Right-Wing Extremism and Alt-Right

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Former Oath Keepers Lawyer Pleads Guilty to Tampering With Jan. 6 Evidence

      by

      Kellye SoRelle admitted to telling members of the far-right group to illegally delete their text messages after the mob attack.The former lawyer for the Oath Keepers militia pleaded guilty on Wednesday to advising members of the far-right group to illegally delete their text messages after the violent mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.At a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, the lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, admitted to charges that included tampering with evidence and illegally entering and remaining in a restricted area of the Capitol grounds.After Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, Ms. SoRelle, who is based in Texas, had close ties to the “Stop the Steal” movement, which claimed that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of a victory in his run against Joseph R. Biden Jr. She also served as the general counsel of the Oath Keepers and had a romantic relationship with the militia’s leader and founder, Stewart Rhodes, who was found guilty at a trial in Washington of seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack and sentenced to 18 years in prison.During Mr. Rhodes’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he and Ms. SoRelle worked closely for weeks organizing the Oath Keepers to descend on Washington on Jan. 6. The evidence also showed that she was present at a mysterious meeting in an underground parking garage near the Capitol on the day before the attack where Mr. Rhodes met with Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, another far-right group instrumental in the violence.On Jan. 6 itself, Ms. SoRelle accompanied Mr. Rhodes to the Capitol, although neither entered the building. Still, court papers say that after the building was stormed and dozens of Oath Keepers came under scrutiny by federal investigators, Ms. SoRelle advised Mr. Rhodes and other members of the group to delete encrypted messages from their cellphones.In the early days of investigation, Ms. SoRelle told reporters that she was cooperating with the Justice Department’s inquiry into the Oath Keepers’ role. She also spoke several times to staff investigators working with the House committee that investigated Jan. 6.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      U.S. Army Soldier Charged With Lying About Ties to Insurrectionist Group

      by

      The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in North Carolina, is also accused of illegally selling firearms.An active duty U.S. Army soldier has been charged with lying to the military about his ties to a group dedicated to overthrowing the government and with illegally selling firearms, according to federal prosecutors in North Carolina.The soldier, Kai Liam Nix, 20, who was stationed at Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, N.C., was arrested on Aug. 15. A day earlier, a grand jury handed up an indictment accusing him of having lied on his security clearance application in 2022, when he stated he had not been involved in a group “dedicated to the use of violence or force to overthrow the United States Government.”A redacted copy of the indictment did not name the group to which Mr. Nix was accused of having ties, and neither did a news release issued on Monday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina. He is also accused of stealing and illegally selling firearms at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of 2024.Mr. Nix, who prosecutors said also went by the name Kai Brazelton, is charged with one count each of making a false statement to the government and of dealing in firearms without a license, along with two counts of selling a stolen firearm. If convicted on all counts, he could face up to 30 years in prison.The U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment further on the case.At Mr. Nix’s first court appearance on Monday, a judge ordered that he remain in custody until a hearing set for Thursday. He was also assigned a federal public defender, Robert J. Parrott, Jr, who said in an email to The New York Times that “we should avoid rushing to judgment.”“Mr. Nix looks forward to making his presentation in court,” he added.Although the authorities did not specify which group they claim Mr. Nix was affiliated with, his arrest came days before The New Yorker published an extensive article on Sunday about organizations outside of law enforcement that investigate far-right groups. The article mentioned Mr. Nix and his potential ties to Patriot Front, a far-right group that has engaged in white nationalist activism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 50 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Saving Conservatism From Trumpism

      by

      More from our inbox:The Candidates’ Foreign ExperienceA Loss of Diversity in Network NewsProtecting School LibrariesIndependent Voters Thalassa Raasch for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “How to Save Conservatism From Itself,” by David French (column, Aug. 12):I commend Mr. French for declaring his intention to vote for Kamala Harris despite his pro-life convictions. And although I do not share his anti-abortion stance, I respect his beliefs.However, in my view Mr. French is mistaken to think that if Donald Trump is defeated in November, there is hope for a conservatism that demonstrates real compassion.Mr. Trump has not become the standard-bearer of the Republican Party against its will; on the contrary, he has articulated (in his most inarticulate way) the fanaticism of today’s conservative movement in America.Absolutism in regard to abortion, gun ownership, immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, the slashing of benefits for the impoverished — these are the bedrock beliefs of today’s conservative movement, with or without Donald Trump. Who are the compassionate, compromise-seeking Republican leaders waiting in the wings to command a majority of voters once Mr. Trump somehow exits the stage?Donald Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of where the Republican Party finds itself today. Until honorable, conservative-minded people like Mr. French recognize this, it seems impossible to me that the Republican Party can rise from its ashes.Barth LandorChicagoTo the Editor:I don’t think one man’s vote will “save conservatism from itself,” but every vote counts, so I’m sure Kamala Harris will appreciate David French’s.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      JD Vance Has Right-Wing Friends in High Places

