U.S. Suboptimal COVID-19 Response | Mystery Drones over Nuke Plants | Extremists & Climate Change, and more

U.S. Accuses Hezbollah of Stockpiling Weapons and Ammonium Nitrate Across Europe (Julian Borger, Guardian)
State Department’s Nathan Sales says group ‘represents clear and present danger to the US’ and urges Europe to take tougher line

FBI Director Says Antifa Is an Ideology, Not an Organization (Eric Tucker and Ben Fox, AP)
FBI Director Chris Wray told lawmakers Thursday that antifa is an ideology, not an organization, delivering testimony that puts him at odds with President Donald Trump, who has said he would designate it a terror group.
Wray did not dispute in his testimony Thursday that antifa activists were a serious concern, saying that antifa was a “real thing” and that the FBI had undertaken “any number of properly predicated investigations into what we would describe as violent anarchist extremists,” including into individuals who identify with antifa.
But, he said, “It’s not a group or an organization. It’s a movement or an ideology.”

Wray: Racially Motivated Violent Extremism Makes Up Most of FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Cases (Olivia Beavers, The Hill)
FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers Thursday that racially motivated violent extremism cases account for the bulk of the bureau’s work on domestic terrorist threats.
Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee, Wray also said most of the racially motivated cases deal with white supremacists.
“Within the domestic terrorism bucket, the category as a whole, racially motivated violent extremism is, I think, the biggest bucket within that larger group. And within the racially motivated violent extremist bucket, people subscribing to some kind of white supremacist-type ideology is certainly the biggest chunk of that,” he said.
“Lately we’ve been having about 1,000 domestic terrorism cases each year. It is higher this year,” Wray added. “I know we’ve had about 120 arrests for domestic terrorism this year.”

Transnational White Supremacist Militancy Thriving in South Africa (John Campbell, Foreign Affairs)
As white supremacist militancy has raced across the Western world, it has not spared South Africa from being swept up in the chaos. Domestic South African white supremacist movements both inform white supremacist movements elsewhere, and at the same time are influenced by global trends on the extreme right.
South Africa, of course, has its own long—and painful—history of white supremacism. The formal apartheid system, which governed the country for over 40 years, institutionally oppressed the Black population, concentrating political, economic, and judicial power exclusively in white hands. Since the 1990s, when apartheid finally collapsed, race relations have remained raw, and the white population still holds much of the economic capital. The country remains one of the world’s premier examples of the postcolonial challenges in managing racial tensions and promoting a sustainable national identity in a democratic context with the rule of law.

Terrorist Prisoners Hit Record High in British Jails amid Warnings of Radicalization (Lizzie Dearden, Independent)
Four alleged terror attacks have been carried out by serving or released inmates in the past year

How Far-Right Extremists Are Using the Climate Crisis to Go Mainstream (Brian Kahn, Gizmodo)
Oregon has been a hot bed of far-right activity for years, but the wildfires have cast the militias in a new light. Misinformation has been rampant as unprecedented fires lit up the state. False rumors of “antifa” igniting fires and coming to loot people’s homes have raced across Facebook. It’s an escalation of fringe ideologies to try and usurp power in chaos and shows another avenue the far-right could use the climate crisis for violent ends.
The right’s relationship with climate change is complicated. Rampant climate denial has been the norm for more than a decade, and any attempts at climate action have faced vehement opposition. In Oregon, state senators ran away to block quorum on a pretty milquetoast cap-and-trade bills. Twice. Militias offered their help, and at least one state senator threatened violence once Gov. Kate Brown dispatched the police to look for the legislators on the lam.
Another emergent ideology, known as ecofascism, takes the warnings of the climate crisis at face value and twists them to violent, exclusionary ends. The alleged shooters who perpetrated both El Paso and Christchurch shootings last year adhered to this belief system, falsely arguing that developed countries had to lock out asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants because the world doesn’t need any more Western consumers. The “we are the virus” meme that emerged at the start of the pandemic also has roots in ecofascism, advocating for humans separate from the natural world and implying it’s OK to wipe out some of us. The end goal for ecofascists, though, is to uses the climate crisis as a means to racist ends.

Quebec Extremists Radicalized by COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Could Turn to Violence, Experts Warn (Jonathan Montpetit, CBC)
Quebec police have made several arrests after threats inspired by anti-government COVID-19 conspiracies

Record Numbers of Far-Right Terrorists Held in U.K. Jails (Charles Hymas, The Telegraph)
The numbers of far right extremists in jails have increased sharply to represent nearly a fifth of the total imprisoned terrorists

The Kremlin’s Plot Against Democracy (Alina Polyakova, Foreign Affairs)
How Russia Updated Its 2016 Playbook for 2020

Post-Mortem of a Triple Poisoning: New Details Emerge in GRU’s Failed Murder Attempts in Bulgaria (Bellingcat)
In 2015, Emilian Gebrev, a Bulgarian arms dealer and owner of EMCO Ltd., his son Hristo Gebrev, and company manager Valentin Takhchiev, were poisoned in Sofia, Bulgaria, but survived the attack.. Bellignat investigative team, which includes The Insider (Russia), has obtained a copy of the suspension decision which contains a summary of Bulgarian investigators’ findings, many of which are previously unknown to the public. These shed more light on whom exactly the GRU targeted for assassination, as well as on the course of events surrounding the poisoning attempts including the time between exposure to the poison and the onset of the first symptoms. Paired with new booking and travel data obtained by our investigative team, these findings shed more light on the modus operandi of the GRU’s elite kill team.
These new findings may be particularly relevant in the context of the disclosure that the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was also caused by exposure to a substance from the Novichok family. The findings also showcase the extreme recklessness of this assassination method which exposes random people to the deadly substance – as seen both in the case with Gebrev’s son and in the death of Dawn Sturgess in 2018.
We have also obtained new data on the interaction of Bulgarian investigators with international bodies like the OPCW, the Finnish laboratory, and Finnish investigative authorities, which suggest that not all all avenues for fact-finding have been explored in full, and some efforts may have been blocked by third parties for unclear reasons. In addition, we note that the role of at least one accessory to the crime has not been investigated despite credible evidence of his involvement.

‘Who’s Putting These Ideas in His Head?’(Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)
The former FBI agent Peter Strzok worries that Americans will never learn the full story about Trump’s relationship with Russia.

How to Know if the Election Is Actually ‘Rigged’ (Edward B. Foley, Politico)
The November vote could be legitimate even if the voting process is flawed. A stable democracy depends on everyone being able to tell the difference.