Category: Audio Posts: Selected Articles

MIAMI (WSVN) – A 20-year-old man and his co-conspirator have been charged with conspiracy to steal and launder over $230 million in cryptocurrency, and federal authorities said the arrests are connected to an FBI raid of a mansion in Miami.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, 20-year-old Malone Lam of Miami and Los Angeles, California, and 21-year-old Jeandiel Serrano of Los Angeles, were placed under arrest Wednesday night.

The federal indictment alleges the duo, along with others, orchestrated cryptocurrency thefts and laundered the proceeds through exchanges and mixing services.

One user on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, uncovered the moment Lam allegedly landed more than $230 million in stolen Bitcoin from a victim in Washington, D.C.

The indictment states the suspects “used the illegally obtained cryptocurrency to purchase international travel, service at nightclubs, numerous luxury automobiles, watches, jewelry, designer handbags, and to pay for rental homes in Los Angeles and Miami.”

The duo are accused of flaunting it all at parties like one recorded on video, showing off the luxury cars and designer handbags.

Lam, a Singapore citizen using the online aliases “Anne Hathaway” and “$$$,” and Serrano, who goes by “VersaceGod” and “@SkidStar,” allegedly accessed victim accounts and transferred cryptocurrency into their control, including over 4,100 Bitcoin from the victim in Washington, D.C. in August.

But it all came to a screeching halt Wednesday evening, when FBI agents busted into a mansion near Northeast 83rd Street and 12th Avenue, located near North Bayshore Drive, just south of Miami Shores.

“I heard what I thought was fireworks,” said an area resident.

Neighbors said the home is a rental property.

Thursday night, FBI officials confirmed Lam and Serrano’s arrests are connected with this raid.

Smoke poured out of the mansion as federal authorities raided during daylight hours and investigated into the night.

7News cameras captured federal agents as they combed through every inch of the property.

City of Miami Police said they assisted FBI agents with Wednesday’s raid.

For neighbors left wondering what went down, they now have their answer.

“We all walk at the same time, so tonight, it’s going to be peace for all,” said an area resident.

Lam and Serrano were set to appear in U.S. District Courts in Florida and California on Thursday.

Copyright 2024 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The Zovighian Public Office (ZPO) has published a second edition of an open-source intelligence (OSINT) and geolocation report at the one-year mark of the military assault of Azerbaijan against the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, known to Armenians as Artsakh. The report, commissioned to explore if Azerbaijan imposed a blockade on the indigenous Armenian population at the Lachin Corridor, shows how an unconventional war began in December 2022 before shifting into a conventional war in September 2023, successfully appropriating the area and expelling the community from their ancestral homeland.

Titled, “From blockade to war: The ethnic cleansing of the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh,” the OSINT study examines and refutes three consistent claims made by the Azerbaijani government during the blockade:

• Claim 1: There was no road closure and no blockade.
• Claim 2: Azerbaijan had the right to erect a checkpoint at its border with Armenia.
• Claim 3: There was no blockade because alternative roads could be used.

“It was a perfect blockade,” said ZPO Founder Lynn Zovighian, who co-authored the report. “Azerbaijan exploited geographic and geopolitical vulnerabilities, under the cover of international credibility, and successfully ethnically cleansed the historic Artsakhi Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh with no consequences.”

“One year since the people of Artsakh were forced to flee their homeland, families continue to suffer from losing their homes and livelihoods. This report painstakingly demonstrates the genocidal strategy of Azerbaijan against the Artsakhi Armenians,” said Gegham Stepanyan Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Studying the first claim, the report shows how the so-called eco-activist protest at the Lachin Corridor Road created both a physical obstruction and hostile space, barring all safe and free movement of food, medicine, and essential items from reaching the population, instigating a population-wide humanitarian disaster. A geolocation study confirmed that there were no mines in the immediate vicinity and that any protest of alleged Armenian mining activities in the region was unexplained and unjustified.

Analyzing the second claim clarified how pressure by the international community pushed Azerbaijan to replace the so-called protestors with an official checkpoint, further militarizing and institutionalizing the comprehensive siege of Nagorno-Karabakh. Insufficient efforts by the international community to stop Azerbaijan’s siege and their manipulations of sovereign rights and territorial integrity, the checkpoint effectively blocked all movement of not only residents and trade, but also humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Studying the third claim helped confirm that no viable alternative route to the Lachin Corridor existed by land between Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia.