      by

      The single most troubling thing about Senator JD Vance — his bizarre understanding of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien notwithstanding — is his close relationship with some of the most extreme elements of the American right.When asked to explain his worldview, Vance has cited his former boss, Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who has written passionately against democracy (“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”), and Curtis Yarvin, a software developer turned blogger and provocateur who believes the United States should transition to monarchy (“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia”). Yarvin has also written favorably of human bondage (slavery, he once wrote, “is a natural human relationship”) and wondered aloud if apartheid wasn’t better for Black South Africans.While Vance’s admirers see him as a uniquely intellectual presence in American politics — a thinker as much as a politician — his right-wing, authoritarian views are largely derivative of the views and preoccupations of Thiel, Yarvin and their community of “postliberal” ideologues and reactionary venture capitalists. Take Vance’s view that the United States is in a period of Romanesque decline. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”Compare this to Thiel’s view that “liberalism” and “democracy” are “exhausted,” and that to restore the nation “we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.” Is this a call for new tax cuts, or does it represent a fundamental hostility toward popular constitutional government in the United States?In addition to relationships with Thiel and Yarvin, Vance is also in close contact with the bottom feeders on the far right. For nearly two years, according to The Washington Post, Vance was in regular conversation by text message with Chuck Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier who has spent the better part of a decade promoting right-wing conspiracy theories.And as my colleague Michelle Goldberg wrote this week, Vance is close enough to Jack Posobiec — an alt-right lunatic who pushed the vile and absurd Pizzagate conspiracy theory and collaborated with online neo-Nazis to spread antisemitic hate — to blurb his latest book, a polemic devoted to the idea that liberals and leftists are Untermenschen who must be stopped lest they destroy civilization. “As they are opposed to humanity itself,” Posobiec and his co-author, Joshua Lisec, write, “they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      UK Riots and How Online Hatred Spurs Real-World Violence

      by

      On New Year’s Day, a Telegram user in Portugal posted an ominous message that the wait was over. This was the year to stop the “Population Replacement” — a conspiracy theory that immigrants of color are taking over. In the days and weeks that followed, thousands more posts like it appeared on Telegram, X, YouTube […] More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The Paris Bridge of Olympic Joy and Its Violent Past

      by

      If the Olympic Games have made of Paris a midsummer night’s dream, perhaps the Pont du Carrousel has been its heart, a dimly lit bridge over glittering water, a merry-go-round of incarnations as the weeks have passed.The broad bridge spans the center of Paris, leading from the Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank of the Seine River to three vaulted openings into the Louvre courtyard on the Right Bank. It has always been a place for lovers to linger, joggers to pause, selfie seekers to snap and Paris wanderers to succumb to wonderment.There are few better places to drink in the city. The Grand Palais and Eiffel Tower rise to the west. To the east loom the domed Académie Française and, in the distance, the Notre-Dame Cathedral, now almost restored after the 2019 fire. The cleaned-up river is ever-changing, now churning after a downpour, now glassy still.France was in a somber mood through much of the summer. Then the Paris Olympics began two weeks ago, replacing social fracture with patriotic rapture, dissolving fences of division into bridges of understanding, none more unifying than the Pont du Carrousel, at least for now.Walking and cycling at the entrance to the Pont du Carrousel in Paris on Thursday.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesThe bridge spans the Seine from Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank to a grand entrance into the Louvre courtyard on the Right Bank.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      JD Vance Just Blurbed a Book Arguing That Progressives Are Subhuman

      by

      In a normal political environment, there would be little need to pay attention to a new book by the far-right provocateur Jack Posobiec, who is probably best known for promoting the conspiracy theory that Democrats ran a satanic child abuse ring beneath a popular Washington pizzeria. But “Unhumans,” an anti-democratic screed that Posobiec co-wrote with the professional ghostwriter Joshua Lisec, comes with endorsements from some of the most influential people in Republican politics, including, most significantly, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance.The word “fascist” gets thrown around a lot in politics, but it’s hard to find a more apt one for “Unhumans,” which came out last month. The book argues that leftists don’t deserve the status of human beings — that they are, as the title says, unhumans — and that they are waging a shadow war against all that is good and decent, which will end in apocalyptic slaughter if they are not stopped. “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman,” write Posobiec and Lisec.As they tell it, modern progressivism is just the latest incarnation of an ancient evil dating back to the late Roman Republic and continuing through the French Revolution and Communism to today. Often, they write, “great men of means” are required to crush this scourge. The contempt for democracy in “Unhumans” is not subtle. “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans,” write Posobiec and Lisec.One of their book’s heroes is the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who overthrew the democratic Second Spanish Republic in the country’s 1930s civil war. The authors call him a “great man of history” and compare him to George Washington. They quote him on what doesn’t work against the unhuman threat: “We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box.”Nakedly authoritarian ideas like this one are not uncommon in the dank corners of the reactionary internet, or among the sort of groups that led the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Unhumans” lauds Augusto Pinochet, leader of the Chilean military junta who led a coup against Salvador Allende’s elected government in 1973, ushering in a reign of torture and repression that involved tossing political enemies from helicopters.Pinochet-inspired helicopter memes have been common in the MAGA movement for years. And as the historian David Austin Walsh wrote last year, there’s long been a cult of Franco on the right. Nevertheless, it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      How JD Vance Thinks About Power

      by

      Follow live updates on the 2024 election here.In September 2021, JD Vance offered two predictions about former President Donald J. Trump and one piece of advice.Mr. Trump would run again in 2024, Mr. Vance said. He would win.And when he did, Mr. Vance counseled, he needed the right people around him this time.“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Mr. Vance said on a podcast.He continued.“Then when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did,” Mr. Vance said, citing a (possibly apocryphal) quotation long attributed to America’s seventh president, “and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”In his U-turning path from anti-Trump author to MAGA-approved Ohio senator and running mate, Mr. Vance has developed a reputation for being ideologically pliable — open-minded, supporters say; core-less, critics counter.But he has been unswerving in recent years in his assessment of how Republicans should carry themselves when they win: Use every available lever of state, even if that means testing the bounds of the constitutional system.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More