White supremacists flourish on Elon Musk's X

 Under owner Elon Musk, the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, has become a hotbed of white supremacist and neo-Nazi content. A recent headline in the Atlantic doesn’t mince words: “X is a white supremacist site,” reported the Texas Observer.

Musk has allowed formerly banned far-right and neo-Nazi accounts back on the platform, and, in some instances, he’s directly responded to accounts that traffic in white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric. Meanwhile, anonymous accounts that regularly promote racial hate on the platform have seen their follower counts grow substantially as Musk has taken a more hands-off approach to moderation compared to the social media network’s prior owners. 

Anonymity has long been a tactic used by extremists to spread their ideology while avoiding consequences, from Klansmen hoods to online pseudonyms. With such ideas spreading rapidly on X, the Texas Observer has identified the operators of four anonymous accounts that regularly share racist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi content on the platform. Three of the operators appear to live or have claimed to own property in Texas, where X moderation operations are based and Musk resides.

Through reviewing posts on X, web archives, leak databases, and other social media profiles, the Observer identified the following individuals as the anonymous operators of neo-Nazi X accounts, which had a collective 500,000 followers at their peak: Cyan Cruz, a 40-year-old marketing professional who appears to have lived in Austin and Amarillo and operates the X account TheOfficial1984; Michael Gramer, a 42-year-old retired mechanical engineer who has lived in New Hampshire, operates the X account 9mm_SMG, and has claimed to have a house in Galveston and to be spending time in Dallas; Robert “Bobby” Thorne, a 35-year-old vice president at JP Morgan Chase in Plano, who operates the account Noble1945 and previously operated the account Noble_x_x_; and John Anthony Provenzano, a 30-year-old who appears to live in Virginia, operates the account utism_ (formerly known as JohnnyBullzeye), and, according to a tip and a records request response from the U.S. Navy, works at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland—where the Navy manufactures explosive ordnance.

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White supremacist plotted to destroy Tennessee electricity substation

A white supremacist is accused of trying to destroy an electricity substation in Tennessee in an attempt to bring down the regional power network and disrupt American society, authorities told NBC News.

Skyler Philippi, 24, of Columbia, Tennessee, was arrested after an FBI investigation found that he planned to attach a bomb to a drone and fly it into the energy facility in Nashville as part of his extremist agenda, authorities said.

Philippi is charged with the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and the attempted destruction of an energy facility. He appeared in court last week and is due to appear again on Nov. 13. He remains in custody and faces possible life in prison.

In messages to FBI sources, Philippi espoused accelerationist views, a theory popular among far-right extremists that is predicated on large shocks causing chaos and forcing society to change its racial make-up, resulting in a white-only state, authorities said.

The theory was popularized by manifestos left by perpetrators in a number of high-profile neo-Nazi and white supremacist terrorist incidents, including the killing of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

The suspect allegedly told a confidential FBI source in June that he wanted to carry out a mass shooting at a YMCA facility in Columbia, south of Nashville, but later in the year decided that this wouldn’t be enough to achieve.

"If you want to do the most damage as an accelerationist, attack high economic, high tax, political zones in every major metropolis," Philippi wrote, according to court documents released Monday.

In September, Philippi showed an undercover agent portions of his manifesto, which said that "radical armed struggle is the only end to protecting and preserving our folk."

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Anti-doxxing law could interfere with outing right-wing extremist

Arguably the most powerful weapon of anti-fascist groups in the Northwest is information, reported Oregon Capital Chronicle. 

Anonymous squads of amateur detectives — parts of groups with names like Stumptown Research Collective, FashFreeNW and Corvallis Antifa — spend months trying to sniff out the identities of those they consider right-wing extremists. 

They pore through photos looking for clues — a ring on a finger, a flash of a recognizable tattoo — and match them with old social media accounts or other sources. And then they “dox” them — short for “releasing documents — exposing their real identities, along with a variety of personal information online. 

In May, for instance, a coalition of anti-fascist groups throughout the West Coast posted to their website an extensive dossier on the man they claim is the heavily tattooed neo-Nazi leader of Evergreen Active Club, a hate group in eastern Washington. 

They directed their readers to the phone number for the construction company he works for. (“Let them know they are employing a Nazi gang leader.”) They pointed to not only his home address, but the emails and phone numbers for his partner’s mom and stepfather. (“Please reach out to them to make sure they know their daughter is a Nazi.”)

Even on the left, doxxing can be controversial — some argue it’s vigilantism, while others see it as the most effective nonviolent weapon they have to fight back against extremists. 

But thanks to a new Washington state law, this type of activism may run the risk of getting anti-fascists sued by the very neo-Nazis they’re exposing. This legislation was pushed by another group dedicated to exposing racists and antisemites — the Anti-Defamation League, a national anti-hate organization. 

“The Anti-Defamation League had witnessed extremists using doxxing tactics to intimidate and harass,” said the law’s sponsor, Washington state Sen. Drew Hansen. “I asked how I could be helpful in efforts to fight back against antisemitism and hate, and this was a proposal that they had been working on.” 

Hansen’s bill, which took effect this July, doesn’t charge doxxers with a crime. It allows people to sue a doxxer if they were harmed — stalked, injured, threatened or criminally harassed — potentially winning $5,000 per violation, plus damages and attorney fees. 

