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      ‘No enemies to the right’: DeSantis ally hosts debate hedging white nationalism

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      Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is a close ally of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, hosted a social media debate in which one participant argued that conservatives should cooperate with a hypothetical white nationalist dictator “in order to destroy the power of the left”.Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow who has been a hugely influential figure in DeSantis’ culture war policies in Florida, did not disagree with the participant’s sentiments. Instead he commended speakers for their “thoughtful points” and presenting the discussion as a model for engagement with “the dissident right”.Rufo is a high-profile conservative activist who in books, columns, media appearances and a Substack newsletter has encouraged conservatives to oppose “wokeness”. He has been credited with mobilizing conservatives against communities of color, first with a distorted version of critical race theory; then by linking LGBTQ-inclusive education practices to pedophilic “grooming”.Rufo has exercised a particular influence on DeSantis. Rufo reportedly consulted on the drafting of DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act”, which bans schools and workplaces from teaching that anyone is inherently privileged due to race or sex, and was invited by DeSantis to witness the bill’s signing in April 2022.Later, DeSantis appointed Rufo to the board of trustees of Florida’s New College in January. New College was a traditionally liberal college, but under Rufo is now transforming into a more conservative institution – a move that many say heralds DeSantis’ view of the future of academia in Florida and the US.Rufo hosted the debate on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter.Participating in the debate was Charles Haywood, a former shampoo magnate who the Guardian previously reported is a would-be “warlord” who founded a secretive, men-only fraternal society, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).The debate concerned Haywood’s promotion of a strategy he calls “no enemies to the right”, which urges people on the right to avoid any public criticism of others in their camp, including extremists.Early in the Rufo-hosted discussion last Tuesday, Haywood raised the hypothetical possibility early in the discussion: “Let’s say a real white nationalist arose who had real political power … and therefore [could] be of assistance against the left.”Responding to the hypothetical, Haywood said: “I think that the answer is that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left.”Later in the broadcast, Haywood responded to concerns about rightwing authoritarianism by saying: “When we’re talking about people like Franco or Pinochet or even Salazar … they did kill people. They killed people justly, they killed people unjustly, and that’s just a historical fact.”“But,” Haywood added, “they saved a lot more people than they killed.”Augusto Pinochet was military dictator of Chile from 1971 to 1990, and after coming to power in a coup he tortured, exiled or killed tens of thousands of his regime’s opponents.Francisco Franco was dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975, and his regime killed 100,000 to 200,000 people during the so-called “white terror”. António de Oliveira Salazar was the head of Portugal’s authoritarian, one-party state from 1932 until 1968; his regime repressed domestic opposition and oversaw brutal colonial policies in Africa that permitted forced labor and other abuses.In closing the discussion, Rufo credited speakers with raising “some provocative points on all sides, some thoughtful points on all sides”, and told listeners: “I think there is a room for engaging the dissident right and the establishment right. I think we need to have a bridge between the two and engage in thoughtful dialogue.”The Guardian emailed Christopher Rufo and the DeSantis campaign detailed requests for comment prior to publication, but received no response.After publication, Rufo said in a statement to the Guardian that he was “against rightwing racialism and against an unrestricted policy of no enemies to the right”. He said that in announcing the debate he had said, in reference to some on the far right, “some elements on the fringes of any political movement are moral non-starters – they should be given no deference, much less support”.During the debate, Rufo also criticized the US white nationalist Richard Spencer, calling him “wrong morally, politically, practically”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHeidi Beirich, an extremism expert who co-founded the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, called the discussion and its framing “a disaster” in an email.