Attention to the Unseen

Wired reports: Within an hour after a horrific knife attack took place in Belfast on Monday night, far-right UK activist Tommy Robinson had shared a video of the incident on X, a post that racked up 6 million views. Within hours Elon Musk, the owner of the platform, weighed in, agreeing with a post calling for “consequences” for politicians. By Tuesday morning, supercharged by X, the video was everywhere, and groups on Facebook were organizing protests across Northern Ireland and…

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Wired reports: On Saturday morning, as hundreds of far-right activists and lawmakers from across Europe gathered outside a conference center in the central Portuguese town of Figueira da Foz, a group of half a dozen men dressed in identical uniforms of khaki chinos, dark blue shirts, and sunglasses marched into the parking lot. On the lapels of their jackets, some wore the red and blue circular emblem of Patriot Front, the US white-supremacist group formed in the wake of the…

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CNN reports: White supremacists will remain the most “persistent and lethal threat” in the United States through 2021, according to Department of Homeland Security draft documents. The most recent draft report predicts an “elevated threat environment at least through” early next year, concluding that some US-based violent extremists have capitalized on increased social and political tensions in 2020. Although foreign terrorist organizations will continue to call for attacks on the US, the report says, they “probably will remain constrained in…

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Peter Baker writes: After a summer when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets protesting racial injustice against Black Americans, President Trump has made it clear over the last few days that, in his view, the country’s real race problem is bias against white Americans. Just days after returning from Kenosha, Wis., where he staunchly backed law enforcement and did not mention the name of Jacob Blake, the Black man shot seven times in the back by the…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump routinely referred to Black leaders of foreign nations with racist insults. He had an abiding admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin’s willingness to treat Russia like a personal business. And he was consumed with hatred for President Barack Obama. Those are the descriptions that Michael D. Cohen, a former personal lawyer and self-described fixer for Mr. Trump, lays out in his book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” which paints the president as a sordid, moblike…

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Thomas B. Edsall writes: The center-right political coalition in America — the Republican Party as it stands today — can be described as holding two overarching goals: First, deregulation and reductions in corporate and other tax liabilities — each clearly stated on the White House website — and second, but packing a bigger punch, the preservation of the status quo by stemming the erosion of the privileged status of white Christian America. For those who want confirmation of Republican accomplishments…

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Yahoo News reports: The former head of the National Counterterrorism Center said he would not be surprised if right-wing domestic terrorist groups stage attacks in the United States around this November’s presidential election. “It certainly wouldn’t surprise me, particularly if the administration loses,” said Russ Travers, who was the center’s acting director when he was fired by President Trump’s hand-picked acting director of national intelligence. Trump, who is behind in all national polls, has repeatedly claimed that the expected widespread…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: Black American identity within the United States emerges from the interaction between structures of oppression — slavery, the slave trade and race hierarchy — and the needs and goals of those enmeshed within them. Slavery bound African captives together into a group; the desire to assert their personhood — to build community, to find respite, to resist — was cause to adopt a common identity. In turn, that common identity gave those individuals and their descendants a…

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Will white people’s participation in Black Lives Matter protests yield real change? Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images By Candis Watts Smith, Pennsylvania State University The first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, which crested after the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, had the support of less than half of white Americans. Given that Americans tend to have a very narrow definition of racism, many at that time were likely confused by the juxtaposition of Black-led…

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