In early 2006 former US Prosecutor Tom Hogan told me that Coatesville was ready to flip over and then these new guys came in. He was talking about the “bloc of four”.
When the “Bloc of Four” became a plurality on the City of Coatesville City Council I knew bad stuff would happen. More guns, less police. traffic stopped by drug dealers on the street, extreme opposition to economic revitalization.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED TO POOR COATESVILLE PA WAS UNIMAGINABLE
I couldn’t imagine sleeping downstairs with a fire extinguisher away from bullets that might come through windows like everyone else who lived in Coatesville.
Below is a portion of the resignation letter of former Coatesville Assistant City Manager Tarron Richardson. He refers to the Walker Administration:
“Continued association with the cesspool of corruption and misconduct created by the majority of council and its political appointments may subsequently jeopardize my future professional, personal, and political endeavors. Such inappropriate behavior has caused a mass exodus of city personnel, many who carried with them substantial institutional knowledge of the organization.”
MORE AT:
Monday, February 17, 2014
Under former city manager Harry Walker’s watch COATESVILLE BURNED.
Everyone with at least ½ a brain knows Trump will make bad stuff happen. Due to my past experience with right wing extremists, I’m prepared for unimaginably bad stuff to happen.
Ken Harbaugh Show
REAL HERO Veterans TAKE ON Pro-Trump Militias
Dec 18, 2024
"Jack Hopkins is a Navy veteran and prolific political commentator, renowned for his incisive critiques of MAGA and Trump. He joins Ken to share his perspective on Trump, the militia movement, and the potential misuse of the US military during Trump’s second term. "
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Syria & the United States have little in common EXCEPT illegal drugs and extremist militias who are financed by illegal drug sales.
Syria is an example of what happens when violent militias are fueled by drugs. Could it the United States get as corrupt & violent as Syria?
Syria: Billions off Meth and Ghost Thugs - Al Profit Fall of Assad
19,507 views Dec 15, 2024
"Turns out Bashar Al-Assad was running a giant Narco-state. Production of Capta-gon which are "stimulant" pills and are known as the "poor-man's cokaine" in the Middle East, brought in BILLIONS in revenue per year. As for Ghost the Thugs... the guy in the thumbnail (photo from 2012) was a "SHABIHA"
Shabiha (Levantine Arabic: شَبِّيحَة Šabbīḥa, pronounced [ʃabˈbiːħa]; also romanized Shabeeha or Shabbiha; lit. 'ghosts') is a colloquial and generally derogatory term for various loosely-organised Syrian militias loyal to the Assad family prior to the collapse of the Assad regime, used particularly during the initial phase of the Syrian civil war. As the war has evolved, many groups which had previously been considered shabiha were amalgamated into the National Defence Force and other paramilitary groups.[10]
The mercenaries consisted of mostly Alawite men paid by the regime to eliminate figures of its domestic opposition and alleged fifth-columnists. The Shabiha were established in the 1980s to smuggle weapons to the Syrian soldiers stationed in Lebanon during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.[11] While most Shabiha were members of the Alawi minority, the main common denominator of the groups was loyalty to the Assad family rather than religion, and in areas such as Aleppo they were primarily Sunni.[12]
The word became common in the 1990s, when it was being used to refer to "thugs" who work with the government and often drove Mercedes-Benz S-Class and gave their guards the same car; that specific car model was nicknamed Shabah (Ghost) in many Arabic countries which led to its drivers being called Shabeeh [13] The Syrian opposition stated that the shabiha are a tool of the government for cracking down on dissent.[14] The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has stated that some of the shabiha are mercenaries.[14] Strongly loyal to the Assad dynasty and containing anti-Sunni factions, shabiha militias are discreetly financed by powerful Syrian businessmen, and have often been responsible for the more brutal actions against the opposition, including possible massacres. Psychological warfare against Syria's Sunni population is also known to have been employed by Alawi Shabiha, which includes demonising Sunni religious beliefs and usage of deriding slogans such as "There is no God but Bashar”.
