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Tag: white supremacism
Why White Nationalist Shootings Mean Rethinking ’National Security

Why White Nationalist Shootings Mean Rethinking ’National Security

After the massacre in El Paso, Texas, the idea that white nationalist terrorism is a threat to US national security is the new normal. Even President Donald Trump felt obliged to mouth a bromide about white supremacy. Outside of Trumpland, a new sort of consensus is taking hold. Senator Bernie Sanders calls for “redirecting federal resources to address this threat to our national security.” So do six former directors of counterterrorism at the National Security Council who served under presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Trump.

“[We] need to enhance efforts to address what is often called ‘domestic terrorism,’ meaning terrorism on US soil not linked to international groups such as ISIS or al-Qaeda,” said the statement of NSC veterans. “It has become abundantly clear over many months now that more must be done to address acts of violence driven by extremist views of all types, including acts of domestic terrorism. We call on our government to make addressing this form of terrorism as high a priority as countering international terrorism has become since 9/11.”

When the national-security establishment speaks the same language as the Vermont socialist Sanders, things are changing. But no small part of the reason that resources have not been redirected and more has not been done is blinders imposed by the very idea of “national security” and its post-September 11, 2001, cousin “homeland security.” These terms – and the nationalistic and racial concepts baked into them – have served to define the problem of white terrorism out of existence. With the US Federal Bureau of Investigation now saying that “a majority of domestic terrorism cases” under investigation “are motivated by white supremacy,” the problem is too bloody to ignore.

“America is under attack,” said Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana. “I’m not sure if this is fully understood. America is under attack by lethal, violent, white nationalist terrorism. And if we’re serious about confronting it, that means we have to have a different conversation…. This is a national-security emergency.”

That “different conversation” begins with unpacking the concept of “national security.” The term entered the American vocabulary in July 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act. The law created the Defense Department, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the secrecy system that still insulates the secret agencies from the voters and Congress. “National security” justified the creation of a fourth branch of government endowed with the mission of protecting America from the alien ideology of a nuclear-armed foe.

This ideology animated American power until the dissolution of the Soviet Union 44 years later. Any communist party anywhere – and any political force with communist allies – was defined as a danger to Americans. So “national security” justified expeditionary wars (from Korea to Vietnam), interference in democratic elections (from Italy in 1948 to Honduras in 2009), and the massacre of democratic movements that included communist partners (from Indonesia in 1965 to El Salvador in the 1980s).

The violence of white supremacists directed against Americans was a different – and lesser – danger. As America fought the Cold War, violence against the civil-rights movement was not considered a national-security threat because it was an indigenous American phenomenon, widely supported by white people, at least in the country’s South.

When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995, Newt Gingrich had just been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives on the strength of his boast to Republican colleagues that he was “a bomb-thrower” who could thwart the menace of Washington embodied by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Because McVeigh’s nationalist ideology was homegrown, the bomb he detonated was not felt as an existential threat. Under the reign of “national security,” white terrorism did not belong in the same threat category as communism.

The notion persisted long after Jim Crow and communism were gone. After 9/11, the USA Patriot Act updated and expanded the doctrine of national security with the notion of “homeland security.” America mobilized to protect its territory from another alien ideology – radical Islam. The imperative of repelling the jihadist threat was used to justify expeditionary wars (and massacres) in Afghanistan and Iraq and drone wars in Pakistan and Somalia, as well as torture and mass surveillance regimes. The notion that a white American might pose a comparable threat was dismissed as inconceivable.

Now the data don’t lie. You’re much more likely to be killed by a white-nationalist terrorist than by a jihadist (much less an Iranian). The post-El Paso conversation about how to make America safe begins with identifying the racialized thinking built into national-security policy.

“Dear white national security practitioners and colleagues,” tweeted Naveed Jamali, a former naval intelligence officer. “Many of you have spent the last decade looking for terrorists in MY community. Will you do the same for yours?” National-security professionals are falling over themselves to say yes. Former NSC staffer Sam Vinograd says, “Fighting white-nationalist terrorism will require sustained strategy, resources, and leadership.”

It will also require realism about the malign influence of endless wars on American democracy. To four generations of white Americans imbued with the norms of “national security” and “homeland security,” a foreign threat is inherently more dangerous and illegitimate than a domestic threat. The suddenly fashionable notion that white-nationalist terrorism is a threat on par with communism or jihadism is sure to strike some white Americans as an alien ideology. It certainly diverges from the concepts that have guided American thinking about national security for the past 72 years.

