The far-right political assassination in Minnesota

Kyle Kulinski is a good commentator and perceptive political analyst. He uses a bit more colorful language that I’m usually inclined to. But his quick take on the early information about the alleged assassin of the Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House is worth hearing. (The usual cautions about the early information on an event like this apply here, too.) (1)

The Independent reports:

At the time of the shootings, he was reportedly driving a black SUV with emergency lights, fully outfitted to be identical to a real police vehicle. He also wore a fake badge and full police-style uniform.

The impersonation has deeply disturbed law enforcement officials. ...

“This individual exploited the trust that comes with our uniform,” said Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson. “It’s a betrayal that strikes at the heart of public safety.”

The first shooting occurred around 2 a.m. at Sen. Hoffman’s home. He and his wife were both shot multiple times.

A short time later, around 3:30 a.m., officers responded to the Hortman residence, where a man dressed as a police officer was found at the door. When police approached, he shot Mark Hortman, fired at officers, and then ran into the home. (2)

The suspect as of this writing is someone who was a manager at a private security agency, aka, a rent-a-cop, of which the US has a large number. So he was presumably more able than the average MAGA chud of putting on a reasonable impersonation of a real cop.

Given Trump 2.0’s militarized response to protests, I can’t help but recall how bizarre the far-right gun culture is.

I could have sworn that for decades, the NRA and assorted other ammosexual types have been insisting that the Second Amendment gives people the right to own any kind of weapon they choose so that when the jackbooted thugs from the federal government show up – or when white people somehow feel vaguely threatened by seeing somebody they think looks like they might be black or Latino or Asian – they have the right to gun them down, no questions asked.

Castle doctrine! Stand your ground! All freedom depends on unlimited proliferation of small arms with no regulations!

So, imagine my surprise when I looked at the website of the National Rifle Association and there was not a word about the President federalizing the California National Guard or even preparing to send Marines to shoot American citizens protesting against, well, illegal raids by ICE goons wearing masks, not wearing badges or police uniforms, often refusing to even identify themselves as law enforcement, and generally acting like, well, jackbooted thugs.

Imagine that! It couldn’t be that NRA was just trying to maximize weapons sales by gun manufacturers, could it? Surely they couldn’t be that cynical and hypocritical, could they?

The reality of the far-right paramilitary culture is very different in actual practice from their rhetoric about defending your home against break-ins.

Notes:

(1) Major Breaking: Pro-Trump T*rrorist k*lls Minnesota Dems: Israel Attack Iranian Oil. (Presumably he uses the *’s to avoid being screened out on some searches.) Secular Talk YouTube channel 06/14/2025. <https://youtu.be/qe8Y8cbIOBM?si=nOSnx6860u3Kd-N-> (Accessed: 2025-14-06),

(2) Two Minnesota lawmakers gunned down and manifesto discovered: what we know about the ‘politically motivated’ shooting. The Independent 06/15/2025. <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/melissa-hortman-shooting-brooklyn-park-minnesota-b2770176.html> (Accessed: 2025-14-06),

Law enforcement needs to take far-right terrorism more seriously - but not with a failed "War on Terror" framework

"A War on Terror modeled after the post-9/11 response would probably be not just ineffective but disastrous," writes Dave Neiwert. (As Biden tries to tackle white-supremacist terrorism, he should steer clear of any ‘War on Terror’ Daily Kos 01/22/2021)

Dave has been an advocate for more serious attention to the problems of far-right terrorism for years. But as he explains again in this piece, even after years of far-right, non-Islamic terrorism being far more of a problem than "radical Islamic terrorism," to use one of the Republicans' favorite magic conjuring phrases, law enforcement is still plagued by the problem of being blind in the right eye, not least because some in law enforcement as active sympathizers of the far right. And, of course, the obvious white racism in law enforcement nationwide means that many of them are unlikely to regard the white supremacy that is a core orientation for the far right.

This piece draws heavily on two other recent articles: Spencer Ackerman's Biden Taps a War on Terror Veteran to Stop White Supremacists Daily Beast 01/21/2021 and No, We Do Not Need New Anti-Terrorism Laws to Combat Right-Wing Extremists 01/11/2021.

