Good to see the paper of record highlighting this important national news story that we’ve been covering at @theintercept for the past eight months.
Going to provide some links and info for those who might be interested in reading more on the topic. nytimes.com/2021/01/30/us/…
In June, a trove of hacked law enforcement documents was posted online. I went through hundreds of those files to look at how law enforcement was treating antifa/anarchists vs groups on the far right.
Part of the reason I did this was because we had already published reporting showing that the NYPD was using a curfew in response to the George Floyd protests to hand over demonstrators to the FBI for questioning. Antifa was a subject of the interviews.
As expected, the analysis of the docs posted online showed extensive law enforcement emphasis on antifa/anarchists even amid detailed evidence of threats and action from far right groups, including the murder of law enforcement officials.
As noted here, the feds’ obsession with leftists under Trump would come as no surprise to anyone who was watching the DHS response to migrant caravans in 2018.
As we reported at time, DHS engaged in a sweeping binational intelligence gathering operation targeting journalists, lawyers and asylum advocates associated with the caravans that in some cases barred individuals from crossing international boundaries.
Documents leaked to NBC San Diego later showed that individuals swept up in the program were included on a blacklist where “suspected antifa” was among the labels used to describe blacklisted targets.
And allegations of some sort of border-wide anarchist conspiracy were key to the Justice Department’s failed attempts to imprison this border-based humanitarian aid provider.
As @jasonintrator and @jeanguerre noted here, what we saw with the Trump administration in 2020 was a turn inward in which the fear-mongering that had been focused on the border was directed at cities like Portland, just in time for the election.
There is a substantial migration from Parler to Telegram underway right now and paramilitary far-right accelerationists are attempting to capitalize on the moment to radicalize what they consider “normie” Trump supporters — here’s what we know so far theintercept.com/2021/01/12/boo…
A “Parler life boat” channel is fast approaching 16,000 subscribers and as researcher @MeganSquire0 has noted, a Proud Boys channel attracted nearly 6,000 users in four hours over the weekend — Telegram says more than 25 million people have joined the app in the past 72 hours
According extremism expert @AlexBNewhouse, the most active channel in the so-called “Terrorgram” network right now — and the one talking most explicitly about violence in the days ahead — is “Boogaloo Intel Drop,” which has nearly 7,000 subscribers.
NEW: an analysis of hundreds of leaked documents reveals that while the president and the attorney general clamored for a crackdown on antifa, law enforcement was sharing detailed reports of threats from far-right extremists to protesters and cops theintercept.com/2020/07/15/geo…
These materials are part of an enormous trove of documents that were recently hacked and posted online.
At first glance, you might say that the fact that the most credible threat to human life during the recent protests was coming from the far-right is not surprising — of course that was the case.
That's true but there are other issues here worth noting.
Just had a conversation with a young guy in Crown Heights about the fireworks situation in Brooklyn that might be helpful to folks trying to understand what’s happening — the source is a lifelong resident whose block has been featured in at least one viral fireworks video.
The supply chain is pretty simple. There’s a widespread understanding that you can buy fireworks on the cheap right now from neighboring states, so folks are carpooling to those states to make those purchases, coming back and selling fireworks at higher prices.
Some of the fireworks are being set off by competing groups of young people from different blocks and areas — there are battles. In addition to fireworks, young people are also attacking their rivals with squirt guns. It’s summertime in Brooklyn. People are trying to have fun.
Happening now: following NYC officials @bradlander, @JumaaneWilliams and @KeithPowersNYC as they attempt to access holding cells in Manhattan — legal advocates say many of 2,500 people arrested in the last week are disappearing in a system rife with unsafe conditions
.@bradlander is knocking on the backdoor here at 100 Centre Street — no answer. Officials are invoking a city charter that empowers them to inspect jail cells
Officials at the front of the building told lawmakers to try the back, officials at the back told them to go to the front.
@JumaaneWilliams gave the NYPD commissioner advance notice that they would be conducting this inspection.
The NYC curfew is not about public safety — it is a pretext for police to arrest people when they otherwise would have no justification to do so.
Some of those people are now being handed off to FBI agents for interrogations about their political views. theintercept.com/2020/06/04/fbi…
Just this week, four men who were arrested in Brooklyn for curfew violations were questioned by the NYPD and FBI about their involvement in protests against police violence.
"We want to know who’s hijacking your movement and making it violent," an FBI agent told one of the men.
All of this comes on the heels of the attorney general labeling anti-fascists as domestic terrorists.
NEW: Trump is blowing up a national monument in Arizona to make way for the border wall interc.pt/2Uwec7Z
This week, government contractors began blowing apart a mountain on protected lands in southern Arizona to make way for the border wall.
The project is expected to last a month. Sacred Native American cultural sites are under threat. theintercept.com/2020/02/06/bor…
CBP says it will have an "environmental monitor" on hand for the blasting.
@RepRaulGrijalva says he has zero faith that the monitor "will do anything to avoid, mitigate, or even point out some of the sacrilegious things that are occurring and will continue to occur."