Tag: extremism

What Just Stop Oil really wants

Everyone’s fed up with Just Stop Oil. The eco-extremist troupe’s recent stunts – bringing traffic to a standstill with their ‘slow marches’ through London; disrupting play at the snooker, the cricket and now the tennis – have turned off even its natural allies. Last week, Californian millionaire Trevor Neilson, who once helped bankroll the group, said its activities had become ‘performative’ and ‘counterproductive’. Even Swampy (aka Daniel Hooper), the notorious, tunnel-digging eco-warrior of the 1990s, has distanced himself from Just Stop Oil. When asked by The Sunday Times whether he would storm the pitch at Lord’s, as JSO did last week, he said ‘I wouldn’t have thought so, no’, adding that greens today should focus on ‘bringing communities together’. When Swampy is telling you to tone it down, you know you’ve lost the room.

The penny finally seems to be dropping among the chattering classes that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion and all its other spawn aren’t the wonderful campaigners they once thought. Working-class people, of course, had their number from the beginning, given their antics disproportionately affected those with real jobs. But since JSO decided to switch from disrupting the lives and leisure activities of the working class to those of the upper-middle class, from blockading builders to storming Harrods, from ruining the snooker to interrupting the Glyndebourne opera festival, it seems its support among the bourgeois set is starting to waver, too. Its latest exploits certainly haven’t received the gushing, uncritical coverage that Extinction Rebellion first enjoyed when it burst on to the scene, blocking roads and bridges, in 2018.

But there’s a problem. The media seem to talk endlessly about Just Stop Oil’s tactics, about whether or not they are turning people off, even though they quite obviously are and have been from the beginning, all with barely a mention of what this group actually stands for – of what sort of society it is agitating to bring about, and what principles guide its irksome activism. The great and good seem to take it as read that Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion et al have their hearts in the right place. Tennis star Andy Murray summed up this sentiment ahead of Wimbledon this week: ‘I agree with the cause – just not always how they go about expressing it.’

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Hollywood and left-wing foundations behind climate charity quietly bankrolling extremist protest groups

A little-known climate change advocacy organization heavily funded by celebrities and influential left-leaning foundations has been quietly dishing out grants to various activist groups deploying unorthodox and extremist methods across the world to protest fossil fuels, documents reveal.

Anti-fossil fuels groups have been ramping up protests in the United States and overseas as part of a coordinated campaign to bring awareness to climate change by vandalizing fine art, blocking major roads, and even gluing themselves to sports cars. Many of these activist hubs are being bankrolled by Climate Emergency Fund, a Beverly Hills-based charity linked to Hollywood celebrities and top liberal nonprofit organizations aiming to shape the Democratic Party’s agenda, according to tax forms and other documents reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

“Climate Emergency Fund has quickly become the ATM that radical environmental activists turn to fund their latest disruptions,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the conservative watchdog Americans for Public Trust, told the Washington Examiner. “And as their destruction increases, so should the scrutiny on who is bankrolling the Climate Emergency Fund and their ties to more mainstream environmental groups that might disagree with these over-the-top and dangerous tactics.”

Last week, an entity called Declare Emergency that calls fossil fuels reliance “genocidal” and “criminal” took credit for smearing paint on the display case of a sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Just Stop Oil, a group that made headlines in October 2022 for splattering tomato soup on a Vincent Van Gogh painting estimated to be worth $84 million at London’s National Gallery, has been blocking traffic for days in the United Kingdom.

These groups and those like it are either funded directly by Climate Emergency Fund or are part of coalitions backed by CEF, which touts on its website how it has “trained” tens of thousands of activists since being founded in 2019. Both Declare Emergency and Just Stop Oil are part of a coalition with almost a dozen climate protest groups called the A22 Network, which is primarily funded by CEF.

And, unlike the typical run-of-the-mill charity, CEF boasts a star-studded cohort of financial backers and board members, including Rory Kennedy, daughter of the late senator Robert F. Kennedy, Aileen Getty, the billionaire philanthropist and heiress of the Getty family fortune earned in the petroleum industry, and even Hollywood’s Adam McKay, who pledged it $4 million in September 2022 and directed the 2021 climate allegory film Don’t Look Up.

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FBI Sent Undercover Agents to Church Services to Investigate ‘Domestic Extremism’

On Monday, Jim Jordan subpoenaed FBI Director Christopher Wray for documents related to the FBI’s handling of a domestic violent extremism investigation against Catholic Americans.

