Sanctions can strike the often-radical Islamist network a piece at a time.
The Editorial Board
Source link
Tag: Extremism
-
Opinion | Trump Takes On the Muslim Brotherhood
-
Teachers Get Death Threats After MAGA Claims Their Halloween Costumes Mocked Charlie Kirk
Staff at a high school in Arizona have been doxed and flooded with online attacks, and have received multiple death threats, after a spokesperson for Turning Point USA inaccurately accused a group of teachers of wearing Halloween costumes that purportedly mocked the assassination of TPUSA cofounder Charlie Kirk.
On Friday, members of Cienega High School’s math department wore matching, bloodied white T-shirts with the words “Problem Solved” written in black lettering across the front. A picture of the group was posted on the Vail School District Facebook page. The district’s superintendent, John Carruth, said in a statement that no student or parent complained about the costumes during the school day.
Then, on Saturday, Andrew Kolvet, who was the executive producer on Charlie Kirk’s show, posted the picture on X. “Concerned parents just sent us this image of what’s believed to be teachers in [Vail School District] mocking Charlie’s murder,” Kolvet wrote. “They deserve to be famous, and fired.”
The white T-shirts, Kolvet implied, bore a resemblance to the “Freedom” T-shirts Kirk was wearing when he was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on September 10.
Kolvet’s post went viral and had been viewed almost 10 million times before it was deleted on Tuesday after WIRED contacted him.
Immediately following Kolvet’s post going live, Cienega High School was bombarded with social media posts, comments, direct messages, emails, and at least one voicemail containing racial slurs, calls for the teachers to be fired, the personal information of school staff, and explicit threats of violence. The school shared these messages with WIRED.
The school district immediately responded to the accusations, clarifying on Facebook that the costumes were not a reference to Kirk’s assassination and that the math department had in fact worn the same costumes a year previously.
“We want to clarify that these shirts were part of a math-themed Halloween costume meant to represent solving tough math problems,” Carruth, the superintendent, wrote. “The shirts were never intended to target any person, event, or political issue.” The Vail School District provided WIRED with a copy of an email from October 31, 2024, featuring a picture of the same costumes.
While Kolvet acknowledged Carruth’s statement and admitted in a post on X later on Saturday that the costumes had been worn the year previously, he did not remove his original post.
“It’s a very weird costume for teachers in general, but after what happened to Charlie, I’m absolutely floored they wore it again,” Kolvet wrote. “I do not believe for a second that all of them are innocent.”
David Gilbert
Source link -
Defeating the Far-Right “Blob Man”
The story of Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber, offers lessons about the persistence of violent extremism, and how to combat it.
John Archibald
Source link -
Elon Musk Has Turned His Eye to the UK
Elon Musk loves responding to posts on X with heart emojis. He’s sent dozens this year alone, often in response to people praising his cars or directly to his mother’s posts.
But this week, Musk sent a heart emoji to Tommy Robinson, the far-right Islamophobic activist from the United Kingdom. Though Musk largely ignored UK politics this year while working in the US government at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he appears to be back across the pond, spending his money and using his platform to elevate far-right extremists.
“A HUGE THANK YOU to @elonmusk today. Legend,” Robinson wrote on Monday, following the first day of his two-day trial for a charge related to counter-terrorism law at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London. Robinson claimed this week that Musk had funded his defense.
Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was charged under the Terrorism Act after he refused to give police access to his cell phone in July 2024 while trying to leave the UK. Prosecutor Jo Morris told the judge this week the police believed “there may be information relevant to acts of terrorism” on the phone at the time. Robinson has pleaded not guilty and claimed the stop was unlawful. A decision in this case is due next month.
In a video posted on X ahead of the trial this week, Robinson said Musk had agreed to fund his defense. Robinson did not say how much Musk was contributing to his defense fund, but Mark Stephens, a prominent British solicitor who has in the past served as legal counsel for Julian Assange, tells WIRED that if he were covering Robinson’s entire defense, Musk’s bill would come to “easily half a million pounds [$665,000], maybe more with appeals.”
Robinson and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Musk posted incessantly about British politics at the beginning of the year, until his focus was consumed by DOGE. But, following his stormy departure from Washington, Musk’s focus on Europe is once again creating chaos. WIRED analyzed data provided by BrightData that shows a significant dropoff in the number of posts Musk made about the UK after January of this year. After he left DOGE in May, Musk’s posts about the UK increased dramatically again in August.
Experts believe Musk’s current outpouring of support for the UK’s far right is part of a possible concerted effort to destabilize the region politically to prevent onerous regulations—such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or the UK’s Online Safety Act—being used to punish X.
