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    Portland: leftwing protesters damage Oregon Democrats’ headquarters

    A group of mostly leftwing and anarchist protesters carrying signs against Joe Biden and police marched in Portland on inauguration day and damaged the headquarters of the Democratic party of Oregon, police said.Portland has been the site of frequent protests, many involving violent clashes between officers and demonstrators, ever since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. Over the summer, there were demonstrations for more than 100 straight days.Some in the group of about 150 people in the protest smashed windows and spray-painted anarchist symbols at the political party building.Police said eight arrests were made in the area. Some demonstrators carried a sign reading “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge!” in response to “police murders” and “imperialist wars”. Others carried a banner declaring “We Are Ungovernable”.Police said on Twitter that officers on bicycles had entered the crowd to contact someone with a weapon and to remove poles affixed to a banner that they thought could be used as a weapon.Police said the crowd swarmed the officers and threw objects at authorities, who used a smoke canister to get away.The group was one of several that gathered in the city on inauguration day, police said. A car caravan in the city celebrated the transition of presidential power and urged policy change, the Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Another group gathered around 5pm in north-east Portland with speakers talking about police brutality.Ted Wheeler, the mayor, has decried what he described as a segment of violent agitators who detract from the message of police accountability and should be subject to more severe punishment.A group of about 100 people also marched in Seattle on Wednesday, where police said windows were broken at a federal courthouse and officers arrested three people. The crowd called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, outside the federal immigration court, several people set fire to an American flag, the Seattle Times reported. More

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    Joe Biden starts presidency by signing executive orders – video

    Joe Biden wasted no time as the newly elected president of the United States by signing a flurry of executive orders on issues including Covid-19, immigration and the environment.
    Some of the executive actions undo policies from Donald Trump’s administration, including halting the travel ban from Muslim-majority countries, and ending the national emergency declaration used to justify funding construction of a wall on the US-Mexico border
    Joe Biden marks start of presidency with flurry of executive orders More

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    Huge fireworks display concludes Joe Biden's inauguration day – video

    The inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States concluded with a spectacular fireworks display over Washington DC, with Biden and the first lady watching from the White House.
    The newly-elected president took the opportunity to underline the importance of ‘unity’ in a democracy while the vice-president, Kamala Harris, said Biden was calling on people to have the ‘courage to see beyond crisis’ More

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    Obama, Clinton and Bush congratulate Biden on presidency – video

    Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush and Bill Clinton spoke together at the inauguration of Joe Biden and underlined the importance of a peaceful transfer of power. 
    The former leaders highlighted the importance of listening to people with different opinions and recognising our common humanity More

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    The star-packed inauguration special: a dull yet competent plea for unity

