OUR PICKSAmerica’s Fingers-Crossed Strategy for Hurricane Season | The MAGA Internet Calls for War | The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer, and more
· The MAGA Internet Calls for War
Extremist rhetoric online is often a foundation for action in the physical world—but not immediately
· Trump’s Online MAGA Army Calls Guilty Verdict a Declaration of War
Trump supporters, fringe extremists, right-wing pundits, and politicians have all posted incendiary rhetoric, including some calls for “war,” following former president Donald Trump’s felony conviction
· How 2024 Could Transform American Elections
A radical reform to de-radicalize politics faces its biggest test in November
· America’s Fingers-Crossed Strategy for Hurricane Season
Grim forecasts for an active season highlight the gaps in our planning
· The Ticketmaster Data Breach May Be Just the Beginning
Data breaches at Ticketmaster and financial services company Santander have been linked to attacks against cloud provider Snowflake. Researchers fear more breaches will soon be uncovered
· The Unusual Espionage Act Case Against a Drone Photographer
In seemingly the first case of its kind, the US Justice Department has charged a Chinese national with using a drone to photograph a Virginia shipyard where the US Navy was assembling nuclear submarines
The MAGA Internet Calls for War (Ali Breland, The Atlantic)
After a jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges yesterday, Bronze Age Pervert, the alter ego of the edgelord influencer Costin Alamariu, retweeted one of his own posts from March. It is a movie clip depicting a scene of armed men storming buildings and gunning people down. In the text accompanying the post, Bronze Age Pervert jokes that the clip is real footage of a “well-planned neutralization operation” that will take place after Trump wins his reelection campaign.
The MAGA faithful are once again on the internet threatening violence. Lots of Republicans, of course, responded to Trump’s felony verdict with simple outrage rather than calls for a “neutralization operation.” But more extreme language has appeared all across the right-wing posting ecosystem. Some Proud Boys chapters responded with the word “war” on their Telegram channels, as reported by Wired, and Reuters found instances of Trump supporters calling for violence against jurors and the judge in the case, as well as calls for civil war and insurrection. An anonymous right-wing X account went viral by posting “Third World Problems Require Third World Solutions” on top of a video of the 2020 military coup in Myanmar.
The incitement of violence and aggressive political retribution is not new on the right, but it has often been confined to the hardened fringes. When it does leak out, it tends to be at least slightly obfuscated. Now though, “some of the more intense rhetoric is coming from the top,” Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told me. Auron MacIntyre, a podcast host for the right-wing outlet Blaze Media, called for Republican district attorneys to manipulate the courts and put “corrupt Democrats in jail immediately,” with “no excuses, no equivocation.” Sean Davis, the CEO of the right-wing publication The Federalist, posted that members of the right have a “moral obligation to terrorize the Left with its own rules and tactics until it is destroyed.” (Cont.)