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"On March 23, 2023, former president Donald Trump launched his third presidential bid in front of a raucous, rollicking crowd in Waco, Texas. Waco, a city of about 145,000 people in east Texas, situated halfway between Dallas and Austin, was the scene 30 years earlier of a bloody showdown between federal and state law enforcement officers and the heavily armed Branch Davidian cult, a siege that left scores of Branch Davidians dead in a suicidal conflagration. Since those events, which began on February 28 and ended on April 19, 1993, Waco has become iconic in the memory of far-right, violence-prone militia groups, and it inspired a militia-affiliated extremist, Timothy McVeigh, to explode a truck bomb in Oklahoma City exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people and injured 680.
By selecting Waco as his campaign kickoff event, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to violence-prone extremists nationwide. The Houston Chronicle, in an editorial about Trump’s rally, wrote that the choice of Waco went far beyond a “dog whistle” and compared it to “the blaring of air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10,” adding that Trump was “stoking the fires of Waco.”
In his speech, Trump fed his audience the red meat that many of them were looking for. He opened the rally by playing a song, “Justice for All” by the “J6 Choir,” recorded by men imprisoned for the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, accompanied by footage of the mob attack. Claiming that the United States has been taken over by “Marxists and communists,” Trump said ominously, “2024 is the final battle. That’s going to be the big one.”
And he added: “I am your warrior.… I am your retribution.”
Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he suggested that “the Second Amendment people”—i.e., his gun-owning backers—might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court choices. In 2019, he said, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” And in 2020 Trump famously told the Proud Boys militia to “stand back and stand by.” Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.
Such rhetoric has led many people to warn that Trump, an authoritarian favored by white supremacists, is a fascist, or proto-fascist, and that stopping him in this year’s election is essential to prevent the erosion of democracy, end runs around the US Constitution, and the beginning of a slide toward fascism in America. But one thing that Trump doesn’t have, so far at least, is something that both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler could count on in their parallel ascents to power in the early 1920s: a reliable force of street thugs and paramilitary units that he and his allies can deploy against Trump’s “enemies,” from the Democrats (“Marxists and communists”) to immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ organizations, and that “enemy of the people,” the media.
Certainly, Trump has summoned US militias and other extremists to his cause. In 2020, for instance, at the height of nationwide protests against lockdowns, mask requirements, and school closures at the start of the coronavirus crisis, Trump issued a series of viral tweets urging his followers to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, where armed adherents were mobilizing in street demonstrations. For instance, on April 17, 2020, Trump tweeted—characteristically, in all caps—“LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Soon afterwards, gun-toting Trump supporters invaded the state capitol in Lansing. Most egregiously, he called on supporters to gather in Washington on January 5-6, 2021—“Be there, will be wild”—for a rally that ended in the occupation of the Capitol and led to Trump’s impeachment.
Yet so far Trump’s interaction with militia groups and what the US Department of Justice calls “domestic violent extremists” has been mostly at arms-length, and the national militia movement is leaderless and inchoate. But America is heading into an election as a bitterly divided nation in which a substantial portion of the populace believes that violence may be necessary. According to a survey by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats, as many as 14 percent of Americans say that violence is justified to “achieve political goals that I support,” and 4.4 percent—that’s more than 11 million US adults—agree that “the use of force is justified to return Donald Trump to the presidency.”
“We are in such an extremely polarized country, where more and more issues are seen as zero-sum, that we are in a tinderbox state where anything can set people off,” says Mark Pitcavage, who’s spent decades studying far-right extremists for the Anti-Defamation League, and who says that Trump’s entry in politics has politicized the militia movement. “It’s like we’re standing outside a building filled with explosives and hoping nobody’s smoking inside.”…
What’s especially worrisome is that conservative elected officials, sheriffs, and Republican Party offices are tacitly, and sometimes even explicitly, cooperating with, encouraging and supporting militia groups. The membrane that has long separated the state and local governments from nongovernmental and private ultra-right actors, including violence-prone ones, is becoming increasingly porous…
“It would be foolish to underestimate the power of Trump’s comments to call rogue militias to action,” wrote Mary McCord, in essay for Lawfare five years ago. “The militia movement has shown that it will take action based on the president’s statements.”…
“Constitutional Sheriffs” and the NRA
Providing the background music for the militia movement and a wide range of other extreme right, anti-government groups is the granddaddy of them all, the National Rifle Association. Though in recent years the far right has been moved to action over the immigrant “invasion,” Covid-19 restrictions, and election fraud conspiracies, no other issue galvanizes the right more than gun safety measures and fears that Democrats are scheming to disarm gun owners.
