But how do you identify Nazis?
You don't have to. They identify themselves. Proudly and arrogantly. They barrage social media. They march through our streets. They publish articles and books. They hold meetings in our communities. They form clubs, organizations and political affiliations.
If he talks like a Nazi, espouses Nazi philosophy, looks like a Nazi, consumes Nazi propaganda, associates himself with Nazi history, and acts like a Nazi . . . he's a Nazi. (It's usually a "he.")
So it's easy to identify Nazi's. Not all of them, but a significant group of them. And they are a good place to start.
If they have gun permits, revoke them. Then issue search warrants, go into their homes, and take their weapons. In addition to guns, that includes any sort of items that can used to build bombs, etc.
No Nazi should be in possession of an AK-47. Or any kind of high powered rifle.
Isn't that obvious???
SEATTLE—A notorious neo-Nazi whose antics have included organizing paramilitary exercises in the woods of western Washington state to prepare for a “race war” has discovered there are limits to organizing violent extremism: Using a so-called “red flag” law, Seattle Police have taken away all of his guns.
Kaleb J. Cole, the 24-year-old leader of the state’s chapter of the violent fascist group Atomwaffen Division (AWD), was ordered by the state’s civil courts to surrender his guns earlier this month, according to a report from Ali Winston of the Daily Beast. The order resulted from Seattle City Police filing an “Extreme Risk Protection” petition against Cole on the basis of his violent rhetoric and organizing.
According to Winston’s report, Cole surrendered several firearms, including a pistol and an AK-47 variant with a high-capacity drum magazine. He was photographed with the weapons while participating in an Atomwaffen exercise in Nevada in 2018.
FBI agents greeted Cole at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago last year, according to a report from Mike Baker of the New York Times, upon his return from a trip to Europe in which he apparently hooked up with a number of other far-right extremists. An inspection of photos on his cell phone found he had visited the Auschwitz concentration camp site in Poland with other neo-Nazis, and there were photos showing him and others with the Atomwaffen banner, giving the Nazi salute.
“This was an individual who had access to firearms and was preparing for a race war,” Kimberly Wyatt, a King County prosecutor, told the Times.
Washington’s “red flag” law allows law enforcement or civilians to obtain a court order to confiscate weapons when there is evidence that people are at high risk of harming themselves or others. A similar law in Oregon was recently used to confiscate the weapons of another right-wing extremist, Marine Sgt. Michael Kohfield, who had announced his plan to hunt down and murder antifascists in their homes.
Wyatt told the Times that the confiscation of Cole’s guns was part of an increased focus on the activities of white supremacist terrorists in the Pacific Northwest by regional law enforcement, noting that their threatening behavior and rhetoric posed a constitutional challenge that the use of “red flag” laws helps them overcome.
“What do you do when there’s a general threat versus one specific individual?” Wyatt observed.
Source: "Seattle confiscates the guns belonging to neo-Nazi Atomwaffen group leader" by David Neiwert - Daily Kos - Friday October 18, 2019
In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a wave of hate crimes. Just in the past few days, bombs were mailed to a number of prominent Democrats, plus CNN. Then, a gunman massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Meanwhile, another gunman killed two African-Americans at a Louisville supermarket, after first trying unsuccessfully to break into a black church — if he had gotten there an hour earlier, we would probably have had another mass murder.
All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media.
Source: "Hate Is on the Ballot Next Week" By Paul Krugman - NY Times - 10/29/18
Officials have said {Robert Bowers, the man accused of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting} used four guns — an AR-15 assault rifle and three Glock .357 handguns — in his shooting spree at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday morning.
An investigation has concluded that the guns were “acquired and possessed legally by Bowers,” the Philadelphia office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said on Tuesday.
Mr. Bowers did not fall into any category barred from gun ownership under federal law, including felons, convicted domestic abusers, dishonorably discharged veterans, or people adjudicated to be mentally ill or subject to certain restraining orders.
He also had a handgun license, an A.T.F. spokeswoman, Charlene Hennessy, said.
Ms. Hennessy said the A.T.F.’s investigation found that Mr. Bowers owned 10 guns in total, all purchased and possessed legally: the four found at the synagogue; three handguns and two rifles recovered from his residence; and a shotgun recovered from his car outside the synagogue.
Among other inflammatory statements he made online, Mr. Bowers, 46, referred to someone who had criticized neo-Nazis as an “oven dodger,” and he said that “Jews are the children of Satan.”
Source: "Synagogue Suspect’s Guns Were All Purchased Legally, Inquiry Finds" By Richard A. Oppel Jr. - NY Times - 10/30/18
{E}veryone has the ability to see the toxic online stylings of Cesar Sayoc, the Trump supporter who has been arrested and charged for a series of mail bombs that he sent to CNN and a list of prominent Democrats. He was all over social media spewing his bile, which escalated on Twitter and Facebook starting in 2016.
It was the same with another radicalized man with issues, Robert Bowers, who has been charged in the murder of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. His preferred outlet was an internet underbelly site called Gab, an alt-right platform with an adorable name and a dead-ugly purpose. As The New York Times’s Kevin Roose noted, Gab was the “last refuge for internet scoundrels — a place where those with views considered too toxic for the mainstream could congregate and converse freely.”
But it takes only seconds to draw a line between the public posts of these internet goblins and their real-life attacks. What is happening on social networks and across digital communications platforms is disturbing and ever metastasizing. And preventable.
