Beto O’Rorke is rightfully getting praise for his “what the f*ck” moment, slamming the majority of the press for failing to cover the president’s racist, violence inciting rhetoric for what it is.
There is a much bigger failing, however, that even the best publications are not entirely innocent of. That is the failure to point out the systematic policy decisions by the Trump administration to reduce the ability of the federal government to prevent domestic terrorist attacks and the message those decisions are sending to white supremacists.
It goes back to the beginning of 2017, when the Trump administration announced it would focus the Countering Violent Extremism program exclusively on Islamic extremism and eliminate efforts to fight white supremacist violence, freezing the grants to prevent funds going to organizations that weren’t exclusively focused on Islamic extremism while they changed the criteria. Later, the Trump administration would try to eliminate the Countering Violent Extremism program entirely.
Then, just this year, the Trump administration eliminated the domestic terrorism intelligence unit in the Department of Homeland Security, causing important intelligence law enforcement depends on to prevent domestic terrorism to dry up completely.
The Trump administration has also eliminated the ability of the FBI to track white supremacist violence by mixing white supremacist statistics in with all other “racially-motivated” extremism despite Trump-appointed FBI Director Wray’s testimony that “a majority of the domestic terrorism cases we’ve [the FBI] investigated are motivated by some version of what you might call white supremacist violence”.
Congressional Republicans are just as active enabling terrorist attacks. Since 2017, the Republican Senate under Mitch McConnell has sat on a bill to create intelligence-sharing and domestic terrorism offices in the federal government. The bill was re-introduced earlier this year with 20 sponsors, all of which are Democrats and has yet to see any action since its introduction.
It’s time for the press to connect the damn dots. This is not an accident or unavoidable tragedy, it is the natural consequence of Republican policies intended to block law enforcement from fighting domestic terrorism.
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