Morning Briefing: White Nationalists Groups Target LGBTIQ Event
A drag queen story hour in Livingston, Montana was targeted by members of multiple far right extremist White Nationalist groups, including Patriot Front, White Lives Matter, and Active Clubs.
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Morning Briefing: A drag queen story hour at Wheatgrass Books in Livingston, Montana was targeted by members of multiple far right extremist White Nationalist groups including Patriot Front, White Lives Matter Montana, Wyoming Active Club, Big Sky Active Club, and Great Plains Active Club.
The Texas Coalition for Kids, a far right anti-LGBTIQ group, is planning to protest at LGBTIQ youth event on May 17th at Grace Avenue Methodist Church in Frisco, Texas. The church has previously been the target of protest by far right extremists groups including the Proud Boys and the New Columbia Movement.
The Chicago Police Department will not fire any of the officers who were recently investigated for their “ties to far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers,” despite the fact that it was revealed that 27 current and former police officers were on a leaked Oath Keepers membership list.
Alejandro Richard Velasquez Gomez, who has been linked to the extremist incel movement, “has been sentenced to five years in prison for threatening violence against a gathering of conservative students in Florida.” Gomez had reportedly targeted the conservative conference “because the organizers hadn't invited white supremacist Nick Fuentes.”
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, promised to reinstate the account of Nick Fuentes, who was permanently banned from Twitter in 2021. Since purchasing the platform, supporters have been lobbying Musk to reinstate Fuentes, and “dozens of accounts with purchased blue checkmarks celebrated Fuentes’ expected return.”
Must Reads
Tess Owen writes that “after lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook—with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED. Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit ‘active patriots’ and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They’re also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be ‘prepared’ for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for ‘war’ or to ‘stand up’ against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists—and the US government.” [Wired]
Nicole Acevedo writes that “under federal laws, only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections, and states are required to regularly update their voter rolls, or voter registration lists, to remove anyone ineligible. The X post that triggered this latest wave of migrant voting misinformation used publicly available federal data from the Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) program, which shows the total number of times Texas, Pennsylvania and Arizona requested the Social Security Administration to verify a voter’s identity using their Social Security numbers. While verification requests are not necessarily a one-to-one tally of people registering to vote, the X post falsely presented such numbers as if they were, suggesting that nearly 1.9 million individual voters registered in such states without a photo identification, only using the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.” [NBC News]
Sarah Wire and Mackenzie Mays write that “what United Sovereign Americans has planned is a legal long shot. But election experts worry that if even one sympathetic judge rules in their favor, it could sow doubts about the integrity of a presidential rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump… The group’s legal arguments rely on faulty interpretations of federal election law and are likely to fail in court, according to Levitt and other experts who believe the group’s evidence of voter registration fraud is overstated and inaccurate. United Sovereign Americans is part of a cottage industry of far-right election deniers that has sown disinformation since Trump lost his reelection bid. The group aims to scrutinize elections with a legal strategy that can ‘throw massive amounts of sand in their gears,’ [Marly] Hornik said during a February presentation in Orange County.” [Los Angeles Times]
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.
I wish we didn’t need this daily briefing of how dangerous our country has become.
Vile people. So tired of the oppression.