More Americans say violence is justified if their candidate loseshttps://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-violence-424157A bipartisan group of pollsters, noticing a yearslong rise in such sentiment, pooled their data and wrote in
Politico:
“All together, about 1 in 5 Americans with a strong political affiliation says they are quite willing to endorse violence if the other party wins the presidency.” The YouGov and Voter Study Group surveys by margins of error between 1.5 to 3 percentage points; those by Nationscape, between 2 and 2.1 percentage points.
“How seriously should we take these expressions of violence? Both history and social psychology warn us to take them very seriously,” they write.
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25,000 veterans of the military and law enforcement are members of the armed, extremist anti-government group Oath Keepers. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/The
Atlantic’s Mike Giglio has just posted a long feature profile of the group, after spending “months” researching and talking to its members, of which two-thirds were counted as military or LEO from small towns to the FBI, and 10 percent “active duty.” Giglio writes, “There were members of the Special Forces, private military contractors, an Army psyops sergeant major, a cavalry scout instructor in Texas, a grunt in Afghanistan. There were Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, a 20-year special agent in the Secret Service, and two people who said they were in the FBI.”
What do they do? Like an unofficial goon squad, they show up for everything from the border with Mexico to BLM protests to Trump’s political rallies. Founder Stewart Rhodes “sent members to ‘protect’ Trump supporters from the protesters at his rallies and appeared in the VIP section at one of them, standing in the front row in a black Oath Keepers shirt.”
They bring a certain set of skills… Oath Keepers prides its success and survival on members keeping their mouths shut, but Giglio found: “A soldier with a U.S. Army email address detailed a background in battlefield intelligence, writing, ‘I am willing to use any skills you identify as helpful,’ and an Iraq War veteran pledged ‘any talents available to a former infantry team leader.’ Still others listed skills in marksmanship, SWAT tactics, interrogation.”
Why do they do it? “Rhodes had tapped into a deep current of anxiety, one that could cause a surprisingly large contingent of people with real police and military experience to consider armed political violence.” Giglio spoke to several of them. At a protest in Richmond, the veteran war correspondent summed up what he saw.
“To me they had the aspect of children playing at war, only their guns were real.”... “Asked plainly if he welcomed the support of white supremacists who ‘clearly love you,’ Trump did not register the problem with that supposition. In fact, he bobbed his head in a seemingly knowing yes motion.”https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-tries-to-step-out-of-the-proud-boys-mess-he-created?ref=home-------------------------------------
Trump’s words help Russia sow division and distrust among Americanshttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepagehttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/us/politics/trump-debate-election.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=HomepageFor more than four years, Trump has been issuing baseless claims of voter fraud and threatening to ignore results he doesn’t like. “But he had never before put it all together in front of such a large audience as he did on Tuesday night,” Sanger writes.
That’s a national security bottom line of two sweeping reports by the New York Times describing how Trump and his political allies are trying to
a) suppress the votes of citizens who might vote against him, and
b) cast doubt upon the electoral process so that the result can be decided by the courts or by Congress instead of by the popular vote.
Let’s take vote suppression first: “In recent years, Americans have faced a growing variety of obstacles put up by Republican officials to fight voter fraud, a problem that is largely nonexistent,” Jim Rutenberg writes in the New York Times Magazine. You probably know about many of them: tightening voter ID requirements, closing hundreds of polling places, aggressively purging voter-registration rolls, and more.
Now
“it is becoming clear that the Trump administration and the Republican Party are not just looking at but heavily investing in the largely nonexistent problem of voter fraud,” Rutenberg writes. His investigation, “based on a review of thousands of pages of court records and interviews with more than 100 key players — lawyers, activists and current and former government officials — found an extensive effort to gain partisan advantage by aggressively promoting the false claim that voter fraud is a pervasive problem.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=HomepageSecond: Laying the groundwork to ignore the vote. Writes NYT’s David Sanger: “President Trump’s angry insistence in the last minutes of Tuesday’s debate that there was no way the presidential election could be conducted without fraud amounted to an extraordinary declaration by a sitting American president that he would try to throw any outcome into the courts, Congress or the streets if he was not re-elected.”
... Sanger writes: “Mr. Trump’s unwillingness to say he would abide by the result, and his disinformation campaign about the integrity of the American electoral system, went beyond anything President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could have imagined.
All Mr. Putin has to do now is amplify the president’s message, which he has already begun to do.” What worries American intelligence and homeland security officials is not just the fodder for Russia’s infowar trolls, but “that over the next 34 days, the country may begin to see disruptive cyberoperations, especially ransomware, intended to create just enough chaos to prove the president’s point.”
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/10/the-d-brief-october-01-2020/168922/