Showing posts with label Sonderbehandlung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sonderbehandlung. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 29, 2022

That Big Black Sun Is Shining Again!

consentfactory |  In the blink of an eye, without missing a beat, both the white-supremacist Putin-Nazis that plagued Democracy throughout the Trumpian Reich and the Covid-denying Anti-Vax Nazis that plagued the New Normals throughout the Global Pandemic were seamlessly replaced by the GloboCap Nazis … but, the thing is, the GloboCap Nazis are the good guys, and the Putin-Nazis and Anti-Vax Nazis are … well, I guess they’re still technically Nazis, except for the fact that they aren’t actual Nazis and are mostly just regular working-class people, whereas the GloboCap Nazis are actual Nazis (i.e., Sieg-heiling, Jew-hating, Hitler-worshiping Nazis), who the US military and Intelligence community, NATO, and assorted private “military advisors” have been funding, arming, and otherwise supporting since the 2014 Ukrainian “revolution” (i.e., coup) that they orchestrated to destabilize Russia as part of that global Clear-and-Hold operation (which operation, of course, doesn’t actually exist, and is just another conspiracy theory disseminated by Putin-Nazi traitors like me to erode support for the GloboCap Nazis, who are really just wholesome young Aryan boys who are trying to defend Democracy from Evil, and cleanse their country of the Jews and the Roma, and exterminate the Russian race, starting with the children, apparently). 

But there I go, getting negative again. I really need to try to focus on the positive, no matter how psychotic things are in reality. Here in New Normal Germany, it’s almost “Freedom Day” again! Technically, “Freedom Day” was March 18, but they rewrote the “Infection Protection Act” (again) to postpone “Freedom Day” until April 2, after which “the Unvaccinated” will be allowed back out into society and everyone will only be forced to wear symbols of conformity to official ideology on their faces on public transport, and trains, and planes, and in hospitals, and various other places, unless federal states declare themselves “hotspots” — which several states have already done — in which case “Freedom Day” is postponed indefinitely.

But whatever … it’s Springtime for GloboCap! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! The GloboCap Nazis are winning the war! Sure, Pfizer just released nine pages of “adverse events of special interest” connected to their Covid “vaccine,” but they “may not have any causal relationship” to each other! And all those videos of the GloboCap Nazis duct-taping men, women, and children to lampposts, painting their faces with chemicals, stripping them half naked, and whipping and beating them? Those people are “saboteurs” or “looters,” or “Putin-Nazi collaborators,” and it’s all just Russian disinformation! And whatever. Trust the “Science” … or something!

 

Thursday, February 11, 2021

The President Can Use Lethal Force On American Citizens On American Soil

consortiumnews |  “the final element of the plan concerns insurgency leadership” before going on to criticize Trump’s unwillingness to accept his own defeat.

It’s that last — unspoken — part of Grenier’s plan that I believe is so dangerous and un-American.  What he means when he warns that we may be headed into a period of political violence “not seen since Reconstruction” is that the government needs to start cracking heads. 

In a subsequent interview with NPR, Grenier opened by saying that he’s not predicting that the U.S. is going to go the way of Iraq or Afghanistan.  But that’s exactly what he’s implying.  And it’s what he implied in his Times op-ed.

After all, what does a CIA-style counterinsurgency campaign look like?  Just use Iraq and Afghanistan as a model.  What it looks like is teams of military or paramilitary forces going around, blowing the doors off of houses, and killing everybody inside — killing them before they can commit a crime against the United States.

It also means a robust drone program.  Remember Anwar al-Awlaki?  The Obama administration accused him of being a major recruiter for al-Qaeda in Yemen.  They executed him by drone, and then a week later they executed his 16-year-old son and 16-year-old nephew.  The problem, though, is that the Awlakis were all American citizens.  They had Constitutional rights, including the right to face their accusers in a court of law and a right to a trial by jury.  The Awlakis had never been charged with a crime.  The government just decided to murder them without due process.

Recall also former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder who, in response to a question from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) in 2013, said that the president had a constitutional right to use lethal force against American citizens on American soil, even if those Americans had never been convicted of a crime.

