As Trump ramps up, so will his maniacal supporters

Had Joseph Rubino not wrecked his car, he might still be living with a house full of guns in New Jersey.

But on the morning of July 24, Mr. Rubino was driving his white Chevy van on Route 517 in Allamuchy, N.J., when he lost control of the vehicle and slammed into a tree, seriously injuring himself and a passenger.

When officers from the New Jersey State Police began extracting Mr. Rubino from the wreckage, they noticed something unsettling in the van: a stockpile of assault weapons and ammunition. In a subsequent search of Mr. Rubino’s home, the police said they found more than a dozen other weapons, drugs and a box of neo-Nazi paraphernalia.

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Why Mr. Rubino kept such a large arsenal — a collection the police say included semiautomatic handguns, shotguns, rifles with scopes and a grenade launcher — remains unclear. But the arrest comes as the nation is already on edge after a spate of recent mass shootings, at least one of which was inspired by racist hatred, and the arrests in the past week of three men who the authorities said were planning attacks.

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Late last week, the police arrested a 20-year-old man near Youngstown, Ohio, after he threatened to shoot up a Jewish community center. In Norwalk, Conn., a 22-year-old was arrested after he began collecting weapons for the purpose of committing a mass shooting, according to the police. And in Florida, a 25-year-old man was arrested after the police said he sent a text message expressing a desire to “break a world record for longest confirmed kill ever.”

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ll of these arrests come as federal law enforcement officials grapple with a resurgent white supremacist threat, the rise of which some say has been aided by rhetoric from the White House and conservative media outlets. The arrests come a decade after the federal government effectively disbanded the Department of Homeland Security team that tracked domestic terrorism.

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In New York City, there has been a significant increase in hate crimes this year, up 68 percent from last year as of June, according to police statistics.

  NYT

And what about that "effectively disbanded" the domestic terrorism tracking unit thing?

Not long after Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Homeland Security Department analyst produced a report presciently predicting that the deep economic downturn, the rise of social media and the election of the first black president would combine to make race-driven extremism a growing and serious threat to national security.

But when the report was made public, it ignited a storm of protest, mostly from the right. Mike Pompeo, then a Republican congressman from Kansas and now secretary of state, said focusing on domestic terrorism was a “dangerous” undertaking born of political correctness that denied “the threat that radical Islamic terrorism poses.”

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Within weeks, Janet Napolitano, then the homeland security secretary, rescinded the threat assessment. The report’s primary author left the government, and the department’s unit dedicated to tracking domestic terrorism was essentially disbanded.

  NYT

Hope the FBI has picked up the slack.

Inside the Obama administration there was concern that highlighting the issue would only fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories or give unwarranted publicity to fringe figures, according to six former administration officials.

Maybe if we don't look at it, it will go away.

The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, told lawmakers last month that the bureau had arrested almost as many domestic terrorists as foreign terrorists this year. He said most of the racially motivated domestic terrorism cases were probably connected to white supremacy.

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During the Obama years, the pressure to minimize the problem came largely from outside the administration, primarily from Republicans who saw it as a diversion from fighting Islamic extremism but also to a lesser degree from people on the left concerned about the implications for the civil liberties of American citizens.

Under Mr. Trump, the skepticism is rooted inside the White House.

Officials at the department have felt they could not broach topics like domestic terrorism and white supremacist violence with Mr. Trump because he was not interested in those concerns, two people familiar with deliberations inside the administration said.

More accurately, he's concerned: he's for letting them run full tilt.

Mr. Trump continues to harbor a deep distrust of the F.B.I., which has made public statements about the threat of domestic terrorists and racially motivated violence as growing national security threats.

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In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting homeland security secretary, said domestic terrorism was becoming a national counterterrorism priority “for the first time,” but confirmed that the department had devoted most resources to “border and international issues.”

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Intelligence analysts in the department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis who focused on domestic terrorism and collaborated with local law enforcement on domestic terrorism were dispersed to other counterterrorism programs.

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Mr. Trump said this spring that he did not see a global increase in the threat of white supremacy.

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The United States has always been plagued by violence associated with white nationalism. Violence associated with white nationalism has spiked at intervals in recent decades, including the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. But government data shows that, since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, far-right extremists carried out nearly three times as many attacks on Americans in the United States as Islamic extremists did.

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Incidents of white supremacist propaganda such as the posting of fliers increased 182 percent in 2018, from 421 in 2017 to 1,187 last year, and the number of racist rallies increased nearly 20 percent, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

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The multipronged Republican backlash included criticism of the term “right-wing extremism,” and a near disavowal of the existence of domestic terrorism. Republican politicians and pundits echoed Mr. Pompeo’s assertion that the idea of domestic terrorism was a feint, born of political correctness, meant to distract from foreign terrorism.

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Republicans pushed back against the idea that domestic terrorism was a serious national security threat for the duration of the Obama administration, even as local law enforcement officials said white supremacists and other right-wing groups were contributing to crime and endangering officers in the field.

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By 2016, after much quiet lobbying, the Homeland Security Department obtained the $10 million in funding from Congress for [a] community partnership program, seeing it as a step toward preventing radicalization.

Mr. Trump’s 2016 election, and his early efforts to implement the travel ban and to build a wall along the southern border, upended the program.

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Republicans who are willing now to acknowledge a growing threat from domestic terrorism and white supremacy still face a difficult political challenge in navigating issues of race and identity, especially given their party’s heavy reliance under Mr. Trump on white voters.