Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

As David French notes, if you haven't connected right-wing political extremism with modern Christian extremism, then you're missing the powerful connection that the two have, to the point of being largely indistinguishable from each other.

On Thursday night in Castle Rock, Colorado, a group called “FEC United” (FEC stands for faith, education, and commerce) held a “town hall” meeting that featured a potpourri of GOP candidates and election conspiracy theorists. Most notably, the event included John Eastman, the Claremont scholar who authored the notorious legal memos that purported to justify the decertification and reversal of the 2020 election results.

During the meeting, a man named Shawn Smith accused Colorado secretary of state Jena Griswold of election misconduct. “You know, if you're involved in election fraud, then you deserve to hang,” he said. “Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”

“I was accused of endorsing violence,” he went on. “I’m not endorsing violence, I’m saying once you put your hand on a hot stove, you get burned.” As soon as he said, “you deserve to hang,” an audience member shouted “Yeah!” and applause filled the room. You can watch the moment here.

The moment, almost entirely ignored by the national media, is worth noting on its own terms, but perhaps the most ominous aspect of the evening was its location—a church called The Rock.

If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event.

Last week, the New York Times’s Robert Draper wrote a must-read profile of former President Donald Trump’s one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn. Before January 6, Flynn advocated military intervention, including martial law, to assist in overturning the election results.

During the Biden administration, he’s taken his show on the road, launching a “ReAwaken America” tour that features conferences that combine “elements of a tent revival, a trade fair and a sci-fi convention.” It is striking to see Flynn’s use of Christian channels and venues to spread his apocalyptic message of election corruption and national doom.

Draper caught up with the tour at Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, where 3,500 people had shown up to see Flynn and his collection of speakers. Flynn, Draper says, is “the single greatest draw besides Trump himself” in the “parallel universe” of the Make America Great Again movement.

Intrigued by the Dream City Church reference in Draper’s article, I went to the ReAwaken America tour page to see where Flynn was headed next. The first thing you notice is that the tour is sponsored by Charisma News, a charismatic Christian outlet. The next thing you should notice is the list of upcoming venues: Trinity Gospel Temple in Ohio, Awaken Church in California, The River Church in Oregon, and Burnsview Baptist Church in South Carolina.

It is always difficult to know when and how to cover extremism. Does highlighting a fringe provide an artificial sense of their danger and strength, in much the same way that “nutpicking” works in online spaces to exaggerate the extremism of your opponents? Or does ignoring a fringe allow it to flourish outside the spotlight and shock the nation when it finally emerges?

When it comes to Christian nationalism, the bar for concern has been passed by any conceivable measure. When a movement is strong enough to storm the Capitol, then it is worth continued monitoring and continued concern. Moreover, it’s important to understand why it continues to flourish, and why it is so difficult to understand, much less combat.

 

It's all linked, folks.  Right-wing white supremacist violence is absolutely in league with heavily funded Christian Dominionist "prosperity gospel" groups and megachurches, but if you point out the fact that an American Christian church is more of a domestic terrorism hotbed than an American Islamic mosque in 2022, you will be burned to the ground for it.

You're damn right the FBI should be checking churches.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

It's time to start asking some hard questions about Donald Trump's mass mishandling of classified documents and keeping them at Mar-a-Lago, a known hotbed of international espionage, and how much damage was done to America's national security. The Washington Post's White House team gives us a pretty good report on what went down in 2021 and 2022.

For the 15 boxes of documents — some classified and marked “top secret” — the long journey from former president Donald Trump’s gilded Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Fla., to a secure facility in the Washington area began last summer, when the National Archives and Records Administration contacted Trump’s team to alert it that some high-profile documents from his presidency appeared to be missing.

But it was not until the end of the year that the boxes were finally readied for collection, according to two people familiar with the logistics, one of whom described the ordeal as “a bit of a process.”

At one point, Archives officials threatened that if Trump’s team did not voluntarily produce the materials, they would send a letter to Congress or the Justice Department revealing the lack of cooperation, according to a third person familiar with the situation.

“At first it was unclear what he was going to give back and when,” said one of these people, who, like the others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid details of a sensitive situation.

Trump was noticeably secretive about the packing process, and top aides and longtime administrative staffers did not see the contents, the people said.

Finally, on Jan. 17, a contractor dispatched by the Archives arrived at Mar-a-Lago to load the boxes into a truck and transport them a thousand miles north, eventually landing at a sensitive compartmented information facility — known as a SCIF — in the greater Washington area. Trump’s assistant had been looped in on the emails handling the logistics, and both Trump’s team and the National Archives described the in-person handover as amicable. Trump said in a statement it was “without conflict” and “very friendly.”

