which was rattled in the midterms as Democrats captured two House seats, 12 state House and 2 state Senate seats, and dozens of judgeships amid the groundswell of turnout for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke. The epicenter of that tension is Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth and Arlington, which for years has been the largest red county in Texas but narrowly went for O'Rourke this year.

Unfortunately for Texas Republicans, at the exact moment they need to reflect on their failure with suburban voters and become more inclusive, their crazier elements are demanding attention.Last week, GOP activist Ray Myers posted"Damn Right, I'm a WHITE NATIONALIST and very Proud of it," on Facebook. Myers worked on the committee that helped the Texas GOP draft their party platform, which calls for abolishing the Voting Rights Act, hate crime laws, state vehicle inspections, divorce, Medicaid, the Seventeenth Amendment, the IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Energy, Education, Interior, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development.

So a bitter fight over whether a loyal conservative should be ejected from a party office because he's Muslim is the last thing the Texas GOP needs right now.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/now-far-right-pundits-are-calling-death-trumps-opponents

While he is notoriously stubborn and self-assured, President Donald Trump is also famous for being susceptible to the power of suggestion.

Trump demonstrates how easily persuadable he is by responding via Twitter to “Fox & Friends" almost every day. His campaign and White House staffers have admitted to this several times, albeit not on the record. But their actions have made clear they believe this: White House chief of staff John Kelly has reportedly prohibited staff members from giving Trump reading materials. More recently, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer asked that presidential aide and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller be kept out of an immigration meeting, lest he shape the president's thinking too much. Even Russian-controlled Twitter accounts have apparently been set to tweet at Trump during times he’s habitually online.

But the relationship between Trump and his admirers goes both ways. It has been observed that the people who have worked closely with the president, either in private or public life, eventually start behaving like him, even when he’s not around. Longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz certainly demonstrated that when he threatened to stalk a "bitch" emailer. Trump’s personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein, has also waxed Trumpian at times, describing his patient’s health as “extraordinary” and “astonishingly excellent.”

Given how the president and his close admirers tend to bring out the worst in each other, it’s particularly concerning how the most vehemently pro-Trump media outlets are going far beyond the sycophantic blather of “Fox & Friends” to outright calls for the president to jail or even execute people he doesn’t like -- particularly if they happen to be investigating connections between Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia.

In December, Fox News pundit and Trump ally Jeanine Pirro called on the president to implement a massive purge of officials who are not totally loyal.

“There is a cleansing needed in our FBI and Department of Justice — it needs to be cleansed of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in cuffs!” Pirro ranted.

The alleged need for large-scale firings and arrests within America’s intelligence agencies is a subject on which Pirro and her fellow Fox News Trump commentators Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have opined for many months now.

But Trump did not need months of persuasion to respond, however. As the New York Times reported on Thursday, the president ordered the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller in June, just a few weeks after he had been appointed. Luckily for Trump, White House counsel Don McGahn and other staffers reportedly declined to carry out the order.

But the president’s Fox fans not have been the only right-wing media figures urging Trump to jail various Democrats and government investigators.

On Tuesday, John Guandolo, a disgraced former FBI agentwho has made a second career as an anti-Muslim and pro-Trump commentator, repeatedly told viewers of the Christian television station theDove that anyone who had allegedly promoted the famous “Steele dossier” as a justification for wiretapping Trump campaign officials was guilty of “sedition and treason” and must be given the death penalty.

“People need to be tried, convicted and executed for treason,” Guandolo said, in remarks that were first reported by the blog Right Wing Watch. “They are conspiring to overthrow the government … they need to be charged, sent to jail, executed, etc., if the republic is to survive.”

Though Guandolo is a relatively obscure pundit, he is apparently respected by a number of federal law enforcement agencies who have repeatedly paid for his anti-Muslim training programs.

Fox News viewers have also been introduced to the idea of capital punishment for Trump's critics. In October, Sebastian Gorka, the former White House adviser who is now a “national security strategist” at Fox News, invoked a conspiracy theory about former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's supposed approved of a deal for a Canadian uranium company that was working with a Russian firm.

“If this had happened in the 1950s, there would be people up on treason charges right now. The Rosenbergs, OK?” Gorka told a rapturous Sean Hannity. “This is equivalent to what the Rosenbergs did, and those people got the chair. Think about it. Giving away nuclear capability to our enemies, that’s what we’re talking about.”According to Gorka, American officials who approved the sale are the equivalent of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the American couple executed for selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

As the Russia investigation has continued to heat up, Alex Jones— the conspiracy radio host who shifted from commentary about gay frogs, Ron Paul, and space aliens to spittle-flecked pro-Trump bombast — has begun increasing his own rhetorical vehemence against law enforcement officials.

Even before he became devoted to Trump, Jones had a long history ofproclaiming violent fantasies on the air, such as warning actor Robert DeNiro that he wanted to “tear his nose completely off his face” and threatening to break the jaws of various other people he dislikes.

(While some observers of his program have argued Jones is just acting, during an April episode, he denied that his harangues are purely theatrical. “We’re the most bona fide, hard-core, real McCoy thing there is,” he told listeners.)

