Eliana Willis

Joe Biden’s accession to the US presidency has spawned a huge body of literature about his intentions towards China, but in his four years out of office Biden has in fact made Russia his primary focus in combatting authoritarianism. Now, just days from coming into office, the arrest of the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny has suddenly presented him with a test case, which may also lead to friction with two of his closest allies: Germany and the UK.Germany under Angela Merkel has always resisted a full confrontation with Russia, and has fought hard to keep the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany going, saying it is a commercial not a political issue.But Merkel has met Navalny, who was nursed back to health in the German capital after his poisoning and has been described as “the Berlin patient” by Vladimir Putin, and her government may now feel a personal obligation, beyond rhetoric, to help him. The Putin entourage is already heavily sanctioned by the EU as a result if their repression in Belarus as well as Navalny’s poisoning, so her options for showing disapproval through further individual sanctions is limited. And the Nord Stream 2 project will not be far from Merkel’s thoughts.In the case of the UK, British prime ministers have been rhetorically strong about Russia, but are open to the charge that the rhetoric does not extend to clamping down on the lawyers, accountants and army of estate agents that enable the Russian kleptocracy to invest their corruptly-obtained wealth in London. Chatham House, the sober minded thinktank, is, for instance, hosting an event on Tuesday promoted as follows: “The most startling findings of the ‘Russia’ report from parliament’s intelligence and security committee were not about the extent of Moscow’s malign influence in the UK, but about how unwilling the British government had been to take steps to detect and counter it.“The report identified gaping holes in both awareness of the problem, and legislation to deal with it. A formulaic response from the government promised that at least some of these holes have been plugged”. Six months on, how many holes in measures such as ”unexplained wealth orders”, have been filled?But perhaps by coincidence matters are coming to a head. Since 2019, the threat of US sanctions has left the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline about 94% complete. If finished, the 764-mile (1,230km) pipeline will terminate in Lubmin, a coastal village in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and more than double Germany’s imports of Russian natural gas.On Friday, Germany’s federal maritime authority approved extending the project’s operational time frame because of “unforeseen delays outside German waters”.Since US sanctions would target private companies involved in the project, the state government of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania has gone to the lengths of establishing a public foundation that could take over the potentially sanctionable activity. Germany believes the US would not have the nerve to sanction a public body, even though this foundation is largely Russian funded.Nicholas Burns the former US assistant secretary of state suggested to the German business newspaper Handelsblatt this week that if Germany suspended construction of the pipeline the US could lift sanctions.Equally, the UK as host of the G7 summit in June looks as if it is going to revive the anti-corruption drive David Cameron started the last time Britain held the event.The west has been hampered in the past four years by the fatal ambiguity of US policy towards Russia. The State Department had been willing to confront Russia, but Donald Trump remained inexplicably averse to doing anything but indulge Putin.Biden has appointed an experienced team with a deep knowledge of Russia including: William Burns, director of the CIA; Victoria Nuland, deputy secretary of state for political affairs; Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior director for Russia and Central Asia in the future NSC; Kathleen Hicks, first female deputy head of the Pentagon; and Shanthi Kalathil, coordinator for human rights and democracy. Collectively they will try to give Germany clearer signals on US policy to Russia, and both how to combat democratic backsliding in Europe and Russian meddling. The huge cyber-attack on Washington institutions, attributed to Russia’s foreign intelligence, lies heavily on the minds of Congress.Biden has promised that he will make the promotion of democracy his guiding foreign policy principle, including a summit to attack the weapons of the authoritarians. Many have questioned the wisdom of the US presenting itself as the standard bearer of liberal values given its state of crisis.But the attack on the Capitol in Washington has only made his allies more convinced of this agenda, and its relevance to America. So the frontline of the “battlefield” where the new US administration and Russia will confront each other is likely to be extended to the post-Soviet space and will include at least Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia. For all the talk of the rise of China and the implications of the “Asian century” on America, it is the threat posed by the old cold war enemy that for now at least may most exercise the transatlantic alliance. More

