GUNS, CASH, & STEAL

All in the same week:

• The public learned that America's hatemongers were, for decades, being financially supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And they learned specifically that the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville (which resulted in dozens of injuries, three fatalities, and millions in damages) an event that looks like the cornerstone of the Democrat and their supporters' playbook for the last decade) was likely staged, or at least made possible and amplified, by one of America’s most celebrated anti-racism NGOs.

• The New York Times decided to do a cheerful sit-down interview and follow-up article with a pair of ascendant cultural voices (imitation Marxists happy to downplay and decontextualize to the maximum and even celebrate things like widespread looting and arson, public executions and terrorism) with the reporter nodding along or otherwise grinning ear-to-ear the whole time.

• The US President and guests endured what everyone assumed was the third assassination attempt against him (not alone on the campaign trail or his golf course this time but seated next to the Vice President, his whole cabinet, much of Congress, and half the nation’s press, all in front of the cameras) but later learned was an attempted mass fatality event involving effectively everyone in attendance.

That's a lot. And all of it appears connected.

LAWLESS CENTER

On Tuesday, April 21, the Acting Attorney General and the Director of the FBI offered a press release and Justice Department press conference to publicly declare that they’d been investigating the Southern Poverty Law Center and now brought a federal grand jury-backed indictment, including 11 counts, charging the human rights organization with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and making false statements to a financial institution.

For a decade now I’ve wondered what the SPLC was up to. My consternation began around 2016 when they placed Ayaan Hirsi Ali (the Somali asylum seeker, women’s rights activist, former Dutch MP, and former Muslim) on their watchlist alongside Majid Nawaz (the Islamist-turned-counter-extremist) and soon after added folks like Sam Harris (the ultra-moderate, anti-bigotry meditation and mindfulness advocate). Particularly disturbing was that this legacy anti-extremist organization is perfectly well apprized of the historical record and that lists of this very sort are what gets nailed or staked with a knife to the mutilated corpses of blasphemers and apostates across the world, whether those are Bangladeshi reformers or Dutch filmmakers. Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that the Southern Poverty Law Center most definitely began losing their way very publicly, like so many organizations, sometime around 2014 or so...

The allegations are that the organization, with a long history of combating the worst expressions of bigotry in America, was taking public money and using that, millions of dollars, not to fight racism but effectively to directly resuscitate and buoy many (nearly all?) of the nation’s worst rightwing extremists and the groups they lead, from the Klan to the National Socialists to biker gangs. As Dan McLaughlin so aptly put it in the National Review, “SPLC Indicted for Gain-of-Function Research into Racism: The scurrilous left-wing group had to pay for racism to meet demand…” If the allegations are true, that seems about right.

The FBI alleges that, in order to conceal the movement of funds from their own coffers to those of America’s most militant hate groups, the NGO created a network of front organizations, said to have “no bona fide employees or legitimate business purpose.” To do so they had to have illegally lied to financial institutions about what those inherently deceptive entities were, their purpose, and who was involved with them in order to open the bank accounts needed to make these transactions possible. The federal indictment against them suggests the SPLC would send a money to what was made to look like a rare book store, who would then transfer the money to what was formulated to appear as a media outlet, writers guild, or photography business, who would then send the money to an organization crafted to appear as a research group, tech business, or electronics company (all created and run by SPLC), who would then go and buy (with public donations) a stack of gift cards or other non-cash items so that these payments did not look to go directly from this legacy civil rights organization to the KKK or into the personal bank account of those organizing a “Unite the Right” rally, because how might that look? Worse than that, the FBI alleges public donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center, solicited explicitly to combat violent extremist groups, were, in fact, “used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups.” To my mind, it is probably safe to say that this covert activity amounts to fraud if most donors would not send money if they understood some or all of their gift could go toward bailing a skinhead out of prison, fomenting anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim bigotry online, or organizing an anti-miscegenation rally in the capitol, even if that could be articulated as a critical element of their long-game.