As the Mueller investigation has gotten two guilty pleas and numerous indictments against former Trump associates, Jones’ violent outbursts have only increased. He has apparently absorbed every unhinged conspiracy theory about treasonous “Deep State” elites and the ways they are using their supposedly limitless power to overthrow the president.

During the Jan. 19 episode of his program, Jones went on anextended-length rant, saying that Clinton, former president Barack Obama, former FBI director James Comey and a host of others were accusing Trump of acting like a dictator. Jones' suggested remedy: Trump should start doing just that.

“Mr. President, they’re not going to stop, they’ve already started a civil war! They’ve all got to go to prison!” Jones raged in a segment discussing CNN host Anderson Cooper and New York Times reporter Matthew Rosenberg. “They’re saying you’re a dictator, we all need to be shut down, take our free speech, and then say you’re doing that. They’ve already launched their operations!"

The Infowars founder then alluded to Phil Mudd, a former FBI and CIA official who now is a commentator at CNN who said last August that Trump’s antagonistic remarks about career intelligence officials could result in them wanting to “kill this guy.” It was clearly a metaphor, as host Jake Tapper and Mudd were quick to point out, for the idea that Trump might be inspiring government officials to leak disparaging information about the president.

According to Jones, however, Mudd had instead publicly stated that American intelligence agencies are planning to assassinate Trump. Because of that, Jones suggested, the president needs to begin physically rounding up his political opponents and treating them like violent traitors:

“Phil Mudd is on TV saying he’s going to kill you! All you need to do is go after them now! Turn the dogs loose! They started it! They did it! They’re the foreign power! They’re the enemy! They’re the traitors!”

“Get ’em! Get ’em!” Jones screamed as he pointed at an image of Cooper and Rosenberg on his studio screen.

Later on in the episode, Jones revisited the topic of the Trump-Russia investigation, claiming that Obama “needs to go to prison” because “these people aren’t above the law.”

“These aren’t Americans,” Jones continued. “They’re globalists.”

He then tried to answer listeners and viewers who might believe that Trump imprisoning Clinton and Obama could lead to civil war.

“They’re already trying to cause one,” Jones replied. “Justice be done, may the heavens fall,” he said, alluding to the famous Latin phrase that is also a line in Oliver Stone's conspiracy film “JFK.”

The Infowars chief then compared government officials and liberal political figures to the Japanese and German armies America fought in World War II.

“We have to attack them legally and lawfully. ...We have to defeat them all. They’re not going to stop,” Jones continued. “Like World War II, you don’t just kick Hitler back into Germany, he’s going to reconstitute and attack again. You don’t just kick the Japanese out of the Pacific Islands, you’ve gotta go all the way to Tokyo. They started it!”

As he continued, Jones suggested that because of their “treason,” Trump needs to “go all the way” against his opponents.

“Whatever has to happen is going to happen. We’re going all the way against these people, period. We have to do it. There’s no other choice. They’ve all got to politically hang for their crimes,” he said.

“Incidentally,” Jones said as he looked deep into the camera and drummed his fingers to accentuate the dramatic pause. “You know what the punishment for treason is.”

He continued: “These are the foreign individuals that took our country over. They’re the ones who corrupted everything almost to the point of the country’s death. And they’re still trying to strangle the country today. We must stand against them.”

Before the rise of Trump, Jones was an irrelevant conspiracy radio host whose ravings were listened to by a small number of deranged core fans and hipsters with eccentric senses of humor. All of that changed after Jones latched on to Trump during his campaign.

Trump returned the favor, saying publicly that Jones has an “amazing” reputation during his campaign. As president, he has given Jones and his Infowars colleagues prime access to White House officials. According to Jones, Trump has called him multiple times at home during the past few months. The host has also claimed that he knows several personal phone numbers for Trump, including the president’s private suite at Mar-a-Lago.

Nor Jones is the only person associated with Infowars who has deep connections inside the administration.

Trump’s longtime friend and unofficial political adviser Roger Stone is now the host of an Infowars show of his own. Donald Trump Jr., the president's oldest son, posted on Twitter last April that Infowars correspondent and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer Prize after an administration source fed him a scoop days before the mainstream press. It was one of several important stories the two have broken ahead of legitimate news outlets. Cernovich has also boasted that Donald Jr. and other Trump family members personally give the president printouts of stories from Infowars and other dubious websites.

Given the many strictures on the commander in chief's authority, it is unlikely that Trump could start imprisoning his political opponents even if he wanted to. But the president is far from the only person exposed to a constant diet of violent rhetoric against Democrats, journalists and law enforcement officers. Many disturbed people who voted for him are as well.

Last week, a Michigan man named Brandon Griesemer was arrested for threatening to kill CNN’s “fake news” anchors.In December of 2016, North Carolina resident Edgar Maddison Welch burst into a pizza restaurant near Washington with a rifle and fired off three rounds, in part because Jones and his staff had spent hours telling their followers the place was the center of a global child-sex ring.

Following Welch’s guilty plea last March, Jones begrudgingly and partially retracted his support for the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory. His actions since, however, suggest he has no legitimate intention of cleaning up his act.

People have mocked the idea that Trump could become a dictator. What's clear is that many people he likes are telling him to become one.

Matthew Sheffield