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After Louisiana District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty ruled against against President Joe Biden administration officials earlier this month, legal experts questioned the legitimacy of the conservative's decision.

Doughty, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, issued a temporary injunction banning federal agencies from talking to social media companies with 'the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.'"

Following his ruling, Reuters reported "Several legal scholars and attorneys said while the lawsuit challenging the administration's communications with social media companies raised real free speech concerns, there wasno precedent to support the sweeping preliminary order" given by" Doughty "that would sharply limit dozens of government agencies and officials' communications with social media companies."

The Guardian reports GUK in addition to questions around the legal standing of Doughty's injunction — the decision "is also the latest in a wider rightwing campaign to weaken attempts at stopping false information and conspiracy theories from proliferating online, one that has included framing disinformation researchers and their efforts as part of a wide-reaching censorship regime."

As a result of the ruling, "Many of the researchers involved have faced significant harassment, leading to fears of a chilling effect on speaking out against disinformation ahead of the 2024 presidential election," according to the report.

The news outlet also points to the fact House GOP members "have put pressure on researchers through a House select subcommittee investigation that launched in January and claims it will look into the 'weaponization of the federal government,'" adding, "House judiciary committee chair, Jim Jordan, earlier this year issued a wide-ranging request for information and documents to multiple universities with programs aimed at researching disinformation, and has so far sent dozens of subpoenas."

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Massachusetts) criticized Jordan's ploy, saying, "This committee is nothing more than a deranged ploy by the Maga extremists who have hijacked the Republican party and now want to use taxpayer money to push their far-right conspiracy nonsense."

American Prospect's Ryan Cooper recently criticized Doughty's ruling, arguing it is a "'conspiracy theory' claiming that Twitter conspired against conservatives before Elon Musk purchased the company and took over as CEO," noting, "The plaintiffs claim they were silenced when pre-Musk Twitter deleted posts expressing opposition to COVID-19 vaccines."

Furthermore, The Guardian emphasizes, "Disinformation researchers have stated that Republican efforts to push back against content moderation and safeguards against misinformation threaten to open the floodgates for conspiracy theories and falsehoods ahead of the 2024 presidential election."

The New Republic's full report is available at this link.

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https://www.rawstory.com/jim-jordan-2661556363/

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Jim Jordan leads GOP push to cripple 'fight against disinformation': report

Matthew Chapman

June 19, 2023,

Republican lawmakers are joining forces with far-right activists to attack universities and even private businesses that are investigating the spread of disinformation online — claiming that this amounts to an effort to silence conservatives on the internet, according to a report.

The New York Times posted a details of the actions they are taking on Monday.

"The effort has encumbered its targets with expansive requests for information and, in some cases, subpoenas — demanding notes, emails and other information related to social media companies and the government dating back to 2015. Complying has consumed time and resources and already affected the groups’ ability to do research and raise money, according to several people involved," reported Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel.

"They and others warned that the campaign undermined the fight against disinformation in American society when the problem is, by most accounts, on the rise — and when another presidential election is around the corner. Many of those behind the Republican effort had also joined former President Donald J. Trump in falsely challenging the outcome of the 2020 presidential election."

The House Judiciary Committee, under Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), has been leading the charge. Meanwhile, a group founded by far-right former Trump adviser Stephen Miller has filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court going after the same entities.

"Targets include Stanford, Clemson and New York Universities and the University of Washington; the Atlantic Council, the German Marshall Fund and the National Conference on Citizenship, all nonpartisan, nongovernmental organizations in Washington; the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco; and Graphika, a company that researches disinformation online," said the report.

"In a related line of inquiry, the committee has also issued a subpoena to the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade association, and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media it created. The committee’s Republican leaders have accused the groups of violating antitrust laws by conspiring to cut off advertising revenue for content researchers and tech companies found to be harmful."

The new push is part of a broader, years-long conspiracy theory among right-wing activists that the government and "big tech" companies are colluding to silence conservative speech on the internet. There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.

LNX

There is no evidence of any such conspiracy; in fact, research shows conservative content actually spreads more easily on Facebook and Twitter.

https://www.propublica.org/article/jim-jordan-disinformation-subpoena-universities

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house Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions' contributions to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime.”

The letters are the latest effort by a House subcommittee set up in January to investigate how the federal government, working with social media companies, has allegedly been “weaponized” to silence conservative and right-wing voices. So far, the committee’s investigations have amplified a variety of dubious, outright false and highly misleading Republican grievances with law enforcement, many of them espoused by former President Donald Trump. Committee members have cited supposed abuses that include the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, its investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the Biden administration’s purported use of executive powers to shut down conservative viewpoints on social media.

now, universities and their researchers are coming under the spotlight of the committee, which the Republicans have labeled the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The letters, signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is chair of both the House Judiciary Committee and the subcommittee, were sent in early March.

They cover an investigation into how “certain third parties, including organizations like yours, may have played a role in this censorship regime by advising on so-called ‘misinformation,’” according to a copy of one of the letters obtained by ProPublica.

The committee requested documents and information dating back to January 2015 between any “employee, contractor, or agent of your organization” and the federal government or social media organizations pertaining to the moderation of social media content. ProPublica confirmed the requests went to Stanford University, the University of Washington, Clemson University and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

The letters have prompted a wave of alarm among those in the field that the congressional inquiry itself, no matter what it finds, will lead universities to pull back on this research just as the 2024 election gets underway. “Recent efforts definitely have a chilling effect on the community of experts across academia, civil society and government built up to understand broader online harms like harassment, foreign influence and — yes — disinformation,” Graham Brookie, who leads studies in this area at the Atlantic Council, told ProPublica.

“The ‘weaponization’ committee is being weaponized against us,” another researcher told ProPublica. Like half a dozen others interviewed for this story, this person asked not to be identified because of the ongoing congressional probe.

Democrats have called the committee a modern-day House Un-American Activities Committee, akin to the congressional committee that pursued alleged communists during the McCarthy era.

Since Rep. Jordan took over the gavel of the judiciary committee in January, he has issued more than 80 subpoenas and requests for documents. Recipients have included the CEOs of social media companies, intelligence officials who signed on to a statement about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 campaign and members of the National School Boards Association who asked the Justice Department to investigate threats of violence against school board officials. Jordan himself refused a subpoena to testify before the Democratic-led House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, prompting that committee to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee.

Jordan’s missives were sent a day after a committee hearing on the “Twitter files,” leaked internal communications from the company that purported to show how right-wing accounts were sidelined and silenced. In written testimony, a panelist accused a broad swath of organizations and individuals of being members of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” including, he implied, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, Department of Defense and universities. The witness wrote disinformation researchers, working with the government, are “creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.”