“By engaging true extremists – white supremacists and authoritarians – Haywood’s vision of ‘no enemies to the right’ will sanction and empower those movements,” Beirich wrote.Beirich also wrote: “Conservative cowardice on white supremacy is the road to losing a democracy and possibly much worse in terms of hate-driven political violence and autocracy.”She compared the “no enemies to the right” doctrine to the situation in “Germany in the 1930s when conservatives worked with Hitler, seeing him as less of a problem than communists”.Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, said: “There’s sizable segments of the right that want the best of both worlds, namely the energy and the vigor of reactionary far-right movements but without any of the baggage.”Gais added: “The idea that the ‘dissident right’ – a sort of umbrella term used within the movement to refer to white nationalists and others on that political spectrum – could make some kind of viable political partner seems to be an extension of this line of thought.“What disturbs me the most about these comments is it makes clear that some on the right are more than comfortable with the fact that the guardrails are off.”In July Mark Granza, Italian-born editor of far-right online magazine IM-1776, hosted a Twitter space to celebrate the launch of Rufo’s latest book, America’s Cultural Revolution. Haywood was an invited speaker at that recording, and he said he was “extremely impressed” by Rufo’s book, calling it “exquisitely written”, and praising its “explicit call for a counter-revolution” and its “aggressive approach”.Following the Guardian’s reporting on Haywood’s involvement in founding the Society for American Civic Renewal, conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck condemned him and his ideas on air.The Guardian emailed Haywood for comment on his appearance on Rufo’s space but received no response.The Guardian also previously reported that Haywood is a featured speaker at a “natalist” conference planned for December in Austin, Texas, where he is scheduled to appear alongside other far-right figures and advocates of eugenics.
      This article was updated on 11 October 2023 to include a response from Christopher Rufo. More

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      Democracy Awakening review: Heather Cox Richardson’s necessary US history

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      In a media landscape so polluted by politicians addicted to cheap thrills (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Orange Monster) and the pundits addicted to them (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon), the success of Heather Cox Richardson is much more than a blast of fresh air. It’s a bona fide miracle.The Boston College history professor started writing her newsletter, Letters from an American, almost four years ago. Today her daily dose of common sense about the day’s news, wrapped in an elegant package of American history, has a remarkable 1.2 million subscribers, making her the most popular writer on Substack. Not since Edward P Morgan captivated the liberal elite with his nightly 15-minute broadcasts in the 1960s has one pundit been so important to so many progressive Americans at once.In the age of social media, Richardson’s success is counterintuitive. When she was profiled by Ben Smith in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Smith confessed he was so addicted to Twitter he rarely found the time to open her “rich summaries” of the news. When he told Bill Moyers, one of Richardson’s earliest promoters, the same thing, the great commentator explained: “You live in a world of thunderstorms, and she watches the waves come in.”Richardson’s latest book shares all the intelligence of her newsletter. It doesn’t have the news value of her internet contributions but it is an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history – and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.Like other recent books, including The Destructionists by Dana Milbank, Richardson’s new volume reminds us that far from being an outlier, Donald Trump was inevitable after 70 years of Republican pandering to big business, racism and Christian nationalism.So many direct lines can be drawn from the dawn of modern conservatism to the insanity of the Freedom Caucus today. It was William F Buckley Jr, the most famous conservative pundit of his era, who in 1951 attacked universities for teaching “secularism and collectivism” and promoted the canard that liberals were basically communists. Among Buckley’s mortal enemies, Richardson writes, were everyone “who believed that the government should regulate business, protect social welfare, promote infrastructure and protect civil rights” – and who “believed in fact-based argument”.In place of the liberal consensus that emerged with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Buckley and his henchmen wanted a new “orthodoxy of religion and the ideology of free markets”. A few years later, the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Four years after that, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy included promises to slow down the desegregation the supreme court had ordered 14 years before.In one of the most notorious dog whistles of all time, Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign by declaring his love for states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi – made infamous by the murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964.Since the 1950s, Richardson writes, conservatives have fought to destroy “the active government of the liberal consensus, and since the 1980s, Republican politicians [have] hacked away at it” but still “left much of the government intact”. With Trump’s election in 2016, the nation had finally “put into office a president who would use his power to destroy it”. Republicans fought for 50 years for an “end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required”. Trump went even further by “making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism”.Richardson is refreshingly direct about the importance of the fascist example to Trump and his Maga movement. When he used the White House to host the Republican convention in 2020, the first lady, Melania Trump, wore a “dress that evoked a Nazi uniform”. And, Richardson writes, the big lie was a “key propaganda tool” for the Nazis, which Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf, the book Trump may have kept on his night table at Trump Tower (or maybe it was a collection of Hitler’s speeches).Richardson even uses the psychological profile of Hitler by the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency during the second world war, to remind us of similarities to Trump. The OSS said Hitler’s “primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy … never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong”.But Richardson’s book isn’t just a recitation of the evil of Republicans. It is also a celebration of progressive successes. She reminds us that before Vietnam ruined his presidency, Lyndon Johnson compiled an incredible record. In one session, Congress passed an astonishing 84 laws. Johnson’s “Great Society” included the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided federal aid for public schools; launched Head Start for the early education of low-income children; the social security amendments that created Medicare; increased welfare payments; rent subsidies; the Water Quality Act of 1965; and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.These laws had a measurable impact. “Forty million Americans were poor in 1960”; by 1969, that had dropped to 24 million.Addressing graduates of the University of Michigan in 1964, Johnson used words that are apt today:“For better or worse, your generation has been appointed by history to … lead America toward a new age … You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.”Johnson rejected the “timid souls” who believed “we are condemned to a soulless wealth. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
      Democracy Awakening is published in the US by Viking More

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      House speaker contender Steve Scalise reportedly said he was ‘David Duke without the baggage’

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      Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who some in his party reportedly want to elect as speaker of the US House of Representatives after the stunning and historic removal of Kevin McCarthy, was once reported to have called himself “David Duke without the baggage”.Duke, 73, is a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an avowed white supremacist who has run for Louisiana governor, the US House and Senate and for president and who in 2003 was sentenced to 15 months in jail for mail and tax fraud.Scalise, now 57, was elected to Congress in 2008. He became Republican House whip in 2014 and was elected majority leader in 2022, as a hardline conservative acceptable to the far right of his party, which has now successfully rebelled against McCarthy.Ahead of McCarthy’s removal, Scalise implored his fellow Republicans “to keep doing this work that we were sent to do” rather than focus on ejecting the speaker.“This isn’t the time to slow that process down,” said Scalise, denying interest in the speakership.Immediately after the vote to remove McCarthy, however, the ringleader of the motion to vacate, Matt Gaetz of Florida, used his first remarks to say Scalise would be “a phenomenal speaker”. He also said Tom Emmer of Minnesota or Tom Cole of Oklahoma might be good choices.The speakership may offer Scalise a tempting prize: if he is elevated into the role, he will become the highest-ranking member of Congress ever to come from Louisiana.His fellow Louisianan, Duke, last made national headlines when he supported Donald Trump for president in 2016 – support Trump was slow to disavow.Two years before that, Scalise ran into controversy, and his remark about Duke surfaced, after a blogger revealed Scalise’s attendance at