Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Our squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question our authority at every turn. I expected that. What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men. The first sign […]
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When detectives from the New York Police Department’s intelligence bureau arrested Jose Pimentel on Nov. 20, 2011, he was in a Washington Heights apartment putting the finishing touches on a pipe bomb he was building in an Al Qaeda-inspired plot to attack military and police targets in the city. On March 22, 2017, James Harris […]
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Two years ago this week, hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Va., under the pretense of protesting the city’s decision to remove a monument to Robert E. Lee from a public park. They were joined by old-guard white supremacists like David Duke, and before they were through, a young man, inspired […]
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A decade ago, Daryl Johnson, then a senior terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, wrote a report about the growing danger of right-wing extremism in America. Citing economic dislocation, the election of the first African-American president and fury about immigration, he concluded that “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells […]
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Early Monday, 8chan, the anonymous message board where the man accused of carrying out the El Paso massacre posted his manifesto, went offline. The man most responsible for the outage wasn’t Jim Watkins, 8chan’s owner, or his son Ronald, the message board’s administrator. Instead, the decision to take 8chan offline, at least temporarily, fell largely […]
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At campaign rallies before last year’s midterm elections, President Trump repeatedly warned that America was under attack by immigrants heading for the border. “You look at what is marching up, that is an invasion!” he declared at one rally. “That is an invasion!” Nine months later, a 21-year-old white man is accused of opening fire […]
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Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call alerted authorities to a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online. It spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners. […]
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LOS ANGELES — A pitched leadership battle is taking place inside one of the country’s oldest neo-Nazi groups. On one side, a true believer is pushing to attract new members and expand the ranks. On the other, a black former Baptist preacher is hoping to destroy the hate-spewing group from the inside. James Hart Stern, […]
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WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday demonstrated the limited influence of allies or advisers who try to steer him away from pre-election racial and cultural fights. He walked back his disavowal of a racially loaded chant at a campaign rally less than 24 hours after making it. Acquiescing to behind-the-scenes pressure from nervous Republican lawmakers […]
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WASHINGTON — When President Trump defended neo-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, one of his top aides took the rare step of publicly condemning what he said. Gary D. Cohn, who served as his top economic adviser at the time, said in an interview with The Financial Times that “this administration can and must […]
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James Fields Jr., the white supremacist who murdered a woman two summers ago when he steered a Dodge Challenger into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., was sentenced Friday to life in federal prison, The Associated Press reported. Lawyers for Mr. Fields, 22, had pleaded for mercy, citing his difficult childhood and mental […]
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EVERETT, Wash. — Dakota Reed’s mind brimmed with thoughts of mass murder. In November, he wrote on Facebook, “I am shooting for 30 Jews.” The next month, he uploaded a video of himself in his bedroom of his mother’s Seattle-area home proudly displaying new gun sights he had mounted on his AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle. White […]
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