David Gilbert
Source link -
Heritage Foundation Uses Bogus Stat to Push a Trans Terrorism Classification
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Republican policy apparatus went immediately to work. The Heritage Foundation, which published Project 2025, and its spinoff, the Oversight Project, issued a call for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to designate “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism,” or TIVE, as a domestic terrorism threat category. The push comes as President Donald Trump just signed an executive order that seeks to mobilize federal law enforcement against vaguely defined domestic terror networks.
The Heritage Foundation and Oversight Project document, which defines “transgender ideology” as “a belief that wholly or partially rejects fundamental science about human sex being biologically determined before birth, binary, and immutable,” grounds its policy recommendations in a startling claim: “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.”
When WIRED asked for the data behind this claim, the Oversight Project did not respond; the Heritage Foundation pointed to a tweet from one of its vice presidents, Roger Severino, claiming that “50% of major (non-gang) school shootings since 2015” involve a transgender shooter or trans-related motive. Severino also lays out what appears to be his entire dataset: eight shootings, four of which, he claims, involve “a trans-identifying shooter and/or a likely trans-ideology related motivation.”
The data tell a different story.
Since 2015, at least four dozen shootings have taken place on school grounds, according to data from the K-12 School Shooting Database, which has tracked every incident involving a gun on school grounds since 1966. Only three perpetrators in the database—the 2019 shooter at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado and the Covenant School shooter in Nashville in 2023 among them—have been credibly identified in public reporting as transgender or undergoing gender-affirming care. Nashville police concluded the shooter there was not motivated by a clear political or ideological agenda, but prioritized notoriety and infamy. In Colorado, investigators say one of the shooters, a transgender boy, cited bullying and long-standing mental health struggles as motivations.
In an August shooting, a 23-year-old individual opened fire outside Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. The shooter had legally changed their name and written about conflict over gender identity, but there is no public evidence they consistently identified as transgender, making classification uncertain. Police say the attack was fueled by hostility toward Jews, Christians, and minorities, along with a quest for notoriety. Prosecutors added the animus was sweeping, saying the shooter “expressed hate towards almost every group imaginable.”
The K-12 database, the most comprehensive of its kind, does not include gender data for about 12.5 percent of school shooters since 2015, which only makes it more difficult to draw firm conclusions about broader patterns.
Other mass shootings at schools, including Parkland in 2018 and Uvalde in 2022, were carried out by young men with histories of grievance, misogyny, or violent ideation. None were tied to “transgender ideology.”
The larger pattern, researchers say, points in the opposite direction: White supremacist, anti-government, and misogynist beliefs account for the lion’s share of ideologically motivated gun violence. Targeting “transgender ideology” as a terrorism category, they warn, confuses identity with ideology, risks licensing violence against anyone who defies gender norms, and shifts attention away from the real drivers of schoolyard violence.
Dell Cameron, Andrew Couts
Source link -
Violence erupts at right-wing demonstration in the Netherlands ahead of election
A right-wing demonstration in the Netherlands erupted into violence and chaos Saturday as rioters clashed with police and vandalized a political party’s office, just weeks before the country holds a general election.
Police used tear gas and a water cannon to disperse rioters who threw objects at officers and torched a police car. There was no immediate word on injuries or arrests. Dutch media showed rioters also attacking an office of a centrist political party, D66.
Dutch news agency ANP reported that a group of 1,500 anti-immigration protesters blocked the A12, a major highway that connects The Hague to the border of Germany.
“Scum. You keep your hands off political parties,” the party’s leader Rob Jetten, said in a message on X. “If you think you can intimidate us, tough luck. We will never let extremist rioters take our beautiful country away.”
REGIO8 via AP
Some of the people in the crowd were carrying the Netherlands flag with an orange stripe instead of red, a symbol of the pre-war Dutch Nazi party (NSB), Jetten said.
“And all this in the name of ‘we are the Netherlands’. No,” the politician said. “This has nothing to do with the Netherlands. It is pure intimidation. Don’t let the loudmouths win. It is the positive forces that build a better country.”
A smaller group of rioters headed for the Dutch parliament complex, which is currently fenced off as it undergoes a yearslong renovation. Police prevented them entering the largely deserted area.
The violence erupted at a demonstration attended by hundreds of people, many of them wearing black and waving flags, that called for tougher asylum policies.
“Shocking and bizarre images of shameless violence in The Hague, after a demonstration got out of hand,” caretaker Prime Minister Dick Schoof wrote on X. He called the attacks on police and the D66 office “completely unacceptable” and expressed confidence that police and prosecutors would bring the rioters to justice.