a white supremacist conference organised by Duke in 2002.Scalise, whose district includes a large suburban area of New Orleans, said he had been seeking “support for legislation that focused on cutting wasteful state spending, eliminating government corruption and stopping tax hikes”, but “wholeheartedly condemn[ed]” the views of the group concerned.He also said attending the conference “was a mistake I regret”, as he “emphatically oppose[d] the divisive racial and religious views that groups like these hold”.Citing his Catholicism, Scalise said “these groups hold views that are vehemently opposed to my own personal faith, and I reject that kind of hateful bigotry. Those who know me best know I have always been passionate about helping, serving and fighting for every family that I represent. And I will continue to do so.”Duke, however, told the Washington Post: “Scalise would communicate a lot with my campaign manager, Kenny Knight. That is why he was invited and why he would come. Kenny knew Scalise, Scalise knew Kenny. They were friendly.”That wasn’t the end of it. The controversy deepened when Stephanie Grace, a Louisiana politics reporter and columnist, told the New York Times that at the start of Scalise’s legislative career, while “explaining his politics”, he told her “he was like David Duke without the baggage”.Grace said she thought Scalise had “meant he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but he wasn’t David Duke, that he didn’t have the same feelings about certain people as David Duke did”.Scalise did not comment on Grace’s remarks. But Chuck Kleckley, the Republican speaker of the Louisiana state house at the time, told the paper comparisons between Scalise and the Klan leader were “not fair to Steve at all”.Nonetheless, the Duke controversy has followed Scalise throughout a career in Republican leadership which has seen him survive being seriously wounded in a mass shooting at congressional baseball practice, in 2017; become one of five Louisiana Congress members to vote against certifying some election results hours after the deadly Capitol attack of 6 January 2021; become majority leader in 2022; and, in August this year, announce a cancer diagnosis.The 2017 shooting was an assassination attempt. The gunman, a leftist extremist who was killed by law enforcement, legally bought the rifle used to shoot Scalise and three others despite a history of run-ins with police.Despite that, through legislation he has sponsored and co-sponsored, Scalise has staunchly advocated to keep guns as accessible to the public as possible, citing the right to bear arms enshrined in the US constitution’s second amendment.In the aftermath of his own shooting, Scalise told reporters: “I was a strong supporter of the second amendment before the shooting and, frankly, as ardent as ever after the shooting in part because I was saved by people who had guns.”Last month, discussing his recent diagnosis of multiple myeloma, Scalise said aggressive treatment meant his outlook was improving.Should Scalise eventually secure the speaker’s gavel, he will surpass the New Orleans Democrat Hale Boggs as the most powerful member of Congress ever to come from the state. Boggs was House majority leader before his plane disappeared over Alaska in 1972. More

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      How a ‘Trump train’ attack on a Biden bus foreshadowed January 6 – and echoed bloody history

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      The bane of raw intelligence – and history – is that you can always look back and find the signs, but you can’t necessarily look ahead and see where they’re pointing. Many questions remain about the intelligence failures that enabled an insurrectionist mob to lay siege virtually unimpeded to the US Capitol. But here’s one sign that’s been flashing in my head since 6 January 2021.Four days before the 2020 election, a “Trump Train” of motorists swarmed a Biden-Harris campaign bus on Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. Kamala Harris would have been on the bus but for a last-minute schedule change, according to Wendy Davis, then a Texas congressional candidate and the campaign surrogate onboard. The videotaped vehicular harassment – tailgating, sudden braking, passing the bus within inches – got nationwide coverage, courtesy of participants’ back-slapping on social media and Donald Trump’s high-five in return. Though no one was hurt, it took little imagination to see how a 20-ton container of flammable fuel moving in heavy traffic could have turned into a highway bomb. But to the Trump Train, one of its founders, Steve Ceh, told me, the razzing of the Democrats was simply “fun” – “like a rival football game”.No local arrests were reported, but the FBI in San Antonio confirmed it was investigating. Presumably (albeit against Trump’s tweeted wishes) it was still investigating two months later when the explosion came: a massive incarnation of the Trump Train rioting against President-elect Biden