white supremacists

In the hour before dawn on August 28 a college student found the first flier while on their morning jog. It was wheat pasted to a stop sign. Every stop sign on their route had one or more flyers from two different neo-nazi groups. A few blocks away, a professor went for their morning coffee and noticed a pickup truck with prominent stickers for a so-called 3% militia group called the “West Ohio Minuteman” idling in a parking lot downtown.

Emboldened by their ability to openly attack students and clergy in Charlottesville while the police look on after having been ordered to stand down, white supremacist organizations seem undaunted by even the negative press that their murder by sports car finale got them. A series of threats against anti-racist demonstrations on August 19th for those nazis who could not make it to make it to the “Free Speech” Rally on Boston Commons.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the man who investigated civil rights workers for registering voters, finally joined the cabinet level damage control effort for his boss 48 hours after Trump muttered something stupid about violence “on many sides” twice in his semi-coherent belated press conference in the wake of the Charlottesville attack. Decoding what Sessions meant by his words and placing it in context of other cabinet level officials paints a very grim picture. Sessions intends to use violence by the right to repress political opposition to the President and his party.

Hundreds of local residents gathered in Goodale park yesterday, August 14th, to express their sorrow and outrage over the death of 32 year old Heather Heyer and the wounding of 19 other anti-fascist protestors at the neo-nazi rally held in Charlottesville Saturday.

A woman I have never met is dead. Heather Heyer was a 32 year old paralegal and she was killed by a speeding car driven into a crowd by a nazi in Charlottesville Virginia yesterday August 12th. The car struck a portion of the crowd that was mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a union for which I was once an organizer and delegate. It is now clear from reports received that she was a member of the IWW.

It has been ten days since The Atlantic, a flagship liberal publication since it's founding in 1857 in Boston, was purchased by Laurene Powell Jobs for an undisclosed sum on July 29th. The first issue since this purchase will be lead by a major editorial from their Contributing Editor Peter Beinart. That particular 2200 word screed has already appeared on the Atlantic's website and been boosted on social media at some cost. This can only be seen in context as a declaration of new editorial line, policy and intent.

Turning Point USA has been clawing it's way to the top of the campus conservative movement in the United States over the last year. As a an allegedly national “student” group it claims “We believe in free markets, limited government, and fiscal responsibility.” In reality, it seems more like a vehicle for political control of student life, a vehicle for a rising wave of Neo-McCarthyism, and increasingly a portal for training members of this country's growing neo-nazi movement. The group is having their statewide conference tomorrow, April 15th, at the downtown Crowne Plaza Hotel.

On Wednesday July 27th a white supremacist militia threatened a planned rally to protest the death of Philando Castile in suburban Minneapolis. The rally and march had a Facebook events page that the group, The Twin Cities General Defence Committee of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-GDC), was using to promote the protest. That page became littered with threats from white supremacists claiming allegiance to the Three Percent Militia, which has a history of physical confrontations with black lives matter protestors in the Minneapolis area.