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To: FJB who wrote (1157583)	8/17/2019 11:08:14 PM
From: sylvester80	1 Recommendation Recommended By Fiscally Conservative Respond to of 1576229

100% of the Racism in America Comes from the Republican Party and the Right A growing chorus of voices is calling for the U.S. government to treat the threat from white-nationalist terrorists like the threat from Islamist extremists. The fight against ISIS offers some lessons—but also a cautionary tale on U.S. failures to combat an ideology. MIKE GIGLIOAUG 7, 2019 theatlantic.com Protesters march against white nationalism in New York City.JOE PENNEY / REUTERS ShareTweetEmail During the war with the Islamic State, I sometimes heard U.S. officials and analysts express something like relief that the group had declared a “caliphate” with recognizable borders in Syria and Iraq, even flying its flag atop Mosul’s historic Great Mosque of al-Nuri. A state was something the U.S. military could take away. An ideology is much harder to defeat. That’s the problem America faces as it grapples with the threat of white-nationalist terrorism today. Against ISIS, America deployed drones, proxy armies, and hundreds upon hundreds of air strikes. The extremist protostate that once controlled millions of people is dead. The ideology that inspired ISIS, however, remains alive. U.S.-led efforts known as “countering violent extremism,” mainly aimed at ISIS and al-Qaeda sympathizers online, were of debatable utility. U.S. air strikes took out ISIS propagandists, just as an Obama-administration-authorized drone strike years earlier in Yemen killed one of al-Qaeda’s most effective messengers, the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Yet his videos remained on YouTube until 2017, and the same basic ideas have continued to fuel terrorist attacks throughout America’s two-decade War on Terror. I remember the earnest passion one al-Qaeda member displayed, at his home in southern Turkey, as he played me a speech from someone he reverentially called “The Sheikh.” Osama bin Laden had been dead for almost three years, but the man was sure that if I just heard the logic of his words, it would open my eyes. MORE STORIES America Moved On From Its Gay-Rights Moment—And Left a Legal Mess Behind EMMA GREEN The Atlantic Politics & Policy Daily: Stacey’s Nom? ELAINE GODFREY Stacey Abrams Is Playing the Long Game ADRIENNE GREEN Sometimes Winning Gets Old ELAINA PLOTT Last weekend’s shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which a gunman targeting Hispanic immigrants killed 22 people at a Walmart, is the latest in a series of painful reminders that Americans are under attack by adherents of another extremist ideology. U.S. authorities were quick to label it an act of domestic terrorism, amid a growing chorus of voices calling for Islamist and white-nationalist extremism to be treated as similar threats. “FBI classifies it as domestic terrorism, but ‘white terrorism’ is more precise. Many of the killers are lone-wolf losers indoctrinated to hate through the internet, just like Islamic terrorists,” Rod Rosenstein, who was the Trump administration’s deputy attorney general until May, wrote on Twitter. “Condemn and deter racists before they shoot, as we do terrorists and other violent criminals.” Read: A charismatic leader for white nationalists Experts who have focused on both types of extremism—Islamist and white nationalist—tell me that a fundamental change in the way America views the latter would indeed help combat it, freeing up law-enforcement resources to address the growing problem. FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress last month that the bureau made about 100 domestic-terrorism arrests in the past nine months, putting it on pace to surpass the total from the previous year, and that the majority of the suspects were motivated by white supremacism. Since 9/11, far-right extremists have killed more people on American soil than Islamist terrorists have. But U.S. struggles in combatting the ideology of Islamist extremism offer a sobering reminder of how difficult fighting the white-nationalist version will be. The comparison also underscores a key problem, one that ISIS and al-Qaeda never forced Americans to face: What if the center of an extremist militant ideology is not in some lawless region of the Middle East or South Asia, but in America itself? The El Paso attack shows the ways in which white-nationalist terror has become an international movement—while also remaining a distinctly American one. Just minutes beforehand, a manifesto that authorities believe was authored by the suspected shooter was posted online. The 2,300-word racist and anti-immigrant diatribe expressed the fear that white Americans are being replaced by foreigners. As my colleague Adam Serwer has documented, the idea of white replacement, like the tenets of white nationalism more generally, has American roots. And these ideas are central to white-nationalist extremists in other countries. The manifesto cited inspiration from the March massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a white supremacist shot and killed 51 people after posting his own rambling warnings about white replacement. Many attacks by white supremacists target the groups demonized in this propaganda: the black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; the Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. “If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable,” the manifesto read. In this sense, Islamist militant terrorism is an easier enemy. Shades of that ideology exist nowhere on the mainstream American political spectrum, but