Hansen believes the bill is written narrowly enough that it shouldn’t worry anyone whose intentions aren’t malicious. 

“My bill deals with doxxing only where you actually intend that someone is going to use the information to harm the person or you recklessly disregard that threat,” said Hansen, a Bainbridge Island Democrat. 

Additionally, unlike the similar law passed in Oregon in 2021, Washington’s anti-doxxing law contains explicit protections for journalists. But it’s also notably broader than Oregon’s, allowing people to sue for showing “reckless disregard” of the risk of harassment for publishing personal information, instead of just malicious intent. 

“It seems to me it very well could limit what you call ‘research into extremism,’” Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh, now the state Republican Party chair from Aberdeen, told the ADL during a hearing about the legislation. 

Stephen Paolini, associate regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Pacific Northwest office, told InvestigateWest that groups like his are safe. But he said it is possible that tactics like “‘you should call this person or show up at their house and tell them why you hate Nazis’” could create the kind of harassment that could get you sued under the law. 

He doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. 

“As much as I may align with the goal of calling out Nazis, if you’re doing it in a way that’s opening people up to death threats, or bodily injury or stalking, that’s a problem,” Paolini said. 

In Washingon and Oregon, Paolini said, the anti-doxxing bills had support from “labor unions, advocates for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, law enforcement, marginalized communities groups, and many others.” 

Still, some activists worry that these laws will be weaponized against those trying to expose extremists or oppose politicians. 

Portland-based journalist Shane Burley, editor of a recent collection of essays from anti-fascist researchers, said the anti-doxxing laws are “scary” and “irresponsible.” 

“It’s a profound misunderstanding of the problem,” he said. “And it will be used against journalists and activists.”

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Right-wing robocalls targeting Black voters violated the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act

Right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman’s robocalls targeting Black voters violated the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act — and the question isn’t close enough to require a jury, a federal judge ruled, reported Law and Crime News.

“The Court recognizes that the free exchange of ideas on issues of public concern and the ability to engage in robust political discussion constitute the foundations of a democratic society,” Senior U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote in a 111-page order on Wednesday.

Marrero nonetheless found that the evidence “establishes that the neighborhoods that Defendants targeted were not accidental or random,” finding that a reasonable jury couldn’t escape the conclusion that the pair wanted to “deny the right to vote specifically to Black voters.”

“Goofballs and political hucksters”

The ruling spells victory without a trial for The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation (NCBCP), a civil rights group that sued Wohl and Burkman in the Southern District of New York before the 2020 presidential election.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who joined the lawsuit, said in a statement on Wednesday saying:

“Your vote is your voice, and I am proud that today the court ruled in our favor to uphold the most important cornerstone of our democracy. Wohl and Burkman engaged in a disgraceful campaign to intimidate Black voters, using threats and lies to keep them from making their voices heard in an attempt to secure the election for their preferred presidential candidate. I will always stand fierce in defense of New Yorkers’ right to vote, and anyone who attempts to take away that right will be met with the full force of the law.”

Wohl and Burkman have been tied to multiple political hoaxes targeting perceived rivals of former President Donald Trump, including then-Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Anthony Fauci, and ex-Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Prosecutors, regulators and common citizens claimed the duo crossed a line with 85,000 robocalls, sent out nationally to such locations as New York, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Recorded by a woman identifying herself as “Tamika Taylor,” the robocalls largely targeted diverse regions with the false message that “if you vote by mail, your personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants, and [will] be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debt.”

Though Wohl and Burkman painted themselves as “goofballs and political hucksters with an irreverent sense of humor,” Judge Marrero rejected that the robocalls were “mere hyperbole.”

“In addition to the specific harms that the call threatened, Defendants dressed the call with a veil of legitimacy to mislead its listeners into believing the statements made in the call were true,” Marrero added. “The Robocall framed Wohl and Burkman’s organization, Project 1599, as a ‘civil rights organization’ with a name reminiscent of the 1619 Project, an initiative of the New York Times that sought to recognize and commemorate the history of the first slave ship that carried enslaved Africans into the United States.”

The stunt also led to criminal prosecution. In the Ohio case, Wohl and Burkman were sentenced to spend 500 hours registering voters living in low-income neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C., area. That was after they pleaded guilty to a felony count of telecommunications fraud. Another case in Michigan remains pending.

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Alarming rise in antisemitic violence across the U.S.

 According to Axios, antisemitic hate crimes are trending higher this year in several major cities, and could surpass 2021 numbers — a possible record year, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

Why it matters: The White House has expressed alarm about rising antisemitic violence across the U.S. and a jump in racist and antisemitic social media posts, but collecting data is difficult because many police departments are failing to report hate crimes.

By the numbers: 

·         New York saw a preliminary count of 260 antisemitic crimes from Jan. 1 to Dec. 1, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found. The city experienced 170 cases during the same period in 2021.

·         Los Angeles faced 80 antisemitic cases from January to Oct. 31, 2022, the center said. The nation's second-largest city experienced 71 during the same period in 2021.

·         Chicago saw 30 antisemitic episodes from January to Oct. 31, 2022, compared to eight in the same period last year.