And at the local level, in parallel with the NRA itself, a group calling itself the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) has emerged to unite elected government officials—that is, the nation’s 3,000 elected sheriffs, one in each of America’s 3,000 counties—and pro-militia armed citizens. Founded in 2011 by Richard Mack, then sheriff of Graham County, Arizona, CSPOA claims that in each country the sheriff is “sovereign,” and can exert law enforcement powers that exceed both federal and state authorities—and includes the refusal to enforce federal and state gun laws. Though its membership rolls are secret, at least 69 sheriffs have been identified as CSPOA members, and in a survey conducted by the Arizona Center for Investigating Reporting, 200 of the 500 sheriffs surveyed said that they agreed with CSPOA’s ideology. Its current CEO, Sam Bushman, operates Liberty News Radio, a forum for white nationalists, where Bushman has hosted Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers’ founder, multiple times. (Rhodes is currently serving an 18-year sentence for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)
Mack, its founder, was a former member of the Oath Keepers board of directors, and since leaving that post he’s maintained ties with the Oath Keepers and other parts of the militia movement. The CSPOA encourages its members to enlist local armed citizens in what they call a “posse,” essentially a sheriff-sponsored militia that can be called up, say, to confront protesters or riots. Sheriff Bob Songer of Klickitat County, Washington, for instance, a CSPOA board member, claims to have assembled a posse of 150 men, after telling the feds to “stay out of our county.” Songer, a far-right personality with a wide following, has worked with a pro-militia organization called Patriot Prayer, which is closely tied to the Proud Boys.
What’s especially worrisome about CSPOA and its member sheriffs’ efforts, like Songer’s, to recruit local civilians to posses is that provides a connection point between the militia movement and local governments. According to Georgetown’s McCord, CSPOA has “advocated for county recognition of local militias.” And in one recent case, in Nassau County, Long Island, just outside New York City, a pro-Trump county executive and the local sheriff made news recently when the executive, Bruce Blakeman, placed an ad asking for local gun-license holders to sign up to be deputized as a civilian law enforcement adjunct force. The priority, he said, would be for ex-military and former law enforcement personnel, who’d earn $150 per day for their participation. In an interview with WPIX-TV, Blakeman said that the force could be called up “if there was a riot.”…
MORE AT:
The Nation
Is Trump Building an Army of Modern Blackshirts?
The proliferation of pro-Trump militia groups across the country eerily echoes the rise of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi.
BOB DREYFUSS
September 5, 2024
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Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Carolyn "Bunny" Welsh in uniform stands to the left of Attorney General William Barr in this photo:
“Anyone who voted at the Pennsbury North-1 and Pennsbury North-2 polling place on Election Day at the main entrance to Chadds Ford Elementary School is being urged to get tested for coronavirus.
Bunny Welsh, former Chester County Sheriff, set up a Republican table inside the vestibule at the school, and all voters had to pass through that vestibule and table en route to voting, said Wayne Braffman, with the Chester County Democratic Party.
Welsh staffed the table from 6:15 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. while interacting with voters, Braffman said, adding she rarely wore a mask.
Welsh has since tested positive for coronavirus and is being treated at Chester County Hospital.”
FROM:
Daily Local News
Pennsbury voters urged to get tested for coronavirus
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The Leadership
CSPOA Council of Sheriffs, Peace Officers and Public Officials
Sheriffs Dean Wilson CA, John D’Agostini CA, Jon Bruce CO, Brad Rogers IN, Chuck Korzenborn KY, Donnie Smith ME, Billy McGee MS, Christopher Conley NH, Tony Demeo NV, Glenn Palmer OR, Bunny Welsh PA, David Medlin TX, Mark Gower UT, County Commissioner Cornel Rasor, ID, Chief of Police Robert Douglas FL.”
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