in Washington. It was then that I started getting flashbacks to another historic act of domestic terrorism, one also presaged by a difficult bus ride and lately back in the news.Sixty years ago, on 15 September 1963, when Ku Klux Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and killed four Black girls attending Sunday school, the shock to the country exceeded the moral language to express it. Both President John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr cast political blame on Alabama’s “Segregation forever!” governor, George Wallace. At the time he seemed a pariah, the only “vicious racist” King singled out in his I Have a Dream speech 18 days earlier, at the March on Washington. In fact, Wallace was the spearhead of a proto-Maga minority that more than half a century later captured the White House for Trump. And now political violence is so “normal” that we have a former southern governor, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas (whose daughter, Trump’s former spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is the current governor), effectively endorsing civil war should the prosecution of Trump over a violent coup attempt derail his return to power.More often than not, though, the slope is slipperier than the cliff of depraved extremism over which Trump led a “conservative” political party. Instead, it is an inertial slide driven by institutional blind spots and choices that were professionally expedient in the moment. Thus it was, more than 60 years ago in Alabama, that the FBI turned a half-closed eye to harassers of a bus and wound up reaping shockwaves that killed children.On Mother’s Day 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying a protest group of integrated Freedom Riders was chased down the highway by a caravan of white Alabamians, who managed to sideline the vehicle outside Anniston and firebomb it. Meanwhile, a second freedom bus headed toward a Ku Klux Klan ambush in Birmingham. FBI agents there had been told by their Klan informant – the eventually notorious double agent Gary Thomas Rowe Jr – that his klavern was coordinating the attack with local police and city hall. But the bureau did nothing to stop the bloody assault. Nor were any arrests made of Rowe’s Klan brothers, certainly not after a widely published news photo showed the informant himself joining in the bludgeoning.When Rowe’s consorts bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church two years later, the FBI was so familiar with them that four or five prime suspects were identified within days. (Rowe was apparently not an active participant.) The first prosecution – of the suspected ringleader, by the Alabama attorney general – did not take place for 14 years and met with stonewalling if not resistance from the FBI. (A couple of decades later, the bureau provided “cooperation from top to bottom,” says Doug Jones, the federal prosecutor who won convictions against the last two living Klansmen in 2001 and 2002. He went on to become Alabama’s brief Democratic senator before losing in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, who recently said of white nationalists, “I call them Americans”.)In contrast to the Freedom Rider attacks, which sent multiple victims to hospital, the buzzing of the Biden team had only one known instance of physical contact, a black pick-up videotaped bumping a campaign car in the bus’s wake. The owner of the pick-up was Eliazar “Cisco” Cisneros, a middle-aged, long-gun-toting San Antonian who had made news six weeks earlier by driving the same Trump-bedecked truck through a peaceful defund-the-police protest. He was not arrested then, but the FBI did talk to him about the Trump Train, according to his lawyer, the former Republican congressman Francisco Canseco. However, Canseco says it was his client who initiated the call, to complain that “his rights were being violated”, meaning the right of Americans “to demonstrate their support for a candidate”. Cisneros claimed the Biden car was the aggressor, despite having boasted on Facebook, “That was me slamming that fucker … Hell yea.” (The available videotape is not definitive, but the analysis by snopes.com contradicts Cisneros’s version.)Perhaps the FBI had bigger Maga fish to fry than the Trump Train, even though the San Antonio paper reported weeks before the election that the group’s raucous Thursday-night parades 30 miles up I-35 in New Braunfels had featured a man dragging a Black Lives Matter flag behind his pick-up. (A social-media post of his surfaced from a few years earlier: “I’m not apart of the kkk … just hate black people.”) Some African American residents were reminded of the 1998 white supremacist dragging murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr, 300 miles east in Jasper. But by the time the New Braunfels Trump Train caught up with the Biden bus on 30 October, the bar for actionable political intimidation had been set pretty high. Earlier that month in Michigan, the FBI along with state authorities