Militia3 Bak

bak estb 3 25

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SEE OATHKEEPERS RHODES JAN 6 HEARING #7

SEE PROUD BOYSPARDONS

SEE MASS DEPORTATION

MUSK PVT SECURITY DEPUTIZE WEAPONS IN WH

merri ok}:

SEE 3% three percent APIII

see domestic terror

see assault ar15 mass shooter walmart race war

see self defense gubmint tyrant

on kyle sorta generic for alt rt white supr nat'l patriot BS

see convoy border BS army of god civil war 2 24

see infiltration / active duty/ radicalization

see violence 4 civil war SEE POLITICAL VIOLENCE 5 VIOLENT RHET

CONST SHERIFF SOVERIEGN

see wired mag

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AN 3 25

Former CIA analyst Holly Berkley Fletcher spent many years studying governments in Africa, and she paid close attention to the tactics used in the more undemocratic ones — tactics that included using violent groups to bully, strongarm and intimidate political opponents.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 14, Fletcher warns that the methods she observed in Africa are now being employed in the United States during President Donald Trump's second term.

Fletcher argues, "One of the great heartbreaks of the Trump era for me is seeing my expertise as an Africa analyst become relevant for understanding political trends in America…. As I was waiting for police to respond to a bomb threat at the Principles First conference last month in Washington, D.C. — the source of which is yet to be determined — I thought of yet another growing parallel: What technically would be called 'informal security forces' but what I, during my time as a CIA Africa analyst, colloquially called 'guys.'"

The former CIA analyst notes that in the African countries she analyzed, "guys" weren't shy about using violence against political opponents.

"When assessing risks to a country's political stability or the endurance of a dictator's power," Fletcher explains, "one of my first questions was always, 'Does he have guys?' They can be anything from a hyper-loyal faction of regular security forces to a specially commissioned 'presidential guard' recruited from a particular ethnic group to a rag-tag gang of young men armed on the cheap and on the down-low. Most recently, they could include hired mercenaries from Russia or other countries."

Fletcher cites specific examples of how "guys" were used in Africa — and could now be used in the U.S. under Trump.

"Most successful African political leaders in less-than-democratic systems have guys, from current dictators to wannabe dictators," Fletcher observes. "Any dictator worth his salt will cultivate independent armed factions to counter any threats from the military or other potential challengers' guys."

Fletcher continues, "Such groups have the added potential advantage of preserving the reputation of formal security forces in the eyes of the international community…. Sudan's former dictator, Omar al-Bashir, created the janjaweed in the early 2000s in an ultimately failed effort to distance his regime from genocide in Darfur…. Across the border, South Sudan is awash in militias formed by various aspirants for President Salva Kiir's job…. The late dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had his Presidential Guard, but he also had his mob of 'war veterans' who terrorized his opposition in exchange for license to forcibly seize whatever farms they wanted."

The former CIA analyst fears that in the U.S., far-right groups like The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers could be used as "guys" by the MAGA movement.

"The most obvious blinking red light is Trump's mass pardon of the January 6th insurrectionists, including members of organized militias such as the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, and the Thugs Formerly Known as the Proud Boys," Fletcher observes. "A court recently awarded their name to a black church they vandalized. Fresh out of jail, Enrique Tarrio showed up at the Principles First conference last month to menace former police officers Harry Dunn, Michael Fanone, Aquilino Gonell, and Daniel Hodges, who have been outspoken about their experiences fighting the mob on January 6th and who have been the targets of constant harassment ever since…. I was similarly horrified by reports that Elon Musk's private security force now has federal law enforcement authority via the U.S. Marshals Service."

*Holly Berkley Fletcher's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

===

NO LNX

‘I miss lynch mobs’: The secretary of retribution's followers are getting impatient

Retired Lt. Col. Ivan Raiklin and self-styled "secretary of retribution" Ivan Raiklin at the Republican National Convention

(Jordan Green / Raw Story)

Jordan Green March 09, 2025

A recent X post by Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army lieutenant general who bills calls the “secretary of retribution,” prompted a flurry of comments endorsing violence and vigilantism directed at four mayors who testified before Congress on Wednesday.

Raiklin, who last year circulated a so-called “Deep State Target List” against President Trump’s enemies while calling for “livestreamed swatting raids,” re-posted a video of Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, delivering a fiery lecture to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, all Democrats.

“One of you said you’re willing to go to jail; we might give you that opportunity, good mayor,” Higgins said, likely referring to Johnston, the Denver mayor.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) declared that she intended to refer the four mayors to the Department of Justice for prosecution, while holding up papers that she said would be delivered to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Raiklin wrote in his post re-sharing the video of Higgins’ remarks: “If these mayors are not arrested, WeThe People [sic] will be compelled to reconsider our relationship with government.”

The two men appear to be acquainted: Last July, Raiklin posted a photo on X that showed him clasping hands with Higgins outside Fiserv Forum during the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Higgins did not respond to an email from Raw Story for this story.

As of Friday evening, Raiklin’s post had been viewed more than 50,000 times, and had been reshared almost 900 times while garnering 168 comments. Raiklin’s follower count on X has grown to almost 235,000.

The comments from X users responding to Raiklin’s post include calls for vigilante justice and violence mixed with irritation directed at Bondi for not taking enough action in their view. The Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against Johnson, the Chicago mayor, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzer and against New York Gov. Kathy Hochul over laws that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Pritzger and Hochul, both Democrats, have scorned the lawsuits, with Pritzger calling it “garbage” and Hochul deriding it as “worthless.”

Among the responses to Raiklin’s post, some X users called for outright violence, while others proposed some form of extrajudicial process along the lines of sovereign citizen activity.

“I suggest we organize and go to war against our government like our forefathers did,” one user wrote.

Another user posted a meme of George Washington, accompanied by an imagined quote by the first American president reading: “Me and my homies woulda been stacking bodies by now.”

“A real insurrection is still possible,” yet another wrote.

One user asserted incorrectly that “citizens can form their own grand juries.”

“Why wait?” he wrote. “Start now.”

Another asserted: “We the people have the right to form and exercise trained militias. Now is the time for these militias to be on standby awaiting deployment.”

Much of Raiklin’s influence among Trump’s more extreme followers rests on his experience as a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former civilian employee of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, not to mention his seemingly unflagging zeal, prolific social media presence and hypermasculine presentation.

“I am ready, Ivan!” one X user wrote. “You make the call and millions will follow. Our patience are running increasingly thin [sic]. For me, I’ll give it 6 months max.”

Another user wrote: “I didn’t suffer for four years to hear empty promises. The first [arrest] might be the hardest, but they get easier as you go. Let’s get going. Be like a serial killer and become a serial arrester.”

Another simply wrote: “I miss lynch mobs.”

While declining to specifically address the comments under Raiklin’s post, the FBI said in a statement provided to Raw Story that the agency “takes all potential threats seriously and works with our law enforcement partners to determine their credibility, share information, and take appropriate investigative action.

“As always, we encourage members of the public to remain vigilant and immediately report anything they consider suspicious to law enforcement,” the statement continued.

Raw Story reached out by email to Raiklin for comment. He said a transcript of 42-minute video depicting him walking around Washington, D.C. and talking about a supposed Jan. 6 coverup by Republican House members would constitute his response to this story.

The comments about Bondi, who Trump appointed to lead the Department of Justice — roughly a dozen in all — were uniformly disparaging.

“Arrest them what the f--- dumb blondie @AGPamBondi,” one user with the screen name “ClownPuncher” wrote in response to Raiklin’s post. Another baselessly accused the attorney general of “actively protecting Democrats.”

An inquiry submitted to the Department of Justice by Raw Story seeking comment from Bondi for this story went unreturned.

Comments about other Trump administration officials were similarly negative, with one calling FBI Director Kash Patel a “disappointment” and another belittling Border Czar Tom Homan by writing, “If Tommy Boy doesn’t have it in him, Trump needs to get someone who can do it.”

Other X users variously suggested that even Trump and Raiklin himself are not truly committed to arresting the president’s political enemies.

“They’re not going to be, Ivan,” wrote a user with the screen name “Truth Seeking Vet.” “I’m afraid POTUS ‘made a deal’ with the demonrats to get back into Office. I hope and pray I’m wrong, but time will tell.”

One deeply paranoid user suggested Raiklin is an infiltrator who is in league with Democrats and federal law enforcement.

Another called Raiklin out for claiming last year that all he needed to carry out a plan to arrest Trump’s enemies was sympathetic prosecutors and sheriffs, and volunteers.

“I thought you were doing it, deputizing sheriffs, didn’t even need Trump to win,” the user wrote. “What/who is stopping you?”

Raiklin serves on the board of directors of America’s Future, a nonprofit led by retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who formerly led the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama and briefly served as national security advisor during Trump’s first term.

Raiklin and Flynn jointly shared master of ceremonies duties at an awards ceremony held by America’s Future at Mar-a-Lago on Feb. 18.

On Friday, Raiklin published a video of the awards ceremony in an X post where he tagged President Trump to publicly thank him for “opening up Mar-a-Lago” to Flynn’s organization.

Trump did not respond.

NOW READ: 'The Hard Reset': Here's how the U.S. is exporting terrorism around the world

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an no lnx

'A boon to far-right extremists': Alarm sounded over new Trump appointee

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 11, 2025.

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Jordan Green February 27, 2025

Dan Bongino, the right-wing podcast host tapped by FBI Director Kash Patel to serve as deputy director of the agency, has a history of downplaying white supremacist extremism, the violence committed by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and threats against school board members.

Bongino suggested during a podcast recorded in September 2022 that the FBI under former Director Christopher Wray pursued investigations of “white supremacists who are terrorists” because of political pressure from President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland. He did not mention the deadly Buffalo mass shooting carried out four months earlier that year or dozens of neo-Nazi accelerationist terror plots foiled by the FBI that would warrant such a focus.

“Biden and Garland say, ‘We need white supremacist, domestic violent extremists’ — you know, we learned in the Salem witch trials: If you’re looking for a witch, you’re going to find one, even if there isn’t one,” Bongino said.

The statement was made during an interview with Kyle Seraphin, an FBI agent who was suspended after raising questions about an email from FBI leadership flagging threats against school board members and later separated from the agency after refusing to take the COVID-19 vaccination.

“The idea that you could have this file on you about what you’re surfing online — not criminal, maybe untoward, maybe nasty — but the fact that this happened because you showed up at a meeting and said something is really horrifying,” Bongino said.

In a second interview with Seraphin that was published the following day, Bongino ridiculed the agency for tasking agents with following up on leads that flooded the FBI from members of the public days after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and disrupted Congress’ certification of the electoral vote in the 2020 presidential election.

“You know, I get it — I would have not preferred January 6th turned out differently as well,” Bongino said. “I think any sane person would have. But to take six-figure FBI earners with a set of skills and let them run out all across America taking tips about a guy you met potentially in eighth grade showing up on January 6th sounds a little Orwellian.”

President Trump issued blanket pardons to the nearly 1,600 people charged with crimes related to that Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, but threats from white supremacist terrorists seeking to cause a collapse of society remain an ongoing concern for law enforcement. Last month, the U.S. State Department named the white supremacist group Terrorgram, whose leaders face charges for soliciting the murder of federal officials among other offenses, a specially designated global terrorist entity.

The mass murder of 10 African Americans in a grocery store in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022 underscored the threat posed by white supremacist terrorism, while a car-ramming attack by an ISIS sympathizer that killed 14 people celebrating New Year’s Eve in New Orleans provided a reminder that Islamic extremism also remains a threat. Meanwhile, school shootings in recent months have revealed a bewildering array of motivations that include white supremacy, inceldom and nihilism.

“At a time when the violent extremist threat is as diverse and unpredictable as any time in recent years, unqualified conspiracy peddlers and election deniers are running the FBI,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said in an email to Raw Story. “It is a boon to far-right extremists in particular, who will undoubtedly feel emboldened counting senior officials like Patel and Bongino among their compatriots.”

Bongino did not respond to an interview request submitted to the press office at FBI headquarters.

Similar to Jan. 6, when Trump supporters angered by false claims that the 2020 election was stolen wound up turning on the U.S. Capitol police, violent white supremacists often target law enforcement, along with Jews, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

In one such case, the FBI filed charges against Kyle Christopher Benton, a Washington state man, for unlawful possession of a machine gun, after he posted on social media that he was joining multiple internet chats to encourage other users to commit mass shootings.

In a filing arguing for continued pre-trial detention, the government said that an investigation for domestic violence conducted by the Army Criminal Investigation Division in 2019 revealed that Benton operated social media accounts that promoted white supremacist and antisemitic propaganda. Benton’s partner allegedly told investigators that he wanted to shoot up the “alphabet boys” — a common reference to federal law enforcement — or a local police station.

“At a time when FBI agents are facing calls of retribution following the January 6 pardons, the nomination of a podcast host who has repeatedly promoted harmful conspiracies aimed at delegitimizing the FBI sends a dangerous message,” Lewis said.

During his interview with Seraphin in 2022, Bongino charged that the agency “bought into the hype” that the Jan. 6 attack was an event of the same magnitude as Pearl Harbor or 9/11. He went on to accuse agents of “locking up people for a January 6th insurrection — or whatever, grandma, who trespassed — because you don’t like their politics.”

Bongino and Seraphin’s discussion of Jan. 6 focused on trespassing and other misdemeanor offenses. Still, about 608 out of the nearly 1,600 defendants were charged with assaulting law enforcement or obstructing officers during a civil disorder, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Of those, 174 were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious injury to an officer.

Emblematic of the administration’s efforts to whitewash the violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the webpage detailing the crimes committed on Jan. 6 was taken down shortly after Trump returned to office. But an archived page itemizes the array of weapons rioters used or carried at the Capitol: firearms; OC spray; tasers; edged weapons, including axes, hatchets, knives and a sword; makeshift weapons, including destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks and stolen riot shields; baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping and reinforced knuckle gloves.

During his appearance on Bongino’s podcast in September 2022, Seraphin outed himself as the source of an email obtained by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH). The email from FBI leadership mandates the use of specific threat tags to track “threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers and staff.” Jordan, as the then-ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, seized on the email as proof that the FBI was “using counterterrorism tools to investigate parents,” even though the email doesn’t specifically mention parents.

“Essentially, they’re asking to tag these inbound threats,” Seraphin told Bongino. “And we don’t have time for those kinds of threats. We really don’t. In the real FBI, there’s not time for threats from some guy who’s yelling at the school board…. But it’s very difficult to convince me you would say that this is a real threat that exists all over the country….”

“Right,” Bongino agreed. “Worthy of FBI resources.”

The threats were, in fact, real.

In November 2021, the mayor of a small city in Ohio accused school board members in Summit County of “distributing essentially what is child pornography.” The accusation reportedly resulted in dozens of threats from around the country. Although the county prosecutor declined to file charges against the mayor, she issued a statement that “these allegations were false and caused numerous public servants to be victimized.”

In another incident, a woman protesting a masking requirement told the Page County Public School Board in Virginia in January 2022, “My children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on. All right. That’s not happening. And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready to — I will.”

As an indication of the turmoil surrounding COVID-19 restrictions and books addressing sensitive topics surrounding race and sexuality during that period, ProPublica reported that 59 people were arrested at school board meetings across the country from May 2021 through November 2022, most of them charged with trespassing, resisting an officer, or disrupting a public meeting.

In 2023, Garland reportedly told a House panel that the FBI received 22 reports of threats against school officials, and the agency referred six cases to state and local authorities to investigate.

“So, if I have a file on the CT side — the counterterrorism side — for showing up at a school board meeting and saying something — it may not have been appropriate thing to say, but it certainly isn’t a terroristic threat, you could have this big body of information available for you to make a criminal prosecution easier is where I’m going with that,” Bongino said during his interview with Seraphin. “The building blocks are already there.”

In at least one instance, a counterterrorism investigation did bring FBI agents to a parking lot outside a school board, if not into the meeting room.

Steve Friend, a former FBI agent, testified before a congressional panel that he had been tasked with surveilling an individual at a school board meeting as part of an open counterterrorism investigation. Based on the date of the subject’s arrest — Aug. 24, 2022 — House Democrats surmised that the subject under surveillance was one of four members of a Three Percenter militia called Guardians of Freedom who were charged with offenses related to the Jan. 6 attack. (A fifth would be arrested separately at a later date.)

“So, essentially we just documented the license plates of the people that were parking at the school board meeting who were January 6th subjects, or people that were in the parking lot with them interacting that we thought could be in their sphere of influence, and then we left,” Friend testified.

One member of the militia had boasted on social media on July 2021 that he was “continuing to build my 3% army so I can overthrow the federal government,” according to the charging document, and he said that 80 percent of the local sheriff’s office was “on our side,” but he didn’t plan on “ever seeing the inside of a cell.”

Ultimately, the five members of Guardians of Freedom were convicted of various charges related to their conduct at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and received sentences ranging from two years of probation to five months in prison, only to be pardoned last month by President Trump.

Bongino, who worked as a New York City police officer and later for the Secret Service before becoming a podcaster, has never worked at the FBI.

But he expressed disdain for FBI upper management when Seraphin told him a colleague reported to Peter Strzok, the former deputy director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Strzok, in turn, reported to Andrew McCabe, who served in the role that Bongino now holds—deputy director.

“The trajectory for someone like that is they show up at a field office; they’re there for two and a half years,” Seraphin told Bongino during the September 2022 interview.

“What the hell do you learn in two to three years to be managing cases like yours out in the field?” Bongino scoffed.

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politico 2 25

it was supposed to be a defiant return to the Capitol for the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and their far-right allies who were pardoned by Donald Trump for their role in the Jan. 6 attack on the halls of Congress.

It ended with the arrest of Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio for allegedly assaulting a protester who got in his face.

Tarrio and other prominent former Jan. 6 defendants had gathered at the Capitol on Friday for a press conference, pledging to seek legal revenge against the government that jailed them. But a handful of demonstrators was also nearby, loudly heckling the group.

After the press conference, one of those demonstrators put her hand near Tarrio’s face as he was speaking with a photographer. Tarrio swatted it away. Capitol Police officers quickly surrounded him, handcuffed him and took him into custody. The police later described the incident as a simple assault, a type of misdemeanor.

The episode provided a moment of historical symmetry for the Capitol Police, who arrested Tarrio four years after he helped organize a group of Proud Boys that formed the vanguard of the riot that injured 140 law enforcement officers and threatened the transfer of power. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years in prison but was freed by a Trump pardon as part of the president’s grant of mass clemency to Jan. 6 defendants.

Minutes before the scuffle — which a POLITICO reporter witnessed — Tarrio was flanked by dozens of other newly pardoned Jan. 6 defendants, including several other Proud Boys like Seattle’s Ethan Nordean and Oath Keepers leaders, like Stewart Rhodes, who were similarly convicted of seditious conspiracy. Richard “Bigo” Barnett, who infamously propped his feet on a desk in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol suite, was there. So was Guy Reffitt, who carried a pistol onto Capitol grounds and helped the mob advance to the foot of the building. New York Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, who stole a police riot shield and smashed a Senate-wing window with it, stood alongside Tarrio.

Others who played memorable roles in the mob were on hand as well, including Jake Lang, who escaped an imminent trial on assault charges, and Couy Griffin, the head of Cowboys for Trump.

The group recreated the route around the Capitol they took on Jan. 6, 2021, ending at the grass on the Capitol’s East Front. There, they posed for photos and chanted “Whose house? Our house,” a reprise of the chants that echoed through the halls of the Capitol while lawmakers and staff fled for safety.

At the press conference, arranged while many of the former Jan. 6 defendants were on a break from visiting the CPAC conference in Maryland, the former defendants pledged to sue the Justice Department. They hope the department welcomes their claims, given its leadership’s embrace of Trump’s assertion that the prosecutions were a “national disgrace.”

Tarrio seemed amused and bewildered by the arrest, grimacing as officers swarmed him and set up an impromptu perimeter. The woman involved in the incident had been trailing the group for an hour, shouting them down during the press conference, calling them “Nazis” and placing herself in front of their group photos while flipping them off.

After arresting Tarrio, the police interviewed the woman, who appeared to be uninjured.

Tarrio stood silently as police quickly put him in cuffs, patted him down and set up a perimeter in the shadow of the Capitol. He was then ushered into a police van and taken into custody.

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YIKES BONGINO #2

AN 2 25

The Base, a paramilitary neo-Nazi/white supremacist group founded in 2018, was a major target of the FBI and its former director, Christopher Wray, during Joe Biden's presidency. And in 2022, according to The Guardian's Ben Makuch, The Base "seemed to disappear" in the United States.

But Makuch, in an article published on February 24, warns that The Base appears to be "regrouping" in 2025.

"An international neo-Nazi terrorist group with origins in the U.S. appears to be quickly rebuilding its global and stateside ranks, according to information obtained by The Guardian from its digital accounts," Makuch reports. "Founded in 2018, The Base has been the intense focus of a years-long FBI counterterrorism investigation that has resulted in more than a dozen of its members arrested. It has plotted an assassination, mass shootings and other actions in Europe, which made it a proscribed terrorist organization in several countries."

The Base's "regrouping," according to Makuch, "comes at a time when the Trump Administration has made it a policy goal to move away from policing far-right extremism" and the FBI is now under the direction of Trump loyalist Kash Patel.

Makuch reports, "Experts say federal law enforcement ignoring far-right groups such as The Base could expose Americans to increased domestic terror threats…. A flurry of new images on The Base's various social media accounts, some closed and some open, show members claiming to be in the U.S. and across Europe brandishing pistols or military-style rifles and donning the trademark skull mask of the accelerationist neo-Nazi movement — one that demands acts of terrorism to bring down world governments. In one photo, a member is holding a knife and what appears to be a pistol in front of the Base flag in the United Kingdom, while others feature members in Bulgaria, Italy, Belgium and Sweden. "

Steven Rai of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) warns that The Base's activities in the U.S. need to be taken seriously.

Rai told The Guardian, "The Base has released a slow but steady trickle of propaganda over the past several months that has mostly highlighted their presence in Europe, so this shift in focus towards the U.S. should raise alarms. The timing of this shift is particularly noteworthy. While neo-Nazi accelerationist groups like The Base have been on their back foot due to intense law enforcement pressure, which disrupted their most integral organizers and propaganda artists, they may sense an opening with the recent change of administration in the U.S…. Violent extremists are absolutely paying attention to the changes in the national security establishment in the U.S."

Terrorism expert Colin Clarke, who serves as director of research at the Soufan Center, stresses that The Base are well-aware of changes in leadership at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

Clarke told The Guardian, "I think groups like The Base, far-right extremist groups that are strategic, have been waiting for the right opportunity before reinvigorating their respective organizations. This means that far-right extremist groups likely perceive the reelection of Trump as a green light to rebuild without fear of arrest or prosecution."

GUK 1 25 SEE TARRIO FOR ANNO

In his first interview after his release from prison, Enrique Tarrio thanked Donald Trumpfor pardoning him for his role in planning the January 6 riot, saying he “literally gave me my life back”.

Now that he is out, the Proud Boys leader wants revenge, he told Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist host of Info Wars.

“The people who did this, they need to feel the heat, they need to be put behind bars, and they need to be prosecuted,” Tarrio said.

“Success is going to be retribution,” he added. “We gotta do everything in our power to make sure that the next four years sets us up for the next 100 years.”

In the days since the leaders of far-right militia groups were freedfrom prison, they and their organizations are regrouping and figuring out how to build back momentum now that Trump is back in office. They are emboldened by the mass pardons for the insurrectionists and are planning their next moves.

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, showed up at the US Capitol this week, dining at a Dunkin inside the Longworth House office building. The Associated Press reported that Rhodes “met with at least one lawmaker during his visit and chatted with others” while on Capitol Hill.

He gave interviews outside the DC jail, where he said he wanted prosecutors to be tried for their “crimes”. Rhodes was not pardoned – his sentence was commuted, and he was released early. He wants a full pardon.

Rhodes suggested January 6 should be remembered in history as “patriots day”. He has not expressed regret for his role in the riots, saying his members were entrapped and their responses to police force were understandable. “We were there to protect Trump supporters from Antifa,” he said in a video after his release.

When Rhodes was sentenced in 2023, the judge in his case said: “You are smart, you are charismatic and compelling and frankly that’s what makes you dangerous. The moment you are released, whenever that may be, you will be ready to take up arms against your government.”

Tarrio and Rhodes had some of the longest sentences given to January 6 defendants, at 22 years and 18 years, respectively. Both were charged with seditious conspiracy for their roles helping plan the attack. Members of both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers infiltrated the Capitol on January 6, and some of them engaged in violence. The Oath Keepers “plotted for months to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power” and the Proud Boys “played a central role in setting the January 6 attack on our Capitol into motion”, attorneys for the government said during the cases against group members.

At the time of Tarrio’s sentencing, federal prosecutors said: “No organization put more boots on the ground at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 than the Proud Boys, and they were at the forefront of every major breach of the Capitol’s defenses, leading the on-the-ground efforts to storm the seat of government.”

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has tracked Proud Boys’ channels online since Trump’s pardons and seen the group “fantasizing about being ‘deputized as ICE under Trump’s second term’ to aid in Trump’s mass deportation plan” and encouraging members to report people who could be in the country illegally.

Tarrio, often referred to in the media as a “former” or “ex” leader of the Proud Boys, recently said that characterizing him as a former member was not accurate.

===

ONE guy shot by cops, another arrested for guns?

===

an 12 5

President Donald Trump sent shockwaves through Washington when, on the first night of his second presidency, he issued across-the-board blanket pardons for more than 1500 of the defendants involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — including some who violently assaulted police officers that day.

In a rural area of Texas, Trump supporter Jenny Cudd is making her home available to pardoned January 6 defendants. And CNN took a look at her efforts in a. vid]

Cudd herself is among the January 6 defendants, although she wasn't among the more violent offenders. The Texan was sentenced to two months of probation for illegally entering the Capitol Building. Video footage aired by CNN showed Cudd admitting, "We did break down Nancy Pelosi's office door."

One of the pardoned January 6 defendants who is staying on Cudd's property is Don Hazard. Sentenced to almost five years in prison, Hazard is a member of the far-right Patriot Boys of North Texas. And he openly called for retribution against prosecutors during a conversation with CNN's Donie O'Sullivan.

..., "I don't think any of us were fairly charged. None of us got a fair shake in court. Federal judges, prosecutors — I think they're all guilty of treason."

When O'Sullivan asked Hazard, "Do you think there should be retribution," the militia member responded, "Most definitely. I think so. I mean, most definitely, I think so."

Hazard noted that after he was released from federal prison, he visited a gun shop in Texas and was able to "check out some firearms and whatnot."

The militia member insists that he did nothing wrong when he invaded the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

, "The only regrets that I have at all about what I did was just got outsmarted by the left. It was a total set up. It was a trap, and we walked right into it."

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AN 1 25

On his first night back in the White House, President Donald Trump granted broad pardons to roughly 1500 defendants who were involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — including those who violently attacked police officers. Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 defendants, resulting in members of far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys being released from prison.

Journalist Ban Makuch, reporting for The Guardian, warns that "far-right activists and neo-Nazis" are feeling encouraged by Trump's second presidency are determined to "take advantage of the popular awakening of American fascism."

In a Telegraph post, Makuch notes, a neo-Nazi wrote, "Get the bag, infiltrate existing institutions with power, build new institutions while we have breathing room, and tear down anything leftist…. The left is exhausted, extremely unpopular, and has been divested from by their tech bro backers. Now is the time to openly advocate for ourselves. Now is the time to go from defense and survival towards organizing and swift action."

READ MORE:[Anger as Trump set 'to make every American pay even more' with Colombia retaliation

Neo-Nazis groups that are feeling more optimistic, according to Makuch, include The Base and the Aryan Freedom Network.

Joshua Fisher-Birch of the Counter Extremism Project told The Guardian, "These groups see the next four years as a mix of positives and negatives but overall, as an opportunity to enlarge their movement. Extreme-right groups are focusing on mass deportations and seeking to win over potential recruits by concentrating on this issue."

Makuch notes, however, that neo-Nazis are deeply suspicious of the federal government and view Trump as a "race traitor" because he has Jewish grandchildren. The president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, was raised Presbyterian but is a convert to Judaism, and her husband, Jared Kushner, is Jewish.