·         Cases appear flat in Boston, Denver, Las Vegas and Portland, Oregon.

The center collects hate crime stats from police data, state reports and open records requests.

Zoom out: The FBI said this week that anti-Jewish hate crimes declined significantly, with 396 incidents in 2021 compared to 959 in 2020.

Yes, but: The FBI hate crime report was based on data received from just 11,883 of the 18,812 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and excludes many large cities with high numbers of Jewish residents.

"Excluded in this report were cities you wouldn't exclude from major sports leagues," Brian Levin, director of the center, told Axios.

Levin said when you include antisemitic hate crimes in New York and Los Angeles, for example, the number of antisemitic hate crimes nationally in 2021 is around a record level. And 2022 could surpass that.

Zoom in: Antisemitic hate crimes have been rising in recent years, even in smaller states.

Wisconsin saw between 2015 and 2021 an almost a 500% increase in antisemitic episodes, Samantha Abramson, executive director of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center in Milwaukee, told Axios.

Flashback: October marked the four-year anniversary of the attack at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, the deadliest assault on Jewish people in U.S. history.

Eleven people were killed and six were injured at the Pittsburgh synagogue on the morning of Oct. 27, 2018, when a gunman stormed the building in the attack that brought more attention to the nation's rising antisemitic violence.

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Antisemitism growing rapidly in the Untied States

The Anti-Defamation League recently released a report showing that in 2021, there were more antisemitic incidents in America than in any other year since the group started keeping track over 40 years ago. “We’ve never seen data like this before, ever,” Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the A.D.L., told Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times.

The rapid growth of Jew hatred isn’t limited to the United States. According to a new report from the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University, antisemitic incidents were up last year in such countries as Australia, Britain, Canada, France and Germany. Comparisons to 2020 might be misleading, because pandemic lockdowns likely reduced the numbers of antisemitic assaults and in-person harassment. But in several countries, including the United States, there were more antisemitic incidents in 2021 than in the prepandemic year 2019.

As the Tel Aviv University report pointed out, there are countless conferences, training programs and legislative proposals devoted to fighting antisemitism. “There is no shortage of organizations dedicated to the cause, which gained the commitment of world leaders,” it said. “The data presented in this report suggest that, despite all these efforts, something has gone terribly wrong.”

Something has obviously gone wrong. The question is, what?

Conservatives might be tempted to blame strident anti-Zionism, and that’s part of the story. Both the A.D.L. and researchers in Tel Aviv use a definition of antisemitism that can conflate it with anti-Zionism, concepts I think should be kept separate. It’s clearly antisemitic, however, when Israel’s enemies blame all Jews for the country’s treatment of the Palestinians. According to the A.D.L. report, of 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year, 345 involved references to Israel and Zionism. The examples detailed in the report aren’t ambiguous; they include Palestinian supporters pushing a man in a yarmulke into a glass window and yelling, “Die, Zionist!”

It’s a mistake to associate all of these 345 incidents with the left; 68 were “propaganda efforts by white supremacist groups to foment anti-Israel and antisemitic beliefs.” More broadly, right-wing extremism was behind 484 of all antisemitic incidents in the U.S. last year, 18 percent of the total.

The radicalization of the Republican Party has helped white nationalism flourish. Antisemitism started increasing in 2015, when Donald Trump came on the political scene and electrified the far right, then spiked during his administration. Trump is now gone, but the Republican Party has grown more hospitable than ever to cranks and zealots. Two Republican members of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, spoke at a white nationalist conference this year.

The antisemitism of the QAnon conspiracy theory — always latent in its fantasies of elite blood-drinking cabals — has also become much more open. As the A.D.L. has reported, one of the most popular QAnon influencers, GhostEzra, “is an open Nazi who praises Hitler, admires the Third Reich and decries the supposedly treacherous nature of Jews.”

But for a huge number of antisemitic episodes, the political motive, if there is one, is illegible. According to Greenblatt, more than 80 percent of the incidents documented in the A.D.L. report “cannot be attributed to any specific extremist group or movement.” Much of the threat to Jews in America seems to come less from a distinct, particular ideology than from the broader cultural breakdown that’s leading to an increase in all manner of antisocial behavior, including shootings, airplane altercations, reckless driving and fights in school.

In 1899, Émile Durkheim, one of the fathers of modern sociology, wrote a short essay called “Antisemitism and Social Crisis.” It was an attempt by Durkheim, a French Jew, to grapple with the explosion of antisemitism accompanying the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a French artillery officer falsely accused of treason. Durkheim described how Jews were blamed for defeats in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and how a burst of antisemitism in 1848 followed an economic crisis the previous year. Similarly, he wrote, “our current antisemitism is the consequence and the superficial symptom of a state of social malaise.”

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AG Garland warns of growing threat of white supremacist groups

Domestic violent extremist groups, particularly white supremacists, pose a growing threat to the United States, Attorney General Merrick Garland told a Senate panel, reported Reuters.

"The threat of lethality is higher than it ever was ... I have not seen a more dangerous threat to democracy than the invasion of the U.S. Capitol" by rioters on Jan. 6, said Garland, who as a prosecutor led the investigation into the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people.

Garland noted the FBI recently said that the top domestic violent extremist threat facing the United States is from "racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocate for the superiority of the white race."

