Tag: Trump racism

How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat

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Federal law enforcement shifted resources last year in response to Donald Trump’s insistence that the radical left endangered the country. Meanwhile, right-wing extremism was building ominously.

WASHINGTON — As racial justice protests erupted nationwide last year, President Donald J. Trump, struggling to find a winning campaign theme, hit on a message that he stressed over and over: The real domestic threat to the United States emanated from the radical left, even though law enforcement authorities had long since concluded it came from the far right.

It was a message that was quickly embraced and amplified by his attorney general and his top homeland security officials, who translated it into a shift in criminal justice and national security priorities even as Mr. Trump was beginning to openly stoke the outrage that months later would culminate in the storming of the Capitol by right-wing extremists.

Mr. Trump’s efforts to focus his administration on the antifa movement and leftist groups did not stop the Justice Department and the F.B.I. from pursuing cases of right-wing extremism. They broke up a kidnapping plot, for example, targeting Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat. Continue reading.

Actions by Proud Boy at Capitol show ‘planning, determination, and coordination,’ U.S. alleges

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A police riot shield used to break a window, then a door kicked open from the inside — new court documents detail the first moments of the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead and more than 100 police officers injured.

A criminal complaint against two Montana brothers and a detention memo against a prominent member of the Proud Boys help explain how, the government believes, one segment of a mob overran a small, poorly defended line of Capitol Police officers. In these and other filings, prosecutors trace the actions of possible key instigators in the storming of the Capitol, including members of the Proud Boys — a far-right nationalist and nativist group with a history of violence — and other right-wing extremist groups.

According to prosecutors, citing surveillance video and social media, Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola was one of the first to lead the charge both outside and inside the Capitol, helping overwhelm police defenses after stealing an officer’s riot shield. Continue reading.

Josh Hawley hometown paper reveals ‘warning signs’: Senator has lifelong history of siding with right-wing extremists

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Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) exhibited “warning signs” of an extremist sympathizer long before he sided with a mob of people who set out to attack the U.S. Capitol, according to a recent report.

The Kansas City Star revealed on Sunday that Hawley has a history of standing up for racists and extremists that stunned his early mentors.

According to the Star, Hawley spoke up for the rights of militia members after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and defended L.A. police detective Mark Fuhrman against charges of racism following the trial of O.J. Simpson. Continue reading.

Proud Boys organizer arrested in Florida over riot at Capitol

Biggs had organized a 2019 rally in Portland, Oregon, in which more than 1,000 far-right protesters and anti-fascist counter-demonstrators faced off.

ORLANDO, Fla. —Two Florida men, including a self-described organizer for the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, were arrested Wednesday on charges of taking part in the siege of the U.S. Capitol earlier this month, authorities said.

Joseph Biggs, 37, was arrested in central Florida and faces charges of obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, entering a restricted area on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and disorderly conduct.

According to an arrest affidavit, Biggs was part of a crowd on Jan. 6 that overwhelmed Capitol Police officers who were manning a metal barrier on the steps of the Capitol. The mob entered the building as lawmakers were certifying President Joe Biden’s election win. Continue reading.

‘A hack job,’ ‘outright lies’: Trump commission’s ‘1776 Report’ outrages historians

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Two days after historians responded with dismay and anger to the White House’s “1776 Commission” report, the Biden transition team announced President-elect Joe Biden would rescind the commission with an executive order on his first day in office.

The report was intended to a version of U.S. history that would “restor[e] patriotic education” in schools. Historians largely condemned it, saying it was filled with errors and partisan politics.

“It’s a hack job. It’s not a work of history,” American Historical Association executive director James Grossman told The Washington Post. “It’s a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars.” Continue reading.

This is white supremacist domestic terrorism. We’ve been here before.

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When domestic terrorists fueled by outlandish conspiracy theories spun by a white supremacist president of the United States stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 to overthrow the government, I was shocked. But not surprised. Our history is filled with eruptions of violence when our nation’s entrenched system of white supremacy feels that its place at the center of American life is threatened.

David Blight, Ron Chernow and Nikole Hannah-Jones, three chroniclers of our fraught racial history, were the perfect people to put the Capitol insurrection into greater perspective.