Fisher-Birch told The Guardian, "Several groups are enjoying fascism being in the public sphere and what they view as liberal and left-wing panic and distress over (Elon) Musk's salute. Several others have noted that they have not benefited from the alliance with big tech and that major social media platforms are still removing their content.”

===

mma also had tarrio

January 22, 2025, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show

STEWART RHODES (OATH KEEPERS FOUNDER): It's frustrating to see anyone say, 'well these people, they assaulted police officers.' Well here's the point I made for some article I did for Gateway Pundit -- is the presumption of innocence in this country means that every single American is presumed innocent until proven guilty by a jury of their peers. That's a fair jury, that's an impartial jury, in a court with an impartial judge. That can't happen in Washington, D.C. They drew the jury pool from the victim pool.

They said all, the judges themselves said, everyone in Washington D.C, all the residents are victims of J6. And the judges even said they themselves were victims. But they insisted on drawing the jury from the victim pool. It's as though you're being charged with robbing a Walmart, and they drew the jury pool from everyone who was in the Walmart on the night of the robbery. You're not going to get an unbiased jury. It's impossible. So, because you had no fair trial, you did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt in a fair trial, so you should all be still presumed innocent until proven guilty and that's why President Trump was fully justified in pardoning everybody. All of us should be pardoned and almost all were.

===

proud boys parade at inaug

List of people pardoned or granted clemency by the president of the United States - Wikipedia

on January 20, 2025, Trump issued roughly 1,500 pardons and 14 commutations to people charged in connection to the January 6 United States Capitol attack.^[109] This included former leader of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio and founder of the Oath Keepers Stewart Rhodes.^[110]

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AN 1 25

The United States' 2024 presidential race will go down in history as incredibly polarizing.

Vice President Kamala Harris led a diverse coalition that ranged from liberals and progressives to centrist Blue Dog Democrat to right-wing Never Trump conservatives, and many of her supporters on both the left and the right slammed Donald Trump as dangerously authoritarian and a threat to democracy. But it wasn't enough to get Harris past the finish line, and President-elect Trump defeated her by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote while picking up 312 electoral votes (according to the Cook Political Report).

Christian nationalists and white fundamentalist evangelicals have been celebrating Trump's victory, which they view as a major triumph for their agenda. And they aren’t the only ones on the far right who are feeling emboldened by Trump's return to the White House.

In an article published on January 6, 2025 — four years after the violent 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building and 14 days before Trump's second inauguration — The New Republic's Spencer Sunshine details the enthusiasm that white nationalists and neo-Nazis are feeling.

"Active clubs — white supremacist MMA training gyms — are in full flourish, and have even expanded overseas," Sunshine reports. "While they've had limited public activism, observers worry they could soon transform into a fully-fledged fighting force. A new wave of swastika-waving neo-Nazis has emerged, too. The media-friendly Blood Tribe, who use striking aesthetics and a confrontational approach, were early promoters of the pet-eating rumor."

Sunshine adds, "A Columbus, Ohio march by their splinter group Hate Club 1488 grabbed so much attention that even President Biden denounced it."

According to Sunshine, Blood Tribe — along with Patriot Front and the antisemitic Goyim Defense League — "represent a new, flourishing neo-Nazi movement — one that will likely continue to grow during Trump's second term."

Trump has vowed to pardon the January 6, 2021 rioters, and he hasn't ruled out the possibility of pardoning those who were charged with violent offenses.

Sunshine warns that these pardons could encourage far-right groups to engage in acts of violence, from militia groups to white nationalists, white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

"Pardons for the leaders of violent groups, such as the Proud Boys' (Enrique) Tarrio, will undoubtedly result in their group's revival," Sunshine predicts. "It will also signal Trump's approval of street violence, potentially reviving the mass street brawls with antifascists during Trump's first term, such as those seen in Portland, Oregon."

Sunshine continues, "As far-right grassroots remain mobilized, the next four years will likely be an environment where far right individuals and groups can be fully activated and function as Trump's foot soldiers — legally or otherwise."

READ MORE:[January 6 rioters are 'political dissidents' declares spouse of Trump Cabinet nominee

*Read Spencer Sunshine's full article for The New Republic at this link.

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AN GUK 1 25

Some supporters of the Oath Keepers have vehemently denied that there is anything racist about the far-right militia group, insisting that non-whites are welcome as members.

But according to The Guardian's Jason Wilson, Robert Kinch — leader of an Oath Keepers spinoff group called Oath Keepers USA — has called for a "race war." And Kinch, a former Las Vegas homicide detective, has maintained his ties to law enforcement, Wilson reports.

In an article published on January 6, 2024 — the fourth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — Wilson explains, "The revelations about Robert 'Bobby' Kinch, now of Duck Creek, Utah, come from public records, online materials and the work of a longtime infiltrator of the patriot movement in the Pacific Northwest, who provided vital evidence to the Guardian captured inside Kinch's home. The findings show that four years on from January 6, the Oath Keepers, who played a central role in fomenting that day's insurrection in Washington, have not disappeared, but have continued quietly adding law-enforcement officers to their ranks."

Wilson warns that President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House "may encourage the likes of Kinch to bring their movement back into the spotlight, as the incoming administration promises to carry out unprecedented mass deportation of immigrants and to take on Trump's perceived opponents, whom he has described as 'the enemy within.'"

Wilson doesn't mention the infiltrator by name, citing "fears of retaliation." But the Guardian reporter notes that the person "spent several years from 2021 in contact with multiple, interconnected and overlapping anti-government 'patriot movement' groups in the Pacific Northwest and Intermountain West."

Wilson reports, "Their trove of archived materials includes chat logs, documents and media files, and has been made available to the Guardian and other news organizations by the whistleblower and pro-transparency non-profit, Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The materials also include first-hand photographs and recordings of direct interactions with anti-government leaders who believed that the infiltrator was a like-minded activist, and who accepted them into their inner circles."

Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) told The Guardian, "These disclosures show once again how police departments aren't taking the threat of extremists in the ranks seriously."

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AN 11 24

Trump has reaffirmed that once he takes office he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military on American streets to accomplish his promises to round up and deport millions of undocumented migrants.

Many experts’ concerns about this program have included the facts that immigrants contribute enormous value to the U.S. economy and mass deportation would hurt food production, housing construction and other crucial industries. Other scholars have analyzed how deportation traumatizes families.

I have an additional concern about a renewed focus on deportation as someone who has studied U.S. domestic militias for more than 15 years: Some militia units may see it as their duty to assist with such efforts. In fact, local police may even deputize certain militias to help them deport immigrants.

Anti-government, but supporting national defense

Militias are generally wary of the government. They’ve even been known to use violence against politicians and other government representatives, including police. I have found in my research that the militias’ disdain for the federal government is especially strong because they believe it is too big and corrupt and takes too much of their income through taxation.

But militia members’ negative beliefs about immigration and self-declared mission to protect the country could lead them to join a national mass-deportation effort.

My research finds that militia members generally believe the falsehoods that undocumented migrants are a threat to public safety.

For some, my research finds, this perception is rooted in xenophobia and racism. Other militia members misunderstand what is required to obtain U.S. citizenship: They believe that anyone who enters the country illegally is, by definition, a criminal and has therefore already proven their intention to not follow the laws and generally be a good American. This is not true, because migrants may seek asylum regardless of their immigration status for up to a year after entering the country.

Members with both sets of motives believe that undocumented migrants are taking jobs away from more deserving citizens and are generally receiving unearned benefits from being in the country. Trump’s promises to crack down on immigration appeal to militia members of both types.

Militias, like these people training in Georgia in 2017, often want to be prepared to help defend the nation. AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane

Militia members also believe that one of the few legitimate functions of the federal government as outlined by the Constitution is national defense. In that sense, those who believe migrants are an urgent threat could see the military’s involvement in a mass-deportation operation as consistent with a duty to defend the nation.

Most scholars agree that even if it were technically legal, domestic deployment of the military would be an alarming threat to democracy.

Active participation

Some militia units in border states have been engaged in deportation efforts for a long time. They typically patrol the border, sometimes detain migrants and regularly call the U.S. Border Patrol to report their findings.

Border Patrol agents have historically expressed skepticism and concerns about militia involvement with border monitoring due to the unverifiable skills and motives of civilian support.

Some state, county and local police also do immigration enforcement, and in recent years they have seemed to become more open to civilian assistance.

Some local police agencies, particularly sheriffs, are already asking for civilian assistance managing perceived problems with migrants. Others have hosted anti-immigration events with militias who patrol the border under an effective, if not formal, deputization of their actions.

A member of a militia group searches the U.S.-Mexico border for people seeking to cross in 2019. Paul Ratje/AFP via Getty Images

Militias may also be called on directly. In the past, Trump has directly addressed militias. The most cited example is his instruction in a Sept. 29, 2020, presidential debate, directing the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” People had similar interpretations of his comments in advance of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

But I have long believed these appeals started much earlier. In 2018 Trump pardoned the men who inspired the Bundy family occupation and standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. I believe that was an early attempt to garner support from people in militia circles. In a 2020 presidential debate, Donald Trump tells militias to ‘stand back and stand by.’

A volatile combination

The military has already been getting involved in immigration enforcement in unprecedented ways. In early 2024, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott claimed the U.S. Border Patrol was not protecting his state from an “invasion” from would-be immigrants. He deployed his state’s National Guard to an area of the border, blocking the Border Patrol from working in that section. That blockade continues.

In a second term, Trump has little incentive to restrain his rhetoric or his actions. The Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office. Even if he does not directly appeal to private citizens to control the border or detain people whom they believe to be undocumented migrants, his official presence and hard-line stance on immigration may be enough to provide legitimacy to vigilante action.

Then-candidate Donald Trump meets with Texas state officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, on Feb. 29, 2024, at a location on the U.S.-Mexico border seized by the state National Guard. AP Photo/Eric Gay

In November 2024, two militia members were convicted of a variety of federal offenses, including conspiracy to murder federal agents, for a plot to kill Border Patrol agents whom the men believed were failing to adequately protect the border from crossing migrants.

Not all militia members support mass deportation, especially if it involves unconstitutionally deploying military forces on U.S. soil. That’s clear from my research.

“The military is the military, and law enforcement is law enforcement,” one militia member replied when I asked some of my long-term contacts for their perspectives on Trump’s declaration to use the military. “They are separate for a reason.”

This man believes undocumented migrants pose dangers – but thinks shifting the military’s role would be even more harmful. Not all militia members are so circumspect.

Amy Cooter, Director of Research, Academic Development, and Innovation at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, Middlebury

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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an 11 24

President-elect Donald Trump's transition team is reportedly having conversations with far-right militia groups in border states as it plans sweeping immigration raids and mass deportations.

According to a new report in Wired magazine, members of armed paramilitary groups are currently in contact with the incoming administration about assisting border agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a volunteer basis. Tim Foley, who leads the group Arizona Border Recon, told Wired he expected to be called upon by the administration once Trump has been inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States.

"We’re in talks with a few different people,” Foley said. “We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”

Foley said his group has several dozen volunteers who routinely hike the rugged terrain around the Southern border, sometimes for as long as a week at a time. He wouldn't say exactly who his group has been in touch with, but that he was confident that his group would play a role in border enforcement, saying: “Everyone’s going to be tied up rounding people up and getting them out of here" and that there would be "a need for live, real-time intel.”

“This is my 14th year doing this,” Foley told Wired. “I’ve hiked over 2,000 miles of [migrant] trails. Most of my guys are certified trackers; we know how to read the ground, age tracks, and know if something’s old or new. We know how many people are traveling together and if they are carrying heavy packs on their backs.”

Trump has so far remained tight-lipped about how he would carry out his mass deportations, though he has said he would seek to use emergency powers to deploy the military as his own deportation force – something that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has already condemned. His new border czar, Tom Homan – who served as Trump's ICE chief during his first administration — has previously said that he would run "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen."

Click here to read Wired's report in its entirety.

READ MORE:['Wait until 2025': Trump's former ICE chief makes chilling promise at far-right conference]

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'We’re all in': Armed vigilantes say Trump team enlisting them for border enforcement - Alternet.org

an 11 24

The Oath Keepers were among the far-fight groups involved in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. And on May 25, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that two prominent figures in the militia group — founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III and Kelly Meggs — had been sentenced to federal prison on seditious conspiracy charges.

But the Oath Keepers remain active in 2024. During an early November interview with Wired, Oath Keepers ally Jim Arroyo described preparations for a possible civil war.

Arroyo told Wired, "The election can certainly trigger a civil war, no different than it happened in any number of countries around the world. I'm training people to survive a civil war, to get out of the way, to stay home, stay off the grid, have enough supplies."

READ MORE:[Inside a Georgia election official’s months-long push to make it easier to challenge the 2024 results

Jim Arroyo and his wife Janet Arroyo operate the Yavapai County Preparedness Team, an Oath Keepers spinoff in Arizona. And both of them, according to Wired reporters David Gilbert and Tess Owen, believe that Democrats are planning to steal the 2024 election from GOP nominee Donald Trump.

Jim Arroyo told Wired, "They want to take him out so that he can't get back in the White House."

During the interview, Jim Arroyo claimed that the left is uniquely violent in the United States — and the Wired reporters noted the violence of January 6, 2021. But Jim Arroyo believes the debunked conspiracy theory that the January 6 rioters were undercover leftists.

Jim Arroyo told Wired, "The main concern right now is the potential of civil unrest because of the election. Whoever wins, one side's going to be pissed off, and the other side, the radical-left side, is going to be more pissed, and they're more known for burning cities to the ground when they don't get their way."

READ MORE:['Trump is toast': Why Michael Moore is 'confident' Harris will win

*Read Wired's full interview with Jim Arroyo at this link (subscription required).

===

an 11 24 badsh

donald Trump over the past few weeks has occasionally been discarding his iconic blue suit, red tie, and red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, and instead wearing a black suit, gold tie, and black and gold MAGA hat. Black and gold are the colors of the far-right group the Proud Boys, who “instigated critical breaches of the Capitol” during the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was handed a sentence last year of “22 years in prison for orchestrating a failed plot to keep Donald Trump in power after the Republican lost the 2020 election.”

Months before the insurrection trump had infamously signaled, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

IFrame Content

“The Proud Boys are back in the news today,” wrote Rolling Stone senior writer Tim Dickinson. “Trump is not only bat signaling to the fight club with a black and gold MAGA hat — he’s campaigning for a far-right congressional candidate who had a Proud Boy on payroll.”

Dickinson pointed to his reporting on Republican Joe Kent, a “far-right candidate for the House, with connections to white nationalists,” who has “extremist views and affiliations, including reportedly paying a Proud Boy as a consultant.”

IFrame Content

Attorney Tristan Snell, who helped lead New York’s successful $25 million prosecution in the Trump University case, warns: “MAGA’s colors have always been red and white. Yet Trump is suddenly wearing black and gold MAGA hats — and even wore a black suit and gold tie the other day, rather than his habitual blue suit and red tie. The Proud Boys colors are black and gold. THIS IS NOT A COINCIDENCE.”

Calling it “a harbinger of potential chaos,” The New York Times on Monday reports: “Groups backing former President Donald J. Trump recently sent messages to organize poll watchers to be ready to dispute votes in Democratic areas. Some posted images of armed men standing up for their rights to recruit for their cause. Others spread conspiracy theories that anything less than a Trump victory on Tuesday would be a miscarriage of justice worthy of revolt.”

One post, “from an Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, the far-right organization that was instrumental in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol,” read: “The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible.”

“You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”

Pointing to “the growth and increased sophistication of the election denialism movement,” The Times reports its “analysis of more than one million messages across nearly 50 Telegram channels with over 500,000 members found a sprawling and interconnected movement intended to question the credibility of the presidential election, interfere with the voting process and potentially dispute the outcome.”

Posts from groups like the Proud Boys, “questioned why states might not be able to fully tally election results on election night and repeated misleading claims about voter registration numbers in Michigan. In one video, a truck with a Confederate flag chased after immigrant children, with a caption reading: ‘1/20/25: Trump is sworn in as President. 1/21/25: Me and the Proud Boys begin the deportation.’”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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1 22 see on the media for report on walkie talkie audio

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SPLC year in hate rept

As Militia Numbers Decline, Antigovernment Threat Persists

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A progressive policy group in North Carolina was among those expressing alarm on Sunday as news spread that federal emergency workers were forced to evacuate an area hit hard by Hurricane Helene late last month after officials warned that "armed militias" were "hunting" hurricane response teams.

But the news didn't come as a shock to Carolina Forward, an independent think tank, considering that it came after weeks of lies from Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump about the Biden administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) response to the hurricane.

"This is what MAGA does," said Carolina Forward on social media. "Eventually, their lies have real world consequences."

As The Washington PostreportedSunday evening, a U.S. Forest Service official sent an urgent message to other federal agencies involved in the recovery on Saturday afternoon, saying FEMA had advised all federal responders in Rutherford County, North Carolina "to stand down and evacuate the county immediately."

National Guard troops in the area, said the official, "had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA."

The message was verified by two federal officials.

"It's terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government... And it's sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most."

Emergency responders moved to a "safe area" and paused their work in Rutherford County, where they had been delivering supplies and clearing trees from roads in order to help search-and-rescue crews.

"Let's be clear: Armed militia are terrorizing FEMA rescue workers and causing important work to stop because Donald Trump spread lies and disinformation about the hurricane. This is on the Republican candidate for president with help from Elon Musk," saidmedia critic Jennifer Schulze, referring to the billionaire owner of X who has used the social media platform to amplify Trump's lies. "Shameful and disqualifying."

The forced pause in the work is just the latest example of the measurable impact of statements made by Trump and his running mate, U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), about FEMA in the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned last Thursday that federal employees, thousands of whom have been deployed to states including North Carolina and Florida to help with the response to the devastating storms, have received threats in recent days. Meteorologists have received angry messages from people convinced that weather experts and government officials "are creating and directing hurricanes," The Guardianreportedlast week.

"I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather," Katie Nickolaou, a meteorologist in Michigan, toldThe Guardian. "I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can't hope to control that. But it's taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed."

President Joe Biden was driven to address Trump's lies about the hurricane response last week, saying the disinformation was "undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken."

Since Helene swept through a number of states late last month, catching communities in western North Carolina off-guard with devastating flooding, Trump has baselessly claimed that:

Biden ignored a call for help from Republican Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who denied Trump's claim;
He received unspecified "reports" that North Carolina officials were "going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas";
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, spent "all her FEMA money" on housing for undocumented immigrants; and
FEMA is providing only $750 to people who lost their homes.

Riva Duncan, a former Forest Service official in hard-hit Asheville, North Carolina, told the Postthat locals have told FEMA employees who have arrived with aid to to help with repairs, "We don't want your help here."

"It's terrible because a lot of these folks who need assistance are refusing it because they believe the stuff people are saying about FEMA and the government," Duncan told the newspaper. "And it's sad because they are probably the ones who need the help the most."

In the town of Chimney Rock in Rutherford County, FEMA has shifted to working in secure areas in fixed locations instead of going door to door to assess community needs, the Post reported, "out of an abundance of caution."

Matt Ortega, a web developer in Oakland, California, said the impact of Trump's baseless claims about the hurricane response mirror that of his earlier lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, where schools and government business ground to a halt in recent weeks due to bomb threats stemming from claims that Haitian people were stealing neighbors' pets and eating them.

"Trump and Republicans' FEMA lies [incur] a debt, just as they did in Springfield," said Ortega. "The people who pay it are children whose schools are closed due to bomb threats in Springfield and recovery aid workers when militias are 'out hunting FEMA.'"

===

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an 7 24

After former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Western Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13, many journalists and political scholars expressed worries that more political violence will follow. And some far-right militia members have called for violent retaliation.

Wired's Tess Owens reports that Scot Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), has posted a video on TikTok telling his allies to prepare for the possibility of civil war.

In the video, Seddon declared, "This is not going to just go away. We need to become f*****g strong, f*****g lions. Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case (of) war, or for when s*** hits the fan."

According to Owens, "incendiary rhetoric and calls for retaliatory violence" have "exploded online" following the attempt on Trump's life.

"In the past year," Owens reports, "APIII has made a significant recruitment push across major social media platforms, such as Facebook, X, TikTok, and even NextDoor, according to research from the Tech Transparency Project shared exclusively with Wired. Despite featuring 'Three Percenters' in its name — a clear nod to the militia movement — APIII touts a disclaimer on its website insisting that it is not a militia."

Owens adds, "That's in line with the broader trend seen since January 6, 2021, when paramilitary activists scrambled to distance themselves from the militia movement implicated in the Capitol riot. But groups like APIII have increasingly been trying to rebuild the militia movement from the ground up, urging people to get organized in their communities.

*Read the full Wired article at this link.

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an 7 24

After the attempted assassination (https://www.nationalreview.com/news/explosives-found-in-car-of-would-be-trump-assassin-thomas-matthew-crooks/?utm_source=onesignal&utm_medium=push&utm_campaign=article) of Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday afternoon, July 13, a long list of prominent Democrats — including President Joe Biden, former President Barack Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) — forcefully condemned the attack, emphasizing that such violence has no place in U.S. politics.

Regardless, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — once a scathing critic of Trump but now a devoted loyalist and possible running mate — blamed Democrats for the assassination attempt. Some other Republicans have pointed the finger at Democrats as well.

During an MSNBC segment on July 14, national security reporter Ken Dilanian warned that the Proud Boys and other far-right extremist groups have responded to the attack by calling for a civil war.

READ MORE: See it: Blood-stained Trump whisked off stage by Secret Service after apparent gunshots at rally (https://www.alternet.org/trump-blood-secret-service/)

Dilanian told his colleague Kate Snow (https://youtu.be/eYfvEBLDohI), "Several Republican members of Congress have directly blamed President Biden, the Democrats and the media for the assassination attempt. They claim it was a result of overheated rhetoric about Trump and part of a campaign to jeopardize his safety. So, for example, Georgia Republican Congressman Mike Collins posted, quote, 'Joe Biden sent the orders.'"

Dilanian continued, "And Trump campaign surrogate Nick Adams posted, on social media, quote, 'Joe Biden's rhetoric is directly responsible. There can be no discussion. This is a fact.'"

The that although Democrats have "called Donald Trump an authoritarian and a threat to democracy," they "have never hinted that violence was an appropriate response to that."

Dilanian explained (https://youtu.be/eYfvEBLDohI), vid?]

"After this shooting, Democrats, including President Biden, have condemned it in the strongest possible terms, and they've called this political violence a threat to democracy…. And experts are worried that this kind of rhetoric increases the risk of more violence."

READ MORE:'I don't want to go down that road': Lindsey Graham ducks question on JD Vance’s rhetoric (https://www.alternet.org/Bank/lindsey-graham-jd-vance/?utm_source=push_notifications)

The MSNBC reporter warned that according to national security experts, "extremists" are "seizing on this incident.

"Telegram channels for branches of the Proud Boys militia group have been calling for civil war and violence," (https://youtu.be/eYfvEBLDohI). "According to Advance Democracy — that's an NGO that tracks this stuff — a user on one forum wrote that the Democratic National Committee, RINOs, and the feds, quote, 'should all be hung in the streets of D.C.' And users on a pro-Trump platform, Patriots.Win, are calling for violence and civil war. One user wrote, 'War now. They don't want to live and let live.' Some really dangerous rhetoric coursing around out there, Kate."

Dilanian observed that although some members of Congress are trying to calm the situation down, "flame-throwing politicians" are "not doing that at all."

"As long as there is some group of people who are throwing gasoline on the fire,"](https://youtu.be/eYfvEBLDohI), "there are sort of a group of deranged individuals out there that are listening to it, paying close attention, and think they are essentially in a civil war."

READ MORE:Historian recalls bipartisan unity after 1981 Reagan assassination attempt: 'We came together' (https://www.alternet.org/beschloss-trump-assassination-attempt/)

Watch the full video below or at this link (https://www.alternet.org/ken-delanian-trump-proud-boys/).

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hunkered down after j6 went to jail oathkeepers and ---

now kinda coming back 7 24

Back in March on Long Island, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman — a far-right MAGA Republican and Donald Trump supporter — announced his plan to recruit a force of 75 armed "special deputies." Blakeman urged residents with gun permits to apply, saying they would be "provisional emergency special deputy sheriffs" and could be activated when he desired.

The special force, Blakeman said, would focus on the "protection of human life and property during an emergency" — which could be anything from a hurricane or a blackout "a riot."

According to New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon, the force has "drawn vocal opposition" from some Long Island residents and "plunged Nassau into a national debate about authoritarianism in an election season that some see as a fork in the road for American democracy."

"Critics have accused (Blakeman) of creating, with little notice or explanation, an unsanctioned militia answering only to him," Kilgannon reports in an article published on July 11. "They called the move especially dangerous amid heightened fears of political violence, and as Mr. Trump promulgates plans for mass deportations and quashing dissent."

One of those critics is Great Neck, Long Island-based IT manager Sabine Margolis, who has posted an online petition named "Stop Bruce Blakeman's Personal Nassau County Militia."

Another critic is Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, Democratic minority leader of the Nassau County Legislature.

DeRiggi-Whitton told the Times, "It's the opposite way we want to be going, a private militia with guns. We're trying to work on gun control, rather than promote them."

New York City's Long Island suburbs are divided among four counties, one of which is Nassau County's neighbor, Suffolk County.

Jay Jacobs — who chairs the New York State Democratic Party as well as the Nassau County Democratic Party — told the Times, "This is all to solidify his extreme right-wing base. Instead of solving the county's problems, he's appealing to the right wing by speaking the language they like: militia, guns, law and order. There is no problem he is looking to solve. Does he think we're going to be invaded by Suffolk County?"

*Read the full New York Times report at this link (subscription required).

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Monday, June 11, Politico's Alexander Burns reported that some Canadian government officials are worried about the possibility of civil war breaking out in the United States. In a 37-page document titled "Disruptions on the Horizon," a Canadian government office called Policy Horizons Canada argued that officials in Ottawa should make preparations for that grim possibility.

The report warned that if "U.S. ideological divisions, democratic erosion, and domestic unrest escalate," the result could be "plunging the country into civil war."

Only a day after Politico's article was published, Wired's David Gilbert reports that far-right Edward "Jake" Lang — who is incarcerated while awaiting trial for his alleged role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection — "is now using encrypted messaging channels to create a nationwide network of armed militias in all 50 states."

Lang, federal prosecutors allege, swung a baseball bat at police officers during the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.

"Though he has been in prison for over 1200 days, Lang is working with a network of election deniers and conspiracists to promote the North American Patriot and Liberty Militia, or Napalm for short," Gilbert reports in his June 12 article for Wired. "The group officially launched last week with 50 state-specific militia groups on Telegram."

Gilbert continues, "Lang claims that the Telegram groups already have 20,000 members, including pastors, farmers, former military personnel, and currently serving sheriffs. However, multiple experts who reviewed the channels tell Wired said that figure was wildly overestimated and that the real figure was closer to 2500 members. But a group this size, they warn, is still large enough to cause a serious threat."

The Wired reporter notes that "tensions around" the United States' 2024 presidential election in November "are already at an all-time high," adding that "many Republicans refuse to say if they will peacefully accept the outcome of the November election."

Devin Burghart, executive director at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR), told Wired, "We've noted considerable energy being put into resurrecting far-right paramilitary activism right now. The growing talk of 'Second Amendment remedies' to unfavorable electoral outcomes is a serious cause for concern. Militia groups like Napalm promote political violence and sow the seeds for another potential insurrection."

Lang is presently incarcerated at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn while awaiting his trial, which is set for September.

Lang told Wired, "I thought it was necessary to get organized in case these encroachments, these violations of our civil liberties, our natural rights were to escalate to a point where it'd absolutely be untenable and that we would need to defend ourselves. There is a tyrannical wave that has hit America that we've never seen before. And so, it's time that people get organized in case they escalate to something that basically puts our very lives in danger."

*:{Read David Gilbert's full report for Wired at this link.

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BB 5 24

Facebook supposely bans militias, but they're there all the same, reports Wired's Tess Owen—and using the plaform to coordinate their activities.

"Join Your Local Militia or III% Patriot Group," a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: "Now more than ever. Support the American militia page."

Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an "armed militia group" on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence.

Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country.

When companies talk vaguely of the challenges of content moderation I'm always reminded of how pre-Musk Twitter would hem and haw and shrug its shoulders at the impossibility of moderating racial slurs and whatnot, but could make tweets containing copyright-infringing strings vanish in a heartbeat. It's true that content moderation is hard, and harder still at scale, but it's also true that if something is on someone's website it's because they've made a choice that allows it to remain. If Facebook wanted to rid itself of this material it would. It doesn't matter how obviously worthless or bad the content is because all that matters is the scale of it. See also: reviews on retail sites

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over the weekend independent 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spoke at a fundraiser for a far-right anti-government group in Erie County, New York – a slice of the country that had a large proportion of residents arrested and charged for crimes related to the January 6 insurrection. Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist and vaccine denialist, increasingly is embracing the far-right.

“That group, Constitutional Coalition of New York State, has founders who not only have ties to Donald Trump but are also connected to the stop-the-steal movement through their activist network, which includes groups that had a presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” The Daily Beast reported Friday. “It’s yet another instance of Kennedy—who is mounting one of the most well-funded third-party presidential threats in decades—serving as a peculiar bridge between his own anti-establishment movement and Trump’s.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center includes the Constitutional Coalition of New York State (CCNYS) on its page of anti-government groups. Political Research Associates, which detailed the high proportion of January 6 residents arrested and charged, included the Constitutional Coalition of New York State in its February report on “The Rise of the Far Right in Western New York.”

“If you don’t think the government is lying to you, you’re not paying attention,” Kennedy told attendees at the CCNYS fundraiser, The Buffalo News reports.

“CCNYS founders Nick and Nancie Orticelli are also affiliated with the Watchmen, a nearby militia who Nick has encouraged his social media followers to join. The Watchmen had several members at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and one member, Pete Harding, is still facing charges for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds,” The Daily Beast noted. “Nancie Orticelli has also hosted the Watchmen’s founder, Charles Pellien, on her weekly radio show on several occasions.”

One of Kennedy’s goals in traveling to New York was to get on the ballot for the November presidential election. Various polls show him taking votes from both President Joe Biden and ex-president Donald Trump, but Kennedy currently has only qualified to be on the ballot in three states, Utah, Michigan and Hawaii, the newspaper reported.

But The Washington Post on Thursday reported The American Independent Party of California, which has a history of “far-right ties,” and “backed segregationist and former Alabama governor George Wallace in 1968, nominated Kennedy for president.”

Kennedy “said this week that he has qualified to be on the ballot in California and will accept the nomination of the American Independent Party, which has a history of associating itself with far-right figures and individuals who have expressed racist views.”

Some news reports and RFK Jr. himself say the Trump campaign was actively courting Kennedy, attempting to convince him to consider being the ex-president’s 2024 vice presidential running mate.

“That MAGA dalliance with Kennedy could be coming back to bite the Trump campaign, some Republicans close to the former president worry,” The Daily Beast also reported.

“’They can only blame themselves,’ a Trump-aligned strategist told The Daily Beast, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about private conversations about the risk Kennedy poses, ‘because they cozied up to him and thought it was funny.’”

Watch WIVBTV’s report on Kennedy’s trip to New York below or at this link.[vid]

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an 4 24

a local New York politician is proposing a plan that would involve the creation of "a list of deputized, armed civilians that can be deployed during emergencies," The Daily Beast reports.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman last week, according to the report, was asked by Donald Trump to hold an umbrella over the former president's head during the wake for former New York City police officer Jonathan Diller.

Per the Beast, Blakeman and Nassau County Sheriff Anthony LaRocco last month "put an ad on the county’s website for residents to apply to be 'Provisional Emergency Special Deputy Sheriffs,'" and the ad notes, "the deputized civilians must be 'skilled in the use of firearms,' and 'within 45 days of appointment must be trained and qualified on service weapon and complete basic training at the Academy in the NYS Penal law and Use of Force.'"

Furthermore, The deputized citizens would be paid a $150 stipend each day they're on duty.

According to Long Island News 12, the New York GOP leader "says he wants to deputize pre-screened citizens with gun licenses so they can be called upon in cases of 'significant emergency' to protect government buildings, hospitals, religious centers and utilities – but not to patrol. He says that some of the more than 100 applicants will begin training this week, and that it will take at least 30 days before he has 25 or so people available, if needed to be called upon."

Blakeman's plan, according to the Beast, "has been deemed dangerous by Nassau County residents and legislators who rallied against Blakeman outside of the Nassau County Legislature on Tuesday in Mineola, New York."

In opposition to the Republican leader's plan, Hempstead NAACP President Barbara Powell declared during the rally, "This is open season to kill."

READ MORE:['Set things straight': Chilling poll shows how far Republicans are willing to go

New York state Senate Kim Keiserman, a Democrat, said of Blakeman, "I think he’s really out of step with the culture of Nassau County, and that’s why the legislators haven’t heard any positive feedback about this idea. It’s really out of step. It’s not governing, it’s performance."

The Beast adds, "Nassau County already has roughly 2,500 police officers, and the National Guard has previously stepped in to assist during emergencies like Hurricane Sandy. Critics point out that Nassau County—which just a couple years ago was deemed the safest community in America by U.S. News and World Report—enjoys an exceedingly low crime rate."

The Daily Beast's full report is available**at this link**(subscription required). Long Island News 12's report is here.

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an 4 24

americans who have purchased firearms since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic are far more willing to engage in political violence against their fellow citizens, according to a new study.

The Guardian recently reported on a study by the University of California-Davis' violence prevention research program dubbed "Firearm Ownership and Support for Political Violence in the United States." Researchers surveyed roughly 13,000 gun owners who bought their weapons over the last four years, and asked if violence was justified in order to accomplish political objectives. 39% of gun owners — a plurality — said yes, while 30% said no.

UC-Davis researchers warned that American gun owners in the survey could potentially be "arming up for anticipated civil conflict."

"Our findings strongly suggest that large numbers of armed individuals who are at least potentially willing to engage in political violence are in public places across the US every day," the study read.

More specifically, 42% of respondents who own AR-15 style assault weapons were in favor of political violence, along with 44% of more recent gun buyers. Additionally, 56% of gun owners who openly carry their firearms in public told researchers they would be willing to carry out political violence.

"Recent purchasers and always- or nearly-always-carriers were more willing to kill to advance political objectives," the study read.

The study was published Tuesday by Jama Network Open, which is a monthly open access medical journal published by the American Medical Association. Its principal author, Garen Wintemute, is a professor of emergency medicine at UC-Davis, and is approaching the problem of American political violence as a public health issue, according to the Guardian.

While the political violence that erupted on January 6, 2021 was initially widely criticized by former President Donald Trump (though only hours after his supporters initially breached the US Capitol) and Republican lawmakers, many have since done a one-eighty. Trump himself has promised on multiple occasions to pardon January 6 defendants, particularly those incarcerated in Washington, DC jail.

As New York University's Just Security publication recently reported, many of those defendants are incarcerated specifically for attacking police officers. The former president has reportedly been in contact with Micki Witthoeft, who is the mother of deceased January 6 participant Ashli Babbitt. A US Capitol police officer shot Babbitt after she broke past several police lines and attempted to leap through a broken window at several lawmakers huddling in the speaker's lobby just several feet away.

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'Seriously concerned': School board may sue new far-right chair with alleged militia ties

York County, Virginia school board chair Lynda Fairman (Image: Screengrab via WAVY / York County)

Carl Gibson

February 21, 2024

A three-member faction on a local school board in Virginia has come under increased scrutiny by both other elected officials and concerned parents, and litigation may be pursued against the board's newest chair.

According to local news outlet WAVY, York County School Board chair Lynda Fairman and two other members — Kimberly Goodwin and Zoran Pajevic — were elected in November 2023 on a far-right "parents' rights" agenda, and have since provoked a "tsunami of discontent" in recent months. WAVY reported that during a recent work session, board members James Richardson and Mark Shafer publicly voiced their opposition to their new colleagues' latest actions, which include allegedly sending a militia group to a local school to record a sex education session.

"What really concerns me, majorly, is that board members have been notified by our board attorney that the board may be liable because of retaliation claims made by the superintendent. This could open the board and division up to possible litigation," Richardson said. "I’m seriously concerned about that."

READ MORE: Far-right 'Moms for Liberty' school board candidates lose races in 5 states

Fairman was accused of sending a militia group to Dare Elementary School last month to film a "Family Life" sex education presentation. According to an online pamphlet, those sessions emphasize abstinence from sex before marriage, argue in favor of adoption over abortion and promote the "benefits of marriage." Richardson noted that he watched a video the group posted in which participants said they were "sent here by Ms. Fairman." However, Fairman strongly disputed the allegations.

"I am not a part of that, absolutely not, and I do not support that name being changed, and that was news to me," Fairman said in response. "... There were several citizens, who when they found out about the Family Life, I asked them 'I said I can't go, can you please go?'”

"[T]hat’s my mistake for how I presented it to them. It was not intended to be that way," Fairman added, saying she had hand-written apology letters to school counselors.

The group in question — York County Poquoson Community Missions (YCPCM) — is led by Yorktown resident Bob Herget, who runs a local pest control business. However, in a video he posted to YouTube that has since been labeled as private (part of which has been uploaded to TikTok), he referred to his group as the "York County Poquoson Constitutional Militia." Herget's Facebook page is populated with content critical of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, clips from various right-wing influencers like Tim Pool and Joe Rogan and content praising former President Donald Trump. YCPCM's website has since been taken down.

READ MORE: Moms for Liberty: 'Joyful warriors' or anti-government conspiracists?

Click here to read WAVY's full report.

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8 23 patriot front sies defam?!

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obligatory macho? // gaetz w trump iowa? use force

right cannot rule out violence?

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-responds-audience-question-about-forming-militias-you-needs-have-systems

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an 7 23 no lnx

no lnx

'Threats and intimidation': Ammon Bundy slammed with over $52 million in damages in hospital lawsuit

Alex Henderson July 25, 2023

In 2022, far-right militia supporter Ammon Bundy and his ally Diego Rodriguez turned their wrath on St. Luke's Medical Center, accusing the Boise, Idaho hospital of wrongdoing in a child welfare case. St. Luke's responded with a civil lawsuit, and on Monday, July 24,a jury awarded St. Luke's more than $52 million in damages — including $26.5 million in compensatory damages and $26 million in punitive damages.

According to the Idaho Statesman's Sally Krutzig, "The $500,000 extra in the compensatory category came as a result of the jury's finding that violations of the Idaho Charitable Solicitation Act by Rodriguez and his Freedom Man Press business had harmed the plaintiffs."

Attorneys for St. Luke's have stressed that the hospital suffered considerable harassment because of Bundy, who claimed that the child in the custody case was "kidnapped" by the hospital.

READ MORE: Militia extremist Ammon Bundy shows how 'emboldened' America’s far right has become: journalist

In an official statement, St. Luke's said, "Taking legal action is not something we take lightly. But standing up to the threats, bullying, intimidation, disruption and self-serving actions of the defendants was necessary. Inaction would have signaled that their menacing behavior was acceptable. Clearly, it is not, and the jury's decision validates that fact."

The Daily Beast's Kate Briquelet, reporting on the verdict, notes that Bundy "was a consistent no-show throughout the legal proceedings."

"In April," Briquelet explains, "a judge issued a default judgment against Bundy and Rodriguez for failing to respond to the suit,leading Bundy to put out an emergency alert that falsely claimed cops surrounded his home and that beckoned his (People's Rights Network) disciples to show up to defend him…. As a result of the default, jurors in the two-week trial were tasked with deciding what damages Bundy and Rodriguez owed to the hospital system."

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Briquelet adds, "They heard testimony from doctors and administrators about the men's mob stoking fear among patients and families in the emergency room, and Life Flight pilots refusing to land at the facility, fearing shots from the armed crowd on the ground."

READ MORE: Idaho judge scolds Ammon Bundy before jail sentence — says he needs to be 'held accountable'

Lindsay Schubiner, programs director for the Western States Center, is applauding the verdict. The Western States Center, which has been vehemently critical of Bundy and his allies, monitors far-right extremists.

Schubiner said of Bundy, "His decision to target St. Luke’s and to use inflammatory, dishonest rhetoric about the hospital's actions endangered both staff and patients. This verdict shows that the courts have the ability to treat this kind of threat with the seriousness it deserves."

READ MORE: The Bundy takeover: How the GOP's embrace of pro-terrorist politics opened the door for Jan. 6 and the Ottawa trucker tantrum

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guk

How far-right figures like Ammon Bundy cause chaos in US politics

Bundy, who is running for governor in Idaho, summoned his followers to a judge’s home, revealing a troubling development in a divided political landscape

Sergio Olmos

Tue 5 Apr 2022

One recent Friday afternoon far-right militia figure Ammon Bundy started a live video feed on his YouTube channel in the wake of being arrested on trespassing charges at a hospital in Idaho, where he is running for governor.

Bundy appeared disappointed to tell his followers what he believed the government was forcing him to do next. He looked down at the camera, wearing an open-collared shirt and his usual cowboy hat, and let out a sigh. Then he threatened a sitting Idaho judge, summoning his supporters to go to his home.

Lt governor Janice McGeachin announces she will run for Idaho Governor at the Downtown Event Center in Idaho Falls, on 19 May 2021.

Republican hopes to ride far-right rage into Idaho’s governor’s office

Addressing his followers, he told them: “I’m calling on you to put off whatever you’re doing tomorrow, and come to [the judge’s] house … Patriot groups all across Idaho and around the country, I cannot try to hold you back any longer.”

What had excised Bundy so much was a child custody case. But what his actions really revealed was a troubling development in America’s ever-more divided political landscape where far-right figures feel emboldened enough to threaten a judge, wield their followers against the institutions of the state and where an implicit threat of violence is increasingly present as they seek elected office.

By the time Bundy made his remarks, his 17,000 YouTube subscribers were receiving near daily updates about a 10-month-old child near Boise, Idaho, who was taken into temporary protection from his parents after officials determined the child was suffering from severe malnourishment and in imminent danger.

Diego Rodriguez, Bundy’s campaign consultant and friend, is the grandfather of the child at the center of a controversy in which even the far-right deputy governor, Janice McGeachin, has become embroiled. An ultra-conserative pastor, Rodriguez is emblematic of the Christian fringe pushing to create a US “theocracy” in Idaho.

Bundy railed against what he considered a “kidnapping” at the hands of the government. After an Ada county judge signed a warrant transferring temporary custody of the child to health and wellness officials, Bundy urged his followers – who are often armed – to physically descend on the judge’s house, to the deep alarm of local police.

It was hardly Bundy’s first time in the headlines. Nor was it even his first time getting his followers to swarm an Idaho judge’s home, following a similar call in 2021.

Bundy and his family have long been established figures in anti-government folklore after leading an armed standoff at their ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada. For 20 years Cliven Bundy, Ammon Bundy’s father, avoided paying grazing fees to the Bureau of Land Management, insisting that his cattle had more right to the land than the federal government.

When armed federal agents were sent to confiscate the cattle for non-payment, hundreds of protesters and some armed militia members came to their support. Charges for Cliven and his two sons, Ammon and Ryan, were dismissed after a mistrial in which the federal prosecutor failed to turn over evidence and disclose the existence of surveillance camera footage and the presence of federal snipers in the area.

Two years later in 2016 Ammon Bundy led a high-profile armed takeover and lengthy occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refugee, a sanctuary for birds in eastern Oregon. That year Ammon and Ryan Bundy were charged with conspiracy in federal court but again found not guilty.

Ammon Bundy speaks to reporters during a news conference at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016.

But Bundy has adapted to new times in US politics as the Republican party has lurched right under the influence of Donald Trump, and far-right militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have dominated headlines, including after the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Bundy, however, has attracted far less attention as he built up a state-by-state-level, cell-like network that can host dinners to create a sense of community but also produce on-demand protesters.

Bundy’s People’s Rights Network aims to form a coalition of militia members, anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, preppers and other far-right travelers. Its size eclipses most far-right groups put together. And many experts see it as a real threat to democracy.

“They’ve repeatedly shown an ability to mobilize large number of armed far-right activists to threaten, harass, and intimidate public officials,” said Devin Burghart, director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a non-profit that monitors the far right.

While 2021 saw a retreat for many of the national far-right groups as they came under intense scrutiny from law enforcement, People’s Rights Network grew last year by 53%. Today it has 33,000 members across 38 states, according to a report from the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.

“Ammon Bundy, with People’s Rights Network, was the first to grasp on to Covid-19 denial as a mobilizing vehicle.The first to galvanize militants to oppose Covid-19 restrictions and to meld together anti-vaxxers, paramilitaries, Proud Boys and others into a larger movement to protest and protect these kinds of efforts,” said Burghart.

Burghart says Bundy has shown the ability to radicalize people by “engaging in local conflict. Whether that’s showing up at vaccination sites and threatening healthcare providers or showing up at school boards and harassing school board members.”

In the case of the call for militias to descend on the Ada county judge’s home, local police announced the baby at the center of the spat would be returned to the parents under stipulations agreed upon by the court. In a statement, Meridian police concluded with a plea: “There is no need to continue protesting or harassing our public health officials, police officers or anyone else involved.”

Bundy called off the protest. But within a week Bundy had announced a new rally – a potluck to recruit new members to the cause.

“Ammon Bundy is important because in many ways his efforts are a bellwether for where the paramilitary side of the movement is moving,” said Burghart.

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no lnx slate

Where Far-Right Militias Trained for Jan. 6

BY LEAH SOTTILE

JULY 13, 2022

A man with a yellow Don't Tread On Me snake flag draped on his back and Jason van Tatenhove during the January 6 hearings.

Tuesday’s Jan. 6 hearing focused on the link between the Trump White House and the far-right militia groups that participated in the Capitol riot, so it makes sense that a former member of one of those militias would testify.

Jason van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers—a group of self-appointed vigilantes who were instrumental in storming the Capitol—told the House committee that the actions of the group on Jan. 6 provided “a glimpse” of their vision. The group had actively hoped for (and trained for) the chance to participate in a violent insurrection like the kind staged in the waning days of Donald Trump’s presidency.

What We Know About That Third Possible Trump

Indictment

Though van Tatenhove ended his affiliation with the group in 2018, his testimony this week was meant to underscore the serious threat that groups like the Oath Keepers pose for the U.S., as well as their capacity for violence in the next election cycle, especially if Trump is re-elected.

But van Tatenhove’s testimony made another thing very clear: Far-right militia groups have, for years, used the Western United States as a testing ground for extremist violence, staging stand-offs on public land to amass followers and experiment with what they could get away with.

Van Tatenhove would know. Sitting before Congress in a Descendents T-shirt and jean jacket adorned with punk pins, the former Oath Keeper told the committee that his association with the group began back in 2014, when he arrived as an “independent journalist” at the Bundy Ranch standoff in the Nevada desert.* He was quickly sucked into the cause.

The 2014 standoff was started by the rancher Cliven Bundy, a man who considered himself a member of the 1970s anti-federal lands Sagebrush Rebellion, and who had been vocal since the 1970s about his disdain for federal ownership of land.

For 20 years, Bundy had refused to pay the required fees to the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that he owed for grazing his cattle on public land. So, in April 2014, the BLM attempted to round up Bundy’s cattle as a penalty for non-payment. It was a repossession: Bundy hadn’t paid his bills, and the government came to collect.

But Bundy twisted the affair into something else entirely: taking to a right-wing YouTube livestreamer’s channel (someone who also positioned himself as an independent journalist), Bundy told a story of a rural family being attacked by a tyrannical government. He called for “We the People” to take a stand, and many people answered Bundy’s call. Supporters arrived from around the country — New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Arizona — and eventually outnumbered the federal officers. These supporters included the Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and members from chapters around the West, who seized the Bundy affair as an opportunity to promote their anti-government worldview. The feds found themselves surrounded: militiamen pointed sniper rifles at the small group of officers from overpasses. Eventually, the BLM let Bundy’s cattle go, and fled.

It wasn’t just that standoff that attracted Oath Keepers and other far-right militia groups.

Far-right militias also showed up at Oregon’s Sugar Pine Mine and Montana’s White Hope Mine in 2015, and at the 41-day Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff helmed by Bundy’s sons in 2016. Van Tatenhove testified that these conflicts owed a lot to far-right propaganda; he himself was a propagandist who had called on “patriots” to fight tyranny at these standoffs.

And for the most part, the anti-government movement got away with all of it: the trial over the affair at Bundy Ranch was tossed out by a federal judge over Brady violations committed by government prosecutors. In Oregon, the trial over the 41-day standoff at Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge resulted in acquittals for Bundy’s sons and most of the main players. These resolutions emboldened the far-right — it had victories. In the past few years, Ammon Bundy — who was the main voice of the Malheur affair — founded a multi-state coalition out of Idaho called the People’s Rights Movement. It staged large-scale protests at hospitals and health board meetings over COVID restrictions across the west. Now he’s running for governor of Idaho.

On Tuesday,Van Tatenhove gave a sobering warning. From his time within the organization, he said he knew first hand that the Oath Keepers want “to get their way through lies, through deceit, through intimidation, and through the perpetration of violence, the swaying of people who may not know better through lies and rhetoric and propaganda.”

He said that at all those western conflicts, “the potential for bloodshed … was always there.” It had only been luck that had kept more blood from being spilled.

There was a time when van Tatenhove had been the one helping spread disinformation, and drum up fear. But on Tuesday, he struck a new tone: “I do fear for this next election cycle, because who knows what that might bring?” he said. If Trump was willing to align with groups that flirted with bloodshed so many times before, he said, “what else is he going to do if he gets elected again?”

“All bets are off at that point,” van Tatenhove said, “and that’s a scary notion.”

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to get a sense of how far to the right the Republican Party has moved, one need only compare 2023's MAGA Republicans to politicians who were considered arch-conservative during the 1960s and 1970s. President Richard Nixon, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and the National Review's William F. Buckley were highly influential conservatives back then, but the MAGA Republicans of today would dismiss them as RINOs: Republicans In Name Only.

Nixon would be condemned for supporting environmentalism and universal healthcare, and Goldwater's disdain for the Religious Right would be as much of a deal breaker as Buckley's decision to exclude the John Birch Society from the National Review. Veteran Washington Post columnist and ex-Republican George Will, once the United States' most famous conservative journalist next to Buckley, is now an outcast in the MAGA movement.

In his new book "The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy," journalist David Neiwert takes an in-depth look at the gains that the far right has made since Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the rise of his MAGA movement. Violent extremism, Neiwert warns, has become increasingly widespread in the United States.

The Guardian's Charles Kaiser, in an "Age of Insurrection" review published on July 5, explains, "Right-wing extremism has always been a feature of American life, from the diehard supporters of slavery in the 19th Century to the 20,000 fascists who filled Madison Square Garden in 1939 and the violent opponents of integration who beat and killed civil rights workers and leaders throughout the 1960s. Today, this ugly tradition of hatred is perpetuated by dozens of vile groups, from the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers to the Family Research Council and a slew of Christian nationalist organizations."

Kaiser continues, "But as the investigative reporter David Neiwert argues in his terrifying new book, there is one terrible difference: the relentless mainstreaming of such disgusting ideas. The white nationalist ideology which inspired Payton Gendron to travel 200 miles to massacre 10 people in a Black Buffalo neighborhood is becoming as American as cherry pie."

Neiwert's book, according to Kaiser, "offers some of the most detailed descriptions I have read of the movement's biggest moments, including Charlottesville and the January 6 Capitol attack." And he "documents how so many far-right conspiracies have made their way into the mainstream, especially the Great Replacement theory, which says progressives want to flood the country with immigrants, to undermine white citizens."

"How successful has this effort been?" Kaiser observes. "In 2020, the Republican Party refused to withdraw support from of any of the '64 GOP candidates.… with QAnon connections…. Neiwert's book is full of reminders of how social media promote right-wing lies. When a veteran of the Tea Party movement teamed up with two ex-writers for Steve Bannon's Breitbart News to start a 'Stop the Steal' Facebook group in November 2020, it got 300,000 followers in 24 hours…. The book ends with a horrifying description of how the movement has metastasized since the January 6 attack."

Kaiser continues, "By fall 2021, Proud Boys and 'patriots' were everywhere, harassing 'LGBTQ+-friendly teens at libraries, mask-promoting school board members and mall shops that required masks.' In Trump-loving rural areas, daily life 'had become filled with foreboding, intimidation, threats and ugliness, all emanating from authoritarian right-wingers directing their aggression at anyone who failed to follow their dictates.' America's only hope lies in the power of important books like this one to inspire decent citizens to redouble their efforts to defeat these vile scourges of freedom and democracy."

charles Kaiser's full review of David Neiwert's book is available at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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===

INDICTMENT

https://www.alternet.org/news-politics/trump-followers/

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'The final battle': Trump tells followers they 'have to' protest as some promise to come 'well-armed'

David BadashandThe New Civil Rights Movement June 12, 2023

More than 24 hours before he he is scheduled to be arraigned, Donald Trump’s supporters have started to show up at the federal courthouse in Miami, where the ex-president will be formally advised of the 37 felony criminal charges against him Tuesday at 3 PM.

Trump wants a big showing – “See you in Miami on Tuesday!!!” – he posted to his Truth Social account last week, in all-caps.

“This is the final battle,” Trump told supporters Saturday, Axios reports, and warned, “our people are angry.”

VICE on Monday reported Trump’s supporters “are planning mass protests at a Miami courthouse on Tuesday, following Trump’s indictment last week. Many are promising to come ‘well-armed.'”

It quoted some Trump supporters, including one who said, “MAGA will make Waco look like a tea party.”

“I used to laugh when my mom said that she was afraid if she registered Republican she may be arrested one day. I’m not laughing any more. Just buying more ammo,” VICE says another wrote.

READ MORE: House Republican’s Paranoid Rant Claims Trump Indictment Is a DOJ ‘Entrapment’ Plan to ‘Imprison’ Conservatives

Yet another over the weekend posted a photo of Attorney General Merrick Garland, and wrote: “America cannot allow this cowardly thug to destroy our democracy. This is what the Second Amendment was made for. Buy a gun or help organize your local militia today.”

On the highly-trafficked forum known as The Donald, many posts “directly referenced Trump’s own posts on his social media platform Truth Social. Under one screenshot of a Trump post about his aide Walt Nauta also being indicted, one user wrote: ‘Revolution Now.’ Another added: ‘I want blood. I want fucking blood.'”

Trump, VICE notes, “has done nothing to tamp down any potential threats, repeatedly calling for his own supporters to turn up en masse in Miami on Tuesday, just as he did ahead of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot,” and he “shared a meme about his indictment with a caption declaring, ‘THIS IS NOT A GAME, THIS IS WAR.'”

Pushing for a big showing, Trump spoke Sunday on the radio show of his longtime friend and advisor Roger Stone, whose sentence he commuted.

Our country has to protest,” Trump said, as Rolling Stone reported. “We’ve lost everything.”

READ MORE: ‘What You’re Saying Just Doesn’t Make Sense’: CNN’s Dana Bash Cuts Off Jim Jordan’s Trump-Defending Rant

Real Clear Politicsadds that Trump told Stone, “our country is being taken away from us. Our country is going communist, it’s going Marxist, it’s going really bad, and the people of our country aren’t that way. But the people running it are. And we need strength at this point and everyone’s afraid to do anything. They’re afraid to talk, and they have to go out and they have to protest peacefully. They have to go.”

Reuters posted this live video feed Monday afternoon. Not a big showing.

Last week author Jeff Sharlet, who writes about extremism and the religious right, said he was “skeptical” that they would show, after all the January 6 arrests.

Sharlet says Trump’s remarks, like “Saturday’s claim that World War III ‘WILL’ occur if he’s not back, & that he is the ‘only one’ who can stop the obliteration of the world, are claims to divinity.”

On Friday The Guardian reported there are 12 million Americans who “believe violence is justified to restore Trump to power.”