The unrest comes weeks before an Oct. 29 general election that was called after anti-Islam lawmaker Geert Wilders pulled his party out of the ruling coalition in a dispute over moves to rein in migration.
In a statement, Wilders condemned the rioters for blocking a highway and attacking police, calling them “idiots” and “scum.”
-
Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Charged as Prosecutor Seeks Death Penalty
Utah County prosecutors on Tuesday charged Tyler Robinson in the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, a murder officials say was politically motivated. They intend to seek the death penalty.
Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray announced the indictment at a midday news conference, listing charges of aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, and commission of a violent offense in the presence of a child. Robinson, 22, is also charged with two counts of obstruction and two counts of witness tampering.
“Charlie Kirk was murdered while engaging in one of our most sacred and cherished American rights,” Gray said. “The bedrock of our democratic republic is the free exchange of ideas in a search for truth, understanding, and a more perfect union.”
Gray said that the murder was considered an aggravated offense because it was believed to be motivated by the victim’s political expression. On the matter of the death penalty, he added: “I do not take this decision lightly, and it is a decision I have made independently as county attorney based solely on the available evidence and circumstances and nature of the crime.”
Robinson will make his first court appearance at 3 pm MST on Tuesday.
Kirk, 31, was fatally shot on September 10 while taking questions from students. The cofounder of Turning Point USA, he was credited with galvanizing young conservatives and playing a pivotal role in Donald Trump’s 2024 White House return.
The shooting sparked chaos on campus, where delayed and contradictory emergency alerts left many students and faculty scrambling in confusion. Vigils for Kirk have since been held in Arizona, New York, and Washington, among other states. Across the US, Kirk’s murder has become both a rallying cry for far-right retribution and fuel for an assault on civil society.
Investigators claim forensic evidence links Robinson to the shooting, with FBI director Kash Patel telling Fox & Friends that matching DNA was found on a towel wrapped around the rifle and on a screwdriver recovered from the rooftop where the fatal shot was fired. Patel also said investigators believe Robinson wrote a note of his alleged intent to kill Kirk, bolstering claims the attack was premeditated.
An indictment released Tuesday adds vivid details to the allegations. Prosecutors say surveillance footage captured Robinson climbing onto a campus rooftop, lying prone in a “sniper position,” and firing from nearly 160 yards away. Investigators recovered cartridges at the scene with hand-engraved messages, which prosecutors argue points to premeditation and motive.
Prosecutors also cited interviews with Robinson’s parents and roommate, who said he expressed anger that Kirk “spreads too much hate” and admitted he had “enough of his hatred.” The filing further alleges that Robinson told his roommate to stay silent if approached by police and that children were visible near the stage when Kirk was shot—factors prosecutors say aggravated the seriousness of the crime.
The indictment recounts an interview with Robinson’s mother, who told investigators her son had grown more political in the past year “and had started to lean more to the left,” the indictment claims, citing “pro-gay” and “trans-rights” views. She described him as becoming increasingly consumed by online debates and grievances, noting his fixation with political topics seemed to intensify in the weeks leading up to the shooting, the indictment says. She added that Robinson had also begun to date his roommate, a transgender woman, adding that his father has “very different political views.”
Dell Cameron
Source link -
JD Vance Hints At Crackdown On Mainstream Liberals While Hosting Charlie Kirk’s Podcast
Vice President JD Vance ramped up the divisive rhetoric following the killing of Charlie Kirk as he hosted the late conservative activist’s radio show and podcast.
Vance took charge of “The Charlie Kirk Show” from the White House on Monday, with administration officials who knew Kirk featuring in a two-hour broadcast that made repeated calls for retribution.
Among the guests were White House adviser Stephen Miller, who vowed to channel “righteous anger” to go after “left-wing organizations” in the aftermath of Kirk’s death.
The vice president continued in a similar vein during his outgoing monologue as he made claims about left-wing violence and implied, without evidence, that Kirk’s killer was motivated by far-left ideology.
In a sign that the Trump administration is preparing for a crackdown on liberal and leftist groups, Vance said unity in America would only emerge “when we work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country.”
Among many pointed remarks, Vance falsely claimed it was a fact that “people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.”
“This is not a both-sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth,” he said.
He went on to argue that “while our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”
Vance also attacked The Nation, a progressive magazine, and accused it of misquoting Kirk.
He blasted the “well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War. George Soros’ Open Society [Foundations] funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.”
“Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder,” Vance claimed.
Vance noted the Ford Foundation and the nonprofit run by Soros, a Democratic megadonor, receive “generous tax treatment,” suggesting they could be targeted in any crackdown.
