Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      How to Defeat America’s Homegrown Insurgency

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow to Defeat America’s Homegrown InsurgencyWe don’t need new laws. We need law enforcement, accountability and a willingness to listen.Mr. Grenier is a former C.I.A. station chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iraq mission manager and director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.Jan. 27, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETInsurgents storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The United States may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency.Credit…Leah Millis/ReutersAs a former overseas operative who has struggled both on the side of insurgents and against them, the past few days have brought a jarring realization: We may be witnessing the dawn of a sustained wave of violent insurgency within our own country, perpetrated by our own countrymen. Three weeks ago, it would have been unthinkable that the United States might be a candidate for a comprehensive counterinsurgency program. But that is where we are.Overrepresented among the ranks of angry but ordinary citizens who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 were others, hardly ordinary, committed to violent extremism: the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, “Christian” national chauvinists, white supremacists and QAnon fantasists, among others. Some of these groups may have planned their incursion in advance, but they could not have breached the Capitol if not for the wave of populist anger that swept them forward and over the barricades.Given impetus and, they believed, political cover by former President Donald Trump, the capering idiots who filmed themselves in the Capitol seemed to think they were untouchable. They may be easy to identify and arrest now, but there are others — well armed, dangerous and now forewarned — who had a glimpse of what may be possible in the political environment Mr. Trump created.There has long existed in this country a large, religiously conservative segment of the population, disproportionately (though not entirely) rural and culturally marginalized, that believes with some reason it is being eclipsed by a politically and culturally ascendant urban coalition of immigrants, minorities and the college-educated secular elites of tech and mainstream media. That coalition, in their eyes, abridges their religious freedoms, disparages and ‘cancels’ their most cherished beliefs, seeks to impose ‘socialism’ and is ultimately prepared to seize their guns.This, in very general terms, is the core segment of the nation that has been unified, championed and politically energized by Donald Trump.Bridging the urban-rural cultural and political gap with facts, tolerance and empathetic sincerity is a vital national project, but one which has become effectively impossible. The sincere belief, reportedly held by a majority of Republicans, that the Democrats stole the recent national election through massive fraud has taken the longstanding fears and resentments of a large section of our fellow citizens to a new and qualitatively different level.In context, their fury is understandable. If I believed as they do, I would be marching with them. The Big Lie perpetrated by Mr. Trump and his allies in the political class and among large elements of the right-wing media, preposterous as it may be, will have incalculable implications not just for long-term political comity in this country, but also for national security.The violent demonstrations feared for Inauguration Week, in the face of extraordinary security precautions, didn’t materialize. Relatively few of our citizens would embark on a program of sustained violence in any case. But if popular anger has crested, left in its wake is a bitter, simmering restiveness, one that will provide a nurturing environment for the worst among us — the extremists who seek a social apocalypse. Their numbers may be relatively small, but even a small slice of a nation of over three hundred million is substantial. Without a program of effective national action, they and their new adherents are capable of producing endemic political violence of a sort not seen in this country since Reconstruction.The challenge facing us now is one of counterinsurgency. Though one may recoil at the thought, it provides the most useful template for action, which must consist of three elements.First, the easiest and most straightforward, is criminal justice. We should continue to track known extremists, and investigate and bring to account those who commit crimes. We have the expertise and the infrastructure to do so, and to do it while preserving civil liberties. We need no new statutes, nor should we import terrorist designations that should apply only to foreign groups beyond the reach of domestic law.But the first element will not succeed without a second, which is even more important but far more difficult: We must isolate and alienate the committed insurgents from the population. Just as Al Qaeda in Iraq depended on a much larger community of disaffected Sunnis for tacit support and recruitment, we face the prospect of there being a mass of citizens — sullen, angry and nursing their grudges — among whom the truly violent minority will be able to live undetectably, attracting new adherents to their cause.The fantasy that the presidency was stolen from Mr. Trump, which has gripped so much of the country, will not easily be broken. The nation is in an epistemological crisis. When “facts” become untethered from objective reality, they become excuses to justify what one wants to believe. Yes, the problem is far worse on the right than on the left, but the problem is a general one.We must establish, undeniably, what actually happened in the election. That requires neither new laws nor a thought police: It’s not something for the government, but for all of the nation. We must all earnestly engage in an effort to listen to others’ ideas, no matter how daft they may seem; to understand where such ideas come from, no matter how hateful the source; to meet assertion with reason and evidence, not counterassertion. And where our evidence is lacking, we must patiently seek it out.Neighbor must speak with neighbor across the divide, rather than merely shunning alien views. Media figures must concede inconvenient facts, rather than tarring the other side with an emotionally satisfying broad brush. This is far from saying that all thoughts and ideas have equal validity: They do not. But truth is unavailing if not presented with clear underlying fact, and if not conveyed with respect. Success in restoring evidence-based truth as the language of public discourse is by no means assured, but lack of effort will doom us to failure.To be sure, the nation’s fundamental and legitimate political divisions will remain. But while not all differences can be bridged, they can be tolerated. For their part, Democrats would do well to avoid the more extravagant aspects of their agenda, which might confirm the worst fears of the rural heartland. By bringing people together, we can isolate the extremists.The final element of the plan concerns insurgency leadership. Mr. Trump’s transition from mere subversion of the constitutional order to open incitement of mass violence exposes what he has long represented to the most radical fringe of his supporters: a charismatic symbol. By shamelessly espousing the politics of white grievance and convincing so many that he actually won re-election, Mr. Trump has created the conditions necessary for the extremists’ success. They know better than to take his recent, ritualistic admonitions against violence at face value, and so should we. He will continue to be their champion, and his self-serving lies will be their most potent enabler.As the Senate prepares to sit in judgment on Mr. Trump, we should be wary of the excuses put forward by his defenders — that his conviction will only divide the country further, that we should simply move on. No: It is far too late for appeasement. Those of us versed in counterinsurgency know that in violent extremism nothing succeeds like success, and that the opposite is also true.I watched as enraged crowds in the streets of Algiers, as in most Arab capitals, melted away when Saddam Hussein was ignominiously defeated in the Persian Gulf war. Mass demonstrations in Pakistan in support of Osama bin Laden fell into dull quiescence when he was driven into hiding after Sept. 11. To blunt the extremists, Mr. Trump’s veneer of invincibility must similarly be crushed.Defeating him politically was the first step. Given the continuing threat he poses, convicting him in the Senate and barring him from future elective office is not only a just punishment for his crimes but also a national security imperative. He will, and must, retain his First Amendment rights. But the public shunning and permanent diminishment of Mr. Trump is a necessary requirement of future peace.The political and social divisions in our country will take time and application, from both sides, to heal. In the meantime, we minimize the threat at our peril.Robert Grenier is a former intelligence officer who was director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center from 2004 to 2006.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How Armed Protests Are Creating a New Kind of Politics

