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Linda Weide's avatar

I knew a couple of people who were following the White Supremacist movement and then I heard Professor Kathleen Belew at a conference on Disinformation and the Impact on Democracy held at the University of Chicago. So, I read her book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America. Then I started reading about the White Power movement internationally. I now subscribe to daily terrorism briefings, just to have a sense of what is going on. In the USA, the briefings can either be about Muslim or White Nationalist terrorists. Formerly, I got the Southern Poverty Law Center Newsletter, and they always tracked White Supremacist activity, so I had a sense of it then as well, which means that when the Oklahoma city bombing happened I did not immediately think it must have been Muslims. I think that Prof. Belew's book is a must read for understanding that what is going on is not isolated incidents, but systematic, and for understanding when one is seeing such things. She also has a book for journalists, which she co-edited, A Field Guide for Journalists, because the press is not reporting the incidents as part of a sustained movement, but as isolated incidents. So, both law enforcement and the press needs to understand these players in domestic terrorism. In Germany the AfD Alternative for Deutschland is really just a renaming of the Nazi party since it is illegal to have a Nazi party here. I am surprised that it has been allowed to exist. This is how they slip a White Supremacist agenda in, by being anti -immigration instead of more directly racist. That is how the Republican party is doing it in the USA too. According to Belew it is a plan. I have been following the attempts to destroy the energy grid, clearly Putin followers, and it is quite concerning. Our energy grids are quite vulnerable to attack, and I am glad that the Biden administration has stressed that the energy sector needs to be vigilant.

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Michèle Sharik's avatar

‘no one told the FBI a mob was going to storm the Capitol. “Why didn’t we have one source come forward and tell me that?”’

And yet it seemed like everyone on Twitter knew it was going to happen. Why the disconnect?

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