But I don’t even know why the SPLC was even asking for public money at this point. Prior to this I assumed, as you likely did, that this non-profit was, like so many, a small operation starved for funding and barely subsisting and fighting its legal battles on the interest derived from perhaps a couple million bucks, mostly accrued through small-dollar donations and maybe a few larger one-time donations from celebrities or major institutions over the decades. Nope. Their accounting suggests they have almost $1 billion in assets, with an endowment of more than $820 million and between $125 and $175 million in annual revenue. The organization also runs multiple political action committees including a Super PAC that dropped $1 million on the 2020 presidential election…

In response to the indictment, the legacy media first emerged to offer their full-throated defence of the organization. What none of them did was spell out or reasonably summarized (and link to) the actual indictment. You know, the very minimum. Instead, and as most of us have come to expect, they reliably omitted critical (or any and all) context, misrepresenting the facts of the case, and/or omitted key allegations, as the majority of journalists and investigative reporters seemingly must in 2026.

No one mentioned, for example, how the co-founder, Morris Dees, was booted in 2019 after 50 years with the organization or that Richard Cohen, then president with more than 30 years with the SPLC, resigned soon after as the legacy civil rights center began a “top-to-bottom review of its workplace culture and policies,” ensuring that “our workplace embodies the values we espouse – truth, justice, equity, and inclusion.” Translation: purge the ‘old white dudes.’ A former employee highlighted the "unchecked power of lavishly compensated white men at the top” as key issues; so It seems relevant that years into a reform process leveraged on racial and gender equity and justice has ended in ground shaking fraud allegations that suggest the organization was not crushing but stoking racial bigotry.

Major media outlets seemed equally disinterested in the fact that it was Michelle Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Tina Tchen, who guided the transition or of the well-documented internal chaos plaguing the organization ever since. Does that seem relevant to charges that the group has been helping foment hatred and civil disorder at a national scale? Avoiding that, everyone also chose not to notice how Margaret Huang, former administrator at Amnesty International, replaced the SPLC interim CEO and president, Karen Baynes-Dunning (who moved to chair the SPLC’s Board of Directors) and how, now with more money than ever coming in and nearly a billion in cash sitting in a Cayman Islands bank account, 2024 saw the SPLC lay off a huge swathe of its workforce. This resulted in the remaining staff supporting a no-confidence motion against Huang and her subsequent resignation (citing not malice or her own incompetence but “family reasons.”) How is none of this relevant?

Most curiously absent from all the media clamour about this indictment were the voices of all those who wrote excoriations of the old leadership at the SPLC, as Bob Moser did in The New Yorker, claiming they were making too much money for a social justice non-profit. None of them piped up this week, or any time since Dees’ departure in 2019, to notice that the he (a founder, key legal expert, and chief trial counsel for five decades) was earning just $375,000 before being kicked while his successors (with none of the background, experience, or education) came to earn as much as $523,000. That’s irrelevant to the history of the organization, recent events, and claims of financial mismanagement or the organization using money in ways its staff and donors disapprove of?

Unlike all of America’s press, I was pretty curious about how the organization was audited by CharityWatch, the charity and not-for-profit accountability organization, and how by 2023 they were downgraded from a ‘B’ to an ‘F’ rating. This failing grade was for hoarding donations in excess of seven years-worth of assets in reserve (when two or maybe three is the norm); spending more than 30% of funds on overhead (when a large established organization of this sort should probably be closer to 15-20%); and in terms of efficiency, it costing them $22 to raise $100 (when 350.org and World Central Kitchen spend $4, the Michael J. Fox Foundation spends $6, the Boys&Girls Clubs of America spends $10, and Doctors Without Borders spends $14…) The press also declined to mention how in recent years, since undergoing reform and insisting upon a new era of workplace democracy and transparency, the SPLC refused to submit information to be evaluated by the Charity Accountability section of the Better Business Bureau. None of this economic picture or its sudden shift is relevant to a major non-profit financial fraud and money laundering scandal? Okay.

Well, so how did the SPLC respond to FBI allegations? As you might expect, they issued their own statement of defence (from the poor Interim President who was left with the task.) The organization explained how they used millions in public donations to infiltrate hate groups and buy themselves insider information through a private network of paid informants. They claimed this practice (using their bottomless resources to cosplay as the FBI) was essential due to decades of credible threats against the organisation and their staff and this was a good way to keep their people safe. They also claimed they used this network of insiders to inform police and federal investigators but noted also that this practice is no longer being employed.