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      The gun-rights debate in Virginia is framed by the commonwealth’s experience of the deadliest school shooting in American history, which occurred in the town of Blacksburg on April 16, 2007. That morning, Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech with a history of mental illness, arrived on campus with a pair of semiautomatic pistols and proceeded to kill 32 of his fellow students before dying by suicide. He wounded 17 more, including Colin Goddard, who was sitting in his French class when Cho entered the classroom and shot him four times. After the shooting, Colin and his father, Andrew Goddard, “looked at what could be done in Virginia — what lessons could be learned,” Andrew Goddard told me. They attended a vigil for gun-violence victims hosted by the Virginia Center for Public Safety, a gun-control group, on the Capitol grounds in Richmond on Lobby Day in 2008.The event, Andrew Goddard recalls, was bracing. Gun rights activists gathered around the vigil participants, shouting, “Guns save lives! Guns save lives!” After Colin spoke, Goddard remembers, “They swarmed around my son and called him a coward for not shooting back.”Andrew Goddard later became the Virginia Center for Public Safety’s legislative director. Over the next decade, the organization and Van Cleave’s group faced off nearly every Lobby Day in demonstrations that neatly mirrored the social and political divisions of Virginia, which in turn mirrored the divisions of the country as a whole. The gun-control position was broadly identified with Democratic Virginia, the suburban professional class of the Greater Washington area and cities with large Black populations like Norfolk and Newport News. The gun-rights activists more often hailed from the state’s Republican south and west: predominantly rural, culturally Southern and Appalachian, mostly white.In the years after Virginia Tech, as the prospect of gun-control legislation receded, the standoffs cooled, until the 2016 election. “When Trump came into power,” Goddard said, “it was like the genie was let out of the bottle again.” The same election — in which Virginia went for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine, the state’s junior senator, by more than five points — also revealed the extent to which Virginia’s rural conservatives were losing purchase on power; the northern suburban population was growing, and growing more Democratic. In 2017, the Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race. Two years later, Democrats won control of both houses of the State Legislature for the first time in a quarter of a century. One of the new majority’s first acts on arriving in office was to begin drafting gun-control legislation. “It’s clear that a majority of Virginians support these measures,” Northam told the Legislature as the session began. “They expect votes and laws to make Virginia safer.” Among the laws the Legislature took up was a “red flag” law allowing law-enforcement officers to temporarily seize firearms from someone deemed by a judge to be a public-safety risk. Red-flag laws already existed in the District of Columbia and 18 other states, and their discretionary scope had made them a particular object of fury among gun rights hard-liners. In November 2019, a 28-year-old Army veteran, Alexander Booth, had Instagrammed in real time a standoff with police officers in Mahopac, a town in upstate New York — which has a red-flag law — over what Booth claimed was their intention to seize his ammunition. In fact, they had come on a domestic-violence call, but his broadcast went viral, as did a hashtag he added: #boogaloo. More

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      From Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the Capitol

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFrom Navy SEAL to Part of the Angry Mob Outside the CapitolThe presence in Washington of a longtime member of the Navy SEALs who was trained to identify misinformation reflects the partisan politics that helped lead to the assault.Adam Newbold, a former member of the Navy SEALs, sat on a police motorcycle near the steps of the Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6. Mr. Newbold says he didn’t enter the building.Credit…William TurtonJan. 26, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIn the weeks since Adam Newbold, a former member of the Navy SEALs, was identified as part of the enraged crowd that descended on the Capitol on Jan. 6, he has been interviewed by the F.B.I. and has resigned under pressure from jobs as a mentor and as a volunteer wrestling coach. He expects his business to lose major customers over his actions.But none of it has shaken his belief, against all evidence, that the presidential election was stolen and that people like him were right to rise up.It is surprising because Mr. Newbold’s background would seem to armor him better than most against the lure of baseless conspiracy theories. In the Navy, he was trained as an expert in sorting information from disinformation, a clandestine commando who spent years working in intelligence paired with the C.I.A., and he once mocked the idea of shadowy antidemocratic plots as “tinfoil hat” thinking.Even so, like thousands of others who surged to Washington this month to support President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Newbold bought into the fabricated theory that the election was rigged by a shadowy cabal of liberal power brokers who had pushed the nation to the precipice of civil war. No one could persuade him otherwise.Photos from the Capitol show Mr. Newbold wearing a black “We the People” T-shirt and straddling a Capitol Police motorcycle, just a few steps from where officers were battling with rioters.Mr. Newbold says he did not enter the Capitol, and he has not been charged with any crimes. But his presence there reflects the volatile brew of partisan politics and viral misinformation that helped lead to the assault.Mr. Newbold’s worldview is plain from his Facebook account. In a combative video laden with expletives that he posted a week before the riot, he repeated debunked but widely circulated claims about the election, saying that “it is absolutely unbelievable, the mountains of evidence of election fraud and voter fraud and machines and people who voted, dead people who voted.” When commenters challenged him, he responded with expletives and rejoinders like “Yeah keep laughing, you’re going to be laughing when you’re stomped down.”One striking aspect of the angry crowd at the Capitol was how many of its members seemed to come not from the fringes of American society but from white picket-fence Main Street backgrounds — firefighters and real estate agents, a marketing executive and a Town Council member, all captivated by flimsy conspiracy theories. Mr. Newbold’s presence showed just how persuasive the rigged-election story had grown.His experience ought to have made him hard to fool. A few years earlier, he had been on the receiving end of the same kind of baseless and potentially dangerous fervor about a supposed sinister government plot that became known as Jade Helm.Even after the Capitol riot, though, he expressed certainty that he had not been fooled.