The FBI describes the group Proud Boys as an “extremist group with ties to white nationalism” in a document provided to reporters by law enforcement in the state of Washington. Read the rest

In Montana today, a federal judge said the First Amendment doesn't protect a pro-Nazi internet publisher from being sued for instructing his readers to unleash a "troll storm" that materialized in a barrage of anti-Semitic threats against a Jewish woman and her family in Whitefish. Read the rest

In news that will not surprise anyone who is Black, Latinx, Jewish, Muslim, queer, or a member of any other group targeted by hateful idiots, hate crimes in America are way up under Trump. Says who? FBI. Read the rest

President Donald Trump said today he may issue an order to deploy more troops, possibly up to 15,000, to the U.S. southern border with Mexico. Read the rest

An official with the U.S. Veterans Administration proudly displayed a lit formal portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan's first Grand Wizard, despite protestations from people who worked for him. ‘I thought it was very nice,’ he said of the official showcased art, which he is sad to have been forced to take down. Read the rest

Women-hating MRAs and Incels, Holocaust Deniers, 9/11 Truthers, and snuff video fetishists on Reddit got harder to find today. An update of Reddit's “quarantine” policy was announced on Thursday, and by Friday new content disclaimers appeared a number of the sketchier “subreddits,” including four with over 100,000 subscribers each. Read the rest

White Supremacist grifter Steve Bannon, formerly of Donald Trump's Presidential administration, has made quite the new career for himself as a lucrative speaker on the journalism and big thinker circuit. Read the rest

This guy worked for DHS. This is really bad stuff:

“Smith responded to a group dinner invitation whose host said his home would be 'judenfrei,' a German word used by the Nazis (...) to describe territory that had been 'cleansed' of Jews. Smith replied, 'They don’t call it Freitag for nothing.” Read the rest

Atlantic reporter Rosie Gray obtained emails that show a former Homeland Security employee was involved in planning social events with white supremacists, self-described racists, and 'white advocates'. The DHS response: "This type of radical ideology runs counter to the Department’s mission of keeping America safe."

Emails reveal that a former Homeland Security Official official was connected to white supremacists. Ian M. Smith has since resigned from his position at the DHS. Read the rest

A Twitter user named @bigotbasher posted a photo of a man wearing a Nazi armband on a Seattle bus, who was reportedly "harassing a black man" and "screaming in peoples' faces." This set into motion a search to find the Nazi. Less than ninety minutes later he was located and knocked out.

#AntiFascistAlert

Nazi shit head seen on D line headed to downtown #Seattle

Submitter said they were harassing a black man on the bus pic.twitter.com/ianQUnyCsC

— BabyGoose (@bigotbasher) September 17, 2017

Via Select All:

People were initially posting videos of the faces of everyone involved in the Seattle incident unblurred, potentially placing people into legal jeopardy. 4chan attempted to track down the guy who clocked Richard Spencer earlier this year (though the man they identified was, ultimately, an already-dead guy). And the horrible series of mistakes made by the amateur sleuths at Reddit after the Boston Bombing, where several innocent people were named as potential terrorists, should loom large in any discussion about broadcasting the face and location of an individual.

Twitter user @teethnclaws, when contacted over DM by Select All, says that using the internet like this is necessary. “[Fascists] already do this. The right has already murdered 27 people this year in the U.S., including one of my dear comrades. I’ve been stabbed twice by them in seven years,” he wrote. “The right is already tracking us, killing us. This is why we organize in numbers, and why we wear those scary black masks. When we are identified, we can lose our lives.

Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine black worshipers at a church in Charleston, made a show of defiance at his trial and waltzed into the hoped-for martyrdom of a death sentence. But his bravado has run out, reports The Post and Courier.

Given the ethnicity of his court-appointed federal public defenders, Alexandra Yates and Sapna Mirchandani, it is "literally impossible that they and I could have the same interests related to my case," Roof wrote.

Yates and Mirchandani were appointed after Roof was sentenced to death in January. During the trial, he often feuded with Bruck, who wanted to present evidence of mental illness and possible autism in an effort to garner Roof a life sentence.

Jose Torres and Kayla Norton terrorized a black kid's birthday party by leading a convoy of confederate-flag flying vehicles past it while shouting racial slurs and threats—and pointing a shotgun at the children. They blubbered in court Monday as a Georgia judge sentenced them to years in jail.

Channel 2 Action News spoke to a woman who was at the birthday party in 2015.

Melissa Alford said at least seven pickup trucks displaying Confederate flags pulled up on her property on Campbellton Street and their passengers were armed and threatened to “kill y’all niggers.”

"This is behavior that even supporters of the Confederate battle flag can agree is criminal and shouldn't be allowed," Douglas County District Attorney Brian Fortner said in a statement.

Norton was sentenced on one count of violating Georgia's street gang act and one count of making terroristic threats. Torres was sentenced on three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, one count of terroristic threats and one count of violating the street gang act.