The report concludes that Azerbaijan was able to manipulate a confounded rhetoric to build diplomatic credibility with the international community, without needing to give away any negotiating power or backtrack on any of their positions.

“Almost two years since the illegal blockade began, this credibility remains very intact, and has been fortified by Azerbaijan’s further crimes, intentional failures to implement orders by the International Court of Justice, and the genocidal aggression and forced displacement of our people. Unfortunately, the perpetrators of the genocide have remained unpunished and have even been encouraged by the international community, winning their bid to host COP29,” explained Artak Beglaryan, Founder of Artsakh Union and former Minister of State and Human Rights Defender (Ombudsman) of the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Azerbaijan has a history of weaponizing environmental causes and platforms, and will be hosting COP29 in November.

An expert panel will be hosted on September 30 to present key OSINT findings featured in this report with diplomats, analysts, and journalists.

“High quality evidence is essential in seeking justice and accountability for international crimes. Azerbaijan’s crimes against the Armenians of Artsakh Nagorno-Karabakh remain unpunished for now, but the collection and preservation of credible and reliable evidence will ensure that those most responsible can be held responsible at any time, and that time will surely come,” said international human rights lawyer Sheila Paylan.

This new edition is now available in the Arabic language as the Gaza War nears its one-year mark on October 7.

“Like Azerbaijan, Israel is successfully employing similar strategies in Gaza against the Palestinian people today,” explained Zovighian.

Israel and Azerbaijan have an intimate decades-long military and trade friendship based on oil, advanced military technology, and intelligence sharing.

Zovighian added, “The success of the Nagorno-Karabakh blockade and takeover by Azerbaijan taught Israel that they too could terrorize, starve, and expel an entire population with a free hand and no consequences. This is what happens when perpetrators and criminals in power are not held to account.”

The Artsakh Union, a grassroots civil society organization, was established by Artak Beglaryan following the forced displacement of the Armenians of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) after the genocidal aggression and nine-month-long blockade by Azerbaijan in 2023. Its mission is to advocate for the collective and individual rights of the Artsakh Armenians globally. It is committed to facilitating international justice and accountability and protect the right of return of the historic Armenian community to their ancestral homeland.

The Zovighian Public Office was established in 2015 to serve communities facing crises and crimes of atrocity. We are dedicated to amplifying their voices through research, culture, advocacy, and diplomacy.

In December, 1954, the United States Senate gathered for the purpose of censuring the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. During the preceding months, McCarthy, whose anti-Communist bromides had made him among the most feared and powerful figures in Congress, had suffered a calamitous decline in fortunes. He had been thoroughly humiliated in the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings and endured lacerating criticism from the journalist Edward R. Murrow. The once potent brand of innuendo, fearmongering, and outright lying that brought the senator to prominence was now the central reason for his rebuke. The traditional narrative of McCarthy’s demise centers on the most visible and operatic moments, but there was also an underlying political logic that facilitated them. In 1950, when it was reported that McCarthy, a Republican, falsely claimed to have the names of two hundred and five Communists employed by the State Department, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House. In 1954, when the Army-McCarthy hearings took place, Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate (narrowly) and the White House, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was one thing to cast toxic conspiracies that made Democrats look bad, but quite another to spread falsehoods that made his own party look inept. In the end, twenty-two Republican senators voted in favor of censure.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a Presidential candidate, observers have compared him to McCarthy, not simply because of their demagogic commonalities and mutual ties to the attorney Roy Cohn but also for the hostile symbiosis they forged with the media outlets of their respective eras. The aftermath of last week’s midterm elections suggests an additional area of comparison: the narratives attached to their political declines. The G.O.P. has abided all manner of corrupt, dishonest, anti-democratic, and potentially illegal behavior from Trump, including his incitement of an armed insurrection against the United States Congress, but the lacklustre midterm performance of Republicans seems to suggest that, like McCarthy sixty-eight years ago, the former President has reached a point where his demagogy has become a liability for his own party.

