Are Terrorist Hordes Lined Up at Our Border?

Israel’s War Spills Into Domestic Politics

Any event challenging the current order of politics and society will generate a disinformation campaign.

Most obvious are the videos aimed at inducing viewer rage. NBC News reported on a propaganda network of 67 accounts on the Xitter social platform, offering up false and/or inflammatory content related to the Israel-Hamas war.

• One video is a clip from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s speech to the United Nations in January, in which he complained about right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson not being on Fox News anymore. The other is Russian President Vladimir Putin saying in January that while the global threat of nuclear war was growing, Russia would not launch a nuclear weapon first.

• The videos posted by the X accounts, however, overlaid those clips with captions that made both men seem to threaten the U.S. with overt military support for the Palestinians. 

The Israeli - Hamas conflict is significant enough to have spawned several flavors of misleading info and outright lies. Republican politicians in DC have favored the Blame Biden alternative history. 

Eight billion dollars of payments for Iranian crude oil were transferred into a special fund and limited to purchases of humanitarian aid. None of it has been spent thus far but that hasn’t stopped right wing chattering about those monies being used to buy arms for Hamas. Photographs taken in earlier conflicts (mostly Ukraine) with text saying President Biden has blood on his hands have made their way into MAGA social media.

This bit of balderdash has even been made into a policy proposal, namely that the already unused funds be “frozen.” (That ought to show those terrorists the US is tough, right?)

More concerning is the line of falsehoods tying the Hamas assault to the potential for an attack on US soil due to ‘Joe Biden’s open borders policies.’

Fox News Laura Ingram had the honor of making a fringe social media claim into a national emergency. With an AMERICA NEXT? graphic displaying, off she went: 

• "What better way for a terror network to disperse and disappear into the general population than amidst hoards of Venezuelans and Hondurans and others, some of them criminals, were set looking for a better life, we don't really know? It's a perfect cover," 

Then came Fox News amplification of an ongoing Homeland Security report about border encounters into something evil sounding.

HEADLINE: Thousands of 'special interest aliens' from Middle East countries stopped at southern border since 2021: data

The reporting translates encounters by the Border Patrol to arrests. It lists the number of contacts by a few countries we’re all supposed to be scared of: 

• …6,386 nationals from Afghanistan in that period as well as 3,153 from Egypt, 659 from Iran and 538 from Syria...

The actual total number of watch-listed individuals ‘encountered’ at the Southern border last year was 151, (out of nearly 3 million crossers) according to the FBI.

"Special Interest Alien" is a CBP term meant only to describe a category of migrants who come from countries where there is a significant terrorism threat. It does NOT indicate an individualized basis for suspecting the person is themselves a terrorist.

Further down, encounters with border crossers from places Fox News thinks are less scary are listed:

•  13,624 from Uzbekistan, 30,830 from Turkey, 1,613 from Pakistan, 164 from Lebanon, 185 from Jordan, 139 from Yemen, 123 from Iraq and 15,594 from Mauritania*. 

*Migrants from Mauritania are fleeing drought, starvation, and terrorist attacks. It’s one of the very few places in the world where incidences of slavery are widespread.

Of course, Fox News is the most high-profile of those platforms ginning up fear. Nearly all conflict images are now initially appearing on Telegram, a chat-based platform used in right wing circles.

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Some of the rhetoric concerning cross border migration is merely repetition of the total numbers of people intercepted. This is in line with the blame-Biden border strategy of the GOP; I have no doubt that some of the MAGA-impaired types are visualizing the President of the United States literally holding the gates open.

This gets scary when the Stars of the extremist right are dropping big hints about taking this situation to the level of domestic armed conflict.

It doesn’t help matters when the leading contender for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination seems to be getting angrier everyday.

From AFP - Trump's darkening language sparks fears of violence

• In recent days, the irascible former US president and 2024 candidate has implied that the country's top military officer should be executed and joked about the elderly husband of a political foe being attacked in a home invasion.

• Critics say he hit a new low last week with comments about illegal immigrants so extreme that the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy group, saw echoes of Nazi rhetoric.

• "Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons, we know they come from mental institutions, insane asylums, we know they're terrorists," Trump told conservative news site The National Pulse.

• "Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It's poisoning the blood of our country."

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So there you have it. After 6+ years of inflammatory and threatening rhetoric, the situation appears to be escalating. I can’t predict when or if something terrible will happen, only that the odds of it are going up.

Don’t lose your outrage. Threats are threats, and sooner than later some nutjob will be moved to make them real. Remember to stay close to the people in your life that matter: isolation makes fear more intense, and making people afraid is a big part of the far right playbook. 

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Investigative Reporting You’ll Want to Know About

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Massive Campaign Cheating Scheme Run by Democratic Consultants Via La Prensa. (A bit long winded for my taste, but Arturo Castañares finds documents to strongly suggest that the southern branch of San Diego’s Democratic party is a wee bit rancid.)

• The Party and the candidate campaign committees failed to properly report the names of sub-vendors who provided the unpaid printing and mailing services as required by state law, leaving the public unaware of who is really covering the hard costs for mailers that may have impacted the election outcomes.

• A review of official campaign finance reports filed by the local Democratic Party and candidates in Chula Vista, National City, and for the County Board of Supervisors reveals that several candidates who all shared the same political consultants received hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of campaign literature without paying for the materials before their elections, creating an unfair advantage over their opponents and obscuring their expenditures from the public in violation of state and local elections laws.

• Three companies all

• Three companies all worked together to execute the unpaid mailings for the Democratic Party and candidates; Grassroots Resources, Margin Victories, and TMC Direct.

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We Don’t Talk About Leonard: The Man Behind the Right’s Supreme Court Supermajority Via ProPublica

• Having reshaped the courts, Leo now has grander ambitions. Today, he sees a nation plagued with ills: “wokism” in education, “one-sided” journalism, and ideas like environmental, social and governance, or ESG, policies sweeping corporate America. A member of the Roman Catholic Church, he intends to wage a broader cultural war against a “progressive Ku Klux Klan” and “vile and immoral current-day barbarians, secularists and bigots” who demonize people of faith and move society further from its “natural order.”

• Leo has the money to match his vision. In 2021, an obscure Chicago businessman put Leo in charge of a newly formed $1.6 billion trust — the single-largest known political advocacy donation in U.S. history at the time. With those funds, Leo wants to expand the Federalist Society model beyond the law to culture and politics.

• The guests at Leo’s party in June 2022 celebrated into the night. One esteemed attendee imbibed so much he needed help to get up a set of stairs. Eventually, the guests boarded buses back to their hotel. The next morning, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization news broke: The Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. When Leo next stepped out for his regular walk, it was into a world he had remade.

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How Trump’s MAGA movement helped a 29-year-old activist become a millionaire Via the Associated Press – All about MAGA youth star Charlie Kirk

• The Make America Great Again political movement has been lucrative for Kirk, the 29-year-old CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point.

• But for all that money, the group has struggled to help Republicans win general elections. That’s particularly true in Turning Point’s adopted home of Arizona, where its slate of deeply conservative candidates in the longtime Republican stronghold lost statewide races last year, among them Kari Lake’s unsuccessful bid for governor.

• Now, as its leaders age out of the youth movement, they are attempting to leverage Turning Point’s connections and fundraising might to branch out. Ahead of the 2024 election, they are pitching a $108 million get-out-the vote campaign that would expand beyond Arizona to the swing states of Georgia and Wisconsin.

• “Any donor who thinks an organization needs $108 million for a three-state grassroots get-out-the-vote campaign is being taken advantage of,” said Erick Erickson, a nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host and frequent Trump critic. “It sounds like a grift.”