US Politics

While law enforcement officials in Washington ought to be held accountable for their alleged culpability in the deadly violence at the US Capitol earlier this month, and the off-duty cops and members of the military who participated in it ought to be disciplined, the attempted auto-coup cannot solely be understood through the lens of policing and security. At least as much responsibility lies with the billionaire donors and corporate interests – in other words, the capitalists – who made this moment possible.Already a picture of the individuals, organizations, and institutions who lent their weight to the movement that stormed Congress has begun to emerge. Last year, the secretive and influential Council for National Policy (CNP), which author Anne Nelson describes as “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” called for state legislators in six swing states to reject Joe Biden’s election victory. CNP leaders were scheduled to speak at the rally on the morning of 6 January, where Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol.Carrie Severino, president of the Judicial Crisis Network, which has contributed millions to the Republican Attorneys General Association (Raga), listed as one of the participating organizations in the rally. Raga’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol ahead of the 6 January rally, at which the former chairman of Raga, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, spoke. But major donors to Raga include not only rightwing bogeymen like Koch Industries, Walmart, or the Adelson family but also household corporate names like Comcast, Amazon and TikTok.Likewise, although Koch Industries is the single largest corporate donor to Republican representatives who pledged to try to overturn the election results, the next biggest contributors included defense companies like Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, as well as tech (Amazon) and finance (Goldman Sachs) and insurance (Aflac), according to the Center for Media and Democracy. And while Charles Koch has maintained a posture of personal ambivalence, verging on distaste, for Donald Trump, super Pacs heavily funded by the donor network he and his late brother founded have spent millions supporting congressional Republicans who rejected the outcome of the 2020 election.Dick Uihlein, the chief executive of the Uline shipping company and a contributor to the Koch donor network, spent at least $2m getting Josh Hawley elected to the US Senate and has contributed more than $4m to the Tea Party Patriots, another one of the 11 groups listed as participating in the Stop the Steal coalition. In 2019, more than $20m was funneled through DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund that disguises the source of major giving to nonprofits, to a dozen organizations that would ultimately contest the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, including $103,000 to Tea Party Patriots. In a statement provided to the Intercept, Tea Party Patriots cofounder Jenny Beth Martin denied spending any money on the Stop the Steal rally and condemned the violence that occurred.Investigative journalists will continue to trace and disentangle the funding networks that facilitated 6 January. The list of names will grow longer; the sum of individual and corporate contributions greater. But already it is clear that what happened at the Capitol was not just the unintended consequence of specific capitalists’ ill-advised campaign donations; it was an expression of a deeper, ongoing crisis of capitalism, and the ruling class’s (sometimes contradictory) attempts to manage that crisis.According to a report released late last year by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness, the 651 billionaires in the United States added more than $1tn to their collective wealth since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, bringing the total to slightly more than $4tn. Meanwhile, the racialized distribution of labor in the United States – the concentration of workers of color in both essential industries, where they are more likely to be exposed to the pandemic, and service and hospitality industries, where layoffs have been rampant – means that Black, Latino, and Native Americans are significantly more likely to be hospitalized and die of Covid-19 than non-Hispanic white Americans. This serves as a stark reminder of the white supremacist character of the decades-long effort to defang and declaw the American labor movement – an effort funded and organized by the same far-right capitalists who laid the groundwork for 6 January.The Capitol siege was just one battle in an ongoing, decades-long assault on democracy. Racist ideologues have served as the vanguard, but they have long been supported (sometimes openly, often tacitly) by a wide swathe of capitalists. The ultranationalist Maga diehards, Qanon cultists, and various fascists that stormed the Capitol are shock troops searching for a leader. Trump will likely prove too self-absorbed, too cowardly, and too lazy for the job. But no matter how many arrests are made or officials fired, the tide of history has returned us to the rocky shores of political violence and mass upheaval. More