A New York Universitystudyconcluded in 2021 that social media had not silenced those on the right. “The claim of anti-conservative animus” by social media companies, the study said, “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it."

A spokesperson for Rep. Jordan did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the 2016 elections, Stanford, UW, Clemson and others have engaged in research, sometimes in partnership with social media platforms, government officials and each other, into ways that disinformation can pose tZreats to democracy and how such efforts can be meaningfully countered. The role of lies and disinformation leading to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol gave increased prominence to their work.

As ProPublica has previously reported, sustained accusations by congressional Republicans and right-wing influencers that the Biden administration is stifling dissent have caused the administration to back away from its efforts countering disinformation, including canceling research contracts and sending messages inside the administration that disinformation work is too hot to handle.

Those moves followed a bungled rollout of a clumsily named “Disinformation Governance Board” to coordinate efforts to counter what the administration had called “dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.” Following criticism, the administration disbanded the board and accepted the resignation of its executive director, Nina Jankowicz.

Jordan has subpoenaed Jankowicz, too. She is scheduled to testify April 10 and said she will happily testify under oath.

“This sort of inquiry isn’t something that belongs in the United States Congress,” said Jankowicz. “But given that this method of bullying has caused other institutions to fold to Republican pressure in the past, I fear we may see the blunt force of congressional committees continue to be used in ways that are in direct opposition to the safety, security and free expression of the American people."

**deSantis Privately Called for Google to Be “Broken Up”**

Stanford did not answer a question about whether it stood by its research or make its researchers, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos or Renee DiResta, available for comment. The university referred ProPublica to an online fact sheet addressing “inaccurate and misleading claims” made in the congressional testimony about Stanford’s “projects to analyze rumors and narratives on social media relating to U.S. elections and the coronavirus.” The German Marshall fund said it was working to address the request and Clemson University’s media relations department did not respond to requests for comment.

The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public issued a statement that said “We’re incredibly proud of our work,” adding that “some of the projects CIP researchers have contributed to have become the subject of false claims and criticism that mischaracterizes our work, a tactic that peer researchers in this space are also experiencing.” The statement did not specifically address the House requests.

A university spokesperson, Victor Balta, said in an email, “The UW stands behind this important research aiming to resist strategic misinformation and strengthen our discourse. We have received a request for documents and information, and a response is in progress.”

https://trashpanda-x.github.io/darklantern/

Thomas' Wife Was Featured in Same Event As Oath Keepers Leader January 23, 2022, Sarah Al-Arshani, Business Insider

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife co-hosted a banquet as part of a symposium that featured the founder of the Oath Keepers, the New Yorker reported.

In a story published Friday, Jane Mayer detailed Virginia "Ginni" Thomas' ties to conservative groups.

Among her connections is Stewart Rhodes, who founded the extremist militia group in 2009. Prosecutors previously said the Oath Keepers planned out attacks on the Capitol and held trainings in the weeks before January 6, 2021.

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Conspiracy theories and misinformation did not greatly impact the 2022 midterm elections, a new analysis has determined.

According to Axios, many of the far-right election deniers that participated in critical races also lost elections, which signals that the influence of misinformation is not as detrimental as experts feared.

Speaking to the news outlet, Jared Holt, a senior research manager for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, weighed in with his perspective of misinformation. Although there is still a mass circulation of misinformation, Holt has emphasized that the impact of it is not as apparent.

"Denialism narratives are still out there circulating," Holt said. "The difference here is that they just don't seem to be exciting people like they did in 2020."

"It's hard to say how much of that is attributable to [actions from] tech platforms, and how much is just general public sentiment," Holt said.

Experts also noted that misinformation was more of a driving force in 2020 as opposed to now. The news outlet noted, "Though misinformation remains present in large quantities, this time it had less reach, was more spread out, and was harder to find."

During the Stanford Law School's "Moderated Content" podcast last week, Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory who also oversees the non-partisan coalition Election Integrity Partnership, also weighed in with similar sentiments.

:{"The amount of content we saw that you could call kind of election disinformation was actually larger than what we saw in 2020 — but overall, the effects were much more muted," Stamos said.

The news outlet also noted that five factors have also helped to diminish the impact of misinformation: De-platforming, too many new apps, an overall rejection of election deniers, defamation fears, more education.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/right-wing-misinformation/

Is Fauci showing us how to handle rightwingers? That’s what I asked Sara Aniano on Wednesday. She’s a Monmouth University graduate student studying rightwing rhetoric and conspiracy theories on social media. She co-authored a new report for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology analyzing QAnon trends a year after J6.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/anonymous-hack-fascist-internet/

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The hacktivist collective Anonymous leaked over 150 gigabytes of private data after hacking the web registration company Epik, a popular domain host for far-right groups.

Popular far-right platforms like Parler, Gab and 8chan, as well as far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and QAnon, recently migrated to Epik being banned from other platforms following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot for violating policies on hate speech and spreading misinformation. Last week, Anonymous dumped what it said was a "decade's worth" of company data in a torrent file, including passwords, internal emails, home addresses, and phone numbers.

"After years of bolstering the worst trash the Internet has to offer, this is, truly, the Epik moment we've all been waiting for," the group said in a statement it published along with the data dump, which was first reported by independent journalist Steven Monacelli.

"This dataset is all that's needed to trace actual ownership and management of the fascist side of the Internet," the statement said. "Time to find out who in your family secretly ran an Ivermectin horse porn fetish site, disinfo publishing outfit, or yet another Qanon hellhole."

Extremism researchers say the leak is akin to a "Rosetta Stone to the far right" and is helping them find new links among the groups.

"It's massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I've seen and, as an extremism researcher, it's certainly the most interesting," Megan Squire, a professor atElon Universitywho studies right-wing extremism, told the Washington Post. "It's an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment."

Epik drew national headlines earlier this month after offering support to Texas Right to Life, an antiabortion group whose website was removed from GoDaddy because it solicited information on women who solicited abortions in violations of Texas' new near-total ban. But Epik ultimately stopped working with the site because it violated their rules against collecting private information. Epik has in recent years become a safe space for far-right platforms that were booted from major web hosts like Amazon Web Services, though it has tried to take steps to shed some of its most toxic clients, cutting ties with the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer and 8chan.

"The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive," Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism, told the Post. "Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the Jan. 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy."

Epik founder Robert Monster has drawn growing criticism for hosting extremist content. Monster has denied holding extremist views but following that Christchurch shooting in New Zealand that killed 50 people, he uploaded links to the shooter's video and published his so-called manifesto. Monster insisted that his employees watch the video, which he claimed was faked, according to Bloomberg News.