arrested 14 Maga men in connection with an alleged plot to kidnap the governor, Gretchen Whitmer.Way back in segregated 1961, within hours of the freedom bus burning, the Kennedy justice department found a statute allowing for a politically neutered prosecution: 18 U.S. Code § 33, covering the destruction of motor vehicles engaged in interstate commerce. A paragraph conceivably pertinent to what happened in Texas – on a federal highway – penalizes one who “willfully disables or incapacitates any driver … or in any way lessens the ability of such person to perform his duties as such”. At any rate, when even symbolic federal charges failed to materialize, the Biden bus driver, Wendy Davis and two others filed a civil suit against (ultimately) eight Trump Train members, including Cisneros and Ceh, under the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They sued the San Marcos police department separately, as the only force along the route that the complaint says ignored SOS calls – though its alleged abdication was more like “we can’t help you” than the Birmingham police’s promise to give the Klan 15 minutes to work over the Freedom Riders.Davis et al filed their suits six months after January 6. While hastening to say that “we can’t begin to compare what happened on the bus to that violence”, Davis calls it “part and parcel of the same trend”. It was intimidating enough to cause the campaign to cancel the rest of the tour. A trial date for the Trump Train case has been set for next year. Two defendants settled separately in April 2023 and have been removed from the suit.Among the plaintiffs’ exhibits included in a court filing on Friday is the transcript of a text chain from late December 2020 about “the March in dc”, in which a message purportedly coming from Cisneros’s phone discusses delivery dates for bear mace and a collapsible baton. Two other defendants, Ceh and his wife, Randi – named in the complaint as leaders of the New Braunfels Trump Train – were among the faithful in Washington on January 6. Steve Ceh told me they did not enter the Capitol but watched “antifa thugs in black breaking windows” and “people in Trump hats telling them to stop”. When I asked if he thought the hundreds of people arrested for their role in the riot were antifa (including a former FBI agent from New Braunfels), he said: “I’m not saying that some people weren’t pretty emotional.”Ceh says the FBI contacted him after he was fired from his job (as a supervisor for a large Texas construction firm) in the aftermath of January 6. “There are a lot of liberals, a lot of Satanists, in this town,” he told me, explaining that they “doxxed” him. Ceh says he invited the FBI man who questioned him (“a very good guy”) to attend the “relevant church” he recently founded. He says the bureau did not seek him out after the Trump Train episode, not even for one of its unofficial “knock and talks”, and in their later interview about the Capitol riot, he says, the Biden bus “never came up”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FBI office in San Antonio declined to make Ceh’s interviewer available for comment and, in response to my request for a Biden bus update, said the bureau did not either confirm or deny the existence of an investigation, apparently even one it previously confirmed. That’s not the worst policy in the world, as then FBI director James Comey painfully demonstrated in 2016 when he violated justice department guidelines with public statements in the Hillary Clinton emails case, arguably giving us President Donald Trump and thereby helping normalize terrorism the bureau is mandated to prevent.John Paredes, one of the many civil rights lawyers representing the bus plaintiffs, says he does “not read anything into [federal officials’] determination not to bring a prosecution”. The US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas emailed its refusal to comment on “the existence or non-existence of investigations”. Still, I have a sneaking feeling that the FBI’s reaction to the vehicular threat on I-35 would have been a little different if, say, those road warriors had been Muslims rather than white Christians.Sixty years ago, the Birmingham church bombing helped unify the country around a consensus that state-sponsored racism had to end and, along with the assassination of President Kennedy two months later in Texas, eased the posthumous passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation. Since the domestic terrorism of January 6, though, the partition of hate has only widened. And so, I got a little jolt of hope and change from Ceh’s surprise answer to my pro forma question about whether he was supporting Trump in 2024.“I’m waiting,” he said. “We have transitioned.”I wish I could say the quote ended there, but he went on to talk about how the issue is no longer “about what man’s in there”, because “we’ve got to turn to God”. If I had to interpret those signs, I would take them to mean that things could get worse. Apocalyptic, maybe.