“I’ve been to countries all over the world that are indoctrinated by propaganda,” Mr. Newbold said in a long telephone interview last week, adding that he knew how misinformation could be used to manipulate the masses. “I have no doubts; I’m convinced that the election was not free and fair.”He said he believed that unnamed elites had quietly pulled off a coup by manipulating election software, and warned that the country was still on the precipice of war.In a Facebook video posted on Jan. 5, Adam Newbold said pro-Trump demonstrators like himself should respect the police and National Guard troops. But he added, “We are just very prepared, very capable, and very skilled patriots ready for a fight.Credit…Facebook, via Associated PressMr. Newbold, 45, lives in the rural hills of eastern Ohio, and is one of three brothers who all became Navy SEAL commandos. He spent 23 years in the elite force, Navy records show, including seven in the Naval Reserves, before retiring as a senior chief petty officer in 2017. He was given two Navy Commendation medals for valor in combat deployments, and several others for good conduct.A former SEAL who served with him at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia said Mr. Newbold was smart and had a good reputation in the SEAL teams, and had worked with the C.I.A. on intelligence gathering.After the Navy, Mr. Newbold moved to the small town of Lisbon, Ohio, opened a coffee shop and started a company called Advanced Training Group that taught SEAL-style tactics to members of the military and the police, and maintained a gym and shooting club for locals.Through his company, he got involved in helping to design and conduct an eight-week military exercise in Texas and other border states in the summer of 2015 that was called Jade Helm 15.When a PowerPoint slide summarizing the exercise was leaked, it was seized upon by fringe Facebook groups and professional conspiracy-theory promoters like Alex Jones, who began claiming that Jade Helm was a covert plot to have federal troops invade Texas, seize citizens’ guns and impose martial law. Baseless rumors circulated about “black helicopters” and Walmart stores that had supposedly been turned into detention camps.The storm of political paranoia whipped up over a straightforward military exercise became so fierce that some members of Congress, who later questioned the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr., began demanding answers, and Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas National Guard to keep watch.In the end, the exercise went off without a hitch. Mr. Newbold said in the interview that he and the other former special operators who planned the training exercise laughed at the paranoia, and even made T-shirts saying “I went to Jade Helm and all I got was this tinfoil hat.”Last week, he acknowledged that the frenzy of misinformation surrounding Jade Helm could have been lethal. Local residents in Texas had been scared to the edge of violence. Three men were arrested after planning to attack the exercise with pipe bombs.“There were actually some farmers and landowners who were making threats that if anyone was on their land, they would shoot them, so there were real concerns,” Mr. Newbold said. “It’s funny, but it’s stuff we have to take seriously.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.At the time, Mr. Newbold dismissed what he had witnessed as fringe ravings, not knowing it was a forerunner of the fantasies that came to suck in many more Americans, including military troops, police officers, members of Congress and a sitting president — not to mention Mr. Newbold.Mr. Newbold is a longtime registered Republican who said he voted for Mr. Trump. In the past four years, as mainstream media coverage of the president grew harsher, and Mr. Newbold’s sometimes strident support on Facebook drew more rebukes, he migrated to news sources and chat rooms that shared his views.By the late fall of 2020, he was spending time on private Facebook pages where far-right chatter proliferated. He posted long, often angry video soliloquies about how the country was being stolen. He seemed to become increasingly convinced that people were plotting not just against Mr. Trump but against the Constitution, and as a veteran it was his duty to defend it.Mr. Newbold began holding private meetings at his shooting club with other like-minded members, according to a former member who said he quit because he was alarmed at the growing extremism.“It became super cultlike,” said the former member, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was afraid of retaliation. “I tried to reason with him, show him facts, and he just went nuclear.”After the November election, Mr. Newbold’s Facebook posts predicting a coming war worried some people in Lisbon to the point that at least one said she alerted the F.B.I.Last week when discussing his beliefs, Mr. Newbold dismissed the dozens of court decisions rejecting challenges to the election results, and shrugged off the logistical obstacles to rigging an election conducted by independent officials in more than 3,000 counties. Without citing evidence, he suggested it was naïve to assume the results had not been rigged.In a long video posted late in December, the former member of the SEALs predicted a communist takeover if people did not rise up to stop it. “Once things start going violent, then I’m in my element,” he said in the video. “And I will defend this country. And there’s a lot of other people that will too.”A week later, Mr. Newbold organized a group of his company’s employees, club members and supporters to travel in a caravan to Washington, and joined the flag-waving crowd that surged toward the Capitol on Jan. 6.In a video posted that evening, he is seen saying that members of his group had been on the “very front lines” of the unrest. “Guys, you would be proud,” Mr. Newbold tells his viewers. “I don’t know when the last time you stormed the Capitol was. But that’s what happened. It was historic, it was necessary.” He adds that members of Congress were “shaking in their shoes.”In the interview last week, Mr. Newbold sought to downplay his involvement in the events at the Capitol. He said that he sat on the police motorcycle only to keep vandals away from it, and that he had traveled to Washington not to incite violence but to protect the Capitol from angry liberals in the event that the Senate agreed to stop the certification of the election. After the attack on the Capitol, he deleted some of his more incendiary online posts. But what happened in Washington has apparently not prompted him to question his beliefs. He said that he was still sure the election had been stolen and that the country was on a path toward global autocracy.And in a video posted six days after the riot, when it was known that people had died, Mr. Newbold said that at the Capitol he had felt “a sense of pride that Americans were finally standing up.” He did not rule out turning to violence himself.“I make no apologies for being a rough man ready to do rough things in rough situations,” he said. “It is absolutely necessary at times, and has been throughout our history.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why Is Big Tech Policing Free Speech? Because the Government Isn’t