some of the central tenets pushed by white-nationalist terrorists are extreme iterations of ideas on the American right. President Donald Trump has never called for violence. But he has hinted and winked at it. He has demonized immigrants and Muslims since the early days of his presidential campaign. And he has used dehumanizing language when talking about people of color—a predominantly black congressional district is “disgusting, rodent and rat infested”; predominantly black countries are “shitholes.” He has referred to illegal immigration by Hispanics as an “ invasion.” Because the language of white-nationalist terrorism can echo the language of Trump and his allies, it raises difficult questions about how to enable U.S. authorities to better address the problem. Read: A reformed white nationalist says the worst is yet to come At the moment, there is a significant disparity in the amount of funds, personnel, and law-enforcement tools that America devotes to combatting Islamist versus white-nationalist terrorism. Finding a way to add white nationalists to the list of U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations could help address that, Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told me. It would lower the bar for law enforcement to be able to charge a person for providing material support to white-nationalist terrorists. It would allow investigators to get warrants to monitor their international communications. The Treasury Department could look into their finances and perhaps issue sanctions. U.S. investigators would have more leeway to explore whether individual attacks and plots were part of a larger network. (Alternatively, as the former FBI agent Ali Soufan has proposed, laws surrounding domestic terrorism could be changed to provide authorities with similar powers.) But all of this is unlikely to happen in America’s political climate. “I think you’re going to have a question on the right about whether this is an end-around to targeting political beliefs. And on the left you’re going to have the same organizations that have been concerned about privacy and civil rights [surrounding U.S. efforts to target Islamist extremism] being concerned about this, regardless of the ideology,” Hughes told me. “It’s one of those things that sounds good as a talking point, but when you start to get into the weeds of it—are you going to designate a local Klan chapter, and how does that address the First Amendment?—I don’t think we’ve had that conversation yet.” Instead, he proposed some more realistic measures. In the wake of the Charleston shooting in 2016, the Obama administration created a domestic-terrorism council within the U.S. Department of Justice, but it needs more staff and resources. The mandate of the National Counterterrorism Center could be reinterpreted to include a broader reading of terrorism that would allow it to focus on better analyzing and understanding the threat from white-nationalist extremism. “There are FBI agents who focus on the issue,” Hughest said, “but they don’t have the staff or resources international terrorism has.” The fact that none of this has happened yet speaks to the politics surrounding the issue. In his remarks after El Paso, Trump did put the focus on the ideology behind the attack. “In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy,” he said at the White House on Monday. “These sinister ideologies must be defeated.” Read: White nationalism’s deep American roots On Tuesday, the FBI Agents Association issued a statement urging Congress to make domestic terrorism a federal crime. “This would ensure that FBI Agents and prosecutors have the best tools to fight domestic terrorism,” it said. Designating white-nationalist extremists as terrorists would only be “a tool,” George Selim, a former Department of Homeland Security official who has held positions in the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, told me. “But in order to figure out what tools we need, the federal government has to articulate its policy and strategy to combat and thwart this threat. And this administration has no articulated policy or strategy to combat domestic terrorism, period.” During the Obama administration and the first months of Trump’s presidency, Selim headed an interagency task force aimed at combatting domestic extremism, before taking a post at the Anti-Defamation League in the summer of 2017. DHS has since “devastated” his former office, he said. (DHS officials have pushed back against similar claims, saying that resources were redirected.) As an example of the type of large-scale effort he believes the U.S. government should now be pursuing against white-nationalist terrorism, Selim cited America’s fight against ISIS and the international coalition it assembled to join the effort in 2014. “We saw a whole-of-government effort come together and mobilize,” he told me. “The basic premise here is that the federal government needs the same tools and resources for investigating, prosecuting, and preventing the type of radicalization and recruitment we put into [fighting] international terrorism.” Not everyone, though, sees U.S. efforts against Islamist extremism through a positive lens. The journalist Murtaza Hussain offered a wry take on the subject on Twitter: “Treating white nationalist terrorism like radical Islamic terrorism: putting lots of white people in jail who have nothing to do with terrorism, making most of them too afraid to donate money to charity or engage in politics openly, drone strikes on majority white rural areas.” Faiza Patel, a co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, has focused extensively on civil-liberties issues