Trump’s lip service notwithstanding, there is no reason to think Washington rhetoric about white supremacy reflects anything like a national consensus. Indeed, by explicitly targeting (some) white people and their “patriotic” feelings, any government campaign against armed white nationalism is sure to be depicted as an un-American cause that must be resisted, like communism and jihadism, with armed action. Only a new vision of American security can protect us.

This article was produced by the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute, which provided it to Asia Times.

Steve Bannon’s Intellectual Influences Are Mostly Fascists And White Supremacists

Steve Bannon’s Intellectual Influences Are Mostly Fascists And White Supremacists

Reprinted with permission fromAlterNet.

Steve Bannon just can’t help himself. The president’s chief strategist, and former executive chair of Breitbart News, has repeatedly cited fascists and white supremacists without compunction or even discretion.

A recent investigation by the Huffington Post exposed how Bannon’s fondness for The Camp of the Saints, an obscure French novel that portrays a race war between the “civilized” white West and the evil brown hordes of the so-called East. The Huffington Post even highlighted several interviews in 2015 and 2016 in which Bannon compared global politics and the refugee crisis to the plot of the book, which has been likened to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

The Camp of the Saints, which takes its title from the Bible, was written by ultra-reactionary French author Jean Raspail, who openly describes himself as a “royalist” who wants to restore the Catholic monarchy. In the book, he describes hordes of Indians trying to conquer white Western Christendom as “thousands of wretched creatures” and “turd-eaters.”

The Huffington Post described the novel Bannon admires as “nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within.”

Yet Bannon’s admiration of The Camp of the Saints is by no means an isolated example of his extreme far-right politics. The New York Times pointed out that Trump’s right-hand man cited Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher Julius Evola in a 2014 speech at a Christian conference.

Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian fascism, greatly admired Evola. The Italian leader of the extreme right-wing Traditionalist movement wrote for fascist publications and journals, espousing anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas. Evola was virulently racist and anti-Semitic and openly claimed that non-European races were inferior. He also condoned patriarchal domination of women and advocated rape.

A big fan of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, Evola spent years in Nazi Germany, where he gave lectures. He personally welcomed Mussolini to the Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s military headquarters. In a post-war trial in 1951, Evola denied being part of Mussolini’s fascist movement, which was apparently not bombastic enough for his tastes; instead, he proudly declared himself to be a “superfascist.”

Neo-fascist leader Richard Spencer told the Times he was excited that Bannon knew of Evola.

“It means a tremendous amount,” Spencer said, adding that Trump’s chief strategist “is at least open to them.”

AlterNet previously reported on Bannon’s 2014 speech, in which he described his belief in an intractable violent conflict between the “enlightened” Christian West and the forces of Islam, secularism, and socialism.

“We’re at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict,” Bannon warned. “We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism.”

He condemned the “immense secularization of the West” and the increasing secularism among millennials, and insisted that Christians must “bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity.”

Right-wing pundit Glenn Beck went so far as to compare Bannon to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, calling Bannon “quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics.”

Fascist forces in the West are not the only ones that find a kindred spirit in Bannon. His mortal enemy, Islamist extremists, share Bannon’s eschatological, clash-of-civilizations worldview — albeit from the opposite side. In fact, al-Qaeda identifies so much with Bannon’s ideas, it put him on the front page of an affiliated newspaper, al-Masra.

The genocidal Islamic State has made it clear that its goal is to destroy the so-called Grayzone, or space where Muslims are accepted in Western countries. Far-right leaders like Trump and Bannon—along with their extreme, anti-Muslim counterparts Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and beyond—help extremist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda fulfill their missions.

ISIS has rejoiced at Trump’s presidential victory. An ISIS-affiliated media network said, in a translation quoted by the Washington Post, “Trump’s win of the American presidency will bring hostility of Muslims against America as a result of his reckless actions, which show the overt and hidden hatred against them.”

Before becoming Trump’s right-hand man in the Oval Office, and CEO of Trump’s campaign before that, Bannon was previously chair of the far-right website Breitbart News, where he was also a founding board member. Bannon proudly described Breitbart as “the platform for the alt-right,” using the popular euphemism for the white supremacist movement led by neo-fascists like Richard Spencer.