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsThe Global Far RightCredit…Illustration by Hudson ChristieFeatureWhy Is Big Tech Policing Free Speech? Because the Government Isn’tDeplatforming President Trump showed that the First Amendment is broken — but not in the way his supporters think.Credit…Illustration by Hudson ChristieSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 26, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETIn the months leading up to the November election, the social media platform Parler attracted millions of new users by promising something competitors, increasingly, did not: unfettered free speech. “If you can say it on the streets of New York,” promised the company’s chief executive, John Matze, in a June CNBC interview, “you can say it on Parler.”The giants of social media — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram — had more stringent rules. And while they still amplified huge amounts of far-right content, they had started using warning labels and deletions to clamp down on misinformation about Covid-19 and false claims of electoral fraud, including in posts by President Trump. Conservative figures, including Senator Ted Cruz, Eric Trump and Sean Hannity, grew increasingly critical of the sites and beckoned followers to join them on Parler, whose investors include the right-wing activist and heiress Rebekah Mercer. The format was like Twitter’s, but with only two clear rules: no criminal activity and no spam or bots. On Parler, you could say what you wanted without being, as conservatives complained, “silenced.”After the election, as Trump sought to overturn his defeat with a barrage of false claims, Matze made a classic First Amendment argument for letting the disinformation stand: More speech is better. Let the marketplace of ideas run without interference. “If you don’t censor, if you don’t — you just let him do what he wants, then the public can judge for themselves,” Matze said of Trump’s Twitter account on the New York Times podcast “Sway.” “Just sit there and say: ‘Hey, that’s what he said. What do you guys think?’”Matze was speaking to the host of “Sway,” Kara Swisher, on Jan. 7 — the day after Trump told supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol and fight congressional certification of the Electoral College vote. In the chaos that followed Trump’s speech, the American marketplace of ideas clearly failed. Protecting democracy, for Trump loyalists, had become a cry to subvert and even destroy it. And while Americans’ freedoms of speech and the press were vital to exposing this assault, they were also among its causes. Right-wing media helped seed destabilizing lies; elected officials helped them grow; and the democratizing power of social media spread them, steadily, from one node to the next.Social media sites effectively function as the public square where people debate the issues of the day. But the platforms are actually more like privately owned malls: They make and enforce rules to keep their spaces tolerable, and unlike the government, they’re not obligated to provide all the freedom of speech offered by the First Amendment. Like the bouncers at a bar, they are free to boot anyone or anything they consider disruptive. In the days after Jan. 6, they swiftly cracked down on whole channels and accounts associated with the violence. Reddit removed the r/DonaldTrump subreddit. YouTube tightened its policy on posting videos that called the outcome of the election into doubt. TikTok took down posts with hashtags like #stormthecapitol. Facebook indefinitely suspended Trump’s account, and Twitter — which, like Facebook, had spent years making some exceptions to its rules for the president — took his account away permanently.Parler, true to its stated principles, did none of this. But it had a weak point: It was dependent on other private companies to operate. In the days after the Capitol assault, Apple and Google removed Parler from their app stores. Then Amazon Web Services stopped hosting Parler, effectively cutting off its plumbing. Parler sued, but it had agreed, in its contract, not to host content that “may be harmful to others”; having promised the streets of New York, it was actually bound by the rules of a kindergarten playground. In a court filing, Amazon provided samples of about 100 posts it had notified Parler were in violation of its contract in the weeks before the Capitol assault. “Fry ’em up,” one said, with a list of targets that included Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. “We are coming for you and you will know it.” On Jan. 21, a judge denied Parler’s demand to reinstate Amazon’s services.It’s unlikely the volume of incendiary content on Parler could rival that of Twitter or Facebook, where groups had openly planned for Jan. 6. But Parler is the one that went dark. A platform built to challenge the oligopoly of its giant rivals was deplatformed by other giants, in a demonstration of how easily they, too, could block speech at will.Over all, the deplatforming after Jan. 6 had the feeling of an emergency response to a wave of lies nearly drowning our democracy. For years, many tech companies had invoked the American ethos of free speech while letting disinformation and incitement spread abroad, even when it led to terrible violence. Now they leapt to action as if, with America in trouble, American ideals no longer applied. Parler eventually turned to overseas web-hosting services to get back online.“We couldn’t beat you in the war of ideas and discourse, so we’re pulling your mic” — that’s how Archon Fung, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, put it, in expressing ambivalence about the moves. It seemed curiously easier to take on Trump and his allies in the wake of Democrats’ victories in the Senate runoffs in Georgia, giving them control of both chambers of Congress along with the White House. (Press officers for Twitter and Facebook said no election outcome influenced the companies’ decision.) And in setting an example that might be applied to the speech of the other groups — foreign dissidents, sex-worker activists, Black Lives Matter organizers — the deplatforming takes on an ominous cast.Fadi Quran, a campaign director for the global human rights group Avaaz, told me he, too, found the precedent worrying. “Although the steps may have been necessary to protect American lives against violence,” he said, “they are a reminder of the power big tech has over our information infrastructure. This infrastructure should be governed by deliberative democratic processes.”But what would those democratic processes be? Americans have a deep and abiding suspicion of letting the state regulate speech. At the moment, tech companies are filling the vacuum created by that fear. But do we really want to trust a handful of chief executives with policing spaces that have become essential parts of democratic discourse? We are uncomfortable with government doing it; we are uncomfortable with Silicon Valley doing it. But we are also uncomfortable with nobody doing it at all. This is a hard place to be — or, perhaps, two rocks and a hard place.When Twitter banned Trump, he found a seemingly unlikely defender: Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who criticized the decision as a “problematic” breach of the right to free speech. This wasn’t necessarily because Merkel considered the content of Trump’s speech defensible. The deplatforming troubled her because it came from a private company; instead, she said through a spokesman, the United States should have a law restricting online incitement, like the one Germany passed in 2017 to prevent the dissemination of hate speech and fake news stories.Among democracies, the United States stands out for its faith that free speech is the right from which all other freedoms flow. European countries are more apt to fight destabilizing lies by balancing free speech with other rights. It’s an approach informed by the history of fascism and the memory of how propaganda, lies and the scapegoating of minorities can sweep authoritarian leaders to power. Many nations shield themselves from such anti-pluralistic ideas. In Canada, it’s a criminal offense to publicly incite hatred “against any identifiable group.” South Africa prosecutes people for uttering certain racial slurs. A number of countries in Europe treat Nazism as a unique evil, making it a crime to deny the Holocaust.In the United States, laws like these surely wouldn’t survive Supreme Court review, given the current understanding of the First Amendment — an understanding that comes out of our country’s history and our own brushes with suppressing dissent. The First Amendment did not prevent the administration of John Adams from prosecuting more than a dozen newspaper editors for seditious libel or the Socialist and labor leader Eugene V. Debs from being convicted of sedition over a speech, before a peaceful crowd, opposing involvement in World War I. In 1951, the Supreme Court upheld the convictions of Communist Party leaders for “conspiring” to advocate the overthrow of the government, though the evidence showed only that they had met to discuss their ideological beliefs.It wasn’t until the 1960s that the Supreme Court enduringly embraced the vision of the First Amendment expressed, decades earlier, in a dissent by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas.” In Brandenburg v. Ohio, that meant protecting the speech of a Ku Klux Klan leader at a 1964 rally, setting a high bar for punishing inflammatory