Just after the mass shooting in Buffalo on May 14th where a white racist terrorist murdered 10 unarmed and mostly elderly Black citizens and nefarious killings of 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde Texas, The Guardian published an article by Ed Pilkington in the US online edition that should not get lost in the digital miasma as just another news story.
“FBI failing to address white supremacist violence, warns former special agent,” on May 20th 2022, featuring an interview with former FBI special agent Michael German, just five days before the two-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.
Pilkington's interview with German illuminates the racist, lethal triangulation between murderous white nationalist ideologues, second amendment zealots in general and US law enforcement agencies – from the local to the federal level – in assaulting Black and Brown lives from two sides. *(The demonization of Black and Brown people by the mainstream media constitutes a 4-pronged attack).
That this piece quotes from Pilkington’s article at length reflects the urgency with which Black and Brown people must absorb these words.
“..the bureau continues to underplay the scope of the threat. As a result, communities targeted by white supremacists and far-right militia groups – such as NAZIS/KKK – are left fatally exposed,' according to former FBI special agent Michael German, who'd infiltrated various white supremacist organizations in the 90s for the organization that has specifically targeted Black civil rights and human rights organizations via “counter-insurgency” program COINTELPRO, responsible for the destruction of countless Black, Brown and Native lives for five decades. German admitting FBI complacency in investigating white racist terrorists is hardly a surprise.
German said that “US law enforcement is failing, as it long has, to provide victimized communities like Buffalo's with equal protection under the law. They are not actually investigating the crimes that occur.” German also said that US law enforcement in general, and the FBI in particular, are lagging behind. Despite a clear mandate from Congress, the bureau has yet to produce statistics revealing the scale of white supremacist crimes.
“White supremacists kill far more Americans than anybody else the FBI designates as domestic terrorists, yet the bureau doesn't document the crimes and fatalities that occur...I think that's a reflection of lack of concern for the victims of that violence,” German added.
Shortly after the slaughter in Buffalo in which white supremacist Peyton Gendron slaughtered 10 mostly elderly African Americans to express his racial hatred, US Attorney General said the DoJ, another government entity that’s long failed at providing BIPOC people equal protection under the law, would treat the massacre as a “hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism.”
The FBI and DoJ both have long histories of complicity in helping known nazis and nazi collaborators acquire and live out new identities as emigre's to America.
I can’t help but be cynical when any of the acronymed feds investigate on behalf of peoples targeted by white supremacists.
As German pointed out in the Guardian piece that “both these designations – 'hate crime' and 'racially motivated violent extremism' – are problematic in terms of how they are routinely applied to white supremacist incidents. Most acts that are deemed to be hate crimes are deferred by the DoJ to state and local police for investigation, though 85% of those agencies do not recognize hate crimes as a phenomenon; police in these jurisdictions don't record or may not even investigate hate crimes, so the incident gets lost.”
Read that again.
German said that the designation ''Racially motivated violent extremism” was less than helpful as a designation as well, in that “it is a catchall in which white supremacy groups are lumped together with Black nationalists and those classified as Black identity extremists,' a term used to mislabel any Black person aware of America's racial inequalities and the violent infrastructure in place to maintain them.
According to German, “the end result is that the spotlight that should be tightly focused on the growing threat of white supremacy is diffused. Federal resources are scattered between animal rights groups, Native American Protestors, non-violent civil disobedience movements, even pro-abortion groups designated as terrorist entities, though there is no evidence such groups exist.
“Meanwhile, organized criminal groups dedicated to upholding white power fly largely beneath the radar.
“There is a dramatic contrast with the overweening surveillance that was aimed at Muslim communities after 9/11, German said. He pointed to the many telltale signs that the Buffalo suspect appears to have offered months before Saturday's attack.
