On Thursday, a federal judge ruled Andrew Anglin, founder and editor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, must pay a Jewish woman $14 million in damages for a coordinated campaign of harassment he organized.

Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana, sued Anglin in 2017 about a year after Anglin posted her personal information on his website, urging people to harass her.

According to the lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Gersh and Sherry Spencer live in the same town, where Spencer owns property. Spencer is the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer.

Spencer received local criticism after a video of her son giving Nazi salutes at a white nationalist gathering went viral. In the video, Richard Spencer said, "Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!"

...

Tito Anchondo wishes people would stop politicizing his family’s tragedy.

Anchondo, who lost his beloved brother and sister-in-law in the rampage outside an El Paso Walmart on Saturday, said he chose to take his orphaned nephew to University Medical Center of El Paso on Wednesday to meet the president and first lady. The 2-month-old suffered two broken fingers in the shooting but survived after his parents, Andre and Jordan Anchondo, shielded him from the gunfire and were slain themselves.

Tito Anchondo said he wanted to meet the president to tell him about his family’s grievous pain. “He was just there as a human being, consoling us and giving his condolences,” he said about Trump in an interview outside his family’s auto-body shop in south-central El Paso.

...

But Anchondo strongly rejects that view of the shootings and said he did not want the photo to be seen through a political lens. Anchondo previously told NPR that his family is Republican and his murdered brother had supported Trump.

The president “wasn’t there to be pushing any kind of political agenda,” he said, describing “a private conversation between human beings.”

Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter has his own superpower: A hard-to-get New York City gun permit renewed by a crooked cop who testified Wednesday that he scored tickets to red-carpet superhero movie premieres.

Ex-NYPD Sgt. David Villanueva, who has pleaded guilty to accepting bribes while working in the department’s scandal-scarred License Division, said under oath that he’d received tickets to the movie premieres from Perlmutter’s assistant, Marisol Garcia.

He described Garcia as a friend and didn’t say he spoke directly with Perlmutter. The reclusive Marvel executive is a prominent supporter of President Trump who has been described as a “shadow ruler” of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“So you went to six premieres for Marvel Comics, right?” defense attorney John Meringolo asked.

Adam Klasfeld
✔
@KlasfeldReports
Uploading files to share right now.

Among the trove of more than a dozen, there is the formerly-sealed 76-page ruling in the case Giuffre v. Maxwell, the case brought by one of Epstein's accusers interviewed in @JKJournalist's watershed series "Perversion of Justice."

Adam Klasfeld
✔
@KlasfeldReports
Epstein's Amazon orders included the following books: "SM 101: A Realistic Introduction," "SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude," "A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners," Giuffre alleges.

A photo of the receipt is included in the motion.

First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying. The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, thought disorders or suicidality.

Second, practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. They often had become angry and despondent because of a specific grievance. For workplace shooters, a change in job status was frequently the trigger. For shooters in other contexts, relationship rejection or loss often played a role. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.

Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives. People in crisis have always existed. But in the age of 24-hour rolling news and social media, there are scripts to follow that promise notoriety in death. Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them. Hence, as we have seen in the last week, mass shootings tend to come in clusters. They are socially contagious. Perpetrators study other perpetrators and model their acts after previous shootings. Many are radicalized online in their search for validation from others that their will to murder is justified.

Fourth, the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans. Once someone decides life is no longer worth living and that murdering others would be a proper revenge, only means and opportunity stand in the way of another mass shooting. Is an appropriate shooting site accessible? Can the would-be shooter obtain firearms? In 80% of school shootings, perpetrators got their weapons from family members, according to our data. Workplace shooters tended to use handguns they legally owned. Other public shooters were more likely to acquire them illegally.

WASHINGTON — Alleged white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018, according to a government document distributed earlier this year to state, local and federal law enforcement.

The document, which has not been previously reported on, becomes public as the Trump administration’s Justice Department has been unable or unwilling to provide data to Congress on white supremacist domestic terrorism.

The data in this document, titled “Domestic Terrorism in 2018,” appears to be what Congress has been asking for — and didn’t get.

...

“For the past decade, the FBI used 11 different categories for domestic terrorism, including a separate category for white supremacist incidents. The Administration is now using a classification system with only four categories, including ‘racially-motivated violent extremism,’” the letter said. “This new category inappropriately combines incidents involving white supremacists and so-called ‘Black identity extremists,’ a fabricated term based on a faulty assessment of a small number of isolated incidents.”

For years, U.S. election officials and voting machine vendors have insisted that critical election systems are never connected to the internet and therefore can’t be hacked.

But a group of election security experts have found what they believe to be nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states connected to the internet over the last year, including some in critical swing states. These include systems in nine Wisconsin counties, in four Michigan counties, and in seven Florida counties—all states that are perennial battlegrounds in presidential elections.

Some of the systems have been online for a year and possibly longer. Some of them disappeared from the internet after the researchers notified an information-sharing group for election officials last year. But at least 19 of the systems, including one in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, were still connected to the internet this week, the researchers told Motherboard.

The researchers and Motherboard have been able to verify that at least some of the systems in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and Florida are in fact election systems. The rest are still unconfirmed, but the fact that some of them appeared to quickly drop offline after the researchers reported them suggests their findings are on the mark.