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the committee that racially or ethnically motivated extremists are "most likely to conduct mass-casualty attacks against civilians," while people tied to right-wing militia groups are the most likely to target police and government employees and buildings.

The threat of attacks inside the United States by foreign militants such as Islamic State also persists, Mayorkas said. "It is not as if they have disappeared... We don't take our eye off one to focus on the other," he said.

Garland and Mayorkas said they were concerned about how disinformation and misinformation spread on social media, and Mayorkas said such "false narratives" can instigate violence.

Garland said the Director of National Intelligence's office was monitoring "sharing of information" between U.S. and European extremists.

Mayorkas said that Homeland Security, whose leadership in the Trump Administration was accused by a whistleblower of playing down right-wing extremist threats, is devoting more intelligence resources to domestic extremism and allocating "at least $77 million" to help local governments prepare for "acts of domestic violent extremism."

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Biden: More resources needed to fight domestic terrorism

A new intelligence report delivered to Congress by the Biden administration warned about the rising threat of militias and white supremacists, adding urgency to calls for more resources to fight the growing problem of homegrown extremism in the United States, reported The New York Times.

In particular, the intelligence assessment highlighted the threat from militias, predicting that it would be elevated in the coming months because of “contentious sociopolitical factors,” likely a reference to the fallout from the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and the increasingly partisan political climate.

Racially motivated violent extremists, such as white supremacists, were most likely to conduct mass casualty attacks against civilians while militias typically targeted law enforcement and government personnel and facilities, the report said. Lone offenders or small cells of extremists were more likely than organizations to carry out attacks, it said.

President Biden requested the comprehensive threat assessment shortly after he took office in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, which laid bare the toxic domestic extremism that has shaken the country. Only the brief executive summary was declassified and made public while a classified version was sent to Congress and the White House.

The top-line assessment echoed earlier analyses by the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security warning of the looming dangers of domestic terrorism, including after followers of President Donald J. Trump embraced his baseless claims of election fraud. An internal F.B.I. report that appeared to have been compiled before Jan. 6 and was published days after the breach predicted the violence to come, saying the events in 2020 were “likely to embolden U.S. domestic violent extremists in 2021.”

The Homeland Security Department also previously issued a rare terrorism bulletin warning that extremists continue to be galvanized over “the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives,” a clear reference to Mr. Trump’s false accusations that the election was stolen.

Domestic extremism “poses the most lethal and persistent terrorism-related threat to the homeland today,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, told a House committee on Wednesday.

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Right wing groups recruit military and law enforcement members

Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI's division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would "very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of" their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month, reported ABC News.

The document, obtained by ABC News, was distributed to law enforcement agencies both in Texas and elsewhere in the country. It focuses on extremists inspired by the white-supremacist publication "Siege," which served as motivation for the neo-Nazi group known as "Atomwaffen Division," among others. The report is titled "Siege-Inspired Actors Very Likely Seek Military and Law Enforcement Affiliation, Increasing Risk of Tradecraft Proliferation and Color of Law Offenses in the FBI San Antonio Area of Responsibility."

Conclusions in the assessment were based on information from records and informants, some of whom had "excellent access," the FBI authors wrote in the Feb. 25 document.

"In the long term, FBI San Antonio assesses [racially motivated violent extremists] successfully entering military and law enforcement careers almost certainly will gain access to non-public tradecraft and information, enabling them to enhance operational security and develop new tactics in and beyond the FBI San Antonio" region, the document said.

FBI spokesperson Katherine Gulotta said that "FBI field offices routinely share information with their local law enforcement partners to assist in protecting the communities they serve." She did not specifically address the content of the report.

Critics say the document once again shows the nation's top law enforcement agency has been slow to deal with the problem of white-supremacist infiltration of police and the military, even as FBI agents watched evidence mounting.

"When we asked the FBI last year to testify about white supremacists executing plans to infiltrate law enforcement entities across America, the bureau refused and told us it had no evidence that racist infiltration was a problem," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said in a statement. "Now, the January insurrection -- and the growing evidence of off-duty law enforcement officers being involved in the attack on Congress -- and this newly leaked report confirm in my mind that the FBI's failure to level with the American people about organized racist infiltration of law enforcement is having dangerous and deadly consequences."

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The recipe for mass radicalization

An excerpt from a Politico interview with Michael Jensen, an expert on extremism who leads the domestic radicalization team at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism on mass radicalization:

First, you have to have a vulnerable audience receptive to the extremist narrative—individuals who are scared, angry, isolated and looking for answers that satisfy their own personal biases, looking to cast blame for their problems on someone else. They find narratives that tell them their problems are not their fault; it’s the product of a conspiracy trying to undermine your way of life and well-being. Those messages are deeply appealing, because it’s harder to look inside and question your own decision-making and behaviors. Over the past year in particular, we’ve had an unprecedented situation that has left a very large audience receptive to those narratives. The pandemic has left people scared, without jobs and looking for answers to what happens next.