Jordan, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said that the FBI used at least one undercover agent to produce their analysis and that FBI agents engaged in outreach programs to Catholic parishes. This included clergy as well as church leadership.

Jordan’s letter reports that the FBI document sought to categorize Catholic Americans based on theological distinctions, as an attempt to label certain kinds of Catholic Americans as domestic terrorists.

“We have repeatedly sought information from the FBI relating to a January 23, 2023 document… After receiving no response, we reiterated our outstanding requests in a subsequent letter dated March 20, 2023. On March 23, 2023, we received a substandard and partial response consisting of only 18 pages — many with significant redactions of ‘personally identifiable information’ or ‘specific non-public information about [FBI] investigations, sources, and methods’ that prevents the Committee from fully assessing the content and context of the documents and obtaining information requested from the Bureau,” wrote Jordan in the letter to Wray.

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Here’s FBI Glossary for Flagging ‘Violent Extremism’

The FBI uses a “glossary of terms” to look for online that could indicate someone is involved with “violent extremism,” according to documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. 

The flagged terms include “redpilled,” first popularized by the 1999 film “The Matrix,” “based,” “looksmaxxing,” and the names “Chad” and “Stacey.”

The FBI also flags phrases that include “it’s over” and “just be first.” 

The documents were obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through a Freedom of Information Act request. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Such words and phrases have come to be code for certain extremists who communicate online with others like them, according to the FBI’s glossary of words indicating “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism” and a list of “key terms” about “involuntary celibate violent extremism.”

According to the FBI document, the word “cell” is short for incel, which in turn is short for “involuntary celibate,” or an online community of men who  think they can’t attract women even though they want to be in a relationship. 

“Docs we obtained show how @FBI equates protected online speech to violence,” the Oversight Project says in a tweet. “According to @FBI using the terms ‘based’ or ‘red pilled’ are signs of ‘Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.’”

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FBI documents associate internet slang like ‘based’ and ‘red pill’ with ‘extremism’

New documents released Monday warned that common internet lingo is being associated with “Violent Extremism” by the FBI.

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project said it used a Freedom of Information Act request to expose FBI documents that include glossaries showing that common internet slang has been flagged as an indication of “Involuntary Celibate Violent Extremism” or “Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremism.”

Part of the document refers specifically to “incels,” or those “involuntary celibate,” whom the “threat overview” describes as possibly seeking to “commit violence in support of their beliefs that society unjustly denies them sexual or romantic attention, to which they believe they are entitled.”

The assessment notes, “While most incels do not engage in violence,” some have been involved in “at least five lethal attacks in the United States and Canada.”

Many of the terms mentioned in the FBI’s list of incel terminology are either widely used across the internet or innocuous in nature.

The one term in the glossary is “Red Pill,” which comes from the 1999 film “The Matrix” and has been used a metaphor for seeing hidden or politically incorrect truths about the modern world, particularly when it comes to politics or dating.

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‘Ministry of Truth’: Critics warn Washington extremism bill targets free speech

As the Washington State Attorney General’s Office continues work on a database for police use of force incidents, a House bill would set up a 13-member commission within that same office to develop a data collection process on incidents of “domestic violent extremism,” or DVE.

Although the term DVE is not defined in the bill, under State Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s description it would include noncriminal activities or speech.

HB 1333 sponsored by Rep. Bill Ramos, D-Issaquah, creates a Domestic Violent Extremism Commission to develop ways to combat “disinformation and misinformation,” though the two words are not defined in the bill. Also not defined is the term DVE.

The legislation is derived from a recommendation by the Attorney General’s Office own 2022 “Domestic Terrorism” study, which cautioned that “effective State intervention to address these threats has the potential to implicate speech or association that may be protected by the First Amendment, or the individual right to bear arms protected by the Second Amendment.”

Among the report’s recommended was the creation of a commission to explore not just data collection, but potentially adding a definition of DVE to state statue. State law already addresses hate crimes, and the FBI defines “domestic terrorism” within the context of actual crimes or intent to commit a crime.

However, the attorney general’s 2022 report argues that “rather than exclusively address ‘domestic terrorism’ per se, these recommendations seek to best support Washington State to respond to this panoply of challenges, which together combine to create the threat of—and indeed, are often precursors to—acts of domestic terrorism.”

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Is the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” Label Still in Use?