That is what Grenier is recommending.  He’s supposed to be one of the “moderates,” one of those Americans who is so concerned about America’s future and wants to offer a solution to ensure it.  His recommendation is that we should be prepared to kill Americans whose politics we disagree with.  All we need to do is declare that they’re “extremists” or “insurgents.”

 

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Insurgents Deviate From The Official Ideology And Must Be Liquidated

Update bill gates predicts food shortages while buying up all the farmland he can. Kinda makes you wonder. He gets a hold of microsoft now you have to live with computer virus threat, he gets a hold of vaxx companies now you have to live with pandemics. Stevie wonder can see the this coming from a mile away.

consentfactory |   It’s time for Globocap to take the gloves off again, root the “terrorists” out of their hidey holes, and roll out a new official narrative.

Actually, there’s not much new about it. When you strip away all the silly new acronyms, the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror is basically just a combination of the “War on Terror” narrative and the “New Normal” narrative, i.e., a militarization of the so-called “New Normal” and a pathologization of the “War on Terror.” Why would GloboCap want to do that, you ask?

I think you know, but I’ll go ahead and tell you.

See, the problem with the original “Global War on Terror” was that it wasn’t actually all that global. It was basically just a war on Islamic “terrorism” (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), which was fine as long as GloboCap was just destabilizing and restructuring the Greater Middle East. It was put on hold in 2016, so that GloboCap could focus on defeating “populism” (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), make an example of Donald Trump, and demonize everyone who voted for him (or just refused to take part in their free and fair elections), which they have just finished doing, in spectacular fashion. So, now it’s back to “War on Terror” business, except with a whole new cast of “terrorists,” or, technically, an expanded cast of “terrorists.” (I rattled off a list in my previous column.)

In short, GloboCap has simply expanded, recontextualized, and pathologized the “War on Terror” (i.e., the war on resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology). This was always inevitable, of course. A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory “outside” the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as “terrorists” and “extremists.” These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called “normality” (or, in our case, currently, “New Normality”). 

In earlier times, these “terrorists” and “extremists” were known as “heretics,” “apostates,” and “blasphemers.” Today, they are also known as “deniers,” e.g., “science deniers,” “Covid deniers,” and recently, more disturbingly, “reality deniers.” This is an essential part of the pathologization of the “War on Terror” narrative. The new breed of “terrorists” do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate “reality.” They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be “treated,” “reeducated,” and “deprogrammed,” until they accept “Reality.” If you think I’m exaggerating the totalitarian nature of the “New Normal/War on Terror” narrative, read this op-ed in The New York Times exploring the concept of a “Reality Czar” to deal with our “Reality Crisis.”

Monday, February 08, 2021

Anti-Mask/Anti-Vaxx: A New Front Opens On The Domestic War On Terror

NYTimes |  For months, far-right activists have rallied against masks and lockdowns imposed during the coronavirus pandemic. Now some protesters have shifted their focus to the Covid-19 vaccine.

One of the protesters, a 48-year-old actor whose first name is Nick and who asked that his last name not be published because of death threats the group had received, said he did not believe that any of the protesters were part of previously established anti-vaccine groups in the state. “This has all stemmed as a result of this whole Covid-19 crisis,” he said. “It started with the mask wearing and evolved to now being concerned over the vaccine. It’s all about civil liberties.”

The lead organizer, Jason Lefkowitz, 42, a stand-up comic and server at a Beverly Hills restaurant, said the catalyst for the stadium protest was the death of Hank Aaron, the baseball legend who died at the age of 86 on Jan. 22.

Mr. Aaron was vaccinated for the coronavirus in Atlanta on Jan. 5, and anti-vaccine activists, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have seized on his death to draw a link. The Fulton County medical examiner has said there was no evidence that he had an allergic or anaphylactic reaction to the vaccine.

“I’m not a violent person,” Mr. Lefkowitz said. “Nobody in my group is violent or physical or anything, but there’s a lot of people that don’t want to take this vaccine or be forced into it.”

