Criticism of Florida’s DeSantis Applies to N.Y.’s Cuomo | Texas Failed Because It Did Not Plan | Extremists Grow Savvy Online, and more

He helped a group of rioters remove barricades surrounding the U.S. Capitol, prosecutors say, and the statute he’s charged under is eligible for a terrorism sentencing enhancement — a rule that allows judges to lengthen prison terms if a crime is deemed to be terrorism. Similarly, prosecutors argued during a February 10 hearing that Pezzola, 43, should be detained because his charge of destroying government property qualifies as a crime of terrorism.

Man Charged with Terror Offences over “Anarchist Website That Published Bomb-Making Instructions”  (Lizzie Dearden, Independent)
A man accused of running an anarchist website that published bomb-making instructions has appeared in court. Toby Shone, 43, has been charged with three terror offences and four drug offences. He appeared at a hearing at the Old Bailey via video-link from HMP Wandsworth on Friday. Prosecution barrister Lee Ingham told the court: “The allegations relate to the running of a pro-anarchy website which included possession and putting instructions on a website of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] and the like.” Mr. Shone, of Drybrook in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, was arrested on 10 February. He has been charged with providing a service that enabled people to access publications, intending the effect to be encouragement of acts of terrorism. Mr. Shone is also accused of inviting people to provide funding that could be used for the purposes of terrorism, and possession of material useful to a terrorist. He has been charged with possession of Class A and B drugs with intent to supply, producing a class B drug and a further count of class AA drug possession. Mr. Shone was not asked to enter a plea and was remanded in custody ahead of a hearing at Bristol Crown Court on 4 June. His trial is scheduled to start on 6 October.

A White Supremacist Podcast Got Taken Offline, for All ff 2 Seconds  (Tim Hume, Vice)
A podcast by two notorious white supremacists has been removed from its hosting platform, after a review of their content triggered by a VICE World News article found it to be in “extreme violation” of the platform’s terms of service. But in an illustration of the whack-a-mole challenge of tackling extremist content online, the podcast has since been re-uploaded to another platform, one with a reputation for hosting far-right and conspiracy theorist content. The podcast was launched last month by two prominent white supremacists, who have both promoted a brand of far-right ideology using slickly-edited videos, clothing lines, and mixed martial arts … Joshua Fisher-Birch, a senior analyst at the New York-headquartered Counter Extremism Project who had previously called for the podcast to be taken down, welcomed the move. “It’s a positive step that PodOmatic has decided to stop hosting Rundo and Kapustin/Nikitin’s podcast, raising the number of podcasting platforms to two that have stopped providing them with services,” he told VICE World News. “Hopefully, in the future, other platforms will follow this example and follow their terms of service, or in some cases improve them, to prevent them from amplifying voices calling for white supremacist violence.

Battle for Young Hearts and Minds as Extremists Grow Savvy Online  (Straits Times)
A 17-year-old detained under the Internal Security Act in January last year had begun to walk down the path of radicalisation in 2017 when he was aged 15, after imbibing Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) material online. Last December, a 16-year-old became the youngest detainee yet to be dealt with under the ISA, and the first to be enthralled by far-right extremist ideology. What was striking was the similar methods by which these two cases came to be self-radicalised - by exclusivist propaganda material that painted the world in stark, us-versus-them terms. They are the latest in an emerging pattern of those being dealt with for terror-linked activity getting younger. Since 2015, seven of the 53 people that the Internal Security Department picked up for terror-related conduct were aged between 16 and 19. All had been radicalised online and each was a prime target for recruitment by extremists due to their young age, experts said. They noted that extremists have displayed a savvy in tapping online trends and emerging platforms to spread their ideology to young people. For instance, far-right extremists in the West have used chatrooms on messaging platform Discord - popular with young gamers - to spread their message, said Mr Muhammad Faizal Abdul Rahman, a homeland defence research fellow from the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS).

Texas Failed Because It Did Not Plan  (Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic)
What went wrong? The Lone Star State made three fundamental errors.

Trump Is Guilty of Pandemicide  (Laura Garrett, Foreign Policy)
History will show the former U.S. president was staggeringly negligent during the pandemic’s deadly third wave.

The Border Mess That Trump Left Behind  (Juliette Kayyem, The Atlantic)
Reversing the previous administration’s cruelties isn’t the same as an unconditional welcome.

Every Slander Media Flung at Florida’s DeSantis Was True of Cuomo(Rich Lowry, New York Post)
Throughout the pandemic, the media have been excoriatingly harsh on a governor who was slow to act, unnecessarily endangered the lives of the elderly, alienated experts and cooked the numbers.
They just thought the governor in question was Florida’s Ron DeSantis, rather than New York’s Andrew Cuomo.
After it has become clear that Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic was not just criminal in the metaphorical sense, but perhaps in the literal sense, the press has begun, only reluctantly and belatedly, to abandon its long-running Cuomo hagiography. 

In Return to Justice Department, Garland Brings Background in Domestic Terror to a Nation in Crisis  (Alexander Mallin andLuke Barr, ABC News)
As a DOJ official, Garland helped lead the Oklahoma City bombing probe in 1995.

Private Equity Ownership Is Killing People at Nursing Homes  (Dylan Scot, Vox)
A new study describes the human toll of private equity firms buying up nursing homes.