Tag: extremists
Our Homegrown Extremists Are 'Christians' Radicalized By Trump

Our Homegrown Extremists Are 'Christians' Radicalized By Trump

The suspect in the Minnesota murders, Vance Luther Boelter, has been charged, for now, with second-degree murder. He allegedly killed two people, Melissa and Mark Hortman, in cold blood, and shot and wounded two others. According to Minnesota police, he showed up at the homes of at least two other people who were on his 45-person hit list (they were away).

What stands out about the descriptions of Boelter we've seen thus far is that everyone agreed he was "deeply religious." In other words, he's a religious extremist. He was also an ardent Trump fan. Those things are obviously related, but it's jarring to consider how much the world has flipped in just 10 years.

Ten years ago, people like Boelter were drawn to Donald Trump at least in part because he seemed to take Muslim religious extremism seriously. They were thrilled when he declared, after the December 2015 jihadist attack in San Bernardino, California, that the United States would shut down all Muslim immigration until we figure out "what the hell is going on."

In the years after 9/11, people became wary of Muslims who were suddenly devout, as this sometimes presaged a violent turn. Jose Padilla, Richard Reid, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and others became seriously religious before proceeding to terrorism.

We didn't feel that way about those who suddenly became devout Christians. Sure, centuries ago, Christians had committed atrocities in the Crusades and during the Inquisition, but that was all over. A more familiar tale was that of George W. Bush, who was able to kick his drinking problem after accepting Jesus as his savior; or Chuck Colson, of Watergate fame, who traded in his political dirty trickster identity to become a lay preacher and founder of the Prison Fellowship after his conversion.

But large parts of American Christianity have been going through some things in the decades since, with certain evangelicals in particular demonstrating a new coolness toward brotherly love. Or, if you read Kristin Kobes Du Mez, evangelical Christianity's ever-present undercurrents surfaced in the Trump era. Christianity Today editor Russell Moore has heard from pastors who've been reproached by parishioners for mentioning the beatitudes in their sermons. "Where are you getting this woke stuff about 'Blessed are the meek?'" they demand.

The problem is not coextensive with evangelicalism: Many evangelicals retain their faith unsullied by ugly politics, and the Catholic integralists are no less abhorrent than the Protestant MAGAs in their embrace of cruelty supposedly for God's sake. But evangelicalism seems to be suffering from politicization more than other denominations and movements, to the point that the public face of evangelicalism has altered.

Boelter seems to have slid into the slipstream of American Christians who are more ideological than spiritual. As Peter Wehner put it in a 2022 interview, whereas churches used to contend over doctrine or practice, things have changed to the point where "a spiritual outlook has been replaced by a core identity that's political."

Though not perceived as particularly strident by his friends, Boelter used the kind of language in a religious context that Trump has normalized in the political context. Speaking to a congregation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he described homosexual and transgender people as "confused," which isn't incendiary, but then he added that "the enemy has gotten so far into their mind and their soul." Enemy talk is contagious.

Boelter, of course, is not an innovator. Other American murderers and criminals were motivated by radicalized Christianity, and he joins a lengthening list of terrorists motivated by MAGA: James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a group of peaceful protesters in Charlottesville in 2017. David DePape attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Patrick Wood Crusius, a 21-year-old from Dallas, drove to El Paso to open fire on those he perceived to be immigrants shopping at a Walmart.

In his manifesto, Crusius cited the great replacement theory and said, "This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas." In Buffalo, a man opened fire on Black shoppers at a supermarket. He, too, cited the great replacement theory. Cody Balmer ignited a fire at Gov. Josh Shapiro's residence in April. More than a thousand people were convicted of storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and countless MAGA supporters have issued violent threats against their fellow Americans.