No one was arrested, but city officials, including the police chief, were disturbed by the symbolism and the global headlines — that a small group of vaccine opponents had temporarily shut down one of the country’s largest vaccination sites and were walking and chanting mask-free among older residents waiting in their cars for their vaccine appointments.

“The optics of it is that it appeared that the protesters were able to symbolically interfere with that line, and I think that we have a greater public responsibility to ensure that that symbolism is not repeated,” Chief Michel R. Moore told the Los Angeles Police Commission at a virtual meeting.

The NPIG Has Been Waiting Since The Outset Of Its Panicdemic To Implement Covid Domestic Terrorism Strategery

house.gov |  Dear Assistant Secretary Neumann:

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to upend American lifein new and unpredictable ways, we seek an understanding ofhow DHS is preparing for and mitigating potential homeland security threats from bad actors, such as violent extremists in the United States and abroad, who may seek to exploit vulnerabilities stemming  from this metastasizing crisis.

To  that  end, we would  like  to  know how  the  Office  of  Threat Prevention and Security Policy is coordinating DHS prevention efforts to account for the evolving threat landscape under the specter of COVID-19. Recent media reports have highlighted how white supremacist extremists across the world are discussing ways  to  take  advantage  of  the  COVID-19  pandemic  to  advance  violent  ends,  including,  in  some  cases, accelerating society toward mass violence by sowing chaos.

ISIS, too, appears to be interested in exploiting the  crisis: in  the  March  19,  2020,issue  of  the  ISIS  magazine Al-Naba’,  an  editorial  urged adherents to leverage the pandemic to free prisoners from the “prisons of the polytheists and the camps of humiliation,” arguing that Western countries’ security forces are preoccupied with the crisis and their financial resources are being drained.

Federal law enforcement entities have published similar warnings. The Federal Protective Service, under DHS,released  an  intelligence  brief, entitled  “White  Racially  Motivated  Violent  Extremists  Suggest Spreading the Coronavirus,” warning that white supremacist extremists have discussed the “obligation” to spread COVID-19 to law enforcement and minority communities.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s field office in New York reportedly released an alert warning local police agencies that white supremacist extremist groups were encouraging members to intentionally spread the virus to police officers and Jews.

Extremists have,  of course,long made calls  to  violence against vulnerable groups. However, as the uncertainty, fears, and anxiety engendered by this pandemic strain our social fabric in many ways, we must renew our efforts to guard against vulnerabilities that bad actors may exploit.The Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violencestates that DHS will “counter terrorists and violent extremists’ influence online” and “develop prevention frameworks... to identify and respond to individuals at risk of mobilizing to violence.”

We seek to understand how this framework is being  implemented across  the  Department in  light  of  the  reports highlighting  extremists’  interest  in exploiting the current crisis here and abroad. To that end, we respectfully request an overview of the Department’s efforts to address and prevent any exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic by violent extremists, including any efforts with foreign partners. In addition, we ask to receive any products that DHS has disseminated to state, local, tribal, and territorial partners regarding this threat. We look  forward  to  continuing  our  partnership with  you in  tackling these  serious  issues. Thank  you  for your attention to this important matter.

Sunday, February 07, 2021

Dealing With The Bottom Rung Of Society Does Not Give You An Excuse To Do Whatever You Want?

theadvocate |  Kerr said he was done serving a system that doesn't care about people like him.

"You have no idea how hard it is to put a uniform on in this day and age with everything that's going on," he said.

"My entire life has been in the service of other people ... y'all entrust me to safeguard your little ones, your small ones, the thing that's most precious to you, and I did that well. I passed security clearance in the military ... but that has allowed me to see the inner workings of things."

The videos show a man who professed he was upset by the state of society: “I’ve had enough.”

Clyde Rudolph Kerr III was many things.

"Rudy" was a son of New Orleans, his dad the famed New Orleans jazz trumpeter and educator Clyde Kerr Jr., who passed away in 2010. Both men were St. Augustine High School Purple Knights.

Kerr was a soldier who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, a lawman, and a hero to the students at St. Genevieve School, where he was a school resource officer. Kerr joined the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office in June 2015 and had served as a patrol deputy and SWAT team member before joining the school resource officer program, according to a statement from the agency.