The problems with their attempted defence are abundant. The least of the problems is that you don’t cease a program highly effective at saving your own lives and helping to take down violent hate groups. That’s effectively the organization’s mission. Possibly the most serious issue though is that we have the names and positions of these people they gifted hundreds of thousands and in one case more than a million dollars to. These were not low-level plants they helped sneak into these organizations, as implied, or folks they were able to make contact with and establish a quid pro quo leading to SPLC lawyers being covertly placed into a Facebook group or Whatsapp chat. Some individuals paid by the NGO, at least one a convicted felon, were actually running these groups (with roles including president, director, or chair of major neo-Nazi groups and the like.) The indictment specifically notes that, while claiming to be working to dismantle hate groups, the SPLC used these so-called informants to “indirectly funnel money to other violent extremist group leaders…” Other hatemongers bankrolled by the Southern Poverty Law Center were merely creating, fundraising, organizing, and transporting people to key events. The indictment spells out such instances. Some of those look like:

F-9 was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance and served as an [informant] for the SPLC for more than 20 years. F-9’s activities included fundraising for the National Alliance. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-9 more than $1,000,000.00…

F-27 was reported as an officer in the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. Between 2014 and 2020, the SPLC secretly paid F-27 more than $300,000.00.

F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees…

To me, this looks less like a little cash for a tip-off or for photocopying some internal documents and more like a sustained $50k or $100k annual salary so these leaders and organizers didn’t have to struggle for resources and labour part time as a barista or mechanic and could focus on the hard work of spreading xenophobia and racial animus. 

Just as troubling, it does look like the SPLC itself was benefitting from their buoying these hate groups and their events. For example, prior to the above hate-rally in 2017 (you might recall the khaki pants, tiki torches, and chants of “the Jews will not replace us”) the NGO had annual revenues of less than $58 million. After the(ir) event? More than double: $138 million, something they’ve sustained ever since. That’s a big jump for a single year and the timing a little curious to be entirely unrelated to the above (fundraising?) effort spelled out in the federal fraud indictment.

If you don’t know, this one event was far more pivotal than it may seem. Joe Biden even stated, multiple times, his whole reason for running for president in 2020 was this single event (what now seems to be a SPLC confection) paired with Trump’s related “very fine people” statement (proven to be a sleight-of-hand trick manufactured by the press and fraudulently repeated by some still today, especially prominent politicians and major press organizations around the globe.) The then-former Vice President said this, Charlottesville, was the “defining moment” that prompted him to launch his campaign to battle for the “soul of this nation.”

What actually happened in Charlottesville was a local debate leading to a clash, one brewing for months, between folks for and against the removal of a Confederate statue and name from a public park. Though there was of course a strong racial and civil rights valence to the issue, defenders of the memorial made no such arguments and focused their grievance on the fact that the city’s plan would violate state law protecting war memorials as well as the deed to the land granted for the war memorial. So, not nothing. You’d think if city council was going to tear down a memorial their predecessors erected they should probably just put in the effort to do it by the book (or otherwise covertly pay a neo-Nazi to bomb it in the night, like any self-respecting civil rights organization would.) But, as you would expect, this issue was like a Bat-Signal to white nationalist types and adjacent parties who eventually did organize and protest the removal of the statue. But all that transpired in early 2017 and none of it was the hate-a-thon television spectacle that would come. Only months later, in mid-August, with what looks now like the aid, funding, and possibly direction of the SPLC, was the “Unite the Right” rally concocted and delivered.

The proposed event whipped up hysteria on social media and eventually resulted in clashes on the street. This public confrontation resulted in some enraged psychopath driving their car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 30 others (for which the man pleaded guilty to hate crimes and domestic terrorism and is now doing life in prison.) And, as I only learned today, the event was declared an unlawful assembly resulting in a police helicopter attempting to surveil and help manage the situation. During their duties the helicopter crashed, killing both state troopers inside. The whole thing never should have happened and was a total shit-show. And it could be that the SPLC had a hand in making all of this possible, which is doubly significant because in 2021 a jury found those it determined were the “organizers” of the event, not the SPLC, and awarded $25M in damages to nine victims.