      Diane McWhorter is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama – The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution More

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      Fascism in America: a long history that predates Trump

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      Pro-Nazi propaganda, courtesy of the US post office? This unlikely scheme was hatched by George Sylvester Viereck, a German-born American who between 1937 and 1941 sought to marshal US sentiment against intervention in Europe. Those who heeded him included prominent members of Congress, such as Burton Wheeler of Montana and Rush Holt Sr of West Virginia, anti-interventionist Democratic senators known for speeches that prompted accusations of antisemitism. Viereck’s contacts on Capitol Hill allowed him to place anti-interventionist speeches in the appendix to the congressional record. Thanks to friends in high places, he could order inexpensive reprints and have German-American groups mail them out on government postage.If this sounds out of place in the land of the free, it shouldn’t – according to an illuminating new anthology, Fascism in America: Past and Present, edited by Gavriel D Rosenfeld and Janet Ward. In 12 chapters plus an introduction and epilogue, the co-editors and their contributors make the case that fascism has existed on US soil for well past a century and remains disturbingly present today.“We don’t sufficiently teach civics or democratic awareness [in high schools], how fascism and far-right extremist movements have a long history in the US,” Rosenfeld said. “We think we’re an exception, that America fought ‘the good war’ to defeat fascism and Nazism. We patted ourselves on the back for many decades as ‘the greatest generation’ – a useful myth for American public life that blinded us to darker undercurrents in our society.”Ward mentions history from even further back, “eugenics-based scientific standards” that “informed opinions and policies on what it meant to be included not just as fully American, but as fully human” in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, subsequently influencing Nazi laws regarding race.Rosenfeld is president of the Center for Jewish History in New York and a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut. From the UK, Ward is a history professor at the University of Oklahoma; she is a past president of the German Studies Association and was an American Council on Education fellow at Yale. Both are scholars of Germany, including the second world war and the Holocaust. (Rosenfeld authored a chapter in the anthology, on alternate histories of the war, from The Plot Against America to Watchmen.) Both editors became alarmed by developments during the Trump administration that suggested parallels with the rise of Nazism and hinted at a reawakening of homegrown fascist sentiments lying dormant for decades.“We redirected attention on our own backyard and applied the same kind of lens to a place that had not been subject to the same kind of scrutiny, the vulnerabilities in our own kind of democratic institutions,” Rosenfeld said. “We reached out to scholars in related fields – American studies, Black studies – to see what we could learn from the American experience … We were equally concerned about the present-day democratic backsliding.”Ward said: “More than one country has turned toward populism and the extreme right. It began to worry a lot of us, not just academics but cultural commentators.” The resulting volume is “very much part of a new awareness of the way in which traditional academics circulate to a broader public”.Collaborators include the New York University history professor Linda Gordon, who incorporated findings from a forthcoming project and The Second Coming of the KKK, her 2017 book about the years after the first world war. Ousmane K Power-Greene, an African American scholar at Clark University in Massachusetts, examined Black antifascist activism from the 1960s to the 1980s, by activists such as Angela Davis and H Rap Brown.Trump comes up repeatedly. Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, compares “Anarchy and the State of Nature in Donald Trump’s America and Adolf Hitler’s Germany”. Marla Stone of Occidental College researched Trump-era detention facilities for migrant children. Her chapter title: “Concentration Camps in Trump’s America?”“It’s not just that we wanted to determine for ourselves, is Trump a fascist or not, is Trumpism fascist or not, is Maga-ism fascist or not,” Rosenfeld said, noting that such questions are frequently posed by scholars, journalists and readers. “We try to trace the evolving debate, the historical shift over time – of course, after the Charlottesville Unite the Right march in 2017 … [Trump’s] defending the Proud Boys at the 2020 debate, obviously after January 6 … it’s been a moving target.”Yet, Rosenfeld said, “ever since January 6, more people are inclined to believe that even if Trump is not a dogmatic fascist, so many of his followers are willing to use violence to overturn the rule of law, the constitution, to make it very concerning for people. At a certain point, you want to be safe rather than sorry, err on the side of caution, to believe we’re in a potential fascist moment.”The book suggests fascism in America might date back as far as the late 19th century, amid Jim Crow laws in the south and nativist fears over immigration from Europe. In the early 20th century, the US enacted infamously high immigration quotas, while domestic white supremacist groups thrived: the Ku Klux Klan during its 1920s resurgence, followed by Depression-era proto-fascist militant groups such as the Silver Legion, under William Dudley Pelley. While the interwar years witnessed clandestine German-backed attempts to mobilize Americans against intervention, the book makes it clear fascism needed no foreign encouragement.“Ultimately, this is an American story,” Ward said. “You can’t – you shouldn’t – look at fascism solely as an outside influence into the US … it needs to be looked at from within, as well as something coming in from without.”She noted that she received her doctorate from the University of Virginia, the campus on which the Charlottesville riots occurred six years ago.“The August 2017 events of Charlottesville pinpointed it for a lot of people,” Ward said. “The open demonstration of violence, the coming together of racism, antisemitism and white supremacy all at once through that ugly moment.”As to whether America is on the precipice of another such ugly moment, the co-editors are hoping democracy holds firm, just as it did in the second world war.“I’m going to be an optimist,” Ward said, “with education, with informed voices like the contributors to our book, with discourse and engagement [to prevent] a doomsday scenario with the new presidential election coming up.”Rosenfeld agreed, but could not help recalling a sobering lesson.“We know now that Franklin Roosevelt was still dealing with a nearly 20% unemployment rate on the eve of world war two,” he said. “Only billions and billions of dollars in military spending got us out of debt. All the isolationists got on board against the Nazis and Japan. Rightwingers were forced into silence.“It’s clear in retrospect,” he added, “that world war two did make the US a great power on the world stage. It also spared us the kind of fascism that Vichy France and Germany experienced, that many other countries experienced. We were spared the same thing – but it was a close call. We shouldn’t be complacent.”
