With the Republican Party increasingly taking political positions - pandering to bigots might be a more apt description - that are anti-immigrant, anti-minority, and anti-government one has to wonder if white supremacy is going mainstream. It certainly seems to be doing so in Virginia under the Republican Party of Virginia even if moronic voters choose to only hear the no tax mantra that is about all that emanates from most GOP candidates. Newsweek has a lengthy piece that focuses on the under cover activities of an aging FBI informant. It's worth a read and it is pretty frightening that the mindset of anti-government violence exposed by the informant's work is going increasingly mainstream in the GOP. This is something that needs to be exposed and stopped. Here are some article highlights:
Matthews’s story, which Newsweek verified through hundreds of FBI documents and several dozen interviews, including conversations with current and former FBI officials, offers a rare glimpse into the murky world of domestic intelligence, and the bureau’s struggles to combat right-wing extremism.
Since President Obama’s election, the number of right-wing extremist groups—a term that covers a broad array of dissidents ranging from white supremacists to antigovernment militias—has mushroomed from 149 to 824, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alabama-based civil-rights group.
“What we’re seeing today is a resurgence,” says Daryl Johnson, the former senior domestic terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security. In 2009, the department issued a report warning that “right-wing extremism is likely to grow in strength.” And because today’s extremists, unlike their predecessors, have at their disposal online information—bomb-making instructions and terrorist tactics—as well as social-networking tools, the report said, “the consequences of their violence [could be] more severe.”
The report, which was quickly withdrawn after an outcry from conservatives, seemed prescient months later when an 88-year-old gunman opened fire on visitors at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Last year, nine members of the Hutaree, a Christian militia, were arrested in a plot to kill police officers in Michigan.
“These people are just plain crazy,” Matthews says. “If they don’t like you, they [would] take you out to have you shot. They don’t care. These people think that if they overthrew the government they’d make a better world. Their world would be a total nightmare.”
At the behest of his FBI handlers, Matthews—a wire often down his pants and a pistol in his shoulder holster—traveled across the country with Posey and others, attending dance parties with the Ku Klux Klan, selling weapons at truck stops and gas stations, sitting in church pews with would-be abortion-clinic bombers, and becoming a regular at gun shows and in paramilitary compounds. Extremist leaders were his frequent guests, sometimes staying the night, and hosted him when he traveled from home. “That’s how well trusted I was. We was one big happy family,” Matthews recalls. It turned out that he was good at his job.
Through Posey, Matthews met—and monitored—a who’s who of the militia movement. One of Posey’s cohorts in Arizona, for instance, planned to attack IRS agents with a homemade mortar gun. For months, Matthews traveled the country with this man, sharing motel rooms with him and networking with other right-wing extremists: “I’m out driving around with explosives in my truck, sleeping at nighttime with a .45 in my pillow because this guy I’m with is a total wacko,” Matthews says.
Posey began having dreams, he told Matthews at the time, that God was directing him to lead a movement to overthrow the U.S. government. He revived his plan to rob the Browns Ferry armory in Alabama, and simultaneously ramped up a plot to take out gas and power lines nearby. For his part, Matthews was increasingly eager to intervene, although he knew that as an informant there was little he could do.
Despite hundreds of hours of recorded conversations, as well as video and personal surveillance, the district attorney’s office had chosen to prosecute Posey and his cohorts only for buying and selling the stolen goggles. A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Northern District of Alabama said there had been insufficient evidence for anything else. . . . In the end, Posey was sentenced to just two years in prison and fined $20,000.
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