arising from U.S. efforts to combat Islamist extremism. She told me that she’s uncomfortable with the idea of another expansion of law-enforcement powers, no matter which group they target, and added that the FBI and other agencies already have enough tools to do the job. The question, she said, is the amount of resources they allocate for the problem and how seriously they take it. “If you were to expand the idea of foreign terrorists to include domestic groups, you would open up a Pandora’s box,” she told me. “Maybe we can all agree that there are certain white-nationalist groups that should be designated, but it also opens the door to the designation of environmental groups, of Muslim civil-rights groups, of a whole slew of other groups.” The designation of a terrorist group is based in large part on the acts of violence it commits, but Patel pointed to the case of the People’s Mujahideen of Iran as one example of how the designation can be fluid. The group got itself removed from the U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2012 after professing to reject violence and spending years lobbying aggressively in Washington, D.C. Declaring which groups are terrorist, Patel said, can often be “a political game.” Republicans have already offered a preview of this. Last month, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas put forward a nonbinding resolution seeking to label members of the antifascist group known as antifa as domestic terrorists. “A lot of your willingness to tolerate the government getting involved in investigating ideologies depends on how much you trust the person in charge and which ideologies you think are okay,” J. M. Berger, the terrorism researcher and author of Extremism, told me. He underlined some fundamental distinctions between the threats from groups such as ISIS and white-nationalist terrorists. “It’s always going to cost more to deal with al-Qaeda or ISIS, because you have to span the globe, you have to deploy a lot of international assets and resources, and you have to have alliances,” he said. “On the other hand, jihadist terrorism is fundamentally less threatening to Americans than white-supremacist terrorism, because jihadis and their sympathizers were never anywhere close to political power and anywhere close to popular power in this country. So it has much more potential to damage American society.” Attacks such as the one in El Paso mirror the sort of ISIS attack that became more common as its caliphate deteriorated. Whereas ISIS operatives once planned and coordinated attacks such as those in Paris in 2015 and Brussels in 2016, it eventually grew more dependent on random acts of violence by so-called lone wolves inspired by the group’s ideology. These relatively unsophisticated atrocities—driving a truck into a crowd, for example, or shooting up an Orlando nightclub—paled in comparison to the type of terrorist operations with which Americans became familiar on 9/11. But they were effective at making the threat seem like it could come from anyone, anytime, and at turning people’s suspicions on one another. Part of ISIS’s goal was to provoke civil strife in Western countries by turning Muslims and non-Muslims against one another. But even as ISIS fades from the concerns of many Americans, a wider unrest seems only to be intensifying in U.S. society.

To: FJB who wrote (1157583)	8/17/2019 11:09:41 PM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 1576229

RACIST El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear Aug. 4, 2019 nytimes.com At campaign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!” Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire in a Walmart in El Paso, killing 20 people and injuring dozens more after writing a manifesto railing against immigration and announcing that “this attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The suspect wrote that his views “predate Trump,” as if anticipating the political debate that would follow the blood bath. But if Mr. Trump did not originally inspire the gunman, he has brought into the mainstream polarizing ideas and people once consigned to the fringes of American society. While other leaders have expressed concern about border security and the costs of illegal immigration, Mr. Trump has filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with sometimes false, fear-stoking language even as he welcomed to the White House a corps of hard-liners, demonizers and conspiracy theorists shunned by past presidents of both parties. Because of this, Mr. Trump is ill equipped to provide the kind of unifying, healing force that other presidents projected in times of national tragedy. [For the latest updates, read our live briefing on the Dayton and El Paso shootings.] In televised remarks on Sunday afternoon before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington from his New Jersey home, Mr. Trump praised the performance of law enforcement officers and offered condolences to the victims and their families in El Paso as well as in Dayton, Ohio, where an unrelated mass shooting occurred early Sunday morning. “Hate has no place in our country, and we’re going to take care of it,” the president said, declining to elaborate but promising to speak more on Monday morning. He made no mention of white supremacy or the El Paso manifesto, but instead focused on what he called “a mental illness problem.” This is your last free article. Subscribe to The Times On Monday morning, he used Twitter to call for Republicans and Democrats to work together to strengthen background checks for prospective gun buyers and pass new immigration laws. Editors’ Picks Arthur Jafa in Bloom Momofuku’s Secret Sauce: A 30-Year-Old C.E.O. Gay Penguins, and Their Hope for a Baby, Have Enchanted Berlin Donald J. Trump ?