words. Brandenburg “wildly overprotects free speech from any logical standpoint,” the University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone points out. “But the court learned from experience to guard against a worse evil: the government using its power to silence its enemies.”This era’s concept of free speech still differed from today’s in one crucial way: The court was willing to press private entities to ensure they allowed different voices to be heard. As another University of Chicago law professor, Genevieve Lakier, wrote in a law-review article last year, a hallmark of the 1960s was the court’s “sensitivity to the threat that economic, social and political inequality posed” to public debate. As a result, the court sometimes required private property owners, like TV broadcasters, to grant access to speakers they wanted to keep out.But the court shifted again, Lakier says, toward interpreting the First Amendment “as a grant of almost total freedom” for private owners to decide who could speak through their outlets. In 1974, it struck down a Florida law requiring newspapers that criticized the character of political candidates to offer them space to reply. Chief Justice Warren Burger, in his opinion for the majority, recognized that barriers to entry in the newspaper market meant this placed the power to shape public opinion “in few hands.” But in his view, there was little the government could do about it..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1amoy78{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1amoy78{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1amoy78:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1amoy78[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}Capitol Riot FalloutFrom Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by President Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Traditionally, conservatives have favored that libertarian approach: Let owners decide how their property is used. That’s changing now that they find their speech running afoul of tech-company rules. “Listen to me, America, we were wiped out,” the right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino, an investor in Parler, said in a Fox News interview after Amazon pulled its services. “And to all the geniuses out there, too, saying this is a private company, it’s not a First Amendment fight — really, it’s not?” The law that prevents the government from censoring speech should still apply, he said, because “these companies are more powerful than a de facto government.” You needn’t sympathize with him to see the hit Parler took as the modern equivalent of, in Burger’s terms, disliking one newspaper and taking the trouble to start your own, only to find no one will sell you ink to print it.One problem with private companies’ holding the ability to deplatform any speaker is that they’re in no way insulated from politics — from accusations of bias to advertiser boycotts to employee walkouts. Facebook is a business, driven by profit and with no legal obligation to explain its decisions the way a court or regulatory body would. Why, for example, hasn’t Facebook suspended the accounts of other leaders who have used the platform to spread lies and bolster their power, like the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte? A spokesman said suspending Trump was “a response to a specific situation based on risk” — but so is every decision, and the risks can be just as high overseas.“It’s really media and public pressure that is the difference between Trump coming down and Duterte staying up,” says Evelyn Douek, a lecturer at Harvard Law School. “But the winds of public opinion are a terrible basis for free-speech decisions! Maybe it seems like it’s working right now. But in the longer run, how do you think unpopular dissidents and minorities will fare?”Deplatforming works, at least in the short term. There are indications that in the weeks after the platforms cleaned house — with Twitter suspending not just Trump but some 70,000 accounts, including many QAnon influencers — conversations about election fraud decreased significantly across several sites. After Facebook reintroduced a scoring system to promote news sources based on its judgment of their quality, the list of top performers, usually filled by hyperpartisan sources, featured CNN, NPR and local news outlets.But there’s no reason to think the healthier information climate will last. The very features that make social media so potent work both to the benefit and the detriment of democracy. YouTube, for instance, changed its recommendation algorithm in 2019, after researchers and reporters (including Kevin Roose at The New York Times) showed how it pushed some users toward radicalizing content. It’s also telling that, since the election, Facebook has stopped recommending civic groups for people to join. After Jan. 6, the researcher Aric Toler at Bellingcat surfaced a cheery video, automatically created by Facebook to promote its groups, which imposed the tagline “community means a lot” over images of a militia brandishing weapons and a photo of Robert Gieswein, who has since been charged in the assault on the Capitol. “I’m afraid that the technology has upended the possibility of a well-functioning, responsible speech environment,” the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith says. “It used to be we had masses of speech in a reasonable range, and some extreme speech we could tolerate. Now we have a lot more extreme speech coming from lots of outlets and mouthpieces, and it’s more injurious and harder to regulate.”For decades, tech companies mostly responded to such criticism with proud free-speech absolutism. But external pressures, and the absence of any other force to contain users, gradually dragged them into the expensive and burdensome role of policing their domains. Facebook, for one, now has legions of low-paid workers reviewing posts flagged as harmful, a task gruesome enough that the company has agreed to pay $52 million in mental-health compensation to settle a lawsuit by more than 10,000 moderators.Perhaps because it’s so easy to question their motives, some executives have taken to begging for mercy. “We are facing something that feels impossible,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, while being grilled by Congress last year. And Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has agreed with lawmakers that the company has too much power over speech. Two weeks after suspending Trump, Facebook said its new oversight board, an independent group of 20 international experts, would review the decision, with the power to make a binding ruling.Zuckerberg and Dorsey have also suggested openness to government regulation that would hold platforms to external standards. That might include, for example, requiring rules for slowing the spread of disinformation from known offenders. European lawmakers, with their more skeptical free-speech tradition (and lack of allegiance to American tech companies), have proposed requiring platforms to show how their recommendations work and giving users more control over them, as has been done in the realm of privacy. Steps like these seem better suited to combating misinformation than eliminating, as is often suggested, the immunity platforms currently enjoy from lawsuits, which directly affects only a narrow range of cases, mostly involving defamation.There is no consensus on a path forward, but there is precedent for some intervention. When radio and television radically altered the information landscape, Congress passed laws to foster competition, local control and public broadcasting. From the 1930s until the 1980s, anyone with a broadcast license had to operate in the “public interest” — and starting in 1949, that explicitly included exposing audiences to multiple points of view in policy debates. The court let the elected branches balance the rights of private ownership with the collective good of pluralism.This model coincided with relatively high levels of trust in media and low levels of political polarization. That arrangement has been rare in American history. It’s hard to imagine a return to it. But it’s worth remembering that radio and TV also induced fear and concern, and our democracy adapted and thrived. The First Amendment of the era aided us. The guarantee of free speech is for democracy; it is worth little, in the end, apart from it.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Republicans Waver on Convicting Donald J. Trump