Few are the demagogues noted for their superior emotional-regulation abilities, but even by that standard the reports that the former President Trump is alternately enraged and defensive over the results of the midterm elections are noteworthy. Not since his grudging exit from the White House in January, 2021, has he inspired such levels of Schadenfreude among his critics. This election—in which the Republicans picked up far fewer congressional seats than expected, the Senate remains in the hands of Democrats, and even those Trump-affiliated candidates who prevailed seemed to have done so against real political headwinds—is being read as a referendum on the dwindling viability of MAGA-style Republicanism, as well as on the former President’s prospects in 2024. Republicans are, tentatively, distancing themselves from the Trump brand, and media observers have noted the stream of criticism emanating from Rupert Murdoch-owned news properties. The cumulative effect of these developments is a barely concealed hope that the G.O.P. will jettison Trump like loose cargo on a storm-battered freighter, and that the most volatile and dangerous elements of American politics will sink along with him. But, for reasons that should be more than familiar to us by now, the path the MAGA movement takes toward irrelevance is likely not so simple—if, in fact, it is headed in that direction.

In the seven years since Trump took his ride down the gold-colored escalator in Trump Tower to declare his candidacy for President of the United States, the movement that coalesced around him has died a thousand deaths, only to climb out of its shallow grave before the first trowel of dirt hit the casket. The political landscape in front of Trump is different and far more formidable than it was even in 2016, when he was a political novice. Notable Presidents—Ulysses S. Grant and Eisenhower among them—had been elected without much political experience. But, in 2024, a prospective Trump would be attempting reëlection after having lost a Presidential election, a feat that only the Democrat Grover Cleveland achieved, in 1892, by defeating Benjamin Harrison, who was himself hobbled by divisions among Republicans. Moreover, in 2016, Trump sliced through a fairly unimpressive field of G.O.P. competitors in the primaries. This time, though, he could face a significant primary challenger, in the form of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. All this seemingly points to the diminished viability of one of the most disruptive political movements we’ve seen in modern American history. Yet it’s worth thinking about what exactly Trumpism is and how it came to be before penning another potentially premature eulogy on its behalf.

It would be easy at this point to saddle Trump with all the ills and the disastrous implications of what we’ve come to refer to as “Trumpism.” But the most significant parallel between Trump’s careers in business and in politics is his lack of standing as a creator. His talent lies not in organizational leadership or in shepherding a novel concept from its inception to a place of prominence but, rather, in marketing. Trump emerged as a political force in the middle of the first Black Presidency and adroitly played to racist and xenophobic fears that attended Barack Obama’s election. He lied prolifically about Obama’s birth certificate. In early 2011, Trump claimed to have people looking into the matter, “and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” As with Trump’s other canards, he never actually said what these people—if they existed at all—were finding.

It should be recalled, however, that Trump did not invent birtherism; he simply recognized the broader political potential of a ridiculous lie and ran with it. Similarly, the phenomenon known as “McCarthyism” had roots that preceded the 1946 election that sent McCarthy to the Senate. Notably, the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Representative Martin Dies, Jr., the Democrat of Texas, was formed a full decade earlier, and its combative use of Red-baiting innuendo against the subjects of its inquiries provided a template for McCarthy’s approach. Yet the disparate elements of intolerance for dissent, including the suppression of First Amendment rights, and the broader currents of social paranoia might have remained just that but for McCarthy’s ability to synthesize them into a cohesive whole.

The persecution associated with anti-Communism survived McCarthy. It took a series of Supreme Court decisions in 1957 and 1958—most notably the Yates v. United States ruling, which overturned the convictions of several Communists prosecuted under the Smith Act—to curtail the most egregious excesses committed in the name of patriotism. Trump did not single-handedly inject the strains of intolerance, racism, nativism, belligerence, and a durable sympathy for anti-democratic behavior into the Republican Party, and there is no reason to believe that his absence would cause them to evaporate. Immigrants make up just under fourteen per cent of the population of the United States—almost triple their proportion in 1970. The age-old fears about racial and ethnic replacement that Trump so deftly manipulated in 2016 remain ambient. Moreover, the drive to curate the electorate via voter suppression has lost none of its resonance on the right. In fact, the razor-thin margins in last week’s elections point to the outsized effect that suppressing even a sliver of specific electorates can yield. And, paradoxically, the emerging audacity among right-wing media to criticize Trump points to how little has changed. Part of what has driven the Republican Party so far to the right has been the influence of these same conservative outlets, whose criticism can spark a primary challenge for Republicans deemed too moderate. They helped foster the environment in which Trumpism could not only emerge but thrive. If they play a role in undermining Trump, this serves to reinforce their role as the rudders of the G.O.P.

