As America grapples with the effects of multiple recent acts of conservative domestic terrorism, whether it be pipe bombs to Donald Trump's most complained-about enemies or a mass murder of Jewish Americans by a white supremacist believer of the Republican-peddled theory that Jewish groups and Jewish Americans are conspiring to increase immigration to this country in a plot against the white race, the Trump White House is responding precisely as one would expect supporters of white nationalist terror to respond: by zeroing out funding on a program intended to combat those acts of terror before they happen.
Oh, and if you don't like how I phrased that last paragraph, "conservative" pundits, bite me. Every word of it is accurate.
The Trump Department of Homeland Security, led by baby prison advocate Kristjen Nielsen, is ending an Obama-era program to provide grants to groups that seek to prevent domestic terrorism by better recognizing and de-radicalizing those that would engage in it. Some of the $10 million in grants go to law enforcement, or to schools; others, to private groups that work with ex-extremists to dissuade others from following their violent path. It is a minuscule program, by federal government standards, but one can imagine America would have been glad to pay $10 million to prevent any one of the last dozen incidents of domestic terror.
Under Trump, the program had already shifted focus to exclude right-wing extremists, instead focusing on "Islamic" violence. Now it's done; it apparently won't be renewed.
Up until Tuesday, the website for the DHS Office of Terrorism Prevention Partnerships suggested that a funding announcement was upcoming but a DHS spokesperson now tells NBC News the website was out of date and changed it to remove any reference to future funding.
Again, within the last week a rabid Trump supporter mailed pipe bombs to Dear Leader's most complained-about enemies and a violent white supremacist cited an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory stoked by, among others, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump, Fox News, and the NRCC. The threat of far-right violence is not theoretical; from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, it has a body count.
But the Trump plan, the conservative plan, and the Fox News plan has been to do absolutely nothing—except to continue the very rhetoric and conspiracy-peddling that stoked such violence to begin with. Now they are doing less than nothing; they are stripping efforts to prevent such violence, rather than supporting them. And it is absolutely certain, without question, that these acts will continue.
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