When an American president is inaugurated, it’s supposed to mark the height of American democracy and power. The elaborate ceremony is designed to convey the peaceful transfer of power and that no matter how bitter the election, the nation is moving on.But when Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th US president on Wednesday, the ceremony will seem anything but that. America is arriving at the inauguration at an incredibly perilous moment, just two weeks after a violent pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol and several Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the results of the election. For months, Donald Trump has refused to acknowledge Biden as the legitimate winner of the election – a belief shared by legions of his supporters. The ceremony will have a heavy military presence because of threats of violence. Trump isn’t bothering attending.While Trump has accelerated this dangerous moment, it’s been shaped by a deliberate Republican strategy to undermine faith in elections to make it harder to vote. The myth of voter fraud and repeated allusions to elections being stolen have moved from fringe theories to the center of Republican ideology over the last several decades. The refusal to accept the election, and the attack on the Capitol, are a consequence of that strategy.“Donald Trump was definitely the spark and he had many enablers and facilitators, but the kindling had all been laid,” said Wendy Weiser, director of the Democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The strategy has been to slowly, steadily, undermine Americans’ faith in the security of elections, increase their belief in the existence of widespread voter fraud so as to enable them to accept what would otherwise be perceived as a really illegitimate and anti-democratic agenda of restricting access to voting.”For years, Republicans have used misleading and faulty data to suggest that elections are at risk of fraud. In Kansas, Kris Kobach, the former secretary of state, used the threat of non-citizen voting to justify a law requiring people to prove their citizenship when they registered to vote (the law has since been blocked by a federal court). Conservative lawyers in recent years have also used misleading data analyses to suggest that voter rolls are filled with ineligible voters.By 2016, when Trump claimed that voter fraud cost him the popular vote, it fit neatly into the narrative the Republican party was beginning to embrace.Two years later, there were signs that questioning election results were moving to Republican orthodoxy. Paul Ryan, then serving as speaker of the House, said it was “bizarre” and “weird” that Republicans fell behind in California races as more mail-in ballots were counted after election night. When Trump started making similar claims last spring and summer that mail-in ballots would lead to fraud and cost him the election, few Republicans objected.The party began to attack ballot drop boxes and mail-in voting, something Republicans long relied on. When Trump claimed there was something amiss as states continued to count ballots after election day, Republicans – with a few exceptions – supported him too. The rhetoric began to have real consequences, as supporters started protesting at vote counting sites and harassing workers trying to count ballots during November’s election.And by the time of electoral college certification, the effort to undermine faith in the vote had gone so far that it made it possible for two-thirds of the House Republican caucus and a dozen senators to back the idea of throwing out the election results entirely.“It’s gone from voter fraud in a particular election to ‘stolen election’,” said Lorraine Minnitte, a professor at Rutgers University-Camden, who has studied allegations of voter fraud. “I don’t think it would have been as successful if the fraud myth hadn’t been planted a long time ago.”Kobach, a Trump ally who briefly led a White House panel to investigate voter fraud, said it was “entirely appropriate” for members of Congress to object to the certification of electoral college votes. He noted that since 2000, Democrats had objected repeatedly to the counting of electoral college votes for Republican presidential winners (in all of those cases, however, the effort was not supported by the Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, who had already conceded the race).He dismissed the idea that there was any connection between raising concerns about election fraud and the attack on the Capitol.“I’ve talked about voter fraud to small audiences and very, very large audiences over 100 times. Maybe multiple hundreds of times. Never has it inflamed passions so that people want to go march on something and break windows,” he told the Guardian. “The idea that talking about the integrity of our elections is inflammatory is idiotic.”Kobach, who built a national reputation by focusing on voter fraud, also downplayed the significance of a Biden presidency in which a significant number of people do not accept him as a legitimately elected figure.“I would say it’s going to be very similar to the last four years where you had many on the left thinking Donald Trump wasn’t legitimately elected because they believed Russian interference caused him to be elected,” he said. “You will have many on the right harboring doubts as to whether the results in those five states were accurate accounts of legal votes in those five states, but I don’t think it’s going to be all that different.”Hillary Clinton conceded the election to Trump the day after the polls closed in 2016.Since last week’s electoral college vote, several businesses have announced they are pausing donations to the Republican members of Congress who voted against upholding election results. The pause comes after business interests for years have supported conservative groups that have facilitated voter ID laws and extreme partisan gerrymandering that allowed Republicans to take votes without fear of the consequences.“People were willing to tolerate this anti-democratic conduct up to a point. And then when it boiled over, when it became so extreme that people couldn’t ignore it, then they became willing to repudiate it,” Weiser said. “Seeing it so vividly all at once has broken that complacency.”Biden will be inaugurated on Wednesday on the Capitol’s west front amid a growing rejection of that complacency. But convincing Trump’s supporters that the election was legitimate and overcoming the doubt sowed in American elections may be an impossible task. We may have only begun to see the consequences of the damage. More