What they all stress is that the central problem of fighting far-right terrorism has not been the lack of laws, but the lack of focus on the problem. Bayoumi writes:

While the USA Patriot Act did redefine terrorism to include its domestic variety, it did not create a specific set of penalties for such acts. Instead, prosecutors can use many of the broad terrorism laws that are on the books to prosecute acts of domestic terror (the majority of which have been committed by far-right actors). The problem is, they simply don’t. (my emphasis)

The milieu of domestic white-supremacist terrorism is very different from that of Islamist terrorism, including the nature of foreign connections that may be involved. To use Democrats' current favorite foreign enemy Russia as an example, Russia does encourage and subsidize far-right movements and groups in foreign countries, but aren't so likely to subsidize radical Islamic jihadist groups. Although our common terminology that distinguishes "far-right" from "Islamic" terrorism is a bit murky, because in terms of political ideology, jihadist Islamism can also legitimately be described as far right in terms of its authoritarianism and cultural politics.

For that matter, if there actually are far-left terrorist groups active in the US (if there are any, they are staying well concealed!), that would also be a distinct political and cultural environment than those of white-supremacist far-right or violent Islamist groups.

But the nearly 20-year-long War on Terror has been almost exclusively focused in practice on Islamist groups. And in the real world, there is a lot of ideological and organizational inertia to do more of what they've been doing in the past. As Bayoumi puts it:

[A] terrorism double standard exists. And the double standard is deeply entrenched both in our laws and in our broader culture. Left unexamined, this same double standard feeds off of its own bigoted limitations and assumptions and grows like yeast in a warm oven. One result of this is the discourse we’re now all familiar with: White guy shooters get labeled as angry or desperate or losers, while Muslim shooters are defined as terrorists. The former are examined as troubled individuals. The latter no longer belong to humanity.

Ackerman's report focused on a key Biden appointee, Russ Travers, as deputy Homeland Security adviser in the White House. Travers "has marinated in the War on Terror," he writes.

But some worry that it will be natural—indeed, human—for Travers to apply his post-9/11 experience to far-right and white-supremacist terror. That would be a disaster, they warn, both for the Constitution and for success. With debate underway amongst Democrats over new domestic terrorism statutes, the path Biden chooses is likely to define his early tenure as president.

“War-on-terrorism tactics aren't the solution to our current problems. In many ways, they are a cause of them,” said Michael German, a retired FBI special agent who arrested white supremacists in the 1990s, and who spoke generically and not about Travers particularly.

Dave Neiwert makes the following key pointss: (1) US law-enforcment needs to take far-right domestic terrorism much more seriously; (2) there is a vigorous legal framework already in place to investigate and prosecute far-right terrorist groups, though the statutes on domestic terrorism may be murky in some ways; (3) the central problem is that white supremacist attitudes are deeply ingrained in law enforcement agencies, a bias that strongly favors permissive treatment for far-right criminals; and, (4) "the War on Terror has in fact failed."

I don't know if there may be some changes to the law that might be needed to combat the kind of insurrectionist groups behind the January 6 Capitol riot. But it's the responsibility of our representatives in Congress to scrutinize laws carefully for necessity, effectiveness, and protection of civil liberties and due process. Congress and the Biden-Harris Administration should definitely not use this as an opportunity to pass a wishlist of new measures without regard to the actual problems.

And, new laws or not, what Dave Neiwert writes here is critically important:

It’s not credible to expect our national law-enforcement apparatus to respond effectively to far-right domestic terrorism when its ranks are full of people sympathetic to their cause. So any effective solution to dealing with the spread of domestic terrorism will necessarily be wrapped up in the similarly major issue of larger police reform, which should probably begin with a focused effort on weeding out extremists within their ranks.

It also should emphasize providing training for officers to recognize, investigate, and prevent both hate crimes and domestic-terrorist acts — which has long been recognized as a significant factor in the ongoing problem of under-enforcement of hate-crimes laws. In the process, it is likely to create forces that are more attuned to the challenges facing communities of color and vulnerable minorities.