Trump himself was the victim of two assassination attempts. But his opponents did not minimize, justify or celebrate these attacks. Trump has signaled again and again that violence in his name or for causes he supports is welcome. People like Boelter have gotten the message. Unlike the Muslim extremists, fear of whom Trump was able to weaponize, the new religious zealots are neither Muslim nor "self-radicalized." They are Christian and radicalized by those who hold the presidency and both houses of Congress.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Elon Musk

'A Clear Danger': Europeans Blast Musk's Neo-Nazi Crusade

The world’s richest broligarch Elon Musk made a virtual appearance Saturday at a rally for Germany’s far-right extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, during which he told a crowd of 4,500 people that Germans should not feel “guilty” about the country’s past.

“It’s okay to be proud to be German. This is a very important principle. It’s okay. It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” he said.

“I only hope that this leads to people realiz[ing] what kind of person he is,” Christiane Benner, the head of Europe’s largest industrial union, told the press. “As citizens in a democracy, we have to stand up against this."

“The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Israel's official Holocaust memorial wrote on Musk’s X. “Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”

“The words we heard from the main actors of the AfD rally about ‘Great Germany’ and ‘the need to forget German guilt for Nazi crimes’ sounded all too familiar and ominous,” Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X. “Especially only hours before the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”

Musk, who endorsed the neo-Nazi-friendly AfD on X last month, was introduced at the rally by AfD leader Alice Weidel, who has her own set of racist-scandals to contend with. Musk also hosted an interview with Weidel on X earlier this month, and he has had an op-ed published in Germany’s largest newspaper supporting the AfD.

Musk’s virtual speech comes just days after making not one but two Nazi salutes during the inaugural parade for Donald Trump last week. His oversimplified whitewashing of Germany’s history is a far cry from how Austrian-native Arnold Schwarzenegger has described the need for everyone—including Americans and Germans—to remember how the path of fascism ends.

“You will not find fulfillment or happiness because hate burns fast and bright. It might make you feel empowered for a while but eventually consumes whatever vessel it fuels,” he said in a video address in 2023. “It breaks you. It's the path of the weak.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Mass Deportation May Rely On Extremist Sheriffs And Snitch Bounties

Mass Deportation May Rely On Extremist Sheriffs And Snitch Bounties

Organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025, a sprawling plan to provide the incoming Republican presidential administration with policy and staffing recommendations, have responded to President-elect Donald Trump’s victory by promoting extreme approaches to carrying out his promise to deport upward of 10 million undocumented immigrants.

Right-wing think tanks the Center for Immigration Studies, The Claremont Institute, and the Center for Renewing America have all advanced anti-immigrant policies since Trump’s win. Some of their proposals include offering bounties for information on suspected undocumented people, conscripting far-right so-called “constitutional sheriffs” to serve as immigration enforcers, and attempting to make life so miserable for out-of-status immigrants that they flee the country — referred to euphemistically as “self-deportation.”

Trump has already named the two top officials who will be tasked with carrying out his mass deportation plan, and they both have direct connections to Project 2025. Tom Homan, Trump’s pick for “border czar,” is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025’s lead organizer. He is also credited as a contributor in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, which proposes drastic cuts to legal immigration in addition to harsh crackdowns on undocumented people. Homan has promised to “to run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Alongside Homan will be Stephen Miller — a top architect of Trump’s Muslim ban and family separation policies — who will serve as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser in the new Trump administration. Miller and his conservative advocacy organization, America First Legal, attempted to distance themselves from Project 2025 amid growing backlash to the effort, but their fingerprints are all over it. Miller appeared in a Project 2025 promotional video, a top AFL executive authored a chapter in Mandate, and AFL was on the advisory board until it removed itself following public outcry.

But the likely influence that Project 2025 partners will have on Trump’s looming immigration policy extends far beyond Homan and Miller. Below are some of the coalition’s more extreme proposals.

Center for Immigration Studies pushes bounties, self-deportation

The Center for Immigration Studies is one of the three main branches of the Tanton network, named after John Tanton, whom the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” The SPLC has designated CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group.

On November 13, CIS published a blog under the headline “The Trump Deportation Plan: Easier Done than Said.” The article argues for a stricter version of E-Verify — which uses Social Security data to determine employment eligibility — called G-Verify, which would require employers to electronically submit the eligibility form to the Department of Homeland Security.