Spencer, who adores Trump, is an avowed white supremacist who coined the term “alt-right” and edits a website of the same name, where he published an article justifying “black genocide” and pondering “the best and easiest way to dispose” of “the Black race.”

At a white supremacist “alt-right” conference in Washington, D.C. in November, Spencer was caught on camera shouting “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” — a reference to the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil.”

The Huffington Post created a video compiling Bannon’s references to these far-right, fascist, white supremacist thinkers and views. You can watch it below.

Ben Norton is a reporter for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project. You can follow him on Twitter at @BenjaminNorton.

IMAGE: Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon speaking at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Gage Skidmore / Flickr

The Government Really Did Fear A ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ — From A White Supremacist

The Government Really Did Fear A ‘Bowling Green Massacre’ — From A White Supremacist

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica. This story was co-published with The New York Times.

The year was 2012. The place was Bowling Green, Ohio. A federal raid had uncovered what the authorities feared were the makings of a massacre. There were 18 firearms, among them two AR–15 assault rifles, an AR–10 assault rifle, and a Remington Model 700 sniper rifle. There was body armor, too, and the authorities counted some 40,000 rounds of ammunition. An extremist had been arrested, and prosecutors suspected that he had been aiming to carry out a wide assortment of killings.

“This defendant, quite simply, was a well-funded, well-armed, and focused one-man army of racial and religious hate,” prosecutors said in a court filing.

The man arrested and charged was Richard Schmidt, a middle-aged owner of a sports-memorabilia business at a mall in town. Prosecutors would later call him a white supremacist. His planned targets, federal authorities said, had been African-Americans and Jews. They’d found a list with the names and addresses of those to be assassinated, including the leaders of NAACP chapters in Michigan and Ohio.

But Schmidt wound up being sentenced to less than six years in prison, after a federal judge said prosecutors had failed to adequately establish that he was a political terrorist, and he is scheduled for release in February 2018. The foiling of what the government worried was a credible plan for mass murder gained little national attention.

For some concerned about America’s vulnerability to terrorism, the very real, mostly forgotten case of Richard Schmidt in Bowling Green, Ohio, deserves an important place in any debate about what is real and what is fake, what gets reported on by the news media and what doesn’t. Those deeply worried about domestic far-right terrorism believe United States authorities, across many administrations, have regularly underplayed the threat, and that the media has repeatedly underreported it. Perhaps we have become trapped in one view of what constitutes the terrorist threat, and as the case of Schmidt shows, that’s a problem.

The notion of a “Bowling Green massacre,” of course, has been in the news recently. Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, referred to it in justifying the president’s travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Conway had Bowling Green, Kentucky, in mind, but she eventually conceded there had been no massacre there. She meant, she said, to refer to the 2011 case of two Iraqi refugees who had moved to Kentucky and been convicted of trying to aid attacks on American military personnel in Iraq. One was sentenced to 40 years, the other to life in prison.

Her gaffe, accidental or intentional, prompted a mock vigil in New York and a flood of internet memes. The imaginary massacre now even has its own Wikipedia page.

On Monday, Trump made the provocative, unsubstantiated claim that the American media intentionally failed to cover acts of terrorism around the globe. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported,” he said in a speech to military commanders. “And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”

At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Ryan Lenz tracks racist and extreme-right terrorists. So far, he said, he’s seen little from the Trump administration to suggest it will make a priority of combating political violence carried out by American racist groups.

“It doesn’t seem at all like they are interested in pursuing extremists inspired by radical right ideologies,” said Lenz, who edits the organization’s HateWatch publication.

Indeed, Reuters reported last week that the Department of Homeland Security is planning to retool its Countering Violent Extremism program to focus solely on Islamic radicals. Government sources told the news agency the program would be rebranded as “Countering Islamic Extremism” or “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism,” and “would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.”

It wouldn’t be the first time the Department of Homeland Security chose to look away. In 2009, Daryl Johnson, then an analyst with the department, drafted a study of right-wing radicals in the United States. Johnson saw a confluence of factors that might energize the movement and its threat: the historic election of an African-American president; rising rates of immigration; proposed gun control legislation; and a wave of military veterans returning to civilian life at a time of painful economic recession.