The second thing you need is an influential voice pushing the extremist narrative. And over the past 4½ years, we have had a very influential political leader [President Donald Trump] pushing a narrative that is not only polarizing—not only highlighting that the right and left are far apart on policy issues and disagree on discretionary spending—it’s a narrative of “othering.” It’s a narrative that casts the other side as evil, as “enemies,” as individuals you have to fight at all costs in order to preserve your way of life. We saw this, whether [Trump’s “others”] were Democrats, the news media or the scientific community. 

The final thing you need is a mechanism to spread that narrative to the masses. Historically, mass radicalization took time. If an influential leader wanted to spread a message, they’d do it through newspapers or political speeches in towns and cities throughout their country, and it could take a while for that message to spread. But that’s not our reality anymore.

Our reality now is one in which a radicalizing message can be broadcast to hundreds of millions of people in a matter of seconds. And if it catches on, you’re virtually guaranteed that millions of people will [believe] that narrative. We’ve seen this in the more traditional forms of media, with outlets like Fox News pushing some of these conspiratorial views, but we’ve also seen it with social media companies not cracking down on this rhetoric early, and instead letting it fester.

Those three conditions [make people] ripe for mass radicalization. And once that narrative changes into a call for action—when it’s not just about changing someone’s beliefs, it’s about inspiring them to act on those beliefs—you get January 6. You get mass mobilization. That’s what we saw.

The question is moving forward is, are those conditions still present? Does the future of extremism in this country look like January 6, or does it look like something we’ve been dealing with for a couple of decades? In my estimation, we are reverting back to somewhat of a mean. The future of extremism in this country won’t look like January 6, but it will look like what we’ve been dealing with for the past couple of decades, [with a] significant threat we have to challenge in a very smart way.

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GateHouse: The term ‘Nazi’ is misused and overused

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

July 3, 2020

Longtime Houston prosecutor Kaylynn Williford recently resigned after posting a meme on Facebook that appeared to equate Nazis with people who have been participating in protests for racial justice.

Williford, who was head of the trial division at the Harris County, Texas District Attorney’s Office, posted the meme that showed a black-and-white photograph of a wooden box full of weddings bands that were removed from Holocaust victims.

A caption above the photo reads in part, “Each ring represents a destroyed family. Never forget, Nazis tore down statues. Banned free speech. Blamed economic hardships on one group of people. Instituted gun control. Sound familiar?”

The Nazis also started World War II, killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and were responsible for widespread looting, plunder and countless atrocities.

From white supremacists who find power in flaunting the swastika to others who want to pin a dreadful label on those whose views they oppose — the term “Nazi” is misused and overused.

In Germany, Nazi was actually a derogatory label for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party which began in 1919 following World War I. The Nazi party grew into a mass movement in the 1920s and early 1930s by promoting fanatical nationalism and anti-Semitism. The Nazis were looking for a scapegoat for the humiliating defeat and the onerous sanctions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles.

Adolf Hitler joined the party the year it was founded and within two years became its leader. By 1933, he became chancellor of Germany and the Nazi party soon began to undermine rights of citizens and electoral politics. Soon Hitler evolved from chancellor to dictator.

With the start of World War II, the Nazis’ ramped up the anti-Jewish rhetoric and increased the systematic slaughter of Jews. After invading and occupying Poland, the Nazis murdered thousands of Polish Jews. They confined many to ghettos where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps, where they were either murdered or forced into slave labor.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 the killing continued. Nazi death squads murdered thousands of Jews in western Russia.

The indiscriminate murder of Jews became a burden for soldiers and Nazi sycophants. In an effort to streamline the killings the Nazis convened a conference in the spring of 1942. The Wannsee Conference outside of Berlin came up with the “Final Solution,” the systematic murder of all European Jews.

The Nazis created a series of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirables” would be delivered by cattle cars to face extermination. Men, women and children would be ushered into death houses after they were stripped of their belongings, i.e., the jewelry in the Williford’s meme, stripped naked and gassed. Their bodies incinerated in large ovens.

Throughout the remainder of the war, Jews in the countries occupied by Germany were deported by the thousands to the death camps. Places like Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz began to operate with ruthless Nazi efficiency.

The killing continued until the last months of war. The liberation of the camps, as the Nazis retreated, revealed the horrors that are still etched in the collective memory of the human race.

As the Nazis made their way back to Berlin their feeble and delusional leader Hitler, hiding in a Berlin bunker, committed suicide.

For those who feel like attaching the label Nazi to some group they oppose or a person, or figure, they disagree with — think twice. Nazi is an abhorrent term reserved for the vilest organization in the history of the world.

Your political opponent is not a Nazi; the protesters down the street are not Nazis; the police are not Nazis. With few exceptions none of us have ever had to face a Nazi in the 75 years since the end of World War II, and for this we should be grateful.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino

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GateHouse: White supremacists pose significant threat to America

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

September 7, 2019

Violent white supremacists pose a significant threat to the American public equal to or greater than the threat posed by foreign terrorists. Those who support such views or just remain silent, enable bigotry and hatred.

Michael C. McGarrity, assistant director of counterterrorism for the FBI testified before the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee in May saying, “We believe domestic terrorists pose a present and persistent threat of violence and economic harm to the United States; in fact, there have been more arrests and deaths caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years.”

Yet, according to the Brennan Center, the “Justice Department regularly treats white supremacist violence not as domestic terrorism or hate crimes, but as gang crimes, which rank sixth on the FBI’s priority list.”