In general, an effective response to domestic terrorism will need to emphasize a ground-level response that engages local and state forces in the work, rather than placing the enforcement eggs in a top-heavy federal apparatus that responds slowly to conditions on the ground and usually becomes bureaucratically calcified in very little time. A War on Terror modeled after the post-9/11 response would probably be not just ineffective but disastrous. [my emphasis]

He also cites these two articles by Michael German, both prior to the Capitol attack: Why New Laws Aren't Needed to Take Domestic Terrorism More Seriously Just Security 12/14/2020 and Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement Brennan Center 08/27/2020.

More on law-enforcement and the Nashvile Christmas Day not-a-suicide-bomber who deliberately killed himself during a bombing

The story of the guy who blew himself up in his RV in downtown Nashvile in from of an AT&T building with bombs he'd been building in his back yard for apparently at least a year is emerging in more detail. We're not even a week out from the Christmas Day explosion in which the bomber killed himself that the press is so reluctant to call either a suicide bombing or a terrorist act.

The Nashville police are scrambling to explain why nobody made any mistakes when the guy's girlfriend and former lawyer gave them what turned out to be an accurate report about Mr. Not-A-Suicide-Bomber building a bunch of bombs in his RV. If they get enough heat, they'll probably find some civilian in their communications department whose boss doesn't especially like them anyway, fire him or her, then tell the public they fired someone responsible but can't say anything about it because it's a personnel matter. (Natalie Allison and Mariah Timms, Did Nashville police do enough to try to search bomber's home in 2019? Experts weigh in Nashville Tennessean 12/30/2020)

NBC News is reporting on one aspect of the investigation into the non-terrorism-non-suicide-bombing bombing. (Tom Winter et al, Feds probing whether Nashville bomber believed in lizard people conspiracy 12/30/2020)

It's important to remember it normally takes a while for incidents like this to be clarified, that we may never have explicit documentation of the not-a-suicide-bomber's motives, and the coulda-shoulda questions always involved some judgment. But this story is a reminder of an important point about US law enforcement's general neglect of the real danger of far-right terrorism from white guys:

[I]nvestigators are looking into the suspect’s previous trips to an undisclosed location in Tennessee where he would camp out in his recreational vehicle and, according to the suspect’s statements to others, hunt possible aliens, the officials said.

In addition, investigators are aware of statements the suspect made about an internet conspiracy that powerful politicians and Hollywood figures are actually lizards or other reptiles who have extraterrestrial origins and are taking over society, the officials said.

Which makes this story is a reminder of what "hate crimes" laws are actually designed to do, a large part of which is to educate local law enforcement to know what it is they are seeing and hearing.

The lizard-people-from-outer-space thing is something that has been promoted by Alex Jones, a popular broadcaster among the lunatic right. (Bob Cesca, Alex Jones Pretends to Be a Lizard Man from Space In Epic Display of Insanity Daily Banter 02/17/2016)

If the Nashville cops had taken the bomb report in 2019 seriously enough to actually find a way to talk to the guy - cops can usually do that if they want to - he might have told them he was worried because the world is being taken over by Demucrat lizard-people space-alien commonists. And if they had known that such talk particularly appeals to people in the violent white supremacist scene, they *might* have done a bit more checking. But he was some white guy with an Amurcan-sounding name, so maybe not.

Allison and Timms also report this statement by Memphis FBI spokesperson Joel Siskovic:

"The FBI does not make a practice of investigating and looking into individuals absent criminal charges, criminal allegations," Siskovic said. "So, I can't get too far into how our system works, but basically if there had been any reason to believe that there was a crime, specifically a federal crime, then we would have taken further steps."

So, is the FBI saying it's not a federal crime to build bombs in your RV in your back yard? Or that it's not a crime for white guys to do it? The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) seems to think it is, according to their official Fact Sheet-Illegal Explosive Devices dated May 2019: "Under federal explosives law, it is illegal to engage in the business of manufacturing explosives without a license; to improperly store explosives; to sell or distribute explosives to any person who does not hold an ATF license or permit."