The report predicted an uptick in extremist activity, particularly within “the white supremacist and militia movements.”

Response to the document was swift and punishing. Conservative news outlets and Republican leaders condemned Johnson’s report as a work of “anti-military bigotry” and an attack on conservative opinion. Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security at the time, retracted the report and closed Johnson’s office, the Extremism and Radicalization Branch.

Three years later, Richard Schmidt came to the attention of the federal government almost by accident. Schmidt had been suspected of trading in counterfeit NFL jerseys. Searching his home and store for fake goods, FBI agents discovered something far more sinister: a vast arsenal. A secret room attached to Schmidt’s shop “contained nothing but his rifles, ammunition, body armor, his writings, and a cot,” wrote prosecutors in a court document.

Beefy, thick-necked, standing 6-foot-4, and weighing about 250 pounds, Schmidt had spent years in the Army as an active-duty soldier and a reservist. His military service ended in 1989 when he got into a fight and shot three people, killing one of them, a man named Anthony Torres. As a result, Schmidt spent 13 years in prison on a manslaughter conviction and was legally barred from owning firearms.

After searching his property, the government came to believe he was involved with the National Alliance, a virulent and long-running extremist group, which was once among the nation’s most powerful white supremacist organizations. They also suspected him of an affiliation with the Vinlanders, a neo-Nazi skinhead gang.

Founded by William Pierce, who died in 2002, the National Alliance has long been linked to terrorism. Pierce, who started the group in 1970 and ran it for many years from a compound in West Virginia, wrote The Turner Diaries, an apocalyptic novel that basically lays out a blueprint for unleashing a white supremacist insurgency against the government. The novel was described by Timothy J. McVeigh as the inspiration for his bombing in 1995 of a federal office building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

FBI agents came to believe Schmidt had been planning his own string of racially motivated attacks on African-American and Jewish community leaders. The agents spread out across Ohio and Michigan to alert his apparent targets. “They had a notebook of information from Schmidt’s home,” recalled Scott Kaufman, the chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. “Some of the items related specifically to our organization and staff — people’s names, locations, maps. It was certainly disturbing.”

In court, the defense lawyer Edward G. Bryan disputed the government’s portrayal of Schmidt, who was 47 at the time of his arrest. Bryan painted his client as a slightly eccentric survivalist who didn’t intend to “harm anyone, including those listed in written materials found within his property.”

The government saw it differently. Schmidt, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo filed in court, planned to assassinate “members of religious and cultural groups based only on their race, religion, and ethnicity.” His cache of weapons, added prosecutors, had only one purpose: to start a “race war.” Other court documents suggest that he planned to videotape his killing spree and email the video clips to his fellow white supremacists.

After pleading guilty to weapons and counterfeiting charges, Schmidt was sentenced to 71 months in federal prison by Judge Jack Zouhary in December 2013.

These days, Kaufman of the Jewish Federation in Detroit doesn’t think much about Schmidt. He’s got plenty of other things to worry about. “In the last two weeks in our community we’ve had two bomb scares,” as well as an incident involving spray-painted swastikas, he said. He’s noted a spike in anti-Semitic incidents over the past year.

“This whole thing is trending in the wrong direction,” he said.

IMAGE: Richard Schmidt / Department of Justice

White Supremacists Celebrate As Trump Downplays Threat Of Right-Wing Terror

White Supremacists Celebrate As Trump Downplays Threat Of Right-Wing Terror

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

Just days after Canada suffered a deadly gun massacre at the hands of a homegrown, right-wing radical who opened fired on praying Muslims, the Trump administration is moving to downplay the threat of homegrown, right-wing radicals in the United States.

Coming in the wake of Trump’s controversial decision to sign an executive order temporarily barring individuals from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States, Reuters this week reported that the Trump administration would direct a government-run program called Countering Violent Extremism to change its name to Countering Islamic Extremism or Countering Radical Islamic Extremism. In doing so, the program “would no longer target groups such as white supremacists who have also carried out bombings and shootings in the United States.” (The FBI and the Justice Department will still track hate crimes and prosecute homegrown terrorists.)

Downgrading the scrutiny given to right-wing radicals has long been a goal of conservative media in America. Now Trump is moving to turn that desire into policy.