Domestic terrorism is defined by statute as any act occurring within the jurisdiction of the United States that is dangerous to human life, violates U.S. criminal laws and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.

Although domestic terrorism is defined by statute there is no specific domestic terrorism law that can encompass acts such as the mass shootings in El Paso,Texas, Pittsburgh and San Diego.

Justice Department attorney Brad Wiegmann told ABC News that he would be open to discussing a domestic terrorism statute with federal lawmakers.

“We’re always looking to improve our authorities. And so I think we’re certainly open to having a discussion with the Congress if there’s interest in the Congress pursuing a domestic terrorism statute,” Wiegmann said.

Do we need a specific domestic terrorism statute?

There are several federal laws on the books that could be used to combat domestic terrorism. One law, the “Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction,” makes it a federal offense to use, attempt to use, or conspire to use nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons - things that commonly come to mind when thinking of mass destruction. However, the law also covers the use of explosives. According to Bobby Chesney a law professor at the University of Texas School of Law, the statute “does not require any showing of a transnational or foreign element in the fact pattern ... and it is perfectly available for domestic terrorism cases that involve bombings.”

As we have seen in recent days, terrorist attacks can be devastating without the use of explosives. Federal law does not appear to reach most gun-based acts of terrorism. There is a provision in federal law that defines a destructive device as a weapon that “expel(s) a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant ... (using a) barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter.” None of the recent mass attacks on U.S. soil were carried out with instrumentalities that fit that definition.

Well it may be true that there is not a specific statute to deal with acts of domestic terrorism that involve mass shootings - it may be as easy as tweaking existing federal law so it does not distinguish between methods of violence.

Another possible tool against domestic terrorists - such as neo-Nazis and racist white supremacist - is to go after the people who materially support those groups, financially and otherwise. This tactic is commonly used in federal terrorism prosecution, but not available for domestic terror.

There are First Amendment concerns with regard to support for a movement as opposed to participation in a criminal act, but exploring a statute that make it illegal to materially support a group promoting and espousing domestic terrorism is worth the effort.
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.weap

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White supremacists no different than foreign terrorists

According to former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan writing in the New York Times, white supremacists, like their Islamist counterparts, explicitly seek to use violence to create a climate of fear and chaos that can then be exploited to reshape society in their own image. Their recruitment videos share an emphasis on the lifestyle they purport to offer recruits — one of “purity,” militancy and physical fitness. While jihadis share beheading videos, right-wing extremists glory in the live streaming of the deadly attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. While Islamic State supporters communicate through an online platform called Telegram, white supremacists tend to do so through another platform, 8chan.

One group for neo-Nazis, founded by a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, has taken the analogy to its logical conclusion, calling itself “The Base” — a direct translation of the meaning of the word Al Qaeda. The organization also uses similar black flag imagery. The Base maintains an online library of terrorist manuals; the Al Qaeda publication Inspire taught the Boston bombers how to build pressure-cooker explosives.

Perhaps most disturbing of all, both groups have real-world war zones in which to learn combat. Jihadis had Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Balkans in the 1990s and Syria today. White supremacists have the war in eastern Ukraine, in which they are fighting on both sides. Dr. Kacper Rekawek, a scholar who has studied the matter, estimates that 17,000 people from 50 countries, including the United States and many of its allies, have traveled to fight in Ukraine. Those with ties to far-right militias in Ukraine include at least one of four Americans indicted on a charge of promoting the deadly violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. The New Zealand mosque attacker claimed in his manifesto that he had traveled to Ukraine. What we know for sure is that during his attack he wore a flak jacket bearing a symbol of one of the country’s main ultranationalist groups.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising to see the white-supremacist threat growing inside the United States. A study by the Anti-Defamation League found that, in 2018, right-wing extremists were responsible for three times as many deaths in the United States as were Islamists. The same study showed that 2018 was the deadliest year of right-wing extremist violence since 1995 — when the Oklahoma City bombing took place. Because of massacres like the one on Saturday in El Paso, the year 2019 may yet prove worse.

Our intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are not blind to the threat. In May, a senior F.B.I. official testified to Congress that the bureau is pursuing about 850 domestic terrorism investigations. But our current counterterrorism framework was set up, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, to deal exclusively with foreign terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. For example, the law allows for the monitoring of communications between people connected with foreign terrorist groups — even if they are United States citizens operating on American soil — and the sharing of the resulting intelligence among American agencies and with our allies. But those monitoring and intelligence-sharing tools cannot be used against those connected with terrorist groups based in the United States — no matter how dangerous — because domestic terror supporters are protected by free speech laws in ways that jihadis (including those who are United States citizens) are not.

Since 2001, a long list of people have been indicted on a charge of providing material support to designated foreign terrorist entities like Al Qaeda. But for domestic terrorist organizations, material support charges are impossible because there is no mechanism for designating domestic terrorist groups as such. Moreover, domestic terror charges are harder to prove and carry penalties inadequate to the gravity of the offense. Even the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, the worst domestic terrorist in the nation’s history, was not charged with any terrorism offense for precisely this reason.