What most folks to the political left of MAGA seem allergic to understanding is that Trump responded to the event with: "We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides…" And when admonished for failing, by some accounts, to denounce the violence clearly or harshly enough (despite his vigorous condemnation), he later responded with "Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans." The only bit recorded in the popular mind, however, is where Trump, with his special brand of bumbling, repetitive verbosity, got into a weird back-and-forth with a reporter who was pretending to not know exactly what was being said. The substance of that tertiary dialogue was later decontextualized, clipped, and spun to make it look like the president’s only utterance on the matter were things he simply did not intend or even imply and actually clarified to be perfectly in line with his official statements above: total condemnation of bigotry and the hate groups who want to spread it. And it was really this egregious, propagandistic reporting that was taken up and repeated unquestioningly — all arriving at the height of the Russia collusion narrative and start of the Mueller investigation — that significantly amplified Trump’s distrust of the press and relentless application of the phrase “fake news” (which was itself spun into him running from the truth and from accountability.) So, you see, the SPLC suddenly looks less like lawyers taking important civil rights cases and more like they’re an instrument at the very center of and shaping social and political life in America.

As an important aside, this story helps illuminate who has power and that things are very much not how they appear on the surface. If this one niche civil rights NGO is worth a billion dollars (and engaged in money laundering and stockpiling cash in off-shore banks), you might wonder what other non-profits, so-called, are up to or just the resources they control. And you can find that information. The Federal Reserve recently reported, for instance, that America’s not-for-profit sector has seen explosive asset growth in recent decades and is now worth $14 trillion (yes, with a ‘T’). For scale, Germany, India, and Japan are the third, fourth, and fifth largest economies in the world. Using the highest estimates I can find, together those nations have a combined GDP of $13.5T. That’s right. And, just so you can see how absurd this really is, what would you guess for the combined assets of all the largest US companies you can name (including Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile, Tesla, Ford, GM, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Johnson&Johnson, Procter&Gamble, Philip Morris, Gap, Nike, Levi Strauss, Walmart, Walt Disney, MasterCard, and Visa)? Would it surprise you that the total is just half what the non-profits of America hold, or approximately $7 trillion? Is that where you thought the not-for-profit community (Ducks Unlimited, Hemophilia Federation of America, Ronald McDonald House, et al) was at?

KNOW YOUR TIMES

That was a rough start to the week. The following day the nation’s best subscribed recipe and puzzle dispensary, The New York Times, felt it was time to release their interview with Hasan Piker — the thirty-something, Hollywood mansion-dwelling Porsche-driver (who was raised as a chubby equestrian in an affluent Turkish family, the patriarch of which is an economist who, among other things, sits on the Board of Directors of the Istanbul-based financial and industrial conglomerate Sabancı Holding). All of that is relevant. As is the fact that this is a guy who, like his uncle Cenk Uygur, made a name for himself barking illiterate or otherwise unethical takes to an ever-larger fanbase online. (Imagine if Joe Rogan was a kid with no family, no life or job experience, nor any interests of any kind and had never been punched in the face but instead spent time in a fraternity, got a bachelor’s degree after attending university in Miami and New Jersey, and enjoys either playing video games while others watch and/or sharing and endorsing terrorist propaganda and political violence.) This is precisely the kind of man the Democratic base is attempting to court and cultivate.

His co-interviewee was Jia Tolentino. She’s as illiterate and lacking in self-awareness as Piker and, of course, writes for The New Yorker. Born in Toronto and raised a Southern Baptist in Houston, this MFA fiction writer is also said to be the voice of a generation. (We might also notice that she grew up in a palatial mansion her parents and grandmother owned but had to eventually forfeit because it was bought with the millions they stole as part of a money laundering, visa fraud, human trafficking, and slavery scheme for which they were eventually indicted on 40 counts…)