Monster acknowledged the hack in an email to customers last week, alerting them of an "alleged security incident."

"You are in our prayers today," he wrote, according to the Post. "When situations arise where individuals might not have honorable intentions, I pray for them. I believe that what theenemy intends for evil, God invariably transforms into good. Blessings to you all."

But the company has come under "ridicule" from researchers who have "marveled at the site's apparent failure to take security precautions," according to the report. None of the files were encrypted, researchers say, including data revealing the administrators of far-right websites and passwords. The hack also exposed personal data from Anonymize, a privacy service the company offered to users that wanted to hide their identity.Previous similar hacks have drawn investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and hefty settlements.

"Given Epik's boasts about security, and the scope of its Web hosting, I would think it would be an FTC target, especially if the company was warned but failed to take protective action," David Vladeck, the former director of the FTC's consumer protection bureau, told the Post. "I would add that the FTC wouldn't care about the content — right wing or left wing; the questions would be the possible magnitude and impact of the breach and the representations … the company may have made about security."

Epik initially said it was unaware of the hack but Monster, on a "rambling three-hour live-stream" last week, acknowledged there was a "hijack of data that should not have been hijacked," according to the report.

"If you have a negative intent to use that data, it's not going to work out for you. I'm just telling you," he said. "If the demon tells you to do it, the demon is not your friend."

But extremism researchers have likened the leak to the "Panama Papers of hate groups," Emma Best, co-founder of the nonprofit whistleblower groupDistributed Denial of Secrets, told the Post.

"A lot of research begins with naming names," she said. "There's a lot of optimism and feeling of being overwhelmed, and people knowing they're in for the long haul with some of this data."

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Welcome back to HEATED, a newsletter for people who are pissed off about the climate crisis—written by me, Emily Atkin.

A new anti-climate leader

Dan Bongino, a climate denier who spread the Texas wind energy lie, is gearing up to take Rush Limbaugh's place today.

Emily Atkin May 24

Dan Bongino at Fox News Channel Studios on June 18, 2019 in New York City. Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images.

Rush Limbaugh’s death in February left a deep hole where some of America’s most influential climate disinformation used to be. That hole will start being filled today, as far-right Fox News pundit Dan Bongino steps in to take Limbaugh’s place.

Twitter avatar for @TPPatriots

Tea Party Patriots

@TPPatriots]

Donald Trump to Be First Guest on Bongino's Show, Expect a Powerful Debut Episode in Limbaugh's Old Time Slot

Dan Bongino will begin a new chapter of conservative talk radio Monday with former President Donald Trump as his first guest.

patriotproject.com May 23rd 2021 204 Retweets1,127 Likes

Bongino, who in 2018 declared his life mission as “owning the libs,” is already an popular purveyor of general disinformation.His Facebookpage, The Bongino Report, regularly boosts false claims of election fraud, among other things.

Though the page only has about 135,000 followers, these posts “consistently land among the site’s top posts and outperform mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, CNN and Fox News,” reports Forbes. That’s in part because Facebook’s algorithim rewards misleading content from conservative creators, as Wired reported in March:

According to researchers at the Cybersecurity for Democracy project at New York University, far-right purveyors of misinformation have by far the highest levels of engagement per follower compared to any other category of news source. Indeed, the researchers found that while left-leaning and centrist publications get much less engagement if they publish misinformation, the relationship is reversed on the far right, where news organizations that regularly publish false material get up to 65 percent more engagement than ones that don’t.

Bongino is about to be rewarded even further with his new radio show. Though it’s yet unclear exactly how many of the 600 stations that once ran Limbaugh’s show will pick up Bongino’s, the opportunity to pick up some of Limbaugh’s 15 million regular listeners is large. In addition, earlier this month, Fox News also announced that it would start airing a new show on Saturday nights lead by Bongino, called “The Big Saturday Show.”

Bongino is thus well-positioned to soon become one of the most influential sources of right-wing disinformation in America. Here’s what we can expect on climate front.

Less flagrant denial, more insulting liberals

Bongino is a straight-up climate denier, and for the most part, is not particularly shy about it. “These climate change alarmists have been wrong about just about everything. All their charts have been debunked,” he said on Fox in 2019. “The climate’s been relatively stable. There’s not any evidence that storms are out of control. All this stuff is made up.”

But just like the fossil fuel industry, Bongino’s anti-climate policy talking points lately have moved further away from flagrant denial. Instead, they promote more insidious falsehoods— like that wind energy was a significant contributor to deadly blackouts in Texas following February’s deep freeze, and that liberals were trying to cover it up.

Bongino delved into that subject specifically for a February episode of his podcast, which he began by strongly defending the quality of his own information regarding “What really happened with Texas and the energy system failures there.” “I never want to be first if I don’t have the facts,” he said. “I’m tired of the lies.”

Bongino went on to disparage “These filthy people on the left who can never ever tell the truth,” like MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, who he called a “sick little turd” for debunking Texas Republican officials’ prolific claims that wind energy was the culprit of Texas’s woes. Bongino did admit that natural gas and nuclear energy failed as well. But he said wind turbines had failed, too, and the only reason liberals were mad that Republicans were pointing it out was because they had to “protect their golden calf.”

He said liberals were taking “advantage of an ongoing tragedy to score cheap political points,” and added: “The hacks at Facebook and soviet fact-checkers will ding this segment because the facts trouble them.”

In reality, the blackouts in Texas were caused not by any particular power source, but by Texas’s failure to prepare for climate change-fueled extreme weather. In order to protect their “golden calf”—fossil fuels—Republican officials publicly sought to place the majority of the blame for Texas’s blackouts on wind reliability. Practically every major news outlet in the country debunked that lie, an attempt to use a tragedy to score political points.

Still, Bongino adopted wholesale the argument made by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which was that the only reason nuclear and gas failed during the deep freeze was because it was trying to make up for the gaps in wind power. Ironically, that editorial was debunked by the journal’s own news section.

[Twitter avatar for @EricKleefeld Eric Kleefeld @EricKleefeld

Texas’ utter failure to winterize — despite a freeze and rolling blackouts 10 years ago — makes the choice of particular energy sources irrelevant. Their whole system is going down across the board!

This happens when you only pursue short-term cost cuts, don’t invest in safety.

February 18th 2021 44 Retweets213 Likes]

Green New Deal-bashing, arguments for human dominion

Here are some other trademark Bongino climate claims that we can expect to proliferate on conservative talk radio and Fox News as his profile continues to rise:

People who compare the challenge of climate change to World War II are participating in the “Moron Olympics.”

The Green New Deal is “outrageous,” “ridiculous,” and “expensive.” It looks “like it was conceived by a high schooler” and “proofread by a bartender.” It’s also not actually about climate change at all. It’s a “bad joke.”