    It goes without saying that Wednesday’s smooth, benignly star-studded inauguration for Joe Biden was a startling change of pace for Washington – the stark, horrifying images of teargas and Maga rioters storming the nation’s Capitol two weeks ago replaced with masked celebrities, odes to American diversity, and earnest, if likely unreciprocated, calls for healing. Capping this secure (thanks to nearly 25,000 national guardsmen), surprisingly smooth event was the 90-minute celebrity extravaganza known as Celebrating America, a collection of musical performances, tributes to America’s essential workers, and nods to better days ahead that played like a technically competent, mostly seamless Zoom telethon for unity.The special benefitted from perhaps the perfect choice as host: Tom Hanks, the beloved everyman actor and one of the few cultural figures on whom most Americans can agree (and also the celebrity whose coronavirus diagnosis on 11 March 2020 was, for many, the moment the direness of the pandemic really sank in). In front of the Lincoln Memorial, the actor most associated with bone-deep decency and ordinary heroism held together a staccato and still-surreal pandemic mix of socially distanced live footage and desktop webcam aesthetics.[embedded content]The evening was ostensibly, in title and structure, intended to honor such Hanksian heroism on the national stage; the zippy 90 minutes was delineated by category of American hero – those who, as title cards spelled out, “feed us” (food pantry workers, farmers), care for us (nurses and medical professionals), teach us (teachers), supply us (delivery workers), among others – represented by single private citizens from around the country.Ordinary heroism quickly bowed to celebrity culture, however, as each hero introduced musical performances, some live and some pre-taped, that cut across generation and genre: Bruce Springsteen, a cringeworthy rendition of Here Comes the Sun by Bon Jovi in Miami, the Foo Fighters coming for your throat with hope for the future, Justin Timberlake doing his Memphis thing with Better alongside Ant Clemons, Katy Perry closing the evening with Firework to some admittedly impressive fireworks over DC. The more successful performances leaned into the heady emotions of the day: anticipation (John Legend’s beautiful take on Feelin’ Good), grief (Yolanda Adams’s performance of Hallelujah, soundtracking a recap of nationwide memorials to the 400,000 Americans now lost to the coronavirus), joyful silliness (Broadway singers hamming it up in a virtual collaboration with the energy of your cousin jumping into the Zoom call two mimosas deep).[embedded content]Still, the cumulative effect of several bland to outright cringingly hollow performances (specifically, Tim McGraw and Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard’s duet on the colorblind country dud Undivided) gave the evening the feel of a come-down from a previous high. Celebrity tributes to American resilience from Eva Longoria and Lin-Manuel Miranda, brief addresses from Biden and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, that hit all the requisite notes, and an almost endearingly awkward riff on peaceful transfers of power from Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama (standing 6ft apart) peppered the evening with gestures of lost stability and hope. But Celebrating America felt less like a party than a denouement from the day’s earlier celebrations, especially the youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s unassailable performance – a parade of good intentions back to the ordinariness of performing American optimism, albeit with social distancing protocols and celebrity webcams.But if I come across as a grouch about this show, it’s only because I’m thrilled to have a bar for national celebrations and observance of presidential power that is not below the ground. After four years of a presidency that ignored basic science, elevated white supremacy and plunged the turbo-charged news cycle to ridiculous depths of stupidity, to suffer blandness feels like a blessing. To begrudge a little corniness, celebrity, or a slightly awkward performance? A luxury. The stakes in Celebrating America felt soothingly low, at worst annoying, sometimes silly, never sinister – not perfect, but beyond welcome. More

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    QAnon's 'Great Awakening' failed to materialize. What's next could be worse

