Piggybacking off of Amanda's post below, I'm just trying to think of how vicious and vituperative the commentary would have been if Clinton had left Bush with two wars, a tanked economy and a looming budget deficit in his first year that was bigger than any two combined years of deficits in our nation's history. It would have been saucy. And it also wouldn't have been couched in terms of Bush's challenges and his need to reconcile with his opposition.
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In an interview with the Guardian's Ed Pilkington, a former FBI agent who spent years infiltrating and working undercover in extremist hate groups claimed his former employers are not paying enough attention to the rise of white nationalism -- and subsequent increase in domestic violence -- seriously enough.
Coming just a week after an 18-year-old New York man went on a murderous rampage at a Buffalo grocery store in a predominately Black neighborhood after reportedly publishing a racist manifesto online, former FBI agent Michael German insisted Americans can expect more domestic terrorism of that sort unless the FBI gets its act together.
As Pilkington wrote, German said the law enforcement agency is "underplaying" the threat of creeping white nationalism that specifically put neighborhoods like the one in Buffalo "fatally exposed."
“US law enforcement is failing, as it long has, to provide victimized communities like Buffalo’s with equal protection under the law. They are not actually investigating the crimes that occur,” said German, now with the Brennan Center at NYU School of Law.
Noting that recent studies have "pinpointed white supremacy as the greatest domestic terrorism threat in America today," Pilkington wrote, "German said that US law enforcement in general, and the FBI in particular, were lagging behind. Despite a clear mandate from Congress, the bureau has yet to produce statistics revealing the scale of white supremacist crimes."
According to German, "White supremacists kill far more Americans than anybody else the FBI designates as domestic terrorists, yet the bureau still doesn’t document the crimes and fatalities that occur. I think that’s a reflection of lack of concern for the victims of that violence.”
With the Guardian journalist claiming that "FBI agents are also overwhelmingly white and male, and the bureau has been infused with elements of white supremacist ideology stretching back decades." German concurred and said that is part of the problem.
“When I was going undercover in the 1990s I was warned about sympathy towards white supremacy among officers – that was raised as a hazard for my undercover operation," he admitted.
You can read more here.
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Trump-loving Doug Mastriano aired 'poisonous' conspiracies in old thesis calling for military takeover of US society
May 20, 2022
Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano wrote a master's thesis two decades ago warning of a left-wing “Hitlerian Putsch."
The Donald Trump-endorsed Republican candidate published the highly unusual thesis in 2001, when he was a major at the Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College, from the point of view of a colonel living in 2018 who has taken refuge in an "isolated cavern" following the collapse of the U.S. military and the deaths of millions of Americans under a left-wing leader by the United Nations and the European Union, reported the Washington Post.
“Domestically, life was bleak with a rampant drug culture, hedonism and a plethora of ‘alternate’ religions dominating the American youth,” wrote Mastriano, in the voice of his fictional colonel. “We were a people without vision or direction.”
Mastriano concluded the military must take action to "prevent the destruction of the republic," which he linked to “aberrant sexual conduct,” and the thesis foreshadows the right-wing conspiratorial worldview that fed his claims about Donald Trump's election defeat and the Jan. 6 insurrection.
READ MORE: Trump-endorsed GOP candidate says she'd 'absolutely' vote to ban all birth control
“This thesis proves that Mastriano’s embrace of activity that undermines the U.S. Constitution is no recent corruption,” said Peter Feaver, a former senior White House official under George W. Bush. “It stems from poisonous views and misunderstandings that he has held for a very long time.”
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'This has to stop': Michigan official whom Trump said should be executed speaks out against violent threats
May 20, 2022
On CNN Friday, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson slammed the ongoing election lies that are fueling violent threats against elected officials.
This comes after new reporting that former President Donald Trump privately called for Benson to be arrested and executed for treason over his election loss in the state.
"Your opponent, Kristina Karamo, said in the past she felt as an overseer in 2020, an observer, that she had seen some election irregularities," said anchor Erica Hill. "She said, actually, that you should go to jail. She's accused you of election corruption, as we know. What are the conversations happening right now on the ground in Michigan?"
"The conversations I'm having are with our election officials, with law enforcement, with lawmakers, are about how we can protect our democracy, and how we can protect those who run it in times like these," said Benson. "I myself allocated $8 million in security funding for our local election officials and clerks so that they can invest in improvements to the security of our processes, and our staff, and I've also called on our state legislature and lawmakers to increase the penalties for those who threaten election officials, because, again, this has to stop, there is no place for rhetoric like this in our democracy."
READ MORE: WSJ editors smack down Trump for pushing 'Stop the Steal 2022' in Pennsylvania race
"We should be talking about issues that affect our state, the American people, as opposed to continuing to spread conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election and about the security of our processes," continued Benson.
Karamo, in addition to promoting Trump's "Big Lie" and calling for the arrest of Benson, has claimed the January 6 insurrection was a false flag and has spoken at a QAnon conference.
Watch below:
Jocelyn Benson speaks out after Trump execution demand revealed www.youtube.com
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