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ARGUMENT: THE POLITICIZATION OF THE FBI Making a Scarecrow of the Law: A Former Agent’s Reaction to Recent Events at the FBI
FBI Director Kash Patel’s ongoing campaign of political purges at the FBI leads former FBI agent Michael Feinberg to lament the assault on the Bureau’s integrity, professionalism, and political impartiality. He writes that “Right now there is some new agent trainee at Quantico, going through her paces at the FBI Academy, who will never know the honor of serving a Bureau unblemished by the taint of political weaponization. Her loss is something worth noting, and it is certainly something worth mourning.”
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POLITICAL VIOLENCEProtecting the Public from the Risk of Political Violence
The nation’s strength lies in its ability to confront political violence not with despair, but with resolve and unity. Americans overwhelmingly reject political violence by a ratio of millions to one. Remaining vigilant, supporting one another, and refusing to succumb to online rage and despair can ensure that acts of violence do not define America’s future.
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DEMOCRACY WATCHTrump’s Targeting of “Enemies” Like James Comey Echoes FBI’s Dark History of Mass Surveillance, Dirty Tricks, and Perversion of Justice Under J. Edgar Hoover
As a candidate last year, Donald Trump promised retribution against his perceived enemies. As president, he is doing that. His campaign of vengeance will be helped by the FBI, the independence of which has been sacrificed by Director Kash Patel, who has, essentially, made the bureau an arm of the White House. It marks the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year reign as FBI director that the FBI has been used to target people perceived to be political enemies.
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SHOOTING AT ICE FACILITYOne Detainee Dead, Two Critically Wounded After Shooting at Dallas ICE Facility
Officials said the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and no ICE personnel were among the victims. FBI Director Kash Patel said an anti-ICE message was found on an unspent shell casing.
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DEMOCRACY WATCHPoliticizing Federal Troops in U.S. Mirrors Use of Military in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s
In his second term as president, Donald Trump has deployed U.S. military forces in rarely used roles in domestic law enforcement. As a political scientist who studies civil-military relations, I recognize the fundamental problems of militarizing domestic law enforcement, which the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits. With Trump’s continued militarization of law enforcement, the United States is entering largely uncharted waters. But in other countries, including Chile and Argentina, this is familiar territory.
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Quote of the Day
“[Antifa] is essentially a kind of coalition politics of all kinds of radicals, from different kinds of socialists to communists, anarchists and more independent radicals,” says historian Mark Bray.
“Sometimes I compare it to feminism. There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. There are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group,” he said.
“Insofar as terrorism is setting off explosives and killing people, that’s not what these groups ever do,” Bray said.— Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers University and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, quoted in the Washington Post, 22 September 2025
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ANTIFAIs Antifa a Terrorist Organization?
The question of whether Antifa qualifies as a terrorist organization has been the subject of intense political, legal, and academic debate in the United States and abroad. President Trump’s 22 September designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization is problematic on legal and operational grounds.
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ANTIFAArgument: Deal with Antifa Without Designating Them
In an Editorial, the editors of the conservative National Review argue that “We’ve seen before what happens when there is an over-insistence by political leaders on supposed domestic political threats —you get cock-up investigations and confusing plots where it is unclear whether FBI agents and informers are investigating actual domestic terrorists, or merely seducing and entrapping people into plans mostly hatched by the agents and informers.”
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POLITICAL VIOLENCEPolitically Motivated Terrorist Killings in the US: Answering the Critics
My recent posts about politically motivated terrorist killings in the United States revealed surprising findings. There are a few politically motivated killings. If we examine politically motivated terrorist killings perpetrated by domestic terrorists (thus excluding the 9/11 attacks, which were perpetrated by foreign terrorists), the left-right political distribution of murders skews decisively right, even in recent years, but the numbers are minuscule.
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POLITICAL VIOLENCE Right-Wing Extremist Violence Is More Frequent and More Deadly Than Left-Wing Violence − What the Data Shows
After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, President Trump and members of his administration claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the U.S. But all research on the subject conclusively shows that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and that right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.
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PERSISTENT SURVEILLANCEThe Toxic Legacy of 9/11…and How to End It
Restoring the Bill of Rights to its proper shape and place in our civic life would be one way to honor those killed on 9/11 and in the wars that followed.
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POLITICAL VIOLENCE“This Will Not End Here”: A Scholar Explains Why Charlie Kirk’s Killing Could Embolden Political Violence
“Political assassinations come in waves. We see that not only in the United States but other countries. I’ve looked at political assassinations in many democracies, and one of the things I see in a fairly consistent manner is that political assassinations create a process of escalation that encourages others on the extreme political spectrum to feel the need to retaliate. And that is my main concern,” says University of Massachusetts Lowell scholar Arie Perliger, who studies political violence and assassinations.
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POLITICAL VIOLENCEAre Political Assassinations on the Rise? A Criminologist Weighs in on the Shooting Death of Charlie Kirk
James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist, says there has been a rise in politically motivated killings, attempted killings and partisan threats —even though the overall fatalities remains a small number.
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EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLINGThe President Should Not Have a License to Kill
The administration claims that the “war” on drugs justifies extrajudicial killing. But redefining civilian drug criminals as “combatants” gives away the reality: the government just militarized what was a low-level criminal law enforcement incident outside the United States. Once we consider the victims’ alleged illegal actions, we can see that the government committed the most egregious crime here.
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THE MILITARY & DOMESTIC LAW ENFORCEMENTGovernors Split Over Mobilizing National Guard as Trump Seeks More Troops
Republican governors want National Guard members to help ICE, in addition to deploying to Washington.
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The long view
SERIAL KILLERSWhy Was Pacific Northwest Home to So Many Serial Killers?
Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, George Russell, Israel Keyes, and Robert Lee Yates were serial killers who grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the shadow of smelters which spewed plumes of lead, arsenic, and cadmium into the air. As a young man, Charles Manson spent ten years at a nearby prison, where lead has seeped into the soil. The idea of a correlation between early exposure to lead and higher crime rates is not new. Fraser doesn’t explicitly support the lead-crime hypothesis, but in a nimble, haunting narrative, she argues that the connections between an unfettered pollution and violent crime warrant scrutiny.