Bhaskar Sunkara, president of The Nation, made clear the magazine is “not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation.”
In his broadcast, Vance also asked his followers to identify anyone rejoicing in Kirk’s death to get them fired from their jobs.
“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
Earlier in the show, Trump aide Miller promised to “use every resource we have” to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” left-wing networks and “make America safe again for the American people.”
“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” he added.
-
‘War Is Here’: The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence
“You could be next,” influencer and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “The Left are terrorists.”
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who popularized the demonization of critical race theory, suggested in a post on X that the “radical left” was responsible for the shooting, and urged the US government “to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
Republican representative Derrick Van Orden from Wisconsin also blamed the shooting on “leftwing political violence” and warned on X that “Whoever does not condemn this is part of the problem. The gloves are off.”
On the floor of the House, after Democrats and Republicans observed a “moment of prayer,” led by House speaker Mike Johnson, for Charlie Kirk and his family, representative Lauren Boebert called for a spoken prayer. Some Democrats said no, and referenced the school shooting in Colorado that also occurred Wednesday. Shouting broke out, and Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna yelled across the aisle, “Y’all caused this.” One Democrat, according to The New York Times, responded, “Pass some gun laws!”
On X, Luna continued to blame the left: “EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS. You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting orgs that exploit minorities, protecting criminals, and stirring hate. YOU ARE THE HATE you claim to fight. Your words caused this. Your hate caused this.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also posted about Kirk’s death, calling on people to “rise up and end this.”
Blake Masters, a twice-failed US congressional candidate once backed by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel and endorsed by Trump, called for RICO investigations into non-governmental organizations as a result of the shooting.
“Left-wing violence is out of control, and it’s not random,” Masters posted on X. “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments it, or it will destroy us.”
Masters was quoting a post from right-wing podcaster and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who blamed the shooting on the left. “Congressional hearings now,” Cernovich posted on X. “Every billionaire funding far left wing extremism. Soros, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman. Massive RICO investigations now.”
Chaya Raichik, who operates the anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok, simply wrote: “THIS IS WAR.”
On fringe platforms like Trump’s own Truth Social and The Donald, the rabidly pro-Trump message board that was responsible for some of the planning of the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, numerous users echoed Jones’ comments about war.
“War is coming,” one user of The Donald wrote on a thread dedicated to Kirk’s shooting. “War is here,” another responded.
Another user of The Donald wrote in the same thread: “Civil War is coming … this will give the left the blowback they’ve been begging white people for so they can play the victim and justify white genocide.”
David Gilbert
Source link -
Election Deniers Are Out in Full Force. We Went Where They Did
Las Vegas — Mindy Robinson has spent four years telling her hundreds of thousands of followers online that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But just days away from the 2024 vote, she has a unique new tactic to prove it’s getting stolen again: Not casting her ballot at all.
“I’m not voting, I want to see if [my ballot] gets counted while I didn’t do anything,” Robinson, who desperately wants Trump to win, tells WIRED at a Las Vegas restaurant on Saturday morning. “I want to see it magically show up as counted. It’s the only fucking thing I can do at this point.”
Just miles away, JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr were at the Whitney Recreation Center, where they urged their supporters to get out and vote.
As Tuesday’s vote looms, the well-funded and lucrative election denial movement that sprung up after former president Donald Trump lost the 2020 election is already calling foul, pushing conspiracies about immigrants voting and harassing election workers.
The weekend ahead of the election, Robinson and thousands of others like her are challenging election officials and spreading conspiracy theories online and in person. Right-wing election observers are already at polling sites and voting tabulation centers; this weekend, election officials in Shasta County, California walked off the job because of the aggressive behavior of election observers.
These election deniers have spent years building and buying an alternative reality sold by far-right groups that have been working around the clock to activate and train them. The groups are well-connected: The Election Integrity Network is run by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a Texas-based group, was cofounded by election denial superstar Catherine Engelbrecht who has worked on dropbox monitoring and voter roll purge initiatives around the country for more than a decade. Election observers have also been trained in online calls by pro-Trump groups like Turning Point USA and the campaign’s own TrumpForce47.
Over livestreams and in conferences around the US, these groups have prepared thousands of activists for this very moment.