For critical observers, it has always been apparent that everything Trump offered the public came slathered in snake oil. That is either a statement about the willful blindness of the American public or a barometer of how many Americans view those dangerous liabilities as assets. In either case, the McCarthy example provides at least one other insight: fixating on the salesman misses the point. The problem is, and always has been, the size of the audience rushing to buy what he’s been selling. ♦

BEIRUT (AP) — Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near-simultaneously Tuesday in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least nine people, including an 8-year-old girl, and wounding several thousand, officials said. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated remote attack.

An American official said Israel briefed the United States on Tuesday after the conclusion of the operation, in which small amounts of explosive secreted in the pagers were detonated. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the information publicly.

The Israeli military declined to comment.

Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious explosions came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.

The pagers that blew up were apparently acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday that it authorized its brand on the AR-924 pagers used by the Hezbollah militant group, but the devices were produced and sold by a company called BAC.

At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and motorcycles in the afternoon traffic, the pagers in their hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.

It appeared that many of those hit were members of Hezbollah, but it was not immediately clear if non-Hezbollah members also carried any of the exploding pagers.

The blasts were mainly in areas where the group has a strong presence, particularly a southern Beirut suburb and in the Beqaa region of eastern Lebanon, as well as in Damascus, according to Lebanese security officials and a Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

The explosions came hours after Israel’s internal security agency said it had foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to kill a former senior Israeli security official using a planted explosive device that could be remotely detonated.

The United States “was not aware of this incident in advance” and was not involved, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “At this point, we’re gathering information.”

Experts said the pager explosions pointed to a long-planned operation, possibly carried out by infiltrating the supply chain and rigging the devices with explosives before they were delivered to Lebanon.

Whatever the means, it targeted an extraordinary breadth of people with hundreds of small explosions — wherever the pager carrier happened to be — that left some maimed.

One online video showed a man picking through produce at a grocery store when the bag he was carrying at his hip explodes, sending him sprawling to the ground and bystanders running.

At overwhelmed hospitals, wounded were rushed in on stretchers, some with missing hands, faces partly blown away or gaping holes at their hips and legs, according to AP photographers. On a main road in central Beirut, a car door was splattered with blood and the windshield cracked.

Lebanon Health Minister Firas Abiad told Qatar’s Al Jazeera network at least nine people were killed, including an 8-year-old girl, and some 2,750 were wounded — 200 of them critically — by the explosions. Most had injuries in the face, hand, or around the abdomen.

It appeared eight of the dead belonged to Hezbollah. The group issued a statement confirming at least two members were killed in the pager bombings. One of them was the son of a Hezbollah member in Parliament, according to the Hezbollah official who spoke anonymously. The group later issued announcements that six other members were killed Tuesday, though it did not specify how.

“We hold the Israeli enemy fully responsible for this criminal aggression that also targeted civilians,” Hezbollah said, adding that Israel will “for sure get its just punishment.”

Iranian state-run IRNA news agency said that the country’s ambassador, Mojtaba Amani, was superficially wounded by an exploding pager and was being treated at a hospital.

Previously, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had warned the group’s members not to carry cellphones, saying they could be used by Israel to track and target them.

Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordnance disposal expert, said videos of the blasts suggested a small explosive charge — as small as a pencil eraser — had been placed into the devices. They would have had to have been rigged prior to delivery, very likely by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, he said.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. What triggered the blasts, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate, forcing the user to click on the buttons to stop the vibration. The combination detonated a small amount of explosives hidden inside and ensured that the user was present when the blast went off, he said.

Israel has a long history of carrying out deadly operations well beyond its borders. This year, separate Israeli airstrikes in Beirut killed senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri and a top Hezbollah commander. A mysterious explosion in Iran, also blamed on Israel, killed Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ supreme leader.

Israel has killed Hamas militants in the past with booby-trapped cellphones and it’s widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran’s nuclear program in 2010.

