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    Saving Democracy by Destroying It

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    Arizona’s Maricopa County is ground zero in the continuing debate over election integrity in the United States. The so-called audit of the 2.1 million votes cast in that county in last year’s presidential election — by the almost comically inept firm Cyber Ninjas — was supposed to arrive at the Arizona Senate this week. But delivery was once again delayed as three members of the five-person ninja team contracted COVID-19.

    The Maricopa “audit” has assumed such mythic proportions among the Trump diehards who insist that their Il Duce won the presidential election that some QAnon believers have insisted that the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is a hoax — to distract attention from the allegations of vote-tampering in Arizona. No doubt rumors have begun somewhere in cyberspace that the forest fires, earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts sweeping across the world are also “false-flag operations” designed by the Biden camp to help them erase evidence of election fraud.

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    The Trump forces that have taken over the Republican Party regularly fulminate against The Squad, antifa, that “socialist Biden” and other convenient punching bags. But the real target of their ire is closer to home: Republicans who have refused to join the Trump personality cult.

    Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer is a very conservative Republican who supported Donald Trump as his party’s leader. He has also refused to lie for the president. Prior to the release of the Cyber Ninja “audit,” he reiterated that a tri-partisan (Republican, Democrat, Libertarian) hand count of the ballots immediately after the election matched the machine count 100% while a live-streamed assessment of the tabulation equipment revealed no manipulations whatsoever.

    The thanks Richer has gotten for standing up for the rule of law? Death threats and ridiculous trolling for being a RINO (Republican In Name Only).

    Bill Gates is an Arizona Republican who serves on the Maricopa Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the 2020 election and certified the results. Gates is one of four Republicans who serve on the five-person board. He and his colleagues resisted calls for the Cyber Ninja audit even as his GOP colleagues in the Arizona Senate unanimously supported a resolution calling to arrest all the supervisors for contempt.

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    In a telling passage in Jane Mayer’s recent New Yorker piece on the financing of the anti-democratic initiatives of the far right, Gates spoke of the death threats that he received for what would ordinarily be the routine actions of the Board of Supervisors. “Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism,” Mayer writes. “He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a ‘kooky’ retirement plan—‘to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.’ He told me, ‘I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.’ He shook his head. ‘If you had told me, You’re going to be doing this in the U.S., I would have told you, You’re crazy.’”

    Democracy promotion — it was supposed to be a method by which the US remade the world to look more like us. Thus, the interchangeability of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in the above passage couldn’t be more revealing. In traditional democracy promotion, the foreign contexts have been wildly diverse — and largely irrelevant. The important part of the equation has never been the various facts on the ground but, rather, the verities of the American constitutional system.

    These verities are now under attack as insurrectionists, vigilante groups and conspiracy theorists attempt to undermine the fundamental principle of one person, one vote. With Democrats rushing to promote democracy at home, Americans are now getting a taste of our own medicine. Actually, given the rapid spread of the anti-democratic disease, we’re in desperate need of a full course of antibiotics.

    Destroy Democracy to Save Democracy?

    After the January 6 insurrection, I wrote about the future of democracy promotion overseas, concluding that the concept was still viable as long as democracy means not only checks and balances, but also grassroots efforts to promote racial justice, reduce economic inequality and address the climate crisis. At the end of the piece, though, I noted that “at some point in the future, we may need to call upon the international community to help us save our democracy as well.”

    So, only six months later, how close is America to sending out that SOS? For the time being, much depends on Trump.

    In the best-case scenario, Trump exits the political scene as smoothly as he did the White House after one disastrous term. He continues to poll poorly in the country as a whole with a 60% disapproval rating (and only 76% of Republicans viewing him favorably). Still banned from Facebook and Twitter and largely ignored by the mainstream media, he lacks a platform to appeal beyond his base. And let’s not forget the multiple lawsuits he faces from election tampering, inciting violence on Capitol Hill, sexually assaulting at least two dozen women and engaging in myriad corrupt business practices.

