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White Nationalists Plot Election Day Show of Force; Greenville Church Burning, Vandalism Investigated as Hate Crime

White nationalists plot election day show of force - KKK, neo-Nazis and militias plan to monitor urban polling places and suppress the black vote. The Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military members often showing up in public heavily armed, is advising members to go undercover and conduct 'intelligence-gathering' at polls. The predominantly black Hopewell Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi was burned "Vote Trump" graffiti was scrawled on it.

On Tuesday, November 1st, 2016, unknown criminals burned the historic, predominantly black Hopewell Baptist Church in Greenville, Mississippi and scrawled graffiti on it: "Vote Trump",Source: Angie Quezada, Delta Daily News // MS News Now (WLBT-WDBD)
KKK, neo-Nazis and militias plan to monitor urban polling places and suppress the black vote.
By Ben Schreckinger 
November 3, 2016
David Duke said his supporters plan to monitor polls with an eye toward "some of the more inner-city areas." 
AP Photo // Politico
Neo-Nazi leader Andrew Anglin plans to muster thousands of poll watchers across all 50 states. His partners at the alt-right website “the Right Stuff” are touting plans to set up hidden cameras at polling places in Philadelphia and hand out liquor and marijuana in the city’s “ghetto” on Election Day to induce residents to stay home. The National Socialist Movement, various factions of the Ku Klux Klan and the white nationalist American Freedom Party all are deploying members to watch polls, either “informally” or, they say, through the Trump campaign.

The Oath Keepers, a group of former law enforcement and military members that often shows up in public heavily armed, is advising members to go undercover and conduct “intelligence-gathering” at polling places, and Donald Trump ally Roger Stone is organizing his own exit polling, aiming to monitor thousands of precincts across the country.

Energized by Trump’s candidacy and alarmed by his warnings of a “rigged election,” white nationalist, alt-right and militia movement groups are planning to come out in full force on Tuesday, creating the potential for conflict at the close of an already turbulent campaign season.

“The possibility of violence on or around Election Day is very real,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Donald Trump has been telling his supporters for weeks and weeks and weeks now that they are about to have the election stolen from them by evil forces on behalf of the elites.”

It is difficult to know at what scale these plans will materialize, because Anglin and his fringe-right ilk are serial exaggerators, according to Potok. And rather than successfully uncover widespread voter fraud — for which there is a lack of compelling evidence — or successfully suppress minority turnout, Potok said the efforts are most likely to backfire.

“If on the morning of Election Day it turns out that we have white supremacists standing around looking threatening at polling places, I think it would arouse anger,” he said. “People would vote just to prove they’re not being intimidated by these radical racists.”

Despite Trump’s claims that American democracy is compromised by massive voter fraud, so far in this election only one person — a Trump supporter in Iowa who attempted to vote twice — has been arrested for it. That has not stopped fringe groups already inclined to believe that minorities are stealing the election from heeding Trump’s call to monitor voting in “certain areas.”

In an email, Anglin, the editor of the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, said he had already led a “big voter registration drive” and that he was “sending an army of Alt-Right nationalists to watch the polls.” Anglin said he was working in conjunction with the alt-right website TheRightStuff.Biz.

A representative of that site wrote in an email: “We are organizing poll watchers in urban areas to cut down on the most traditional type of voter fraud. We also will have stationary cameras hidden at polling locations in Philadelphia, to monitor anyone that comes in to vote and make sure that the same people are not voting at multiple locations. If we see people voting in multiple locations the footage will be submitted to the [Federal Election Commission] as well as put out on social media to undermine the legitimacy of [Hillary] Clinton should she steal the election.”

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The representative, who did not provide his name, went on to explain, "Many polling locations are in schools, and black schools are so disorderly that pretty much any official-looking white person with a clipboard can gain access to them ahead of time and set up a hidden camera. You don't really ever even have to speak with an adult. Simply walk in like you belong there and no one even asks you why you are there. So we usually go in teams of two, one person driving and one person dressed as a blue collar worker with a clipboard, and we set up a hidden camera in the school cafeteria. Go during lunchtime and the teachers are all so busy trying to contain the kids that no one says anything. We already have a few set up."

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

A senior Trump adviser told Bloomberg Businessweek last month that the campaign is working on a three-pronged voter suppression strategy that includes an effort to depress black turnout. Though other Trump advisers later pushed back on the report, Anglin’s partners say they are hoping to put Trump over the top by doing just that.