@realDonaldTrump · Aug 5, 2019 We cannot let those killed in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, die in vain. Likewise for those so seriously wounded. We can never forget them, and those many who came before them. Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying.... Donald J. Trump ?@realDonaldTrump ....this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform. We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events! 96.3K 3:54 AM - Aug 5, 2019 Twitter Ads info and privacy 49.8K people are talking about this Democratic presidential candidates wasted little time on Sunday pointing the finger at Mr. Trump, arguing that he had encouraged extremism with what they called hateful language. Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies rejected that, arguing that the president’s political foes were exploiting a tragedy to further their political ambitions. “I’m saying that President Trump has a lot to do with what happened in El Paso yesterday,” Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic presidential candidate who represented El Paso in Congress, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. Mr. O’Rourke said Mr. Trump “sows the kind of fear, the kind of reaction that we saw in El Paso yesterday.” Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said it was outrageous to hold Mr. Trump responsible for the acts of a madman or suggest the president sympathized with white supremacists. “I don’t think it’s at all fair to sit here and say that he doesn’t think that white nationalism is bad for the nation,” he said on “This Week” on ABC. “These are sick people. You cannot be a white supremacist and be normal in the head. These are sick people. You know it, I know it, the president knows it. And this type of thing has to stop. And we have to figure out a way to fix the problem, not figure out a way to lay blame.” Linking political speech, however heated, to the specific acts of ruthless mass killers is a fraught exercise, but experts on political communication said national leaders could shape an environment with their words and deeds, and bore a special responsibility to avoid inflaming individuals or groups, however unintentionally. Image Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic presidential candidate who represented El Paso in Congress, said Mr. Trump “sows the kind of fear, the kind of reaction that we saw in El Paso yesterday.”CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times “The people who carry out these attacks are already violent and hateful people,” said Nathan P. Kalmoe, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University who has studied hate speech. “But top political leaders and partisan media figures encourage extremism when they endorse white supremacist ideas and play with violent language. Having the most powerful person on Earth echo their hateful views may even give extremists a sense of impunity.” This has come up repeatedly during Mr. Trump’s presidency, whether it be the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va., or the bomber who sent explosives to Mr. Trump’s political adversaries and prominent news media figures or the gunman who stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue after ranting online about “invaders” to the United States. David Livingstone Smith, a philosophy professor at the University of New England and the author of a book on dehumanization of whole categories of people, said Mr. Trump had emboldened Americans whose views were seen as unacceptable in everyday society not long ago. “This has always been part of American life,” he said. “But Trump has given people permission to say what they think. And that’s crack cocaine. That’s powerful. When someone allows you to be authentic, that’s a very, very potent thing. People have come out of the shadows.” Grant Stinchfield, a former host of NRATV, the defunct online media arm of the National Rifle Association, said his “heart aches” for the victims of El Paso, but he accused the news media and Democrats of unfairly blaming Mr. Trump for a crime committed by a “disgusting, deranged human being.” “Evil has existed since the beginning of time,” Mr. Stinchfield said. “To blame the president or any other conservative on the actions of a deranged lunatic is insane and flat-out disgusting. The problem with liberals today is they do not want to take responsibility for anything. They will blame everyone but the shooter.” Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state in Kansas and an immigration hard-liner who is close to Mr. Trump, said Democrats were being outrageous. “They are trying to exploit this horrific tragedy to attack the president and push an open-borders agenda and push gun control,” he said. “It’s not only incorrect, it’s improper to do this at a time when people are still grieving.” Dark, anti-immigrant language has flavored American politics for generations. Politicians in the 1880s and 1920s rose to power by seizing on fears of Italians, Japanese, Chinese and other immigrants, stoking fears about the loss of the “American identity.” In more recent years, those who trafficked in racist conspiracies and warned that immigrants were a threat to the safety and economic well-being of native-born Americans were largely ignored by the bipartisan establishment even as they gave voice to the views of many Americans who felt disenfranchised. But Mr. Trump embraced racist conspiracies for years: He was among the leading voices who pushed the “birtherism” lie claiming