A secretive billionaire supporter of Josh Hawley and other rightwing lawmakers suggested he had been “deceived” by the Republican senator from Missouri, who led the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Jeffrey Yass is a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group – headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a critical swing state – who has donated tens of millions of dollars to hardline Republican groups who supported Donald Trump’s effort to invalidate his defeat at the polls by Joe Biden.Yass privately told a longtime associate he had not foreseen how his contributions would lead to attempts to overturn US democracy.“Do you think anyone knew Hawley was going to do that?” Yass wrote to Laura Goldman, a former stockbroker who has known him for more than three decades.“Sometimes politicians deceive their donors.”Yass, who does not give interviews and generally avoids publicity, also told Goldman he did not believe the 2020 election had been “stolen”, even though he has directly and indirectly supported rightwing Republicans who have repeatedly – and falsely – sought to discredit the results.The latest fallout of the 6 January attempt to invalidate the election, in which 147 Republicans in Congress objected to electoral college results in the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, comes as both Hawley and his donors face pressure and criticism for his role.Hawley has said he objected to the counting of electoral votes in order to instigate a “debate” on the issue of election integrity. He has denied that his actions helped to incite the violent outburst and breach of the Capitol in which five people died, including a police officer.Goldman told the Guardian she emailed Yass because she was upset to learn about his support for Hawley and other Republicans, especially since the lawmakers were seeking to invalidate the election results in their home state, Pennsylvania, which helped Biden clinch the White House.“I approached Jeff Yass upset after reading the Guardian’s article [about his involvement in donations] because I was shocked he would allow my vote and the vote of his neighbors to possibly be invalidated by politicians to whom he gives millions of dollars,” she said.She added: “Yass lives here. He knows local politicians … he could simply call them and ask questions if he thought the election results were funky, which they absolutely were not. He doesn’t need Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, or Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, to question the election results in the state that he has lived almost 40 years.”Goldman published snippets of Yass’s private remarks to her on Twitter. The Guardian was able to verify the authenticity of the statements.Yass, a trader and poker aficionado who is an active Republican donor and has been a force in Pennsylvania elections, donated about $30m to conservative Super Pacs in the 2020 election cycle, making him the eighth-largest donor in the election, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.Most of those donations were made to the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that in 2018 and 2020 supported 42 Republican hardliners who ultimately voted to overturn election results even after insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol.The Club for Growth has been a major back of both Hawley and Cruz, his partner in seeking to invalidate the election.Yass has not responded to requests for comment from the Guardian. Nor has he responded to questions about whether he will continue to donate to the Club for Growth or whether he discussed issues with Hawley and others. Goldman said she sought out a discussion with him in part because she knows he is a “hands on” political donor.The Club for Growth did not respond to a request for comment. The group’s president, David McIntosh, has been an avid supporter of some of most anti-democratic lawmakers elected in 2020, including Lauren Boebert, a QAnon follower and gun rights advocate from Colorado who has been criticized for tweeting the location of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, during the riot in the Capitol, against the advice of police.In an endorsement of Boebert in July 2020, McIntosh lauded the the restaurant owner and political novice for her understanding of the “irreparable harm” caused by “government overreach” and said he had no doubt Boebert would be a “conservative firebrand” in Washington.Yass told Goldman he donated to the Club for Growth a year ago and suggested he could not have anticipated what Hawley and others might do.But public records show Yass also donated $2.5m to the Protect Freedom Pac on 10 November 2020, a week after the US election. The Protect Freedom Pac, affiliated with the Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul, ran advertisements against Democrats ahead of two January runoff elections in Georgia, including ads that claimed Democrats were seeking to defund the police, institute “socialist healthcare” and raise “trillions in new taxes”.The Protect Freedom Pac’s website currently – and falsely – states that Democrats “stole” the 2020 election and used the Covid-19 crisis to illegally change election laws. It has also endorsed an in-person voter ID law, a policy that would disproportionately block minority voters.Yass has received far less attention than other billionaire donors, such as Mike Bloomberg or the late Sheldon Adelson, but has been known to get involved in local politics, donating money to candidates who support charter schools.Goldman told the Guardian Yass has been a longtime supporter of the Republican majority in the Pennsylvania legislature that led the fight to stop mail-in ballots from being counted until election day. Pennsylvania’s final results were not known until days after the election and Biden’s victory was clinched in large part because of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots that were counted after in-person ballots.Hawley’s office did not respond to a request for comment. More