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Trump supporters got hustled, fleeced and lied to — but don't be fooled. They still love him as much as ever ›

Former congressman recalls Trump voters saying God chose him to fight liberals guided by the devil ›

It’s science: Trump voters are dumb ›

'There’s going to be a disaster': Trump confidants fear MAGA courthouse protests could hurt his defense - Alternet.org ›

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Trump supporters are neither underrecognized nor half the country ... ›

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Is there a tipping point for Trump supporters to stop backing him ... ›

===

https://www.alternet.org/jericho-march-extremists-illustrate-threat/

an 5 23

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as Donald Trump plots a return to the White House in 2025, his past courtship of militant far-right groups — some of whom led the mob that overran the U.S. Capitol — highlights an ongoing threat of political violence in the United States.

Trump has continued to signal to violent extremists since Joe Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. In February, the former president amplified a user on the Truth Social platform who pledged that his supporters will “physically fight for him” to win the Republican nomination while warning that “we Are Locked and LOADED.”

Jacob Glick, a former investigative counsel for the January 6th Committee, told Raw Story it’s largely beside the point whether Trump directly or indirectly coordinated with the militant groups that attacked the Capitol — including, most prominently, leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who have been convicted of seditious conspiracy.

“The scheme is in plain sight,” said Glick, who now serves as policy counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center. “The fact is that both Trump’s authoritarianism and the fascistic bloodlust of the militant groups who aligned with him were out in the open. They each saw each other without necessarily communicating directly. That doesn’t make it any less dangerous. That’s how this anti-democratic dynamic has operated throughout history.”

A patch on a tactical vest worn by a Trump supporter at the Jericho March rally reads: "Water boarding is how we baptize the terrorists." Jordan Green/Raw Story

Glick pointed to one particular strand of the Jan. 6 story as exemplifying Trump’s proximity to the militant groups.

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Robert M. Weaver, then employed in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, co-organized the Jericho March — a series of quasi-religious gatherings attended by a loose coalition of Trump supporters who staged weekly rallies in state capitols that culminated with a major demonstration in Washington, D.C., in December 2020.

The Jericho March helped set the stage for what transpired less than a month later on Jan. 6, 2021.

Texts obtained by the January 6th Committee show that Weaver communicated extensively with Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, a featured speaker at the rally, and also received confirmation of Trump’s approval through an undisclosed contact within the Trump camp.

:{:{}:

“What the messages show is a really egregious instance of a pro-Trump political operative serving in the administration at the time who was extremely active in Stop the Steal — welcoming the help of armed extremists and didn’t reject it,” Glick told Raw Story.

A representative for the Trump campaign could not be reached for comment.

Weaver’s collaboration with Rhodes — now among six Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy — represents a “mainstreaming and normalization of political violence” seen in multiple instances of crossover between political operatives and militants in the runup to Jan. 6, Glick said, adding, “The Jericho March was 1,000 percent in that category.”

‘Let his church roar’

Weaver presented an unlikely candidate to lead the Christian nationalist wing of the election denial movement. It’s a movement that materialized quickly, one bent on keeping Trump in power after 2020 election returns showed the former president losing the electoral vote to Democrat Joe Biden.

A member of the Quapaw Tribe in Oklahoma with a business background in healthcare and employee benefits, Trump had made Weaver part of his administration. Then-President Trump first tapped Weaver to lead the Indian Health Service in 2017. But Weaver withdrew following a report by the Wall Street Journal that indicated his resume inaccurately stated his qualifications.

Despite being denied the leadership post, which required Senate confirmation, Weaver in July 2020 joined U.S. Department of Health and Human Services staff as anadviser to the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

While other political operatives such as Ali Alexander, Amy Kremer, Felisa Blazek and Tomi Collins began organizing weekly rallies to sow doubt about the result of the 2020 election, Weaver launched a similar effort tomobilize Christians and a smaller subset of conservative Jews behind Trump. Weaver teamed up with Arina Grossu, a former Family Research Council spokesperson who was also working at Health and Human Services at the time, to lead what they called the Jericho March.

A self-described “holy roller, speaking-in-tongues” Pentecostal Christian, Weaver recalled during a Dec. 9, 2020, interview with Christian radio host Eric Metaxas that two days after the election he cried out to God in prayer, and then heard a voice telling him: “It’s not over.”

Weaver told Metaxas: “And the vision was of people all over the crowd, shofars blowing. I saw Catholics. I saw evangelical Christians. Charismatic Christians. I saw all kinds of nuns. I saw Jewish rabbis. I saw people praying. The church was united. And I knew that we were supposed to march on the 12th, that God was showing us that. And I knew we were also supposed to go to the contested states, and do the same thing. And it wasn’t just one time. God said to do it every day at noon, so we’ve been doing it since.”

]A man holding a pro-Second Amendment flag raises his hand during a praise song at the Jericho March in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 12, 2020. Jordan Green/Raw Story

As described by Weaver and others, the Jericho March was inspired by the Book of Joshua in the Old Testament, in which Joshua, the successor to Moses, leads an army of Israelites who conquer the ancient city of Jericho by marching around it seven times while blowing horns, with the walls crumbling at the seventh pass.

“God had told me that this was about unity,” Weaver said. “He told me to let his church roar.”

On the same day he described his vision to Metaxas, Rhodes added Weaver to the “Dec. 12 DC Security/Leadership” Signal chat, according to the communications which Weaver turned over to the January 6th Committee.

In a separate text obtained by the January 6th Committee, Weaver introduced Rhodes to Stephen Brown, whom the organizers hired to handle logistics for the event, writing: “Steve meet Stewart with Oathkeepers security. Please get with him to work on extra security.” Not only did the Oath Keepers provide additional security for the rally, but Rhodes spoke from the stage during the event.

Responding to news on the eve of the rally that the Supreme Court would refuse to hear a challenge filed by the Texas attorney general, Rhodes launched into a rant in the “Dec. 12 DC Security/Leadership” chat labeling the justices as “compromised or deep state traitors” and calling on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

:{:{}:

“We are at war,” Rhodes wrote. “At war with China and all its American proxies, who are the domestic traitors and insurrectionists. Trump needs to be a wartime president and wage war on our enemies. That is all he has left. If he doesn’t do that, then we will have to fight against an illegitimate Biden regime and all of the deep state with him. It will be a bloody and desperate fight.”

Rhodes' comments on theSignal chat previewed his remarks when he took the stage the next day.

“He had these grand visions of being a paramilitary leader,” Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers, told the January 6th Committee during a public hearing last July. “And the Insurrection Act would have given him a path forward with that. The fact that the president was communicating, whether directly or indirectly messaging that gave him the nod. All I can do is thank the gods that things did not go any worse that day.”

Trump ‘encouraged by’ Jericho marches

While Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder, was emboldened by Trump’s flirtation with the Insurrection Act in 2020, the Jericho March organizers were able to cite the president’s approval to galvanize supporters. Trump’s benediction was passed down to Weaver through a contact at the White House, his co-organizer told the January 6th Committee.

:{:{}:

In a Nov. 10, 2020 Jericho March newsletter obtained by the committee, Arina Grossu wrote: “President Trump is also aware of the Jericho Marches and is encouraged by them.”

One of the staff members asked Grossu how she knew that Trump was aware of the marches.

“So that is a question for Rob,” she responded. “I don’t have — I was not in those conversations or in any of those — I did not have that kind of connection.”

Grossu also told the committee thatin the days leading up to the Dec. 12 rally, “there was talk that maybe he would fly over,” and indeed Trump did signal his approval to the rally by flying over in Marine One that day.

President Trump flies over the Jericho March in Washington, D.C. on Dec. 12, 2020. Jordan Green/Raw Story

Again, Grossu said her information came from Weaver.

“Rob would probably know more about details of that,” she said. Grossu said she did not know the identity of Weaver’s point of contact at the White House.

The committee did not depose Weaver, although he did provide documents. Reached by phone by Raw Story last week, Weaver abruptly hung up.

The Dec. 12, 2020, Jericho March event in Washington, D.C. was a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the insurrection,in Glick’s view.

Two days later, the duly appointed electors would meet to cast electoral votes on behalf of their respective states. And in the early morning hours of Dec. 19, following a late-night meeting at the White House at which Trump’s allies urged him to call out the National Guard to seize voting machinery, Trump would summon his supporters to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 with his infamous “be there, will be wild” tweet.

:{:{}:

“It’s all of the January 6th story compressed into one disturbing arc,” Glick said. “December 12th was such an important day in terms of proving that model of political-militant coordination can work. They were able to replicate it on January 6th.

“December 12th was also important because Trump flew over the rally,” he continued. “That night D.C. descends into violence. He sends out his tweet a week later. We see Trump witnessing firsthand the violent potential of the Stop the Steal movement on the ground in D.C. Then, a few days later, when his paths to victory are all but closed off, he calls out his supporters again.”

“Be there, will be wild” was only the culmination of Trump’s courtship of militant groups, Glick said.

“The dynamics are crystal clear in the January 6th Committee report, in the DOJ prosecutions and in public reports,” Glick said. “Trump leaned into the potentially violent power of his base, while he was simultaneously orchestrating multiple illegal schemes to undermine the election. His extreme base followed those cues. They engaged in a call and response that stretched back for months and years before January 6th.”

Trump cultivated militant far-right groups throughout the 2020 campaign.

The former president kicked off his last re-election campaign with a speech in Orlando, Fla. in June 2019 in which he complained that “our patriotic movement has been under assault from the very first day” as members of the Proud Boys street gang prowled the streets outside the venue chanting, “Pinochet did nothing wrong” in homage to the late Chilean dictator known for extrajudicial execution of political opponents.

Days before a January 2020 Second Amendment rally in Richmond, Va. that attracted militia members, neo-Nazis and conspiracy theorists, Trump tweeted: “Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attackin the Great Commonwealth of Virginia.” As protests against COVID restrictions took shape across the country — including one in which men in tactical gear carried assault rifles into the Michigan state capitol — a couple months later, Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” and, “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege.”

During his first debate with Joe Biden in September 2020, Trump infamously instructed the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” And in the closing days of the campaign, he minimized a plot by Three Percenters to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer,telling supporters at a rally in Lansing that “people are entitled to say maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn’t.”

‘2024 is the final battle’

The same contours of desperation that drove Trump’s 2020 campaign are in place again for his 2024 bid.

While Trump is the early favorite to again win the Republican presidential nomination, significant trouble looms for him. The multiple criminal investigations against Trump may only increase the incentive for him to inflame his supporters with appeals to base fears. He will also face a 2024 Republican primary featuring several legitimate, conservative candidates intent on ending Trump’s political career for good.

Recalling that the Trump campaign sought to link civil unrest that erupted during his administration to Biden, Kristofer Goldsmith — a military veteran who leads the anti-sedition group Task Force Butler — predicted that Trump will encourage rioting during the 2024 election in order to inflict political damage on his Democratic opponent.

“Any opportunity he has to inspire a riot, especially in American cities — what are traditionally considered Democrat-controlled areas — he has every incentive to inspire riots, and there are tons of neo-Nazis around the country who are desperate for that kind of permission structure,” Goldsmith said.

While militant leaders such as Rhodes looked to Trump for approval to carry out acts of violence, Trump signaled to extremists at key moments during the 2020 campaign when he needed to energize his base by invoking fears about federal investigations, gun control, urban crime, and pandemic restrictions.

Goldsmith said Trump shows every sign of similarly exploiting anti-LGBTQ hate as the 2024 campaign unfolds.

RELATED ARTICLE: How Trump-backing Jan. 6 ‘marshals’ ditched their pink vests and staged an insurrection

“The way that the last two years have gone with the radicalization of the Republican Party and the adoption of legislation specifically targeting, taking away the rights of, and imposing restrictions on the LGBTQ community, I expect Trump to use that,” Goldsmith told Raw Story. “I expect Trump to use the LGBTQ community as a punching bag to further radicalize the Republican Party — to give permission to elements of the far right that have a desire to go out and use violence.”

:{:{}:

During a campaign rally in New Hampshire last month, Trump demonstrated how his rhetoric has evolved since he left the White House in January 2021. Specifically, he used anti-LGBTQ language and apocalyptic political imagery to excite his supporters.

“Does anybody really believe what’s going on in this country?” Trump asked. “I will sign a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states. And this is what we must do to save our country from destruction. 2024 is the final battle. If we don’t take it over, we’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Far from condemning those who committed violence on his behalf, Trump has offered symbolic support.

The former president glorified the rioters who attacked the Capitol by playing a recording of Jan. 6 defendants housed at the D.C. jail singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a recent rally in Waco, Texas. And last week, during a CNN town hall in New Hampshire, Trump said he was inclined to pardon many of those who face criminal charges in the attack. That signaling gives a green light to future violence, Goldsmith said.

“He wants to assure his fascist troops and out-and-out neo-Nazis that he will go to bat for them if they commit violence on his behalf,” Goldsmith said.

Again, as in 2020, Trump is refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of any outcome in the 2024 election that does not make him the victor, while claiming that America’s very nationhood is at stake.

“I’m just telling you,” he said during his campaign rally in New Hampshire last month, “if we allow them to cheat, because that’s the only way they’re going to win the election — if we allow them to cheat again, you’re not going to have a country.”

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'Sick and disgusting': Republican skewers Trump after he claims MAGA rioters were 'zero threat' to Congress ›

'Very ugly': MAGA supporter violently clashes with anti-Trump protesters outside courthouse ›

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Biden warns Trump's extreme MAGA Republicans are a 'danger' to ... ›

Joe Biden says Trump ideology threatens US democracy - BBC News ›

Trump's MAGA forces threaten to upend vote for RNC chair | AP News ›

===

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/radical-right-wing-broadcaster-pete-santilli-calls-for-obama-and-clinton-to-be-executed-in-response-to-trumps-indictment/

rww 4 23

when news reports first broke that former President Donald Trump was likely to be indicted over the hush money payments he made to a pornographic actress with whom he had an alleged extramarital affair, radical right-wing broadcaster Pete Santilli reacted by calling on the military and law enforcement to round up former President Barack Obama and other members of a supposed“criminal cabal,” line them up against a wall, and execute them.

[tet]

santilli is a right-wing conspiracy theorist who was deeply involved in the 2014 Bundy standoff and who once declaredthat he wanted to shoot Hillary Clinton “right in the vagina.” Give that Santilli has used his radio program to encourage violence against his perceived political opponents in the past, it was no surprise when he reacted on Saturday to the news that Trump had in fact been indicted by doubling down on his call for the military to rise up and execute Obama and others.

Santilli used the Saturday program of his “The Pete Santilli Show” to lay out a plan that he said will result in Trump being restored to the White House by the end of the month. Santilli’s plan revolves around having 150 million United States citizens send $1 to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign as a pledge of their intention to vote for him. Once Trump raises $150 million in individual $1 donations, Santilli asserted that this would conclusively demonstrate that there is no need for a presidential election in 2024 at which point the military would immediately restore Trump to office and execute his political enemies.

Santilli said this would be a “constitutional restoration” that he likened to the execution of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1989.

“Every single one of you that’s wearing a badge and a gun, be forewarned: We the people are rising. Serve us,” Santilli declared. “It’s not sooner or later; it’s now.”

“I’m escalating things because they’re escalating taking away my freedom,” he continued. “I wanted to wait till 2024, but no, they want to meddle in my election in 2023. Not sooner or later, now! I’m liighting the candle. Will you join me?”

“You in the military, you need to work for us and protect us,” Santilli said. “Ceaușescu was taken to the concrete wall and executed as a symbol of what I’m talking about. I want to set up a scenario where themilitary and the police have no choice but to execute Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton—through proper process. I’m not in charge of that.… I think I share a lot in common with* 150 million other people that don’t want communism, and if we come together and we say that the military and police are to set up a law that requires when you get overthrown by we the people and a constitutional restoration happens, that you should be swiftly brought to a concrete wall andhold a little hearing and fire away."[vid]*

it is worth remembering that Santilli has hosted numerous Republican candidates for office on his show including Ohio Senate candidate Josh Mandel, Arizona congressional candidate Jerone Davison, and Kari Lake. Lake, the broadcaster-turned-MAGA-cultist who lost her bid for governor of Arizona last year, appeared on Santilli’s show in February, where she praised Santilli and agreed with his assertion that thenation has been overthrown by “a CIA coup.”

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veterans group is appealing to the U.S. Pentagon to implement a ban that would prohibit Fox News from being accessible on military bases.

According to HuffPost, the progressive political action committee (PAC) VoteVets on Monday posted a video to highlight concerns about the right-wing news network and its anchors who have knowingly circulated baseless, unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud following the 2020 presidential election.

“The most valuable weapon to the enemy is disinformation,” the narrator began. “That’s why the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions training our troops to resist it."

"Yet, at the same time, the U.S. military uses taxpayer-funded facilities to broadcast disinformation on military bases, knowingly letting false propaganda infiltrate the ranks," the narrator added.

At one point during the clip, the narrator also noted that Fox News' Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have “open access to spread their conspiracy theories to U.S. troops."

The push for a Fox News ban on military bases comes as Fox News' Tucker Carlson faces criticism for his latest attempt to spread misleading information about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

During his broadcast on Monday night, Carlson featured subtle clips of Capitol surveillance footage in an effort to support his argument suggesting what transpired on Jan. 6 was not an insurrection.

===

DHS infiltration

https://www.alternet.org/oath-keepers-2658957735/

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rhodes, wolverine and baked alaska jailed:

3 sent 7 plus yrs 12 22

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an 2 23

Although David Hogg lives in a state that finds itself dominated by Republicans in 2023, the 22-year-old Floridian has become one of the United States' best-known gun control activists. Hogg is a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre that occurred in Parkland, Florida on Valentine's Day 2018, and he has often used social media to speak out about gun control and the mass shootings that are so common in the United States.

Hogg addressed gun control once again in a Twitter thread posted on February 26, noting what the U.S. Constitution has to say about militias. And it didn't take right-wing Republicans long to become enraged by his comments.

Hogg posted,* "You have no right to a gun. You are not a militia. When you're talking about your second amendment rights, you're talking about a state’s right to have what is today the National Guard. The modern interpretation of 2A is a ridiculous fraud pushed for decades by the gun lobby."*

By "2A," Hogg is referring to the Second Amendment, which, he argues, Republicans have been misinterpreting.

"We need to stop using the NRA's talking points and the false interpretation of 2A they have been pushing for decades," Hogg argued. "Their version of 2A is younger than I am…. The future the gun lobby is pushing for is one with absolutely no gun regulation whatsoever where anyone can get a gun. That is the path we are going down right now. They want bad guys to have guns so they can use the rise in gun violence to sell more guns to scared people."

Republican attorney **Jenna Ellis,* famous for promoting former President Donald Trump's false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, was quick to slam Hogg and tweeted, "So the Constitution is a living, breathing, fluid document, except for THIS ONE ISSUE ONLY ALWAYS because it suits your (false) narrative."*

Twitter user David Benjamin wrote that Hogg is a "paid shill for the [George] Soros crew."

Far-right talk radio host Lori Mills responded by posting, "Considering my state Government puts criminal rights above victims rights, my 2nd amendment right is and always will be mine. Don't break into my home, don't threaten my family and my gun will leave you alone."

Hogg's thread was mostly attacked by Republicans, but some Libertarians weighed in as well. @LPNational tweeted, "Our rights aren't subject to what you or any tyrant think we need."

Read David Hogg’s Twitter thread at this link.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-outlets-are-endorsing-border-militias-tool-curb-immigration

mma 2 23

hannity

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-outlets-are-endorsing-border-militias-tool-curb-immigration

===

turner diary?

12 22

The “rule of three” is one of those informal guidelines that help us journalists decide whether an event is newsworthy. If something occurs three times, it’s probably a trend. Trends are newsworthy.

Trends can be fads, but three rifle attacks on critical infrastructure in less than 10 years – two this week alone – isn’t a fad. That goes double since the attacks appear to correlate with another political trend, which is wider and greater social acceptance of trans people.

Even as GOP-dominated state legislatures move to restrict trans rights, more than 500 municipal governments are moving the other way, opening cities to greater equality and freedom. Two hundred major urban centers and 50 state capitals have enacted or are set to enact laws, policies and services inclusive of the LGBT-plus people.

That’s democratic politics. It never stops. But neither does the political violence that erupts in reaction to democratic politics. The more Americans perceive trans people as people, rather than subhuman perversions, the more political violence we can expect.

Hence the nature of the ongoing right-wing insurgency.

It’s not a fad

Two electrical substations were damaged Saturday in Moore County, North Carolina, knocking out power in more than 37,000 homes.

In what police said was an “intentional” and “malicious” attack, a person or persons “open fired” on the transformers, leaving behind more than two dozen shell casings from a “high-powered rifle.”

Investigators initially said there was no evidence linking the attack to “a local drag show that had been targeted with threats of violence and calls to cancel the show in recent weeks,” reported *USA Today.*

There’s still no hard evidence linking the events, but investigators appear now to be broadening their perspective, setting the attack, according to CNN, “in context with the growing tensions and armed confrontations around similar LBGTQ+ events across the country.”

They are looking at “writings by extremists on online forums encouraging attacks on critical infrastructure” as well as “a series of recent disruptions of LGBTQ+ events by domestic extremists.”

CNN reported that paramilitaries have for the last two years used online forums to discuss attacking critical infrastructure, including the power grid, and to encourage individuals to act. These paramilitaries “posted documents and even instructions outlining vulnerabilities and suggesting the use of high-powered rifles.”

A government report from 2013 determined that attacks on 17 transformers in Silicon Valley were the result of sniper fire. More than 100 bullets were expended over 20 minutes, leaving scores of thousands without power and costing the public utility $15 million.

The Seattle Times reported today the investigation of at least five rifle attacks on electrical substations in Washington state. The damage was similar to the damage in North Carolina. Authorities there said it was a “deliberate physical attack,” though the newspaper reported it was unclear whether they caused service disruptions.

That, my friend, is three related events. It’s not a fad.

It’s a trend.

“Normal reality”

It’s also an example of the friction between democratic politics and an established political order (white power) that refuses to yield to democratic politics. That friction can be healthy, but more often than not in this country a consequence of it has been political violence.

It bears repeating at this point that the greatest locus of friction was probably when Americans elected their first Black president. Given that white power was “normal reality” to most white Americans, Barack Obama’s ascendance was a perversion of the natural order.

I don’t find it surprising that a person or persons fired on 17 electrical substations after Obama was reelected in 2012. If democratic politics couldn’t stop “normal reality” from being turned upside down, political violence was justified in returning us to “normal reality.”

But the attack on critical infrastructure was, in 2013, an outlier.

Most of the political violence we have seen since then has been inflicted on people. As I have said before, every shooting massacre is a reaction to white people’s perceived loss of racial status. There have been so many mass shootings, in fact, that if they happened anywhere else in the world, they would be called an insurgency.

If the attackers were Black or brown, yes! Then that’s an insurgency! But we don’t call it that. Most people in this country are white and most white people can’t see a political insurgency in front of them, even when it erupts in schools, even when it mows down children

Property over people

Maybe that will change given this new trend.

This is America, after all. Here, the rights of property have historically superseded the rights of people, as is evidenced by Republican legislators bent on outlawing gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, banning certain trans-related books in public schools and forbidding the discussion of LGBT-plus topics in the classroom.

All of that is jim-dandy, as is the massacre of innocents, but taking out the power supply? That crosses the line. Crosses! The! Line!

There’s no hope for gun control as long as the Republicans don’t want it – and they won’t want it when the status quo is mere mass death.

The Republicans, however, are the party of property, of business, of old white people. Power outages cost time. Time costs money. And money is the entire point of living a once-only existence on Earth.

I’m not the only one who sees a crack in the GOP’s united front. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said Tuesday:

“When we look at all the money that’s being lost by businesses here at Christmastime, when we look at threats to people in nursing homes having lost power, hospitals having to run off generators and not being able to do certain kinds of operations at this point – all of those are deep concerns here, and we can’t let this happen” (italics mine).

I’m not holding my breath, but if this new trend gains some momentum, we might see a few Republicans actually stand up to the paramilitaries among them and put an end to this insurgency.

===

https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy7wvj/lions-of-liberty-oath-keepers-midterm-ballot-boxes

Armed Fringe Groups Are Gearing Up to ‘Protect’ Midterm Ballot Dropboxes

The groups, inspired by conspiracy theories and the Big Lie about the 2020 election, could deter some voters, experts warn.

By Tess Owen

October 6, 2022Screenshot of a YCPT meeting in August led by Jim Arroyo

A “patriot group” in Arizona called Lions of Liberty—which is closely tied to the Oath Keepers—is organizing their supporters to go out and conduct round-the-clock surveillance of ballot dropboxes during the midterm elections. It’s the latest sign that groups with clear ties to extremists, galvanized by conspiracy theories, are seeking to take matters into their own hands this election season.

Ballot dropboxes have become the central focus of election fraud conspiracy theorists, thanks to the debunked documentary 2,000 Mules, by right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza.

That film claims that a shadowy network of hired “mules” in contested states were hired by nonprofits as part of a giant ballot trafficking operation to stuff dropboxes with fake absentee ballots, all with the goal of stealing the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The film was released in May, six months before the midterms, reinvigorated the “Stop the Steal” movement and inspired vigilante efforts around the country—in some cases spearheaded by innocuous-sounding groups that obscure the known ideologues and extremists behind them.

Lions of Liberty is the “political arm” of a newly-formed nonprofit called Yavapai County Preparedness Team (YCPT), led by the former vice president of Arizona’s Oath Keeper chapter, Jim Arroyo. At a meeting in August that was posted to YouTube, Arroyo explained that they had turned the Oath Keeper chapter into a corporate nonprofit under the name of YCPT, which in turn gave them the ability to get a bank account.

In an email to VICE News, Arroyo said that the Arizona chapter officially broke ties with the national leadership of the notorious militia group after it was implicated in the violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6. (Five members are currently standing trial for seditious conspiracy charges, including the group’s leader Stewart Rhodes. Prosecutors allege that Rhodes and his cohort plotted an “armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy.”) However, they had been operating more or less independently from the national organization for about four years, said Arroyo; Rhodes broke ties with the Arizona contingent after they declined to assist in armed vigilante activities at the border, out of respect for Border Patrol.

News

The Oath Keepers’ Jan. 6 Texts Sure Do Look Damning

GREG WALTERS

10.05.22

Arroyo, who insists YCPT is not a militia, led that August meeting in an Oath Keepers hat and T-shirt. He explained to the crowd that he would need volunteers to monitor ballot drop boxes, and that he was particularly concerned about the period between midnight and 6 a.m. “If you saw the movie 2,000 Mules” he said, that timeframe was “when the bulk of the problems happen, that’s when we will be on scene with a camera and flashlight.” Arroyo told VICE News that some volunteers might be armed. “This is Arizona; almost everyone is armed, all the time,” he said. “That's not a big deal here.”

Arroyo said he will likely pick up a couple of shifts to monitor dropboxes.

In the August meeting, Arroyo assured members of the crowd that they’d be welcome to continue wearing their Oath Keepers merch, even while conducting ballot dropbox surveillance. “Your shirts and hats are what tell the world you’re not ashamed to be an Oath Keeper, or afraid of the government just because of that crap that happened on January the 6th, which was completely staged. It was a setup,” Arroyo said, before acknowledging, “Yeah, they did something stupid beyond all belief.”

During the meeting, Arroyo also stoked fears of an imminent civil war. “This is not the same as (Black Lives Matter) and George Floyd or antifa. This is a direct confrontation with the federal government,” he said. “This is now the federal government of the United States of America in direct conflict with its own citizenry.”

The Lions of Liberty describe themselves as a “resolute nucleus of concerned, passionate conservative patriots who are determined to correct the course for our country which has been hijacked and undermined by global elites, communists, leftists, deep state bureaucrats, and fake news.” Their goal? “To bring God back to our leadership and win this spiritual battle for the soul of our nation.”

The Lions of Liberty aren’t the only ones calling for and coordinating vigilante activity around the midterm elections.

Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a Seattle-based nonprofit, has been closely tracking this trend.

“The threat of groups of far-right vigilantes, some potentially armed, fueled by Big Lie misinformation, lurking near ballot dropboxes, could potentially deter some from casting their votes,” warned Burghart. “The possibility of conflict in such a scenario is real.”

Burghart added that “dropbox vigilantism” perpetuates unsubstantiated claims of rampant voter fraud that “keep the Big Lie alive and further erodes confidence in elections and democracy.”