“The climate changes all the time. Temperatures have been flat for 18 years.”

“We should care about the environment. It’s the right thing to do, if you’re really a God-loving person. But God gave us the world, not the other way around.”

“The Left is the one destroying their own credibility. Because ironically there are a lot of Republicans, me included, who are absolutely open to a conversation about a cleaner, better future, just not with a bunch of lunatics telling me the world is going to blow up.”

Moving forward, it’ll be interesting to see which advertisers are willing to sponsor claims like these. Bongino’s interview with Trump airs at noon EST. So, you know. Right now.

Bonus: Gina McCarthy on HBO]

insurrection sine qua non

apogee culmination

aha-ish: HUB it was gathering of tribes, via and b/c of soc med, vax, qanon, trumpistas, boogaloo...

alt rt keeps trying to make online manifest IRL [LARP] "back to our parents' basements" post-gamergate // magical thinking? recall GRU organized opposing groups online to clash IRL

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/boogaloo-boys/

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Following the violent January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building, national security experts are pointing to the Boogaloo Bois as one of the extremist groups that law enforcement will need to keep a close eye on in the months ahead. Dallas-based journalist Michael J. Mooney examines Boogaloo's goals in an article published by The Atlantic this week, stressing that although they didn't have a "huge presence" in that attack, they have been inspired by it.

"The riot at the Capitol last Wednesday featuredpartisans of the long-gone country of South Vietnam, Falun Gongadherents, end-times Christians, neo-Nazis, QAnon believers, a handful of Orthodox Jews, and Daniel Boone impersonators," Mooney writes. "The Boogaloos weren't a huge presence in that mob. But according to federal officials, the attack on the Capitol has galvanized them and could inspire Boogaloo violence in D.C. and around the country between now and Inauguration Day."

Most of the far-right insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol Building were devotees of President Donald Trump and were hoping to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College victory of President-elect Joe Biden. But according to Mooney, "The Boogaloos don't appear interested in fighting for Donald Trump — they tend to despise him, mostly because they think he panders to the police. But for the past year, Boogaloo Bois all over the United States have been cheering on the country's breakdown, waiting for the moment when their nihilistic memes would come to life and the country would devolve into bloody chaos."

Many liberal and progressive activists, contrary to what right-wing media often claim, have stressed that they are not anti-police — that they want to reform law enforcement, not abolish it. But at Mooney points out, the Boogaloo Bois have expressed a visceral hatred of law enforcement in general.

"Some are likely just joking when they 'shit-post' about shooting cops or 'yeeting alphabet boys' — killing government law-enforcement agents," Mooney explains. "But others seem serious. They've already shown up heavily armed — and in their signature Hawaiian shirts — at protests and at state capitols. They've allegedly killed law-enforcement officers, talked about throwing Molotov cocktails at cops during the racial-justice protests this summer, and plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They say they want a total reset of society, even if they haven't thought very hard about what, exactly, should come next."

The Boogaloo Bois have made it clear that they want a civil war, and Mooney notes that he has "spent the past few months trying to figure" exactly why they want one. For his article, Mooney interviewed JJ MacNab, a fellow with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University

According to MacNab, "They really want to create their own in-world so the rest of us won't get their jokes. It's tribal. These are tribal markings: the shirts they wear, the jargon they speak, even the types of guns they like."

But Mooney writes that even though Boogaloo's beliefs are nebulous and seem incoherent at times, that doesn't mean they aren't dangerous.

"Watching hordes of armed people storming the doors of Congress, facing off with any cop who offered resistance, killing a Capitol Police officer, and chasing another through the halls of a government building, I couldn't help thinking: These are the fantasies that Boogaloo Bois have been posting about for months," Mooney writes. "The riot may have captured their imagination."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/insurrection

The disturbing violence that ensued on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Jan. 6 was a pinnacle of far-right rhetoric and several weeks of premeditated online planning clearly publicized on right-wing media websites, according to a new report published by NPR.

Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) in Washington, D.C., offered details about his own findings after investigating right-wing extremist activity online. Since President Donald Trump lost the presidential election,Holt has noted an uptick on various sites including "Parler, Gab, TheDonald, and MeWe."

According to Holt, those sites have been inundated with "conspiracy theories, disinformation and outright lies about the results of the election." He also noted that many of the lies circulated on those sites "often came from the top arbiters of power in the Republican Party, notably President Donald Trump himself."

Holt also noted that the vast majority of the posts published by TheDonald ahead of the Electoral College certification highlighted "calls for violence."

More than 80% of the top posts on TheDonald on Wednesday about the Electoral College certification featured calls for violence in the top five responses, according to research from Advance Democracy, Inc., an independent, non-partisan organization.

On social media platforms, including Twitter and TikTok there were other posts inciting violence on Jan. 6 several days before the event took place. The publication reports "ADI found more than 1,480 posts from QAnon-related accounts about Jan. 6 that contained terms of violence since Jan. 1."

A substantial number of TikTok videos inciting violence had also gone viral with "hundreds of thousands of views." While it is no secret that President Donald Trump's post-election rhetoric over the last two months contributed to his base's hostile response, his promotion of the "Save America" rally and his remarks during the event subsequently served as gasoline being poured on a blazing dumpster fire.

"Then it really, really went nuts," Holt says. After Trump promoteda Jan. 6 protest in D.C., "a lot of his extremist supporters interpreted this as a call to action for them."

While Holt claims he was "closely monitoring" the dialogue and discussions taking place on right-wing platforms, he admits he was taken aback by the rapid escalation in violence that erupted on Capitol Hill.

"I was surprised," Holt admitted. "One of the challenges of doing the line of work that I do is these are extremist communities and the rhetoric is extreme just all the time. It got really, really intense running up to the protest, but oftentimes the ratio of extreme rhetoric to extreme action — there is a little bit of difference there."

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/right-wing-media/

Trump was furious when, on Election Night, Fox News' decision desk called Arizona for Joe Biden — and many of Trump's followers share his sense of betrayal. Trump has been urging his MAGA base to look to sources other than Fox News or Fox Business for information, and according to Renée DiResta — a technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory — some right-wing social media outlets are happy to tell Trump devotees what they want to hear.

After Fox News called Arizona for Biden, DiResta notes this week in an article for The Atlantic, the internet was full of anti-Fox hashtags from his supporters. And Trump devotees, according to DiResta, are also angry with Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

DiResta explains, "Throughout Election Day, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had been cracking down on a flurry of allegations about voter fraud in Arizona; the platforms quickly applied warning labels to new posts containing false or disputed information and reduced the distribution of groups spreading them. In response, pro-Trump influencers exhorted their followers to congregate on Parler."[twt]

DiResta cites the social media app Parler as one of the right-wing outlets that has been willing to help Trump promote "baseless conspiracy theories." And she points out that for some Trump supporters, Newsmax TV and One America News have become far-right alternatives to Fox News.