    Embed from Getty Images

    If Trump drops out of political life, his followers in the Republican Party will be left leaderless, though any number of rogues aspire to take his place. Without a broadly popular standard-bearer, the Trump forces would disintegrate and the Republican Party would face the inevitable. America is becoming increasingly multiracial (and the Republican Party isn’t). Climate change is raging across the country (and the Republican Party remains in denial). The US needs to retool its economy to meet the demands of the global market and the constraints of natural resources (and the Republican Party still has its head in the tar sands).

    In this scenario, Trump has been little more than a deus ex machina inserted into the final act of the Republican Party’s story to enable it to escape, momentarily, its self-inflicted marginality. Trump has been the last-ditch effort of America’s version of the Nationalist Party in South Africa, the minority Afrikaner party that presided over apartheid, to preserve white power.

    Trump or no Trump, the Republican Party extremists have latched onto an age-old method of maintaining control: voter suppression. Democrats have demography on their side: African-American voters supported Biden over Trump by a margin of seven to one, Latinos by two to one and Asians by almost two to one. Instead of trying to woo the non-white vote, which is growing every election cycle, Republicans have decided simply to make it as hard as possible for those folks to vote.

    So far in 2021, 17 states have passed 28 laws making it harder to vote. Democrats in Texas fled the state to prevent one more such vote from passing, but that looks to be only a temporary gambit. Meanwhile, the omnibus voting rights bill (For the People Act) has attracted exactly zero Republican support in the Senate, which means that it will die without some modification of the filibuster. The narrower bill that just passed the House along party lines, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, faces a similar fate in the Senate.

    Then there’s the effort among some Republican extremists to do an end run around the popular vote altogether by empowering state legislatures to pick electors in the Electoral College and thereby determine the outcome of presidential elections. They call it the “independent state legislature doctrine,” and unfortunately it has even attracted some support from four Supreme Court justices. In one 2024 scenario, Richard Hasen writes in Slate, “Republican legislatures in states won by the Democratic candidate could seize on some normal election administration rule created by a state or local election administrator or some ruling from a state court, and argue that implementation of the rule renders the presidential election unconstitutional, leaving it to the state legislature to pick a different slate of electors.”

    So, all those careful arguments about Trump’s unpopularity, the divisions within the Republican Party, and the demographic transformation of the United States mean little in the face of a brazen power play by Republican stalwarts who have already demonstrated on multiple occasions that they could care less about rules, law or the rule of law. Like the US Army units in the Vietnam War that were determined to “save” Vietnamese villages by destroying them, the Republican Party is mission-driven to “save” American democracy in their own special way.

    Embed from Getty Images

    In between the voter suppression laws and ploys like the “independent state legislature doctrine” are the more insidious efforts to call into question the integrity of all elections that produce outcomes that Trump supporters simply don’t like. The spread of insane conspiracy theories undermines not only the impartiality of elections, but the verifiability of their integrity. Conservative Republicans have time and again debunked the outlandish claims of “voter fraud” in Maricopa County, but that has not silenced the crazies.

    Multiply Maricopa by the hundreds, even the thousands, and US elections will no longer reflect popular will but extremist skepticism. When faith in elections erodes, democracy can’t endure.

    Geopolitical Implications

    It would be comforting to report that the defeat of Trump in 2020 has taken the wind out of the sails of the far right around the world. But the success of the far right relies on a globally networked set of ideas — the failures of neoliberal globalization, the perfidy of “globalists” in supporting this failed project and the perception of immigrants as the foot soldiers of globalization — not any one figure.

    In fact, Trump proved to be something of a liability to the global far right. He’s an American (a no-no among the anti-American right), a nationalist (who believes that America is better than everywhere else) and an ignoramus (whose gaffes are so gross as to embarrass the more discerning members of the far right). In America, Trump was the perfect candidate to unite disaffected independents, traditional conservatives and the American alt-right. As his would-be Svengali Steve Bannon discovered in his failed effort to create a nationalist international, Trump was not a grand unifier on the international stage.

    Without Trump in the White House, the far right continues to prosper. In Europe, right-wing nationalists remain securely in power in Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. A neo-fascist party leads the polls in Italy, the far-right Sweden Democrats are poised to exercise real power after helping to oust the Social Democratic prime minister, and the extremist Marine Le Pen continues to run head-to-head with Emmanuel Macron in France’s presidential polls (though her Nationalist Rally didn’t do so well in recent regional elections).