The blog acknowledges that these programs “would not capture unauthorized migrants who work ‘off the books’” — a common critique of E-Verify, which critics argue actually pushes immigrant workers into unregulated markets.

That’s where the bounties come in. CIS continues, “However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.”

In another blog — this time for the National Review — CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian revived the idea of “self-deportation,” which is to say coercing undocumented people into leaving the country by making life miserable for them.“

Persuading illegal aliens to go home on their own saves the government time and money,” Krikorian wrote.

“And it’s also preferable for the illegal aliens themselves, allowing them to return on their own terms,” he continued, “They can settle their affairs, pack up their belongings, and go home for Christmas — and not come back.” After arguing that immigrants leave the country all the time, he suggested that one reason might be that “little Mario came home one day from P.S. 666 insisting on being called Maria.”

Krikorian has been joined in resurrecting this once-radical proposition by Heritage Foundation President — and Project 2025 evangelist — Kevin Roberts, who recently pushed it on The Vince Coglianese Show. While praising his colleague Tom Homan as a fantastic hire, Roberts argued that “such a big part of this is trying to inspire self-deportation.”

As a sign of how far contemporary politics have shifted toward the nativist right, it’s worth remembering that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was roundly excoriated for proposing “self-deportation” as a central plank of his immigration plan during the 2012 presidential race. He was denounced at the time by liberal magazines, mainstream outlets like the Washington Post editorial board, and conservatives including former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and a little magazine called the National Review.

In another blog published following Trump’s win, CIS argued that “the time may have come for President Biden or President-elect Trump to deploy the [Alien Enemies Act] against Iranian nationals residing in the U.S.” Per the author’s own description, invoking the act would allow “the president to summarily detain and remove nationals of enemy nations” — i.e., Iran. As the Brennan Center for Justice notes, the Alien Enemies Act “is best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”

The Claremont Institute: Conscript right-wing sheriffs for deportations

The Claremont Institute is a MAGA-aligned think tank that publishes the right-wing blog The American Mind. While the conservative authors featured on The American Mind may not necessarily speak for the institution, they offer a clear window into the Trump movement.

On November 8, The American Mind posted a blog headlined “Mr. President, Deputize Your Local Sheriffs.” The piece was written by Kyle Shideler of the Center for Security Policy, an SPLC-designated hate group.

“President Trump should look to sheriffs to fill U.S. Marshal roles,” Shideler argued, for the purpose of facilitating “the cross-deputization of local sheriffs’ deputies and police officers along the Southern border, which is needed to address prohibitions against state and local officials enforcing federal immigration law.”

“That manpower will be required if Trump is to meet his campaign promise of securing the border and expelling millions of illegal aliens,” he continued.

Shideler further suggested that “conservative organizations” could “identify local law enforcement leaders who support the Trump agenda” — adding that “those who have participated in the Claremont Institute’s Sheriffs Fellowship would be an excellent place to start.”

Jessica Pishko — author of a recent book about sheriffs and right-wing movements — reported on Claremont’s inaugural sheriff fellows program in 2022. She revealed that it “presented for the sheriffs two sets of people in America: those communities sheriffs should police as freely and brutally as they see fit, and those ‘real’ Americans who should be considered virtually above the law.”

As Pishko and others have noted, many of Claremont’s honorees adhere to the far-right ideology of the constitutional sheriffs movement, which holds that sheriffs “should be the ultimate law enforcement authority in the U.S.”

Center for Renewing America defends “Operation Wetback”

The Center for Renewing America is a MAGA-aligned think tank founded by Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist and top architect of Project 2025.

On November 8, CRA published a white paper titled “Primer: U.S. Deportations — A Longstanding & Normal Process” which attempts to normalize and sanitize an earlier mass deportation undertaking officially known as “Operation Wetback” (though CRA’s authors don’t use that racist slur).

The authors argue that “mass deportations are a normal part of the president’s toolbox.”

