DON’T BET ON Washington, much less state and local authorities, coming up with a solution to the violence emanating from MAGA world against the perceived enemies of Donald Trump. Staunching the rising tide of bomb threats, assassination plots and swatting attacks, all in apparent service of the Republican Party’s leader, who himself has approvingly forecast “bedlam” should he be convicted of trying to overthrow the 2020 election, seems beyond the will or ability of political leaders and law enforcement.
There’s no stomach in Washington, much less MAGA-dominated Red States, to unleash the FBI against these White miscreants in a manner that it used to hound Black militants in the 1960s, when the fiery civil rights agitator H. Rap Brown quipped, "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down."
“I say violence is necessary,” Brown more famously said. ”Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
It’s a mantra apparently taken up by Trump partisans.
On Thursday someone phoned in a threat to bomb the Long Island home of Arthur Engoron, the judge overseeing Trump’s New York bank fraud case. The day before, baracalounger terrorists called in threats to bomb capital buildings in nine states, forcing their evacuation. On Sunday night in D.C., police and fire trucks rushed to the home of Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing Trump’s insurrection case, after someone called in a false report of a shooting. Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, Special counsel Jack Smith, Judge Engoran and their staffs have gotten death threats. An audio tape surfaced this week of Trump acolyte Roger Stone urging the assassination of two prominent congressional Democrats. He still walks this earth.
So-called swatting incidents are rife, mostly directed at state and local officials who had the temerity to certify election results recording Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. In monkey-see, monkey-do fashion, a few have been directed at Republicans. Recently Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Florida senator Rick Scott were victims.
Law enforcement is flummoxed. It’s evidently as stumped as I am on how to neutralize these violent American “self starters“—not much different, really, than the millions of unhappy Muslims across the Middle East, South Asia and Africa who have answered the siren song of Hamas and the like to change their circumstances. Attempt to pass a muscular federal domestic antiterrorism bill have failed. Hate crime statutes aren’t filling the gap.
Former FBI agent Mike German, who spent years undercover with White supremacist and Neo-Nazi groups, has said that the feds have the tools to intercede when threats of violence start to evolve into action, but aren’t using them.
“While it is true the First Amendment doesn't allow the designation of domestic groups as banned groups,” he told SpyTalk in late 2020, “the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) allows the FBI to investigate domestic groups and individuals without evidence of criminality (assessments). Preliminary investigations require only an allegation that crime might occur in the future, and the agents themselves often make these allegations, which the IG said was okay.”
If you’re a U.S. Muslim who aspires to violence, of course, you’ll be picked up in a heartbeat. Not so White Christian nationalists, who, led by Trump, have taken to celebrating the insurrectionists prosecuted for participating in bloody mayhem at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “hostages.”
A 2019 warning from Russell Travers, then-acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, remains apt nearly five years down the road. In a prescient piece after Trump fired him, Travers wrote, “Over the last several years…the United States has seen a resurgence of non-Islamist leaderless terrorism. Left-wing anarchists and antifascists remain a violent threat. So do right-wing antigovernment militias. But the greatest cause for concern is white supremacist violence. With a long, sordid history in the United States, white supremacists have not gone away.”
Travers has come out of retirement to pitch in with the intelligence wing at DHS, which the Biden Administration re-empowered in 2021, along with other federal, state and other agencies, to tackle “Domestic Violent Extremism,” but the White House remains skittish about casting a dragnet upon the good ol’ white boys who make up the core of violent MAGA America.
Even if, in an unimaginable scenario today, Congress did authorize the feds to launch a nationwide crackdown on violence-prone malcontents akin to the FBI’s 60s-era COINTEL program, it should be obvious by now that we can’t arrest our way out of the MAGA world threat matrix, any more than eradicating the leaders of al Qaeda, ISIS or Hamas will vanquish Palestinian aspirations.There’s a widespread fear and loathing over the rapid cultural and economic changes roiling America. Relegating Trump to the ash heap of history will only slow it down. ###
More and more it feels as if the reluctance of government agencies to investigate right wing criminality is currently one of the most under-reported stories around. For example, there's the Secret Service destroying phone records from Jan 6. Elements of the FBI have slow-walked or outright blocked investigations (for example forcing Postal Office inspectors to step in to arrest Bannon). The IRS leapt into action against Hunter Biden but not against Trump, despite all the tax fraud revealed in his court cases. Plus there is this collective blind spot when it comes to stochastic terrorism. And there is so much more.
One might say this is the true Deep State at work. Whoops, let me correct that: the true Deep State NOT at work.
As the wizard said, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."