Superior Court Judge William McClain gave Torres 20 years, with 13 served in prison, and Norton was given 15 years with 6 inside. Three things seem to have enhanced the community's righteous ire:

1. It was shortly after white supremacist Dylann Roof's killing of 9 black worshipers at a church in Charleston.

2. The Douglasville Police Department originally refused to arrest the people making the threats.

3. Only four of the people in the convoy were charged with serious crimes, despite there being "a dozen or more" involved. Read the rest

This would suggest that people who hide beneath white sheets while cowardly attempting to scare the rest of us are no pleasure to live with. Frank Ancona, a self-proclaimed imperial wizard of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was shot to death in his bed while sleeping. His wife and step-son have been arrested for his murder.

Via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The wife and stepson of a Missouri KKK leader who was fatally shot last week were charged Monday with his murder.

Malissa Ann Ancona, 44, and Paul Edward Jinkerson Jr., 24, were both charged with first-degree murder, tampering with physical evidence and abandonment of a corpse.

Jinkerson shot Frank Ancona, 51, on Thursday in his bedroom while he was asleep, St. Francois County Sheriff's Det. Matt Wampler wrote in the probable cause statement. Ancona's body was then taken in Jinkerson's vehicle to an area near Belgrade, Mo., where it was dumped, Wampler wrote.

When investigators searched the home Saturday, they found "extensive blood evidence" in the master bedroom of the Ancona home in Leadwood. Malissa Ancona told police in a recorded interview that Jinkerson shot her husband, and she helped clean up the blood and tried to cover up the crime, Wampler wrote.

Ancona's body was found in the Big River near Belgrade, Mo. in Washington County over the weekend.

St. Francois County Prosecuting Attorney Jerrod Mahurin declined to speculate on the motive for the crime.

Certainly this is only a single point of data but you may want to re-think marrying that white supremacist. Read the rest

The Anonymous activists behind "OpKKK" -- which infiltrated and unmasked Klan members, including many in US military and police departments -- began by creating thin-but-plausible fake identities on Facebook that signalled support for "Blue Lives Matter." By friending other accounts that indicated support for Blue Lives Matter, they found themselves being auto-suggested friendships with KKK members. Read the rest

President Donald Trump went full Alex Jones Infowars conspiracy theory wingnut today, saying the American news media are conspiring to cover up a vast series of Islamic terrorist attacks in which innocent God-fearin' Americans have been killed.

Statements like this from authoritarian leaders are the sort of thing you hear when a regime is preparing to institute martial law. Perhaps that is where America is now headed. Hope not.

Today's wackadoodle Trump camp statement was yet another nutty lie, just like Trump's long-running racist birther campaign against President Barack Obama, whom we miss terribly, please for the love of God make this descent into national insanity stop. Read the rest

It won't surprise you to learn American policing has a racism problem. It may surprise you to know that the FBI has been quietly, systematically investigating the white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement.

Alice Speri writes that there's just not much anyone in politics is willing to do about it—and an inevitable conservative-led backlash when they try—but the FBI is starting to treat local cops the way it treated hippies: as a problem worth getting its hands dirty over.

“For some reason, we have stepped away from the threat of domestic terrorism and right-wing extremism,” Jones continued. “The only way we can reconcile this kind of behavior is if we accept the possibility that the ideology that permeates white nationalists and white supremacists is something that many in our federal and law enforcement communities understand and may be in sympathy with.”

Investigation is difficult:

Although officers have been fired for expressing hateful views — sometimes to be re-hired by other departments, as happens regularly with officers accused of misconduct — some officers have also challenged those dismissals in court. Robert Henderson, an 18-year veteran of the Nebraska State Patrol, was fired when his membership in the Klan was discovered. He sued on First Amendment grounds and appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case. Last year, 14 officers in the San Francisco Police Department were caught exchanging racist and homophobic texts that included several references to “white power” and messages such as “all niggers must fucking hang.” Most of those officers remain on the force after an attempt to fire several of them was blocked by a judge, who said the statute of limitation had expired.

In an outrageous interview with the New York Times, Steve Bannon declared the press an "opposition party" and suggests it "keep its mouth shut."

Talking Points Memo shares the highlights:

Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News-chairman-turned-White-House-chief-strategist, said in a Wednesday interview that the media "is the opposition party" for President Trump and should "keep its mouth shut."

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” he said in an interview with the New York Times.

“I want you to quote this,” he said. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country."

Bannon railed against "the elite media," whose failure to predict Trump's election he called "a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away." He told the Times that no "mainstream media" journalists who reported on Trump's campaign were "fired or terminated," apparently suggesting that they should have been, and decried them as "outright activists of the Clinton campaign."

He did not name any specific members of the press in that diatribe, according to the report.

Bannon also dismissed questions about White House press secretary Sean Spicer's contentious relationship with the press. The Times noted Bannon initiated a phone call in order to talk up Spicer.

"Are you kidding me?" he told the Times. "We think that’s a badge of honor."

He singled out the Washington Post and New York Times as examples of the media outlets he said missed the Trump phenomenon, and said that the New York Times in particular should be "absolutely ashamed and humiliated" for its coverage of Trump's candidacy.