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentDivisions in the SenateList of Senators’ StancesTrump ImpeachedHow the House VotedKey QuotesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWith Impeachment Trial Looming, Republicans Waver on Punishing TrumpHouse managers presented the Senate with an article charging Donald J. Trump with “incitement of insurrection.” But Republicans are increasingly indicating they are unlikely to find him guilty.For the second time in just over a year, the House delivered an article of impeachment to the Senate against former President Donald J. Trump, citing “incitement of insurrection.”CreditCredit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesJan. 25, 2021Updated 10:12 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — For the second time in just over a year, the House on Monday sent an article of impeachment against Donald J. Trump to the Senate for trial, thrusting his fate into the hands of 50 Republican senators who for now appear reluctant to convict him.On a day marked more by ceremony than substance, nine House impeachment managers crossed the Capitol to inform the Senate that they were ready to prosecute Mr. Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” a bipartisan charge approved after the former president stirred up a violent mob that stormed the Capitol. But with some of the outrage wrought by the Jan. 6 rampage already dissipating, few Republicans appeared ready to repudiate a leader who maintains broad sway over their party by joining Democrats in convicting him.Senators planned to put off the heart of the trial until Feb. 9. That move will allow President Biden time to win confirmation of crucial cabinet officials and buy breathing room for Republicans to weigh their stances in what amounts to a referendum on their own futures and that of their party as much as on Mr. Trump.Unlike Mr. Trump’s last impeachment, when his party quickly rallied behind him, several Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, have signaled they are open to convicting the former president after his mendacious campaign to overturn his election loss turned deadly. That would allow the Senate to take a second vote to bar him from ever holding office again. But at least at the trial’s outset, their numbers fell well short of the 17 Republicans needed to join Democrats to secure a conviction.A survey by The New York Times on the eve of the trial found that 27 Republican senators had expressed opposition to charging Mr. Trump or otherwise holding him accountable by impeachment. Sixteen Republicans indicated they were undecided, and seven had no response. Most of those opposed increasingly fell back on process-based objections, rather than defending Mr. Trump.“Why are we doing this?” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. “I can’t think of something more divisive and unhealing than doing an impeachment trial when the president is already gone. It’s just vindictive. It’s ridiculous.”Lawmakers in both parties cautioned that Republicans’ mood could quickly shift in the weeks ahead, if more evidence broke into public view about Mr. Trump’s actions or he provoked them further with his defiant threats of retribution.Already, unflattering new details were surfacing about Mr. Trump’s broader campaign to use his power stay in office at any cost. The Justice Department’s inspector general opened an investigation on Monday into whether current or former officials had tried to use their positions inappropriately to help Mr. Trump overturn the election outcome. The inquiry appeared to be a response to a report in The Times on efforts by a senior Justice Department official working with Mr. Trump to push top law enforcement officials to falsely and publicly use fraud investigations to cast doubt on the election outcome.Although Donald J. Trump has left the White House, he remains popular with Republican voters, and many lawmakers fear crossing him.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWith so much at stake, senators were moving with little precedent to guide them. Mr. Trump is the only president to have been impeached twice, and the trial will be the first in which the Senate has considered convicting a former president.With few Republicans ready to defend Mr. Trump’s actions, many have turned to arguing that the process itself is flawed because the Constitution does not explicitly say ex-presidents can be tried. Republicans have invited Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, to expound on the argument at Republicans’ luncheon on Tuesday, and some were bracing for Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, to try to force a vote to toss out the case for that reason during Tuesday’s session. Such a vote would fail, but could provide an early gauge of Republicans’ views on the trial.“We will listen to it, but I still have concerns about the constitutionality of this, and the precedent it sets in trying to convict a private citizen,” said Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa.She added: “He exhibited poor leadership, I think we all agree with that. But it was these people that came into the Capitol, they did it knowingly. So they bear the responsibility.”Irked by senators flocking to procedural claims that the trial was unconstitutional or unfair, Democrats warned Republicans that they could not hide from a substantive verdict.“There seems to be some hope that Republicans could oppose the former president’s impeachment on process grounds, rather than grappling with his awful conduct,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader. “Let me be perfectly clear: This is not going to fly.”Mr. Biden, who has been reluctant to comment on the proceeding, told CNN on Monday that the trial “has to happen,” even if will complicate his legislative agenda. But he cast doubt on whether the enough Republicans would vote to convict to sustain the charge.That Republicans were going to such lengths to avoid discussing Mr. Trump’s actions underscored how precarious their political situation was. Few contest that Mr. Trump bears at least some responsibility for the most violent attack on the seat of American government since the War of 1812, and many privately blame him for costing them control of the House, Senate and White House. But he also remains a popular figure among Republican voters, and many lawmakers fear that he could marshal votes to turn them out of office should they cross him.“I guess it depends on what state you’re in and what phase in your career you are,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, told reporters with a chuckle when asked what would happen to Republicans who voted to convict..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-1sjr751{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1sjr751 a:hover{border-bottom:1px solid #dcdcdc;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1cs27wo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1cs27wo{padding:20px;}}.css-1cs27wo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-1cs27wo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}The Trump Impeachment ›From Riot to ImpeachmentThe riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here’s a look at what happened and at the ongoing fallout:As this video shows, poor planning and a restive crowd encouraged by Mr. Trump set the stage for the riot.A two hour period was crucial to turning the rally into the riot.Several Trump administration officials, including cabinet members Betsy DeVos and Elaine Chao, announced that they were stepping down as a result of the riot.Federal prosecutors have charged more than 70 people, including some who appeared in viral photos and videos of the riot. Officials expect to eventually charge hundreds of others.The House voted to impeach the president on charges of “inciting an insurrection” that led to the rampage by his supporters.Mr. McConnell, who steered the president to acquittal a year ago, has largely left senators to navigate the proceeding on their own this time. He has made clear through advisers and calls with colleagues that he personally views Mr. Trump’s conduct as impeachable and sees the process as a possible way to purge him from the party and rebuild before the 2022 midterm elections. But he has not committed to voting to convict.At least a half-dozen or so Republicans appear ready to join him if he does, but dozens of others appear to be unwilling to break from four years of alliance with Mr. Trump.Carrying a slim blue envelope on Monday, the House managers, led by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, walked the impeachment article through a Capitol where memories of the siege were still fresh. They started in the House chamber, where lawmakers had ducked for cover and donned gas masks as rioters tried to force their way in; past Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite, which was ransacked; through the Rotunda, where officers fired tear gas as they lost control over the throng; and into the well of the Senate chamber, where invaders wearing pro-Trump gear congregated, taking photos on the dais from which the vice president and senators had been forced to evacuate minutes before.House Impeachment Managers Rep. Madeleine Dean and Rep. Jamie Raskin talk after delivering the article of impeachment to the Senate on Capitol Hill.