The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, has suggested comments by Donald Trump that encouraged an insurrectionist mob to storm the US Capitol were “incredibly disappointing” and led to a “terrible” outcome.
In his first media outing since returning from a week’s holiday, Morrison distanced himself from the outgoing US president, noting the two weren’t friends before he became prime minister.
Morrison on Monday also downplayed suggestions that deaths among some “very aged” people who took the Pfizer vaccine in Norway could impact Australia’s rollout.
Earlier in January, Morrison said he hoped for a peaceful transfer of power in the US as he condemned rioters for “terribly distressing” acts of violence in storming the Capitol building.
But the Liberal leader stopped short of criticising Trump for encouraging the crowd to travel to Washington DC, and for later describing them as “very nice people”. His reluctance to admonish Trump earned Morrison a rebuke from his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, who said his response was “tepid”.

Scott Morrison
(@ScottMorrisonMP)
Very distressing scenes at the US Congress. We condemn these acts of violence and look forward to a peaceful transfer of Government to the newly elected administration in the great American democratic tradition.

January 6, 2021

The acting prime minister, Michael McCormack, managed firmer criticism of Trump, last week describing the president’s refusal to concede defeat and his inflammatory tweets as “unfortunate”.
On Monday, Morrison told 2GB he had spoken to president-elect Joe Biden “not long after” the election and Australia had done work “behind the scenes” to engage with like-minded countries about the transition in the US.
“America is going through a very terrible time at the moment – but [we’re] looking forward to the country uniting and moving on from these terrible last few months and particularly these last few weeks,” Morrison said.
He distanced himself from Trump, saying he had “worked closely” with him as prime minister but countered suggestions they were friends, observing he didn’t know Trump before he became prime minister.
Morrison described events in the US as “deeply distressing” and recent “actions” as “very disappointing”.
Pressed if he thought Trump’s actions were disappointing, he said: “I’ve echoed the comments of other leaders about those things. I think it was very disappointing that things were allowed to get to that stage.
“The things that were said, that it encouraged others to come to the Capitol and engage in that way, were incredibly disappointing, very disappointing, and the outcomes were terrible.”
Morrison said it was not for him to “provide lectures to anybody” but it was important for the American people to come together behind their “elected president” and continue as a close friend and strong ally of Australia. “We look forward to working with president Biden and his whole team.”
During a trip to the US in 2019, Morrison attended a Trump rally in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and praised Trump’s political priorities, expressing a view that the pair “share a lot of the same views”.
In December, Trump awarded Morrison, and the prime minister accepted, a legion of merit, America’s highest military honour.
Morrison on Monday also addressed reports of potential adverse reactions to the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine in Norway, where authorities said they could not rule out the vaccine had contributed to the deaths of patients with severe underlying disease.
Morrison said the cases were “distressing” but downplayed the incidence of adverse reactions among “the total volume of vaccinations that have been provided”.
He said the people “who have sadly passed away – they’re very aged people, they were in the last phases of life and very frail”.
“This can happen with vaccinations. We know that,” Morrison said.
“That’s why it’s important we’re very careful – people know my view on the vaccines has always been safety first, health first. Let’s make sure they’re right, all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed, then we can give the tick and then people can safely get the jab.”
Morrison said Australia’s rollout would proceed “patiently but as expeditiously as we responsibly can”. More