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Former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea runs On Fire Ministries, an apocalyptic Christian nationalist church in Spokane, and has been leading “training sessions” for prospective volunteers to monitor dropboxes.

“We are doing something for the community. How many of you watched 2,000 Mules? Raise your hands,” said Shea during a service in September. “I think it would be good if we had some folks who were certified, trained, dropbox observers, in Spokane County.” The training took place on Sept. 30.

Shea is a particularly controversial character; a 2019 investigation by the Washington Legislature concluded that he’d “participated in an act of domestic terrorism” for his involvement in three armed conflicts against the federal government between 2014 and 2016, including the Bundys’ armed standoffs in Nevada and Oregon and an armed conflict with the U.S. Veterans Affairs Department in Priest River, Idaho.

And a group called True the Vote, which was involved in the 2,000 Mules documentary, is also teaming up with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) to monitor dropboxes nationwide. CSPOA is headed by Richard Mack, who has long-standing ties to the militia movement, including to the Oath Keepers.

“The plan from national Big Lie groups, like True the Vote, is to use those “voter fraud” claims to get sympathetic sheriffs to intervene in elections,” said Burghart.

Dropbox surveillance efforts started getting underway earlier this summer, during the primaries, described then by the New York Times as a “nascent” movement. In some places, like in Arizona, groups were planning dropbox “tailgate parties.” One person with a handle referencing QAnon posted a photo of their party to Trump’s platform Truth Social, and credited Seth Keshel, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and conspiracy theorist, for the idea.

[Screenshot from the app TruthSocial showing a "dropbox tailgate party"

Brian Cates, a columnist for the fringe-right publication The Epoch Times, has long been a proponent of the “Big Lie” and has been riling up his more than 120,000 followers on Telegram around the idea of taking matters into their own hands this election season.

“The time for calling for people to just show up to vote is long past. We’re moving into another completely different era,” he wrote. “Citizens will be given the tools to monitor all the dropboxes and engage in massive real-time information operations in order to bring about election integrity.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” he added. “An army of patriots is going to force compliance with the election laws in their states before these next elections are held.”

One of the primary examples of “evidence” of nefarious activity offered by 2,000 Mules was surveillance videos that appeared to show individuals posting multiple ballots into a dropbox, including in Georgia. Submitting multiple ballots on behalf of other people is known as “ballot harvesting,” and it is legal in several states, including Georgia.

However, the fact that submitting multiple ballots has been presented as a telltale sign of election fraud lays the groundwork for possible confrontations between dropbox “monitors” and people who are acting entirely within the law. (Right-wing political commentator Monica Matthews, from Clear Talk Media, even tried to remind her followers of this fact. “Before you all plan Dropbox tailgate parties to monitor the integrity of your elections- MAKE SURE you check your new state laws. Some states allow harvesting,” she wrote on Twitter in August. “Confronting people at dropboxes could land you in jail.”)

Earlier this summer, ahead of Washington’s August 2 primary, some signs began showing up near dropboxes near Seattle saying “This Ballot Dropbox is Under Surveillance” and warned of criminal penalties for ballot harvesting, the Seattle Times reported. However, it’s also legal in Washington to drop off multiple ballots at once on behalf of family members.

The signs also had a QR code that allowed passersby to report “suspicious activity” to the King County Republican Party(whose chair disavowed the vigilante activity). Amber Krabach, a GOP activist, QAnon conspiracy theorist and member of the Kings County Republicans’ “Election integrity Committee”, was behind the signs. The county elections office asked the sheriff’s department to investigate whether Krabach had broken a state law barring civilians from influencing someone’s vote within 25 feet of a ballot dropbox. They didn’t press charges, but they did refer the matter to the FBI.

All these vigilante efforts are taking place against a backdrop of increasingly incendiary rhetoric from GOP figures and far-right forums alike, about what will happen if they get even so much of a whiff of “voter fraud” this election season.

“If our election systems continue to be rigged and continue to be stolen, then it’s going to lead to one place—and it’s bloodshed,” said ex-Congressman Madison Cawthorn at a GOP event in North Carolina this summer.

:{:{}:

On Patriots.win, a pro-Trump forum, some have discussed the need to bring guns to monitor dropboxes. Someone shared an article from the right-wing Gateway Pundit claiming they’d found evidence of massive voter fraud in Detroit during the 2020 election. “We need people waiting for that shit this time and take that shit at gun point,” someone responded. “Use walkie-talkies and don't park anywhere near there or use fake plates and a vehicle wrap.”

Others, like Arroyo from YCPT, have stoked fears of an imminent civil war instigated by the Democrats. “Keep your powder dry until after the midterms,” one person wrote. “No matter what, they are going to try like hell to provoke a civil war before then.”

“Hold the line till Nov… then do whatever the fuck you gotta do,” another user on patriots.win wrote.

===

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/oregon-gop-governor-candidate-christine-drazan-extremists_n_633c5ebbe4b08e0e60723253

no lnx vid

Oregon's GOP Candidate For Governor Is Tying Herself To Violent Extremists

Christine Drazan is campaigning with a far-right militia leader and taking money from a guy who bankrolled one of the main organizers of the Jan. 6 rally.

Jennifer Bendery

Oct 6, 2022 As the polls tighten in Oregon’s gubernatorial race, Republican candidate Christine Drazan appears to be tightening her ties to right-wing extremists, too.

Drazan, who served in the state legislature from 2019 to 2022 and was also the House minority leader, has taken a total of $70,000 this year from conservative megadonor David Gore and his wife, per a review of Drazan’s campaign finance records.

That includes their $20,000 campaign donation from a couple of weeks ago.

:{:{}:

Who is Gore? The Oregon libertarian has been a major funder of the far-right Tea Party Patriots, which helped organize the Jan. 6, 2021, rally in support of former President Donald Trump that led to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Gore has given a total of $449,000 to the Tea Party Patriots’ three sub-organizations in recent years, according to The Intercept. Between 2018 and 2021, he gave $50,000 to Tea Party Patriot Action, $275,000 to Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund and $124,000 to the Tea Party Patriot Foundation.

Among those donations, Gore gave $100,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund in January 2020. That contribution more than doubled all of his previous federal donations since 2007, and it was a major infusion of cash for the group, which started that year with just $11,200 cash in reserves.

And curiously, about a week after the insurrection at the Capitol, Gore gave $150,000 to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, according to FEC filings.

Oregon Republican gubernatorial nominee Christine Drazan appears to be tying herself to violent extremists in the final weeks of her campaign.

Beyond her financial ties to Gore, Drazan recently featured B.J. Soper, a far-right, anti-government militia leader, as a speaker at one of her campaign events.

Soper issued “a rousing call to arms” to Drazan’s supporters at her Sept. 1 campaign event in Terrebonne, Oregon, as one local website put it. He tied his support for GOP candidates like Drazan to the mission of his organization, People’s Rights, which he said is to defend people against federal government intrusion at all costs.

“We do that physically if everything else fails,” Soper said during his remarks. “That’s our motto at this point.”

He also compared central Oregon to a military fort, and warned Drazan’s supporters of “an assault coming our way — a socialist, communist assault” aimed at stripping people of their way of life. “It is time that we stand up and we take hold of this redoubt here,” he said.

Here’s video footage of Soper speaking at Drazan’s campaign event.

Soper has a long history of far-right militia organizing. The Washington Post described him in 2016 as “an emerging leader in a growing national movement rooted in distrust of the federal government, one that increasingly finds itself in armed conflicts with authorities.” Law enforcement officials see people like Soper as “dangerous, delusional and sometimes violent,” the article notes.

Soper founded the Pacific Patriot Network in 2015, “a far-right paramilitary network under the direction of Oath Keepers,” per the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, an organization that unmasks movements that threaten democracy. Soper’s network included members of Oath Keepers, the leaders of which are currently on trial for seditious conspiracy, and Three Percenters, a militia movement that backs the idea of a small number of dedicated “patriots” protecting Americans from government tyranny.

Soper also founded the Central Oregon Constitutional Guard, a group that practices “basic infantry tactics” and trains with concealed handguns and combat-style rifles, per The Washington Post. In April 2015, he put on paramilitary camouflage fatigues, carried his AR-15 rifle and spent a couple of weeks “standing guard” at the Sugar Pine Mine in Oregon, where miners were having a dispute with the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Soper’s stump speech for Drazan comes at a time when she has refused, twice, to say if she supports Jo Rae Perkins, a QAnon supporter running for U.S. Senate in Oregon. QAnon conspiracy theorists believe that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic sexual abusers of children operating a global child sex trafficking ring conspired against Trump when he was president. (Yeah.)

Perkins also attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. She called the attempted coup “the American Revolution.”

Asked in August if she supports Perkins, Drazan simply wished her “the best.”

[Oregon Democratic gubernatorial nominee Tina Kotek, on the right, appears skeptical of whatever GOP nominee Christine Drazan is saying in this image from their July 2022 debate.

Drazan spokesperson John Burke did not respond to a request for comment on why Drazan appears to be tying herself to right-wing extremists in the final weeks of her campaign.

Instead, Burke attacked Drazan’s Democratic opponent, Tina Kotek, and said that she and random HuffPost editors are the only ones who believe that Drazan is a right-wing extremist. (There is no evidence that any HuffPost editors believe that Drazan is a right-wing extremist or even know who she is.)

Burke requested that his entire statement be shared, so here it is:

“The only people who believe Christine Drazan is a quote ‘right-wing extremist’ are the editors at Huffpost and the Kotek campaign. Oregonians know that this line of questioning is complete nonsense and a desperate attempt to use pitched opposition research to save a governorship that Democrats have held for nearly 40 years. Unlike Tina Kotek, who is focused on spreading laughable conspiracy theories like this one, Christine Drazan is focused on the issues that matter most to the people of our state.”

Kotek spokesperson Katie Wertheimer also did not say that Kotek believes Drazan is a right-wing extremist. Instead, she said what Drazan is doing is appealing to extremists to try to win their votes ahead of the election.

“The threats to our democracy are very real and they are here in Oregon,” said Wertheimer. “Instead of standing up for what’s right, Christine Drazan is courting the support of election deniers, insurrectionists and MAGA loyalists.”

Drazan currently holds a slight lead in the polls in her three-way race against Kotek, who served in the state legislature from 2007 to 2022 and was House speaker from 2013 to 2022, and independent Betsy Johnson, who served in the state legislature for 20 years as a Democrat.

Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1982. But The Cook Political Report recently shifted this race to a toss-up, citing Johnson’s influence as a well-funded independent and a potential spoiler.

EXTREMISM

OREGON

2022 ELECTIONS

Jennifer Bendery - Senior Politics Reporter, HuffPost

an 9 22

Andy Campbell, a senior editor at The Huffington Post who is the author of the book We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism has said that The Proud Boys and other far-right vigilante groups will likely commit violence during the next two upcoming elections.

In a recent interview, Campell noted the Proud Boys were founded by right-wing commentator Gavin McInnes to fight in ways that other straight-laced Republicans wouldn’t.

Campbell also noted former President Donald Trump’s ominous command for the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” during his final September 2020 debate against now-President Joe Biden.

Several Proud Boys members are currently on trial for sedition for their involvement in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“I think we might learn some bombshells about their connection to Trump’s inner circle,” Campbell said. “And the fact that several top-level Proud Boys have already agreed to testify against their own means we may learn a lot.”

Trump also recently said that the nation would face “problems … the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen” if he is indicted for taking classified documents after leaving office. His comment was widely seen as a call for his followers to commit violence if he’s ever criminally charged.

“I think Trump knows that everybody is going to react violently to this,” Campbell said. “The pipeline between the rhetoric and the violence in the street is so short now. How many hours was it between the time he was complaining about the FBI going through Mar-a-Lago and somebody showing up with a gun to an FBI field office? He knows he has people waiting to mobilize.”

Campbell added, “There will absolutely be Proud Boys violence in 2024 and I think in the 2022 election, too,” noting that Arizona Republicans have called for vigilante justice around ballot boxes.

“I think they are absolutely going to show up in force for Trump’s election regardless of what happens. I think we have to realize that the violence has trickled out to everyday Americans. It’s not just extremist groups anymore. Trump pointing to the back and calling the press the enemy, Trump glorifying Jan. 6 rioters,… that has come full circle.”

He concluded, “I think the spirit of January 6 is still here. All of the groups involved are still here, and everyday Americans have joined them… It’s going to be scary.”

===

an 9 22 raw tom b

According to two different experts on the rising tide of domestic terrorists since the election of Donald Trump, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better as long as the former president remainsfree to incite violencein much the way he did on Jan 6, 2020.

Speaking with the New York Times' Blake Hounshell, authors Luke Mogelson and Andy Campbell, both of whom have new books on right-wing extremists, waved the red flag about what they see coming as Trump continues to egg his followers on -- which is setting the stage for more violence.

As Hounshell summed up their warning: "The worst is yet to come."

Getting right to the point, Campbell, who has a new book out on the Proud Boys, told the Times, "I really do believe that, going forward, it’s not just going to be MAGA rallies. It’s not just going to be political violence at Proud Boys rallies or leftist rallies or B.L.M. events. It’s going to be political violence at any civic event that happens to fall in the cross hairs of Donald Trump and company.”

According to Hounshell, "In the United States, it is not illegal to be a part of a domestic extremist group. To go after specific threats, the government has limited tools, meaning that federal officials often must find links to groups overseas in order to crack down on homegrown extremists or prosecute them under other provisions of law," adding, "Complicating matters, Republican politicians like Trump — who instructed the Proud Boys to 'stand back and stand by' during a presidential debate in 2020 — often provide rhetorical cover."

Mogelson claims the violence he saw on Jan 6, when supporters of the former president stormed the Capitol, reminded him of covering armed conflicts around the world for the past decade.

"He witnessed a mob killing of someone in Iraq, which gave him an understanding of what he called the 'intoxicating' feeling that can whip a crowd of seemingly ordinary people into a frenzy," the Times reports before noting, "he began reporting on anti-lockdown groups that mobilized against the pandemic measures put in place by governors like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, he immediately saw that the story was much larger."

He told the Times, "I soon realized that these groups and this movement was rapidly mutating.”

Campbell chimed in to add the Republican Party appears unable -- or unwilling -- to rein the far-right extremists in.

“The Republican Party seems to not know what to do,” he claimed before warning, “It seems like their inability to rebut the Proud Boys and other extremists is pushing this machine forward so much faster and really making it hard for law enforcement to keep up.”

===

https://www.joemygod.com/2022/09/oath-keepers-lawyer-arrested-on-conspiracy-charges/

Washington Post reports:

An attorney for the Oath Keepers who was with the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was arrested Thursday in Texas on charges related to the attack on Congress, federal prosecutors announced.

Kellye SoRelle, 43, was arrested in Junction, Tex., and is scheduled to make an initial appearance Thursday afternoon before a federal judge in Austin, according to the U.S. attorney’s office for Washington.

SoRelle was charged in an indictment returned Wednesday on four counts — conspiracy, obstruction of a federal proceeding, tampering with documents and misdemeanor trespassing in a restricted building or grounds — prosecutors said.

Read the full article. SoRelle last appeared on JMG in January 2022 when she declared herself to be the new leader of the Oath Keepers after the arrest of Stewart Rhodes. SoRelle is a failed candidate for the Texas House, finishing third in the 2020 GOP primary.

===

an 8 22

Two men have received a guilty verdict for their involvement in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

On Tuesday, August 23, a jury found Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr., guilty of "conspiring to obtain a weapon of mass destruction, namely a bomb to blow up a bridge and stymie police if the kidnapping could be pulled off at Whitmer’s vacation home."

According to HuffPost, the guilty verdict was a victory for the U.S. government. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nils Kessler shared his argument about the case with the jury. “You can’t just strap on an AR-15 and body armor and go snatch the governor,” Kessler told jurors.

“But that wasn’t the defendants’ ultimate goal,” Kessler said. “They wanted to set off a second American civil war, a second American Revolution, something that they call the boogaloo. And they wanted to do it for a long time before they settled on Gov. Whitmer.”

The jury's decision in reference to Fox and Croft came as the jury also delivered a conviction for two other men who also conspired to kidnap the Democratic governor.

Shortly after reports surfaced about the kidnapping plot, Fox, Croft and the other suspects are said to have been accompanied by government operatives as they "traveled to northern Michigan to see Whitmer’s vacation home at night and a bridge that could be destroyed."

However, the suspects' defense attorneys attempted to turn the tables on the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI). “This isn’t Russia. This isn’t how our country works,” Croft attorney Joshua Blanchard told jurors.“You don’t get to suspect that someone might commit a crime because you don’t like things that they say, that you don’t like their ideologies.”

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/former-virginia-police-officer-sentenced/

Although it remains to be seen whether or not former President Donald Trump will face any type of federal charges in connection with the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has prosecuted many of the Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building that day. The DOJ certainly hasn’t had a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to prosecuting Capitol rioters; the charges have ranged from severe to relatively mild. And one of the harsher sentences came on Thursday, August 11, whenformer Rocky Mount, Virginia police officer Thomas Robertson was sentenced to 87 months in federal prison for his role in the assault on the Capitol.

The Washington Post’s Rachel Weiner, in an article published on August 12, notes that a jury found Robertson guilty of “six crimes, including using a large wooden stick to block police outside the Capitol and destroying his phone when he got home.” And another former Rocky Mount police officer, Jacob Fracker, pled guilty to a conspiracy charge.

“At his sentencing, Robertson depicted his actions on January 6 as an aberration in the life of a respected member of a law-abiding and respectable community,” Weiner reports. “The government’s filings suggest he became radicalized under the influence of those around him, including the chief of a small neighboring police department and a retired FBI agent. Prosecutors took the unusual step of publishing two detailed FBI investigations into the claims Robertson made in his appeal for mercy.”

Part of the evidence against Robertson, according to Weiner, was a “text conversation from March 2021” in which Robertson told former Boones Mill, Virginia Police Chief Dennis M. Deacon, “I can kill every agent that they send for at least two weeks.” Robertson, Weiner reports, also told Deacon he was “prepared to die in battle.” And Deacon responded that Robertson needed to “be smart, pick battles, plan logistics, very carefully recruit and hope it’s not going to come down to it.”

The judge in the case, Christopher Cooper, said he found it especially disturbing that Robertson was still threatening violence in March 2021 even though police officers had been seriously injured during the Capitol attack two months earlier.

Fracker’s sentencing is scheduled for Tuesday, August 16.

Weiner reports, “In his letter to the court, Fracker said he had been labeled a ‘rat,’ a ‘snitch’ and a ‘back stabber’ by community members for testifying against Robertson. ‘It really is just heartbreaking,’ he said. Robertson was a mentor to him and a ‘once valued father figure,’ Fracker wrote.”

According to Weiner, “Robertson was released after his arrest in January 2021 but was jailed months later after going on what Cooper described as a ‘remarkable shopping spree for high-powered assault weapons’ while becoming ‘further radicalized.’ Robertson could be charged with illegal firearm possession, the judge noted.”

===

ref

Ex-Va. police officer gets more than 7 years for role in Jan. 6 riot

Sentence for former Rocky Mount officer Thomas Robertson matches highest punishment for a Capitol riot defendant so far

By Rachel Weiner

Updated August 11, 2022 at 7:14 p.m. EDT|Published August 11, 2022

Thomas Robertson, right, and Jacob Fracker, then officers in the Rocky Mount Police Department, inside the Capitol. (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia)

A Virginia police officer who prosecutors say lied about his actions before, during and after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, including his military service and his marriage, was sentenced Thursday to 87 months in prison.

Thomas Robertson and Jacob Fracker were members of the police department in the small western Virginia town of Rocky Mount when they joined the mob that stormed the Capitol. Both have since been fired.

...

===

Ex-cop sentenced to more than 7 years in prison for role in storming U.S. Capitol

By Sarah N. Lynch

no lnx

Reuters.com

WASHINGTON, Aug 11(Reuters) - A former Virginia police sergeant who joined Donald Trump's supporters in storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison on Thursday, a Justice Department spokesperson said.

A jury in April convicted Thomas Robertson, a former police sergeant for the town of Rocky Mount, Virginia, of six criminal charges, including obstructing an official proceeding and obstruction of justice.

Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to sentence Robertson to eight years - the longest amount yet for any Capitol riot defendant - on the grounds that Robertson abused his position of trust as a law enforcement officer.

Both Robertson and Guy Reffitt, an associate of the far-right Three Percenters militiawho also received a sentence of seven years and three months earlier this month, are now tied for the longest sentence to date for any Capitol riot defendant. read more

Thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, in an attempt to overturn his election defeat, which Trump falsely claims was the result of fraud.

Robertson's defense attorney had asked for a sentence of no more than 15 months.

He has been in detention since last year, after the judge found he violated court orders and continued to purchase what prosecutors described as an "arsenal" of guns online. FBI agents also found a loaded M4 rifle and a partially assembled pipe bomb at his home during a search.

Robertson's trial featured testimony from Jacob Fracker, who had reported to Robertson on the police force, who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, with Robertson where they took selfies together.

Prosecutors said Robertson later destroyed the cell phones they had used that day.

Fracker, who cooperated with the Justice Department, pleaded guilty to a felony charge of conspiracy in March, and is due to be sentenced on Aug. 16. In exchange for his cooperation, prosecutors are asking the judge to sentence him to six months’ probation with a condition of community confinement or home detention.

Prosecutors said Robertson "anticipated violence" on Jan. 6, and he packed gas masks for himself and Fracker, as well as military food rations, water and a large wooden stick.

Robertson "used his law enforcement training to block Metropolitan Police Officers attempting to hold back the mob," federal prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi wrote in the government's sentencing memo.

In a letter to the judge, Robertson said he takes "full responsibility" for his actions on Jan. 6, and said he was "exposed to lots of pro-Trump, anti-Biden media" while he was passing the time in 2020 with a cancer-stricken friend.

:{:{}:

He drank to cope with stress, he said, and fell deep into the "rabbit holes of election conspiracy theories."

However, he denied ever having "any intention to disrupt Congress" and claimed that Fracker actually destroyed the cell phones, and later lied to the FBI and the court about it.

===

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/19/mask-mandate-midterm-elections/

wapo no lnx

Military

Building on anti-mask activism, far-right groups pivot from mandates to midterms

Energized by their fight against government coronavirus restrictions, far-right activists are rallying supporters to engage in politics and show up to vote.

By Hannah Allam

March 19, 2022

A person holds a sign advocating for the recall of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee during a protest against coronavirus vaccine mandates and other issues, on March 5, 2022, at the Capitol in Olympia, Wash. (Ted S. Warren/AP)

OLYMPIA, Wash. — Melanie Gabriel became the teen idol of Washington state’s anti-masking movement last fall when she showed up to school and, claiming a medical exemption, marched barefaced to class.

As Gabriel’s protest continued and she was barred from campus, she drew support from self-styled militia groups and other far-right extremists who saw theanti-mandate movementas a chance to rally conservatives toward more-militant stances. Members of the Proud Boys offered to escort Gabriel to class, prompting a security lockdown of three schools.

Now, with the lifting of most mask and vaccine requirements, Gabriel and her far-right backers are mobilizing the networks they’ve built over the past two years toward a new goal: November’s midterm elections.

Gabriel spoke this month at a gathering that was emblematic of the increasingly blurry lines on the right — it was organized by the far-rightWashington Three Percent and sponsored by a conservative student group, Turning Point USA. With the state Capitol dome in the background, speaker after speaker told supporters not to get complacent with mandates gone.

“Just because they’re lifted doesn’t mean they’re going to stay that way, and that’s why we’re all here,” said Gabriel, a striking figure in a bright crimson bob, cat-eye makeup, and a T-shirt with the anti-Biden slogan “Let’s Go Brandon.” Her bullhorn was decorated with stickers that read “Say No To Critical Hate Theory” and “Allergic to socialism.”

A man in the audience yelled that Gabriel should run for governor.

“I will!” Gabriel replied. “I will run for governor. And I’ll run for president. And I’ll run for everything!” She waited a beat before adding: “Once I’m of legal age.”

That’s the kind of youthful energy far-right movements are working to harness across the country as they teach the pandemic’s newly minted activists how to get out the vote.

A school board race in Washington state shows how far-right groups are thinking locally

Extremism trackers say the past two years of fighting pandemic restrictions have given far-right groups a new generation of recruits and a blueprint for taking the lead in conservative organizing. The midterm season, they warn, brings a heightened risk of political violence, as armed groups build on those gains to push deeper into the mainstream.

“In Olympia today, we saw paramilitary groups and a range of other anti-democracy activists aggressively working to recruit young people and making pledges of unity against what they see as their common enemies,” Eric K. Ward, executive director of Western States Center, a regional extremism watchdog, said in a statement after the event where Gabriel spoke.

Anti-mandate activists galvanized a broad cross section of political conservatives by melding disparate agendas into one fuzzy call to “fight tyranny.” By now, most of their big demonstrations look like a right-wing soup, featuring Trump and MAGA logos, self-styled militia insignia, Confederate flags, references to the debunked QAnon movement, and Christian nationalist prayers.

Researchers say connections forged early in the pandemic allowed once-fringe groups to take on more visible roles in other kinds of organizing, such as the “Stop the Steal” effort to overturn the 2020 election results, or the campaign to whitewash U.S. history by attacking the teaching of racism and its impact.

New laws on teaching about race have teachers scared, confused and self-censoring

The nonstop focus on grievances, researchers say, has created a tinderbox of disenchanted Americans who view themselves as foot soldiers in a struggle against mandates and other perceived attacks on personal liberties. Many right-wing politicians and media personalities are stoking the outrage in pursuit of a “red wave” in November.

“The grievances are there as a reservoir for mobilization, but they still have to be triggered.They have to be activated towards specific action,” said Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor leading an in-depth study of the rioters who violently breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. “And it rarely happens spontaneously.”

The event where Gabriel spoke was called GRIT, for Government Resistance Impedes Tyranny. Several hundred people participated, along with a convoy of big rigs, part of the U.S. version of the Canadian trucker demonstrations that united a variety of conspiracy-minded protesters.

Unlike at previous far-right gatherings in Olympia, no leftist counter protesters showed up, and the event was peaceful.Journalists were encouraged to refer to it as a “freedom festival,” not a rally. On the damp statehouse grounds, leather-clad bikers chatted about gas prices with khakis-wearing politicians. Gun rights activists told college students that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an example of why they consider the Second Amendment untouchable. A voter registration table sat next to a self-styled militia’s information booth, a reminder that, in this milieu, there are two paths to making change.

Organizer Matt Marshall, founder of the Washington Three Percent and a member of his local school board,called the rally “a networking event” to connect pandemic-era upstarts with more established groups and reliable donors. A dozen or so Republican candidates for congressional and local races worked the crowd, urging constituents to serve on precinct committees as a first step into politics.

Some had clear-cut ties to extremism, with documented support for and interactions with parts of the anti-government movement. Take, for example, a former police chief named Loren Culp, a failed gubernatorial candidate now running to unseat U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of 10 members of the House GOP who voted to impeach President Trump after the Capitol riot. Culp has close ties to a far-right sheriff’s organization that believes local authorities have the power to decide whether state and federal laws are constitutional; in 2018, he pledged he wouldn’t enforce a statewide gun-control law.

Many other candidates, however, fall into a gray area. They espouse views or cultivate relationships that only a few years ago would have put them on the far-right fringe, but which are now broadly shared, or at least tolerated, by Republican leaders. Extremism researchers say it’s startling how quickly it became socially acceptable for relatively mainstream groups like Turning Point USA to provide funding and speakers to an event led by the anti-government Washington Three Percent.

“This kind of meshing of people is typical of the landscape we’re seeing right now — the blurring of the line with an extremist host and mainstream sponsor,” said Carla Hill, associate director of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which is tracking more than 100 political candidates who have documented ties to extremist groups or conspiratorial movements.

Black, brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role

Rachel Anderson, 29, head of Lewis County Young Republicans in the western part of the state, told the crowd how in the space of a year she went from being politically unaware to joining other nascent activists in “taking over” the county party. She said she has helped four Young Republicans get elected and contributed to a threefold increase in local GOP fundraising — work she calls vital to electoral success next fall.

