Global Right-Wing Extremism Networks Are Growing. The U.S. Is Just Now Catching Up.

This article was originally published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1356125

Other former officials disagreed. Federal agencies avoided the term “right-wing terrorism” because they didn’t want to give extremists legitimacy by placing them on the political spectrum, or to fuel the United States’ intense polarization

What a convenient rationalization for failing to deal with the issue. Especially when right-wing terrorism is the largest terrorist threat to American life right now:

“There have been more arrests and deaths in the United States caused by domestic terrorists than international terrorists in recent years,” said Michael McGarrity, then the counterterrorism chief of the FBI, in congressional testimony in 2019. “Individuals affiliated with racially-motivated violent extremism are responsible for the most lethal and violent activity.”

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Critics say the Trump administration was reluctant to take on right-wing extremism.

Do what? Why would he attempt to hobble his base?

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Global Right-Wing Extremism Networks Are Growing. The U.S. Is Just Now Catching Up.
Bannon’s & Mercer’s dream come true.

Added: People like Geert Wilders, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider may fade away, but their followers won’t.

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I tell myself it has to help that the most powerful leader in the world is no longer their chief apologist and cheerleader.

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An excessive response could give the impression that authorities are criminalizing political views, which could worsen radicalization among right-wing groups and individuals for whom suspicion of government is a core tenet.

If your political view is that the violent imposition of white supremacy is a good thing, then I’m willing to take the risk that you might get the impression your political view is being criminalized.

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the FBI and Department of Homeland Security referred to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” while the State Department chose “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism.”

Conservatives bring back political correctness.

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We will soon see if Moscow Mitch will take a stand against Right-Wing extremism or continue to back Trump’s Putin puppet ways.

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This was a superb article about an important topic.

FBI agents got a tip that two members of the anti-government movement known as the Boogaloo Bois…

I question the common characterization that these people are “anti-government”. No government? No stoplights? What do they mean? No trash collection? No laws?

I think a more accurate characterization of them — from the Booger Boys to Limbaugh Lemmings — is they oppose majority rule.

They are conservatives.

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Back in the early 2000s, you would see Russian monarchists selling Nicholas II nostalgia items, e.g. icons of the Royal Martyrs and various imperial flags. You wouldn’t have to look too long at their books and pamphlets to see copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion prominently displayed. Some of their colleagues have apparently put their white supremacist convictions to work networking with global extremist comrades…

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If whites are really supreme, then what are they so afraid of?

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Amanda Gorman said it best. They are people who would rather shatter their country than share it.

I don’t know what the world does about such people, but other countries are doing better at discouragement than we are, and for us here in America, we’d better wake up. The threat is real.

Laws in Europe and Canada allow authorities to outlaw domestic extremist groups and conduct aggressive surveillance of suspected members. America’s civil liberties laws, which trace to the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech spelled out in the First Amendment, are far less expansive.

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Strange how insecure the master race always seems to be, innit?

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In Nashville’s Centennial Park, there used to be a very popular swimming pool. Popular, but whites only. In the 1960s, when it was becoming clear that that sort of Jim Crow wasn’t going to be viable any more, rather than desegregate the public pool, they filled it in.

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Yes white people have been cutting of their noses to spite their faces ever since integration became the law.

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This is just one of the things which make Clarence Thomas especially repulsive.

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Some causes espoused by white supremacists, such as using violence to protect the environment, are not regarded as traditionally right-wing ideology

Got an example of that? I don’t doubt that you could find some people ranting on Stormfront about how the Jews are responsible for global warming, but I’ve never seen a group (in the US at least) that makes it a prominent part of their ideology, unless you include the part about population reduction through mass genocide of non-white people. There’s no Earth Liberation Klan.

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