The FBI is vetting all 25,000 National Guard troops arriving in Washington DC for president-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration amid fears of an insider attack, as heavily fortified state capitals across the US saw only small-scale protests by far-right groups on Sunday.
Commanders have been warned to be on the lookout for problems within their ranks, and Guard members are being trained to identify potential insider threats, army secretary Ryan McCarthy told the Associated Press.
“We’re continually going through the process, and taking second, third looks at every one of the individuals assigned to this operation,” McCarthy said in an interview on Sunday after he and other military leaders went through a three-hour security drill. So far, however, he and other leaders said they had not seen evidence of any such threats, and officials said the vetting hadn’t flagged any issues.
The warning came after muted protests across the country saw only a handful of armed men showing up to planned rightwing demonstrations.
Following the pro-Trump insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, governors in many states had mobilized the national guard, erected fences around government buildings, and in some cases even cancelled official business, amid warnings from law enforcement agencies of armed protests in all 50 states ahead of Biden’s inauguration.
On Sunday, the only far-right groups that were visible at the protests were the ones who had first promoted the event: members of the “Boogaloo Bois”, an extremist pro-gun and anti-government movement fixated on a coming civil war. Their desire to make the protest happen across all 50 states was not realized, and even in the states where protests took place, they were unable to muster significant numbers.
In Salem, Oregon, where the state capitol was breached in December, and where dozens of far-right protesters clashed with Oregon state police on 1 January, the entire protest consisted of eight heavily armed Boogaloo Bois, compared with more than 20 reporters.
In Lansing, Michigan, where the state’s capitol was also breached by armed men in April, and where men with alleged Boogaloo ties were charged in a plot to kidnap the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, this fall, about a dozen Boogaloo Bois showed up to protest, according to local news reports. One journalist estimated the Boogaloo Bois stayed for about 30 minutes.

Dave Boucher
(@Dave_Boucher1)
About a dozen people who appear to be boogaloo boys accompanied by a fair number of media members walk to the front of the Capitol pic.twitter.com/rUjWvP6F3C

January 17, 2021

In Ohio, there were about two dozen protesters at the capitol in all, some armed with assault-style rifles and wearing military gear. Several identified themselves as part of the Boogaloo movement. In Colorado, there were a handful of Boogaloo Bois at the state capitol, and in New Hampshire, there were five, the New York Times reported. In Arizona, there were about 10 protesters at the state capitol, the Arizona Republic reported, with two men captured in photographs wearing the Hawaiian shirts paired with a military-style rifle that the Boogaloo Bois chose as their uniform.
The National Guard vetting process began as the first troops began deploying to DC more than a week ago, according to multiple officials.
“The question is, is that all of them? Are there others?” said McCarthy. “We need to be conscious of it and we need to put all of the mechanisms in place to thoroughly vet these men and women who would support any operations like this.”
“This is a national priority. We have to be successful as an institution,” said McCarthy. “We want to send the message to everyone in the United States and for the rest of the world that we can do this safely and peacefully.”
Since June, prosecutors have charged multiple Boogaloo Bois in a series of violent incidents, including the alleged murders of a federal security officer and a sheriff’s deputy in California, an alleged plot to set off molotov cocktails at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas, and the alleged plot to kidnap a Democratic governor of Michigan.

Anna Liz Nichols
(@annaliznichols)
View from Lansing, MI https://t.co/syDrL5Kv4n

January 17, 2021

Asked in a text message about the limited success of the protests on Sunday, Southern Poverty Law Center spokesman Michael Edison Hayden said: “Boogaloo adherents voiced quixotic plans for Sunday. They ran up against obstacles in achieving them in the aftermath of the violence on 6 January and lost access to websites they typically use to bring crowds together.”
An influential Boogaloo movement website that analysts said had first advertised the national protests on Sunday was taken offline last week.
And amid fallout from the Capitol riot, Sunday’s protests themselves had become a point of contention in the remaining online platforms that far-right activists could access.
In a group dedicated to refugees from Parler, the far-right-friendly social media platform whose hosting was yanked by Amazon a week ago, users clashed over the planned protests, with some arguing the events were a “false flag”, and a trap laid by antifascists or law enforcement. More