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAfter Mr. Raskin read the charge in full, the managers departed, leaving the matter to the Senate, which planned to reconvene at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday to issue a summons to Mr. Trump to answer for the charge. Senators were expected to formally agree to a schedule for the coming weeks and swear an impeachment oath dating to the 18th century to do “impartial justice.”Mr. Trump’s new defense lawyer, Butch Bowers, was said to be trying to line up at least one additional lawyer to join him, according to people familiar with the planning. He was also working with Jason Miller, an adviser to Mr. Trump, on a public-relations campaign.Other aspects of the trial began to come into focus on Monday as well. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Senate president pro tempore, said he would preside over the trial, assuming a role filled last year by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.The Constitution states that the chief justice of the United States presides over any impeachment trial of the president or vice president. But it does not explicitly give guidance on who should oversee the proceeding for others, including former presidents. Mr. Schumer said Chief Justice Roberts was uninterested in reprising a time-consuming role that would insert him and the Supreme Court into the political fight over Mr. Trump.The role was largely ceremonial in the first impeachment trial of Mr. Trump a year ago. But as the presiding officer, Mr. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, could issue rulings on key questions around the admissibility of evidence and whether a trial of a former president is even allowed under the Constitution. He will also retain a vote himself.The job could also have gone to Vice President Kamala Harris, in her capacity as president of the Senate. But there were clear drawbacks for Ms. Harris in overseeing a proceeding that is all but certain to be regarded by some as an effort by Democrats to use their newfound power to punish the leader of the rival political party.Mr. Leahy’s presence on the dais could open Democrats to similar charges from the right, particularly if he issues a contentious ruling, but officials said there was no clear alternative without the chief justice. In a statement, Mr. Leahy was adamant he would take “extraordinarily seriously” his trial oath to administer “impartial justice.”Maggie Haberman More

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      Rupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’Mr. Murdoch of News Corp, who spoke in a video, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He called conformity on social media “a straitjacket on sensibility.” Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp, said his long career “is still in motion.”Credit…Mike Segar/ReutersJan. 25, 2021Updated 3:06 p.m. ETThe media mogul Rupert Murdoch denounced an “awful woke orthodoxy” and declared, “I’m far from done,” while accepting a lifetime achievement award this weekend.Mr. Murdoch, 89, made the remarks in a prerecorded video shown on Saturday during a virtual event for the United Kingdom nonprofit that honored him, the Australia Day Foundation. The video was shared on the website of The Herald Sun, a newspaper in Melbourne owned by Mr. Murdoch.The video is noteworthy because Mr. Murdoch, despite exerting enormous influence over the global media landscape as the executive chairman of News Corp, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He has been weathering the pandemic in his home in the Cotswolds in England, and received a Covid-19 vaccination in December.In the video, Mr. Murdoch, standing next to a bottle of Australian red wine and wearing a medal, thanked the foundation for the award in the video but said his career “that began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom is still in motion.”He also took the opportunity to condemn “cancel culture.”“For those of us in media,” he said, “there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.”He continued: “This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”It seems Mr. Murdoch’s beliefs have been noted by the editors of his publications. On Monday, The New York Post published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on the front page of the paper with the headline “Time to take a stand against the muzzling of America.”Mr. Hawley, who has been widely condemned for his role in trying to overturn the result of the presidential election even after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, echoed Mr. Murdoch in denouncing “woke orthodoxy.”Credit…New York PostMr. Hawley also used his front-page column in one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country to bemoan the revoking of his book deal and the canceling of events he had scheduled. Mr. Hawley’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped his book after the Jan. 6 siege, though it was quickly picked up by the conservative publishing house Regnery Publishing.The New York Post declined to comment.Mr. Murdoch’s media empire, which includes The Post and Fox News, is trying to navigate a tense political moment. It is attempting to maintain conservative viewers who, unhappy with some of the straight news reporting on Fox, tuned in to Newsmax and One America News, which embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims about election fraud. Fox News executives this month fired the politics editor Chris Stirewalt, who was an on-screen face of the network’s election night projections, and introduced more right-wing opinion programming.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Proud Boys No Longer Standing By Trump

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storylettersProud Boys No Longer Standing By TrumpA reader says they were thrown under the bus in typical Trump fashion. Also: Truth and the election; a teaching moment from “Gatsby.”Jan. 22, 2021, 2:01 p.m. ETMore from our inbox:Truth Won, Trump LostThe ‘Gatsby’ Stereotype of WealthMembers of the Proud Boys, who have engaged in political violence, at a rally in Portland, Ore., in September.Credit…Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “They Called Trump ‘Emperor.’ Now, He’s ‘Weak’” (news article, Jan. 21):It appears that the love affair between the Proud Boys and Donald Trump is done. They’re over him. Mr. Trump betrayed the Proud Boys by denouncing their violent attack on the Capitol after he had encouraged them. And he failed to issue any pardons to them for their attempted insurrection.The Proud Boys should have known better. Mr. Trump has a long history of tossing loyalists under the Trump bus once they’re no longer useful to him. At least the Proud Boys finally see him for what he is and has always been — in their own words, an “extraordinarily weak” man.Perhaps there’s hope that they’ll also see that their own agenda to effect change by sowing chaos in this country is wrongheaded and ultimately against their own best interests.Doug WilliamsMinneapolisTo the Editor:Pass this on to the Proud Boys: Donald Trump was never a tough guy. He just plays one on TV.Patrick FlynnRidge, N.Y.Truth Won, Trump Lost   Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Donald Trump left the White House a defeated man. He left unable to admit to, let alone face, the reality of his destructive actions.On Wednesday the country celebrated the victory of its system of democracy, a democracy that suffered damage but withstood Mr. Trump’s self-serving attacks, proving that its greatness was not in need of remaking. Indeed, from the courts to the people’s vote, the integrity of our system of government held strong when it counted.What Mr. Trump did not count on was this thing called truth, and this other thing called consequences. For perhaps the first time in his life, he could not bully, lie and cheat his way to evading responsibility. And that is the greatness of a flawed but real democracy. Truth prevails.Philip KenneyPortland, Ore.The ‘Gatsby’ Stereotype of WealthNew versions of “The Great Gatsby” published by, clockwise from left, Everyman’s Library, Candlewick Press, Modern Library, Vintage Classics, Penguin Classics and Black Dog & Leventhal.Credit…  To the Editor:Re “The Great Glut of ‘Gatsby’” (Arts pages, Jan. 15):“The Great Gatsby” is a great American novel, but it has also solidified a stereotype of money and class that contributes to today’s “us versus them” mind-set.When Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby are the only affluent folks we know, our view of wealth is dangerously narrow. Instead of further solidifying clichés, we need to move money out of the taboo category and have honest conversations at a personal level.Let’s read “Gatsby” as a novel rather than viewing its characters as more real than reality.Jennifer RisherSan FranciscoThe writer is the author of “We Need to Talk: A Memoir About Wealth.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      We Have to Make the Republican Party Less Dangerous

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWe Have to Make the Republican Party Less DangerousThe crisis Trump set in motion is far from over.Opinion ColumnistJan. 22, 2021Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn his Inaugural Address on Wednesday, Joe Biden said that after four years of Trumpian chaos — including two months of thrashing against the results of the election, culminating in an attack on the Capitol itself — “democracy” had “prevailed.” But it might have been better, if inappropriate to the moment, for the new president to have said that democracy had “survived.”In so many ways, Donald Trump was a stress test for our democracy. And as we begin to assess the damage from his time in office, it’s clear we did not do especially well.Forces we thought would constrain Trump out of simple self-preservation — public opinion and the demands of the election cycle — were of no concern to a president with ironclad loyalty from his base and a multipronged propaganda network at his side.Institutions we thought would curb his worst behavior — the courts, the federal bureaucracy — had a mixed record, enabling his desires as often as they stymied his most destructive impulses.And Congress, designed to check and challenge a lawless president, struggled to do its job on account of partisanship and party loyalty. With just 34 senators on his side, a president can act with virtual impunity, secure in the knowledge that he won’t be removed from office, even if the House votes to impeach him and a majority of senators wants to see him go.Yes, we held an election, and yes, Trump actually left the White House — the Secret Service did not have to drag him out. But the difference between our reality and one where Trump overturned a narrow result in Biden’s favor is just a few tens of thousands of votes across a handful of states. If it were Pennsylvania or Arizona alone that meant the difference between victory and defeat, are we so sure that Republican election officials would have resisted the overwhelming pressure of the president and his allies? Are we absolutely confident the Supreme Court would not have intervened? Do we think the Republican Party wouldn’t have done everything it could to keep Trump in the White House?We don’t have to speculate too much. At points before the election, key actors signaled some willingness to stand with Trump should the results come close enough to seriously contest. And recent reporting from Axios shows that the plan, from the start, was to try to use any ambiguity in the results to claim victory, even if Trump lacked the votes.We were saved, in short, by the point spread. This does not reflect well on American democracy. But it does make clear the source of our dysfunction: the Republican Party.This is not a new insight, but it’s worth repeating all the same, especially in light of President Biden’s inaugural call for unity, decency and the common good. The Republican Party in 2021 is a party in near total thrall to its most radical elements, a party that in the main — as we just witnessed a few weeks ago — does not accept that it can lose elections and seeks to overturn or delegitimize the result when it does. It disseminates false accusations of voter fraud and then uses those accusations to justify voter suppression and disenfranchisement. It feeds lies to its supporters and uses those lies, as Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley did, to challenge the fundamental processes of our democracy.When in power in Washington, the Republican Party can barely govern, and when out of power, it does almost everything it can to stymie the government’s ability to act. And it was the party’s nearly unbreakable loyalty to Trump that neutered the impeachment power and enabled his fight to overturn constitutional government, which ended on Jan. 6 with a deadly mob wilding through the Capitol.To even begin to fix American democracy, we have to make the Republican Party less dangerous than it is. The optimal solution would be to build our two-party system into a multiparty one that splits the radical from the moderate Right and gives the latter a chance to win power without appeal to the former. But this requires fundamental change to the American system of elections, which is to say, it’s not going to happen anytime soon (and may never).The only other alternative — the only thing that might force the Republican Party to shift gears — is for the Democratic Party to establish national political dominance of the kind not seen since the heyday of the New Deal coalition. Parties tend to change when they can’t win power. It’s part of the problem of our time that the Republican Party can win a large share of national power — up to and including unified control of Washington — without winning a majority of votes, because of its advantage in the counter-majoritarian elements of our system. Without that advantage, there’s immediate incentive to do something different.This, too, is unlikely. Even if President Biden has a successful four (or eight) years in office, it is difficult to imagine anything that could prompt the kind of national realignment that would give the Democratic Party a durable advantage in the House, the Senate and the states. In a system that awards political power on the basis of land and boundaries as much as it does votes, Democrats would have to reverse the convergence of geography and partisan identity — where rural and exurban voters mostly vote for Republicans while their urban and suburban counterparts mostly vote for Democrats — in order to win the kind of victory that would force the Republican Party off its current path and into the wilderness. And even then, as the example of the California Republican Party and Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader of the House, demonstrates, there’s no guarantee that the party will change its tune.The Trump stress test, in other words, has revealed a nearly fatal vulnerability in our democracy — a militant, increasingly anti-democratic Republican Party — for which we may not have a viable solution.With that said, I don’t think we’re doomed to minoritarian rule by reactionaries. Political life is unpredictable, and there’s no way to know what may change. Lofty dreams can enter reality and obvious certainties can vanish into thin air.But one thing is certain. The crisis of our democracy is far from over. The most we’ve won, with Trump’s departure, is a respite from chaos and a chance to make whatever repairs we can manage.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More