In their interview with The Times, titled “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?: Why petty theft might be the new political protest”, Piker and Tolentino describe their pro-theft, pro-property destruction, and pro-murder stance, explaining how this sort of behaviour is so clearly morally justified and, at worst, both understandable and completely relatable. The self-identified anti-capitalist Marxist (and millionaire) argued that what America is lacking and “we” should see more of are “cool crimes” like bank robberies and the theft of priceless artifacts. Though Tolentino is a thief, who, she tells us, enjoys stealing citrus from her local grocer, Piker doesn’t steal. Piker, like Tolentino, is also not for stealing from the rich, because he himself and his family and everyone he knows would firmly fit into that category. (It's like how effectively all your university professors sympathize with or endorse Leftist extremism especially if grounded in Gramsci, because, unlike the Khmer Rouge or Maoists, say, Gramsci endorsed not the execution of intellectuals but imagined them as key players in the culture and even running the show when the revolution comes...) So, what the pair and the NTY want is not for you and your friends to roll up to their house in a stolen Mercedes G-class wearing balaclavas and in trench coats concealing sledgehammers and suppressed uzis but to swipe stuff from Walgreens and Whole Foods and maybe MoMA and the Getty. It's almost as if this LA resident is entirely oblivious to whole neighbourhoods in his own state (but not West Hollywood, I suppose) becoming food and pharmacy deserts due to unrelenting theft of the sort he endorses. Or maybe, sure the losses will impact none of them in any way, these media messengers just don’t care — just like they don’t care about you being arrested, charged, or doing time or even about total social collapse. As seen in this interview, they call for it, in fact.

For me the best part of the interview was when Piker transitioned from endorsing mass theft to celebration of “our boy” Luigi Mangione, the kid who executed a man in the street for reasons he could not articulate — to the swooning celebration of a large swathe of the vulva-toting members of the Democratic party and their allies on the militant Left, as well as most of the nation's teachers and college instructors and many of those in the press and on popular television. Tolentino, of course, agrees and contributes to the discussion by explaining how the problem with the petty theft she herself performs and prescribes here is that it is too personal and private and insufficiently violent or conspicuous. Tolentino tells us “any successful direct action in history has to be ostentatious, has to make itself known, is ideally collective.” She implores Americans to “move this [petty theft] energy into some other thing.” Then she explains (with her and the NYT host positively glowing with delight and Piker nodding his approval) how looting, riot, arson, bombings, and the like are really what America needs a whole lot more of at this time. In her clunky and tangled manner, she asserts that, “There’s a long and storied history of sabotage and, sort of, engagement with property… destruction, even… which is abhorrent to people… I mean, you remember in 2020 the, like, Gucci/Chanel stuff in SoHo, when that was looted, that looms so much larger in many Bloomberg liberals’ imaginations, as profoundly more violent, in some ways, than the original action being protested.”

What she’s saying here (and Piker and the NYT clearly concur with and endorse) is that the 570 protests that devolved into violent rioting, looting, and arson (in 140 US cities, with 30 states deploying their National Guard) — resulting in countless individuals and families losing homes, businesses, and places of employment (but only those in non-wealthy communities, with a six-storey affordable housing complex burning to the ground, 52 more buildings wholly destroyed, 140 rendered uninhabitable by fire and smashed windows, and 1,500 more pointlessly burning and being broken into in Minneapolis alone and another 2,100 properties suffering similar fate in Chicago; to a total of perhaps as much as $2 billion in damages) including some 42 people losing their lives — is just no big deal.

No one paused at the time during the interview, in the editing booth, or since to note that this series of connected and coordinated events was one of the worst collective acts of destruction in US history, far eclipsing all of the property damage and fatalities from all of the 2,500 domestic terrorist bombings in the 1970s or the profligate property damage from Rodney King riots of 1992, for instance. And certainly no one paused to illuminate that all of this recent mayhem arose, “the original action being protested”, from the death of George Floyd — the official version of which, including so much of the swirling race-based narratives propelling it and coming since, appears more presumed, willfully misrepresented, or wholly fictionalized than grounded in evidence. So all of that death and destruction was, far more likely than not, for nothing (or less than nothing), and certainly least of all helping manifest greater racial justice or just any consciousness raising in the desired direction.