Since the 2020 presidential election, Robinson has become something of a celebrity in MAGA world. She calls Laura Loomer a friend and says Roger Stone phones her to get the lowdown on breaking news. She has over 400,000 followers on X and her own show—called Conspiracy Truths—on the America Happens Network, a platform she founded with her business partner Vem Miller, who was recently arrested at a Trump rally in possession of a shotgun and a handgun. There are few conspiracy theories Robinson, an actress with over 150 credits to her name on IMDB, doesn’t indulge in: In addition to believing the 2020 election was stolen, she also thinks most major school shootings are perpetrated by crisis actors, that shadowy organizations are implementing digital currencies to control the population, that COVID was released as a bioweapon, that COVID vaccines are untested and kill people, that January 6 was an inside job. She even believes the moon landing didn’t happen.
David Gilbert
Source link -
Judges and Border Police Targeted by Anti-Government Extremists, Doxed as ‘Traitors’
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court’s ruling that the federal government—not Texas —had ultimate authority over border enforcement led to a tense standoff, which turbocharged violent rhetoric and civil war fantasies online. That ruling, which DHS cited as a driver behind the uptick in anti-immigration threats, drew an array of extremists who traveled convoy style to the border to “support” Texas law enforcement. As that was playing out, FBI agents said they disrupted a plot by militiamen to shoot border patrol agents and immigrants and “start a war.”
And last month, Trump and his running mate, senator JD Vance of Ohio, pounced on a debunked story, stemming from a rumor on Facebook, claiming that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating people’s pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio. City officials were bombarded by hoax bomb threats and death threats, forcing some schools and municipal buildings to temporarily shut down. Proud Boys and Neo-Nazis from the group Blood Tribe also paraded through Springfield.
“We’ve certainly seen in the last couple years the spike in threats from anti-immigrant extremists,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism. “We see this as one of the easiest mobilizing concepts for the right-wing ecosystem … it certainly shouldn’t be a surprise that we see the foot soldiers mobilizing in response to these repeated calls to arms.”
The intel fits into a broader trend of the right-wing—which was once typically supportive of all law enforcement—villainizing certain agencies. For example, the FBI has been targeted with threats for its involvement in January 6 prosecutions.
Recently released FBI data also shows that hate crimes targeting Latinos—who have been broadly scapegoated by anti-immigrant “invasion” rhetoric—also surged by 11 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, continuing a disturbing years-long upwards trend.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is driving threats against “critical government infrastructure,” and leading to US officials being targeted in their homes, according to another security memo, authored in April. Violent threats against “all immigration-related targets” had tripled in January compared to previous months, the memo said. In April, several immigration-related court rulings reportedly caused a spike in calls for the “mass murder of US judges.”
“Many groups working on immigration rights and advocacy in recent years have been raising the alarm in terms of this nativist rhetoric,” says Jesse Franzblau, a senior analyst at the National Immigration Justice Center. “Particularly from members of Congress.”
“It’s nothing new,” Franzblau says, “blaming immigrants for the social ills of the country. But it has grown to a new extreme and it seems more coordinated. There’s a lot of money going into developing these talking points, and pushing these completely dangerous narratives about immigrant communities.” There’s broad consensus among economists that immigration, in the long-term, revitalizes local economies.
DHS projects that overall threats against court officers and court facilities will remain on the rise throughout 2025, the memos show. Those targeting federal judges rose 52 percent last year, one memo says, while threats against court officers effectively doubled.
“Threat actors include domestic violent extremists (DVEs) motivated by political and policy-related grievances and criminal actors who threaten critical government infrastructure and personnel, both at their workplaces and private residences,” it says, adding that incidents involving “hoaxes,” “swatting,” and “doxing” have affected a “wide array of federal and state judicial figures.”
The April memo also credits “immigration-related grievances” with a “spate of swatting incidents” against members of Congress earlier this year, capping off a 7 percent increase in investigations by Capitol Police into threats to US officials.
Dell Cameron, Tess Owen
Source link -
‘Take Back the States’: The Far-Right Sheriffs Ready to Disrupt the Election
When WIRED asked Mack how many sheriffs were currently members of the CSPOA, he said 300 sheriffs could be described as “really solid.” He would not divulge how many paying members the group has.
While Mack and the CSPOA are the most prominent part of the Constitutional Sheriff movement, there are many other sheriffs who espouse the same beliefs. A 2022 survey conducted by the Marshall Project found that close to 50 percent of the sheriffs polled agreed with the constitutional sheriff mantra that “their own authority, within their counties, supersedes that of the state or federal government.”
Many sheriffs have also shied away from publicly aligning themselves with Mack, something the former sheriff readily admits. And yet Trumpworld, the election denial movement, and some of the most prominent far-right influencers are now seeking to team up with the sheriffs to influence the outcome of the US election.