"For most of Trump's term, Facebook and others had been loath to crack down on even baseless conspiracy theories, including those repeated by the president himself," DiResta explains. "Freedom of expression, the argument went, covers the right to think and say even floridly false things, which were best addressed through corrections and counter-speech. Yet the major platforms concluded that misleading theories about the election were a distinct class of misinformation because of their potential to cause significant harm to the body politic."

Other Trump-friendly outlets, DiResta observes, range from the tube sites Rumble and BitChute to the social media site Gab — which has been described as a far-right equivalent of Twitter.

"People are joining Parler today to find like-minded users to validate their own beliefs, but ultimately, some percentage will get bored and move on," DiResta argues. "That subset will ultimately drift away from the app. It's less user-friendly than Facebook, and it lacks one of the primary appeals that Twitter affords its core users: the ability to criticize people at the other end of the political spectrum. For some Trump supporters, the whole point of politics is to 'own the libs,' but on Parler, there are no libs around to own."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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wapo no lnx

Opinions

Technology

Confusion and conflict stir online as Trump claims victory, questions states’ efforts to count ballots

As mainstream social media sites raced to address suspect claims, the chaotic environment showcased the fractured nature of the Internet

Craig Timberg,

Tony Romm,

Isaac Stanley-Becker and

Drew Harwell

November 4, 2020

President Trump throughout Wednesday repeated false declarations of victory, even as numerous swing states were still counting ballots, causing widespread confusion online and sparking bellicose talk on far-right forums and on mainstream platforms such as Twitter.

As most news organizations urged caution and patience, social media swelled with agitation, conflict and, in some cases, fury in response to the president’s assertions — a scenario that law enforcement officials and digital-threat analysts had warned about for months.

The furious talk would prove to be little more than chatter. But it was clear Trump’s and his allies’ use of Facebook, Twitter and text messages to press claims that the continued ballot counting was evidence of fraud resonated among some fringe actors on the Web — even though they contained no overt calls for action.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists were among those who celebrated his messages as an invitation to conflict. On the messaging app Telegram, one anonymous poster shared an image of three rifles and a handgun, along with the words, “I’m ready.” Another poster wrote, “Get the guns and the amor ready.”

“I’ve been tracking some of the most vile chatter and outreach from terrorists for two decades, but there’s something different about what we’re seeing now," said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism. “It is in many ways more troubling, not to mention sadder. Many Americans legitimately believe they are at war with many of their fellow citizens and are willing — if not eager — to harm them.”

The tweets and other social media posts by Trump and his allies drew widespread rebukes and disciplinary action from the main social media companies, which have spent months planning for a scenario that involved premature calls of victory. Twitter quickly put a warning label on a Trump tweet claiming victory and limited its reach, an action experts said had moderate impact. Facebook also appended a label, saying the Trump post was misleading.

Trump’s early victory declarations test tech giants’ mettle in policing threats to the election

But some of the attempts by Trump and other prominent Republicans to discredit the electoral process still managed to go viral, reflecting the daunting task facing technology companies and election officials to keep a fractured nation calm, preserve democratic norms and ensure an orderly, safe end to one of the most contentious races in history.

“WHAT IS THIS ALL ABOUT?” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, sharing another user’s concern about a steady uptick in votes for Biden in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.

Twitter labeled the retweet as misleading, even as Trump’s comment attracted more than 26,000 shares on the platform. Trump later turned to his campaign’s storehouse of voters’ phone numbers, blasting out a text message urging them to donate so that Trump’s election campaign could “FIGHT BACK.”

“Pres Trump & VP Pence: It’s so urgent we BOTH texted you. Dems & the Fake News want to STEAL this Election! 1000%-MATCH to FIGHT BACK! Act NOW,” read the text, a copy of which was shared by RoboKiller, a call-and-text-blocking app.

Far-right influencers lined up behind Trump, praising him for going “on offense”and lashing out at social networking services for applying labels to his posts that noted that the count was still ongoing. Some of the president’s most avid supporters baselessly suggested that the slow uptick in votes for Democratic candidate Joe Biden reflected evidence of fraud.

“This is a statistical impossibility — LOL. Time to open an investigation,” tweeted Candace Owens, a former communications director for the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA. “Democrats are trying to cheat. There is no denying that now.”

There were notable exceptions, however. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit with a vast online following, wrote in a tweet shortly after the president’s remarks from the White House, “No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say he has.”

No, Trump has not already won the election, and it is deeply irresponsible for him to say he has.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 4, 2020

On Twitter, unverified allegations that Democrats were trying usurp the vote surged under the hashtag #StopTheSteal throughout Election Day. The tone sharpened after Trump went before cameras at the White House shortly before 2:30 a.m. Wednesday to assert that “we did win this election.” He said that he would appeal to the Supreme Court to halt the counting of ballots in numerous states, though he did not say on what grounds he would make the appeal.

The information vacuum exploited by Trump was at least partly the result of the refusal by Republican-controlled state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to make substantial changes to rules about when mail-in ballots can be processed. Numerous states modified their guidelines to authorize the earlier handling of these ballots, but the three critical battlegrounds did not, with Michigan allowing just an extra day.

Efforts by technology giants to slow the spread of the baseless allegations were hampered by their endorsement from prominent users, including a congresswoman-elect, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has expressed support for the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory. Twitter obscured her posts amplifying the conspiratorial #StopTheSteal narrative behind warning labels, while Facebook merely appended a link to additional voting information.

Michigan kidnapping plot, like so many other extremist crimes, foreshadowed on social media

SITE reported a Twitter account saying, “Trump won [and] any attempts to alter the outcome should be treated as acts of treason.”

The monitoring group found a different user on Twitter taking a more belligerent tone, “And so the boogaloo begins” — a reference to a far-right movement that contends the United States will soon descend into civil war. The movement, which is virulently anti-government, has been linked to numerous cases of real-world violence, including the fatal shooting of a security guard at a federal court in Oakland, Calif., in May.

A neo-Nazi group on Telegram, a messaging app with little moderation, predicted “actual civil war” could be weeks away, according to SITE.

Trump’s early victory declarations test tech giants’ mettle in policing threats to the election

On TheDonald, a pro-Trump message board previously banned from Reddit, roughly 6,000 accounts boosted an early-morning thread saying that “they are trying to STEAL the election. We will never let them do it.”