    Authoritarian nationalists still preside over the largest countries in the world: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey. The Taliban have taken over in Afghanistan, the conservatives have come to power in Iran and the Saudis are still running their extremist theocracy. In the one Arab Spring success story, Tunisia, Kais Saied just extended the state of emergency he declared last month. Coup leaders continue to control Thailand and Myanmar. It’s hard to find good news on the democracy front in Africa. Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela: all still run by strong-arm caudillos despite significant public protests.

    All of this means that the list of countries that can pitch in to save American democracy is a short one. New Zealand and Iceland can teach Americans how gender equality is central to a healthy political system. South Korea can give us some pointers on how to put a Green New Deal at the center of national policy. A number of European countries can provide guidance on the importance of strong social policy for any thriving democracy.

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    US President Joe Biden plans to invite these countries to his Summit for Democracy in December. The three pillars of this initiative are reasonable: “defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, advancing respect for human rights.” Given the trends in the world, however, the gathering has a whiff of the desperate. It threatens to be a farewell party: Alas, poor democracy, I knew it well for it hath borne me on its back a thousand times.

    It would be a different matter if Biden convened the summit as a true listening session. The Summit for Democracy could be an opportunity for America to admit that it has a problem and submit to a 12-step program of self-help, perhaps with a couple of sponsors (South Korea, Costa Rica) to keep us on the road to political health.

    But that’s just a fantasy. The United States doesn’t listen to other countries. America is like the alpha male who refuses to ask for directions even when he’s dangerously lost. Right now, America is heading into uncharted political territory. Will any of our leaders ask for directions before it’s too late?

    *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Is the “Great Reset”?

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      Who wouldn’t reveal what is kept out of sight by those who do not have our best interests at heart? Although it is not only the far right that claims to be in the know about sinister plots, they certainly provide a steady stream of such revelations.

      Amongst recent ones, the “great replacement” stands out as an attempt to capture the imagination of the public. According to this ethno-nationalist theory, the “indigenous European—e.g., white—population is being replaced by non-European immigrants.” Yet since the second half of 2020, “the great reset” (TGR) conspiracy theory has been making rounds on the internet too.

      World Economic Forum

      In 2020, the need for a reset was presented by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in terms of reimagining capitalism in a post-pandemic world. As per the WEF, there is an “urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

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      The World Economic Forum brings together high-profile figures from politics and business every year in Davos. So, with the WEF pushing the initiative, it is no surprise that it has become a gift for conspiracy theorists. “Globalists” have been accused of using — or even orchestrating — the COVID-19 pandemic to rebuild and take control of the world economy, with a liberal-cosmopolitan elite executing the next step in a quest to overcome resistance.

      In an article for The Intercept about TGR, Naomi Klein, a Canadian-American writer and activist, talks about the difficulties to critically engage with the WEF project from a progressive perspective. She also points out that the initiative does provide “a coronavirus-themed rebranding of all the things Davos does anyway.” In her typical style, Klein summarizes the plan as encompassing “some good stuff that won’t happen and some bad stuff that certainly will and, frankly, nothing out of the ordinary in our era of ‘green’ billionaires readying rockets for Mars.”

      So, while there is ample space for criticism, far-right groups have been working on turning TGR into an umbrella for their political agenda. Globally, readers might have encountered such attempts. In November 2020, a video of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a UN meeting began circulating. In the clip, Trudeau says that the pandemic provided an opportunity for a “reset.” After the video went viral, he stated that thinking about such a reset in terms of a conspiracy theory arises from people “looking for reasons for things that are happening to them … we’re seeing a lot of people fall prey to disinformation.”