In September, election denial group True the Vote told its followers that it was working with sheriffs to monitor drop boxes. While Mack told WIRED he hasn’t spoken to True the Vote about this specific plan, he has confirmed that the CSPOA is still actively working with True the Vote, though he declined to say in what capacity. Bushman also wouldn’t give details of their collaboration, but said: “It’s more than just supporting what they’re doing.”
In multiple conversations with Mack over the last six months, he repeatedly asserted that the CSPOA advocates only for nonviolent action in efforts to combat the alleged (and unproven) widespread voter fraud that is now the group’s driving force.
But Mack also maintains deep ties to Stewart Rhodes and the Oath Keepers and is publicly meeting with figures like Raiklin, who in August also posted an ominous threat on X referencing the recent assassination attempt against Trump: “In a duel, each side gets one shot. They missed 36 days ago. Now it’s [our] turn.”
Earlier this month, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security warned that “election-related grievances” could motivate domestic extremists to engage in violence around the election.
In a recent phone conversation, Mack’s tone sounded more deflated than antagonistic; he admitted that he was “frustrated” that more sheriffs were not taking a more active role in policing elections, a practice that has led to voters feeling intimidated in the past.
“President Biden and his administration have just caused so much extra work for the sheriffs, it’s really hard to get them to focus on elections,” says Mack. Every sheriff in this country should verify the security and integrity of the voting in their county. Every single one.”
Dar Leaf, for one, remains focused. As he prepares to police an election while continuing to investigate the last one, he is clear-eyed about where the threat is coming from: immigrants and Democrats. He claims that America has received “other countries’ garbage,” and as a result, he needs to act.
“Any police officer who thinks that machine is bad or something criminal is going on,” Leaf says, “we have a duty to seize it.”
David Gilbert
Source link -
DHS Warns Law Enforcement Election Deniers May Attempt to Bomb Drop Boxes
United States intelligence officials have been quietly issuing warnings to government agencies all summer about a rising threat of extremist violence tied to the 2024 presidential election, including plots to destroy bins full of paper ballots and promote “lone wolf” attacks against election facilities throughout the country.
In a series of reports between July and September, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security warned of a “heightened risk” of extremists carrying out attacks in response to the race. Copies of the reports, first reported by WIRED, describe efforts by violent groups to provoke attacks against election infrastructure and spread calls for the assassinations of lawmakers and law enforcement agents.
Last month, the agency’s intelligence office emphasized in a report that “perceptions of voter fraud” had risen to become a primary “trigger” for the “mobilization to violence.” This is particularly true, the report says, among groups working to leverage the “concept of a potential civil war.” Fears about “crimes by migrants or minorities” are among other top “triggers,” it says.
The documents show that DHS alerted dozens of agencies this summer to online chatter indicating potential attacks on election drop boxes—secured receptacles used in more than thirty states to collect mail-in voter ballots. The text highlights the efforts of an unnamed group to crowdsource information about “incendiary and explosive materials” capable of destroying the boxes and ballots. An extensive list of household mixtures and solvents, which are said to render voter ballots “impossible to process,” was also compiled by members of the group, the report says, and openly shared online.
DHS did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is on a distribution list for several of the reports, declined to comment.
The reports were first obtained by Property of the People, a nonprofit focused on transparency and national security, under open records law. The reports contain details about how to commit crimes and avoid law enforcement, which WIRED is not publishing.
Wendy Via, cofounder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), says the conclusion reached by DHS matches the consensus of experts in the field: “Election denialism is going to be the primary motivator—if there is going to be violence.”
Dell Cameron, Tess Owen
Source link -
Leaked Docs From Far-Right Militias Show History of Voter Intimidation Plans
A trove of leaked internal messages and documents from the militia American Patriots Three Percent—also known as AP3—reveals how the group coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022.
This information was leaked to Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a non-profit that says it publishes hacked and leaked documents in the public interest. The person behind these AP3 leaks is an individual who, according to their statement uploaded by DDoSecrets, infiltrated the militia, and grew so alarmed by what they were seeing that they felt compelled to go public with the information ahead of the upcoming presidential election.
Election and federal officials have already voiced concern about possible voter intimidation this November, in part due to the proliferation of politically violent rhetoric and election denialism. Some right-wing groups have already committed to conducting surveillance of ballot boxes remotely using AI-driven cameras. And last month, a Homeland Security bulletin warned that domestic extremist groups could plan on sabotaging election infrastructure including ballot drop boxes.
Devin Burghart, president and executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, says that AP3’s leaked plans for the 2022 midterms should be a warning for what may transpire next month. “Baseless election denial conspiracies stoking armed militia surveillance of ballot drop boxes is a dangerous form of voter intimidation,” Burghart tells WIRED. “The expansion of the election denial, increased militia activity, and growing coordination between them, is cause for serious concern heading into November. Now with voter suppression groups like True the Vote and some GOP elected officials targeting drop boxes for vigilante activity, the situation should be raising alarms.”