The pager bombings are likely to stoke Hezbollah’s worries about vulnerabilities in security and communications as Israeli officials are threaten to escalate their monthslong conflict. The near-daily exchanges of fire between Israel and Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon and several dozen in Israel, and have displaced tens of thousands on both sides of the border.

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, deplored the attack and warned that it marks “an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context.”

On Tuesday, Israel said that halting Hezbollah’s attacks in the north to allow residents to return to their homes is now an official war goal. Israeli Defense Minister Gallant said the focus of the conflict is shifting from Gaza to Israel’s north and that time is running out for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah.

___

This story has been updated to correct the name of the Hezbollah lawmaker’s son killed by a pager blast.

___

Associated Press writers Hussein Malla, Hassan Ammar, Fadi Tawil and Sarah El Deeb in Beirut; Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran; Michael Biesecker in Washington; Josef Federman in Jerusalem; Zeke Miller in Washington; and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.

CNN
 — 

Ex-President Donald Trump responded to a second apparent assassination attempt that he blames on incendiary political rhetoric by inflaming the situation even more.

When a bullet grazed his ear in a horrific shooting that killed a rally goer in July, Trump initially acted like a changed man, telling The Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito he had a chance to bring the country and the world together — although that aspiration did not last any longer than the opening paragraphs of his convention speech.

After the Secret Service thwarted a gunman who had apparently lain in wait for the ex-president at one of his Florida golf courses Sunday, Trump’s reaction was different. He accused President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of inviting assassins to target him when they warn that he is a threat to democracy.

He told Fox News Digital on Monday without evidence that the alleged would-be shooter “believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it.” Trump went on: “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.”

“It is called the enemy from within,” he said using a familiar trope of totalitarian leaders. Trump warned that “dangerous fools” like the suspect in Sunday’s incident listen to what Democratic leaders say and react to what he has claimed, falsely, is an orchestrated attempt by the White House to use the justice system to persecute him.

Trump’s running mate advanced an even blunter argument.

“The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that … no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months,” Ohio Sen. JD Vance said.

“I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.”

The Republican vice-presidential nominee has recently denied he is guilty of incitement after his perpetuation of baseless claims that Haitian refugees have been eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, was followed by bomb threats to hospitals and schools.

Democratic Rep. Nikema Williams condemned Vance’s remarks about assassinations and the difference between liberals and conservatives.

“Would he want that? Why would you say that at a time when we’re talking about bringing down the temperature and changing the rhetoric and bringing the country together – unity – moving forward?” the Georgia Democrat said on “CNN This Morning” with Kasie Hunt. “We can disagree on policies, but we don’t want anyone to have an assassination attempt.”

Williams said it was “no secret” that she’s not a Trump supporter, but that she doesn’t want anyone to face a threat on their life. She added that she’s had to arrange personal security measures since becoming a member of Congress to protect herself and her family after facing threats.

The experience of being singled out for apparent attempted murder twice in two months would weigh on anyone. Trump is also facing an election, less than 50 days away, that is a dead heat between him and the vice president, according to most polls.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday that anyone who had been targeted for assassination “might be pretty sensitive, you might be pretty agitated, you might be pretty worried, so I think that is understandable.”

And seeking to decide an election by murdering a candidate for president ought to be repugnant to anyone that believes in democracy and the right of voters to choose their leaders. The exact motives of the suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, are also not clear, although he was a longtime advocate for doing more to help Ukraine – a position that conflicts with Trump’s vow to end the war with Russia.

And the connection between a politician’s rhetoric and actions taken by isolated individuals is often hard to pin down even if the fear is always that a small minority of people might be motivated by a leader’s comments to provoke violence.

But Trump’s claims that Biden and Harris bear direct culpability underscore the extreme nature of his own political instincts.

His claim that their warnings about his supposed threat to democracy risk getting him killed is particularly stark. By implication, he’s saying that it is illegitimate for his opponents to point out the truth: that his past behavior — in seeking to steal the 2020 election and spreading false claims that this year’s voting will be corrupt — suggests that he poses a danger to America’s democratic system. His position, which looks like an attempt to stifle free speech, may also be a dark harbinger of how he would behave if he won a second term.

Trump played a similar political card at last week’s presidential debate when Harris raised his threat to terminate the Constitution and to weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies. She said that since the Supreme Court and Vance wouldn’t stop Trump if he was back in the White House, “It’s up to the American people to stop him.” The vice president was clearly speaking in a political context, but Trump replied: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.”

