"We Are At A Turning Point": Counterterrorism Experts Say Trump Is Inspiring A Terrifying New Era Of
"We Are At A Turning Point": Counterterrorism Experts Say Trump Is Inspiring A Terrifying New Era Of Right-Wing Violence
“These are all extremist messages that I saw on Stormfront and other white-supremacist message boards 10 or 15 years ago,” says one former Homeland Security analyst. “Now they are being endorsed as policy by the president.”
BY ABIGAIL TRACY NOVEMBER 2, 2018 8:38 AM
On Monday, an attorney representing Patrick Eugene Stein, one of three men convicted of plotting to bomb Somali refugees, filed an explosive memo in U.S. District Court in Kansas. Stein, his lawyer argued, should receive a more lenient sentence because he was inspired by then-candidate Donald Trump. “The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful, and contentious presidential elections in modern history,” attorney Jim Pratt wrote, “driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president.”
The filing made national news in part because Pratt was willing to argue publicly what many in Washington are saying in private. In the past weeks, the United States has been rocked by a series of vicious hate crimes, including a mail-bombing spree targeting Democrats and Trump critics; the racially inspired killing of two black patrons at a Kentucky grocery store; and, most recently, the massacre of 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue believed to be the work of an avowed neo-Nazi.
Trump and his allies have argued that the president bears no responsibility for the acts of deranged individuals. But to many experts on hate groups and former Homeland Security, law enforcement, and counterterrorism officials, there is unquestionably a correlation. “I think it’s laughable that people are trying to separate the two things in saying there is no relationship between what the president urges his supporters to do and what his supporters then do,” Glenn Kirschner, a former federal homicide prosecutor, told me. “A fourth-grader could see the connection. . . . Anybody who says there is no connection, I think is saying it for political or ideological reasons.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/trump-administration-tree-of-life-shooting-domestic-terrorism
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