Joe Biden will deliver a message of national unity when he assumes the presidency on Wednesday, seeking to begin healing a country fractured by the acrimony of Donald Trump’s administration and ongoing threats of violence by his supporters.The preview of the theme of Biden’s inauguration address came as cities across the US braced for violent protests and Washington DC resembled a fortress with up to 25,000 national guard troops deployed.“It’s a message of moving this country forward, it’s a message of unity, it’s a message of getting things done,” Ron Klain, the incoming White House chief of staff, told CNN’s State of the Union.“There’s no question we’ve seen the most divisive four years in over a century from President Trump, it’s one reason Joe Biden ran, to restore the soul of America. The events of the past few weeks have proven out just how damaged the soul of America has been, and how important it is to restore it. That work starts on Wednesday.”Biden will act quickly to reverse many of Trump’s most controversial policies, Klain said, beginning with a 10-day flurry of executive orders that will return the US to the Paris climate agreement and Iran nuclear deal, aim to speed the delivery of Covid-19 vaccines and erase the immigration ban on Muslim-majority countries.The promise of new beginnings, however, is set against the backdrop of threats of domestic terrorism this weekend and around the inauguration. Throughout the day on Sunday, small groups of rightwing protesters gathered outside statehouses across the country, outnumbered by national guard troops and police. By late afternoon Sunday, no incidents were reported. There was an attack on our people. This was the most terrible crime ever by a president against our countryThe Washington DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, told NBC’s Meet the Press she was concerned about several areas of her city following FBI warnings of armed individuals heading there, and to state capitals, bent on repeating the insurrection that left five dead when a mob incited by Trump overran the US Capitol on 6 January.With the massive national guard presence in Washington, and federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies including the Secret Service working with local police, Bowser said she was confident Wednesday’s inauguration would be “a safe event”.But, she said, “this will be an inauguration unlike any other. It was already destined to be given Covid concerns and limited seating and public access. But having our fellow Americans storm the Capitol, in an attempt to overthrow the government, certainly warrants heightened security.”Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, likened the scene in Washington to Baghdad’s Green Zone, “with so much military presence and barricades”.“I never thought I would see that in our own capital or that it would be necessary, but there was a profound threat from domestic violent extremists of the nature we saw on 6 January,” he said told CBS’s Face the Nation.“There are people coming to the Washington DC area that are bringing weapons, and we see threats to all 50 state capitals. There will be gatherings of individuals and those gatherings could turn violent, so there’s a very high level of risk.”An FBI bulletin warned of the likelihood of violence from armed protesters in Washington and every state capital between 16 and 20 January, Trump’s last day in office. The president, impeached for the second time for inciting the Capitol attack with lies about a stolen election, remained isolated and silent in the White House on Sunday, reportedly assembling a legal team for his Senate trial.Christopher Wray, the FBI director, outlined on Thursday threats by rightwing agitators including QAnon and white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys.“We are seeing an extensive amount of concerning online chatter,” he said. “One of the real challenges is trying to distinguish what’s aspirational versus what’s intentional.”As a precaution, Capitol buildings were boarded up and extra law enforcement resources deployed in numerous states. On Saturday, Washington police arrested a Virginia man found with a fake inaugural ID, a loaded handgun and ammunition. The man later told the Washington Post the he had been working security in the capital all week and pulled up to the checkpoint after getting lost. He told the paper he forgot the gun was in his truck and denied having so much ammunition. He was released after an initial court appearance and is due back in court in June, records show.“We have intelligence that there’s going to be activity around our capital and capitals across the country,” Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas, told Fox News Sunday. “We’re taking necessary precautions to protect our capital and our citizens. I know some governors have beefed up even more, but I think the deterrent value hopefully has diminished that threat level.”In Washington, a large area including the White House, the Capitol, the National Mall and several blocks on either side was sealed off by thousands of national guard troops. High steel fences on concrete stands protected government buildings.In the run-up to the inauguration, troops from DC and neighbouring states will garrison the city. By several measures, it is a bigger response than the aftermath of 9/11. Large numbers of soldiers resting in the corridors of the Capitol, have not been seen since the civil war.The protected area was divided into a highly restricted “red zone” and around that a “green zone” accessible to residents, an echo of the Iraq war, and the fortified government and diplomatic area in central Baghdad.By lunchtime on Sunday, the city was quiet, with white supremacist militia leaders telling followers to stay away.In an email to supporters on Thursday, Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, joined other extremists in begging Trump to declare martial law. But he also told supporters they should not gather at state capitols, warning them of “false-flag traps”.Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the neo-fascist Proud Boys, told USA Today his group was not mobilising, saying: “I feel like this part of the battle is over.”A majority of respondents in a USA Today/Suffolk poll published on Sunday said they were still expecting violence.Trump was consumed on Sunday with his Senate trial for “incitement of insurrection”, which could begin as early as Wednesday afternoon.Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland and the lead impeachment manager, gave a moving interview to CNN in which he recalled the Capitol riot and remembered his son Tommy, who died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 25.“When we went to count the electoral college votes and [the Capitol] came under that ludicrous attack, I felt my son with me and I was most concerned with our youngest daughter and my son in law, who is married to our other daughter, who were with me that day and who got caught in a room off of the House floor,” he said.“In between them and me was a rampaging armed mob, that could have killed them easily. These events are personal to me. There was an attack on our country, there was an attack on our people.“This was the most terrible crime ever by a president of the United States against our country.”Reuters contributed to this report. More

In easier times, the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal church would be crowded, especially on the Sunday morning before a presidential inauguration a few blocks away.In the midst of a pandemic and a security lockdown following the assault on the Capitol, the street outside was almost deserted. Metropolitan AME, one of the city’s oldest Black American churches, has already been vandalised by the white supremacist Proud Boys, while “liberal” churches have been warned they could be targets once more in the days before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take office, and the Donald Trump era ends.“You couldn’t imagine this happening in the United States, for the seat of power to have been overtaken like that,” said Angela Walker, a 63-year-old congregant who had come to work in the church kitchen. “It’s just sad.”Metropolitan AME was one of many churches targeted by a Proud Boys mob in December, when they rampaged through town, destroying Black Lives Matter (BLM) signs and looking for people to fight.Enrique Tarrio, the group’s leader who has been charged over the attack, told USA Today his group was not mobilizing as part of inauguration protests, saying: “I feel like this part of the battle is over.”Walker said: “They were here and they have done a lot of damage.” But she quickly added she was unafraid. “I pray that it stops now. I actually truly believe that they will not hit any of the churches again, not here in this city.”She said her conviction was rooted in her faith but also in the presence of thousands of national guard troops. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks there were US warplanes in the air but fewer soldiers on the ground. Less of Washington was locked down.Blocks to the south of the church were blocked off by the national guard detachments with armoured cars, guarding “green” and “red” zones, an echo of the fortified area of central Baghdad that was part of America’s ill-fated war on terror. The presence of a military garrison in Washington, on a scale not witnessed since the civil war, was a reminder that endemic racism remains a greater menace to national security than any external threat.“We have more troops in Washington than we do in Afghanistan right now and they’re here to protect us from our own president and his mob,” Seth Moulton, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, told the Guardian.The Marine Corps combat veteran said the images from the Capitol this week were “shocking”.“I expected this in Baghdad,” he said. “I never imagined this in Washington.”The area around Metropolitan AME was held by the Pennsylvania national guard, posted at junctions, assault rifles hanging from their body armour.“I never thought in a million years that I would be on patrol in the streets of DC,” said one sergeant who said his unit was deployed in Iraq just before he joined up and last year went on military exercises in North Macedonia, codenamed Decisive Strike, meant to prepare them to meet foreign adversaries.The sergeant hoped the current deployment, defending the seat of government against his fellow countrymen, would go down in history as an aberration.“We’ve been through worse before and got through it,” he said. “Hopefully we can soon all go home.”Thomas Porter, vice-president for government affairs at the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an advocacy group, said: “To many veterans, they’re going to recall the vivid images of their experiences in Baghdad.”The invasion of the halls of Congress, and the knowledge some veterans were part of the mob, has left many veterans angry, Porter said.