“This unfortunate attempt by the media to twist a story, along with the help of anonymous sources, is just another sensationalized distraction of an otherwise uneventful effort to persevere the legacy of President Trump and a good faith effort to ensure the fulfillment of the Presidential Records Act,” Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said in a statement Saturday. “Sadly, the business of ‘news’ has become reliant on the next manufactured Trump ‘investigation,’ and so here we are. It’s a disgrace.”

The tale of these 15 boxes — and the material contained within — underscores how defiantly and indiscriminately Trump violated the records law, which requires that the White House preserve all written communication related to a president’s official duties and then turn it over to the National Archives. Instead, starting in his presidency and continuing into his post-presidency, documents both classified and mundane — as well as official gifts, which are governed by similarly stringent rules — were treated with the same disregard and enveloped in the same chaos that characterized his term in office.

A trucking administrator at Bennett, a Georgia transportation firm that handles a lot of government contracts, said that under traditional circumstances, shipment of these sorts of materials would be handled through a secure transfer — including GPS tracking of the vehicle and a team trained to handle sensitive information.

But it remains unclear what protocols were followed because, as one person familiar with the transfer said, “Nothing about this is normal.” Officials have not identified what company handled the Mar-a-Lago shipment.

“He would roll his eyes at the rules, so we did, too,” said Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary who has become an outspoken Trump critic since the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. “We weren’t going to get in trouble because he’s the president of the United States.”

Grisham, the author of “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House,” recalled one instance in which she expressed concern about violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some forms of political activity. Grisham said that Trump told her: “Who’s the boss of the Hatch Act? It’s me. So say whatever you want.”

That cavalier attitude about the rules extended to Trump’s treatment of documents, which he routinely ripped up and threw away, forcing aides to retrieve them and send them to the White House Office of Records Management to be taped back together to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which dates to 1978.

Trump had a ripping process so distinctive that several aides instantly recalled it — two large, clean tears that left paper in quarters — and the remnants were strewn on desks, in trash cans and on floors, from the Oval Office to Air Force One. As president, Trump also regularly retired to his private residence with reams of official documents, often leaving them to pile up until records staff came searching for them.

When the Archives sent a tranche of documents to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, some of them had been ripped up and taped back together. And some no longer existed at all; when the committee requested certain documents focused on Trump’s campaign to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election results, some of the relevant materials had already been shredded, according to a former senior administration official.

A forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman also reports that while Trump was president, White House residence staff members from time to time found clumps of paper clogging a toilet, leading them to believe that Trump was flushing documents.

Trump was warned by his first two chiefs of staff — Reince Priebus and John F. Kelly — about complying with the records act, as well as by Donald McGahn, his White House counsel.

And in 2020, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union address after he delivered it, Trump seemed to exhibit at least some awareness of the Presidential Records Act, incorrectly claiming Pelosi had committed a crime.

“I thought it was a terrible thing when she ripped up the speech,” Trump said at the time. “First of all, it’s an official document. You’re not allowed. It’s illegal what she did. She broke the law.”

This past week, The Washington Post reported that Archives officials — suspecting that Trump may have violated laws dealing with the handling of government documents — asked the Justice Department to examine the issue. It is unclear whether the department will launch a full investigation, but the query prompted discussions between federal law enforcement officials about whether they should investigate Trump for a possible crime, though such a prosecution would face a high legal bar.

Trump’s haphazard treatment of documents, including sensitive ones, continued throughout his administration, right up until his frenzied and begrudging departure.

 

So another field of criminality that Merrick Garland will almost certainly ignore.  The Justice Department has been asked to investigate a number of Trump crimes: the Old Post Office Building lease, profiting from being in office, campaign finance crimes, the inauguration and its funding, now this.

No charges.

Sunday Long Read: The American Animal

From volunteers in cars to ASPCA chartered flights, America is moving millions of dogs and cats from states with overloaded animal shelter networks to new homes in other states, and the pandemic era has only made this service more needed as we take a look at Andrew Blum's piece in Newsweek for our Sunday Long Read.

The dusty white cargo plane stood out among the gleaming corporate jets, as did its passengers: 48 barking dogs, newly arrived at the private air terminal at Hanscom Field, outside of Boston.

They had left Mississippi that morning with their health certificates taped to their kennels. All week, the staff at Oktibbeha County Humane Society (OCHS), in Starkville, Miss., had been getting them ready, giving them their shots, testing their temperaments, and color-coding each crate for its destination: red for Second Chance Animal Services in North Brookfield, Mass.; gray for the Animal Rescue League of Boston; and blue for the MSPCA, an independent animal-welfare organization.

