Morning Briefing: White Supremacist Groups Target Communities for Propaganda and Recruitment Campaigns

White Supremacist groups have targeted communities with propaganda and recruitment campaigns in towns from Ohio to Mississippi to Montana.

Members of Patriot Front, the neo-fascist White Nationalist group, engaged in a propaganda campaign in Clarksville, Tennessee. (Image: Telegram)

Morning Briefing: Patriot Front, the neo-fascist White Nationalist group, is reportedly targeting the town of Magee, Mississippi, in an effort to “recruit young adults and others to join their cause," and local law enforcement issued a statement that it is “committed to protecting every member of our community from hate-fueled violence and intimidation."

In recent weeks, Patriot Front has also targeted communities in Littlefield, Arizona; Ontario, California; Sarasota, Florida; Amicalola, Georgia; South Bend, Indiana; Reno, Nevada; Clarksville and Jackson, Tennessee; Herriman, Utah; and Rock Springs, Wyoming.

In Hamilton County, Ohio, the sheriff is reportedly “calling on Ohio lawmakers to create stricter laws more than a week after a neo-Nazi demonstration,” and has requested harsher penalties for “hate speech” in addition to “make it a crime to wear a mask while carrying a firearm for purposes of intimidation.”

In Whitefish, Montana, the manager of Bookworks told the city council that “flyers touting white supremacy had been dropped off at the popular store, put into books and placed in the window,” and that “there’s a lot of hateful rhetoric happening and people feel emboldened by that.”

Must Reads

• Steven Monacelli writes that the “fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids began to spread the day after President Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time. Posts on social media and Reddit claimed that ICE had already been spotted in the Dallas neighborhood of Oak Cliff, where Latino immigrants began to settle in large numbers in the 1970s and have profoundly shaped the culture of the vibrant community. That same Tuesday morning, an X account with over 17,000 followers named GlomarResponder made an ominous post. ‘Yeah, I’m in a courthouse wating [sic] on warrants,’ GlomarResponder wrote. ‘Turns out there’s a lot of bitch work to be done to make mass deportations happen.’ One day prior, GlomarResponder had posted that he ‘Can confirm all of those,’ regarding a list of cities where ICE was expected to begin deportation operations the next day. ‘May have a betting pool to see who can guess which one I’m at on any particular day, based on the news,’ GlomarResponder wrote. These were but the latest posts that GlomarResponder has made over the years that suggest the operator of the account is an ICE employee. GlomarResponder has also routinely expressed blatantly racist and anti-immigrant views. Through an extensive review of GlomarResponder’s X posts, publicly available documents, and other social media profiles and posts, the Texas Observer has identified the operator of GlomarResponder as James ‘Jim’ Joseph Rodden, a 44-year-old who works as an assistant chief counsel for ICE in the Dallas area. Rodden represents the agency in immigration court hearings where judges decide whether an individual is removed from the country.” [Texas Observer]

• Quinta Jurecic writes that “a month after the January 6 insurrection, a page appeared on the Justice Department’s website naming the defendants charged for their alleged role in the Capitol riot. The list remained in place over the next four years, ballooning as the department brought charges against hundreds of people. Then, shortly after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, it vanished. Trump has seized on his reelection as an opportunity to rewrite the story of January 6. Just hours after he assumed the presidency, he granted pardons and commutations to the insurrectionists who broke into the Capitol, calling their prosecutions a ‘grave national injustice.’ The deletion of the Justice Department’s page on January 6 is a triumph for the insurrectionists whose crimes were erased, and for Republicans more generally, many of whom would simply rather not talk about the late unpleasantness. But in the long term, the truth of what happened will prove difficult to bury. The roughly six hours during which rioters breached the Capitol are some of the most exhaustively documented in recent history, thanks to the many participants who filmed themselves in action and the investigative efforts of both the Justice Department and the House January 6 committee. Even Trump can’t wipe that away.” [The Atlantic]

• Melissa Gira Grant writes that “in recent weeks, it’s become clear that the Trump/Musk takeover does not need to be well-executed to accomplish its goals. But now, it’s also becoming clear that protesters have adapted to the seemingly unending number of attacks, on an ever-expanding number of targets—the emerging theme in whatever kind of fascism this is… Building on the first weeks of protest, which focused on the budget freezes and staff firings at federal agencies, now protest is intentionally distributed. The Women’s Marches of 2017 took place in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, but only once and on one day. Eight years later, in a sense, the scene of the crime is everywhere: each hospital that has denied care to trans kids; each neighborhood ICE has tried to terrorize. From close up, this may seem diffuse or non-strategic. But it reflects the multi-faceted nature of the crisis (and the seemingly random volley of executive actions driving it): Those who are feeling rightfully overwhelmed are reasonably not limiting themselves to just one target in their response.” [The New Republic]

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.

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