Dozens of users called for “war.” “Lock and load,” one responded. “I’m ready,” another said. One account, named “America1stAndOnly,” said they were “standing by and keeping my rifle by my side.”

Long before the polls closed, researchers tracking disinformation on social media had grown alarmed about the prospect of calls for violence in the case of a close, hotly contested election in which results were not immediately known. Numerous analysts and state officials had warned of the potential for late shifts toward the Democrats, who disproportionately voted through mail ballots, which in several states were counted later than others.

Misleading images showing piles of bricks, for example, were used Tuesday to bolster claims that left-wing activists were preparing for dangerous street brawls. University of Washington professor Kate Starbird, in a Zoom call with reporters for a disinformation-research consortium, warned that social media posts might amount to “a match thrown into a pile of dry leaves.”

But while anger played out in isolated and predictably partisan corners of the Internet, fears of widespread Election Day unrest did not unfold.

Facebook and Twitter, enforcing new policies governing premature claims of victory, applied labels to the president’s posts Wednesday morning accusing Democrats of “trying to STEAL the Election.”

A Trump tweet claiming victory was quickly hidden with a warning by the company. Facebook appended a notice advising, “Final results may be different from initial vote counts, as ballot counting will continue for days or weeks.”

Reaction to the president’s premature claims of victory and baseless assertions of fraud showed how he has advanced and exploited the fracturing of the country’s information ecosystem, with more and more Americans self-selecting to get their information from partisan echo chambers.

Many conservatives directed their ire at Facebook, Google and other big tech companies, echoing Trump’s months of assertions that they sought to censor the president and tip the election in Democrats’ favor — charges for which they offer no credible evidence and that the industry strongly denies.

On fringe platforms that have picked up new users because of heightened moderation on the major social networking services, Trump’s most hard-line supporters urged one another off cable networks that cautioned against the president’s claims, even longtime conservative favorite Fox News.

“Go to OAN,” one wrote on the MeWe service, in a channel devoted to Pennsylvania, recommending the adamantly pro-Trump One America News.

As Trump warns of leftist violence, a dangerous threat emerges from the right-wing boogaloo movement

“You have to get buy-in from the mainstream to have big cultural impact,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. As the results arrived on Tuesday, she said, “most people are watching the networks, not social media streams.” But as the count drags on in the ensuing days, more and more voters may search online for confirmation of their existing biases.

The harsh tone followed months of allegations by Trump, leading Republicans and popular online conservative figures that Democrats were planning to commit widespread fraud, especially in urban areas in swing states. Accounts of an Election Day incident in Philadelphia, when a Republican poll watcher was temporarily prevented from entering a polling place, garnered 287 million likes, retweets and views across Twitter, according to researchers who tracked the incident, which was recounted in misleading ways online.

The Trump campaign on Wednesday morning attempted to capitalize on anger over false allegations of a stolen election, sending fundraising emails saying Democrats will “do whatever it takes to manipulate the results.” We “ask for you to step up ONE LAST TIME and DEFEND YOUR PRESIDENT!” one email said just before soliciting donations. “Everything we’ve worked for is on the line.”

Some far-right users online said the social media sites’ increased levels of fact-checking and content moderation, such as marking certifiably false claims as “disputed,” were election-skewing attempts to censor the president and tantamount to “treason.” The companies said the rules applied to all posts across the political divide, and data shows Trump has had no issues getting his message across: On Twitter alone, he has gained more than 270,000 followers since Election Day began.

In stoking claims about the authenticity of the count, Trump touched off a wave of skepticism about the integrity of the system among his supporters online. They quickly blasted the election as fraudulent, sharing posts, photos and videos online questioning the veracity of mail-in ballots despite a long documented history of such voting being safe and secure. Some pointed to news organizations’ incomplete electoral maps — still being updated as states continue their counts — as a sign votes are being suppressed.

“Trump was winning in Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, North Carolina with only a few percent of votes remaining, when they stopped counting votes and all news channels went offline,” tweeted one user. “And suddenly Biden is apparently winning in all of these states?”

“They stopped counting votes because the Republicans were winning,” tweeted Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America, which styles itself as a “grass-roots national security organization.”

Her post was shared nearly 5,000 times.

Russian and Iranian news services avidly tracked the unfolding drama in the United States, as did social media accounts previously identified as being operated by Russian operatives, including the infamous Internet Research Agency that aggressively interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

“A handful of covert Russian accounts tied to the IRA pushed stories overnight, with very limited traction,” said Camille Francois, chief innovation officer for Graphika,which tracks online influence operations. “One focused on the claim that the U.S. Postal Service had failed to deliver 300,000 ballots, and another piece, borrowed from American sources, described Trump as a sacrificial hero and divine figure.”

Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this report.

c de v

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/expert-on-the-radical-right-warns-that-vigilantes-are-preparing-to-launch-a-coup

in the Age of Trump, Portland, Oregon, is no longer just another city. Now it is a symbol and almost a Rorschach test for the country’s deep and explosive political divides.

For Trumpists, Republicans and members of the far right, Portland is all that is wrong with “the Left” and “Liberals,” a chaotic nightmare zone where Black Lives Matter, antifa and other“enemies”are running amok while they attack “patriotism” and “real American values.”

To TrumpWorld, Portland and other Democratic-led big cities (which of course is virtually all of them) are hives of scum and villainy, overrun by criminals and “rioters,” which must be conquered by Trump’s enforcers and armed vigilante supporters.

Trump’s “law and order” politics, and its inherent racism and violence, are believed by many to be his path back to the White House. In this view, Portland and other “Democrat cities” and communities are targets of opportunity for the Trump regime.

writing at Washington Monthly, David Atkins explains Trump’s mindset:

He sees the violence as politically beneficial, a useful cudgel against Democratic nominee Joe Biden — even though the violence is happening while Trump himself is president, not Biden.

Trump’s election theme is that Americans won’t be safe in a Biden presidency. The opposite is true. Americans won’t be safe as long as a white supremacist president is leading a movement of bigots to incite a civil war, and attempting to ensure that the majority of Americans with cosmopolitan, egalitarian values remain politically disenfranchised and under the thumb of those who fear and despise them.

Trump’s campaign of racial authoritarianism and stochastic terrorism, as well as overt threats of “law and order,” resulted in a group of his supporters driving into Portland last weekend, armed with mace and paintball guns, to seek out confrontations with Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist protesters. During one such encounter, a member of the right-wing militia group Patriot Prayer, Aaron Danielson,was shot and killed. On Thursday night, the apparent shooter,Michael Reinoehl, was himself shot and killed by U.S. marshals in Olympia, Washington.

