Necessary study of violent extremism gets reprieve
By The Herald Editorial Board
The warning, given by a Cle Elum man — his chest emblazoned with a swastika and the Nazi eagle symbol — to an Edmonds police office who arrested the man in November 2021 for spewing racist slurs and making threatening actions against an animal control officer might have been dismissed as a bully’s bluster.
“I follow orders too,” Sean Wagner, then 34, told the police officer, according to court documents. “It’s coming. We’re just waiting for the right moment, but it’s coming. When the order is given, you won’t be able to do anything about it. We’ll win.”
A jury understood it as more than bluster and convicted the man of a hate crime for the threats against the animal control officer. Wagner was sentenced in November of last year to nine months confinement, the high end of the state sentencing range.
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State lawmakers, during the session that wrapped up last month, had a response in hand that promised a path toward better understanding the threat of what the FBI and Department of Homeland Security now call domestic violent extremism and toward developing an approach that sought to improve collection of data and statistics around hate crimes and incidents and propose solutions, including an innovative public-health strategy toward prevention of extremism.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-necessary-study-of-violent-extremism-gets-reprieve/