America Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead | Anti-Science Extremism | No Threat Assessment, and more

America Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead (Alex Yablon, Foreign Policy)
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” President Donald Trump told his supporters in the far-right street-fighting group from his podium at the first 2020 presidential debate. “Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.” Four years into the Trump era, Americans have struggled to habituate themselves to the persistent presence of armed paramilitaries at demonstrations and flashes of lethal political violence. What do these hard men herald for our political life? Are they stormtroopers waiting for Trump’s signal to hasten the transition from autocratic attempt to autocratic breakthrough and the final demise of American democracy, as some liberals fear? Or are they a sideshow of confused, lonely men acting out fantasies with semi-automatic rifles?
Both hyperventilating over paramilitary fantasists and laughing off potential death squads miss the mark. The whiff of putsch may be more pungent than feels comfortable at the moment, but the far-right’s window for an extra-legal takeover remains quite narrow, especially if polls hold and Biden wins by a healthy margin. At the same time, American politics really has been destabilized by political violence, overwhelmingly perpetrated by the extreme right. But if the United States is heading into an era of fear and violence, it won’t be the first time this has happened in a democracy—or even the first time this has happened in America itself.

Trump’s Spy Chief Just Released “Russian Disinformation” against Hillary Clinton that He Acknowledged May Be Fabricated (Shonam Sheth, Business Insider)
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified a dubious claim from Russian intelligence sources alleging that former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton “approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” against then-Republican candidate Donald Trump and his ties to Russia.
Ratcliffe said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham that the US intelligence community “does not know the accuracy” of the allegation “or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.”
The DNI’s move raised questions about why the nation’s spy chief declassified information that had not been corroborated and which he himself admitted may be false or exaggerated.
Ratcliffe’s decision to release disparaging information about Clinton also mirrors Moscow’s ongoing disinformation campaign against the former secretary of state.

German State Suspects Intelligence Staff of Far-Right Activity (DW)
The suspects worked as part of a team that monitored right-wing extremism online in North Rhine-Westphalia. But they reportedly shared and posted anti-Islam or xenophobic content on chat groups and social media.

Anti-Science Extremism in America: Escalating and Globalizing (Peter J. Hotez, Microbes and Infection)
The last five years has seen a sharp rise in anti-science rhetoric in the United States, especially from the political far right, mostly focused on vaccines and, of late, anti-COVID-19 prevention approaches. Vaccine coverage has declined in more than 100 US counties leading to measles outbreaks in 2019, while in 2020 the US became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now the anti-science movement in America has begun to globalize, with new and unexpected associations with extremist groups and the potential for tragic consequences in terms of global public health. A new anti-science triumvirate has emerged, comprised of far right groups in the US and Germany, and amplified by Russian media.

Hold Russia Accountable for Latest Chemical Weapons Attack (Gregory D. Koblentz and Andrea Stricker, The Hill)
Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption activist who was poisoned with a rare nerve agent while traveling in Russia, has recovered sufficiently to do what he does best: demand accountability from Russian government officials who abuse their power to violate human rights and the rule of law.
Navalny used his first blog post since the attempt on his life to demand that the Russian government turn over a key piece of evidence: the clothing he was wearing on the day he was poisoned. Earlier this month, German, French, and Swedish laboratories confirmed that Navalny, who is now receiving medical treatment in Germany, had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the Novichok group, a family of chemical weapons developed by the Soviet Union. Moscow’s continued use of chemical weapons against Kremlin enemies underscores that the international community has yet to deter Russia’s repeated violations of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the 1993 treaty that bans chemical weapons.
To uphold long-standing international norms and laws against the use of chemical weapons, Washington and its allies should impose meaningful sanctions on Moscow.