Joe Moore, a high-profile FBI informant who spent years infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan confirms in a new book public fears that America’s fraught 2024 election could be hit by far-right violence, the Guardian reports. Moore, a former U.S. Army sniper, spent a decade tasked with infiltrating KKK chapters in Florida to investigate enduring ties between law enforcement and the white supremacist organization. He disrupted a plot by Klansmen prison guards to murder a Black former inmates and foiled a plan to assassinate Barack Obama, then a candidate for president, he says. Moore’s extraordinary tale has been told previously – both as an Associated Press story in 2021 corroborated using court records and trial transcripts, and as a documentary, Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, but Moore’s new account comes with an immediate political message.
Moore's new book, White Robes and Broken Badges, applies the lessons he learned to an approaching election freighted with fears of the impact of far-right and white supremacist groups. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in May reported that two out of three Americans said they were concerned that political violence could follow the 5 November election. Despite his overseas combat experience in authoritarian counties, “nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much what we’re facing at home now. Should we be afraid? With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.” The foreword is written by the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, who last week described his experience during the January 6 riot to Democratic conventioneers in Chicago. Moore, Raskin writes, “shows how the KKK remains a central entry point and organizing force for violent white nationalism in America.”
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