Could we be in a hot civil war before people have gotten hip to the cold civil war?

Obviously we have the situation in D.C. where Steve Bannon, a white supremacist has been installed, perhaps illegally, on the National Security Council and Trump said the acting Attorney General “betrayed” the Justice Dept. by vowing not to enforce the executive orders that she determined were illegal.  That’s the stuff they spend a lot of time discussing on cable news.

We need to connecting the disturbing dots where there’s less light shone.  We have law enforcement agents not following court orders.

“Rogue customs and Border Patrol agents continue to try to get people on to planes,” Becca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told reporters on Sunday morning at JFK airport in New York. “A lot of people have been handcuffed, a lot of people who don’t speak English are being coerced into taking involuntary departures.”

The FBI has quietly been investigating whether law enforcement has been infiltrated by white supremacists.  We know the National Security Council was.   Read the linked piece by the Intercept, it is chilling and we know it’s an issue, not only in law enforcement, but the military.  Not really a surprise that people who want the power of a gun and a badge and a kevlar vest might be more likely to be of the Bannonist persuasion.  But given that the last line of defense in a democracy is the courts and the ability to carry out their orders, if you cannot trust law enforcement to carry out court orders?  Then we’re already at a coup 9 days in.  And do we have to start worrying about the loyalty of the military?

Although these right-wing extremists have posed a growing threat for years, federal investigators have been reluctant to publicly address that threat or to point out the movement’s longstanding strategy of infiltrating the law enforcement community.

Up in the Godforsaken hellscape of Canada, that media can’t possibly beat a path to, apparently, a white nationalist Bannonist who supports Trump and LePen murdered 6 Muslim Canadians in an act of terrorism.  But Sean Spicer and Fox News have characterized the killer as a Moroccan.  One can’t help but wonder why so little coverage of this latest atrocity.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack.

But these assertions are utterly false. The suspect is neither Moroccan nor Muslim. The Moroccan individual, Mohamed Belkhadir, was actually one of the worshippers at the mosque and called 911 to summon the police, and played no role whatsoever in the shooting.

The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights groups, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online.

Expect more attacks like this.  Concurrently, experts expect that Trump’s immigration order could inspire attacks on American targets as it plays into Islamist claims that we’re at war with Islam.  What happens when a Trump property is targeted?  The war that Trump wants could happen just like that.  But that’s international war.  I’m still more concerned with domestic conflict as Trump/Bannon and their nutty followers take a harder and increasingly more violent and less lawful stance to defend the power they believe they’ve been given.  These people are messianic in their belief that they’re saving the world from the naive ideas of democracy and pluralism that is destroying their idea of what civilization is (law and order for white people).

Check 0ut the Early Warning Signs of Fascism.  Um, we are there.  It’s not sufficient to say that America has traditions that will not allow it to be so easily taken over the way Putin made Russia his chew toy.  Maybe those traditions are easier to overcome that we thought.