“My heart goes out to Deputy Kerr, his immediate family and to all of the brothers and sisters he has at the sheriff’s office. We will do everything in our power to support our employees as we all grieve,” Sheriff Mark Garber said in the statement.

Todd Dwyer and Kerr became friends after working at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Police Department together in the early 2000s. Kerr would visit the Dwyers’ home every week, playing with their 8 and 4-year-old children, cooking out or dreaming up his next big plan. Kerr was disciplined but also had an infectious energy, the kind of guy everyone wanted to know and be friends with, his friend said.

“No matter where he was in the world, what was going on, everybody was always smiling who was around him,” Dwyer said.

The construction safety specialist said Kerr was the friend he went to for difficult conversations and hard truths — about race, politics, religion and the world their children were growing up in. Dwyer said the men didn’t keep secrets from one another. He and his wife noticed a shift in Kerr in the last two weeks, but the lawman was never explicit about taking his life.

 

Facism Is Capitalism That Really Means It

counterpunch |   American prisons are warehouses for inconvenient populations. This makes them (definitionally) Concentration Camps.

The alliance of the American left with right-wing nationalist national security and surveillance state officials since 2016 in fighting ‘fascists’ seems inexplicable in ideological terms. The reason? The national security and surveillance states are corporate-state amalgams that exist to enforce an imperial world order. The attempted U.S. coup in Bolivia was to control lithium for liberal, green EVs (Electric Vehicles). The U.S. coup in Venezuela that is still under way is to control oil. The build-out of the surveillance state domestically is to secure control of domestic politics by and for capital. This is fascism.

One of the many good arguments against George W. Bush’s 2003 war against Iraq was that combat forces turn into reactionary armies when they return home. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a veteran of the first Gulf War. The militia movement of the early 1990s was made up of veterans of U.S. dirty wars in Central America and the first Gulf War. Veterans returning from W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco were unable to find meaningful employment during the Great Recession. What this meant practically is a choice between becoming a cop or stocking shelves at Target for minimum wage.

Those most capable of inflicting harm amongst the Capitol invaders appear to be those who had military training combined with an alleged willingness to use it. That a lot of cops appeared sympathetic to the invaders more likely than not ties to real or imagined shared experience in the military. The militarization of the police includes the psychology of seeing others as enemy combatants, as well as a duty to commit violence for imagined right. This is manifested in varying solidarities including class and the residual detritus of American history, including race. What is missing from assertions of what people ‘are,’ fascist, racist, etc., is any notion of relative power.

Consider: do liberals really believe that the U.S. is trying to restore democracy in Bolivia or Venezuela by ousting democratically elected leaders and replacing them with hard-right pawns of the U.S.? Why then would the CIA care about democracy in the U.S.? The CIA brought Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq. The CIA helped install Pinochet in Chile. The CIA ousted Mosaddeq in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. While it is a large and complex organization, some fair proportion of everything dark and evil that has taken place since 1948 can be laid at its feet.

The point: between the alliance of corporate and state interests reflected in the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailouts, and the CIA’s long history of destroying functioning democracies for the benefit of American business interests, lies the approximate locus of American power. Few of the players involved in these machinations are motivated by ideology. One of Howard Zinn’s contributions in A People’s History is his explication of the economic motives that powerful people and organizations hide with ideological explanations of their actions. In other words, what people are, e.g. racist, fascist, does little to explain history.

Now that Donald Trump is out of power, what do the liberal opponents of fascism intend to do to disentangle the corporate from political power that defines it? One of the early answers is to redefine it as exclusively the province of authoritarian leaders. In fact, the Nazis based much of their political economy on the American model. The Americans provided eugenics, slavery, genocide, the legal framework for Nazi race laws, and an industrial model that motivated some fair portion of German militarism. In the present, the Americans have mass incarceration, a militarized police force, a large and intrusive surveillance apparatus, political police (FBI) and a public-private domestic spying operation.

Nevada Governor Sisolak And The 21st Century Company Town/Store...,

reviewjournal |   If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form a new local government in Nevada.