“We can’t be complacent anymore,” Anderson told the crowd, to cheers. “We have to go out there. We have to canvass our voting rolls, make sure that every single vote counts and we elect proper, conservative patriots into office.”

As they stump for votes, some Republican hopefuls are encountering a problem of their party’s own making. After two solid years of being fed lies about a stolen election, a bloc of Republicans no longer see the point in voting and refuse to participate in what they regard as a corrupt system.

“We still get a lot of people who say, ‘Nah, I just don’t believe it matters,’” said Joe Kent, a former Green Beret trying to oust Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R), whose vote to impeach President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot made her a pariah within much of the GOP. “And there’s where we’ve got to come back, to tell people we’re taking real stands.”

When asked whether he had qualms about appearing at an event alongside groups like the Washington Three Percent, Kent looked puzzled and said he didn’t know the organizers.

“All I know is that there’s a bunch of people with flags,” he said.

[How the Jan. 6 Capitol riot happened: A Washington Post investigation

Within days of the event, Kent was under scrutiny again for another far-right link: a phone call with white nationalist Nick Fuentes in which the two discussed working together on social media strategy for Kent’s campaign. In an interview, Kent told Oregon Public Broadcasting that he had no association with Fuentes beyond the conversation last spring.

Federal authorities are careful to say they don’t police protected views, including the racist or anti-government stances often articulated at anti-mandate events, and don’t want to overhype a fringe threat. The problem is, violent messaging is now laced throughout the planning for big gatherings, making it difficult to separate “keyboard warriors” from real-life provocateurs.

John Cohen, the top Homeland Security counterterrorism official, said in public remarks last month that the current threat environment is “more volatile and even more dynamic than it was even back in December.” A recent report from the global nonprofit conflict-monitoring group known as ACLED said current trends in guns and violence at U.S. protests “raises the specter of further escalation in armed demonstration activity going into the upcoming midterm elections.”

At the Olympia gathering, guns were concealed, in accordance with a recently changed law that bans open-carry near protests and the state Capitol grounds. The event was legally permitted, and organizers had asked participants not to display hateful imagery. Three Percenter logos, a few Confederate flags and a Proud Boys shirt were visible, but most of the participants wore generic MAGA, anti-Biden, or red, white and blue attire. Families brought their dogs. Children blew soap bubbles on the lawn.

Speakers repeatedly invoked civil rights language to refer to their perceived persecution, a common theme throughout the anti-mandate movement. Online and at rallies, protesters regularly compare themselves to enslaved Africans, dispossessed Native Americans, Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the Founding Fathers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Jesus.

“It’s about trying to give themselves some historical cache, and it’s remarkable how they do this,” said terrorism analyst Juliette Kayyem, a former Homeland Security official now at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “It’s not like, ‘We’re just upset about vaccines.’ It’s ‘This is the arc of history, and we’re on it with all of these other quote-unquote freedom fighters.’”

The idea of historical significance resonated with Don and Carol Moody, a married couple in their 60s who were eating smoked-pork sandwiches in side-by-side lawn chairs at the Olympia event. Speaking over loud honking as another trucker convoy arrived, Don said that this was a moment, “to make a stand with what you believe in your heart.”

The couple said they’re confused and frightened by the bloodshed in Ukraine; the right-wing news outlets they watch tell them it’s a precursor to World War III. They worry about whether their unvaccinated grandkids will be cleared to play sports. They said they’ve heard that the government might introduce a “vaccine passport.”

They still plan to vote in the midterms — it’s worth a try, they said — but they firmly believe lies about the “stolen” 2020 election and suspect the Biden administration is already cooking up new ways to disenfranchise the right.

“Everything they do seems to be poking us to be more angry,” Don said.

Carol said that’s why she’s suspicious of the lifting of mandates. In her conspiratorial world, it’s not the time to celebrate.

“They’re thinking up something next,” Carol said. “And that’s what scares me.”

===

Jamie Raskin routs 2a BS const 7x says taking up arms ~ gov't is insurrection/treason

2a minuteman BS:*

http://www.armedwithreason.com/militia-myths-why-armed-populations-dont-prevent-tyranny-but-often-lead-to-it/

...

A well-armed population has the power to stop tyrannical governments. Our country was founded by such a battle, where a well-armed population succeeded in stopping tyranny and founded a government of the people.
Governments will inevitably abuse their power, and we must be ready to overthrow the government as a last resort to protect liberty.
Without guns, we are powerless to prevent government overreach.

Reality

It is worth noting at the outset that this fear of tyranny suddenly arising belies a fundamental misreading of how authoritarian regimes actually come to power. Namely, it assumes a false dichotomy between “the people” on one side and “the government” on the other. Government is not some foreign entity imposed on the people, which would only arise from a foreign country conquering the United States (not going to happen). Rather democratic government is derived from the people. A tyrannical government could only arise in the US with a majority of the population supporting it due to some economic or military crisis: in reaction, say, to a heavily armed minority attempting to enforce its will on the rest of the country. Government does not just “suddenly” become tyrannical. The debate should just end here. However, given that this a blog dedicated to thoroughly debunking myths, I will delve deeper.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The founding fathers were wrong.

Blasphemy, I know. Yet the idea that Militias are in anyway necessary or good for a free State has no historical justification, especially in the modern era. Militias (especially unregulated ones) are overwhelmingly detrimental to the existence of a free society, and at best are impotent in its defense. A historical analysis reveals that Militias are typically the gateway to tyranny, not the safeguard against it. A heavily armed population has little to no bearing on preventing tyranny.

Pro-gun arguments typically follow at least one of four paths:

Our own Revolutionary War shows militias are effective at protecting liberty.
Militias promote liberty.
Armed populations deter tyrants while unarmed populations are defenseless.
Disarming a population is the gateway to genocide.

All of these arguments are false. Let’s first look at our own Revolutionary War.

The idea that militias are the bulwark against tyranny typically begins in a faulty reading of American History. The Revolutionary War was not won by Militias, but rather the Continental Army with considerable help from the French. While it is probably an exaggeration to suggest that the Militia was completely worthless during the War, that is far closer to reality than the myth promulgated by some pro-gun advocates. And the Militias that did significantly contribute to the cause were organized by the states and represented a well-disciplined, cohesive fighting force that mirrored the Continental Army, not the minutemen of lore.

Moving to the modern era, Militias have a terrible history of creating tyranny, even when fighting against foreign powers. Militias that have been successful in warding off foreign aggression overwhelmingly opposed democratic rule. A few examples are Vietnam, Afghanistan, Cuba, Somalia, Iraq, and southern Lebanon; in none of these countries did the militias promote a free State. Add to this list countries where militias have ripped apart society in tribal states or civil war (such as Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Colombia, and the Palestinian Territories) and we can form an even clearer picture of militias. For a more immediate example, one only has to look at the bewildering array of militias (more than “1,000” according to Robin Wright) currently fighting in Syria to see how little they promote democratic values and how ineffective they tend to be on the battlefield. While there may be an example of victorious militias replacing tyranny with freedom since the industrial age hiding somewhere in an obscure footnote of history, the rule that militias are detrimental to preserving freedom holds....

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the founder of a neo-Nazi terror network comprised of former military service members who sought to create a base in Idaho appears to be talking to federal prosecutors about a potential plea deal.

Posting on Iron March — a now-defunct global online forum for accelerationist neo-Nazis — in 2017, Liam Montgomery Collins wrote, “I live in the Northeast, so I have a tightknit crew of ex-mil and security I train with. We do hikes, gym sessions, live firing exercises, and we eventually plan to buy a lot of land. Can’t really specify the name or details because it’s an inner-circle thing, but it will serve its purpose when the time comes.

“Think of it as a modern-day SS,” Collins added, referencing the elite corps of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler.

It was through Iron March that Collins met Paul James Kryscuk, an actor who specialized in a subgenre of pornography that is degrading to women of color and helped him build theterror network that they called “BSN.”

Collins entered the Marine Corps in August 2017 and recruited fellow Marine Jordan Duncan and Justin Wade Hermanson while stationed at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina.

In 2020, Kyrscuk relocated from New York City to Boise, Idaho. Members of the network stalked Black Lives Matter members in Boise and held a live-fire training that attracted Joseph Maurino, an enlisted member of the New Jersey Army National Guard. Another member, Joseph Zacharek, joined the Lafayette, Ind. Police Department as a probationary recruit in the summer of 2020, and remained employed there for four months until he was doxed by an antifascist researcher and was fired.

In an Instagram chat on Oct. 1, 2020, Kryscuk and Duncan fantasized about shooting protesters in Boise, according to a federal indictment.

Duncan: “How the BSNs finna be pulling up to chipotle after hitting legs.”

Kryscuk: “Death squad…. Assassins creed hoodies and suppressed 22 pistols.”

Duncan: “People freaking tf out.”

Kryscuck: “About what?”

Duncan: “The end of democracy.”

Kryscuk: “One can hope.”

When the FBI raided Kryscuk’s home in Boise in October 2020, they found a list of assassination targets that included Black Lives Matter founders Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors and Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, and a list of intersections that were consistent with power stations. The investigation revealed a plot to attack the power grid to create a blackout before undertaking an assassination campaign. A fourth Marine who joined BSN after serving in the same unit as Collins and Hermanson began cooperating with the authorities in October 2020, along with Zacharek, the former police officer, according to testimony by Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Chris Little.

Kryscuk and Collins wereinitially charged with conspiracy to illegally manufacture and transport firearmsin October 2020. A superseding indictment the following month added Duncan and Hermanson as defendants. A second superseding indictment filed in June 2021 added Maurino as the fifth defendant. And in August 2021, a third superseding indictment expanded the charges to include conspiracy to destroy an energy facility.

Kryscuk and Hermanson accepted plea deals earlier this year that include agreements to cooperate with the government’s investigation and testify against their codefendants.In return for their cooperation, the two men could receive reductions from expected prison sentences of up to 15 years.

Collins was previously scheduled to be arraigned in the Eastern District of North Carolina on Sept. 6, but last week Chief District Judge Richard E. Myers agreed to push back the date to Nov. 1. The new date gives Collins and the government time to work out a deal.

In a motion filed on July 27, Collins' lawyer, Elliot S. Abrams, wrote, “Undersigned counsel has been in discussions with the government about a potential resolution of this matter. These discussions have been fruitful and undersigned counsel requests this additional time to continue discussions with the government regarding non-trial disposition.”

Duncan and Maurino, the two remaining defendants, are both currently scheduled to be arraigned in Wilmington on Sept. 20.

Kryscuk’s sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 20 in Wilmington, while Hermanson’s sentencing is set for the Sept. 22 term.

===

an 7 22

it not quite clear what, exactly, former President Donald Trump was doing and privately saying inside the White House during the five long, violent hours when more than 2,000 rioters invaded the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.

It’s a key timeline that the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is set to explore on July 21, 2022 during its latest – and possibly last – public hearing.

At the heart of the issue is Trump’s precise engagement, if any, with the rioters and several fringe nationalist militia groups, including the Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers, that stormed the Capitol.

Amy Cooter, a senior lecturer in sociology at Vanderbilt University, embedded with militia groups, mostly in Michigan, from 2008 through 2012. Knowing who these groups are – and how they have changed over time – makes it easier to understand the Jan. 6 attacks, Cooter said.

“Fifteen years ago, people thought of these groups as being niche, crazy people. That’s not really what I saw in my fieldwork – I saw people who were just more willing to be open about their political perspectives than maybe more mainstream Republicans were at the time. It seemed to me, both then and now, that their concerns resonate with a broad swath of the population,” Cooter said in a recent interview.

We asked Cooter to explain what drives these groups and their complicated relationship with Trump and the government.

What is your understanding of how Trump is seen by these nationalist groups?

Traditionally, militia groups have been very opposed to the federal government, regardless of whether we’re talking about Democrats or Republicans. However, with Trump, they really found sort of a mouthpiece. Not all of them truly liked him, but they really want somebody who speaks out against immigration and has a nationalistic and isolationist perspective. Trump gave them a sense of legitimacy. But there didn’t seem to be too many formal connections, as far as we know.

How does leadership and hierarchy work within these groups?

Many of these groups present themselves as top-down organizations with centralized leadership and then different state-level structures. But the degree to which that is reality varies enormously, especially with the Three Percenters but also with the Oath Keepers.

There are groups that kind of fit the stereotypical top-down model that make it easy to activate them for action. There are other groups who maybe were completely oblivious to this Jan. 6 plan.

What do you mean by activate? That sounds similar to language Trump used during a presidential debate in September 2020, to “stand back and stand by.”

Militias always see themselves as prepared for action. Usually, this means they’re prepared to defend themselves and their communities in the event of a natural disaster, or some kind of invasion. But as we saw leading up to Jan. 6, some of these groups were clearly planning more than just a defensive stance.

What was Trump getting from these groups, and what were they getting from Trump?

They get from Trump this idea that someone finally represents their interests, someone finally sees the state of the nation as they do, even though not all of them completely agree with him. They see it as an opportunity to push things in the direction that they would prefer.

I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say that Trump sees an opportunity for a private army from them. In 2018, he pardoned the Bundy ranchers, who were arrested for arson on federal land. Not a lot of people paid attention to this, but that was a signal to these groups that he had their back and would expect them to have his back in the future.

I think that Jan. 6 is really kind of proof of that, that he has activated people who in some cases do have military or police experience.

How have you seen these groups evolve over time, since you began researching them?

Before Trump, there had been very clear-cut tensions between different groups. That boundary has broken down substantially, and most groups have been pushed more toward an extreme than used to be true – in no small part because of how Trump and others in his administration legitimized the core fears that different groups had about being invaded.

Since Jan. 6, the groups as a whole have declined in size. Many of these people were really surprised at how Jan. 6 played out and were quite embarrassed – or they were appalled that it didn’t go far enough.

Now, many people have taken a step back even from these groups altogether. But the folks that have stuck around continue to be quite radical, and probably even more radical than they were before. Especially thinking about what is going to happen with the midterm elections, we are going to see a lot of invigoration.

Amy Cooter, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

===

claremont inst WAR GAMES

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/john-eastman-2020/

The Trump advisor who wrote the infamous pseudo-legal justification for overturning the 2020 election also helped to create a blueprint for what Donald Trump could do to hang onto power by force.

John Eastman joined a couple dozen right-wing operatives in simulating the aftermath of a closely contested election. The report was published in mid-October 2020 and co-sponsored by the Claremont Institute, the think tank where Eastman works.

The authors of the report are clear their simulation had a very serious purpose: to prepare real public officials for real violence in the event of a disputed election. The authors say they fully expected the necessary preparations to crush dissent would be perceived as the run-up to a military coup. But in their view, that couldn't be helped. It was important to come up with legal justifications for overwhelming political violence before the election, they said.

The report is a blueprint for how Donald Trump could fuse federal power, local police and criminal gangs like the Proud Boys to hang onto power. It seems to foreshadow Eastman's plan for a procedural coup on January 6, except projected onto Biden supporters.

The Claremont simulation started from the assumption that left wing violence was a "near-certainty" and that Trump's Defense Department, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security must be prepared to crush Biden supporters in the event of a contested election.

The simulation starts from the following half-baked premise: All the networks call the contest for Biden on Election Night, because he appears to have won Texas, bringing his electoral vote total to 270.

Somehow, all the networks fail to notice that Russia had taken the entire electoral apparatus of Texas offline before all the votes came in. (This wouldn't get past Steve Kornacki, let me tell you.) Texas goes back in the "too close to call" column. Biden is still two electoral votes ahead, but the nation explodes with rioting and arson by "antifa" and Black Lives Matter. Fourteen police officers are shot on election night.

Thus begins Choose Your Own Adventure: Death Squads. There's an elaborate procedural and legal backstory about how an uncertain Election Night metastasizes into a constitutional crisis to be worked out probably by the Supreme Court, but I won't bore you with it because it's obviously a figleaf. This is a manual for state violence.

With the nation in flames, the players have Trump's Department of Defense deploy military personnel carriers to multiple states, which local mayors rudely call "tanks." These pesky mayors aren't cooperating with the Trump administration's desire to clamp down on dissent.

So, their police departments go completely rogue and join forces with the Trump administration. The NYPD seems to have overthrown Bill De Blasio. The Chicago Police Union refuses to protect Mayor Lori Lightfoot. Federal law enforcement with no identifying insignias encircle the White House to defend it with heat rays.The Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers form posses to "assist."

Tellingly, Eastman and his fellow players assume that pro-Biden forces will try to gather at the Capitol on January 6. So they thwart their political adversaries by tracking their phones, setting up police checkpoints and using Trump's* Homeland Security fusion centers to identify and detain their leaders. The players protect the Capitol with an army of federal agents, snipers and of course more heat rays. Trump's FBI hunts down more antifa leaders in the DC suburbs.*

War games often reveal more about the players than they do about the future, and this exercise is no exception. The report shows that John Eastman and his confederates expected a disputed election would set off a wave of civil unrest that would culminate in the US Capitol on January 6, supported by insurrections at key state houses that same day. The report projected this strategy onto Biden supporters, but that's exactly what Trump confederates did on January 6.

A showdown on January 6 might feel inevitable in retrospect, given the horrific events of that day. But it wasn't an obvious choice. January 6 was the date of the certification of the presidential election, which has historically been a pro-forma affair. Results have already been decided.

The states have certified their election results, the Electoral College already has voted and all that's left to be done is the little ceremony during which the Congress counts the electoral votes. It doesn't make sense to have your last stand to win a contested election after the results are already set in stone, unless you think you can change them.

John Eastman did in fact come up with a crackpot legal excuse for how Mike Pence could throw the election to Trump. His argument was to the law as creationism is to biology, but it was good enough for Trump. We know Trump pressured Pence to act on Eastman's advice. Eastman shared a dais with Trump as well as Rudy Giuliani at the rally immediately before the siege. The crowd was chanting "Hang Mike Pence," because Pence had refused to comply with Eastman's scheme.

Eastman later claimed he wasn't serious about the memo, but the results of this simulation suggests he and fellow right-wingers had sized up the certification of the presidential election as their moment to stage a procedural coup with physical reinforcements waiting.

===

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/patriot-front-2657558190/

an 6 22 no lnx

PB t shirt gangs of NY DDL

Report details the chilling ways far-right extremists are recruiting military veterans

Members of the Proud Boys in Raleigh, North Carolina in November 2018, Wikimedia Commons

Alex Henderson June 24, 2022

From a mass shooting in a Buffalo, New York supermarket on May 14 to the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre in October 2018 to a plot to kidnap and possibly murder Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — not to mention the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building — the United States clearly has a problem with White supremacist and White nationalist terrorism. And one of the places where racist extremists, according to law enforcement officials and national security experts, are trying to recruit new members is the U.S. military.

Reporter Sonner Kehrt, in article published by The War Horse on June 23 and republished by Navy Times that day, takes an in-depth look at White power groups that are trying to convert veterans to their cause. And her piece points to Chris Buckley, an Afghan War veteran, as an example of a veteran who racists targeted for recruitment.

After serving in Afghanistan, Kehrt reports, Buckley was incredibly angry — angry because of the death of a close friend and fellow veteran in Afghanistan, angry because of the severe back pain he was living with because of a training accident. And Buckley was attracted to the anger expressed by a Facebook group, not realizing, at first, that the people he was chatting with online wereKu Klux Klan members. Buckley joined the KKK in 2014, but he has since distanced from that terrorist group.

“With the help of a former extremist, Buckley left the KKK,” Kehrt explains. “Today, he works with Parents for Peace, an organization dedicated to supporting families and friends trying to help loved ones leave extremist groups. He points to his experience in the months and years after he left the Army National Guard as an example of why a disproportionate number of veterans are vulnerable to extremist recruitment efforts.”

Buckley, interviewed by The War Horse, warned, “I would rival KKK recruiters to that of any military recruiter I ever talked to…. I was looking for something to be a part of something. I needed a mission.”

Buckley, according to Kehrt, is hardly the only military veteran who has been vulnerable to recruitment by White supremacists and White nationalists.

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“The data that does exist suggests the problem is growing,” Kehrt reports. “Statistics from the Center for Strategic & International Studies show that 6.4% of all domestic terror plots and attacks in the United States in 2020 were committed by active-duty or reserve service members — a tiny percentage, but up from 1.5% in 2019. A 2019 poll byMilitary Times found that more than 1 in 3 troops surveyed reported seeing direct evidence of White nationalism within the military.”

Kehrt continues, “That’s also up, from 1 in 4 in 2017…. While the total number of veterans who join extremist groups is still very small, they play an outsize role in these groups, particularly in militia-style organizations. (Researcher) Amy Cooter and other experts have found that, very roughly, 30 to 40% of militia members have military experience.”

Because there are so many different far-right extremist groups in the U.S. in 2022 — from Patriot Front to the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to the Boogaloo Bois to Patriot Prayer — the KKK, which has a long history of terrorism, doesn’t receive as much attention as it did in the past. But Buckley warns that the KKK is still a threat, although they have changed some of their tactics.

Buckley told The War Horse, “They’re doing away with the ‘let’s protest in public with pointy hats and robes.’ The KKK is shifting towards a more militia-style environment.”

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===

rhoades big ish w. proud boys in 1/6 hearing, says mult times bloody civil war inevitable, footage in deep throat garage and arms caches in hotels

===

an 6 22

as the House Select Committee prepares to begin public hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, far-right groups including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are slated to be a topic of discussion.

At the same time, both of those groups’ leaders are facing criminal charges of seditious conspiracy. They are alleged to have worked together “to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Those charges can be difficult to prove in court. But regardless of the outcome of any prosecution that alleges these groups worked to overthrow the government, our research has shown that the more committed members of these and other extreme right-wing groups believe that the U.S. government, as currently constituted, is illegitimate and should be overthrown and replaced with one that is based on white supremacy.

Violent racism

Proud Boys have identified themselves as “Western chauvinists” who focus on opposing political correctness and white guilt. But these claims have generally been seen as cover for deeper racist and antisemitic sentiments. For some Proud Boys members, this group was a steppingstone to more extreme groups, such as The Base.

Like any street gang, the Proud Boys as a national group is made up of semi-autonomous chapters of varying numbers and abilities. They are in different degrees of contact and coordination with other chapters [3x after stand by?] . It’s not clear the level of interest – or capability – that most members have in actually following through with overthrowing the government.

Oath Keepers is an anti-government group that calls itself a “militia” focused on defending the Constitution and fighting tyranny. Former Oath Keepers spokesman Jason Van Tatenhove stated that the group is actually “selling the revolution,” meaning that the group is pushing conspiracy theories and propaganda to facilitate confrontations with federal law enforcement.

While members of the Proud Boys have concentrated their confrontations on anti-fascists or other protesters, Oath Keepers have participated in several armed standoffs against the government.

In 2014, the Oath Keepers joined an armed standoff between far-right patriot groups in Nevada on behalf of Cliven Bundy. In 2015, Oath Keepers showed up heavily armed in Ferguson, Missouri, during protests over the killing of Michael Brown. And in 2016, Oath Keepers were present at the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.

Members of the Proud Boys, along with others, march toward the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.]

A challenging road

Historically, prosecutions of seditious conspiracy charges succeeded against militant Islamist or Marxist groups.

But prosecuting far-right groups has tended to be much more difficult. In 1988, Louis Beam, a figurehead in the white power movement, and 13 white supremacists from groups such as the Aryan Brotherhood and the Ku Klux Klan were acquitted of conspiring to kill a federal judge and an FBI agent and plotting to overthrow the federal government to establish an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2012, charges of seditious conspiracy against members of Hutaree, a militant far-right Christian nationalist group, were dismissed after the judge concluded the government had not proved there was an actual conspiracy.

But it is clear from the charges stemming from the Jan. 6 insurrection – involving hundreds of alleged participants – that police and prosecutors are taking seriously the threat of violent action by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other far-right groups against individuals, organizations and local and national governments.

Matthew Valasik, Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Alabama and Shannon Reid, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina – Charlotte

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4 22 an

no lnx twt

Newly released text messages show Oath Keepers discussing Jan. 6 security for Trump allies: report

An Oath Keepers billboard in Pine River, Minnesota in July 2015, Wikimedia Commons] 10 in logo? bill of r?]

Alex Henderson April 21, 2022

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes is among the 11 members of that far-right militia group that is facing federal seditious conspiracy charges because of their January 6, 2021-related activities. According to Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, a “newly released trove of text messages” shows that “top members” of the Oath Keepers who have been indicted “chatted for days about providing security for some of the highest-profile figures associated with Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election.”

Rhodes and Florida-based Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs, Cheney reports, “discussed plans to provide security for figures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Ali Alexander and Michael Flynn on January 5 and January 6, (2021), describing potential partnerships with other groups and security details.”

“While several members of the group now facing charges notably flanked Stone on January 5 — including Joshua James, who has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy — the extent of the Oath Keepers’ work for other figures has been murky,” Cheney explains. “For example, Alexander indicated, in a recent statement, that the Oath Keepers never ended up providing security for him because his own January 6 event was canceled amid the chaos on Capitol grounds. But the group’s conversations reveal an easy relationship among several of the groups and entities now under scrutiny by federal prosecutors and the January 6 select committee.”

Cheney adds, “In one exchange, Meggs — identified by his handle ‘Gator 1’ — indicates he attempted to call Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, after hearing reports he had been arrested on January 4, 2021.”

The text messages, according to Cheney, were “posted” by Ed Vallejo, one of the Oath Keepers facing seditious conspiracy charges.

“Vallejo was stationed at a Comfort Inn in Arlington, VA, where prosecutors say he oversaw the group’s cache of weapons and was prepared to drive it to the Capitol if the fighting grew more intense,” Cheney reports. “Vallejo is seeking release from pretrial detention. Evidence that Meggs had a direct line to Tarrio — whose phone was confiscated by law enforcement and has now been accessed by federal prosecutors — adds new heft to the evidence of coordination among the groups. Prosecutors recently highlighted their interest in a January 5 meeting between Rhodes and Tarrio in a parking garage in Washington, D.C., shortly after Tarrio was released following his January 4 arrest.”

Federal prosecutors, Cheney notes, had “previously disclosed” text messages from Meggs that described “efforts to forge an ‘alliance’ between Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other groups like the Three Percenters.”

“In the newly released cache of messages,” Cheney reports, “Oath Keepers discuss the possibility of joining Flynn’s security detail. Rhodes noted that he had previously worked with First Amendment Praetorian, a group linked to Flynn, to protect Flynn, as well as with a group assigned to protect pro-Trump broadcaster Alex Jones, who has described relying on a group of retired police officers for his protection on January 6.”

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A right-wing activist known for hosting a podcast about firearms along with his 67-year-old father has been arrested on federal charges of illegal possession of firearms, according to federal prosecutors.

Joseph Paul Berger, the 32-year-old host of the podcast “Alt-Right Armory,” was indicted along with his father, Joseph Raymond Berger. Both are from Bethlehem in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and the announcement of their arrest came on Thursday, February 10 from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Business Insider’s Kelsey Vlamis quotes William S. Walker, an acting special agent for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as saying, “This father-and-son duo possessed a small artillery of firearms in their home, including more than a dozen machine guns and silencers. This type of fire-power is incredibly dangerous if in the wrong hands.”

The indictment, according to Vlamis, alleged that the Bergers illegally possessed 13 fully automatic machine guns and 12 silencers.

U.S. Attorney Jennifer Williams warned, “These weapons are extremely dangerous, which is why there are laws regulating their possession.”

The Bergers have pleaded “not guilty” to the charges. If convicted, the men face up to 30 years in prison and $270,000 in fines.

===

no lnx twt

2 teams, one looking for peolsi]

A right-wing talking point about Jan. 6 just completely collapsed after indictment of the Oath Keepers

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/oath-keepers-sedition/

An Oath Keepers billboard in Pine River, Minnesota in July 2015, Wikimedia Commons minuteman]

Alex Henderson January 13, 2022

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, has been charged with seditious conspiracyas part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s probe of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Washington Post reporters Spencer S. Hsu and Devlin Barrett have described the 56-year-old Rhodes as “the most high-profile person charged in the investigation so far.” And according to Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter, Rhodes’ arrest explodes a MAGA talking about the violence that occurred during the Capitol riot.

Ten others were charged along with Rhodes.