Despite this lamentable violence — for which Trump and the right must bear ultimate responsibility — for progressives and other people of conscience Portland is a symbol of resistance and hope. As part of the nationwide people’s uprising sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters have been outside the Portland federal courthouse for more than 100 days.

The protests were largely peaceful until Trump and acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf deployed federal police forces to the city in July. Their presence, as designed, escalated the tension and led to increasing levels of property damage and incidents of violence.

Previewing Trump’s plan for other parts of the nation, these federal shock troops made journalists and reporters a special focus of their violence. They also kidnapped protesters and other “enemies” of Donald Trump’s regime off the streetas though they were operating in a banana republic.

Much of the mainstream American news media’s coverage of the recent events in Portland lacks meaningful context. Writing at Medium, a Portland press collective describes one such example of this “parachute journalism”:

One night last week, during one of the smaller demonstrations, a tall white man in a clean ballistic helmet and brand-new plate carrier emblazoned with “PRESS” strolled through the crowd in front of the Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. He stopped by a gaggle of other journalists, most out-of-towners. “I’ve only been around for the last week,” he said, “but the protests in Portland feel a lot more performative than the ones I’ve seen in other cities. Less genuine.” A local journalist mentioned having been present for over 50 nights of the protests, starting in early June. “Yeah, I can only speak for what I’ve seen this week,” said Clean Helmet. “I’m flying back to DC tomorrow.” … Clean Helmet was on the ground in Portland, by his own description, for less than a week. This means that he was present for approximately 1/10th of Portland’s BLM protests, thus far. I’m sure he got some great footage.

The Parachutes (as we have come to know them) come with money, and zero community connections. Their goal is the clip that can make the nightly news. They want a story that will dominate the news cycle. They do not know what is happening in Portland, and they do not care. They are coming to a city with a vibrant, scrappy community of street-level journalists. By and large, they do not want the context that those journalists can provide. And soon they will come to a city near you. When the Feds and the Parachutes come to your town, you’ll want everyone to understand the context there, too. And they are coming. Clean Helmet is already back in DC, and on to the next assignment.

The important context which “the Parachutes” usually omit includes the way Portland is depicted as a liberal oasis in America’s popular imagination. In reality, Portland is a very race and class-segregated city. As historian and activist Walidah Imarisha and others have richly documented, the Oregon territory passed laws in 1844 explicitly excluding Black people from the region under punishment of whippings and other violence. The state of Oregon formally included white supremacy in its constitution, explicitly banning nonwhites.

To this day, Oregon remains a redoubt of white supremacy, where white supremacists and other right-wing extremists have a large presence in the state and surrounding region. Portland itself has a long and ongoing history of right-wing violence.

Alexander Reid Ross is a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. His most recent book is “Against the Fascist Creep.” Ross has also completed new research which documents more than 500 incidents in which white vigilantes and other right-wing extremists have confronted Black Lives Matter protests. This includes hundreds of acts of intimidation and other threats as well as dozens of examples in which right-wing extremists have assaulted or attacked Black Lives Matter protesters.

In this conversation Ross shares his firsthand experiences with the recent George Floyd protests in Portland. He also provides some context for those events and the police and federal response. Ross also details the long history of right-wing paramilitaries and political street gangs in Portland and their relationship with local police and other law enforcement.

Reid warns that Portland, the right-wing vigilante killings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the hundreds of other attacks by right-wing extremists on Black Lives Matter protesters is just a preview of the massive violence that Donald Trump and his movement may unleash before and after Election Day — perhaps including the arrest or imprisonment of prominent Democrats, journalists, and others deemed to be enemies of the state.

Q: After almost four years of Trump and his regime’s authoritarian, neofascist behavior, some voices in the mainstream American news media now use that correct and appropriate language to describe the reality of the situation. Why was there so much fear and denial about the obvious? Even when they use the correct terminology, the coverage is largely superficial and avoids serious discussion of the dire implications.

You must also take into account that many so-called left-leaning voices have also been interfering with bringing that truth to light. There were writers at the Guardian, for example, who were trying to sound the alarm about the dangers of right-wing extremism and fascism in America, but they were derided by their peers across the political spectrum.

I also believe that publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times saw themselves as being aloof from questions of the mob and political violence in America.There is a tendency among elite voices to want to say that, “We’re above political violence here in America and we resolve our differences through conversation. Therefore, let’s give everyone a hearing and let’s debate these issues, regardless of how extreme they may be. That is what a democratic country should act like.”

In a sense, they put their faith completely in some abstract idea of “democracy” instead of taking the temperature of what is really happening on the ground.

You live in Portland. How is your experience different from the narrative being offered by the mainstream American news media and other outside observers?

We in Portland have been dealing with right-wing extremists and police abuse for a long time. Portland has experience with the likes of right-wing extremist groups such as Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys. This is not new to us.

I would go out to protests and see how the political violence is not a result of the breakdown in the monopoly of violence held by the police. The political violence was a result of theProud Boys and the police effectively acting as two different elements of the same side. It wasn’t that the police had lost the monopoly of violence. It was the police were shooting us in order to allow the Proud Boys to march through the city without proper permits.

Most mainstream news media coverage of the protests which have taken place here in Portland, recently and before, totally fail to acknowledge or even fathom the police involvement in the rise of the far right in this community. That failure has cascaded to the point that we are now at a point where the press is painting the current crisis as some type of grudge match between the feds and the anarchists. In fact, the protest movement is a very diverse group of people — especially by Portland standards — who are coming out night after night and making extraordinarily clear demands and being absolutely brutalized in the streets every night.

What too many reporters in many cases are trying to do is figure out how to resolve the situation, rather than understanding it and properly explaining to the public what is really happening and the context for it. By doing so, too many reporters are creating false equivalencies regarding the various forces at play here in Portland.

What does Portland exemplify, in terms of the protests and the Trump’s regime’s reaction?

It is an example of Donald Trump attempting to rise to the level of a right-wing political strongman. Donald Trump is using classic authoritarian tactics that one does not often see in a healthy democracy. Donald Trump is deliberately undermining the Constitution by using federal law to circumvent local governments’ control over their police forces.

Trump and William Barr’s de facto secret police are literally disappearing people off the streets of Portland and in other parts of the country where the Democratic Party is in power. How do you explain what is happening to people who do not live in those communities? Who are not being targeted by Trump and his henchmen?

The specific federal forces involved are BORTAC — the Border Patrol Tactical Unit — and the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and others, under the coordination of the Department of Homeland Security. BORTAC have been in Portland shooting at people and launching tear gas. BORTAC is not trained for crowd or riot control. They are trained to engage in raids against migrants and to separate children from their mothers. That is what BORTAC does. They pride themselves on being the most militarized branch and group of the U.S. law enforcement community. BORTAC members are extreme Trump supporters. What is happening in Portland and other parts of the country is the border closing in on the citizens of the United States.