Source: "I Thought the Web Would Stop Hate, Not Spread It" By Kara Swisher - NY Times - 10/30/18
White supremacists and other far-right extremists have killed far more people since Sept. 11, 2001, than any other category of domestic extremist. The Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism has reported that 71 percent of the extremist-related fatalities in the United States between 2008 and 2017 were committed by members of the far right or white-supremacist movements. Islamic extremists were responsible for just 26 percent. Data compiled by the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database shows that the number of terror-related incidents has more than tripled in the United States since 2013, and the number of those killed has quadrupled. In 2017, there were 65 incidents totaling 95 deaths. In a recent analysis of the data by the news site Quartz, roughly 60 percent of those incidents were driven by racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, antigovernment or other right-wing ideologies. Left-wing ideologies, like radical environmentalism, were responsible for 11 attacks. Muslim extremists committed just seven attacks.
With violent political messaging emanating from the White House and echoed throughout the conservative media and social-media landscapes, {Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer who now leads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino} only expects more attacks. “What we need to worry about is the guy who is riled up by this rhetoric and decides to go out and do something on his own,” he told me in August. “We have people who are ticking time bombs.”
At the time, he later recalled, he was the only analyst exclusively working on non-Islamic domestic threats. By 2007, he had put together a small team of analysts who began to scour extremist websites and message boards. What they found alarmed them.
The militant far right was enjoying a renaissance, thanks to the internet. Hundreds of militia recruitment and paramilitary training videos had sprung up on YouTube, along with promotions for weapons training and, to {Daryl Johnson, who ran a small Homeland Security domestic-terrorism unit}'s horror, bomb-making manuals. Between October 2007 and March 2008, Johnson and his unit documented the formation of 45 new antigovernment militia groups, which he saw as highly significant given that before fall 2007, these sorts of groups had been on the decline. Some white-supremacist groups, seizing upon the anti-immigration rhetoric that was then fomenting, created violent video games aimed at exploiting public fear of “illegals” streaming over the border.
“I blame an entire political apparatus led by Republicans that made calling something ‘right-wing extremism’ a political statement,” says{Mohamed Elibiary, an adviser to Obama’s national-security team}, who notes the paradox of G.O.P. leaders’ attacking Democrats for refusing to use the phrase “radical Islamic extremism.” “They’d say if you can’t say it, you can’t fight it,” she says. “But it cuts both ways. If you’re not allowed to say that white supremacy is a form of radicalization, then how are you going to stop it?”
Nate Snyder, a counterterrorism adviser to the Obama administration at the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 through 2017 {recalls as} early as 2010, his office was receiving calls from police officers asking for help in many Southern and Midwestern states. “They’d be like, ‘Thanks for that stuff on Al Qaeda, but what I really need to know is how to handle the Hammerskin population in my jurisdiction,’?” he says, referring to the white-supremacist skinhead group.
A person’s willingness to brawl was a point of pride. Some of the most ardent fighters, many of them felons, became celebrities in their own right, offered speaking slots at rallies, where their V.I.P. status earned them police protection. The Rise Above Movement, led in part by a gang member who had gone to prison for an attack, turned beat-downs into an art form, which they promoted on YouTube, drawing recruits. Nathan Damigo, a former Marine who was incarcerated for five years for armed robbery, used footage of his punching a young woman in the face during a Berkeley protest as a recruiting video for his white-nationalist organization, Identity Evropa. The Proud Boys went as far as to create an entire culture around gang-style rituals, including initiation beatings.
{A} baseball cap adorned with a red, white and blue patch known as the “whomster” flag. It’s “kind of a racist joke,” {. . . }, albeit one that most people won’t get, as they probably have no clue what “whomster” means (it’s a common meme that refers to the supposed, if baseless, fact that African-Americans say “whomst” a lot). The flag featured the Texas lone star against a backdrop of 14 red and white stripes, an allusion to a signature white supremacist slogan addressing their goal of preserving the white race. The star is centered on a large blue sonnerad, or black sun, an ancient symbol favored by white supremacists, who see it as less obvious than, say, a swastika. In recent years, even longtime neo-Nazi groups like the National Socialist Movement have rebranded by dropping the swastika for less “triggering” symbols like sonnerads or runes. The meaning is the same.
Source: "U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It." By JANET REITMAN - NY Times - NOV. 3, 2018
In 2014, California passed what is commonly known as the red flag law, which allows family members or the police to request a gun violence restraining order temporarily prohibiting a person from purchasing or possessing firearms and ammunition. More than a dozen other states are considering similar measures.
Source: "A Look at California Gun Laws, Among the Toughest in the Nation" By Ian Urbina - NY Times - 11/8/18
“Red flag” laws have been enacted in 13 states in the past couple of years, allowing relatives or law enforcement with concerns about a person’s mental health to go to court and seek to have firearms removed at least temporarily.
Source: "Online Rants by Would-Be Shooters Create Dilemma for Police " by LISA MARIE PANE / The Associated Press via Truthdig.com - 10/31/18
Donald Trump supporters at a campaign event last week in Charlotte, N.C.
Source: Doug Mills/The New York Times - Oct 30, 2018
Atomwaffen members pose for a photo while participating in paramilitary training exercises near Concrete, Wash., in 2017.
Source: Image posted by Atomwaffen on Discord