INTELLIGENCE BRIEFS
4 splc intelligence report
Donald Trump described President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s
brutal “Operation Wetback” as a
“very humane” way to accomplish
mass deportation, responded to
the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally
by saying, “Maybe he should have
been roughed up,” and claimed
to have personally seen “thou-
President Vladimir Putin all went
to school together in Moscow
in 1968.
Ted Cruz suggested baselessly that the man who murdered three at a Colorado
Planned Parenthood (see story,
p. 7) was a “transgendered leftist activist.” Mike Huckabee
lauded American Family Radio
— which features among its pundits Bryan Fischer, who claims
that LGBT people were responsible for the Holocaust and
that because American Indians
failed to embrace Christianity,
they deserved to have their land
taken by European settlers — for
offering viewpoints that people
sands and thousands” of New Jersey Muslims celebrating the 9/11
attacks — something that both law
enforcement and media investigations have thoroughly debunked.
Ben Carson said he found the
notion of gun control more disturbing than the sight of a bullet-riddled dead body, believed
the biblical figure Joseph built
the Egyptian pyramids to serve
as granaries, and asserted that
Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei of Iran and Russian
“are not going to get on NPR.”
Marco Rubio selected a man who
believes President Obama was
fathered by a communist pedophile as co-chair of his Alabama
campaign committee.
These men are GOP front-runners — individuals who, if the 2016
presidential race continues along
the same path in which it began,
stand a reasonable chance of being
elected to what is arguably the
most powerful position on earth.
It’s hard to say which candidate’s rhetoric is most appalling.
[ EX T R EM IS M IN T H E M A IN ST R EA M ]
Candidates for
President, Other
Offices, Voice
Extremist Views
AP IMAGES/JOHN LOCHER
Strange brew: Political
races, especially
for the Republican
nomination, have
been marked by an
extraordinary level of
extremist, demeaning
and factually untrue
rhetoric.
Anonymous’ beef with the
KKK dates back to the November
2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo.,
that followed the decision not
to prosecute Darren Wilson, the
white police officer who fatally
shot unarmed black teenager
Michael Brown. At that time,
Anonymous retaliated against a
Klan group that threatened to
use “lethal force” against protesters by hacking the group’s
Twitter account and releasing
personal identifying information
about its members.
But even when their hearts
are in the right place, the “virtual
vigilantes” (as Vox termed them)
of Anonymous can make mistakes. In 2014, before
Wilson’s identity was
made public, the group
released the name of a
police officer its members believed had shot
and killed Brown. They
got the wrong guy, and
t h e n c o u l d n ’t s t e m
the avalanche of death
threats sent to their
accidental victim.
Soon after Operation
KKK simmered down,
a Vermont prosecutor
mounted a more focused
attack on Klan activity
when he charged a Klan
activist with disorderly
conduct, with a hate
crime enhancement, for
allegedly targeting an
African-American woman and
a Latina with fliers promoting
the Klan. On Nov. 10, authorities
in Morrisville arrested William
Schenk, of North Carolina, saying that the 21-year-old’s intentional delivery of KKK materials
to minority subjects’ homes constituted a threat and was not protected by the First Amendment. If
convicted on all charges, Schenk
— who was on probation in his
home state in connection with a
2011 arson — faces more than four
years in prison.