'When you blow that kind of dog whistle, animals come out'

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called out Donald Trump’s rhetoric early last week in response to the mass shooting in El Paso:

"As the leader of our country, I implore the president to set a better, clearer moral tone, because what he's been doing is blowing every racist xenophobic dog whistle, and when you do that, when you blow that kind of dog whistle, animals come out," Lightfoot said on Monday.

The very next day, Trump’s daughter sent out a tweet comparing the violence in El Paso and Dayton with the gun violence in Chicago. But like everyone else in that name-sharing dysfunctional assortment of idiots, she got her figures wrong in an obvious attempt to distract from the animals responding to her father’s whistle.

But, as we all know, lies work for the Trump family, and their co-conspirator Fox News is built on them. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks the activities of domestic terror groups, has written about how the violent right uses a “mirror” strategy in the furtherance of its ultimate goal: a civil war. In “Accusations in a Mirror: How the Radical Right Blames Rising Political Violence on the Left,” Cassie Miller lays out the ground game, discussing Candace Owens’ testimony before Congress in April 2019:

[Candace]Owens’s strategy has become standard fare on the right: diminishing the rise of white nationalist violence, diffusing blame onto “many sides” – as President Trump did after “Unite the Right” – or insisting, despite all evidence, that political violence is a left-wing problem. Trump downplayed the threat once again in the aftermath of the Christchurch, New Zealand, shooting that left 50 Muslim worshippers dead at the hands of a white supremacist. When a reporter asked the president whether he believed white nationalism was a rising global threat, he responded, “I don’t really.”

The right’s refusal to acknowledge actual political violence only aids white nationalists, not only by downplaying their culpability but also by allowing white nationalists space to push the narrative that the “violent left” is the real threat. If leftists – and, specifically, the anti-fascist activists known as antifa – are the ones hellbent on violence, then any right-wing act of violence can be framed as self-defensive or retaliatory and, therefore, justified. Accordingly, the right wing has strategically pushed what one commenter on the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer called “the ‘out of control, violent left’ meme.”

Miller meticulously outlines how the right has reversed reality in their rhetoric, claiming that political violence is a tool of the left.

President Trump, who notoriously parrots Fox News talking points, has also started sounding the alarm on apparently rampant leftist violence. At a rally in Missouri last September, he claimed that the entire Democratic Party was being “held hostage by far-left activists, by angry mobs – antifa – by deep-state radicals.” “I would never suggest this,” he continued, “but I tell you – they’re so lucky we’re peaceful.”

By November, his tone had become more ominous. “They better hope that the opposition to antifa decides not to mobilize. Because if they do, they’re much tougher. Much stronger. Potentially much more violent. And antifa’s going to be in big trouble,” he told The Daily Caller, adding that those who opposed antifa were “getting angrier and angrier.”

This, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of murders are committed by right-wing extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

ADL’s Center on Extremism, which has aggregated data going back to 1970, shows that over the last decade, a total of 73.3 percent of all extremist-related fatalities can be linked to domestic right-wing extremists, while 23.4 percent can be attributed to Islamic extremists. The remaining 3.2 percent were carried out by extremists who did not fall into either category.

But we don’t want to allow reality to distort the inflammatory pronouncements of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the clown prince of this administration, who claims that even criticizing white supremacy will lead to a civil war. Because rich Democrats want us to ignore the class differences that divide our nation, or something like that.

Jesus Christ, Tucker Carlson just said that calling out and criticizing white supremacy is leading us down "the path to civil war. Obviously" pic.twitter.com/LEz7IUQRsO

Basically, the right is trying to foment a civil war that they can then claim was all a matter of self-defense. And the current occupant of the Oval Office has willingly lent them his support.

But the violent racism of the white supremacists is not only aided by the head of the Republican Party, it is abetted throughout the bureaucracy that he controls, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. (George Orwell would be so proud of that name.) After serving on the Trump transition team, Katharine Gorka, who is married to former Trump adviser, known Islamophobe, and Nazi sympathizer Sebastian Gorka, was appointed to the DHS as a policy adviser. In response to the request of then-DHS Secretary John Kelly, for examples of:

organizations “that counter-hate groups,” an aide wrote in an email, which HuffPost obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Gorka couldn’t think of any specific groups, she wrote in response. But “it would also be important to get the data on the actual threats right now,” she added, “because my understanding is that the far-left groups (Antifa, or anti-fascist) are currently on the rise.”