The leaked messages from 2022 show how AP3 and other militias provided paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations organized by “The People’s Movement,” the group that spearheaded the 2021 anti-vaccine convoy protest, and Clean Elections USA, a group with links to the team behind the “2000 Mules” film that falsely claimed widespread voter fraud. In the leaked chats, People’s Movement leader Carolyn Smith identifies herself as an honorary AP3 member.
AP3 is run by Scot Seddon, a former Army Reservist, Long Islander and male model, according to a ProPublica profile on him published in August. That profile, which relied on the same anonymous infiltrator who leaked AP3’s internal messages to DDoSecrets, explains that AP3 escaped scrutiny in the aftermath of January 6 in part because Seddon, after spending weeks preparing his ranks to go to DC, ultimately decided to save his soldiers for another day. ProPublica reported that some members went anyway but were under strict instruction to forgo any AP3 insignia. According to the leaked messages, Seddon also directed his state leaders to participate in the “operation.”
Tess Owen
Source link -
The Influence of the US Far Right on Ireland Is Growing
“The people who are running us act like they are Jewish and act like they are Christian. They are not Christian, nor are not Jewish, they are Satanists. And they belong to secret societies, and that’s where their loyalty lies, not with God, not with Jesus, not with anything else, but the deceiver.”
Pedersen told WIRED that he was invited by an Irish-based X account to “explain to them what Q is, not what the mainstream media says it is but what it really is,” adding that he wanted to spread the message that “if the US falls, by not electing Donald Trump, the whole world falls.”
Far-right Canadians have also become increasingly focused on Ireland.
Ezra Levant, the founder of Rebel News, a far-right website that promotes Islamophobic content, traveled to Ireland to report on anti-immigrant protests in Dublin, interviewing several prominent members of Ireland’s far-right community. Shane Sweeney, an influencer from Newfoundland who regularly posts white nationalist content on social media, is also very closely linked to Butler, regularly joining him in online discussions.
Levant did not respond to requests for comment. Sweeney declined to comment.
During a number of chats in recent months, some members of these far-right groups have suggested they have connections to people in the US who may be willing to provide funding for Irish extremist groups.
While there was no evidence provided to back up these claims, one recent fundraiser for an Irish far-right group does indicate that there is at least some willingness for Americans to donate money to these causes.
Justin Barrett, a well-known figure in Irish far-right politics who has called Hitler the greatest leader of all time, recently launched a fundraiser on Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo. The money was earmarked for the National Shield, the “protection unit” of his newly created political party, called Clann Eireann, which means “Family of Ireland.”
While the effort has so far raised just €3,000 of its €10,000 goal, many of those donating money claim to be based in the US. “Much love from America,” one donor wrote, while another added: “Integration has failed in America. We can move out of the citys [sic]. You live on an island. You don’t have anywhere to go. Fight the invasion.”
Irish far-right influencer Keith O’Brien, who is known online as Keith Woods, is also seeking to benefit financially from links to the US. O’Brien has spent years building up relationships with figures in the US far-right movement, including Fuentes, who has hosted the Irishman numerous times on his podcast. Woods also appeared last summer at a notorious white supremacist conference in Tennessee.
“He has a significant US audience very much focused in the same space as Nick Fuentes and the Groyper movement,” Malone said. “There isn’t a large paying Irish audience for his material, so O’Brien is really US-focused.”
O’Brien did not respond to a request for comment.
In the US, armed militias are once again organizing at a local level ahead of November’s election, and while Irish people do not have easy access to guns, there are efforts underway to create localized groups.
David Gilbert
Source link -
Elon Musk Is a National Security Risk
Shortly following reports of an apparent second assassination attempt against former US president and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Elon Musk decided to speak up.
“And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala 🤔,” Musk, X’s owner, wrote in a now deleted post, in response to another person asking, “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?”
After deleting the post—which could be interpreted as a call to murder President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent in the US presidential election—Musk indicated that it was merely a joke that fell flat given the context. “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on 𝕏,” he wrote, adding, “Turns out that jokes are WAY less funny if people don’t know the context and the delivery is plain text.”
The incident was the latest in a long line of increasingly incendiary political posts from Musk, whose substantial defense contracts with the US government may give him access to highly sensitive information even while he makes potential threats against the sitting commander in chief. And they point to the more pressing risk that Musk’s recent rhetoric has posed: the potential to inspire further political violence.