      The Far Right

      Against this background, the following briefly summarizes key aspects of TGR as they have circulated among the German-speaking far right. The cover pages of Compact, a German radical-right magazine, and the monthly of the extreme-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) have illustrated the conspiracy theory. An offshoot of the Austrian Identitarian Movement published a webpage, distributed leaflets and organized information booths called “info-zones” about TGR. These examples assert that the conspiracy attempts to put the form of globalization that existed prior to the pandemic on steroids. Rather than limiting globalization, which some claim enabled the worldwide spread of the coronavirus, even more of the same old medicine is being administered.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In an interview with the NPD monthly, Alexander Dugin, the Russian far-right ideologue, says that TGR is both the latest attempt by “globalists” and “the final battle” that is openly totalitarian and characterized by censorship, political repression and homicide. With the exaggerated help of the media, homogenous opinions allegedly rule.

      Various sources use the term Gleichschaltung, the process through which the Nazis established total control over German society, to describe what is unfolding today. Compact magazine claims we are already in 1934 (and not in 1933 when the Nazi Party took the first steps toward Gleichschaltung) as, apparently, the global, totalitarian takeover began last year. Unsurprisingly, the WEF, the European Union and politicians like German Chancellor Angela Merkel are said to be the villains of the story.

      As TGR is supposed to move the public even closer toward a global government, it not only endangers sovereignty and democracy, but also peoples and cultures. That is, conspiracy theorists claim that TGR aims to destroy existing bonds and structures through repeated lockdowns so as to provoke calls for and install a new world order. Or, as Martin Sellner puts it in a video dedicated to TGR, “here, we see one of the basic principles of universalist, globalist, totalitarian ideologues. Also, by the way, a basic principle of the Freemasonry, expressed, entirely free of conspiracy-theoretical wrong tracks: the world has to be built up.”

      Framework

      While such far-right views are hardly news, perhaps the most interesting attack is directed against transhumanism. By merging the digital with the physical world, the ruling elite, according to the Great Reset Stoppen website, enables “total surveillance.” As a result, global dictatorship becomes possible and a once rooted, cultural being is turned into a “socially isolated consumer” slave. Such a person is someone without property and privacy, and one who is not even encouraged to meet and mingle with others face to face. Hence, US tech companies are also on the list of villains.

      None of this is new, but TGR offers a framework for a wide range of far-right ideas, a rhetorical space into which diverse claims can be made. These include the “great replacement” as well as “patriotic” opposition to climate policies and Big Pharma and Big Tech. This time, those in the business of “revealing” sinister plots can even point to what is directly said by the World Economic Forum. Whether TGR will unite the far right’s stories and appeal to wider segments of the public remains to be seen.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Remember, Remember: Guy Fawkes’ Co-opting by the Far Right

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      The far right have a habit of co-opting symbols and visual iconography originally used by other movements, oftentimes those holding opposing ideologies. For example, during the rally-turned-siege in Washington on January 6, protesters chanted, “Whose house? Our house!” This was a likely nod to, “Whose streets? Our streets!” shouted by attendees of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

      Prior to the Unite the Right rally, however, the phrase was commonly used by groups protesting oppression. The “Whose streets? Our streets!” chant has, since the 1990s, been used by “LGBTQ activists, immigration activists, and most pertinently, Black activists at intense junctions of racial tension.” While their collective belief system was built upon a deeply flawed foundation of disinformation and conspiracy, the rioters on Capitol Hill were also combating a sense of perceived oppression. As a result, they felt justified in weaponizing their victimhood.

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      The mob that stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, was a smorgasbord of white supremacists, militia members and conspiratorial adherents, mobilized by former US President Donald Trump to attempt a coup on his behalf. Kathleen Belew’s description of the ideological composition of the Capitol insurrectionists is apt. The mob featured “ardent partisans of President Trump. … people recently radicalized by fantastic QAnon conspiracy theories” and “participants in the organized white power movement.” The mob’s spectrum of beliefs was also seen in the variety of iconography present. As observed in videos from the Capitol Hill riot, a noteworthy staple of this far-right iconography is the infamous Guy Fawkes mask — in this case, worn by a man with a Trump/Pence 2020 campaign flag draped over his shoulders.

      Stop the Steal… of Other Movements’ Symbols

      In addition to adopting iconography and slogans from movements ideologically oftentimes at odds with their own, the far right have also co-opted historical, cultural and even religious symbols and trends. For example, Britain First, an Islamophobic anti-immigrant group, has co-opted Christian symbolism and rhetoric, including carrying white crosses and handing out Bibles at public demonstrations. In that same vein, Stormfront posters drew ties between “The Lord of the Rings” and white nationalism to bolster recruitment. More recently, the Betsy Ross flag, various Norse imagery and Pepe the Frog were displayed during the Capitol attack.