“For example, in 1954, the U.S. government conducted a campaign that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons,” they continue.

Left unmentioned is the humanitarian catastrophe unleashed by the mass deportations. As Dara Lind wrote for Vox when Trump praised the Eisenhower-era mass deportations in 2015, immigrants were “deported en masse: by train, by truck, by plane, and by cargo ship.” She adds that a “congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a ‘penal hell ship’ and compared it to a slave ship on the Middle Passage.”

In one mass raid, 88 people died of “sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat,” according to a definitive account by Mae Ngai.

And as Professors Louis Hyman and Natasha Iskander argue, Operation Wetback was largely a propaganda campaign that “enforced the idea that American citizens are white.”

Nevertheless, the 1954 operation has become a touchstone for the Trumpist right. As but one example, Stephen Miller recently cited the “Eisenhower model” as justification for the potential deployment of the U.S. military “in a large-scale deportation operation.” CRA’s anodyne description of the 1950s deportations shows how embedded this history has become in the MAGA movement.

Project 2025 embeds itself in Trump 2.0

Trump’s new administration and its partners in the conservative policy ecosystem are laying the groundwork for the most nativist, xenophobic government in decades. From Homan and Miller to the think tanks providing them scaffolding, every sign suggests that the Trump administration will terrorize, surveil, and deport immigrants and their communities in record numbers. And Project 2025 and its partners will almost certainly continue to provide a roadmap for the draconian crackdown.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Liz Cheney

Liz Cheney Says GOP's Extremist Abortion Policies Are 'Untenable'

Former Rep. Liz Cheney said the restrictive abortion policies put in place by her fellow Republicans have created an “untenable” situation for millions.

Cheney made the comments during a Monday town hall session in Wisconsin alongside Vice President Kamala Harris. Cheney has endorsed the Democratic nominee’s presidential bid, citing the need to cross party lines to defend democracy against Republican nominee Donald Trump and events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol that he instigated.

“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled, by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” Cheney said, citing “women who, in some cases, have died, who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”

Her conclusion: “We’re facing a situation today where—I think that it’s an untenable one.”

The 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization by a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling and allowed Republican-led states to implement and enforce anti-choice laws and regulations. Trump appointed three of the six justices who voted with the court majority.

Cheney warned that there are “fundamentally dangerous” things that have happened in the years following the court’s unpopular decision.

Among the issues Cheney singled out: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s pending lawsuit that seeks to obtain the medical records of women who have crossed state lines to get an abortion. Abortion is illegal in Texas except “when a doctor, in their ‘reasonable medical judgment,’ believes it is necessary to save the life or protect the health of the pregnant patient,” according to the Texas Tribune.

”Even if you are pro-life, as I am, I do not believe … that the state of Texas ought to have the right, as they’re currently suing to do, to get access to a woman’s medical records,” Cheney said.

Cheney also cited cases where women have died because they could not receive abortion care.

As she noted, Cheney has a legislative record of opposing abortion access and even received an “A” rating from the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. But she said that several states’ extremist actions following the Supreme Court’s decision cause her concern.

Cheney pointed out that Trump has praised himself for appointing the justices who overturned the precedent.

“You just cannot count on him, you can’t trust him,” she said.

Trump has claimed he isn’t affiliated with anti-choice extremists and tried to distance himself from Republican efforts to pass a federal abortion ban. But recent opinion polling has shown that most voters are skeptical, with 51 percent surveyed by Navigator Research saying they believe he would sign such a law.

Harris has argued that those with strong religious objections to abortion should still back efforts to curtail the fallout from Trump’s effort to pack the Supreme Court with justices who eventually nullified the constitutional right to an abortion.

“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said during her September debate against him.

Harris backs federal legislation that would enshrine the protections of Roe in federal law and has said she backs killing the Senate filibuster if it would enable the passage of such legislation. Current Senate rules require that if legislation is filibustered by a single senator, 60 votes are required before an issue can be voted on, even if a majority supports a proposal.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

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