Despite the fierce political exchanges, there was one moment that recalled lost political normality on Monday. Biden and Trump had a telephone conversation, and the president conveyed his relief that his erstwhile rival was safe. The Republican nominee said in a statement to CNN that it was “a very nice call.”

Incitement and inflammatory rhetoric are often in the eye of the beholder. Republicans were angered, for instance, by Biden’s claim in August 2022 that the philosophical underpinning of the MAGA movement was like “semi-fascism.” (The charge did not become a staple of the president’s rhetoric). New York Rep. Daniel Goldman, a Democrat, said last year in an interview that Trump needed to be “eliminated” — a comment that Vance referenced on Monday. Goldman quickly apologized for his “poor choice of words” and said that he wished no harm to Trump.

But if Democrats are to blame for sometimes going over the top, Trump has made a political brand out of the most outlandish rhetoric uttered by a president or ex-president in the modern history of the United States. The scale and intensity of his invective dwarf anything that the Democrats have flung at him. He calls Harris a “fascist” in almost every public appearance — for instance, he said on August 26 in Virginia that “we have a fascist person running who’s incompetent.” He used similar rhetoric on August 23, August 17, and August 3 in campaign appearances.

Earlier this year, he claimed Biden was running a “Gestapo administration” referring to the genocidal Nazi secret police. He parroted the language of some of history’s worst tyrants by calling his political opponents “vermin” and by warning that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

And when he refused to concede that he lost the 2020 election, Trump called supporters to Washington, DC, and told them to “fight like hell” or they wouldn’t have a country anymore. Then his supporters smashed their way into the US Capitol, to try to thwart the certification of Biden’s victory. Trump has since called those arrested over the events of January 6, 2021, political prisoners and said he’d look at pardoning them if he wins back the White House in November.

Even now Trump is warning he will only accept the result of this year’s election if he deems it fair and has warned he will seek to jail officials and political opponents if he wins back power.

“He plays to people’s fear, he plays to people’s anxiety. He defines us with hate and fear,” Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell said Monday at a canvassing event for Harris. “This violence has to stop, but we also need to understand who and what he is and how much he is contributing to it,” she said, adding, “He has not said he’ll accept the election results.”

Social media has often helped Trump inject bile into political life. After Sunday’s incident, one of his most prominent supporters — Elon Musk, who owns X — questioned why Trump had faced two apparent assassination attempts and his rivals had not encountered any. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote in the post that he later deleted. He later argued the post had been a joke, although given America’s violent political history and assassinations of four US presidents, it’s hard to see how people might find such quips funny.

The rhetoric of Trump and his allies has also made life dangerous for others. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s former infectious diseases expert, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this year that when he is assailed, for instance, by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in congressional hearings, the pace of death threats against him rises. “(There is) a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense,” Fauci said.

Media organizations and election workers have also faced threats when on the wrong end of Trump’s baseless attacks. Prosecutors and judges need extra security while assigned to Trump cases and targeted by his daily screeds.

And even as the shocking aftermath of another apparent attempt on Trump’s life plays out, the impact of his and Vance’s rhetoric is evident in Springfield, Ohio.

After Trump amplified the false claims in the debate, Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine deployed the state highway patrol to monitor city schools that faced bomb threats. Elsewhere in Springfield, classes at Wittenberg University were held remotely Monday while campus police and local law enforcement assessed emailed threats of a bombing and a campus shooting that targeted “members of the Haitian community,” the university said.

In his interview on “State of the Union,” Vance said that any suggestion that he or Trump had acted in a way that caused such threats was “disgusting.”

It’s also disgusting that anyone would consider assassinating a former president running in a democratic election. Yet the historical record shows that while Trump has become a victim of a toxic political culture, he’s also one of its primary instigators.

London
CNN
 — 

It is exactly the kind of attention Ukraine did not need. Since the start of clashes with Russia over its future in 2003, Ukraine has carefully avoided the sort of political violence Ryan Wesley Routh is accused of.

Yet now, at arguably the most crucial point of the conflict, Routh’s vocal support for Kyiv has somehow been seized upon by Russian echo chambers after he was detained Sunday in connection with an apparent assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump.