It’s been over five years since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) “Black Identity Extremist” (BIE) report was leaked to Foreign Policy magazine in early October 2017. The August 3, 2017, report – which alleged that “perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement” – drew a torrent of criticism from civil rights and civil liberties groups, as well as a backlash from Black House and Senate members. The fact that the FBI was employing overtly race-based criteria for investigating the political activities of Black Americans brought back ugly memories of the Bureau’s infamous Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeting the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Congress, NAACP, and a host of other prominent Black civil rights leaders and organizations from the mid-1950s through at least the late 1970s.

In the two years after the leak of the “BIE” report, FBI Director Chris Wray found himself constantly on the defensive over the report and the FBI’s use of the BIE term. In late July 2019, Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Bureau had abandoned the use of the BIE phrase, with one other FBI official claiming the term had not been used by the FBI since 2018.

FBI documents obtained by the Cato Institute via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit appear to tell a somewhat different story.

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Meet the ‘Black Robe Regiment’ of Extremist Pastors Spreading Christian Nationalism

Days before the midterm elections, Pastor David MacLellan was ready to preach far-right politics through Bible verses to his small congregation. MacLellan, a hulking man with a long, grizzled black beard, isn’t an ordinary pastor. He proudly identifies himself as a far-right, extremist pastor and a Christian nationalist, someone who believes American politics should reflect fundamentalist Christian values. 

And he’s part of a growing national religious political movement called the Black Robe Regiment, a modern-day group inspired by a myth of a group of militant pastors during the American Revolution who took up arms to lead their flock into battle against the British. The movement, imbued with support from far-right political activists like Michael Flynn, wants pastors to play a central role in not only preaching politics from the pulpit but also actively getting their congregations to rise up and claim election fraud by weaving myths about the American Revolution together with modern-day conspiracy theories and hard-line Christianity. These pastors believe they’re saving democracy, though what they’re really doing is encouraging supporters to undermine the democratic process.

And MacLellan plans to take an active role: He’s convinced that the 2020 election was stolen and that fraud has already been committed in the 2022 midterms. He wants his congregants to fight back. 

“This Tuesday, I’ll be taking some of our seniors to the polling station,” MacLellan announced at the beginning of his service, held in the living room of his home in Mesa, Arizona. That day, he wore a tweed jacket over a black shirt, and a bolo tie. His hands are gnarled with faded tattoos—a nod, he says, to his Scottish heritage and a holdover from a past life when he played in punk bands in New York and was a “heathen biker.”

His sermon mixed Bible verses with remarks about evolution, made claims of violence against anti-abortion groups, and described Jewish people as a “wealthy group of people who didn’t believe in heaven or hell, didn’t believe in angels, and they had political control over everything.”

“Interesting, huh?” he said, as an aside to the congregation crowded into his living room, who responded with knowing sounds.

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German Domestic Intelligence Is Running 100s Of Fake Right-Wing Extremist Social Media Accounts

Hundreds of the radical Nazis and right-wing extremists online are actually German domestic intelligence agents, and many of them may even responsible for “inciting hatred” and even violence. These agents, who once needed to drink and directly socialize with members of the extreme right, are now running right-wing extremist accounts online in Germany.

Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) argues that these accounts are needed to gather information, but critics say that they may also be promoting and actively encouraging radicalism, according to a report from German newspaper Süddeutshce Zeitung.

“This is the future of information gathering,” an unnamed head of a relevant state office told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

According to research by the newspaper, the authority has invested heavily in “virtual agents” since 2019, which it finances with taxpayers’ money. Both the federal office and the federal states employ spies, who besides right-wing extremists, are also tasked with keeping an eye on the left-wing extremists, Islamists, and the “conspiracy-ideological” scene.

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DHS to spend almost $700,000 of taxpayers’ cash on studying “extremism” in video gaming

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded researchers a $699,768 grant to investigate extremism in gaming.

As reported by VICE, the money will go to Logically, a company committed to the issue of “bad” online behavior, Middlebury Institute’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism (CTEC), and Take This, a nonprofit that specializes in mental health in video gaming.

“Over the past decade, video games have increasingly become focal points of social activity and identity creation for adolescents and young adults. Relationships made and fostered within game ecosystems routinely cross over into the real world and are impactful parts of local communities,” the grant announcement on the DHS website said. “Correspondingly, extremists have used video games and targeted video game communities for activities ranging from propaganda creation to terrorist mobilization and training.”

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