that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States. And since his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Trump has taken those views to the center of American politics. He denounces immigrant gang members as “ animals” and complains that unauthorized migrants “pour into and infest” the United States. Illegal immigration is a “monstrosity,” he says, while demanding that even American-born congresswomen of color “go back” to their home countries. He uses the word “aliens” to refer to immigrants long after it was deemed dehumanizing even by other Republicans. And his language about immigration is suffused in anger: In El Paso earlier this year, he demanded that Democrats help him “deport criminal aliens and keep the coyotes and traffickers and drug dealers the hell out of our country.” His preferred recourse to illegal immigration often seems to rely on force. He sent the military to the border last year before the election and at one point even said he would order troops to open fire on migrants who throw stones, disconcerting military leaders who objected to what they considered a disproportionate response. At a Florida rally in May, the president asked the crowd for ideas to block migrants from crossing the border. “How do you stop these people?” he asked. “Shoot them!” one man shouted. The crowd laughed and Mr. Trump smiled. “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that stuff,” he said. “Only in the Panhandle.” White Extremist Ideology Drives Many Deadly ShootingsActive-shooter episodes in which the gunmen espoused white extremist beliefs have been among the deadliest in recent years. Along the way, Mr. Trump has empowered groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has been designated a hate group by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center. He has become a reliable megaphone for anti-immigrant screeds carried by Breitbart News and Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Network. And he has seeded his administration with activists, lawyers and a cadre of former Capitol Hill staff members on the far end of the anti-immigration spectrum, all of whom had toiled for years in obscurity, viewed by Democrats and Republicans alike as too radical. Stephen Miller, who promoted anti-immigration views as a congressional aide, is now the chief architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda. Julie Kirchner, the former executive director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, is a top official at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages legal immigration. Jon Feere, a former legal analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates significantly less immigration, is a top adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And Stephen K. Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News, ran Mr. Trump’s campaign and served in the White House as the president’s chief strategist. While the police in Ohio said they were still looking into the motive of the Dayton gunman, the El Paso killings were quickly linked to politics. In the 2,300-word manifesto tied by the police to Patrick Crusius, the suspect in the El Paso shooting, he said he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.” Mr. Trump said much the same four years ago, at an event hosted by the Texas Patriots at a Houston-area school. “Everything’s coming across the border,” Mr. Trump said. “The illegals, the cars, the whole thing — it’s like a big mess, blah. It’s like vomit.” Mr. Crusius described legal and illegal immigrants as “invaders” who are flooding into the United States, a term Mr. Trump has frequently employed to argue for a border wall. In July 2015, Mr. Trump tweeted at critics: “WHAT U REALLY SHOULD B ANGRY ABT IS THE INVASION OF MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS TKING OVER AMERICA! NOT DonaldTrump.” After using the term regularly during last fall’s campaign, he has begun using it for next year’s campaign as well. In one Facebook ad in February, for instance, his campaign wrote, “It’s CRITICAL that we STOP THE INVASION.” Image Mr. Trump’s campaign has run advertising playing on fears of an “INVASION” of migrants. In March, Mr. Trump defended the use of the term before an audience of conservative activists. “They don’t like it when I say it — but we are being invaded,” he said of his critics. “We’re being invaded by drugs, by people, by criminals. And we have to stop it.” White House aides argue that there is a vast difference between favoring tough policies at the border and condoning violence, but they resigned themselves to a fresh round of criticism of the president from the moment they heard about the El Paso shooting and the manifesto. Several of Mr. Trump’s advisers said they were happy that his public messages since the shooting had been restrained and presidential, but they conceded that he needed to do more to unify the country. Still, few advisers believed he would be easily moved to perform as past presidents have during national crises, with a grand speech or even a news conference with the F.B.I. director, to whom the president would have to partly cede the stage. For their part, other Republicans made a point over the weekend of denouncing white nationalism, going where Mr. Trump himself would not. “There have now been multiple attacks from self-declared white terrorists here in the U.S. in the last several months,” George P. Bush, the Texas land commissioner and son of former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, said in a statement. “This is a real and present threat that we must all denounce and defeat.” Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.