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President's immigration rhetoric legitimizes white supremacist violence

Adrian Carrasquillo writes in The New Republic how closely the language used by the El Paso, Texas mass murderer echoes the Trump administration messaging. Trump called immigration along the southern border an “invasion” six times in seven months: once in November and December each, and twice in January and again in June, all before telling four congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from. At a rally in May, Trump asked, “How do you stop these people?” A follower in the crowd responded, “shoot them.” Trump laughed and pointed.

This rhetoric is tied to actions and consequences of Trump’s abuse-prone zero-tolerance immigration policy, which have included U.S. citizens detained for weeks, six migrant children dead since September, and increased denaturalization investigations by Homeland Security. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials allowed reporters to photograph caged immigrants in desperate conditions under a bridge in El Paso in March, a spectacle one reporter in attendance told me seemed to be an effort by the Trump administration to push the narrative that the national emergency declaration of the previous month was warranted, by depicting El Paso negatively.

It’s no surprise, then, that Latino elected officials, activists, and leaders grappling with what happened in El Paso say it was a natural progression of the rhetoric and actions of the administration and exposed the staggering scale of racism the Latino and immigrant community has been facing all along.

 “If you look at the shooter’s language and the president’s language they were very similar, and the president has inspired hate and violence, especially against immigrants and Hispanic Americans,” Representative Joaquin Castro, chair of the Hispanic Caucus, told me. “My fear is what the shooter says in his manifesto is true—that this is just the beginning because of the president’s rhetoric that he engages in regularly.”

The League of United Latin American Citizens released an unambiguous statement, declaring “President Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and policies inspired the killing of innocent women, children, and men.”

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White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis hit the mainstream

Conservative and even mainstream media outlets have also played a role in mainstreaming white nationalist ideas, reports The Guardian. Beirich, of the SPLC, said that the concept of demographic replacement is “definitely cropping up in conservative media”, pointing to the Fox News anchors Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham as having broadcast programs which “may not use the same language” but which convey the same basic narrative of “replacement”.

Although white nationalism is far from a new ideology, today’s racist activists have been adept at using social networks to expand their reach and radicalize a new generation of young white men and women. They have worked under a veil of irony and trolling explicitly designed to create uncertainty in the mainstream public about how serious they are. That effort has been extremely successful.

Facebook and Instagram only banned content advocating white nationalism, like “The US should be a white-only nation,” four months ago. Previously, the company suggested in a post announcing the ban, it had considered white nationalism or white separatism valid political viewpoints, and had believed in the arguments, rejected by experts, that “white nationalism” was not necessarily racist.

“There is so much material on the web – treatises, tracts, and manifestos – that would have been extraordinarily difficult to get hold of 25 years ago,” said Brian Levin, the director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

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Officer tattoos a concern for LAPD

For decades, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has struggled to combat secretive cliques of deputies who bonded over aggressive, often violent police work and branded themselves with matching tattoos, reported the Los Angeles Times.

A federal judge called out the problem nearly 30 years ago, accusing deputies of running a "neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang" named the Vikings within the Lynwood station. Others followed with names such as the Regulators, Grim Reapers, Rattlesnakes and the Jump Out Boys. Inside the county’s central jail, the 2000 Boys and 3000 Boys ran roughshod over the lockup’s toughest floors.

Now, despite past attempts by sheriff’s officials to discourage internal cliques, fresh allegations have arisen of deputies in the department’s Compton station adorned with matching skull tattoos.

One deputy acknowledged in a recent deposition that he and 10 to 20 of his colleagues at the station had the tattoos but denied there was a formal clique.

Attorneys representing the family of a black man shot by deputies during a 2016 foot pursuit have used the existence of the tattoos to argue there is a clique tied to the killing, which they allege was racially motivated.

It’s unclear whether the tattoos signal a return of a secret deputy group that celebrates violence or something more benign. But some law enforcement experts said it’s important for the Sheriff’s Department to understand what’s going on and make sure the clique mind-set has not returned.

“In addition to investigating the police shooting, the department should also look at the culture,” said Alex Busansky, a former prosecutor who served on a county commission that in 2012 found that the department’s tolerance of cliques contributed to excessive force in the jails. “A place where 20 police officers receive matching tattoos is a place where there is a mentality of us-versus-them, and that on its face is concerning.”

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GateHouse: Immigration tip line rekindles dangerous era

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

July 7, 2018

Eighty years ago Winston Churchill was a lonely figure on the British home front, sounding the alarm about a growing menace in Europe — the Nazis. In October 1938 he gave a speech simulcast in England and the United States. The Defense of Freedom and Peace, also known as The Lights are Going Out speech, was an oratorical gem and made the case for standing up to Nazism.

One passage condemns the German authorities for promoting a culture “where children denounce their parents to the police, where a business man or small shopkeeper ruins his competitor by telling tales about his private opinions — such a state of society cannot long endure.”

Does it matter what religion or ethnic group is the target?

President Donald Trump continues to aggressively enforced immigration laws and has instituted a zero tolerance policy for immigrants entering the U.S. without authorization. According to the Washington Post, more than 2,500 children were separated from their parents in a crackdown that has since been stopped by executive order.