“We also have some teams going in to the ghettos in Philly with 40s and weed to give out to the local residents, which we think will lead to more of them staying home. We have had success with this in the past,” wrote the representative of TheRightStuff.biz, who said four teams of two employed this tactic in Detroit during the Democratic primary in an effort to help Bernie Sanders. “40s” are 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. POLITICO could not independently verify his claims.

It remains an open question whether the neo-Nazis’ plans materialize, and to what extent.

Mark Pitcavage, who monitors extremists for the Anti-Defamation League, said Anglin lacks a track record of organizing real-world action and that he was skeptical he could “get even close” to what he was promising.

More concrete, said Pitcavage, are the plans of the Oath Keepers, a militia movement group formed in 2009. It has thousands of active members, drawn largely from the ranks of former military, law enforcement, intelligence and first responders, and a track record of mustering heavily armed members in public places.

The group issued a statement last month claiming that James O’Keefe’s latest Project Veritas video provided evidence of “a well-orchestrated campaign of criminal vote fraud on an industrial scale” and urging members “to form up incognito intelligence-gathering and crime spotting teams and go out into public on Election Day, dressed to blend in with the public.” The group said it believed most vote-rigging was “leftist” but that it would seek to expose fraud committed by anyone. Last week, The Washington Post reported that the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law would ask the Justice Department to investigate the group’s Election Day plans.

Stone, who first began advising Trump in the ’80s and describes the alt-right as “the new mainstream,” has also come under scrutiny for his Election Day plans. The Republican operative — less concerned with fraud committed by voters than with vote-rigging by elections officials — is organizing a volunteer exit-polling operation he hopes will reach 7,000 precincts that he sees as prone to rigging because of the voting methods employed and their one-party control. Stone said the precincts targeted included 2,000 in Philadelphia as well as some Republican-controlled areas in Ohio, though he declined to specify where. “If I told you, I would be warning the [Republican Gov. John] Kasich machine,” he said.

Stone said he planned to present his findings to Trump and that he would consider any deviation of more than 2 percent between his exit polls and the posted precinct totals to be suspicious, citing the State Department’s standard for monitoring foreign elections.

But it is doubtful that a hastily assembled volunteer effort could result in reliable exit polling data, and Potok warned, “Anything he would produce would merely create more conflict and not lead us any closer to the truth of what happens out there.”

Other groups are combining poll-watching with more traditional forms of politicking, including leafleting, rallies and get-out-the-vote efforts.

Jeff Schoep, leader of the National Socialist Movement, said he was organizing a Saturday rally at the Pennsylvania Statehouse in Harrisburg, where he expected between 75 and a few hundred people to show up, to mobilize supporters ahead of the election. Schoep said the party, which has not officially endorsed Trump though its members overwhelmingly support him, would deploy “informal” poll watchers through its roughly 50 chapters across the country.

William Johnson, chairman of the American Freedom Party and an advocate of deporting nonwhites from the United States, said his party members are working through Trump’s operation rather than organizing their own efforts.

“We have some of our members that are doing poll watching, but they’re not doing it as American Freedom Party members,” he said. “They’re doing it through the Trump campaign.”

“We have a lot of people that are involved with the get-out-the-vote through the various Trump organizations,” said the Los Angeles-based Johnson, who added that the party’s California members are focused on aiding the Trump campaign in Nevada.

Trump adviser Flynn gets agitated over KKK question
Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn talks about Donald Trump
Members of the party were also working with an Ohio car dealer to throw an Election Day party in Las Vegas at a rooftop location overlooking Trump International Hotel but could not pull together the financing for it, according to Johnson, a lawyer who made headlines this week by commissioning robocalls in Utah that attack independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin as a “closet homosexual.”

Meanwhile, members of the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party will descend on Ohio to hand out leaflets hailing Trump as “the peace candidate,” according to the party’s leader, Matthew Heimbach.

Though a pale shadow of its former self, the KKK is also mobilizing for Election Day. Thomas Robb, national director of knights of Ku Klux Klan, which considers itself the national standard-bearer of the KKK, said party members across the country would be working to get voters to the polls for Trump.

And Louisiana Senate candidate David Duke — a former KKK grand wizard who supports Trump but was disavowed by the New York businessman in February after some hesitation in a CNN interview — said his supporters plan to monitor polls with an eye toward “some of the more inner-city areas” that he said exhibited suspicious voting patterns in the state’s 1991 governor’s race.