Twitter has temporarily suspended the account of the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who has gained a large following on social media, in part by posting incendiary videos and comments.Greene, a Republican businesswoman, is the first candidate who expressed support for the baseless, far-right QAnon conspiracy theory to win a US House seat. Greene in November won the race for Georgia’s 14th congressional district after her Democratic opponent had dropped out.On Sunday, she posted a clip from an interview with a local news outlet in which she condemned Georgia election officials and expressed support for debunked theories claiming that voting machines, absentee ballots and other issues led to widespread fraud in the state during the presidential election.Twitter responded to the tweet, and others, with a message that called the election fraud claim “disputed”, and saying it posed “a risk of violence”.A statement from Greene’s team on Sunday included screenshots from Twitter that appeared to show the company informing the congresswoman she had violated its rules and would be prohibited from interacting with content on the site for 12 hours.Greene said in a statement her account had been suspended “without explanation”.Greene has faced national scrutiny for racist and bigoted statements and posts supporting QAnon, the baseless conspiracy theory rooted in antisemitic tropes whose followers believe Donald Trump is secretly fighting against a cabal of Democrats, billionaires and celebrities engaged in child trafficking.The FBI has identified the movement as a potential domestic terrorism threat, and it has repeatedly inspired vigilante violence.Last week, Greene wore a face mask that said “censored” on it during her remarks on on Trump’s second impeachment. Greene was speaking on the House floor, during a session broadcast on national television.Twitter last week banned Trump from its platform, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” following the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January.As of 12 January, the company had also suspended more than 70,000 accounts associated with QAnon as it attempted to rein in harmful activity ahead of the presidential inauguration.Twitter has said it is taking action against online behaviour “that has the potential to lead to offline harm” after the mob of Trump supporters tried to violently storm the Capitol building.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Greene’s suspension. More

The the Donald Trump baby blimp, a 6-metre-high inflatable caricature that became a symbol of UK protest against the US president, has secured its place in history at a leading museum.The helium-filled balloon, paid for through crowdfunding, depicts the outgoing president as a snarling orange baby wearing a nappy, with its tiny hands clutching a smartphone. It first took to the skies above Parliament Square during protests over Trump’s first presidential visit to the UK in 2018.It was present again on his state visit in 2019, and has also been flown in France, Argentina, Ireland, Denmark and various locations in the US.Now, after a global tour, the Trump baby, designed by Matt Bonner, and constructed by Imagine Inflatables of Leicester, has been acquired by the Museum of London. It will be conserved and could be displayed as part of the museum’s protest collection, which includes artefacts from the Suffragette movement, climate-crisis rallies and peace activism.The creators of the effigy said they hoped it served as a reminder of the fight against the “politics of hate”.“While we’re pleased that the Trump baby can now be consigned to history along with the man himself, we’re under no illusions that this is the end of the story,” they said in a statement to PA Media.“We hope the baby’s place in the museum will stand as a reminder of when London stood against Mr Trump – but will prompt those who see it to examine how they can continue the fight against the politics of hate.“Most of all, we hope the Trump baby serves as a reminder of the politics of resistance that took place during Trump’s time in office.”On the blimp’s first outing in 2018, Nigel Farage called it “the biggest insult to a sitting US president ever”. Trump himself said: “I guess when they put out blimps to make me feel unwelcome, no reason for me to go to London.”Sharon Ament, the director of the Museum of London, said: “Of course the museum is not political, and does not have any view about the state of politics in the States.” But the blimp touched on a typical British response, she said: satire. “We use humour a lot. And we poke fun at politicians. This is a big – literally – example of that.”The blimp had just arrived at the museum, she said, squashed into a suitcase. “It is timely, because it’s coming to us in the final days of President Trump being President Trump … the most ironic and fitting thing now is that it’s currently in quarantine in the museum. All objects have to be put into quarantine before they go into the collection because they could have insects.”The museum is a fitting home for the effigy, which is “a response from Londoners”, she said. “It was born in London … it was an extraordinary and imaginative idea.”“This large inflatable was just a tiny part of a global movement,” said the blimp’s creators. “A movement that was led by the marginalised people who Trump’s politics most endangered – and whose role in this moment should never be underestimated.” More