Last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to take time to distinguish the Trump administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the border from the ignominious conduct of the Nazis. When asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham about comparisons between the immigrant detention facilities and Nazi concentration camps all Sessions could muster was, “Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,”

According to the Chicago Tribune, the Trump administration has, capped the number of refugees the United States accepts at 45,000 — the lowest number since the refugee program was created in 1980; rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program; barred entry from certain Muslim-majority countries; and ended temporary protected status for immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nepal, Sudan and Nicaragua.

“No administration in modern U.S. history has placed such a high priority on immigration policy or had an almost exclusive focus on restricting flows, legal and unauthorized alike, and further maximizing enforcement,” concluded the Migration Policy Institute.

The Trump administration’s laser focus on immigration has rekindled concerns trumpeted by Churchill three-quarters of a century ago.

In a nondescript brick office building in Williston, Vermont, a town of about 7,500 on the New York state border, the Homeland Security Investigations Tip Line does its thing. According to the VTDigger, a statewide news website that publishes government, politics and public policy reports, the tip line began in 2003 as an initiative designed to crack down on child predators. It has since expanded into a tip line for undocumented immigrants and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Data obtained by VTDigger shows that the number of ICE tips increased by 27 percent between 2016 and 2017. Tips received from across the country reviewed by Elisabeth Hewitt of VTDigger, revealed the following:

— A worker at a school called the tip line to report parents of children at the school. She reported them after she learned their undocumented status because she felt it was wrong for them to use public schools.

— An employee at a medical facility called to report a patient who did not have legal status. The patient had been receiving treatment for more than a year at the facility’s expense, according to the caller.

— A worker in a restaurant called to report his employer after he learned some of his coworkers did not have authorization to work in the country. He called in because he was forced to share some earnings with people he said were working illegally.

— A woman who was separated from her husband called to report him. She had known about his status for years. They were in a dispute over property.

A tip line that lets a competitor use the authority of the United States of America to eliminate a rival — harkens back to a tragic time in world history. America can, and must, do better.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.comand follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Sessions tries to distinguish U.S. border policy from Nazi policy

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rebuffed claims that the Justice Department’s new zero-tolerance immigration policy that separates families echoed Nazi Germany  concentration camps, reported the Huffington Post.

Sessions spoke with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham on Monday and defended his agency amid a growing outcry over family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border under the new DOJ policy.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security said nearly 2,000 children had been separated from their parents over a six-week period ending in May. Many of these children are being held in juvenile detention centers.

Sessions said comparisons of those centers to the Nazis camps wasn’t fair, “Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions said. The Justice Department was simply trying to deter people from crossing the border, not keep them in the U.S.

The best the attorney general could do to refute comparisons to the Nazi's is that the U.S. Government wants to keep people out of the county and the Nazi's wanted to keep them in--what a sad day in America where the U.S. Government is trying to distinguish its conduct from that of the Nazi Germany.

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White supremacists surge on college campuses

Recently released reports from a pair of prominent nonprofit organizations reveal the increased targeting of student spaces by neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and the violence these ideologies entail, according to The Intercept .

The Anti-Defamation League reported that incidents of white supremacist propaganda on U.S. campuses more than tripled in 2017. Groups doubling down on campus propagandizing include explicit neo-Nazis like the Florida-based Atomwaffen Division, as well as associations like Identity Evropa, known for couching its unabashed racist message in thinly veiled panegyrics to protecting Western culture and posters bearing Michelangelo’s David.

“The ‘alt-right’ is a movement of mostly young white males,” Carla Hill, senior researcher for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, told me. “They realize that for any movement to truly grow, they must reach young minds, and this segment of the white supremacist movement has been focused on doing that.”

The potential gravity of this surge was then underlined by a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, titled simply, “The Alt-Right Is Killing People.” More than 100 people have been killed or injured since 2014 by perpetrators believed to be influenced by the racism and misogyny that defines the so-called alt-right, the center found. More than 60 people were killed or injured in “alt-right” violence last year alone.

The reports draw no direct link between the rise in white supremacist propaganda and the spike in white supremacist murders. But together, they make clear that the threat of “alt-right” influence on young people, above all young white men, is anything but academic: Racist ideology is never free of violence, and neither is it in the case of the cosplaying, Nazi-adjacent trolls of the “alt-right.”

The Anti-Defamation League reported separately in November that white supremacists and other far-right extremists were responsible for 59 percent of all extremist-related fatalities in the U.S. in 2017, up from 20 percent in 2016. While it’s too soon for much dispositive social science on the link, it’s difficult to consider all this data outside of the Trump era in American politics.

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Sen. McCain lashes out against 'spurious' nationalism

Sen. John McCain of Arizona set rhetorical fire to what he called "half-baked, spurious nationalism" in a speech in Philadelphia, reported Business Insider.

McCain was there to accept the National Constitution Center's Liberty Medal, in recognition of his decades of service to the US. Former Vice President Joe Biden presented McCain with the honor on Monday evening.

"To refuse the obligations of international leadership, and our duty to remain the last, best hope of Earth for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems," McCain said, as the audience erupted in a raucous applause.

McCain said that kind of nationalism "is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history."

"We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil," McCain declared, referencing the racist ideologies of Nazi Germany that have resurfaced in the midst of the current white-nationalist movement in the US.

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