Carpenter, who is known for her commentary on CNN and her articles for The Bulwark, notes that “Trump defenders” have been claiming that the January 6, 2021 violence wasn’t an insurrection “because people like Rhodes had not been charged yet.”

“That talking point is out the window now,” Carpenter emphasized in a Twitter thread. “Sedition is being charged.”

READ: One sentence from the Supreme Court's ruling against an OSHA vaccine rule reveals its upside-down logic]

Carpenter, who once served as communications director for Sen. Ted Cruz but now criticizes him for being a Trump apologist, observed:

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel also believes that Rhodes’ arrest totally discredits a flawed MAGA talking point. Weigel tweeted:

Fox News’ Brit Hume has argued, “Let's base our view on whether 1/6 was an ‘insurrection" on whether those arrested are charged with insurrection. So far, none has been.” And blogger Marcy Wheeler explained why Hume’s reasoning doesn’t hold up:

Christian Vanderbrouk likewise noted that the lack of sedition charges had been a popular right-wing, Jan. 6 apologist talking point:

Here are some more reactions to Rhodes’ arrest for seditious conspiracy:[twt]

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

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Tucker Carlson's effort to divert blame for Jan. 6 away from Trump ... ›

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

January 6 committee weighs options to get members of Congress to ... ›

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More Capitol Riot defendants have ties to Oath Keepers, data leak ... ›

===

HNN Militias Were Hiding in Plain Sight Before 1/6. They're Still a Threat

by Kathleen Belew

The January 6 attack on the Capitol and the election results was not a one-off coup attempt; it was a recruitment event for the militant far right which increasingly threatens democracy.

militias Were Hiding in Plain Sight Before 1/6. They're Still a Threat

:{:{by Kathleen Belew}::{}:

The January 6 attack on the Capitol and the election results was not a one-off coup attempt; it was a recruitment event for the militant far right which increasingly threatens democracy.

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no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/far-right/

A journalist and the author of the book The Next Civil War has published a terrifying but credible overview of the status of American democracy today, just two days before the anniversary of Donald Trump’s January 6 insurrection.

“The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factions,” writes Stephen Marche at The Guardian in “The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it.”

“January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry,” Marche says. “Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.”

:{:{}:

He says Americans should not place false hopes in law enforcement officials, including police, saving us.

:{:{}:

“Hard right organization[s] have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.”

:{:{}:

Marche writes that “white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions,” as he quotes a former undercover FBI agent who used to work on domestic terrorism cases:

:{:{}:

“The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.”

And he blasts the left which he says “has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment.”

The left “must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.”

Read the entire piece here.

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rww 12 21

constitutional Sheriff’ Richard Mack Endorses Mark Finchem, Oath Keeper, QAnon Promoter, and Stop the Steal Activist, for Arizona Secretary of State

===

ref oath and proud

https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/trump-captiol-riot/

1/6 analysis, sm sample here

12 21 raw an relationship coach kind // life coach?

...Both men overtly invoke the apocalypse, and self-consciously make QAnon references in their respective podcasts.

“What is going on here in America?” Cusick said in the Oct. 19 episode of his podcast. “They have us — we’re enslaved…. When the pilgrims came to America in 1620 — four hundred years from then goes to 2020 — when did this awakening start in the United States? Everyone started realizing what was going on with our elections, with Hollywood, with all these elites. It started in 2020, thanks to our president, Donald Trump.”

Cusick offered an allegory, comparing Americans from the settling of the colonies in the 1600s to the Israelites who, according to the Old Testament, were enslaved in Egypt under the pharaoh. By way of explaining how the United States, which after all, was supposedly “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” had been “enslaved” since before its founding, Cusick claimed that “it was infiltrated and it became Satanic.”

For Cusick, Trump is to be credited for awakening a sense of nationalism in Americans and helping them define an enemy, which happens to be their fellow citizens.

“Trump’s the one who made people all of a sudden realize we have a country, and we have an opposition, whether you were on the left side or the right side,” Cusick said.

While concerned with something entirely different — helping men have more sex, as opposed to saving souls for Jesus — Stedman offered a similar chronology in his Dec. 9 blog post entitled “Why Your Woman Stops Wanting Sex.”

“We have been experiencing a gradual dark night of soul these past 100 years; as I write this in December 2021 we are near the culmination of it,” he wrote. Then, he went straight to the apocalypse: “In this collapse all that has been hidden is becoming seen. We are living through the apocalypse — the great revealing. The great awakening.”

After invoking apocalypse as a force for a transformation in gender relations, Stedman advised young men that they should strive for “consensual polarity” while making it clear that he was not advocating for equality: In his view, the men are protagonists; women are material to be “forged.”

“Such a relationship is well within your grasp,” Stedman advised. “In spite of all the programming, suitable women are all around; though many do need guidance — you will need to help forge them. But the limiting factor is you. Because you can only take a woman as far as you yourself have gone.”...

===

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/rittenhouse-2655770737/

no lnx pix req

Rittenhouse verdict championed on right-wing social media as green light for killing protesters

[Charlottesville "Unite the Right" Rally. Far-right Oath Keepers patrol Emancipation Park. Credit: Anthony Crider]

David Neiwertand Daily Kos November 21, 2021

The exultation on right-wing social media following Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal has been sickeningly predictable: Mainstream conservatives loudly valorize Rittenhouse as a "hero," while more extremist voices, applying the same logic, demand that more Americans follow his footsteps—urging the likeminded to take to the street now to begin using guns to "be like Kyle." They have even appropriated his name for their future plans, voiced in numerous celebratory threads: Any leftist protester shot by a right-wing "patriot" henceforth will have been "Rittenhoused."

As we forecasted, the acquittal is now a beacon-like green light granting permission to violent right-wing extremists to openly wage the kind of "civil war" against "the left"—which ranges from liberal Democrats like Joe Biden to the "antifa" bogeyman they have concocted—that they have been fantasizing about for the past decade. In the words of Charlie Kirk's interlocutor, it's the signal that now they "get to use the guns."

The bloodlust has been palpable. Online trolls celebrated that "it's Open Season on pedo-commies" and boasted that the verdict means "there's nothing you can do about it." A neo-Nazi channel on Twitter urged readers to "let this win fuel your rage." A fan of pseudo-journalist Andy Ngo commented in a retweet: "Every one of these anarchist criminal thugs should be shot in the street like the worthless dogs they are."

Far-right maven Ann Coulter posted a meme showing a gantlet of [marvel nazi nerd wet dr] comic-book superheroes bowing to Rittenhouse. On Facebook, Ben Shapiro framed any future violence as being left-wing: "The Left accepting the verdict in a peaceable manner remains the sizable elephant in the room."

The white-nationalist site VDare also extolled Rittenhouse's heroism:

This much is true: Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we've been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.

[Coulter-RittenhouseMeme.jpeg]

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire blamed the media for there even having been a trial:

The verdict is right and just but Kyle Rittenhouse never should have been on trial at all. Now themedia will go to work, like the demonsthey are, to ensure that Kenosha burns because they did not get their blood sacrifice.

Walsh then added:

I hope Rittenhouse bankrupts all of you dirtbags in media who smeared him as a white supremacist. [sue for libel based on verdict? // charlottesville ~ KKK case finished ] I hope he ruins your life. I want you to suffer. It's what you deserve. It's justice.

Idaho legislator Tammy Nichols, a Republican, posted a meme featuring the Gadsden-flag "Don't Tread On Me" design, but with a graphic of Rittenhouse firing from a seated position as he did in Kenosha.

The Gun Owners of America (GOA)—a gun-rights extremist group headed by far-right militia figure Larry Pratt—joined in the celebration by announcing it was giving Rittenhouse a new gun.

Alert: GOA will be awarding Kyle Rittenhouse with an AR-15 for his defense of gun rights in America. Join us in saying THANK YOU to Kyle Rittenhouse for being awarrior for gun rights and self defense rights across the country!

Other "Patriot" Movement extremists saw the verdict as vindication for vigilantism and militia organizing. The "Washougal Moms," a militia-friendly group from eastern Washington state, opined:

Today the jury and legal system has reaffirmed our rights as citizens. The second amendmentin all aspects, to form a well regulated militia, the right to bear arms in self defense, and against enemiesboth foreign and domestic!

Kurt Schlichter, the right-wing troll with over 380,000 followers, taunted MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who had expressed concern about the double racial standard that the verdict reflects, on Twitter.

Your pain delights me. Kyle Rittenhouse killed two leftistcatspawsand bisected the bicep of another and there's nothing you can do about it.

A white-nationalist Twitter account called "Based Teutonic" celebrated the verdict by posting a fantasy that Rittenhouse would now embark on an action-hero-like mission—with the help of Judge Bruce Schroeder, who oversaw the trial in markedly biased fashion.

About to exit court room

Judge yells from behind:

Rittenhouse turns around

You forgot this

Tosses him his AR15

Credits roll, Eye of the Tiger plays

"Based Teutonic" wasn't alone in celebrating Schroeder's role in the verdict. On Telegram, a commenter in a Proud Boys channel observed:

Kyle's case shows how important is to have your guys in power on a local level. One vaguely conservative boomer judge made all of the difference in a monumental trial.

Other Proud Boys were more focused on their long-anticipated civil war. "There's still a chance for this country," wrote one. Another wrote: "The left wont stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights monitored a number of far-right chat forums (particularly Telegram) following the verdict, and found an outpouring of extremist bile, much of it anticipating the ability to inflict lethal violence on "leftists," as well as Black "parasites" and, of course, Jewish people. A user called The Western Chauvinist commented: "The parasites are planning multiple 'protests' across the United States."

One user calling himself "Proud Boy To Fascist Pipeline" replied to one of these comments mocking Black leaders protesting the verdict as "parasites": "Your 17 year olds are already armed and terrorizing our neighborhoods, n----er."

Fittingly, Charlie Kirk fans—following the example of his Idaho audience member—were focused on the violence: "Arm up and tell them f**cking bring it!" one replied to predictions of leftist protests after the verdict. "Shoot these phukers," commented another.

Nick Fuentes' "Groypers" were also unbridled in their anticipation of gunning down their opponents. "The most American thing you can do is Killing Commies," opined one on the white-nationalist forum Gab.

Another Gab user exulted with a meme showing Joaquin Phoenix as The Joker, dancing: "When you find out it's officially Open Season on pedo-commies." Mocking "wannabe street thugs upset with the verdict," another Gab user replied, "you're gonna get Rittenhouse'd. Bitch."

Gab-OpenSeason.png

"Getting Rittenhoused" became a popular way of threatening leftists. After Ngo posted a handful of tweets from leftists angry about the verdict, hundreds of his fans piled on, making threats of violence against them. "Someone will Rittenhouse them too," one responded. Another replied: "I came here to say that!"

Antisemitism also was a common theme. Right-wing troll Keith Woods, who has 23,500 followers on Twitter, declared after the verdict: "Huge L for the Jews." His followers piled on; one responded with a GIF meme of Gollum and the text, "Curse you goyim." Another replied, "hopefully they take an L in Charlottsville trial too. WHITE BOY WINTER!"

White nationalist Eric Striker was more explicitly antisemitic, as well as strategic, in his commentary:

Beating the Jews to the narrative as incidents unfold is more important than anything that happens in court.

Once you frame a story with the facts (and the facts have to be 100% accurate) and disseminate it with an effective propaganda network, Jews will struggle to challenge it once it's cemented.

Notorious white nationalist and antisemite Mike "Enoch" Peinovich put out a statement through his National Justice Party: "This victory for Kyle Rittenhouse over the cosmopolitan elite forces that plague the nation isn't only a victory for the young man himself, it's a victory for justice and for all White people who take a stand," Peinovich said.

On Telegram, a white nationalist commented: "The victory of Kyle Rittenhouse over thejewish forces that plague the nation isn't just a victory for the man himself, it's a victory for justice, and for the masses of disenfranchised White people which populate the globe.

The neo-Nazi group White Lives Matter had this advice for its white-supremacist followers:

Don't let this one victory lull you back to sleep. That's what they want. They know small "victories" can placate the angry masses more than anything else. Instead let this win fuel your rage.Never forget the simple fact that this clear-cut self-defense should never have gone to trial in the first place. Muslim, Hispanic, and African invaders have raped millions of our women, WHITE women.Their time ofterrorizing our People with 0 consequences is coming to an end. The Rittenhouse verdict is a single tick in the scoreboard on our side. Our enemy doesn't have a scoreboard big enough for their victories. Fight harder, stronger, fiercer, and with the same remorse they have shown us. None. Get going, White man.

"This might be interpreted across the far right as a type of permission slip to do this kind of thing or to seek out altercations in this way, believing that there is a potential that they won't face serious consequences for it," Jared Holt of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council told NPR. "I worry that that might end up being interpreted by some people as a proof of concept of this idea that you can actually go out and seek a 'self-defense situation,' and you'll be cheered as a hero for it."

===

11 21 an

On January 2, Trump lawyer John Eastman called into Steve Bannon's War Room podcast to explain how to steal the election. Eastman told Bannon that Vice President Mike Pence could still overturn Biden's victory. The interview was part of an extremely public campaign by Trump and his closest allies to lobby Pence to steal the election during the certification ceremony.

One of Eastman's crackpot theories was that the vice president has the unilateral power to accept or reject electoral votes at his whim, or failing that, to somehow "send the election back" to Republican-controlled swing state legislatures that would disregard the will of their people and replace Biden's electors with Trump's.

Eastman was Trump's master of self-serving constitutional bafflegab. His job was to spin elaborate pseudo-legal theories to justify Trump's assault on democracy. It was Eastman who wrote the notorious memos outlining his fanciful legal arguments for why the vice president has the power to unilaterally reelect himself. Eastman also co-wrote a blueprint for how Trump could use the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power after a disputed election. Eastman even spoke at Trump's rally on the Ellipse, making wild allegations of election fraud before Trump set the mob on the Capitol.

To understand January 6, you have to think in terms of an inside game and an outside game. The inside game was to steal the election procedurally. The outside game was to gather a mob to terrorize officials into going along with it. Eastman was a conceptual architect of both the paper coup attempt and of the plan for the political repression that Trumpists expected to follow in the wake of the theft.

READ:A growing threat is emerging from the theocratic wing of the GOP — but many liberals are missing it

It all comes back to the Big Lie of massive Democratic voter fraud in the swing states. Trump used the fantasy of a stolen election to gather his supporters in Washington for a "wild protest" on January 6, whip them into a rage and set them on the Capitol. Eastman used the same lie to justify his schemes to overturn the election procedurally.

In his various memos and public appearances, Eastman presented several paths to overrule the will of the people, but his ultimate justification was always the same: Democratic "fraud" in the swing states invalidated their certified slates of Biden electors.

Therefore, he maintained, Mike Pence was entitled to unilaterally cast aside the electoral votes and count alternate slates of fake electors in their place or discard the votes from those states altogether, denying either candidate the necessary 270 votes and throwing the election to the state delegations in the House.

As Eastman wrote in his second memo, Trump would prevail, "if the Republicans in the State Delegations stand firm." At the time, the GOP caucus was deeply divided over whether to back Trump's paper coup, and Pence was signalling he was not willing to play his assigned role.

READ:'Whole case is a mess': Internet stunned as judge lets Rittenhouse choose final jurors in raffle system

Hence the need for extra muscle on the outside.

This fits with what another key conspirator has said about his reason for gathering a mob on January 6. "We […] schemed up putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting," said Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, regarding his motives. He wanted to "change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside."

After an extended rant about the cowardice of Mike Pence, the last order Trump gave the mob before sending them down Pennsylvania Avenue was that they must give "boldness" to "weak Republicans."

Trump's command echoed Eastman's language in the longer of the two memos in which he described his own scheme as "BOLD, certainly."

Read:'Conspiracy nuts': DeSantis is in the hot seat after his aide gets caught pushing anti-Semitic theory

The label "coup" conjures up images of a military takeover, but a procedural coup under the threat of violence is still a coup.

Denialists try to mislead by pointing to the insurgents' relatively light weaponry and saying: "You don't think they meant to overthrow the US government with that, do you?" But the plan was never to physically seize control of the government. Insurgents just had to bully Pence and House Republicans into reversing the election for Trump.

Trump's advisors were well aware that reversing a free and fair election would provoke national outrage and widespread protests. Eastman's blueprint for leveraging the military, the police, and criminal gangs to hold onto power would work as well or better after a procedural coup as it would after an uncertain Election Night (the scenario nominally entertained in the report). A stolen election would putBiden supporters in the streets where the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers would be waiting for them, prepared to start or escalate violence wherever they could. This kind of unrest was exactly what Eastman warned local officials to be prepared to suppress.[see war game bs?]

We eagerly await what Bannon and Eastman will tell the January 6 committee, but what they've already said is utterly damning.

READ:Ocasio-Cortez gives an impassioned speech blasting Kevin McCarthy after Gosar's 'incitement of violence'

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omg yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-2655520362/

no lnx

'Barely concealed bloodlust': Claremont Institute laid out detailed plan for using cops to overturn Trump’s election loss

Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 08, 2021

The right-wing Claremont Institute published a report in mid-October 2020 that gamed out a scenario where Donald Trump would remain in office through an alliance between law enforcement and militant extremists.

The report was prepared by attorney John Eastman, who authored a memo laying out another strategy for keeping Trump in office, and former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland, as well as Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, alt-right figure Jeff Giesea and right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, reported The Bulwark.

"Despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor — 'for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism' — the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right," writes columnist Christian Vanderbrouk. "Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government — aided by citizen 'posses' of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office."

Most of the predictions in the report, titled "79 Days to Inauguration," did not come to fruition, such as the authors' belief that some states' voting results would be fatally tainted by cyber attacks and suspicious fires, and left-wing mobs did not converge on Washington, D.C., to incite violence, and police did not execute antifa/Black Lives Matter leaders as part of a federal operation.

"A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report," Vanderbrouk writes. "This isn't a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries."

The report was produced in response to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project's (TIP) exercise on "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition," which considered the prospect of Trump refusing to concede an election loss and made recommendations for avoiding a crisis -- which seems to be the opposite intent of the Claremont Institute's exercise.

"To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation 'for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios,'" Vanderbrouk writes. "The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that 'prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.'"

"Either way. It's as if they're steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it," he adds. "The message is clear:do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term."

===

10/21 YIKES

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/trumpists/

no lnx

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Chauncey DeVega and Salon October 12, 2021

It's an old truism that the "real bad men" (and bad women) "move in silence and violence." That's certainly true for the most dangerous and most effective of Donald Trump's allies, henchmen, henchwomen, and other followers. But for Donald Trump himself, and most of his political cult, that rule does not apply.

Trump and his followers were loud, exuberant and enthusiastic on Jan. 6. The lethal attack on the Capitol had been publicly announced weeks in advance, and should have come as no surprise. Trump's rallies and gatherings continue to celebrate violence and the prospect of revenge — and specifically of "getting even" with Trump's "enemies."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign chairman and White House strategist, has now threatened to recruit Republican-fascist "shock troops" with the apparent goal of undermining the U.S. government, and by implication multiracial democracy, if and when Trump and the Republicans regain control of both Congress and the White House.

On a daily basis Fox News and other elements of the right-wing disinformation propaganda machine use stochastic terrorism and other techniques to radicalize their audience into committing acts of political violence. To this point, the Democratic Party and the political and news media class in general have remained in denial, and largely passive in response.

In one troubling new development, Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents — meaning nonwhite people,"socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America." As media critic Eric Boehlert recently noted, the liberal opinion site Living Blue in Texas is sounding the alarm about the specific meaning of the black flag and the Republican-fascists support for terrorism and other political violence. That post, "Are Your Republican Neighbors Planning on Killing You?", merits lengthy quotation:

It didn't take long to find hundreds of videos where these Trumpers and so-called patriots were hanging black American flags. ...

Black American flags are the flags that mean "no quarter shall be given." They are the opposite of the white flag of surrender.

According to the people on TikTok and the Sun (British tabloid), the black American flag originated in the civil war and was flown by the Confederates.

It means that they will not surrender, will not take prisoners, and are willing to die for their cause. It means they will execute their enemies.

Who are their enemies? Pretty much any non-Conservative. You know, Democrats, Liberals, LGBTQ, BIPOC, and the vaccinated. ...

So, we're the enemy, and they're openly professing to want to execute us. … So, why are they doing this

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it's already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It's alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, "it's time" or "the time is now." ...

Although showing guns on Tik Tok is supposed to be against community guidelines, they show lots of videos of their guns, shooting them, wearing them, or sitting on their bed.

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

However you interpret these videos posted by Trump followers and other neofascists — which could be mainly performative — it is clearly true that the American right is increasingly willing to accept or condone violence as a means of expanding and protecting their social and political power. (Salon did not find licensed news photographs of these flags, and has made the editorial decision not to reproduce the images mentioned above, which are easy to find on social media.)

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that millions of Republican voters and Trump followers would support the use of violence to remove Joe Biden from office because of the "Big Lie" and their belief that that he is not a legitimate president. Similarly, a large proportion of Republicans believe that the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were "patriots" whose use of violence was justified.

And a new poll from the University of Virginia's Center for Politics even suggests that more than 50 percent of Trump supporters want "red states" to secede from the Union. Republican elected officials and other right-wing opinion leaders have continued to escalate their threats of political violence against Democrats and other targeted groups.

In a recent speech to the North Carolina Faith and Freedom Coalition's "Salt & Light" conference, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., issued what sounded like a declaration of war:

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It is time for the American Christian church to come out of the shadows to say, "No longer are we going to allow our culture to be determined by people who hate the things that we believe in…. We are going to stand valiantly for God's incredible inherent truths that predate any version of government. Because, my friends, if we lose this country today, if we bend the knee to the Democrats today, our country will be lost forever, our children will never know what freedom is. It's our duty to stand up, Let us stand united as men and women of faith to fight for our country.

During an interview with MSNBC's Joy Reid, terrorism and national security expert Malcolm Nance said that Cawthorn's video "picks up on the themes that are not just coming from the Steve Bannon level and Donald Trump level, they are coming from the Republican street — and that Republican street is armed. They're angry. They have been fed an entire line which makes them believe that America is no longer America and that they no longer want the America that the rest of us, the 60 percent of the country, live in. And they`re willing to take up arms for it."

Nance also noted that Cawthorn's propaganda video is thematically similar to the type of propaganda used by Islamic terrorist groups such as ISIS and al-Qaida to radicalize and recruit members.

During an interview with Scientific American magazine, Dr. Bandy Lee, the principal editor of the 2017 bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump," explained how a mentally pathological leader can "infect" his followers and perhaps even an entire nation:

I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence — while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a "lock and key" relationship….

"Shared psychosis" — which is also called "folie à millions" ["madness for millions"] when occurring at the national level or "induced delusions" — refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person's symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia andpropensity for violence — even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

Trump and his regime gave permission and encouragement to his followers and other supporters to engage in antisocial and other anti-human behavior on a national scale. Once such a process has begun, and those forces are unleashed, it is not easy to stop. Fascism is not a simple machine with an on-and-off switch. In practice, fascism is given life and takes corporeal form through its followers, with each one being a potential carrier of the pathology.

As Hussein Ibish warned in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The cancer of political violence is not an endemic American disease. At the moment, it is a Republican disease. No one but Republicans themselves can cure it. Until they do, the violence of the right is only going to keep swelling and crashing. From a Middle Eastern perspective, this is all appallingly familiar."

Fascism is a highly virulent social disease that usually destroys the host body – but not before spreading the disease to many other people. In fact, if the original host dies, he or she can be elevated to the status of martyr for "the cause," serving to inspire existing followers and lure in new ones.

Ultimately, Donald Trump, like other fascist and authoritarian leaders, is the symptom of a sick society. Trumpism is not actually the core disease. For America to counteract the deep underlying illness that has made Trumpism possible will require a long-term cultural and moral reckoning. Anything less, and the disease of American fascism will only go dormant until it is resurrected again — perhaps in a more dangerous and virulent form.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/qanon/

no lnx

'Lost sheep': Conspiracy theory expert says QAnon believers are being swallowed by 'mass radicalization'

Jacob Chansley, dubbed 'The QAnon Shaman'/Channel 4 News screenshot]

Chauncey DeVegaand Salon November 03, 2021

America's mainstream news media has a short attention span [cits have /voters have of golden retriever], which has certainly played to the advantage of the long-running Republican-fascist assault on democracy (and on reality). Of late, the media has grown bored with QAnon, the antisemitic and racist conspiracy cult which claims to believes that a secret cabal of pedophile Democrats and other members of the "deep state" run the world — and gain superpowers from kidnapping and killing children and then ingesting their vital essence. In this demented worldview, only Donald Trump and other "patriots" can save America and the world.

It appears that QAnon followers played a significant role in the attack on the Capitol and coup attempt on Jan. 6. No leaders of that coup plot have been apprehended or punished, and most of the foot soldiers have received relatively lenient punishment to this point. President Joe Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland appear reluctant to apply the full power of the law to punish Donald Trump, along with his allies, operatives and followers.

QAnon followers are also attempting to undermine American democracy and civil society by infiltrating such "vulnerable" sites as local school boards, library committees and other ground-level institutions of local and state government. Their purported goal may be to ban the teaching of "critical race theory" (which is not taught in public schools), but the real goal is larger: to enforce punishment of "unpatriotic" thoughtcrimes, and to mainstream right-wing conspiracy theories and other lies about American history.

QAnon followers are also seeking to become election officials, where they are planning to use the fervor around Trump's Big Lie and other conspiracy theories to rig election results, overthrow multiracial democracy and replace it with one-party Republican rule.

In an article posted last June, the National Education Association explored the QAnon-fueled "radicalization" of school boards in communities all over America:

In a small town in Washington State, the newly elected mayor calls QAnon, "a truth movement," and recently fired the town's skeptical city manager. In coastal San Luis Obispo, California, a school board trustee's Facebook posts include a QAnon video, misinformation about COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, and promotion of the ex-gay, conversion movement. She won, says the town's mayor, who is calling for her resignation, because "people had no idea this was going on," and didn't have the "bandwidth to research the school board election," reports the local newspaper, the Tribune.

Meanwhile, in Florida, a newly elected county sheriff is now explaining why he posed for photos last year with a supporter in a "We are Q" t-shirt.

Across the county, conspiracy theorists and proponents of fake news are winning local elections. And their new positions give them a powerful voice in everything from local law enforcement to libraries, trash pickup to textbook purchases.

QAnon followers are also gaining influence and power within white Christian evangelical churches and other faith communities. This is integral to the worsening radicalization of white Christianity and the threat of a right-wing "holy war" against Democrats, liberals, progressives, Black and brown people and anyone else who believes in the separation of church and state, or who holds values and beliefs deemed "un-American" or "anti-Christian."

Public opinion polls and other research show that a large percentage of Republicans and Trump followers say they believe in at least portions of the outlandish QAnon fantasy and — not coincidentally — are alsowilling to support right-wing political violence to protect their "traditional way of life" and "save the country." This includes removing President Joe Biden from office by violent means if deemed necessary.

Matthew Rozsa of Salon summarized these findings this week:

New public opinion research from the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute, part of its 12th annual American Values Survey, has returned alarming findings.

Close to one-third of Republicans in the survey, or 30%, agreed with the statement that "true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country." That was more than the combined total of Democrats and independents who say the same thing (at 11% and 17%, respectively).

PRRI CEO and founder Robert Jones said the large proportion of Republicans who appear ready to endorse political violence is "a direct result of former President Trump calling into question the election." Jones noted that according to the same survey, more than two-thirds of Republicans (68%) claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump, as opposed to only 26% of independents and 6% of Democrats.

The study also found that 39% of those who believed that Trump had won the 2020 election endorsed potential violence, compared to only 10% of those who rejected election misinformation. There were also signs of a split based on media consumption, with 40% of Republicans who trust far-right news sources agreeing that violence could be necessary, compared to 32% of those who trust Fox News and 22% among those who trust mainstream outlets. In addition, respondents who said violence may be necessary are more likely to report feeling like strangers in their country, to say American culture has mostly worsened since the 1950s and to believe that God has granted America a special role in human history.

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Sophia Moskalenko is a social psychologist and expert on conspiracy theories, radicalization and extremism. She is currently a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START) and is the author of several books, including "Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us" and "The Marvel of Martyrdom: The Power of Self-Sacrifice in the Selfish World." Her new book, with co-author Mia Bloom, is "Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon."