The writer Alistair Cooke once observed: “As always, the British especially shudder at the latest American vulgarity, and then they embrace it with enthusiasm two years later.” That is a kind way of saying that the British are always a few years behind the Americans, emulating them and then pretending that we came up with whatever it is we are mimicking, or coming up with a uniquely British version of it.For example, Britain’s allegedly evidence-based involvement in the Iraq war was largely – as President George W Bush wrote in an internal memo months before military action – a matter of it following the US’s lead. So much of the special relationship between the two countries hinges on this keeping up of appearances, where the British political classes – who like to maintain their nation is the superior of the two, the original superpower – can admire and obey while holding on to the fiction that the UK is a more restrained country, less prone to the excesses of the other.Margaret Thatcher hit both of these notes, fawning over the US president, Ronald Reagan, when she said that they both “had almost identical beliefs” even though they were from “very different backgrounds”. And on her first visit to the White House, she said that the two countries were “inextricably entwined” because George Washington himself “was a British subject until well after his 40th birthday”.But then Donald Trump became president and upset this taut balance of adulation and snootiness. He publicly flaunted the influence over Britain that had always been wielded in secret, humiliated Theresa May, insulted London mayor Sadiq Khan, and took a swipe at the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. He flourished the power and vulgarity of the US without any of its refining rhetoric or protocol. And the country he presided over became not just one of inelegant indulgence but a darker place where white supremacists, backed by the White House itself, marched in the streets.With that erosion of reputation, Trump’s America has gained a new utility for the British: it is not a place that Britain secretly looks up to, but a place that Britain is unlike; a place that demonstrates why things over here are not to be compared with how bad it is over there. A country that is struggling with its demons, and which we observe from a safe distance while lamenting its decline.Whether it’s the US’s culture wars, its race crisis or its succumbing to far-right politics and white supremacy, these are things that do not map neatly on to Britain’s faultlines. Poor America, the country we no longer share beliefs or an inextricably entwined history with.The distancing began in earnest in the summer of Black Lives Matter, but the storming of the Capitol was the final dividing line. Boris Johnson was appalled at the “disgraceful scenes” and “unreservedly” condemned Trump’s incitement of the crowd, even though he had little to say when Trump was building momentum for the insurrection in the preceding weeks.The prime minister’s transition from spectating to actively condemning was in part because the scenes in Washington DC were simply too shocking to be silent on. But the more important factor is that Trump is on the way out. He can be repudiated with no risk of blowback or diplomatic crisis. Had the events at the Capitol happened in the middle of Trump’s term in office, I would wager that much of the scrambling to denounce, from Twitter to Johnson, would have been absent.And so again, circumstances help the UK to distance itself, pretend it was not complicit in Trump’s ascendancy, that there was no aiding and abetting of the president and his extremist supporters (despite refusing to condemn his Muslim flight ban, and rolling out “the reddest of red carpets” for him). The scenes at the Capitol serve a useful purpose, which is to overshadow the path that led to the steps of the building: with images so vivid and rich, and with so many colourful characters, we become preoccupied with their detail and fail to see all the arteries that nourished them.The insurrection was just one point on a continuum that involves not just Trump and the Republican party, but an entire hinterland of conservative politics. It includes those in Congress who didn’t quite disavow Trump, and respectable conservative pundits who, even if they repudiated the president’s most extreme acts, still played on his themes, such as the conspiring leftwing elite who hate the “real America”. The connective tissue between Trump and the white supremacist on the street is much more fibrous than it serves many to admit.In the UK we are prone to the same impulses of denial – using the high-octane events of the past few weeks to claim that a difference in degree means all the difference in the world. The reality is that, even though our parliament wasn’t stormed, British members of parliament were jostled and abused on their way to work by hardcore Brexit supporters. One of those MPs was assassinated by a far-right nationalist. Another almost was.Britain’s culture war is so potent that we have our own mobs scuffling with the police, responding to the dog whistles of our own government. We have respectable sections in the media who pump out conspiratorial theories about the woke and the elite, and now preach against mask-wearing and lockdowns. When the far right spills out on to the streets, claiming lives and attacking democracies, it’s the result of a million compounded complicities and complacencies. Like a jigsaw, when these details come together they create a larger image. Today that image is Donald Trump. When he is gone, the jigsaw will be broken up again and both the US and the UK will choose not to see what together those pieces can create. More