“He announced a “murder/suicide” mission at his school that was later dismissed by New York State police after the white nationalist convinced them that he had been “joking”. (*Pilkington cited the Washington Post)
“German said it was puzzling that an institution like the FBI that had effectively turned itself into a counter-terrorism intelligence agency after 9/11 was, by contrast, so lax in its handling of white supremacy. “
And in the next sentence, as if to answer his own bewilderment:
“...One factor, he said, was that the FBI displays the prejudices of society writ large: we fail to recognize how foundational white supremacism is to our culture,” said German. And that “FBI agents are also overwhelmingly white and male, and the bureau has been infused with elements of white supremacist ideology stretching back for decades. German knows that from personal experience.
“When I was going undercover in the 90s I was warned about sympathy towards white supremacy among officers – that was raised as a hazard for my undercover operation.”
“In 2006 the FBI drew up an internal intelligence assessment that found that 'white supremacist presence among law enforcement personnel is a concern'. It said that organized groups were infiltrating law enforcement agencies, while individuals sympathetic to 'white supremacist causes' were also joining the ranks.
“That was 16 years ago. To this day there has been no national effort to root out the infection.” wrote Pilkington.
The infection has grown to become a contagion, endemic to the whole of US law enforcement. Because the infection goes back well past the 90s when German was a government infiltrator of white nationalist organizations. Given America's enthusiastic embrace of the violent racist and fascist principles that underpin these causes it would seem those infiltrations accomplished little to protect the lives of melanated Americans.
German assessed that the tendency by law enforcement to under-record and underestimate the scope of white supremacist criminal activity shows no signs of changing despite the scope of the Buffalo shootings and despite President Biden's assurances to the victim's families that 'hate will not prevail.'
German advised that the communities of color who are the subjects and targets hate groups “have to solve their own problems. They (we) know that law enforcement, the FBI included, treat them harshly when they are suspects and ignore them when they are victims.
German is telling us what many have already long known; The law enforcement community increasingly builds itself from a candidate pool of violent right wing extremists, up the the federal levels that many expect would would already have such extremists in check. German states in the article as much: that many FBI agents straight up hold right-wing extremist views and empathize with them at the expense of communities of color, over policed and swarmed when we defend or arm ourselves, and left hanging by law enforcement when we are in violent racists' crosshairs.
Pilkington wrote that “the invisibility of white supremacist hatred to law enforcement is reflected in those official figures that do exist...surveys based on the experiences of crime victims themselves have recorded more than 200,000 hate crime incidents each year compared to the average number of hate crime cases prosecuted by the DoJ annually –21.”
Fast forward to Texas…
Texas law enforcement reluctance to bum-rush and neutralize a non-Black assailant was on full display in Uvalde last week, and resulted in another o-so-very-American mass killing of children. Texas law enforcement literally aided and abetted 18 year-old Salvador Ramos’ hour-long massacre of schoolchildren and teachers.
Meanwhile Texas’ police and government officials are reeling after the dismal failure of the “good-guy with a gun” mythos favored by ammo-sexuals nationwide as a response to a “bad-guy with a gun’. The obfuscations, bloviations, and just outright lies emitted by Texas’ political and law enforcement leadership regarding their response to the emergency and their various versions of the events’ timeline has already become a legendary. The lies of Texas are upon us, and have done more to promote awareness of public safety alternatives to police — such as defunding and or abolition — than two years of activism since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ever could.
At the expense of 21 innocent lives Texas law enforcers did in fact enable Salvador Ramos, 18, to murder 19 children and 2 teachers. Footage of the LEOs pinning frightened and justifiably emotional parents back has gone viral; footage that shows police procrastinating, shields and heavy weaponry in hand, doing nothing as AR-15 rounds are clearly audible. It is disturbing, gut-wrenching footage, as it is the parents, family and community members who are the ones attempting to actively respond and save their children inside the elementary school building that yet another 18 year old harboring malevolence and a gun fetish, chose defenseless school children as the targets of his hate.
Rashard is self employed and white-balled by the mainstream media industrial complex. A defender of universal human rights and advocate for police abolition. Contact and PayPal donations accepted at rashard.zanders@gmail.con