The guardian reports FBI head Kash Patel, has “eviscerated” sections of the FBI tasked with investigating right-wing extremists who are considered the most dangerous domestic security threat facing the U.S. today.
“What we know is these groups are emboldened and the federal government appears to be abandoning its efforts to monitor and surveil racists and white supremacists,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “They can certainly act with less concern about FBI interference, and we should expect there will be more violence and more activity on the streets from these groups given what the federal government has shut down.”
The Guardian reports “one of the president’s first moves, mere hours after his second inauguration in January, was to give full pardons to 1,500 people involved in the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill.” The president has also canceled research grants for academic and government researchers studying the de-radicalization of extremists.
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But despite “this backdrop of helpful policies,” the Guardian reports far-right activists and fascist street-fighting gangs known as active neo-Nazi clubs increasingly view Trump as an enemy.
“His alliance with Israel and Netanyahu is obviously problematic for antisemites, and there have always been questions about how dedicated Trump is to the cause of a white America,” said Beirich, referring to American right-wing extremists’ view of the president. “Frankly, white supremacists have never had it so good as they do now under Trump.”
Joshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst and expert on online extremists, tells the Guardian that some propagandists have claimed the Trump administration is “explicitly attempting to appeal to white Americans to manipulate them further … whether economically, politically, or while planning a new war.”
But those perceived overtures are only going so far. According to Fisher-Birch, an influential channel with more than 2,000 subscribers within the far-right Telegram ecosystem carried out a poll in mid-July about Trump and the Epstein files. That poll showed that 70 percent of its respondents said they did not support the president.
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“The irony is that they should be celebrating Trump regardless,” said Beirich, “for the ICE raids, for appointing extremists like Darren Beattie and Stephen Miller, for putting Confederate statutes back up and assaulting DEI, not to mention the pardons.”
The Guardian reports Beattie, a senior state department official, has been linked to white nationalism, “while[ [Stephen] Miller has been widely seen as the architect for the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy and has long been lambasted for his racism and white supremacist ideology.”
Read the full Guardian report at this link.