BORTAC is loyal to Donald Trump and that’s why he is using them.He’s not using them because they’re the most skilled and adept at riot and crowd control management. That also explains why there are so many incidents of people being shot in the face and otherwise abused here in Portland and other places where BORTAC and other such forces are being deployed by the Trump administration.They don’t know what they’re doing at all.

BORTAC is being used because Trump feels that they are his most loyal forces. That is fully in keeping with the tactics of authoritarian leaders who cultivate secret police whose main function is to serve as the government leader’s private force, one that operates outside of any restraints such as internal review.

The [former] Chilean dictatorship is explicitly supported by Trump’s own supporters, who wear T-shirts that say, “Right-wing death squad” and “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”The American mainstream news media is far too charitable with its narrative that “Trump is playing to his base.”

During the recent protests in Portland, were there moments where you feared that the federal forces were going to start shooting the crowd with lethal rounds?

The fear is very real and it’s constant. The federal forces have assault rifles. They are loaded with live rounds. There are protesters who were throwing fireworks and things of that sort at the courthouse. What if one of the feds has an itchy trigger finger? What if a firework explodes and they then open fire on an entire group of unarmed people?

Trump and their defenders and other apologists will just say, “Well, these poor agents have been overworked for 60 days and look at all the things that have been thrown at them” and so on and so forth. We know what the narrative will be. All a person can do when protesting is to act accordingly and stay focused.

You have been documenting what are now almost 500 attacks, acts of intimidation, vehicular assaults, shootings and other threats by Trump supporters and other members of the right against Black Lives Matter protests. What do we know?

I have never seen this amount of anti-left vigilantism from the right. During the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, the Tea Party was huge, and they mobilized with events all over the country. There were also armed protests in opposition to Obamacare. But those right-wing protesters were not coming out to confront and intimidate a much smaller group of anti-racists. Of course, those anti-Obama Tea Party and anti-health-care type protesters were extremely racist and a breath away from being fascists, but there was not that same energy and menace that we are seeing today.

The idea of these right-wing protesters and militia types being “anti-government” — again, a narrative circulated by the mainstream American news media — is very uncritical, a total misnomer. They are really pro-government. They are entirely in favor of the United States government as controlled by Donald Trump. Their claim to be “libertarians” is a joke.

Those right-wing militias and others sympathetic to them are arming in opposition to Democrats, liberals and progressives.

Right-wing extremists and other terrorists, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, are also coordinating at times with the police.

They actually say that they are at the protests to “protect the police.” Think about that claim: They are “anti-government” vigilantes who promise that they are trying to protect the police. In essence, these right-wing militias and the like are American citizens who believe it is their role not to become police, but to guard the police. Such a claim is ludicrous.It is a paramilitary force. These right-wing forces are coordinating and positioning themselves to be able to launch a coup against American democracy and the Democratic Party, if the latter gains control of the presidency and government.

The closest parallel with what we are seeing with Trump’s movement would be the “massive resistance” by white people against racial integration in the South during the civil rights movement. I am of the opinion that the United States has not seen such a mobilization of violent, far-right forces to this extent since the 1960s.

Recently, a Trumpist and right-wing militia supporter traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin and involved himself in the protests there. He apparently shot three people, killing two of them. He crossed state lines illegally with a weapon he was not allowed to own. He was only a teenager, and was radicalized online into right-wing extremism. He is now being valorized by the right-wing media machine. Trump has defended this young man as a hero who was fighting against “criminals” and “looters.” This apparent killer now has hundreds of thousands of dollars pledged to his defense.

Trump has defended Kyle Rittenhouse with the claim he was firing in “self-defense.” In essence, Donald Trump supports the right-wing vigilante movement, which represents the disintegration of the rule of law.

We are witnessing an erosion of democratic norms in this country by Republicans. They accept breaking the law as being viable if it supports “traditional values” — meaning racism. As a practical matter, Donald Trump is spearheading the movement of the Republican Party into a full-on violent racist organization that encourages vigilantism.

In terms of engaging in the worst type of “both-sides-ism” and false equivalencies that helped Trump win and now keep power, the American mainstream news media is now advancing a “mutual combat” narrative in its coverage of Trump’s supporters and the violence in Portland last weekend. How does that narrative contradict what really happened in Portland?

The “mutual combat” framing is inane, legally a non-starter, and obviously supportive of the aggressive party, which is typically the Trump supporters. Their strategy is to provoke fights and then call for “law and order” intervention from a corrupt president.

Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibsonhas not been leading protests in Portland for a long time. He is a marginal figure, but the American news media has suddenly selected him and lifted him up for no apparent reason other than that he participated in an aggressive and bellicose Trump “caravan” last week during which right-wing vigilantes tried to run people over with their trucks, shot protesters and bystanders with paintball guns, and used pepper spray to attack people.

Should Black Lives Matter, antifascist and other human rights and social justice supporters stop protesting in order to deny Trump’s supporters and other right-wing hooligans a narrative that could hurt Joe Biden nd the the Democrats? In essence, should they make a tactical withdrawal to deny Trump a strategic victory, because of how events will likely be distorted by the media to his advantage?

I will not say what protesters should or shouldn’t do. I do not think what they choose to do or not do will matter much. What is significant is that the far right will deepen its insurgency against the left the more that Donald Trump falters and as he continues demanding “law and order.”

The left would be remiss to engage them on this level. The left is not in the streets to spark a civil war or escalate violent encounters to the point of breaking civil society into protracted sectarian warfare. The left is in the streets to make life better for ordinary people, and to present a version of the future that would be better and more prosperous for everyone. The more the left maintains its sanity against overwhelming odds, the more the right’s paranoia and hysteria will marginalize it in American society. This will create new spaces for progressive causes and movements.

What do you want to warn the American people about? What do you think happens next?

I am worried about crackdowns by Donald Trump and his forces against their direct enemies. This would involve dragging Democrats in front of kangaroo courts and starting to criminalize dissent such that the average American who has a bumper sticker or other affiliation with the Democratic Party or liberal or progressive causes becomes a target for Trump’s zealots.I worry that Trump will find some way to round up the leaders of the Democratic Party and put them in jail or execute them.

That is the future that right-wing conspiracists such as the QAnon people want. They are the crowd that Donald Trump is signaling to. I do not believe that there is much stopping Donald Trump from following through on his extreme impulses. At this point Donald Trump is desperate. If Trump wins again it will just be more fuel on the fire for his followers. The right wing will follow through on his cues and start attacking regular people, not just protesters, who they believe are Democrats.