A final thought on what we call terrorism. The definition does change over time. It does make some sense to take motives into account. But legal and popular understandings may diverge. A gang shooting with multiple casualties or family murder-suicides are horrible and tragic and deadly. But those aren't typically treated as terrorism in the press, nor do I think they should be. In the case of the Nashville bomber, that looks to me like an act of terror, i.e., an act meant to terrorize a lot of people, including the targeting of an important local communications center.

In any case, police and law enforcement should not be "blind in the right eye" when it comes to politically or religiously based terrorism. Including screening out cops who are found to support far-right violence-oriented groups.

Nashville cops on suicide bomber back in 2019: He's got an RV full of bombs? Aw, don't worry about it, it's probably no big deal

This is an amazing story on how the Nashville Metro police handled the white guy who blew himself up in an RV in downtown Nashville in a huge explosion but mainstream news outlets don’t want to call him either a “terrorist” or a “suicide bomber”. Even though he killed himself with explosives in a location designed to take out communications in the area and, uh, terrorize the entire city. (Ben Hall, Anthony Warner's girlfriend warned police he was building bombs in his RV last year News Channel 5 Nashville 12/29/2020) See also: Natalie Allison, Girlfriend warned Nashville police Anthony Warner was building bomb a year ago, report shows Nashville Tennessean 12/30/2020

Here's how the owner of a business in the affected area describes the we-don't-call-it-terrorism attack (Rachel and Mariah Timms, 'It's like war': Residents, business owners get first look at damage in Nashville bombing 12/30/2020):

Segroves Bergeron, a Nashville-based photographer and art curator, runs Studio 208, a gallery and art show room at 208 Third Avenue North in Nashville, just a block away from the site of a Christmas morning bombing that shook the city.

On Tuesday, she was one of dozens of residents and business owners allowed to retrieve needed supplies and assess the damage to their property that's been behind an investigative perimeter since Friday.

“I’ve been fortunate to never have to be in a war zone so I can’t be sure this is what it would be like, but it feels like war, it feels eerie, it feels surreal,” she said. “Everyone’s faces are dazed. The crew, the police, FBI, everyone. Just dazed and tired.”

The Channel 5 report is also a great example of why initial police statements on their own performance should be taken with a lot of skepticism. An event like this is a big PR opportunity for police departments to show off their bravery and heroism and remind people how glad they should be to have them around.

It's worth mentioning here that it's still early, so some of the details may vary. The Channel 5 report may give the impression that the girlfriend and the attorney were at the bomber's house when the cops showed up. But in the Natalie Allison, it sounds like the police spoke to the two of them at a separate house. And in that story, the attorney also says in the Natalie Allison story that he hadn't been the guy's attorney for a while.

We even had a story from one of the cops on the scene Christmas morning that he “literally” (his word) heard God tell him to turn around and walk away from the direction of the RV just before it exploded. Which would be entertaining in a "testimony" in a conservative church. But my first thought was, let me get this straight: the Nashville police department has an officer walking around with a gun and a license to kill who says publicly that he can “literally” hear a voice in his head that he knows is the voice of God?

Except now, a few days later, we find out that in August a year ago, the heroic and vigilant Nashville police were at the we-don’t-call-him-a-suicide-bomber’s house based on a call from the bomber’s girlfriend who was there and told them that the guy was building bombs in the RV setting right there in his yard. Funny, I’m pretty sure the cops were saying just a couple of days ago that, gee, we had no idea there was anything threatening about the guy. "Warner wasn’t on the radar of law enforcement before Friday’s explosion, ["authorities"] said, and officials have declined to deem the bombing an act of terrorism." (Natalie Allison, Anthony Quinn Warner, self-employed computer guru ID'd as lone Nashville bomber, killed in blast Nashville Tennessean 12/27/2020)

The bomber’s OWN ATTORNEY was on the scene and told the cops he thought her story about the bombs was credible. So they knocked on the house door a couple of times and the guy didn’t respond. They looked at the RV from outside the fence it was in and claimed they didn’t see anything suspicious. I guess if it doesn’t have BOMB FACTORY painted on the outside, it’s not worth the trouble.

