(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog's Favourite Living Canadian)

This report from The Intercept got rather lost in the shuffle over the past two weeks, but it's no less chilling than it was the first time I read it. It seems that, almost covertly, the FBI has been tracking the infiltration into law enforcement of white-supremacist extremists.

"Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups," said Daryl Johnson, who was the lead researcher on the DHS report. Johnson, who now runs DT Analytics, a consulting firm that analyzes domestic extremism, says the problem has since gotten "a lot more troublesome."

As The Intercept story makes clear, critical to the rise of these groups within law enforcement was the severe backlash by mainstream conservatives to a 2009 report by the Department of Homeland Security that revealed that white-supremacist groups and right-wing domestic terrorist organizations had been recruiting heavily among a number of groups in the country, especially among returning military veterans. Mainstream conservatives went completely bananas and, to her discredit, then-DHS Secretary Donna Shalala killed the report, apologized to various veterans groups, and disbanded the unit within her department that had done the research.

"They stopped doing intel on that, and that was that," Heidi Beirich, who leads the Southern Poverty Law Center's tracking of extremist groups, told The Intercept. "The FBI in theory investigates right-wing terrorism and right-wing extremism, but they have limited resources. The loss of that unit was a loss for a lot of people who did this kind of work."

That, of course, presented the people who actually were doing the recruiting with a glorious opportunity, of which they took full advantage.

Critics fear that the backlash following the 2009 DHS report hindered further action against the growing white supremacist threat, and that it was largely ignored because the issue was so politically controversial. "I believe that because that report was so denounced by conservatives, it sort of closed the door on whatever the FBI may have been considering doing with respect to combating infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacists," said Samuel Jones, a professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who has written about white power ideology in law enforcement. "Because after the 2006 FBI report, we simply cannot find anything by local law enforcement or the federal government that addresses this issue."

Pete Simi, a sociologist at Chapman University who spent decades studying the proliferation of white supremacists in the U.S. military, agreed. "The report underscores the problem of even discussing this issue. It underscores how difficult this issue is to get any traction on, because a lot of people don't want to discuss this, let alone actually do something about it." Simi said that the extremist strategy to infiltrate the military and law enforcement has existed "for decades." In a study he conducted of individuals indicted for far-right terrorism-related activities, he found that at least 31 percent had military experience.

This takes place in the context of a tacit policy of soft-pedaling right-wing extremism, particularly in the days since the 9/11 attacks. As the kidz say, read the whole thing, and then think about what might happen in the case of widespread civil disobedience.

Dogs: lie down with, get fleas.

I am going to reserve judgment on the moral component of this idea until after I see the interview. Sunlight, disinfectant, I get that, and generally, I agree with it. However, I can understand fully why, for example, the parents and friends of the schoolchildren murdered at Sandy Hook are steaming with outrage. Alex Jones is a blight, and a swindler, and a nut. I don't suspect that anything Megyn Kelly manages to get out of him will change any of those opinions. The fact that he's already got his victim drag on leads me to believe that the whole effort likely was futile and worthless. But, we shall see what we shall see.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Eh Las Bas" (Danny Barker): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here's Marlene Dietrich, singing in Russia. This is not to be confused with singing about Russia, which I suspect will be a serious choral work in a few weeks.

This was my favorite thing on the Intertoobz this week. It was what convinced me that Maine Woman is the exact opposite of Florida Man. And a great job by the reporter. From The Bangor Daily News:

She met her mother, Elizabeth, at home, and together they drove immediately to Pen Bay Medical Center. The dead raccoon was retrieved by Borch's dad, who packed it into a Taste of the Wild dog food bag and handed it over to the Maine Warden Service. Hope Animal Control Officer Heidi Blood confirmed Wednesday that the dead raccoon later tested positive for rabies by the Maine Center for Disease Control. "Not to scare people," Blood said, but "when there's one [infected], there's typically another."

The reporter, Alex Acquisto, gets many props for including the precise brand of dog food of the bag used to transport the dead raccoon.

Is it a good day for dinosaur news, IBTUK? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

The reptile – a new species of pliosaur – has been named Luskhan itilensis, which translates as spirit and master of the Volga River. The large marine creature was a fully grown adult, at roughly 5 metres long from tip to tail. It was found 20 kilometres to the north of the city of Ulyanovsk, in south-western Russia… The reptile was unlike any other advanced pliosaur of its time. The plesiosaurs - a group of marine reptiles including the pliosaurs - were thought to feed primarily on large marine animals and fish. The group included some of the most deadly predators on the planet.

I wouldn't mind going down through history known as The Spirit And Master Of The Volga River. There is some risk, however, that Paul Manafort may have the copyright on that and will now have to fight the descendants of the pliosaur in court. I'm rooting for the representatives of the things that lived then to make us happy now.

The members of the Committee always are suckers for the classics, so Top Commenter Chris Curtis is this week's Top Commenter of the Week for this blast from the far distant past.

"Does not Dionysius seem to have made it sufficiently clear that there can be nothing happy for the person over whom some fear always looms?" That's some serious subtweeting from 2400 years ago.

Indeed it is, good sir. Take 71.23 Beckhams out of petty cash.

I'll be checking in Monday from Georgia as Ossoff-Handel heads into the clubhouse turn. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline, or I shall summon the Spirit Of The Volga, and you'll be in real trouble.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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