President moves to shield White Nationalist from terrorist watchlist

Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly pushing to erase neo-Nazis and white supremacists from the US government’s counter-extremism programme by moving it to focus exclusively on Islamist terrorism.

American officials briefed on the proposed changes told Reuters the Countering Violent Extremism (DVE) initiative could be renamed to “Countering Radical Islamic Extremism”.\




‘Trump is setting us free:’ White supremacists celebrate reports that Trump will dial down scrutiny
“This is absolutely a signal of favor to us.”


CREDIT: AP Photo/Jay Reeves



By Laurel Raymond and Alan Pyke

Online neo-Nazi and white supremacist forums have been unmistakably jubilant lately, as web chatter moved from celebrating President Donald Trump’s electoral victory to celebrating individual cabinet appointments and policy proposals.

On Thursday, internet racists celebrated another perceived victory: Reportsthat President Trump will soon remove white nationalist groups from a federal effort to study and neutralize extremist radicalization, and rebrand the program to focus solely on groups associating themselves with Islam.
“Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”

The Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program partners government agencies with community organizations in hopes of preventing people from being radicalized into various types of terror and hate groups. Its primary focus has always been in Muslim communities, but the Obama administration designed it to also encompass the American far-right groups that propagandize to people like Dylann Roof.

News of Trump’s plan to reverse that symbolic recognition of right-wing threats prompted a wave of celebration in white nationalist circles.

“Donald Trump wants to remove us from undue federal scrutiny by removing ‘white supremacists’ from the definition of ‘extremism,’” the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer (which takes its name from a Nazi propaganda publication) wrote in a post on the site. “Yes, this is real life. Our memes are all real life. Donald Trump is setting us free.”