FBI, Homeland Security warn of more ‘antifa’ attacks

It wasn’t just lefties griping or working the refs, it really was striking that a bunch of power-adjacent media outlets ran anti-antifa pieces last week, after the issue had been relegated to millennial sites and millennial beats (and their sympathetic millennial authors) for so long.

Maybe latter-day aggression tripped some flag, I did hear sniffs on Twitter about them going after photographers (the media’s #1 topic of concern being itself). But I suspected other causes, and I count this article as confirmation.

Federal authorities have been warning state and local officials since early 2016 that leftist extremists known as “antifa” had become increasingly confrontational and dangerous, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security formally classified their activities as “domestic terrorist violence,” according to interviews and confidential law enforcement documents obtained by POLITICO.

Oh man, I’m sure Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a guy halls-of-power enough to know how to build elite consensus before launching initiatives, is furious these auxiliary apparatchiks managed to obtain those interviews and confidential law enforcement documents.

It’s like I’d been saying, there are well-established countermeasures to “let’s publicly build a movement around punching our opponents in the head”, and with a bit of care in lining things up and trading on tensions, authorities can unlock a fierce response within existing law.

I told you about the Multnomah County Republican Party, here in Portland, how they were kinda sympathetic, drawing threats and menacing for doing some really Norman Rockwell-type local politicking, and not getting backed up by civic institutions in the hands of a rival party.

(Portland recently replaced its police chief in part off of activist anger at the last one for cracking down too hard on black-clad marchers getting rowdy in the street)

Well, in recent interviews MultCoGOP officials have been mentioning that picnic rally and parade I did, but also saying that they feel intimidated from doing voter registration tabling at public events, and I don’t know if anyone else notices but that is a loud, CLANGING bell. Because of the way history played out, the protection of voter registration drives is absolutely central to the same body of American civil rights law that Jeff Sessions has been salivating to deploy on behalf of Republican constituencies for a change.

Trump’s Trolls Are Waging War on America’s Civil Servants

Career civil servants often endure stressful working conditions, but in the Trump White House, some of them face online trolling from alt-right bloggers who seek to portray them as clandestine partisans plotting to sabotage the president’s agenda. The online attacks often cite information that appears to be provided by unnamed White House officials or Trump loyalists.

Cernovich acknowledges that he’s going after McMaster’s staff. “Personnel is policy,” he wrote in response to queries for this article. “The NSC and State are the most interesting beats to cover, because the hiring and firing decisions within State and NSC will determine whether America enters another disastrous ground war, as H.R. McMaster and his mentor David Petraeus desire,” he wrote. “McMaster has stacked the NSC with pro-war globalists, some of whom came from the Obama administration and others who were ‘Never Trump’ers.’”

“alt-right” seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, without it you have a pretty Dog Bites Man story of “administration factions wield media leaks against each other”, but if I’m reading between the lines right, hey, Steve Bannon’s realized Mike Cernovich’s following can be operationalized against low-level enough officials to cut H.R. McMaster’s supporters out from under him.