So, they left to go to the donut shop or wherever. They filed a request for records with the FBI, who responded they had no information on him. (Don’t be surprised if we later hear the FBI had several gigabytes of data on him.)

To understand how problematic this is, we just have to imagine if they were out in a black neighborhood on a call like this. Or if the girlfriend and attorney had told the cops the guy's real name was something “Muslim-sounding” name like Hasan al-Bomba. Would they have even bothered to get a warrant before they sent a SWAT team to bust through the door?

This is a nationwide problem that authorities just don’t take white terrorism seriously enough, even though for years most deaths from terrorist attacks in the US have been due to far-right groups with some more-or-less white supremacist political ideology.

Lots of people (not just conservatives) claim to be upset by the protest slogan “Defund the Police”. But cops who get a credible complaint about a guy who’s going bonkers from the guy’s girlfriend and the man’s own attorney but just say, “Well, the girlfriend sounds kind of hysterical, it's probably her time of the month or something. And this is a white guy, so he’s probably just a good ole boy who ain’t really causing no trouble” – we shouldn’t be paying public money for that kind of cops.

Cops who say publicly that they are following orders from a “literal” voice in their head that they know is God's – nah, “defunding” cops like that sounds like a good idea, too. Police PR departments who put top priority on staging their officers as heroes immediately after a horrible terrorist attack but cheerfully try to avoid accountability for their own fecklessness about the perpetrator? No, that’s probably not the best use of public funds, either.

Trump and the s-word (sedition)

Trump's clown coup has reached the stage of huddling with his most loony associates to desperately plot a military coup. While it's highly improbable that he can pull off such a thing at this point, what he's attempting is serious and is likely to have not only very politically disruptive effects but also increases the likelihood of far-right violence in the coming months and years. And it sets some terrible legal precedents if he gets aware with it without legal accountability.

Mehdi Hasan recently address the far-right terrorist problem in How Will the Biden Admin. Tackle the Growing Threat of Domestic Terror? The Choice 12/22/2020:

Historian Sean Wilentz made the case that Donald has been committing literal sedition in The Sedition of Donald Trump Rolling Stone 10/11/2020:

Trump’s racist rhetoric and shout-outs to white nationalists have cleaved the nation in two, driving political polarization with an intensity not seen since the Civil War. His explicit encouragement of violence and armed demonstrations has menaced the rule of law. His brazen attempt to shake down the president of Ukraine (“Do us a favor, though”), in order to manufacture dirt against his chief political opponent — the event that triggered Trump’s impeachment — almost surely would have led to his removal from office but for the cynicism, cowardice, and partisanship of the Senate Republican majority. His amply documented obstruction of justice in connection with the Russia investigation — 10 offenses, according to the Mueller report; the corruption of his office to enrich himself and his family in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause; his purposeful sabotage of the First Amendment by demonizing the free press as enemies of the people — all this and more add up to not just the worst performance of any American president, but the most subversive conduct since Jefferson Davis, who was not a president of the United States.

Trump’s subversion is an immediate existential crisis for American democracy, the worst since the Civil War. He has deliberately tried to discredit and delegitimize democracy itself. By repeatedly trashing the upcoming election as rigged and corrupt, raising baseless wild charges about voting by mail, Trump has poisoned the political wells. By instructing the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic Proud Boys to “stand back” and “stand by,” and instructing his goon squads to descend on the polls to intimidate voters, he has openly called for disrupting the election. By refusing to pledge to a peaceful transition of power should he lose the election, Trump has revealed his plan for a coup d’etat, with the connivance and unswerving support of the Republican Party. [my emphasis]

Wilentz' article was three weeks before the election on November 3, so some of the things he talks about we know what happened with them. But he correctly describes what was almost certainly Trump's main coup strategy:

Should Trump fall short, as current polls show him doing, then his campaign, against the backdrop of civil chaos, would try and throw the election into either the House of Representatives, where the GOP controls the majority of states and thus the outcome, or the courts, where they can expect that, eventually, the Supreme Court, packed with his appointees and other right-wingers, will simply declare Trump the winner. Complicit GOP leaders and officeholders would absolve themselves of responsibility by throwing up their hands and saying the law, then, must be followed, knowing full well the final decision had been politically preordained. The Republican theft of the presidency in 2000 would look like a dry run for the overthrow of American democracy in 2020. [my emphasis]

In describing Attorney General Bill Barr, Wilentz also reminds us of another important precedent for official impunity for serious crimes by the Executive Branch, the Iran-Contra affair:

Barr seemed to be what is approvingly called in Washington an institutionalist, meaning in this case the type of conventional GOP operator who privately loathed Trump. What most observers had forgotten is that back in 1992, Barr had helped successfully shut down once and for all the investigation of the Iran-Contra scandal that for a time had threatened to topple Ronald Reagan and to upset George H.W. Bush. Now Barr was about to go to full-scale war in the service of Donald Trump — and his own ideas about America as a degenerate liberal culture in need of a right-wing judiciary and an autocratic president. [my emphasis]

Wilentz calls attention to this particular action of Trump's that he sees as sedition:

Trump’s summons to militias began long before his callout to the Proud Boys. “Liberate Michigan,” the president tweeted in all caps in April, when rifle-toting MAGA troops shut down the state’s Legislature over Michigan’s Covid restrictions.

These two words were seditious in the most exact sense, a president instructing armed American citizens to attack their own government. His acts amounted to an assault by the president himself on the Constitution’s clause that guarantees states “a Republican Form of Government,” including against “domestic violence.” And chillingly, they may well have encouraged, if not incited, the right-wing militia plot, now revealed by the FBI, to kidnap Michigan’s governor Gretchen Whitmer, storm the state capitol, and overthrow the state government. (In character, Trump the inflamer reacted to news of the plot by attacking Whitmer as an ingrate who has done “a terrible job” on Covid.) Yet Trump’s April tweet — perhaps the most literally subversive utterance by any president in our history — has proven to be but a forecast of the grander subversion taking place right now. [my emphasis]

He also uses this characterization of the variants of authoritarianism on the Republican menu during Trump's Presidency: "Trump, for his part, would prefer a kind of Putin-like kleptocracy. Barr’s vision, if you can call it that, is an Americanized version of something more akin to Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Spain."

I should state here what I take to be obvious, which is that since the Civil War, sedition laws have been used far more often against dissident groups on the left than on the right. The earliest major effort to suppress freedom of speech and the press after the Constitution took effect were the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. "The Sedition Act (July 14 [1797]) banned the publishing of false or malicious writings against the government and the inciting of opposition to any act of Congress or the president." (Britannica Online 01/17/2020)

But even though they were used against the left, including against Thomas Jefferson's new Democratic-Republican Party, Alexander Hamilton's party (though not Hamilton himself) later at least heavily flirted with (pro-British) sedition around the War of 1812.

But even after the election of 1800 which Jefferson won, some influential High Federalists did conspiracy to keep John Adams in the White House despite losing. So rightwing sedition around a Presidential election is not a Trump innovation. Jefferson's biographer Dumas Malone describes a key face-to-face negotiation with Adams during the crisis. Showing how different things were in those days, Malone writes that Jefferson "afterwards said that he conversed with John Adams about the state of affairs when he chanced to meet the President walking on Pennsylvnia Avenue." (my emphasis)

But one could plausibly speculate that the conversation was a bit more formal than, "Hey, John, fancy bumping into you here! If you've got a moment, let's chat a bit about the coup your party is planning to block me from taking office." Since the substance of the conversation as Malone relates it basically came down to: Look, John. Our side has more state militia forces on our side than yours do. And we will use them to restore the results of the election if push comes to shove with what you guys are doing.

Sasha Abramsky offers a more current take on the Trump sedition issue in Trump Is Guilty of Sedition and Must Be Brought to Justice The Nation 12/22/2020. "In increasingly specific language, Trump and his band of traitors are advocating some combination of martial law, national emergency, and paramilitarism as a way to cling to power."