Back in 2015, Fox News’ Eric Bolling was part of a chorus of conservative media voices who denounced a Department of Homeland Security report that warned about violence from “right-wing sovereign citizen extremists.” Bolling insisted there weren’t any examples of far-right attacks in the U.S., while his colleague Greg Gutfeld offered there had been just two in “over four decades.”

But the DHS report, produced in conjunction with the FBI, clearly documented 24 violent, right-wing domestic attacks that took place between 2010 and 2014.

“A survey last year of state and local law enforcement officers listed sovereign citizen terrorists, ahead of foreign Islamists, and domestic militia groups as the top domestic terror threat,” CNN reported at the time.

Concurrently, a 2015 report from the New America Foundation found that of the 28 deadly homegrown terror attacks since 9/11, 18 were incidents inspired by right-wing extremism, while 10 were inspired by Islamic extremism.

Dr. John Horgan of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell toldThe New YorkTimes that year, “There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown. And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”

But some on the “alt-right” were furious over the government’s 2015 report. “It really is the most egregious politicization of national security,” Breitbart’s Sebastian Gorka insisted during a Fox News appearance. “We’re going to be looking for right-wing extremists when ISIS prepares to attack us? It’s outrageous.”

Gorka has since been hired by the Trump White House and serves as deputy assistant to the president.

Meanwhile, white supremacists continue to express their deep appreciation for President Trump and his administration’s plan to radically change the CVE program. “My hands are shaking right now as I prepare this article – I’m just that unbelievably happy,” announced neo-Nazi website Infostormer. “This measure would be the first step to us going fully mainstream, and beginning the process of entering the government in full-force without the fear of being attacked, financially-assailed, and intimidated into silence by the nefarious Jews.”

At neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, editor Andrew Anglin announced to readers, “Donald Trump is setting us free.” He continued, “This is absolutely a signal of favor to us. We are not a threat to America, we are American patriots trying to save this country. It is also a slap in the face to the kikes of the SPLC and the ADL who pushed for us to be classified along with actual Islamic terrorists as a way to legally justify outrageous abuses against us by the federal government.” (In the same article, Anglin called the actions of white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof, who was recently sentenced to death for massacring African American worshipers at a church, “silly” but “perfectly understandable if you put it in context.”)

This remains the hard truth: From neo-Nazi killers, to a string of women’s health clinic bombings and attacks, as well as assaults on law enforcement from anti-government radicals, acts of right-wing extreme violenceled by self-described revolutionaries continue to unfold regularly in the United States.

The Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a running tally of confirmed radical-right terror plots. Its most recent entry was from October 14, 2016:

Three members of a southwest Kansas militia dubbed “The Crusaders” are arrested after an eight-month investigation on charges stemming from a plot to attack a housing complex in Garden City, Kansas, that houses a mosque… The attack was planned for the day after the 2016 general election. According to an affidavit filed in the case, the men had repeatedly referred to Somalis as “cockroaches.”

That looming, present danger drives the conservative media, and the emerging alt-right media, to distraction. Simultaneously obsessed with pushing that idea that Islamic terrorists are pouring across America’s borders, while insisting domestic, far-right extremists pose no real danger, the right-wing media regularly attack the government for its interest (until now) in tracking homegrown terrorists of all ideologies.

In 2009, they tried to sabotage a report released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis that warned law enforcement agencies how “right-wing extremist groups” might be out recruiting members in the wake of the first black president being elected.

Then too, there was a coordinated, hysterical reaction from the conservative media, which wildly misconstrued a report about skinheads and white supremacist terror groups to claim the Obama administration was trying to criminalize conservatives who opposed the new president.

In truth, CNN reported the study was actually “produced by staff members during the Bush administration,” and not released until early 2009. The report focused on “rightwing extremists,” “domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups,” “terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks,” and “white supremacists,” making it abundantly clear the government was not targeting mainstream political activists.

Of note in that the 2009 report was the fact that right-wing recruitment in the U.S. had previously spiked during the 1990s, “but subsided after increased scrutiny by the government following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings,” which were masterminded by right-wing domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh.

Today, with the threat of homegrown, radical-right extremists still looming, the Trump administration is doing the opposite and following the Fox News lead. Rather than increasing scrutiny, it’s proposing to scale it back.

IMAGE: Flickr / John Kittelsrud