When Gov. Steve Sisolak last month announced his plan to launch Innovation Zones in Nevada to jump-start the state’s economy by attracting new tech companies, the details of how those zones would operate proved scarce.

According to a draft of the proposed legislation, obtained by the Review-Journal but not yet introduced in the Legislature, Innovation Zones would allow tech companies like Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in Nevada, governments that would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address as his plan to bring in new companies that are at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies,” all without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that had previously helped Nevada bring companies like Tesla to the state.

During his speech last month, Sisolak specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in the area east of Reno that would run entirely on blockchain technology, once the legislation passes.

The draft, which could change before it’s unveiled as a formal bill, provides the first look into the details behind the concept.

The draft language of the proposal says that the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries.”

It adds that this “alternative form of local government” is needed to aid economic development within the state.

 

Saturday, February 06, 2021

Domestic Terrorism Is A Naked Predatory Imperial Government Without Restraint

bombthrower |  These days I’m reading Marco Papic’s Geopolitical Alpha, and in it, his core premise, is this:

“Preferences are optional and subject to constraints, whereas constraints are neither optional nor subject to preferences.”

By this he means: many investors factor their assumptions around how governments will impact their plans on what turn out to be policy preferences. But what actually happens, and what actually does impact their activities will be shaped by constraints, not preferences.

Said differently, a lot of capital gets allocated on what people think governments want to do, but what actually matters is what is preventing or constraining the government from doing what they want to do.

The five big constraints on governments are: political, economic, financial, geo-political and legal/constitutional.

Seen in this light, even if true, that governments wanted to impose a totalitarian communist regime globally, surely they are constrained from doing so. Right? RIGHT? They can’t just fscking do it. 

But… all kinds of things I thought governments couldn’t just come out and do over the last year…. well they just came right out and did it. And just to really mess with my head, Papic added two wildcard constraints to his list: terrorism and pandemics.

The problem is, those wildcards, they aren’t wildcard constraints – they’re wildcard enablers. Those two wildcards seem to have the ability to trump all normal constraints. Every one of those constraints went out the window because of the wildcards.

Where does that leave us?

Speaking for myself, I’m losing my moorings as I no longer have any clear idea what, if any, policy constraints exist anymore.

So I have no grounding in the arena of what’s possible, how arbitrarily policy makers can act, what’s to stop them from simply confiscating my wealth (except for my crypto), or nationalizing the business I’ve built up over 22 years, and doing the same to everybody else. This is Canada. We’re generally meek as fuck here.

Second passport and expat strategies won’t work if, as per the “World Debt Reset Program” outlined in the conspiracy theory, this happens simultaneously everywhere. Granted that seems farfetched, but the boundaries of the word “farfetched” have shifted dramatically since all this began.

The question I keep coming back to is “What’s to stop them from trying it?” One of my first articles that I wrote on my old blog said that:

“The ultimate goal of the State is to cultivate absolute dependency on it by its subjects. This is because until this happens there is a real danger that those governed will one day wake up and realize that the State is not only entirely unnecessary but actually malignant; a malevolent force actively impoverishing society to the benefit of it’s elites”

I think nation states do know this, and that the continuous iteration of failed policies painted all of them into a corner vis-à-vis the global economy and the financial system as we know it. As Daniel Dimartino Booth observed in a recent George Gammon podcast, (paraphrasing) “The central banks were screwed. They needed something like COVID because the financial system was coming unglued”.

Understanding that there is a real incentive for nation states to move in a drastic direction, combined with a conspicuous absence of restraints, is taking a huge psychological toll on the populace. As hypernormalization runs wild, a type of mass psychosis sets in which has been manifesting in rabid polarization, hysterical cancel culture, Reddit-driven stonk manias and myriad tribes of neo-Flagellants.

Something’s gotta give, but at the same time, I’m really worried that something’s about to give.

Sonderbehandlung (Special Treatment) Is Coming For Deplorables

NYTimes |  As a former overseas operative who has struggled both on the side of insurgents and against them, the past few days have brought a jarring realization: We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen. Three weeks ago, it would have been unthinkable that the United States might be a candidate for a comprehensive counterinsurgency program. But that is where we are.