Someone like Routh was quite easy to meet in Ukraine in the opening months of Russia’s full-scale war in 2022. Border crossings and railway stations were often haunted by whispering, unshaven expatriates of questionable military provenance, trying to conjure the idea that the very real and painful struggle of Ukraine was something they had a pivotal role in. As the conflict has dragged on, the fantasists have faded, and the resumes of dozens of Western volunteers been vetted, or become less relevant as their alleged experience has been tested in combat. The most brutal fighting Europe has seen since the 1940s, the Ukrainian front line has never been less of a place for amateur thrill-seekers.

Yet Routh tried his best to associate himself with the fight against Russia, expressing support for Ukraine in dozens of X posts that year, saying he was willing to die in the fight and that “we need to burn the Kremlin to the ground.”

He protested in Kyiv after Russia invaded, and even tried to enlist, but, aged 56 with no military experience, was turned away. He tried to help recruit foreigners to fight but seems to have failed. The New York Times even interviewed him about a plan to obtain fake passports so Afghan veterans could come from Pakistan or Iran to Ukraine to help resist Russia’s onslaught. His offers to recruit large numbers to fight for Ukraine from across the world “were not realistic” said Oleksandr Shaguri, an officer of the Foreigners Coordination Department of the Land Forces Command. He told CNN, “The best way to describe [Routh’s] messages is – delusional ideas.” Routh never worked with them – a common refrain from across Ukraine’s military heard Monday.

Kyiv has enough on its plate now, other than explaining how little it had to do with the author of “Ukraine’s Unwinnable War: The Fatal Flaw of Democracy, World Abandonment and the Global Citizen – Taiwan, Afghanistan, North Korea and the end of Humanity.” This – Routh’s title for his self-published book – does not demand its author’s ideas are taken too seriously.

But already, Moscow’s prolific echo chambers have begun to fashion a narrative in which US support for Ukraine is somehow extremist. Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, asked what he thought about the assassination bid, said, according to Reuters: “It is not us who should be thinking, it is the US intelligence services who should be thinking. In any case, playing with fire has its consequences.”

<a href=”http://RT.com” rel=”nofollow”>RT.com</a>, a Kremlin-run English news outlet, also highlighted Routh’s interest in Ukraine, writing that “Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene stated that if the suspect’s identity is confirmed, it is clear he is ‘obsessed with the Ukraine war, which is funded by the US.’”

Do not expect any majorly new or intelligent arguments to surface about the war in Ukraine in the weeks ahead. But instead, anticipate a slow drip of some new voices, and some of the usual, suggesting the war in Ukraine cannot be won, that Putin must be given a chance to negotiate a deal (even one that lets him keep the chunk of Ukraine he has stolen), and that there is an unhealthy infection of extremists in the ranks of those who feel they must – as Routh once said – “fight and die” for Ukraine.

None of this helps Ukrainians who genuinely must fight and die to protect their homes and families. It particularly hampers Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, days before he is set to present a victory plan to the Biden administration. The clamor of support for Ukraine to receive US permission to fire longer-range US-supplied missiles at targets deeper inside Russian territory had been growing. It seemed likely last week that President Joe Biden would follow the course he’s taken when past decisions on arming Ukraine were presented to him, and consent – albeit very, very late – after public pressure from allies.

But now Zelensky’s press appearances may be dogged by questions about Routh, however absurdly distant from Kyiv’s agenda his apparent attack on a Florida golf course was. It will feed into the ultimate paranoia of US isolationists: that actions overseas which appear to benefit America’s global interests carry with them the risk of fomenting violence back home.

Routh’s political leanings and worldview were far from consistent, if not delusional. But in the breathy forum of random gibberish that is social media, they contribute to a narrative, for those who seek it, of support for Ukraine causing chaos in America. That the United States should just stay out of Putin’s war.

None of it connects with the savage reality Ukrainians face every night, shaken awake by Russian missiles, or losing loved ones to the ghastly attrition of the front lines.

Washington’s support for Kyiv is weighty and consequential when it lumbers into play, yet horrifyingly fragile when subjected to US electoral politics and the Republican party’s fickle grip on geopolitics. The sudden insertion of a wayward extremist like Routh is a loud, confusing wild card, at a time when support for Ukraine urgently needed a calm and balanced voice.