On the tarmac, representatives from each jostled around the animals like vacationers at baggage claim. Danielle Bowes, a staff member at Second Chance, checked her list. She was looking for two tiny puppies named Tiger and Presley; black and brown 4-month-olds Bandit, Josie, and Wells; an adult lab mix, Trent; and a dozen more, ranging from 8 lb. to 40 lb., from 8 weeks to 4 years old. When she found Bravo, a 1-year-old collie and American blue heeler mix, she cooed into his cage, “Hi, Pretty, you’re going to go quick!” Back at Second Chance, the dogs will quarantine for 48 hours, per state law, before they go up for adoption. If past experience is any guide—and transports like this arrive nearly every week all over the country, by plane, truck, and van—they will be gone in a few days, becoming the newest of the estimated 90 million canines living with U.S. families.

There is not a dog shortage in America—not yet, at least. But there are stark geographic differences in supply and demand. Massachusetts needs more dogs, and Mississippi has too many. The same is true of Delaware and Oklahoma, Minnesota and Louisiana, New York and Tennessee, and Washington and New Mexico, among other states. To compensate, sophisticated dog–relocation networks have sprung up over the past decade, transporting dogs and cats from states with too many to states with too few. Mostly, it’s a tactical problem: “How do we connect those shelters that have too many animals and are at risk of euthanasia simply because they were born there, to those shelters where these animals are gonna fly off the shelves?” says Matt Bershadker, CEO of the ASPCA, the New York–based animal-welfare giant, which sponsored and organized the flight arriving at Hanscom. Over the past five years, the ASPCA has poured resources into its “relocation” program, which in March will celebrate its 200,000th animal moved. But it is far from alone.

These pipelines of adoptable animals—primarily, but not exclusively, moving from south to north—have become a cultural phenomenon in their own right, and a key part of a broader transformation of companion-animal welfare. The ASPCA’s program may be the biggest and most organized, but dogs (and, to a lesser extent, cats) move by all sorts of other means. There are ad hoc bands of volunteers, organizing on Facebook and Petfinder, who cover their back seats with towels and rendezvous at rest stops, passing animals along every couple hundred miles. In big cities and their suburbs, nonprofits have sprung up to partner with overcrowded Southern shelters, hire a driver and load up a van with a few dozen animals every month or more. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these groups became overwhelmed with demand in some states, leading to months-long waiting lists and stiff competition among adopters. That spurred a surprising fourth category: veritable smugglers, who saw an opportunity in loading up a horse trailer with the cutest strays and driving north (leaving the nonprofits with the sick and less desirable animals).

It is a good time to be an American dog. In the 1970s, as many as 20 million dogs and cats were euthanized each year. That number has declined precipitously. The ASPCA now estimates 390,000 dogs and 530,000 cats are euthanized each year, down from 2.6 million as recently as 2011. That’s still too many—especially when a way to further reduce the number is at hand. Euthanasia was once seen as an inevitability: there were just too many animals. But a combination of factors—cultural, medical, and political—has changed that. More people want mutts, rebranded “rescues.” Fewer animals are born each year, thanks to broader spay and neuter programs, often dictated by law, and improved surgical techniques. And more are being moved, which helps save those animals, but also opens up space and time to care for others left behind. For shelter staff, who suffer from a disproportionately high rate of mental-health problems, nothing matters more than keeping up with their animals’ needs. Rather than being beaten down by the incessant necessity of euthanizing the unwanted, they are buoyed by a steady flow of adoptions.

Money helps, of course. The geographic disparities that lead one place to have too many dogs and another too few are primarily fueled by a difference in resources. Shelters in heavily populated cities and suburbs benefit from well-funded population-control programs and large pools of potential adopters. Shelters in rural areas struggle with excess animals, and communities with broader economic burdens. Puppies flying private may seem excessive—the flight into Hanscom cost the ASPCA approximately $30,000—but the kennels on the tarmac among the corporate jets are an indicator of the broader success of the animal-welfare movement, and the enthusiasm of its donors. The easy problems are nearly solved; the hard ones require a new approach. “Animal relocation” is not only about meeting demand for puppies, but also building the capacity to help all animals.

The ASPCA-sponsored flight exemplifies an organized effort to connect disparate communities in pursuit of a common goal. It is a living, breathing—barking, panting—geographic arbitrage. But by treating these flying puppies as points of connection between communities, like the knots in a net, the issue of excess animals can be addressed. It’s a recognition that some problems, even ones that bridge red states and blue states, can be solved together.

 

Optimist me says "Everybody loves dogs."

 

Realist me says "People love dogs more than other people."

 

Your mileage may vary.

 

Also, adopt a rescue animal if you can.