But Duke said his supporters would not limit their efforts to black neighborhoods. “It’s good to watch everywhere because there always can be major mistakes,” Duke said. “Or unintentional mistakes. Who knows?”

[Ben Schreckinger is a reporter at POLITICO.]
By Brianna Cox
November 2, 2016

image via flickr.com // Atlanta Black Star
White nationalist organizations have surprisingly come to support Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The surprise is not necessarily because of the white supremacists, but moreso that they support him - someone they used to distrust.
Politico reports that most of the white nationalist movement is represented with online activity, with the entirety expressing anger, irritation and criticism of varying nonwhite ethnic groups. They also ventured into current events and political discussions with some regularity.
In the 10-plus years prior to him becoming a presidential candidate, Trump the businessman, entrepreneur and public figure was sometimes a topic of discussion on white nationalist websites like Stormfront, the most prominent English-language white nationalist forum, according to Politico.
Posts about Trump were usually negative and mostly complained about the diversity of the contestants on both "The Apprentice" and in the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.
"Users on the forums mostly saw Trump as annoying or entertaining, but they frequently speculated that he was secretly Jewish, or close enough to Judaism to be worthy of hate: In the fevered white nationalist worldview, it's inconceivable that a New York real estate magnate could make billions of dollars without support from a Jewish financial conspiracy," Politico reports.
Fast-forward to 2016, and not only is Trump a viable presidential candidate, but he is now heavily supported by neo-Nazis, former and current members of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists across the United States.
In Philadelphia, neo-Nazi groups are planning to congregate at polling places in the name of Trump next week to keep an eye out for supposed "voter fraud," and also to discourage people from showing up to vote at all.
The group plans to hand out free alcohol and marijuana to voters in the "ghetto," to encourage them to get drunk and high as opposed to voting.
"We have had success with this in the past," a representative for the pro-Trump website TheRightStuff.biz told Politico. "We also have some teams going in to the ghettos in Philly with 40s and weed to give out to the local residents, which we think will lead to more of them staying home."
Politico also reports that a militia group called the Oath Keepers is apparently training its members to perform undercover "sting" operations, with the purpose of monitoring polling places for supposed fraud. Their aim is to watch "thousands of precincts across the country."
Some are hopeful that these intimidation tactics will fall through. Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center told Politico, "If on the morning of Election Day it turns out that we have white supremacists standing around looking threatening at polling places, I think it would arouse anger. People would vote just to prove they're not being intimidated by these radical racists."
By Morgan Howard and Mary Grace Brantley 
November 3, 2016
Source: Angie Quezada, Delta Daily News // MS News Now (WLBT-WDBD)
GREENVILLE, MS (Mississippi News Now) - Authorities are investigating the burning and vandalism of a historic African American church in Greenville  as a hate crime.
The words "Vote Trump" were spray painted on the side of the charred building, leading many around the nation to call it a "crime of race".
A GoFundMe page has been created for the church called "Repair the Hopewell Baptist Church". The goal was $10 thousand and people have already donated over $143,000 as of Friday morning.
The incident happened at 9:15 p.m Tuesday when authorities responded to the 111-year-old Hopewell M.B. Church. The sanctuary, pews and more than 80 percent of the church building was gutted by the flames and smoke. 
Authorities are working to connect the dots and find the person behind the burning and vandalism of the church.
Investigators are ruling this a "hate crime". Both state and federal resources have been brought in to help with investigation.
"The only things that conquers hate is love, said Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons. "And what we have to do as residents of this community is come together and show love."
The words "vote trump" along the side of the church caused pause for investigators.
"We feel that the quote that was placed on the church is basically an intimidation of someone's right to vote, whatever way they choose to vote," said Greenville Police Chief Delandro Wilson.
As for this church, they're trying to keep the focus on their faith.
"Whatever happens. We don't carry grudges, no way. We forgive. We believe in unlimited forgiveness," said Bishop Clarence Green.
The fact is that it's early in the investigation. They have a person of interest but no suspect. While the church's bishop "gets" this statement.
"This is an attack on the black church, the black community," said the Mayor. "And so to just bolster what the Chief says, yeah, it appears to be a race crime."
"I don't think even with this, I don't think I'll try to speculate as though this is a hate crime," said the Bishop. "Somebody set it. I don't know. Investigators, that's their job."
A reward of $11,000 dollars is now being offered for anyone with information about this crime. The Crime Stoppers number is:  662-378-8477.