“We have plenty of precedents for what happened on January 6, not at the federal level, but in white-on-black violence in the South during Reconstruction,” Chernow told me in a primer he emailed to me before appearing on my Sunday show on MSNBC. “During this dreadful period, we had numerous cases of rampaging whites invading legislatures.” Chernow is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a biography of President Ulysses S. Grant. Continue reading.

Trump Launched A Civil War — Now We Must Defeat His ‘Army’

The second American Civil War is here.

No official announced Trump’s civil car. That’s why our major news organizations dance around the awful truth, using confusing language.

But we don’t need a press release to recognize that Trump directed his white supremacist followers to attack a branch of our national government on Jan. 6. The treasonous assault capped years of undermining the judiciary and the executive branch’s intelligence, law enforcement and health agencies. Continue reading.

Lankford Apologizes to Black Voters for Backing Trump’s Election Deceit

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The Oklahoma senator, who is up for re-election in 2022, said he had not realized his objection to the election results would be seen as a direct attack on the voting rights of people of color.

WASHINGTON — Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma, apologized on Thursday to Black constituents who were offended by his decision to join President Trump in trying to discredit the victory of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., saying he had not realized the effort would be seen as a direct attack on the voting rights of people of color.

In a letter addressed to his “friends” in North Tulsa, which is predominantly Black, Mr. Lankford, who is white, acknowledged that his initial efforts to upend Mr. Biden’s victory — which he dropped in the immediate aftermath of the deadly assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob — had “caused a firestorm of suspicion among many of my friends, particularly in Black communities around the state.”

“After decades of fighting for voting rights, many Black friends in Oklahoma saw this as a direct attack on their right to vote, for their vote to matter, and even a belief that their votes made an election in our country illegitimate,” he wrote in a letter first published by the news site Tulsa World and obtained by The New York Times. “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you. I deeply regret my blindness to that perception, and for that I am sorry.”

From Charlottesville to the Capitol: Trump fueled right-wing violence — and it may soon get even worse

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As security is ramped up in Washington, D.C., and state capitols across the U.S., the FBI is warning of more potential violence in the lead-up to Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. Federal authorities have arrested over 100 people who took part in last week’s deadly insurrection at the Capitol, and The Washington Post reports that dozens of people on a terrorist watch list — including many white supremacists — were in Washington on the day of the insurrection. “This was something that had been coming for a long time,” ProPublica reporter A.C. Thompson, who covers right-wing extremism, says of the January 6 riot. “If you looked at the rhetoric online … it was all about revolution, it was all about death to tyrants, it was all about civil war.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Security is being ramped up in Washington, D.C., and state capitols across the United States as the FBI is warning of more “potential armed protests” in the lead-up to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s inauguration, following last week’s deadly insurrection at the Capitol. By Wednesday, 21,000 National Guard troops are expected to be in Washington, D.C. FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke publicly for the first time, more than a week after the insurrection, Thursday. Continue reading.

4 First Steps for Congress To Address White Supremacist Terrorism

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Introduction and summary

From the Ku Klux Klan’s campaign of terror against African Americans following the Civil War to the anti-government bombing in Oklahoma City, terrorism and political violence have been a part of American history for generations. Since 2001, America has focused intently on countering a different form of terrorism—specifically, a form of terrorism practiced most prominently by al-Qaida and later the Islamic State (IS) group. After the September 11 attacks, there was a consensus that this form of terrorism presented the clearest threat to the U.S. homeland—and the U.S. government was willing to take unprecedented measures to counter the threat. Some actions, such as the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, were proportionate and successful; others deeply undermined U.S. values while increasing anti-American sentiment.1 The country continues to live with these shameful legacies such as the ongoing operation of the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Today, however, America faces a different threat environment. The increasingly polarized state of American politics, combined with the proliferation of social media networks, has allowed previously isolated hate groups to connect and coordinate. As a result, a new consensus is growing among counterterrorism watchers that the most significant terrorist threat to the United States is now the threat from violent white supremacists. Most recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found that white supremacist violence is the most lethal overall threat facing the United States.2 Early this past summer, a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) corroborated these findings:

… far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020.3

Continue reading.