      Such figures and images are now incongruously tied together by a shared adoption by the far right as part of their iconographical repertoire. These symbols have thereby lost their previously benign respective meanings as they have become aligned with armed groups, militias and other hateful and potentially violent belief systems.

      A Staple of Anti-Authoritarian Protest

      Despite its use at the Capitol riot, the Guy Fawkes mask has historically been an element of anti-authoritarian activist iconography, representing the struggle against those in power perceived to be treading on civil liberties. It entered the mainstream in the 1980s upon the creation of the comic “V for Vendetta,” set in a fascist, dystopian version of future England. In it, the protagonist V is an anti-fascist battling an authoritarian police state, donning the mask to obscure his identity.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Since then, the evocation of Guy Fawkes at contemporary political events has become a tradition. First used by the Anonymous group circa 2008 in protests against the Church of Scientology, it has since been worn in the organization’s protests against the CIA, the Ku Klux Klan, Visa and PayPal. The disguise-turned-symbol was subsequently used by Occupy and other anti-establishment, generally left-leaning movements.  

      The Fawkes mask has since been donned by protesters around the world. In 2011, it was seen at Arab Spring protests, eventually assuming such a high profile that both the Saudi and Bahraini governments banned its import and sale. The Saudi government explained the ban by stating that the mask “instills a culture of violence and extremism.” Later that year, Thai protesters wore it as they demonstrated against their government, which at the time was widely believed to be secretly controlled by the exiled former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

      As Sarah Barrett of The New York Times wrote of the Fawkes mask, “it is now the face of protest, largely anti-government but not exclusively. It’s a face that demands attention, an unsettling visage floating in the sea of yellow vests, umbrellas and black hoods.” Indeed, the illustrator of “V for Vendetta,” David Lloyd, said in a 2011 interview with The Times that the Fawkes-inspired masquerade has become “a great symbol of protest for anyone who sees tyranny.”

      Guy Fawkes’ Adoption by the Right

      Enter the Capitol insurrectionists, whose members cried tyranny over the certification of electoral votes to secure now-President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Like the Capitol rioters, Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators had a vision of how their respective government should be run — and who should be running it. Guy Fawkes’ gunpowder plot envisaged three goals: blow up the House of Lords in London, assassinate King James I and install a Catholic sovereign. The plot was planned to unfold on November 5, 1605, and, similar to the Capitol siege, was meant to occur during a ceremonial government event; Fawkes’ barrels of gunpowder were supposed to explode during the state opening of Parliament.

      Fawkes and several of his co-conspirators were found guilty of treason, and some have argued that the Capitol attackers are guilty of the same. An additional similarity between the two sets of plotters is the planned use of explosives; both Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs were found near Capitol Hill.

      Prior to the Capitol insurrection, the American far right had embraced the Fawkes mask and its interpreted meaning at other demonstrations, notably seen on members of Proud Boys, among others, at anti-lockdown protests throughout 2020. Moreover, in far-right Telegram channels, Guy Fawkes’ name and associated message have been sources of inspiration. The repeated use of the mask by those who identify with or support the far right may fulfill two objectives.

      First, and perhaps most obviously, it hides the identity of the protester in question. Second, it enables the wearer to construct their own identity as a patriotic hero standing up to perceived tyrannical government action. The mask is used to convey a specific image, depending on the observing audience. For some far-right individuals and groups, the mask acts as a dog whistle. For those outside of the movement, it provides the wearer with plausible deniability. According to Matthew Gabriele of Virginia Tech: “They’re hoping that either other observers will get it and they’ll agree. Or if they don’t agree and if there’s consequences, they can just shrug it off like, ‘Oh, I’m just referencing history’ or something like that.”