Overrepresented among the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism: the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, “Christian” national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists, among others. Some of these groups may have planned their incursion in advance, but they could not have breached the Capitol if not for the wave of populist anger that swept them forward and over the barricades.

Given impetus and, they believed, political cover by former President Donald Trump, the capering idiots who filmed themselves in the Capitol seemed to think they were untouchable. They may be easy to identify and arrest now, but there are others — well armed, dangerous and now forewarned — who had a glimpse of what may be possible in the political environment Mr. Trump created.

There has long existed in this country a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized, that believes with some reason it is being eclipsed by a politically and culturally ascendant urban coalition of immigrants, minorities and the college-educated secular elites of tech and mainstream media. That coalition, in their eyes, abridges their religious freedoms, disparages and ‘cancels’ their most cherished beliefs, seeks to impose ‘socialism’ and is ultimately prepared to seize their guns.

This, in very general terms, is the core segment of the nation that has been unified, championed and politically energized by Donald Trump. 

Bridging the urban-rural cultural and political gap with facts, tolerance and empathetic sincerity is a vital national project, but one which has become effectively impossible. The sincere belief, reportedly held by a majority of Republicans, that the Democrats stole the recent national election through massive fraud has taken the longstanding fears and resentments of a large section of our fellow citizens to a new and qualitatively different level.

In context, their fury is understandable. If I believed as they do, I would be marching with them. The Big Lie perpetrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the political class and among large elements of the right-wing media, preposterous as it may be, will have incalculable implications not just for long-term political comity in this country, but also for national security.

The violent demonstrations feared for Inauguration Week, in the face of extraordinary security precautions, didn’t materialize. Relatively few of our citizens would embark on a program of sustained violence in any case. But if popular anger has crested, left in its wake is a bitter, simmering restiveness, one that will provide a nurturing environment for the worst among us — the extremists who seek a social apocalypse. Their numbers may be relatively small, but even a small slice of a nation of over three hundred million is substantial. Without a program of effective national action, they and their new adherents are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction.

The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency. Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action, which must consist of three elements.

 

Deeply Compromised Senator Mark Warner Takes Over Official Senate Demonization Of Deplorables...,

NYTimes |  The Senate Intelligence Committee will examine the influence of Russia and other foreign powers on antigovernment extremist groups like the ones that helped mobilize the deadly attack on the Capitol last month, the panel’s new chairman said in an interview this week.

As the executive branch undertakes a nationwide manhunt to hold members of the mob accountable, Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virgina, said it would be vitally important for the influential committee to do a “significant dive” into antigovernment extremism in the United States, the ties those groups have to organizations in Europe and Russia’s amplification of their message.

With the power-sharing agreement between Democrats and Republicans in place, Mr. Warner took over this week as the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after four years as its vice chairman. In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Warner outlined his priorities, such as the spread of disinformation, the rise of antigovernment extremist groups, Chinese domination of key technologies, Russia’s widespread hacking of government computer networks and strengthening watchdog protections in the intelligence agencies.

The White House has ordered the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to work with the Department of Homeland Security and the F.B.I. on a new analysis of the threat from domestic extremist groups and the support they receive from foreign powers or overseas organizations.

The issue is a difficult one for the intelligence community. By law, the most influential agencies, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, are not allowed to collect information domestically. But Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, has some oversight of the intelligence arms of the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, which can collect information domestically. Other intelligence agencies look at foreign attempts to influence American groups.

While preliminary work by Ms. Haines’s office is underway, administration officials said that analysis was unlikely to be completed before April. But there appears to be significant interest in moving quickly on the issue in the Senate. At Ms. Haines’s confirmation hearing last month, a number of lawmakers raised the subject of domestic extremist groups.

The Senate Intelligence Committee will examine both white supremacist groups on the right, and antifascist, or antifa, groups on the left, though Mr. Warner was quick to say that the danger the groups posed was not the same. “I don’t want to make a false equivalency argument here,” he said, “because the vast preponderance of them are on the right.”

 

Fuck Robert Kagan And Would He Please Now Just Go Quietly Burn In Hell?

politico | The Washington Post on Friday announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking decades of tradition in a...