In this conversation Moskalenko discusses the dangers QAnon poses to American democracy and national security. She explains that QAnon is a community where overwhelmingly white and often socially alienated followers find fellowship and meaning as they are radicalized into extremism and other potentially dangerous antisocial behavior. In her view, QAnon functions as a space that nurtures and satisfies white fantasies of right-wing masculinity, femininity, violence and heroism about "protecting" children and reasserting "traditional values".

Toward the end of this conversation, Moskalenko explains what she would tell Joe Biden and other senior members of the administration about the threats posed by right-wing terrorism, as well as about the ways hostile foreign powers are using disinformation and other forms of propaganda to weaken American democracy and society.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You are an expert on terrorism and other forms of political extremism. You are also an expert on propaganda and disinformation. How are you feeling right now, given America's democracy crisis?

I've been feeling a little bit like Cassandra, the woman in Troy who was yelling as loud as he could about the city falling to ruin, and everybody was laughing at her. Then of course her warnings came true. It doesn't feel good. There was so much attention being paid to Islamic terrorism after 9/11. Unfortunately, there was not enough attention being paid to the trends right here in the United States domestically. This was all very alarming for somebody such as me who is an expert on terrorism and radicalization.These trends pointed to how right-wing groups were attracting more people and carrying out more and more lethal attacks.

There were people in positions of power and influence here in the United States who were beginning to pander increasingly to these groups. And of course, Trump's presidency was a type of pinnacle for that behavior. Those appeals to right-wing extremist groups are now crystallized in congressional representatives who are outspoken supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

There was also Trump's line after the riots in Charlottesville about "good people on both sides," which implies that maybe Nazis aren't so bad. This problem has been developing for a long time.

When you looked at the events of Jan. 6, what did you see? What jumped out at you?

I'm a psychologist, so I focused on the emotions that I observed in the faces, the screams and the actions of the Trump followers who were there that day at the Capitol.

It was just striking to me how angry and violent and ready to inflict serious damage a lot of those people were. On Jan. 6, I saw a huge crowd of people who look just like my neighbors but who were acting in a very threatening and menacing way. It was disturbing. I also, of course, saw many QAnon symbols and antisemitic symbols and other references to hate groups.

I was also struck by the composition of the people at the Capitol on Jan. 6. They were very diverse in terms of age and gender. From the Arab Spring to images from the Ukrainian revolution or Georgian revolution, we mostly see men carrying out these mass radical actions. But on Jan. 6 at the Capitol, we saw a lot of women. There were many young people and also people in their 60s and 70s. That is very unusual, in many ways, as far as radical movements go.

There were various right-wing extremist groups and other forces involved in the events of Jan. 6. What role did QAnon conspiracy believers play?

We know that between 10% and 20% of people present at the Jan. 6 insurrection were members of right-wing militia groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and Three Percenters. A sizable proportion of those groups also consisted of active-duty military or veterans. Those militia groups also include active or retired police.

As for QAnon members, after Jan. 6 when the prophecy about Trump's return was unfulfilled, a number of QAnon followers became disenchanted. They went back online looking for answers, like they did before they found QAnon. Now they are looking for something else.

There was a concerted effort by the right-wing extremist groups to bring them in, because they were like lost sheep. The way these groups and individuals talk about the QAnon types is very dismissive. They call them idiots. They call the QAnon prophecy nonsense. But they felt this was an opportunity to recruit a bunch of disenchanted QAnoners into their ranks.

We know that both QAnon and the right-wingers I am discussing here are very antisemitic and racist. Whatever they may say about it, we know from the data we have collected from their own materials that they express clearly antisemitic and racist attitudes. In that aspect there is an overlap, at least psychologically, between QAnon and these right-wing extremists.

"I am Q." We see that language everywhere among the QAnon believers. What is the meaning?

"Q" is a mysterious person, or likely several people. This person or persons has "Q-level" government clearance, which indicates they are supposedly quite high in America's intelligence hierarchy. So while a given person may claim to be "Q," another way of thinking about the meaning of "Q" is that it is an expression of a larger identity.We are in the era of identity politics. Wearing some clothing that announces that one believes in QAnon is a way of projecting that membership and identity.

Wearing that symbol is also a way to connect to other QAnon followers. Because again, especially at these mass rallies or events, people come there for many different reasons, including a shared emotional experience, whether it's rage or hope or even fear. That is the attraction of being together with all these other people who are experiencing the same emotions – even if they are negative emotions. It's a way of establishing your tribe. In a rapidly changing world where we often do not know who our neighbors are, it can be very isolating and very unsettling to not have a tribe.

Carrying something like a big letter "Q" on your chest or over your head is likely an attempt to feel connected with other people who believe similar things.

One key aspect of QAnon is how it is a space forwhite male fantasies of power, home and family, and about using violence to "protect" children, women, faith and community. QAnon is also a space for fantasies about a particular type of white womanhood and femininity.

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Much of QAnon behavior and beliefs arerooted in entertainment. In fact, they borrowed many of their tropes from traditional folklore, like vampires and witches, and also from Hollywood movies. Experimental research has shown that people are compelled to conspiracy theories because they are a lot better at eliciting strong emotions. Some people seek out conspiracy theories because they offer a chance to feel fear, like a horror movie, or anger, such as in a revenge movie.

At the same time, QAnon fills a void that was created when single-earner households where the dad goes to work and the mom stays home in her white little apron were increasingly not viable for most Americans. Such an idea, that a lot of white middle-class men and women grew up with, is no longer available to them. What is left behind are feelings of disillusionment, anger, grievance.

Of course, many of these grievances are then redirected by these QAnon or right-wing narratives more broadly towardsimmigrants who are supposedly taking the good jobs or taking money out of the economy that would have been enough to make the American dream possible for "real" Americans. Channeling that anger into a hatred toward minorities or immigrants is one way to make sense of their new reality.

QAnon is also a fantasy of action and about the ability of individuals to have agency in their own lives— albeit in delusional, dangerous and unhealthy ways. For example, this deranged belief that children are being held hostage by evil forces who drink their blood is likely to encourage people to get their weapons and go save them. How do these QAnon fantasies play out on the individual level?

QAnon really grew in power and popularity when the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter protests were also becoming more prominent. For a lot of women, it was an uncomfortable political conversation that they did not feel ready to have. This idea about saving children then became a safe political alternative for white suburban women to discuss. In their minds, who wouldn't want to save the children?

These QAnon "save the children" ads often portray white children who are being held roughly or muzzled by dark hands. It's a man of color holding this child. This is in contrast to the real Save the Children charity's posters, which overwhelmingly depict children from African and Asian countries who are smiling and laughing in the pictures. By comparison, the QAnon pictures show horrified, abused and generally unkempt kids who elicit sympathy and distress by their appearance alone.

These QAnon "save the children" ads are just a kind of placeholder, I believe, to project their racial discomfort and political beliefs with people who feel the same way — and to do without really calling things by their actual name.

How do you assess the Republican Party and the larger right-wing movement's use of stochastic terrorism? Are we at a tipping point where that stochastic terrorism could become direct encouragements to violence against "the enemy"?

I believe that we are past the tipping point. Hate speech has been increasing for a number of years. I published a book in 2018 where I traced trends for hate speech online, including on Facebook and Twitter. There was a very sizable increase since before the 2016 election, with hate speech becoming more and more prevalent.

For example, the rise of Nazism involved the use of dehumanizing language and other propaganda comparing Jewish people and others to vermin and cockroaches. Jews were depicted as being less than human, which makes it easier to call on people to exterminate them.

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The language used by the Nazis might sound familiar in the present because it's also what we hear from places like OAN or Fox News about immigrants, especially in the context of COVID. As seen with the increasing number of attacks against the Asian and Asian American communities, we can see how such hate speech has an impact.

The question is now whether we will see more mass events such as the Jan. 6 insurrection, which require coordination, movement across the country, money and other resources. I am really hoping that the authorities who are tasked with preventing another such event are doing their jobs.

Donald Trump and his spokespeople and other agents have created a martyrs out of his follower who was killed by law enforcement in the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Trumpists and right-wing propaganda media are now referring to members of Trump's attack force as "political prisoners," who are by implication innocent and heroic.How do you explain to the public the importance of this narrative and the political work it is doing?

This is a classic move. We saw it in Nazi Germany. We also saw it in the Soviet Union. Mythologized martyrdoms manufactured sometimes literally out of nothing. In Nazi Germany before World War II, they created a fake martyr out of a man named Horst Wessel. He became a huge martyr, and it was completely fabricated.

Martyrdoms in general are a hugely potent mass radicalization weapon. A martyr always inspires followers who will make self-sacrifices of their own. And it always challenges opponents to prove that their values are not morally bankrupt and that they too can pay the cost in blood to support the cause they believe in. There is always conflict in the wake of a martyrdom, including a fake martyrdom.

What Donald Trump and his spokespeople are doing is capitalizing on the potential of right-wing martyrdom. Whether or not this is going to catch on like Horst Wessel's did depends on how ready the public is to carry the banner of fake martyrdom. Because any martyrdom is always a symphony between the individual and the public, even a true martyr will not inspire followers if they are not ready to make sacrifices in the name of the cause.

A fake martyr, on the other hand, can appeal to millions, as in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Union, if they are ready to jump on the bandwagon and express their rage in the name of the martyr.

What are you most concerned about in this crisis and going forward?

I am most concerned about mass radicalization and the related hatred and intolerance.

What advice would you give President Biden and other senior leadership?

Try not to pay attention to red herrings. Things like QAnon are a red herring. Try to not lose the forest for the trees. We have a massive right-wing radicalization problem in the United States where the followers are mobilized and armed and actively training. They have military or police training. They are also actively recruiting from those ranks. The resources should be going to confront that problem.

Do not discount the influence of malicious foreign actors, such as Russia and China. They are a lot more experienced with the weaponization of information and concocting propaganda narratives that are going to spread like wildfire and sow discord and mobilize people. The United States needs to catch up with their capabilities in that regard, and to protect ourselves in a way that we are not doing right now.

We need to do better with the social media giants about holding them accountable for what is taking place on their platforms.That means we need to demand that they become a lot more transparent, such as by sharing how they use algorithms and who they allow to dominate the discourse. At the moment, it's a complete black box. We need to hold those huge business entities responsible. They're like a type of public square — they need to be regulated.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/oath-keepers/

pro pub

North Carolina state representative Mike Clampittswore an oath to uphold the Constitution after his election in 2016 and again in 2020. But there's another pledge that Clampitt said he's upholding: to the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militant organization.

Dozens of Oath Keepers have been arrested in connection to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some of them looking like a paramilitary group, wearing camo helmets and flak vests. But a list of more than 35,000 members of the Oath Keepers — obtained by an anonymous hacker and shared with ProPublica by the whistleblower group Distributed Denial of Secrets — underscores how the organization is evolving into a force within the Republican Party.

ProPublica identified Clampitt and 47 more state and local government officials on the list, all Republicans: 10 sitting state lawmakers; two former state representatives; one current state assembly candidate; a state legislative aide; a city council assistant; county commissioners in Indiana, Arizona and North Carolina; two town aldermen; sheriffsor constables in Montana, Texas and Kentucky; state investigators in Texas and Louisiana; and a New Jersey town's public works director.

ProPublica's analysis also found more than 400 people who signed up for membership or newsletters using government, military or political campaign email addresses, including candidates for Congress and sheriff, a retired assistant school superintendent in Alabama, and an award-winning elementary school teacher in California.

Three of the state lawmakers on the list had already been publicly identified with the Oath Keepers. Other outlets have also scoured the list, finding police officers and military veterans.

People with law enforcement and military backgrounds — like Clampitt, a retired fire captain in Charlotte, North Carolina — have been the focus of the Oath Keepers' recruiting efforts since the group started in 2009. According to researchers who monitor the group's activities, Oath Keepers pledge to resist if the federal government imposes martial law, invades a state or takes people's guns, ideas that show up in a dark swirl of right-wing conspiracy theories.The group is loosely organized and its leaders do not centrally issue commands. The organization's roster has ballooned in recent years, from less than 10,000 members at the start of 2011 to more than 35,000 by 2020, membership records show.

The hacked list marks participants as annual ($50) or lifetime ($1,000) members, so not everyone on the list is currently active, though some said they viewed it as a lifelong commitment even if they only paid for one year. Many members said they had little contact with the group after sending in their dues but still supported the cause. Others drifted away and disavowed the group, even before Jan. 6.

The list also includes at least three people who were arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and who federal prosecutors did not identify as Oath Keepers in charging documents: Andrew Alan Hernandez of Riverside, California; Dawn Frankowski of Naperville, Illinois; and Sean David Watson of Alpine, Texas. They pleaded not guilty. These defendants, their attorneys and family members didn't respond to requests for comment. The Justice Department also declined to comment.

According to experts who monitor violent extremism, the Oath Keepers' broadening membership provides the group with two crucial resources: money and, particularly when government officials get involved, legitimacy.

Clampitt said he went to a few Oath Keepers meetings when he joined back in 2014, but the way he participates now is by being a state legislator. He has co-sponsored a bill to allow elected officials to carry concealed guns in courthouses, schools and government buildings, and he supported legislation stiffening penalties for violent demonstrations in response to last year's protests in Raleigh over George Floyd's murder. Clampitt said he opposes violence but stood by his Oath Keepers affiliation, despite the dozens of members charged in the Capitol riot.

“Five or six years ago, politicians wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with Oath Keepers, you'd have to go pretty fringe," said Jared Holt, who monitors the group for the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. “When groups like that become emboldened, it makes them significantly more dangerous."

The State Lawmakers

Then-state Delegate Don Dwyer from Maryland was the only elected official at the Oath Keepers' first rally, back in April 2009. Dwyer was, by his own account, a pariah in Annapolis, but he was building a national profile as a conservative firebrand.He claimed to take direction from his own interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and a personal library of 230 books about U.S. history pre-1900.

The Oath Keepers' founder, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law School graduate named Stewart Rhodes, invited Dwyer to speak at the group's kickoff rally — they called it a “muster" — in Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the “shot heard round the world" that started the Revolutionary War in 1775.

“I still support the cause," Dwyer told ProPublica. “And I'm proud to say that I'm a member of that organization." He left politics in 2015 and served six months in prison for violating his probation after a drunk boating accident.

Dwyer said he was not aware of the Oath Keeper's presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. “If they were there, they were there on a peaceful mission, I'm sure of it," he said. Informed that members were photographed wearing tactical gear, Dwyer responded, “OK, that surprises me. That's all I'll say."

Among the current officeholders on the list is Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem, who was already publicly identified with the Oath Keepers.Finchem was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 but has said he did not enter the building or engage in violence, and he has disputed the characterization of the Oath Keepers as an anti-government group. He is currently running to be Arizona's top elections official, and he won former President Donald Trump's endorsement in September.

Serving with Clampitt in the North Carolina assembly, deputy majority whip Keith Kidwell appeared on the Oath Keepers list as an annual member in 2012. Kidwell declined to comment, calling the membership list “stolen information." A spokesperson for the state house speaker declined to comment on Kidwell's and Clampitt's Oath Keepers affiliation.

The membership list also names Alaska state Rep. David Eastman as a life member and Indiana state Sen. Scott Baldwin and Georgia state Rep. Steve Tarvin as annual members. Eastman confirmed his membership and declined to answer further questions. Baldwin's spokesperson said he was unavailable to comment.

Tarvin recalled signing up at a booth in White County, Georgia, in 2009 when he was running for Congress. He lost that race but later became a state lawmaker. He didn't view the Oath Keepers as a militia group back then.

Tarvin said he stands by the pledge he signed and said he isn't aware of the Oath Keepers' involvement in the Capitol breach on Jan 6. His congressional district is now represented by Andrew Clyde, who helped barricade a door to the House chamber on Jan. 6 but later compared the riot to a “normal tourist visit."

Kaye Beach, who is listed as an annual member in 2010, is a legislative assistant to Oklahoma state Rep. Jon Echols, the majority floor leader. Beach sued the state in 2011, arguing that the Bible prohibited taking a driver's license photo of her. She eventually lost at the state supreme court. Beach and Echols did not respond to requests for comment.

Two other lawmakers have long been public about their affiliation with the Oath Keepers.

Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers announced her membership a few years ago. She responded to Trump's 2020 loss by encouraging people to buy ammo and recently demanded to “decertify" the election based on the GOP's “audit" of Maricopa County ballots, even though the partisan review confirmed President Joe Biden's win.

Idaho state Rep. Chad Christensen lists his Oath Keepers membership on his official legislative biography, in between the John Birch Society and the Idaho Farm Bureau.

Rogers and Christensen didn't respond to requests for comment.

South Dakota state legislator Phil Jensen appeared on the list as an annual member in 2014, using his title (then state senator) and government email address. His affiliation was reported Tuesday by Rolling Stone. He did not respond to a request for comment.

South Dakota state Sen. Jim Stalzer, whose 2015 annual membership was first reported by BuzzFeed, said he never renewed his membership and stopped supporting the Oath Keepers because he disagreed with “their confrontational approach to what they view as federal overreach." In an email, Stalzer said he supported peaceful demonstrators on Jan. 6 but “we do not have the right to damage property or harm others, whether it be at the Capitol or anywhere else."

The Candidates

Virginia Fuller first encountered the Oath Keepers in 2009 at a meeting in San Francisco featuring Rhodes, the group's founder. Fuller liked Rhodes' message of upholding the Constitution, she told ProPublica. For a while she corresponded with one of the group's leaders but they eventually lost touch, and she moved to Florida and ran unsuccessfully for Congress on the Republican ticket in 2018.

Rhodes and other leaders of the Oath Keepers embraced Trump's lies about election fraud and promoted Jan. 6 as a last chance to make a stand for the republic. Asked about Jan. 6, Fuller said, “There was nothing wrong with that. The Capitol belongs to the people."

The Oath Keepers rose to prominence when handfuls of heavily armed members showed up at racial justice protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and their profile grew thanks to a series of standoffs between right-wing militants and federal agents in the Western U.S.

At the 2016 funeral for a rancher who officers shot while trying to arrest him, Stan Vaughan met several Oath Keepers and became an annual member. Vaughan, a one-time chess champion from Las Vegas, ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for the Nevada State Assembly in 2016, 2018 and 2020. Even though Vaughan ran in a predominantly Democratic district, he had the support of his party's establishment, receiving a $500 campaign contribution from Robin Titus, the Assembly's Republican floor leader. Titus did not respond to requests for comment. Vaughan said he'll probably run again once he sees how new districts are drawn.

Vaughan said he wouldn't join the Oath Keepers today. It's not their ideology that bothers him or their involvement in the Jan. 6 riot. Rather, he said he has concerns about how the group's leaders spend its money.

One Oath Keeper seen on Jan. 6 wearing an earpiece and talking with group leaders outside the Capitol was Edward Durfee, a local Republican committee member in Bergen County, New Jersey, who is running for state assembly in a predominantly Democratic district. Durfee has not been charged and said he did not enter the building.

“They were caught up in the melee, what else can I say? For whatever reason, I didn't go in," Durfee said. “They brand you as white supremacists, domestic terrorists. I don't know how we got in this mix where there's so much hatred and so much dislike and how it continues to get fomented. It's just shameful actually."

The Local Party Officials

When Joe Marmorato, a retired New York City cop who moved upstate, signed up for an Oath Keepers annual membership in 2013, he described the skills he could offer the group: “Pistol Shooting, police street tactics, driving skills, County Republican committee member." Marmorato later rose to vice chairman of the Otsego County GOP, but he recently resigned that post because he's moving. Reached by phone, Marmorato stood by the Oath Keepers, even after Jan. 6. “I just thought they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. I know most of them are all retired police and firemen and have the best interests of the country in mind," he said. “No matter what you do, you're vilified by the left."

Steven K. Booth, a twice-elected Republican county commissioner and state senate candidate in Minnesota in the 2000s, said he wants to run for office again if his wife agrees to it. He's still active in the local GOP. Booth joined the Oath Keepers as an annual member in 2011 and said he hasn't heard from them in years. He said he wasn't aware of their role in Jan. 6 but he's concerned that some Capitol breach defendants are being held in jail. “That seems kind of weird to me," Booth said. “I also think it's kind of weird that nobody is doing anything about all the fraud we were told about in the last election either."

Asked about the possibility of Booth running for office again, local GOP chair Rich Siegert started talking through openings Booth could aim for. Booth's Oath Keepers affiliation did not give Siegert pause. “When tyranny comes, that's when you stop and say you've got to do something about it," said Siegert, who heads the party in northern Minnesota's Beltrami County. “To go out and get violent and kill people like they did in the early days, I'm not really in favor of that. How do you get the attention of liberals and get them to listen? Firing guns, I don't know, it's what they do in some countries. Define what 'radical' is."

Not all party officials shared Siegert's view. Richland County, South Carolina, GOP chair Tyson Grinstead distanced his committee from Patsy Stewart, who is listed as an Oath Keepers annual member in 2015. “Personally," Grinstead said, “I don't think there's a place for that in our party."

Stewart has been a delegate or alternate to the GOP state convention and is currently a party precinct officer in Columbia, South Carolina. She didn't respond to requests for comment. In recent months, Trump supporters have flooded into precinct positions in South Carolina and other states as part of an organized movement inspired by the stolen election myth, ProPublica reported in September.

The Poll Worker

When Andy Maul signed up for the Oath Keepers as an annual member around 2010, he touted his role in the Pittsburgh GOP. Maul said he let his membership lapse because there wasn't a local chapter, but he still likes the group's concept.

Maul became the party chairman of his city council district starting around 2016. But other local party leaders chafed at Maul's confrontational style and lack of follow-through.

“Andy was getting a little out there," said Allegheny County chairman Sam DeMarco, who had to ask Maul to take down some of his inflammatory social media posts. “If you want to be associated with our committee, you have to represent mainstream traditional Republican values and not be affiliated with fringe groups."

Maul left the local party committee in 2020, but he continued serving as a poll worker. According to the county elections department, Maul was the “judge of elections" in charge of his precinct in every election since 2017, including this year's primary in May.

In Pennsylvania, the judge of elections in every precinct is an elected position. If no one runs, as often happens, the local elections office appoints someone to fill in, so a person can sometimes land the job “if you have a pulse and you call them," said Bob Hillen, the Pittsburgh Republican chairman.

“If I opposed people based on their views for being a judge of elections or anything, that would eliminate a whole lot of people," Hillen said. “I'm a city chairman, I don't have time to think about all those things like that."

Maul said he observed “aberrative" ballots at his precinct on Nov. 3 — just a handful, but he asserted that if the same number occurred at every precinct in the state, it would add up to more than Biden's margin of victory. (There is no evidence of widespread fraud that could have affected the outcome in Pennsylvania or any other state.)

On Jan. 6, Maul said he marched toward the Capitol but couldn't make it all the way and returned to his bus. He said he wasn't familiar with the Oath Keepers' activities that day. “As a supporter of the Constitution, I had strong differences and concerns about Trump," Maul said in a text message. “Although my feeling on Trump were mixed, I went to the Jan. 6 rally mainly due to what I experienced at my polling location."

The Democrat

Around 2005, Marine veteran Bob Haran joined the Minuteman Project, a group of armed people who took it upon themselves to patrol Arizona's border with Mexico. Haran resented that critics called the group vigilantes and Mexican hunters. All they did, he said, was call the Border Patrol.

Haran held positions in the local GOP and had run for the state House as a Republican. During the tea party wave, Haran became frustrated with the new activists' anti-government tilt and turned to the Constitution Party, a minor party that's to the right of the GOP. Haran rose to be the state chairman and secretary. By the time he became an Oath Keepers annual member in 2016, Haran was looking for a new political home.

When Trump rode down a golden escalator to launch his presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists," Haran took offense. He faulted the government for failing to secure the border, but he didn't blame people for seeking better lives for themselves and their families. Haran grew up in Coney Island, near a middle-class apartment complex built by Trump's father, and he remembered Trump as a braggadocious playboy, not as the successful self-made businessman he later played on TV. Haran said he was appalled as Republicans fell in line behind Trump.

Then, Haran did something unusual, even among never-Trump Republicans: He became a Democrat.

Haran doesn't agree with the Democrats on everything, but he said he feels welcome in the party. He's still passionate about guns and immigration, but he also supports environmental protections and universal health care. Above all, he wanted to help get rid of Trump. In 2020, he joined his local precinct committee and started regularly attending party meetings.

Haran was so excited to see Trump leave office that he tuned in to watch the Electoral College certification process on Jan. 6. He couldn't believe how fast the Trump supporters reached the Senate floor, or how Oath Keepers were attacking the Constitution they swore to defend.

Haran thought back to when he ran for office as a Republican, in 2000, and lost. “I called my opponent and congratulated him: I would have won except he got more votes," Haran said. “I conceded, which is bestowing legitimacy on my opponent, which is more important than anything."

He finds it disturbing that Trump and other Republicans today won't do that anymore. “They were anti-government," Haran said of the GOP, “but now they're being anti-democracy."

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/sheriff-s-fellowship/

no lnx

One far-right, Trump-inspired think tank is adding more fuel to the extremism fire.

According to The Bulwark,The Claremont Institute is at the center of a new initiative called the "Sheriff's Fellowship." The disturbing new movement is described as an incentive to "weaponize 'patriotic law enforcement officers' to counter 'the perversion of the justice system by which the revolutionary left seeks to advance its totalitarian agenda.'"

In short, these types of sheriff groups classify more as "militias with badges, guns, and formal law enforcement powers. Or, if you like, secession-by-sheriff."

While the Sheriff's Fellowship is a new initiative for Claremont, the publication notes that other similar organizations like the Constitutional Sheriffs have existed for quite some time.

"Although the Oath Keepers, another anti-government extremist group that recruits from law enforcement, have garnered more media attention in recent years," the Anti-Defamation League said in their report, the Constitutional Sheriff movement "has arguably had more success infiltrating law enforcement, including at the executive level."

The central tenet of [the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association], borrowed from the anti-government extremist sovereign citizen movement, is that thecounty sheriff is the ultimate authority in the county, able to halt enforcement of any federal or state law or measure they deem unconstitutional.

Trump, members of his administration, and well-known law enforcement officials have echoed the values and beliefs highlighted by the Claremont Institute. In fact, during a previous interview, Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R) lauded the practices of "Anglo-American" law enforcement.

"Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people's protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process," said Sessions. "The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement. We must never erode this historic office."

Sheriff Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, Ariz., is also seen as an upcoming member of the Republican Party. The law enforcement officer, who describes himself as "America's Sheriff," who "fashions himself as more of a vigilante resister, with a heavy dose of anti-government, sometimes militant rhetoric."

Lamb supported the "stop the steal" campaign in Arizona and has expressed sympathy for the Jan. 6 rioters. He has called vaccine mandates "garbage" and spoke at a recent anti-vaccine rally in Phoenix, where he told supporters, "We're going to find out what kind of patriots you are. We're going to find out who is willing to die for freedom." He also makes direct appeals to citizens, an effort that looks more dangerous after former President Donald Trump riled up supporters on Jan. 6.

For example, Lamb, an ardent defender of the Second Amendment, has spoken in support of the formation of private militias — "well within the Constitution," he told a group of supporters in March — and emphasized the power of sheriffs in Arizona, an open-carry state, to call local civilians into service to "suppress all affrays, insurrections and riots that comes to the attention of the sheriff." Last year, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, he formed a local civilian "posse" to assist his office with law enforcement, even though there were no such protests in Pinal County.

Milwaukee's Sheriff David Clarke, a known vocal supporter of Trump, has also expressed extremist views. In the days leading up to the January 6 insurrection, Clarke even urged Capitol rioters not to comply with law enforcement.

"ALERT!!!," Clarke wrote on Facebook at the time. "If you attended the Trump rally in Washington DC last Wednesday and are contacted by the FBI or they come to your home, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TALK TO THEM. DON'T LET THEM IN YOUR HOME EITHER. POLITELY TELL THEM TO LEAVE AND CLOSE THE DOOR."

"If you did not go into the US Capital (sic) you do not have to explain why you exercised your Constitutional right to assemble," Clarke wrote. "TRUST NO GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL right now."

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