THESE GUYS ARE IN TOTALLY OVER THEIR HEADS": EXPERTS WORRY TRUMP'S DHS CRACKDOWNS ARE IGNORING THE
REAL THREAT
As Trump wages war on the left, and threatens to send more federal agents to U.S. cities, far-right, white nationalist extremists seem to get a free pass. “It’s an abuse of power,” says one former DHS analyst.
BY ABIGAIL TRACY at Vanity Fair
JULY 24, 2020
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/donald-trump-dhs-portland-protests
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When Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security dispatched heavily armed federal troops to patrol the streets of Portland, Oregon—where, as in many cities across the country, protests against the police killing of George Floyd are ongoing—the reaction was swift and largely predictable. Allies of the president hailed the strong-arm tactics as an appropriate response to “the violent left.” Critics saw the deployment as a bald-faced political ploy. “It’s clear that these guys are in totally over their heads at this point and that there is no plan beyond ‘law and order,’” a former high-ranking DHS official told me.
Former officials have been vocal about their horror at the weaponization of the agency under Trump and acting secretary Chad Wolf. Experts I spoke with were similarly alarmed, and not only at the deployment of a force that acts as the president’s own secret police. What struck them was the fact that Trump’s response to peaceful protesters comes at the expense of his attention to a far more serious threat: the rise of homegrown white nationalist extremism. “I think that [Customs and Border Protection] is being used by the president for political purposes,” said Daryl Johnson, a former senior analyst at DHS. “Homeland security, as well as the president and his administration, have turned a blind eye year after year to this growing threat of white supremacy and anti-government extremism. And yet within two months of protests erupting, they’ve got this plan of action that’s very aggressive…it’s an abuse of power, an overreaction to one type of threat, and yet they downplay and hide from the threat of violence from the far right.”
Under the Trump administration, in other words, violent threats themselves have become politicized. “Just as we have seen in the public’s response and understanding of the pandemic, which seems to be influenced or informed by what political party you belong to, the same applies to these types of threats,” said John Cohen, the former deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS. “We have become so politically divided as a nation that it has actually undermined our ability to deal with emerging threats because of the way people interpret information, the way people understand potential threats in large part is driven by the political party that you support.”
Trump’s history of trafficking in white supremacist tropes is well-documented. As I reported last year, his rhetoric has been so extreme that a number of attorneys have relied on the Trump Defense, as it were, to argue in court that words from the Oval Office radicalized their clients. As it has become increasingly tethered to Trump, the rank and file of the Republican Party appears to be taking its cues from the top; a critical mass of GOP lawmakers and candidates have echoed—if in a diluted form—a racist conspiracy theory dubbed “the Great Replacement,” which falsely claims that white people are being “replaced.” “The rhetoric and policy priorities for many on the far right…have been incorporated into the mainstream political discourse. And when they hear from the president of the United States, and from his supporters in the media and on Capitol Hill, support for policies that they have advocated for, they derive a sense of validation,” said Cohen. “They believe that they have support at the highest levels of our government.”
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= new reply since forum marked as read
DHS has chosen to abandon THIS:
I hope we find out, after Prez Biden dissolves it. And bans the word "homeland".