“We would compare ourselves to countries overseas and we could always depend on a democratic and peaceful transfer of power,” Porter said. “The whole attack on the Capitol was an affront to that.”The heavy military presence represented the closing of a very large stable door after the horse had bolted. The show of force which confronted BLM protests in the summer was glaringly absent when Trump loyalists ransacked the Capitol on 6 January.On Sunday, at BLM Plaza in front of the White House, a few demonstrators talked to journalists near a sign warning: “Domestic terrorists not welcome.”Jade Olivo, 31, had come from New York to demonstrate for Black trans lives. The presence of so many troops in the city was “nerve-racking”, she said. She planned to stay in Washington through inauguration but said she had no idea what the next days might bring.A few blocks to the north, two Washingtonians had paused on a street corner to discuss the strange atmosphere in their city.Emily Turner, 24, had spent part of Saturday walking around the fortified perimeter around Capitol Hill.“I’ve never seen so many guns in my life,” she said.Inauguration is supposed to be a celebratory event, she said, but there was “not so much celebrating going on anywhere”.“It’s just eerie,” said Andy Smith, 33. “I hope it’s not the future of every major event in DC.The militarisation of the Capitol and the shutdowns of businesses, streets and public transportation has had a disproportionate effect on homeless residents of Washington, said Shannon Clark, 27, an organizer with Remora House, a small mutual aid group that distributes supplies. There are small tent encampments throughout downtown, some in close proximity to the Capitol and the White House.“In effect, folks are largely trapped down there,” Clark said. “It’s going to be very difficult for them to get out.”Reports that far-right groups have harassed and targeted unhoused people in the past has only increased concerns, Clark said.On Saturday, Remora House distributed dozens of Metro cards loaded with $10, along with instructions on how to access shelters and stations still open.“People here are hungry,” the group tweeted. “Cold. And scared. People want out.” More

Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterWhen Alison Lopez discovered her uncle’s sister had been part of the mob that breached the Capitol doors on 6 January, she immediately reported her to the FBI. “I had no second thoughts,” she said.Lopez found out about her in-law’s participation when the woman in question called her aunt from inside the Capitol to brag about “taking back the election”. Lopez, who is 42, said she had known the relative her whole life but had “no qualms” about reporting her.“If I saw my grandmother making bombs in her basement, or my aunt breaking into a home, I would have to intervene as well – it’s just about doing what’s right,” she said.In the week after the attacks on the Capitol, there has been a concerted effort to “unmask” rioters online, with self-styled detectives investigating who’s who in videos and photos posted from the attack. Outing family members – either online or to authorities – has marked a new frontier of the rift Trumpism has created in the US.Lopez said she was horrified but not surprised to see a loved one participate in the riot. Over the last four years she has watched helplessly as members of her family became increasingly entrenched in the world of hateful rightwing conspiracy theories.“These are people who never really identified with politics before, and now they have just let this consume their lives,” Lopez said, adding she does not consider herself a Democrat and has voted for Republican candidates in the past.If I saw my grandmother making bombs in her basement … I would have to intervene as well – it’s about doing what’s rightMore than 140,000 people have sent tips to the FBI reporting participants in the riots on the Capitol on 6 January, resulting in at least 200 arrests. The vast majority of those, according to the Department of Justice, come from friends, family, and other acquaintances of those involved in the attacks.The Massachusetts teen Helena Duke received a flood of support this week when she posted a video outing her own mother, aunt and uncle as having attended the Capitol protests.The 18-year-old said her mother, who appears to be harassing a Black woman in the video shared, previously condemned her for attending Black Lives Matter protests. “If I did nothing, I felt I was as bad as them,” Duke told Good Morning America.The decision to report a family member or publicly out them as espousing dangerous views can make a huge impact in stopping the spread of hate speech, said Talia Lavin, an expert in extremism and white supremacist groups and the author of Culture Warlords.“I applaud the bravery of people who have called out people in their own families for this kind of radicalization,” she said. “When people experience ostracization or disavowal from one’s own family, it can lead to a kind of cooling of extremist sentiment, because individuals are for the very first time experiencing a consequence for what they have so proudly engaged in for so long.”Online sleuthing is not new, especially among hate speech and extremism investigators, who have for years hunted down and outed racists and fascist agitators to employers in hopes to foster accountability. But in the aftermath of the insurrection, the practice has gone more mainstream, with journalists, activists and the FBI tweeting out photos and videos of the riot and encouraging followers to investigate them.Online sleuthing has its drawbacks: a Chicago firefighter faced harassment after being falsely identified as the killer of a Capitol police officer through a blurry video image. Another photo was falsely traced to a man pictured on an Antifa website, a tie that has been definitively disproven.But the chance of mistaken identity is much lower when the accusation comes from a family member or loved one. Leslie, a woman in Chicago who asked that her last name not be used in this story, said she and her sister both submitted screenshots of images their mother posted on social media from the steps of the Capitol during the riots to the FBI.Leslie, who considers herself far left politically, said she had watched in horror as vigilantes stormed the Capitol on 6 January, only to learn days later her estranged mother was one of them.