      Many facets of the American far right will likely remain steadfast in their belief that a Trump-esque figurehead (or Trump himself) should assume his rightful place in the Oval Office. Online chatter and offline manifestations of violence indicate that some individuals view this as a cause worth fighting, dying and killing for — after all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. The use of the Guy Fawkes mask at the Capitol siege indicates how the insurrectionists saw themselves: as the latter.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Beating Back the Far Right

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      After four years of shock, confusion and paralysis, the United States is finally taking action against the far right. Perhaps most dramatic has been the de-platforming of Donald Trump: the suspension of his Twitter and Facebook accounts and the targeting of his prominent followers across social media platforms. Even a few months ago, such a radically sensible action would have been inconceivable. Kick a president off of social media?

      But such are the indignities visited upon sore losers. Not surprisingly, these moves have significantly decreased the amount of misinformation in the public sphere and made it that much more difficult for white nationalists to organize actions.

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      The events of January 6 also led to Trump’s second impeachment. The Senate trial, which took place last week, may not have resulted in a conviction, but it forced the Republican Party to choose between upholding the Constitution and supporting a president who tried to overthrow democracy.

      The penalties for remaining the party of Trump are slowly beginning to mount. The corporate world has moved against the ex-president by canceling events at his resorts and hotels and suspending financial services with his company. Several high-profile donors have abandoned the most vocal congressional adherents of the phony election fraud narrative, like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Not only has Simon & Schuster canceled Senator Hawley’s book contract, but the chief promoter of MAGA texts at Hachette — who published screeds by Donald Trump, Jr., Corey Lewandowski and Jeanine Pirro — was recently fired.

      Some politicians have faced steeper penalties. For their participation in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, West Virginia State Delegate Derrick Evans was pushed to resign and Jorge Riley was forced out of his position in the California Republican Assembly. At the federal level, House Democrats and 11 of their Republican colleagues recently voted to strip Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. That seems like a mere slap on the wrist for someone who has promoted the assassination of her political opponents. But it’s something.

      A defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, all of whom spread conspiracy theories about the company’s voting machines used in the 2020 election, has already claimed one success. Fox canceled Lou Dobbs, one of its many factually compromised show hosts. Dominion is readying another round of suits against as many as 150 targets including Newsmax, One America News Network and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Justice Department has opened up “domestic terrorism” cases against a number of the participants in the January 6 insurrection. Congress is beginning to consider new legislation on federal penalties for domestic terrorism.

      The campaign against the far right isn’t exactly a full-court press. Greene continues to push Trump-like pronouncements on Twitter, and all the attention she’s gotten in recent weeks has only enlarged her platform. Corporate boycotts are not affecting the bottom lines of politicians like Hawley, who depends more on individual donors (he actually saw a big increase in donations after January 6). Trump retains his hold over much of the Republican Party, especially at the state level as the censures of Liz Cheney in Wyoming and Doug Ducey in Arizona indicate.

      In other words, the far right is down but not out. The much-feared round of violence at the state level in the wake of January 6 did not happen. Rallies and marches in support of MAGA or Trump or QAnon have not materialized. When Twitter suspended Trump’s account, a demonstration outside the company’s San Francisco office brought out dozens of police officers and exactly one protester. But neither the Proud Boys nor the white activist militias have disbanded. And according to a poll at the end of January, 64% of Republicans would join any party that Trump sets up.

      Even as the US establishment begins its tentative detox of the public sphere, the handwringing has also begun. The de-platforming of Trump has raised concerns over the tyranny of unregulated social media giants. The campaigns to limit the platforms of Hawley and Greene have generated a fear that the silencing of minority opinions will be applied to radical voices on the left as well. Critics worry that the labeling of the January 6 insurrectionists as “domestic terrorists” will inevitably be used against communities of color and others protesting racial inequities.

      The threat of white nationalist movements is not hypothetical. Four years of Trump have provided ample evidence of what can happen when these movements gain mainstream legitimation. But the anxieties over how “cancel culture” can be applied to the left and communities of color are also legitimate, as erstwhile football star Colin Kaepernick can readily confirm.

      The Biden administration has already begun its de-Trumpification of the US government by reversing the previous administration’s policies, removing Trump appointees and cutting off high-level access for right-wing crazies like Giuliani, Steve Bannon and members of the MAGA media.