    Shortly before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Dave Hayes – a longtime QAnon influencer who goes by the name Praying Medic – posted a photo of dark storm clouds gathering over the US Capitol on the rightwing social media platform Gab. “What a beautiful black sky,” he wrote to his 92,000 followers, appending a thunderclap emoji.The message was clear to those well-versed in QAnon lore: “the Storm” – the day of reckoning when Donald Trump and his faithful allies in the military would declare martial law, round up all their many political enemies, and send them to Guantánamo Bay for execution by hanging – was finally here. 20 January 2021 wouldn’t mark the end of Trump’s presidency, but the beginning of “the Great Awakening”.Instead, Trump slunk off to Florida and Biden took the oath of office under a clear blue sky. Now QAnon adherents are left to figure out how to move forward in a world that, time and time again, has proven impervious to their fevered fantasies and fascistic predictions. And while some seem to be waking up to reality, others are doubling down, raising concerns among experts that the movement is ripe for even more extreme radicalization.Extremists view this as a great opportunity to do a mass red-pilling“My primary concern about this moment is the Q to JQ move,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, referring to “the Jewish question”, a phrase that white nationalists and neo-Nazis use to discuss their antisemitic belief that Jews control the world. Friedberg said that he had seen clear signs that white nationalists and alt-right figures, who have long disliked QAnon because it focused the Maga movement’s energies away from the “white identity movement”, were preparing to take advantage.“They view this as a great opportunity to do a mass red-pilling,” he said.Travis View, a co-host of the podcast QAnon Anonymous who has studied the movement closely for years, concurred. “The greatest risk is that people who become disillusioned in QAnon are going to these channels where they might be recruited by white nationalists or other extremists,” he said. “In QAnon world, they already believed that George Soros and the Rothschilds controlled the world. It’s not that far to go from ‘there’s a globalist cabal’ to ‘there’s a Jewish conspiracy’.”The storm that didn’t comeAs Biden took the oath of office just before noon on Wednesday, a QAnon channel on Telegram lit up with laments. “We’ve been lied to,” wrote one person. “I think we have been fooled like no other,” another responded, adding: “Hate to say it. Held on to hope til this very moment.” “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” said a third. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”“Anyone else feeling beyond let down right now?” read a popular post on a QAnon message board. “It’s like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and realize it was a lump of coal the whole time.”QAnon adherents are used to dealing with predictions that have not come true. The conspiracy theory began in October 2017 when an anonymous internet user posing as a government insider posted on 4chan that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, that her passport had been flagged, and that the government was preparing for “massive riots”. None of that happened, nor did any of the myriad other arrests, declassifications, executions, resignations or revelations that the anonymous poster, who came to be known as Q, has promised believers for the past three years. But the movement has nevertheless grown in size and influence, becoming a meaningful force in the Republican party and a motivating factor for many of the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January.“A lot of QAnon followers are expressing a lot of anger and disillusionment and feeling they are being misled,” said View, who expects the movement to “fracture” as followers grapple with the end of Trump’s presidency. “There may be people who fall off quietly because they were just along for the ride and it isn’t fun any more, but these kind of movements will always have true believers. Over and over again we’ve seen huge dis-confirming events that didn’t cause people to lose faith.”That resilience in false belief was apparent among some QAnon followers on Wednesday. They took solace in the number of flags placed on the dais when Trump gave farewell remarks from a military base before departing on Air Force One: there were 17, which followers interpreted as a secret message to them, since “Q” is the 17th letter of the alphabet.Others returned to the process of “baking” – or reinterpreting through their obscure and esoteric epistemology – the thousands of missives that Q has posted over the years, in order to find a new way to understand the unfolding events, and to tell themselves that Q was right all along. “Like many of you, I am in shock by today’s [events] and then I realized why it had to happen and that Q told us it would happen and, why this NEEDED to happen,” read one popular post on a QAnon forum, which went on to detail a new theory that explains why Q’s false predictions were in fact correct.One of the most important figures in QAnon, Ron Watkins, appeared ready to call it quits, writing to his more than 100,000 followers on Telegram: “We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able.”Watkins is the son of Jim Watkins, the owner of the message boards that Q relied on to make anonymous posts, 8chan and 8kun. When Q stopped posting new material on 8kun following the November election, Watkins began promoting a steady stream of baseless allegations of election fraud to a large Twitter audience.View warned that Watkins’s statements should not be taken at face value, noting that after the election he claimed that he would stop running 8kun in order to focus on his woodworking. “Instead, he filled the vacuum of Q by spreading conspiracy theories,” View said. “I would be wary of anything Ron Watkins says.”No reason to stopWatkins made his pronouncement on Telegram, a messaging app that has seen its QAnon community explode in the wake of recent crackdowns by Facebook and Twitter. Sweeping bans on QAnon influencers and communities since 6 January and the deplatforming of Parler have forced QAnon communities to attempt to reconstitute on alternative social media platforms, including Telegram and Gab, sites that have long been the haven of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and the dregs of the alt-right.The QAnon narrative has always been fundamentally antisemitic (the “globalist cabal” is a remix of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while another major QAnon belief is a modern remaking of the blood libel), but many of the top QAnon influencers shied away from overt antisemitism, leaving it to posters on 8kun while promoting a slightly more sanitized version of QAnon on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.“Now that QAnon has coalesced on alt-tech, where Nazis have had a few years of head start, organized antisemitism is even fewer clicks away,” warned Friedberg.Friedberg also anticipates that some QAnon followers will choose to follow a path “from the esoteric to the neoconservative” rather than adopting white nationalism. This countercurrent of the movement is focused on exalting American militarism and patriotism, and opposing communism, especially the Chinese Communist party.Ultimately, Friedberg said, Trump’s departure will only help reinforce the “underdog mentality” and sense of grievance that has defined QAnon since the beginning, ensuring that the movement won’t just disappear.“The things that they hate are still there,” Friedberg said. “The fetishization of Trump is certainly real, but the hatred of the ‘deep state’, of communists, of liberals, antifa – all these institutions are still there, and they won.”“That underdog mentality, which was illogical when Trump was president, is now justified,” he added. “There’s no reason to stop hating.” More

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    The preparation for an inauguration like no other – a photo essay

    A presidency like no other ended in an inauguration like no other. The twin forces of Covid-19 and domestic terrorism bent the event – and its host city – out of shape. There were no cheering crowds on the Mall and this was no “shining city on a hill”. Instead Washington DC was wrapped in perimeter fencing, road barricades and security checkpoints. Meanwhile 20,000 troops from the national guard patrolled a Capitol that had been sacked two weeks earlier by insurrectionists wishing to overturn the election result. We asked the photographer Jordan Gale to record this extraordinary inauguration – he has been in the city since Saturday – and he captured these sombre images that reflect a city, and country, in the grip of terror and anxiety. – John Mulholland More