“I almost passed out,” she said of the moment she saw the images. “I was really shocked, she was on the scaffolding we saw people climbing on TV. It was such a helpless, horrifying feeling.”Leslie said she and her three siblings all stopped speaking to their parents after they got sucked into QAnon, movement surrounding a disproven conspiracy theory that Donald Trump is saving the world from a secret cabal of child abusers. She said she watched her evangelical mother go from being a devout Christian to posting hate speech on Facebook and aligning herself with the far right.“I am really, really angry that I have essentially lost my family to a cult,” she said. “I am angry that people were not taking the rise of QAnon more seriously. People kept saying, ‘nobody is actually going to do anything, it is just a bunch of idiots online’.”“Well, the people at the Capitol are the people who were looking at this online,” she said. “This is what happens when you don’t do anything.”Leslie is not alone: support groups have emerged in recent years for the countless Americans who have lost loved ones to the conspiracy theory.Leslie said she is hoping a call from the FBI could serve as “kind of wake up call for them”, she said.“Maybe if she gets a call from the authorities she will realize this is not just a game, this is not just something playing out on Facebook. This is real and people got killed,” she said. More

Far right “playbooks” teaching white nationalists how to recruit and radicalise Trump supporters have surfaced on the encrypted messaging app Telegram ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The documents, seen by the Observer, detail how to convert mainstream conservatives who have just joined Telegram into violent white supremacists. They were found last week by Tech Against Terrorism, an initiative launched by the UN counter terrorism executive directorate.
Large numbers of Trump supporters migrated on to Telegram in recent days after Parler, the social media platform favoured by the far right, was forced offline for hosting threats of violence and racist slurs after the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
The documents have prompted concern that far right extremists congregating on Telegram instead of Parler has made it far harder for law enforcement to track where the next attack could come from.
Already, hundreds of suspects threatening violence during this week’s inauguration of Biden have been identified by the FBI.
One of the playbooks, found on a channel with 6,000 subscribers, was specially drawn up to radicalise Trump supporters who had just joined Telegram and teach them “how to have the proper OPSEC [operations security] to keep your identity concealed”.
The four-page document encourages recruiters to avoid being overtly racist or antisemitic initially when approaching Trump supporters, stating: “Trying to show them racial IQ stats and facts on Jewish power will generally leave them unreceptive… that material will be instrumental later on in their ideological journey.
“The point of discussion you should focus on is the blatant anti-white agenda that is being aggressively pushed from every institution in the country, as well as white demographic decline and its consequences.”
The document concludes with its author stating: “Big Tech made a serious mistake by banishing conservatives to the one place [Telegram] where we have unfettered access to them, and that’s a mistake they’ll come to regret!”
The document is named the “comprehensive redpill guide”, a reference to the online term red-pilling, used to describe a conversion to extreme far-right views.
The document adds: “Not every normie can be redpilled, but if they’re receptive and open-minded to hearing what you have to say, you should gradually be sending them edgier pro-white/anti-Zionist content as they move along in their journey.”
Another white nationalist recruitment guide uncovered by Tech Against Terrorism, which is working with global tech firms to tackle terrorist use of the internet, shares seven steps of “conservative conversion”. More

The presidency of Donald Trump may be ending with both a bang and a whimper: one insurrection, two impeachments and no more characters on Twitter. But the legacy he leaves to American politics – and especially the Republican party – will not end neatly with the inauguration of his successor.That’s not just because Trump has toyed openly with the notion of running for president again in four years. Trump may or may not be able or willing to run for elected office again, if he survives his second impeachment trial and the multiple investigations into his business and tax affairs.Whether or not he stalks Washington on social media or television, Trump leaves the nation’s capital having cleaved his own party in two.On one side is the Trumpist base, willing to follow an autocratic leader wherever his whims lead: blowing up democratic and diplomatic norms, while stoking up racial and social divisions. On the other are establishment conservatives, committed to the institutions and culture that have served their traditional priorities: business, national security and suburban privilege.That schism was on display and on the record as 10 House Republicans – including Liz Cheney, the third-ranking Republican leader – voted for Trump’s impeachment this week, joining Democrats for the most bipartisan impeachment vote in American history. That left 197 Republicans voting to support Trump, reflecting the overwhelming sentiment of the party.According to recent polling by Quinnipiac University, Trump may have plunged to a new low of 33% in his approval ratings, but fully 71% of Republicans still think he’s doing a great job as president.Such numbers help explain the wobbling positions of Republican congressional leaders.Senator Mitch McConnell has let it be known that he welcomes Trump’s impeachment but has curiously not taken a position on convicting the outgoing president – except to delay his trial. Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, voted against impeachment while also blaming Trump for inciting insurrection. They are ironically leading a party that once built an entire election campaign around attacking the Democrats for flip-flopping.These are not new divisions for the Republican party: their roots lie in past divisions like Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork rebellion, Ross Perot’s barn-cleaning reforms, Barry Goldwater’s embrace of extremism and Joe McCarthy’s red scare. But no other Republican president since Richard Nixon has left his party in such a conflicted state, and Nixon himself was ejected from the White House by an establishment led by Goldwater himself.Seasoned conservative intellectuals, operatives and analysts are frankly perplexed by what lies ahead.Pete Wehner, a veteran of three Republican administrations and senior fellow at the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center, is a staunch Trump critic who does not see an immediate path beyond Trumpism.“It was confusing to me before this week and it’s probably more confusing to me after this week what the future of the Republican party is,” he said. “The reason I say that is because prior to this week, the populist, nihilistic Trumpist movement was in the stronger position. Now it’s in a weaker position, but it doesn’t mean it’s in a weak position.”Wehner says the party’s challenges go far beyond the current crop of Republicans in Congress.“For all of my criticism of Republican lawmakers – and I have had a lot – I have always believed that the fundamental problem isn’t them,” he said. “It’s the base of the party that is where the pathologies are. They are very attuned to what the base wants and what their constituents want. A lot of them were acting in ways that weren’t true to what they believed or their philosophy. They felt constrained and pressured and intimidated. They are scared of Trump supporters and don’t want to be defeated in primaries.”Since November, the dynamic has changed inside the Republican party but it’s not at all clear that the change is enough to move the party away from its obsession with Trump himself. For all the jockeying among Trump-like figures – such as senators Ted Cruz of Texas or Josh Hawley of Missouri – there may be no oxygen left after Trump consumes it all for the next four years. There may be even less oxygen for less toxic conservatives like Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Trump’s UN ambassador, or the Nebraska senator Ben Sasse.What’s the plan and who are the leaders to do that? There’s no clear answer as of right now“Before 6 January, there was a much more complex coalition of factions inside the Trump GOP,” says Kevin Madden, a former senior aide to Mitt Romney and congressional Republican leaders. “There was a variation of Trump supporters and skeptics who were at least united against what they believed were the excesses of the political left. That’s how he enjoyed a 90% approval rating.“After January 6, there was a shift and the fracture in the party is more obvious and out in the open. Now it’s a split between Republicans devoted to the rule of law and those who are devoted to Donald Trump above all else. It’s too early to tell how deep that fracture is and whether it can ever be repaired but, as of right now, those devoted to Donald Trump outnumber the others.”Madden is skeptical that anybody can challenge Trump’s hold on the party while he remains a vocal president-in-exile.“Anyone who believes that they can just draft behind him and build or maintain support with his base while Trump himself fades out is embarking on a fool’s errand,” he says. “This was the conceit of the entire 2016 field, thinking Trump was someone else’s fight. Trump has to be confronted, otherwise the party will look and sound like him for the next 15 years. That’s the question for the so-called establishment. What’s the plan and who are the leaders to do that? There’s no clear answer as of right now.”One clear sign of Trump’s domination is that there is no substantive debate about what amounts to Trump’s policy legacy.There is little dispute about the wisdom of Trump’s massive deficit spending, even as Republicans say they will reject deficit spending by the Biden administration. There is little soul-searching about the nativist anti-immigrant policies of the Trump years, including the forced separation of children at the border. And there’s almost no dispute about Trump’s catastrophic response to the pandemic – from his opposition to mask-wearing, to his failures of testing and tracing, to the botched rollout of mass vaccinations.“He hasn’t weakened the Republican party in all respects,” said Wehner. “It’s true that the Democrats have the Senate and the House and the presidency. There’s no question there’s been some cost. But there’s also no empirical doubt that Trump brought in new people and the party won down-ballot in ways that people didn’t foresee. I can’t say that Trump has been a catastrophe for the party when at the state level they are doing pretty well.”Still, Wehner believes that the best outcome for Republicans is an open dispute about its future: “In my view, a figurative civil war is better than the alternative, which is a massacre of the good guys. Our best hope is that there’s a fight for the soul of the party.”Could that dispute lead to a permanent rupture in the party? The United States has a poor track record with third parties, unlike European politics, where multi-party legislatures have long represented the status quo.Michael Barone, the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics and a conservative analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, has heard it all before. “In my 60-plus years of observing these things, I’ve seen numerous prophecies that the Republican party was going out of business, and none of those prophecies has yet come true,” he said “I suppose one will some day.” More

