Morning Briefing: Hate Crimes Increased in California and Texas
Morning Briefing: Hate Crimes Increased in California and Texas
Recently published data shows that hate crimes increased from 2021 to 2022 in both California and Texas.
Morning Briefing: The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) recently published data which revealed “that hate crimes in Texas increased by 6.4 percent from 2021 to 2022, marking the sixth year in a row the state has seen an increase in hate crimes—and setting a new record.”
The California Department of Justice published an annual report that found “hate crimes increased in California by about 20% in 2022 from the previous year, largely due to more reports of offenses targeting Black or LGBTQ people.”
The Oregon Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Unit published a report on the statewide Bias Response Hotline, and the report found that “bias-motivated reports to the Hotline have increased 178% since 2020 when the hotline opened, to 2,534 reports of bias crimes and incidents in 2022.”
Taylor Taranto, a Capitol Riot defendant, who was “arrested near the D.C. home of former President Barack Obama had threatened to blow up his van at a government facility the day before," and Taranto reportedly began live streaming near Obama's purported private D.C. residence “shortly after he reposted the address which had been shared by former President Donald Trump.”
Patrick Gordon Macdonald is reportedly facing “terrorism-related charges in Canada after being accused of facilitating propaganda videos for the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division to help recruit new members.” Atomwaffen Division is a White Supremacist neo-Nazi accelerationist organization that “formed out of Iron March, an influential fascist forum that went offline in fall 2017.”
Macdonald was previously revealed to be ‘Dark Foreigner,” an infamous neo-Nazi propagandist.
The man who pleaded guilty to killing 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas was in court for a sentencing hearing, and the admitted White Supremacist faced a courtroom “filled with more than 50 people, including victims, family members, prominent El Pasoans and dozens of members of local and national media outlets.”
Kathleen Sorensen, a “momfluencer” and adherent to the QAnon conspiracy theory, was “sentenced to jail after falsely reporting to police that a couple tried to kidnap her kids at a Michaels arts and crafts store in December 2020.”
Must Reads
Lydia Namubiru reports that a “loophole in US charity law is letting anonymous donors hand hundreds of millions of dollars to ‘culture war’ groups campaigning globally against women’s and LGBTIQ rights, a nine-month investigation by openDemocracy has found. Recipients of the $272m funnelled through special accounts called ‘donor advised funds’ (DAFs) in the four tax years from 2017 to 2020 included at least two US groups linked to the political organising in Uganda that preceded its brutal ‘kill the gays’ law, as well as groups that have argued for the statutory castration of transgender people in Europe and been implicated in anti-LGBTIQ ‘conversion therapy’ even in US states where the practice is restricted. Anonymity makes it impossible for campaigners to understand where the money that bankrolls anti-rights groups ultimately comes from, and frustrates their efforts to hold backers accountable or persuade them away from funding hate.” [openDemocracy]
Jordan Green reports that “Michael Alan Jones, a white supremacist, convicted sex offender and FBI informant, was a vetted member of the Charlotte, N.C., Proud Boys chapter, Raw Story has learned. The revelation means that the Proud Boys — an extremist group that has loudly positioned itself as a guardian of public morality by protesting drag shows and other LGBTQ events — failed to properly vet a former member who had been convicted of a sex offense for having sex with a minor. As Raw Story has previously reported, Jones recruited for the white supremacist terror network the Base, attended rallies with the more public facing white supremacist group Patriot Front, and fought with the police alongside the Proud Boys at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Following a traffic stop in upstate New York, Jones pleaded guilty in December to being a felon in possession of a gun. He is currently awaiting sentencing.” [Raw Story]
David Neiwert writes that “there was a brief moment, in the days immediately following the insurrection, when there was an opportunity by Republicans to bring the nation back from the brink—to recoil in horror at the violent attack on the backbone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power; to renounce the extremism that had overwhelmed their party both before and during the Trump years, to embrace their longtime role as a viable partner in democracy. But within a matter of days—especially when confronted with the painfully obvious need to impeach Trump for inciting the mob and attempting a coup, which should have been understood as a duty—they promptly regressed into the cultish authoritarianism of Trumpism, refusing his impeachment and dismissing the insurrection as a mere protest that had ‘gotten out of hand.’ So rather than breaking the fever of right-wing extremism, January 6 became a starting point for a new age of American politics: an age in which insurrection is celebrated, seditionists are defended as ‘patriots,’ and the politics of menace and violence are woven into our everyday discourse and interactions.” [The Daily Beast]
What to expect from Radical Reports: Morning Briefing provides a daily round-up of reporting on the Radical Right; Extremist Links offers a weekly round-up of extremists activities including the white supremacist and militia movements; Narratives of the Right delivers weekly analysis of the current narratives in far right online spaces and promoted by right-wing media; and Research Desk provides monthly highlights research and analysis from academia on the Radical Right.