Her claim, which is not backed by any data, is the most obvious example of a trend that pervades a tranche of DHS emails obtained by HuffPost: Trump administration officials came into office with very specific — and mistaken — ideas about what violent extremism in the U.S. looked like, then went searching for evidence to back up those ideas.

According to the Gorkas—both of them—the only terror worthy of the name is that committed by players like ISIS, who hide behind the shield of a religion of peace. A rabid Islamophobe, she has collaborated with her husband, and has, according to the HuffPost:

… her own history of anti-Muslim fearmongering. As a Breitbart columnist, she warned of Muslim Brotherhood influence in U.S. politics and “sharia finance” in London. She took issue with the idea that Islam is a religion of peace. And she claimed that the Obama administration was “supporting Islamist groups abroad” and “allowing Islamists to dictate national security policy.”

While serving as a policy adviser, she was instrumental in cutting funding for Life After Hate, a non-profit group of former white supremacists working to help others break away from right-wing terror groups. Life After Hate was awarded a $400,000 grant in 2016 to continue its work under the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program. Life After Hate was the only group to counter right-wing terrorism that was awarded a grant. Gorka made sure that the group’s grant was rescinded, depriving them of the resources they needed to continue their work. She also made sure that a funding grant awarded to the Muslim Public Affairs Council was canceled as well. All the funding was instead granted to anti-Islam organizations and law enforcement agencies. It is expected that she will soon be named as the spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection.

In a recent interview with The Atlantic, Christian Picciolini, former head of Life After Hate, claimed that white nationalists exist throughout our society. 

But Picciolini said that even if the U.S. could get a handle on its gun problem, terrorists can always find other ways. McVeigh had his car bomb, the September 11th hijackers had their airplanes, Islamic State attackers have suicide bombings, trucks, and knives. “I have to ask myself, Do we have white-nationalist airline pilots?” Picciolini said. “There have to be. I knew people in powerful positions, in politics, in law enforcement, who were secretly white nationalists. I think we’d be stupid and selfish to think that we don’t have those in the truck-driving industry.”

But it is not just political operatives who support domestic terror through policy decisions and dog whistles. Hatewatch, the blog of the SPLC, has reported on a foreign affairs officer in the State Department, one Matthew Q. Gebert, who is an active participant in the white supremacy network. Using the online pseudonym Coach Finstock, he hopes to remake America as an all-white nation. 

“[Whites] need a country of our own with nukes, and we will retake this thing lickety split,” “Coach Finstock” said on a May 2018 episode of “The Fatherland,” a white nationalist podcast. “That’s all that we need. We need a country founded for white people with a nuclear deterrent. And you watch how the world trembles.”

Evidence indicates that for roughly the past four years, Gebert and his wife, Anna Vuckovic, have been active in the white supremacist movement, hosting parties for them in their home, recruiting members for the SPLC-identified hate group The Right Stuff, joining Holocaust deniers for dinner, praising Nazis, and trying to recruit law enforcement and military members into the movement. 

Gebert, as “Coach Finstock,” helped lead a Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia-based organizing chapter of Michael Peinovich’s The Right Stuff network called “D.C. Helicopter Pilots,” according to three sources who spent time with those two men and their associates between 2016 and 2018.

The use of the word “helicopter” in the chapter’s name probably springs from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who used helicopters to dispose of political opponents by throwing them out the open door. Alt-right terrorists have certainly embraced the helicopter as a meme. SPLC lists The Right Stuff on its hate map.

Hatewatch has been unable to determine if Gebert participated in online discussions during his working hours or if he engaged in any prohibited political activities under the Hatch Act, although, as we have seen, this administration does not seem troubled by Hatch Act violations. Hatewatch quotes a post that shows he is aware that what he is doing is unethical, at the very least, and could damage his career.

“There are bigger things than a career and a paycheck, and I don’t want to lose mine,” Gebert said as “Coach Finstock” on an episode of “The Fatherland” recorded in August 2017, referring to his commitment to white nationalism. “I am prepared to lose mine. Because this is the most important thing to me in my life … in tandem with my family, of course.”

Because hate is more powerful than reason.

And that seems to be true for the re-election aspirations of the current occupant of the Oval Office. His offensive visits to Dayton and El Paso, where he claimed to be offering comfort to shooting victims, only led to more dog whistle tweets attacking the mayor of Dayton and the Democratic senator of Ohio, as well as Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro and former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke.

The thing about wild animals is that once you whistle for them and rile them up, you are not necessarily in control of their actions. They are unpredictable and have been known to turn on their keepers. The lead whistler could be especially vulnerable when he fails to deliver on his campaign’s extreme and racist promises.