When Donald Trump leaves the White House on 20 January, reports indicate that he will not return to his home town of New York City but rather, reside at his Mar-a-Lago home in south Florida. Indeed, Trump formally changed his residency to the so-called Sunshine State in fall 2019.Trump’s seemingly permanent departure to a state known for its large population of elderly retirees marks the end of an era in New York, the city where he grew up and moved from its suburbs of Queens to become an icon of brash Manhattan style and wealth in the 1970s and 1980s.“He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid 70s, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock,” the New York Times reported in 1983. “Donald John Trump exhibited a flair for self-promotion, grandiose schemes – and, perhaps not surprisingly, for provoking fury along the way.”Trump’s flashiness arguably encapsulated the unapologetic financial excesses of the 1980s and beyond with him sticking his family name on seemingly everything he got his hands on. There have been 17 properties in New York City that bore Trump’s name over time, NBC News reported.Trump became a tabloid fixture, feeding the papers stories about himself, according to the Hollywood Reporter and other outlets. One of them was the famed New York Post cover about his relationship with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. The headline read: “Marla boasts to her pals about Donald: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD.’”Trump even had a cameo in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Macaulay Culkin, as the star Kevin, asks him for directions to the lobby of the Plaza hotel, which Trump owned at that time.While Trump’s cultural cachet was bizarre, it had power. Director Chris Columbus said in a December interview with Insider that Trump “did bully his way into the movie” by demanding that he get a role in return for allowing shooting to take place at the Plaza.The majority of New Yorkers are not mourning Trump’s departure. They long seemed ready for it.When news emerged that Trump was changing his residency, Governor Andrew Cuomo said in as statement: “Good riddance. It’s not like Mr Trump paid taxes here anyway. He’s all yours, Florida.”Cuomo’s reaction encapsulated the feelings of many residents. New York is a blue state, and the city still more liberal; since Trump took office, there have routinely been demonstrations against White House policies outside his eponymous properties.New Yorkers’ dislike of Trump hit new highs last spring. His administration’s mishandling of coronavirus was felt especially deeply in New York City, an early US center of the pandemic. City and state officials begged a seemingly uninterested Trump for help.“How on earth do you think that New York City can get back on its feet without federal support?” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “Mr President, are you going to save New York City, or are you telling New York City to drop dead?”Cuomo, speaking of the coronavirus-spurred financial crisis in September, remarked: “Trump is actively trying to kill New York City. It is personal. I think it’s psychological. He is trying to kill New York City.”Since many New Yorkers feel this way, it’s not surprising that Trump and his clan have nothing left for them here, except for a sea of legal problems.De Blasio announced this week that New York City was cutting its contracts with Trump’s companies for his involvement in spurring a deadly attack on the Capitol. That means Trump will lose $17m in deals to run the Central Park Carousel, Wollman and Lasker skating rinks, and Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx, according to ABC News.Trump’s cronies speculate that Trump’s departure from New York City could also include his business interests, given his dislike of local and state officials, ABC News reported. Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney and state attorney general are investigating Trump’s financial dealings.Trump’s departure from the White House also means that civil litigation against him here might finally proceed, as he can no longer cite presidential duties in efforts to delay proceedings.Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, are not expected to be welcomed in New York City’s elite circles when they leave Washington, according to reports. They purchased a $30m property in Miami’s luxe Indian Creek village.Donald Trump Jr and girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle are also relocating to Florida and are eyeing homes in Jupiter. “There is no way they can stay in New York. They’d be tortured in the streets,” a source told the New York Post of Junior’s impending move.As Trump and his family try building a new life, and potential Maga capital, in south Florida, the ostracism they faced in New York might follow them to some degree. Ivanka and Kushner might struggle with the south Florida social scene.The New York Post quoted a source saying: “The Indian Creek country club members are very picky and the word is that Javanka need not apply.”Even Trump’s appearance in Home Alone 2 has come into question, with Culkin supporting social media commentary in favor of removing Trump from the movie. More