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re: Bitter TRUMP Liar & Cheat to The End Incites More Violence & Starts Lawsuits
Proud Boys are a Dangerous White Supremacist Group say US Agencies
-White Supremacists and Militias Have Infiltrated Police Across US, Report Says
When Trump Defends Armed Rightwing Gangs, His Rhetoric Has Echoes of Fascism
Presidential Debate Rules to Change After TRUMPS' Tirades
What Happens if Trump Refuses to Leave The White House if He Loses?
The Guardian UK / BBC NEWS, 1 OCT 2020.
A desperate man (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
Proud Boys are a Dangerous White Supremacist Group say US Agencies-
White Supremacists and Militias Have Infiltrated Police Across US, Report Says
Law enforcement have shown concerns about the group’s menace to minority groups and police officers, and its conspiracy theories
The Proud Boys is a far-right and neo-fascist organization that admits only men as members and promotes and engages in political violence. It is based in the United States and has a presence in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
The far-right Proud Boys group whom Donald Trump told to “stand by” during this week’s presidential debate is seen as a dangerous organization by law enforcement, according to leaked assessments of the organization from federal, state and local agencies.
Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists during the debate, and his suggestion that the Proud Boys “stand by” during the current 2020 election campaign sent shockwaves through American politics. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls the Proud Boys a hate group.
Files from the Blueleaks trove of leaked law enforcement documents reveal warnings that the Proud Boys, who some of the US agencies label as “white supremacists” and “extremists”, and others as a “gang”, show persistent concerns about the group’s menace to minority groups and even police officers, and its dissemination of dangerous conspiracy theories.
Repeated warnings about the Proud Boys, and descriptions of them as a dangerous white supremacist group, were issued by members of the national network of counter-terrorist fusion centers. The Colorado Information Analysis Center (CIAC) showed particular, repeated concerns about the group, and their activities in that state.
A former FBI agent has documented links between serving officers and racist militant activities in more than a dozen states...
In a 22-page 2019 document titled Violent Extremism in Colorado: a Reference Guide for Law Enforcement, published by CIAC, the state’s division of homeland security, and the Colorado department of public safety, various incidents of violence involving the Proud Boys are discussed under the heading of White Supremacist Extremism.
On page 15 of the document, the group is discussed in terms of the “threat to Colorado” from white supremacist extremists, and the “concern that white supremacist extremists will continue attacking members of the community who threaten their belief of Caucasian superiority”.
In illustrating this threat, the document reports on local members of the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, and Charlottesville’s deadly Unite the Right rally, but also offers that “there have been several incidents in Colorado between the Proud Boys and Rocky Mountain Antifa, to include violent clashes at protests”, and “two members of the Proud Boys were convicted of assaulting Antifa members during a 2018 fight in New York”.
Two pages later, the same document incorporates the Proud Boys, along with Atomwaffen, the Soldiers of Odin, and skinhead groups such as the Hammerskins in a list titled White Supremacist Groups with a Presence in Colorado.
Later, CIAC pointed to the group as a source of Covid-19 conspiracy theories. On 10 May this year, in a bulletin on Covid-19 Protest Disinformation Campaigns, CIAC described how “the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, has been active in spreading conspiracy theories regarding Covid-19 on Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram”, suggesting that “a faction of elites are weaponizing the virus, and a vaccine would likely be a tool for population control and mind control”.
The bulletin also warns that “spread of disinformation has the potential to cause civil unrest and mass panic”.
Agencies have defined the Proud Boys as a threat throughout most of their active existence.
As early as August 2018, a brief from another fusion center, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), summarizes a report of rightwing groups gathering weapons before a rally. The basis for the warning is a July call from a named man to the Berkeley police department, expressing concern about someone who he knew “who is allegedly a member of the right-wing group called Proud Boys” who is “gathering masks, helmets, and guns and would have absolute war with the liberals at an event scheduled to take place in Berkeley on August 5, 2018”.
A much-heralded Say No to Marxism rally was held in the city that day, and saw the Proud Boys and their allies outnumbered by counter-protesters.
Mike Sena, executive director of NCRIC, told the Guardian that “everyone’s absolutely entitled to their freedom of speech”, but that “violence is a crime”, and that this kind of intelligence was passed to partners when “people mention the possibility of going to an event with weapons”.
In 2019, the Texas-based fusion center, the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, warned in a Special Event Threat Assessment of potential dangers to the Austin Pride Parade.
It identified the Proud Boys as being associated with a “growing backlash against Pride Month [which] has emerged in the form of the Straight Pride movement”, noting that “on 28 June 2019, a Trans Pride parade event in Seattle, Washington was disrupted by the alt-right Proud Boys organization”.
There is also evidence of concern about the group from local agencies, some of whom define the Proud Boys as a gang.
