Sunday 4 November 2018

Inverse PC: Ignoring White supremacists and other far-right extremists

[...]

White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.

These statistics belie the strident rhetoric around “foreign-born” terrorists that the Trump administration has used to drive its anti-immigration agenda. They also raise questions about the United States’ counterterrorism strategy, which for nearly two decades has been focused almost exclusively on American and foreign-born jihadists, overshadowing right-wing extremism as a legitimate national-security threat. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism. Terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists killed 100 people in the United States during that time. Between 2008 and 2017, domestic extremists killed 387 in the United States, according to the 2018 Anti-Defamation League report.

“We’re actually seeing all the same phenomena of what was happening with groups like ISIS, same tactics, but no one talks about it because it’s far-right extremism,” says the national-security strategist P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the New America think tank. During the first year of the Trump administration, Singer and several other analysts met with a group of senior administration officials about building a counterterrorism strategy that encompassed a wider range of threats. “They only wanted to talk about Muslim extremism,” he says. But even before the Trump administration, he says, “we willingly turned the other way on white supremacy because there were real political costs to talking about white supremacy.”

In March 2018, a 20-year-old white evangelical Christian named Mark Anthony Conditt laid a series of homemade I.E.D.s around Austin, Tex., in largely minority communities. The bombs killed two African-Americans and injured at least four others over the course of several weeks, terrorizing the city, yet the local authorities preferred to describe Conditt, who committed suicide, as a “very challenged young man.” Also last spring, another white man, 28-year-old Benjamin Morrow, blew himself up in his apartment in Beaver Dam, Wis., while apparently constructing a bomb. Federal investigators said Morrow’s apartment doubled as a “homemade explosives laboratory.” There was a trove of white-supremacist literature in Morrow’s home, according to the F.B.I. But local cops, citing Morrow’s clean-cut demeanor and standout record as a quality-control manager at a local food-processing plant, made sure to note that just because he had this material didn’t mean he was a white supremacist. “He could have been an individual that was doing research,” the local police chief said.

In this atmosphere of apparent indifference on the part of government officials and law enforcement, a virulent, and violent, far-right movement has grown and metastasized. To combat it, some officials have suggested prosecuting related crimes through expansion of the government’s counterterrorism powers — creating a special “domestic terrorism” statute, for instance, which currently doesn’t exist. But a report released on Oct. 31 by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School argues that the creation of such a statute could easily be abused to target “protesters and political dissidents instead of terrorists,” and that law enforcement already has ample authority to prosecute domestic terrorism: “Congress must require that counterterrorism resource decisions be based on objective evaluations of the physical harm different groups pose to human life, rather than on political considerations that prioritize the safety of some communities over others.”

The report also calls out the Justice Department for its “blind spot” when it comes to domestic terrorism and hate crimes, which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein conceded earlier in the week. During a conference on Oct. 29, Rosenstein said that according to the latest F.B.I. crime report, “88 percent of agencies that provide hate-crimes data to the F.B.I. reported zero hate crimes in 2016.” The Justice Department was reviewing the accuracy of the reports, he noted. “Simply because hate crimes are not reported does not mean they are not happening.”

In 2016, the latest full year of data available from the F.B.I., more than 6,100 hate-crime incidents were reported, 4,270 of them crimes against people (as opposed to, say, defacing property). And yet only 27 federal hate-crime defendants were prosecuted that year. “The F.B.I. knows how many bank robberies there were last year,” says Michael German, an author of the Brennan Center report and a former F.B.I. agent, “but it doesn’t know how many white supremacists attacked people, how many they injured or killed.”

More concerning to German, though, is that law enforcement seems uninterested in policing the violent far right. During the first year after Donald Trump’s election, protests and riots erupted across the country, often involving men with criminal histories who, by definition, were on the law-enforcement radar. During the so-called Battle of Berkeley in March 2017, for instance, a far-right agitator named Kyle Chapman became a hero to the alt-right after he reportedly pummeled an anti-fascist counterprotester with a billy club. Chapman was a 41-year-old who had two previous felony convictions. He proceeded to travel around the country, engaging in violence at other protests, now under the online moniker Based Stickman — a cheerful reference to the Berkeley attacks.

The NYT Magazine.

23 comments:

  1. The US spends ~$5.8b countering each attack? Not a very effective use of funds, if you ask me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Does the ADL recognize Antifa as a terrorist organization? Chapman wasn't merely beating innocent citizens with his stick.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ps - The police @ Berkeley was ordered by their Antifa loving mayor to "stand-down" so that Antifa could stomp the alt-right. I don't think that the ADL author of this article has many of its' facts right, either.

      Delete
  3. Why did all this violence always happen in Berkeley and Portland? Democrat mayors, not an alt-R conspiracy.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Inverse PC isn't about ignoring far right extremism. Far right extremism has ALWAYS been been seen, from neo-Nazi's to the KKK. Inverse PC is ignoring Leftist extremism like Antifa. The SCLC has become a running joke, due to its' unbalanced perspective. Seems the ADL has fallen victim to its' own 'mainstreamed' ideology as well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ”Inverse PC isn't about ignoring far right extremism. Far right extremism has ALWAYS been been seen, from neo-Nazi's to the KKK. Inverse PC is ignoring Leftist extremism like Antifa.”

      BULLSHIT. You haven’t read the article, have you? It’s very long and I’ve only just finished reading it about ½ hour ago myself. Read it and FND OUT why Far right extremism is being ignored.

      Even if you consider antifa a hate group (which it isn’t), it DWARFS into insignificance compared to the violent side of the alt-right. Just look at the numbers of domestic terrorism incidents. Do you think the ADL has sympathy for the antifas, hardly Zionist in their outlook?