While Sunday night’s post is gone, it appears likely that Musk could receive some attention from federal law enforcement, if he hasn’t already.
The United States Secret Service declined WIRED’s request to comment on Musk’s post. “We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees,” USSS spokesperson Nate Herring tells WIRED.
“In my experience, the Secret Service would take such a comment very seriously,” says Michael German, a former FBI special agent and a liberty and national security fellow at NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “Typically, agents would go out and interview the subject to ensure that there wasn’t an existing threat, and to make the subject aware that the agency takes such statements seriously.”
German notes that it’s possible the FBI could also launch an investigation. However, it’s unlikely that Musk would face any charges for his post. “On its face, the tweet would not meet the ‘true threat’ test, in that it wasn’t a direct threat to do harm to the vice president, so it wouldn’t likely proceed to prosecution,” German says. Still, “it would create a record of the investigations.”
The FBI declined WIRED’s request to comment on Musk’s post. X did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Both Biden and Harris have released statements condemning the apparent attempt on Trump’s life and political violence more broadly. In a statement to ABC News, the White House condemned Musk’s post. “Violence should only be condemned, never encouraged or joked about,” the statement says. “This rhetoric is irresponsible.”
Where things get dicier for Musk is his role as a major contractor for the US Department of Defense and NASA. According to Reuters, SpaceX signed a $1.8 billion contract in 2021 with the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees US spy satellites. The US Space Force also signed a $70 million contract late last year with SpaceX to build out military-grade low-earth-orbit satellite capabilities. Starlink, SpaceX’s commercial satellite internet wing, is providing connectivity to the US Navy.
Andrew Couts
Source link -
Germany’s Far Right Is in a Panic Over Telegram
Soon after the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, a warning that was viewed more than 85,000 times started circulating among Germany’s far right: “Back up your Telegram data as quickly as you can and clean your account.”
The message came from Kim Dotcom, the embattled German founder of the now-defunct digital piracy website Megaupload who is set to be extradited from New Zealand, and who knows a thing or two about facing penalties for illegal activity on the internet.
Telegram users may have reason to fear after French authorities threw the book at Durov, charging him with complicity in crimes that take place on the app, including the sharing of child pornography and the trading of narcotics. If Durov can be held liable for crimes on the app, so too can the criminals perpetrating them, the logic goes.
Researchers at Germany’s Center for Monitoring, Analysis, and Strategy (CeMAS) track around 3,000 channels and 2,000 groups linked to the German far right and conspiracy movements. Users are known to post racist and antisemitic hate speech, and some groups contain Nazi symbols, Holocaust denial, and calls to violence, openly flouting Germany’s strict criminal code. But a mass exodus from the platform, where groups have spent the past five years building a global infrastructure for radicalization and offline demonstrations, would be tantamount to starting from scratch online.
“If you’re a terrorist or you’re an extremist, you’re going to follow the path of least resistance, and in this particular case, that probably means Telegram,” Adam Hadley, the founder and executive director of the United Nations–backed organization Tech Against Terrorism, tells WIRED.
Durov’s arrest is a shot across the bow for Telegram, which now suddenly finds itself in the sights of European law enforcement and regulators. Neo-Nazis’ favorite app is staring down an existential threat, and they’re not quite sure what to do about it.
A ‘Bridge Technology’
Alarm spread quickly the Saturday of Durov’s arrest. Just 90 minutes after French media reported that Durov’s private jet had been intercepted by authorities at Paris’ Le Bourget Airport, a far-right channel posted that his arrest “may have political reasons and be a tool to gain access to personal data of Telegram users.”
The channel is associated with the Reichsbürger movement, which believes Germany is not a sovereign state and is still occupied by Allied powers. German police thwarted their coup plot in 2022, discovering a cache of more than $500,000 in gold and cash, as well as hundreds of guns, knives, ballistic helmets, and ammunition rounds.
Similar messages began proliferating across the app. That night, Austrian extremist Martin Sellner wrote—the translation here is via Google’s translation tool—that “the ‘liberal West’ is switching off the democracy simulation. All communication channels may soon collapse. Will Musk be arrested next?” The message was viewed more than 40,000 times as estimated by TGStat, a Telegram analytics tool, which provided the view counts cited in this story.
Sellner was banned from entering Germany in March for being the keynote speaker at the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party’s ill-famed November Potsdam conference. There, he presented a plan to members of Germany’s surging far-right party on conducting mass deportations once it came into power. AfD emerged victorious Sunday in a state election in eastern Germany, granting the far right a historic first since World War II.
Josh Axelrod
Source link