      But the banishing of the far right back to the fringes of American society is going to require a different set of strategies. And here, the United States could learn a few lessons from other countries.

      Quarantining Politicians and Parties

      Although several European countries ban Nazi or neo-Nazi parties, a more effective tactic to reduce the political influence of extremist parties that fall just short of fascist has been to quarantine them. In Belgium, for instance, the major parties have an informal agreement not to partner with Vlaams Belang, a far-right Flemish nationalist party. This agreement became increasingly difficult when Vlaams Belang received the second most votes in the last parliamentary election in 2019. Austria abided by a similar “cordon sanitaire” until 2000, when the conservative People’s Party invited the far-right Freedom Party into government. The European Parliament has nevertheless borrowed the cordon sanitaire strategy to prevent members of the far-right Identity and Democracy bloc from holding any key posts such as the presidency of committees.

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      In Germany, the major parties have similarly avoided any coalition arrangements with the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). But the German government, presided over by the conservative Christian Democrats, has deployed another interesting tactic against the AfD. Last spring, the country’s domestic intelligence agency declared one wing of the AfD “extremist” and placed its leaders under surveillance. “But many saw in Thursday’s announcement a step toward broader measures targeting the entire Alternative for Germany party, setting the stage for a battle between the state and a party whose influence has steadily grown even as it has radicalized,” writes Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times.

      In Greece, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn grew to become the third-largest party in the parliament. The government successfully pursued a legal strategy to criminalize the organization, charging it with murder, racketeering, illegal possession of firearms and attacks on migrants. In the end, 37 members of the party, including 17 MPs, were convicted of crimes and imprisoned. By the 2019 election, the party couldn’t get enough votes to have even one representative in parliament.

      If Trump ends up creating a new political party, a public pressure campaign could be mounted on the Democrats and Republicans to follow a strict policy of no talks, no committee assignments and no joint actions with any entity that Trump touches. Whether the disgraced ex-president follows through on his threat, a similar approach should be applied to all Republicans who continue to embrace a “stop the steal” agenda. Biden should make clear that his efforts at bipartisanship should exclude those who believe his administration to be illegitimate.

      Purging the Far Right from Security Forces

      When the National Guard was called in to secure the Capitol for Inauguration Day, two members were removed from duty because of possible ties to right-wing extremist movements. This additional vetting was deemed necessary because nearly one in five participants in the January 6 insurrection had links to the military. As a first step in addressing the longstanding problem of far-right proselytizing, the new head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin, has already notified the armed forces to conduct a one-day stand down to address extremism in the ranks.

      The United States could learn from the example of Germany where the country’s special forces, Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK), had become a veritable haven of far-right sympathizers. The working group investigating the KSK discovered “soldiers who expounded unconstitutional views, a ‘toxic leadership culture’ among superiors, and the unexplained disappearance of 62 kilograms of explosives and large quantities of ordnance from KSK depots.” As a result of the investigation, the German government disbanded one entire company of the KSK and reorganized the remaining units. It has also tightened its screening process.

      In the US, only thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement and other efforts to bring accountability to policing did the FBI begin collecting data in 2018 on the use of force in law enforcement. The next step is to purge police ranks of racist extremists, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

      Hate Speech and Digital Controls

      Because of First Amendment protections, the United States does not have any hate speech laws. However, such provisions can be found in the private sector, such as universities.

      Other countries, however, have sought to penalize hate speech in a number of different ways. Germany has outlawed “incitement to hate” or Volksverhetzung, which applies to verbal attacks on national, racial, religious or ethnic groups but also, according to a 2020 ruling, the denigration of women. Denmark, too, has recently expanded its hate speech law to include extremist language directed at gender identity and gender expression. Since the 1970s, New Zealand has had a law on the books criminalizing the incitement of “racial disharmony,” and the government has been considering additional measures following the Christchurch killings in 2019.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But legislating against hate is notoriously tricky. Canada repealed a hate speech law that tried to balance a commitment to free expression with equally strong commitments to multiculturalism and equality (but has more recently explored reviving it). France passed an online hate speech law last spring only for the country’s constitutional court to strike down large portions of it.