      Trump is starting to fry your otherwise fine mind.

      Delete
    2. And I'm not a fan of antifa, BTW.

      Delete
    3. The numbers are a pitiful cherry picked selection not worth anyone's attention given the ADA's definition of "extremism".

      65 incidents and 95 deaths in 2017 pales in comparison to Baltimore's homicide rate (343 homicide's in a city of 600k) where the "extremism" of the drug trade prevails.

      We have many problems in America, but the terrorism of "extremists" isn't one of them, let alone worthy of a $2 trillion expenditure.

      Delete
    4. For example, this is one of the so called "incidents"

      Leadwood, Missouri, February 9, 2017. Frank Ancona, head of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was shot to death; his wife and fellow Klan member, Malissa Ancona, and her son have been charged for the murder.

      Doesn't sound like a "hate crime" to me. "Vanilla" domestic violence is more like it.

      Delete
    5. "We have many problems in America, but the terrorism of "extremists" isn't one of them, let alone worthy of a $2 trillion expenditure."

      Agreed but where did you get the $2 Tn number from?

      Delete
    6. The second paragraph of your initial post.
      According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Stimson Center, between 2002 and 2017, the United States spent $2.8 trillion — 16 percent of the overall federal budget — on counterterrorism.

      Delete
  5. Another snippet (the things I do for you!):

    In the months following Donald Trump’s inauguration, security analysts noted with increasing alarm what seemed to be a systematic erosion of the Department of Homeland Security’s analytic and operational capabilities with regard to countering violent extremism. It began with the appointment of a new national-security team. Like their counterparts now running immigration policy, the team came from the fringe of conservative politics, some of them with connections to Islamophobic think tanks and organizations like ACT for America or the Center for Security Policy, whose founder, Frank Gaffney, was Washington’s most prominent peddler of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories.

    In addition to Gaffney, whose biased and statistically flawed data on the “Muslim threat” became the premise for Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, there were other ideological fellow travelers like Sebastian and Katharine Gorka, the husband-and-wife national-security team. Sebastian Gorka became a senior White House adviser, and Katharine Gorka became a senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security. During the transition, Sebastian Gorka predicted the demise of “C.V.E.,” which he suggested was a fuzzy, politically correct approach to a problem — terrorism — that needed a better fix. Shortly afterward, Katharine Gorka, who once criticized the Obama administration for “allowing Islamists to dictate national-security policy,” made it clear, Nate Snyder recalls, that she didn’t like the phrase “countering violent extremism.” From now on, the mission would be focused on “radical Islamic terrorism,” the White House’s go-to phrase, which, as Sebastian Gorka later explained, was intended to “jettison the political correctness of the last eight years.”

    A surreal scene, replicated in nearly every department and agency, soon began to play out inside the Department of Homeland Security. George Selim, a longtime national-security expert in both the Bush and Obama administrations who headed the Office of Community Partnerships, which worked with local government and civic groups on C.V.E. efforts, noted that as the months passed, “it was clear that there were fewer and fewer of the career civil servants at the table for critical policy decisions.” Some political appointees seemed to have virtually no experience with the issues they had been tapped to advise on. Katharine Gorka, as her own LinkedIn biography notes, had never held a public-sector job before joining the department, nor did she seem to have any practical experience in national security, or law enforcement, or intelligence. Another new senior Homeland Security official, the retired Navy officer Frank Wuco, had made a career of lecturing to the military about the jihadi mind-set, often while role-playing as a member of the Taliban in a Pashtun hat and kaffiyeh. “That’s who was trying to tell me he understands the threat,” an official said dryly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well why didn't Trump bring a more experienced team with him? Because the Bush-kissing neocon NEVER-TRUMPERS from the Hoover Institute teamed up with their DNC opposites in the Lawfare coordinated Brookings Institute to boycott the administration in protest to Trump's election. The Deep State traitors laugh and ridicule anyone who joins the Trump team. All the while, the National Intelligence Agencies "alarm" serves to promote their own schaudenfraude. And frankly, I'm euphoric that our second stringers from the Defense and Intelligence communities are now in charge. Perhaps now a lot of those stale globalist ideals will finally die the death they deserve.

      Delete
    2. Don't think the two are working hand-in-hand (DNC-Neoliberals & NeverTrumpers)? The Baltimore Sun has endorsed our Never-trumper Maryland Governor OVER a very progressive Ben Jealous. Why would they do that unless they realized their plight and desperate need to return to the globalist status-quo ante?

      Delete
    3. Hogan will win the election tomorrow and I can guarantee you that Bernie will NOT be on the Democrat presidential ballot in 2020. Some ridiculous moderate like Biden or Kerry will be on it. Because 2018 is about shaming Democrat Party Progressives into not believing that a progressive like Jealous can win a state like Maryland, which is overwhelmingly Democrat.

      ps - Ben Cardin's victory over Kweisi Mfume showed me the split in the Maryland DNC. Mfume should have won, but for the racial/ ideological divide.

      Delete
    4. I have no love for the far progressive Left, but they're being played for suckers here by the neo-liberal elite in Maryland and elsewhere. The Lawfare group is firmly in control of the defense and intelligence community civil service.

      Delete
    5. Full disclosure as to article above... I've followed Brittany Pettibone and Chris Ray Gun on YouTube for quite a while. Censoring them in the name of extremism and PC'ness is not a good idea.

      Delete
  6. David McInnes [in your TDC article]: yikes! Only Mordor seems to be able to generate/attract that kind of... 'Conservative'...

    ReplyDelete
  7. One thing's for sure: NEVER-TRUMPISM will not save the DNC. And it remains set to lose 2020 spectacularly...

    ReplyDelete