In 2019, a flyer from the Orange county, California, probation department advertised a “One Day Law Enforcement Training” day covering “white gangs”.
In one session of the training day on 19 April, the flyer said, two probation officers would “delve into ideological groups including KKK in Orange county as well as other hate groups/gangs including RAM (Rise Above Movement), Proud Boys, Traditionalist Worker’s Party, Hammerskins, WAR, and cover Antifa and sovereign citizens”.
White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says....
Read More;
Report: White supremacists have infiltrated police across the US
When Trump Defends Armed Rightwing Gangs, His Rhetoric Has Echoes of Fascism
Signalling to his base, as he did referring to the Proud Boys on Tuesday, the president is following a playbook from 1930s Germany...
David Renton, a barrister
You can imagine the men as they prepared for the showdown. For days, the papers had been predicting a “great sensation”. Press photographers besieged the entrance. No one could enter the building where the debate was due to take place without a special permit. In his dark blue suit, one question above all troubled the party leader, and with the help of his advisers, he puzzled how best to answer it. What if he was accused of links to fascist street gangs?
This wasn’t the United States in September 2020. It was Germany in May 1931.
For as the historian Benjamin Hett describes in his book, Crossing Hitler, the summer of 1931 saw Hitler being summonsed to court and accused of being complicit in the work of gangs who had beaten – and killed – their anti-fascist enemies.
Hitler’s response was to play a double game. First of all, he was worried about looking weak in front of his supporters, who had called him a coward and a conformist. So he needed to signal that the gangs still had his support. Second, he tried to pretend that any harm caused by his supporters was necessary since the country faced a much more threatening enemy: the far left.
“The SA men are the first men in the party,” he told his opponent, the private prosecutor Hans Litten. Then, in answer to Kurt Ohnesorge, the judge who moderated the hearing, Hitler said that the “red murderers” of the left were the real problem: “If an SA man really oversteps the boundary of self-defence, you can’t hold a man responsible for that.”
Compare this to Donald Trump signalling to his base. During Tuesday’s presidential debate, he was asked:
“Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacist and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence?”
He answered,
“I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing.” He continued: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” Then came the justification: “But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left. Because this is not a rightwing problem, this is a leftwing problem.”
Trump is wrong to pretend that the left is responsible for the violence on America’s streets. Between 1 January 1994 and 8 May 2020, white supremacists and other rightwing extremists in the US carried out attacks that left 329 people dead. In the same period, a single attack staged by an anti-fascist resulted in a killing. And during that incident, the one person who lost their life was the anti-fascist perpetrator.
That survey ended in May. Since then, the number of killings carried out by anti-fascists has risen from zero to one. On 29 August this year a pro-Trump truck convoy made its way through Portland, firing paintballs and pepper sprays. A counter-protest saw an associate of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, Aaron J Danielson, shot dead. One anti-fascist, Michael Forest Reinoehl, admitted to the shooting in a media interview, but said he acted in self-defence. He was shot by US marshals on 3 September in Lacey, Washington.
Even after Danielson’s death, the grim headcount remains: the far right has been carrying out killings at the rate of 300 to the anti-fascist one.
The 1920s saw a similar disparity of casualties. The most detailed survey of deaths in Weimar Germany, carried out by the German mathematician Emil Julius Gumbel, found 314 murders carried out by the right in 1918-22 and 15 by the left. After 1923, deaths fell almost to zero before resuming again from 1928 with the rise of the Nazis.
In the US, since 2016 and Trump’s election, attacks on leftwing demonstrators have become more frequent. They have included the killing of anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer at Charlottesville. James Alex Fields Jr drove his car at protesters after being photographed earlier brandishing a shield with a fascist symbol right out of the 1920s (a bundle of rods and an executioner’s rod). He was sentenced to life in prison.
There were the 11 worshippers shot at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, allegedly by Robert Bowers. And there have been the more than 100 white supremacists who have attempted to disperse anti-racist protests since the spring by driving their cars at demonstrators – the same method of attack as that used by Fields at Charlottesville.
Hitler’s followers were responding to the electoral success of the left; they knew that in areas of Berlin the Communist vote was as high as 40%. And, in order to break the opposition to Hitler, they went into those districts and beat and killed antifascists. It was this violence that led to Hitler’s trial.
The main purpose of the Proud Boys, in summer 2020, is the same. That’s why the they were in Portland last weekend, carrying posters denouncing anti-fascists and supporters of Black Lives Matters, and promising to drive the left out of the city.
Trump is lying when he says that the left is responsible for the violence. In blaming the left he is encouraging his armed supporters and inviting further killings.
In many ways Trump is a weak authoritarian. After four years in power, Trump has not gone to war. His opponents are at large and not in jail.
But when Trump defends armed gangs, he echoes the worst moments in modern history.
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