      Dealing with hate speech became even more urgent when the far right discovered how to use social media to recruit, organize and inject its messages into the conservative mainstream. In the US, the home of the largest social media platforms, there has been no move to legislate against extremist content online as long as it isn’t criminal (like libel, threats to kill or child pornography).

      Rather, in typically American fashion, policing has been left to the private sector, which determines who to “de-platform” and what posts to take down. Initially, the mainstream social media platforms only suspended the accounts of those on the lunatic fringe, like Alex Jones of InfoWars infamy or Milo Yiannopoulos formerly of Breitbart News. Facebook and Twitter were reluctant to take a more proactive approach to white nationalists not only for fear of being labeled “censors” but because it would also have meant banning Republican politicians who voiced similar sentiments.

      By 2020, however, Facebook and Twitter reversed themselves because politicians like Trump were openly challenging American democracy. Well, actually, Trump and his cohort had been doing so from day one, thanks to an indirect assist from the social media giants. But after the November election, Twitter and Facebook could rationalize their moves because Trump had become a lame-duck president.

      De-platforming demonstrably works, whether measured by the bankrupting of Milo Yiannopoulos, the reduction of an audience for groups like the Islamic State and QAnon, or the virtual disappearance of Donald Trump from public discourse. It doesn’t qualify as censorship, since Twitter and Facebook are not public spaces. They are corporate spaces, and the corporation decides who speaks there, just like The New York Times decides who to publish.

      But this raises two problems: To whom are Twitter and Facebook accountable? And why aren’t there rules governing the internet more generally, since the web is certainly a public commons?

      Facebook instituted an oversight board last year that looks at decisions with an eye toward possibly overturning them. Three of the first six cases have involved hate speech. Here’s one of them: “A user posted two screenshots of tweets by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, which said ‘Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.’ Facebook removed the post for hate speech violations, but the user’s appeal indicates they wanted to spread awareness of the prime minister’s ‘horrible words.’” Perhaps more consequentially, the oversight board will soon make the call on whether to restore Trump’s Facebook account.

      As for generating rules for the web more generally, that’s a tougher challenge, given the anarchic, libertarian spirit that has presided over the enterprise since its inception. But here’s one interesting “fix” that New Zealand has instituted: Any Kiwi who views extremist content online is now automatically directed to websites that help people leave hate groups.

      Going After Terrorists

      For two decades, the US has conducted a “war on terror” largely against “radical Islam” in countries like Afghanistan and Syria. It has ignored state supporters of such groups, like Saudi Arabia, when they’re allies, while going after governments like Saddam Hussein’s that were mistakenly identified as al-Qaeda boosters.

      Meanwhile, the US government largely ignored home-grown, right-wing extremists who organized with near-impunity particularly during the Trump era. So, why are some people unhappy about calling the right-wing extremists who overran the Capitol on January 6 “terrorists”?

      “The use of these words only elevates a harmful counterterrorism framework that has historically been used to target Arab, Muslim, and Black communities,” writes Rania Batrice in The Boston Globe. “Call them white supremacists. Call them a violent, murderous mob. Call them insurrectionists. Call them fascists. Call them traitors or treasonous. But please remember that the words used have an impact on broader, already oppressed communities.”

      I am sympathetic to this argument. But is it not problematic that the Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list does not include any far-right extremist groups? A number of these outfits — the Proud Boys, the Atomwaffen Division, the Base — have an international presence. Canada just labeled all of them terrorist outfits. An FTO designation would permit greater international cooperation to disrupt the global networking of the far right.

      Yes, I’d like to see the United States criminalize white supremacy and fascism. But the terrorism designation, for all its problematic history, focuses not so much on words but on actions. And in the US, it has historically been easier to go after the far right for what it does, not for what it says.

      Whatever language we use, however, it’s critically important to keep up the pressure to delegitimize the far right. Extremists are trying to maintain a toehold in power via Hawley, Greene and others in the hopes that Trump will run again or some equally malign candidate will emerge in 2024. It’s time to resurrect a global anti-fascist consensus to name, shame and throw these guys out of the game.

      *[This article was originally published by FPIF.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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