Tolentino and Piker (who together appear to share about six-and-a-half brain cells) are here, brought on to the NYT platform to megaphone this message to the broadest possible audience, telling Liberal snowflakes that they need not just desensitize themselves, and quickly, to murder and mayhem but to get behind and enact more such socially aware and just theft, arson, and Mangione-style public executions. (New York’s new mayor even got in on the fun. Nine combined brain cells...) Why? Because, like, justice, or Marxism, or something… And that’s the purpose of this whole meeting of minds and doing so in this venue. The New York Times and key messengers want you to know that violence and theft is valorized in historical narrative and fantasy (Aladdin, Robin Hood, Jean Valjean) because what history has told us is that stealing and killing is inherently good so long as you feel you’re doing it for the right reasons. “We love that in America. We do. We can love it again! We just have to do it with a purpose.” Piker attempts to explain, but without an names or citations of course, that there’s a long Marxist and Anarchist tradition that Americans can look to if they wish to see how any amount of violence and destruction may be morally justified; but that, by the account of this equestrian-turned-frat-boy-turned-full-time-streamer, Americans lack the political language, education, and class consciousness to recognize this and organize to bring about total chaos and devastation. Piker counters the other guest’s bemoaning that “Americans are not on board with murder” by noting how America is, in fact, a culture of violence. No one should feel bad about killing their political enemies, you see. He tells us “In some ways, Charlie Kirk’s murder was not unique; school shootings are happening all the time: we have actually decided, almost collectively, that it’s just another byproduct of American existence.” Well, message received.

CORRESPONDENTS DINNER

Then on Saturday was the White House Correspondents Dinner. Almost on cue, a young man thought it was a good use of his life to hop on a train from his home in California to DC, get himself a room at the Hilton, and attempt, strapped with guns and knives, a Naruto run through the abundant hotel security, DC police, and Secret Service at one of the checkpoints for an event hosting everyone in government and much of the media.

The following day we learned that moments prior to ruining his life for nothing at all he sent everyone he knew a [boy]ifesto replete with tragic, disordered thinking. His stated intent? To shoot and kill anyone who committed the crime of being in attendance. Unfortunately for the Right, the perpetrator was not a 17-year-old trans woman or drag performer but a devout Christian gun-owner with an engineering degree from the elite, “Ivy Plus” Caltech who did an internship at NASA. Unfortunately for the Left and the vast majority of those in the media, the man appeared motivated and possessed by obvious untruths relentlessly repeated over the airways and in print for years, and still today.

As if sent there by The New York Times or Hasan Piker, the fellow wanted his family to know that anyone who would allow themself to be seated near a pedophile, such as Donald Trump and his ilk, fully justified their own execution. He took all this time and energy to consider the situation, spell it all out, and to act (and the press, too, all the subsequent bloviating and false-surprise prior and since) but neither expended one second, then or now, looking to see, for example, if there was a single ounce of credible evidence, or even one serious allegation, supporting that Trump harmed someone as suggested, male of female, young or old, and animating or “justifying” the mass, on-camera murder of everyone in government — an event, one imagines, would meet the ostentatious calibre so popularly prescribed and endorsed in text and in video just days earlier in the nation’s paper of record, the same day the shooter decided to leave home for DC.

Goddamn.

I was told in 2018, in the middle of the first Trump administration, that those in the know, deeply studied in the realities and precursors of genocide, saw nearly all the signs that would presage imminent mass slaughter inside America and that anyone not voting Republican should be prepared for this worst possible scenario. This is what they were telling themselves and also sharing with the world. Really whipping themselves and their friends into a mass panic. But the pandemic arrived and deflated and diverted all that energy. About a year ago I was noticing how seemingly everyone who didn’t vote for Trump — particularly the most prominent folks in Congress, in the press, and many delivering popular content on podcasts, blogs, and so many newsletters going out to millions — were literally calling for “war”, declaring that it was time to “go gangster” and to “fight in the streets,” arguing that fascism was not ascendant but dominant and the apocalypse nigh. My current assessment is that this talk hasn’t slowed down or been diluted over the last twelve months but worsened.

UPDATE:

Batya Ungar-Sargon just wrote a great post relating to political violence but that delves into the data collection and reporting on the direction the violence comes from. It's pretty wild. She also joined News Nation to spell out her rather damning findings after scouring the primary sources for common claims about political violence in the United States. Check those out and tell me where she's wrong or missing the point.