      Fascism in America is published in the US by Cambridge University Press More

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      in US Politics

      What does a US shutdown mean? Seven things you should know

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      The US stands just days from a full government shutdown amid political deadlock over demands from rightwing congressional Republicans for deep public spending cuts.Fuelled by bitter ideological divisions among the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, funding for federal agencies will run out at midnight on 30 September unless – against widespread expectation – Congress votes to pass a stopgap measure to extend government funding.It is an event with the potential to inflict disruption to a range of public services, cause delays in salaries, and wreak significant damage on the national economy if it becomes prolonged.At the heart of the looming upheaval is the uncertain status of the Republican House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who is under fire from members of his own party for agreeing spending limits with Joe Biden, that members of the GOP’s far-right “Freedom Caucus” say are too generous and want to urgently prune.What happens when a US government shutdown takes place?Thousands of federal government employees are put on furlough, meaning that they are told not to report for work and go unpaid for the period of the shutdown, although their salaries are paid retroactively when it ends.Other government workers who perform what are judged essential services, such as air traffic controllers and law enforcement officials, continue to work but do not get paid until Congress acts to end the shutdown.Depending on how long it lasts, national parks can either shut entirely or open without certain vital services such as public toilets or attendants. Passport processing can stop, as can research – at national health institutes.The Biden administration has warned that federal inspections ensuring food safety and prevention of the release of dangerous materials into drinking water could stop for the duration of the shutdown.About 10,000 children aged three and four may also lose access to Head Start, a federally funded program to promote school readiness among toddlers, especially among low-income families.What causes a shutdown?Simply put, the terms of a piece of legislation known as the Anti-Deficiency Act, first passed in 1884, prohibits federal agencies from spending or obligating funds without an act of appropriation – or some alternative form of approval – from Congress.If Congress fails to enact the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund the US government’s activities and associated bureaucracy, all non-essential work must cease until it does. If Congress enacts some of the bills but not others, the agencies affected by the bills not enacted are forced to cease normal functioning; this is known as a partial government shutdown.How unusual are US government shutdowns?For the first 200 years of the US’s existence, they did not happen at all. In recent decades, they have become an increasingly regular part of the political landscape, as Washington politics has become more polarised and brinkmanship a commonplace political tool. There have been 20 federal funding gaps since 1976, when the US first shifted the start of its fiscal year to 1 October.Three shutdowns in particular have entered US political lore:A 21-day partial closure in 1995 over a dispute about spending cuts between President Bill Clinton and the Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, that is widely seen as setting the tone for later partisan congressional struggles.In 2013, when the government was partially closed for 16 days after another Republican-led Congress tried to use budget negotiations to defund Barack Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare.A 34-day shutdown, the longest on record, lasting from December 2018 until January 2019, when Donald Trump refused to sign any appropriations bill that did not include $5.7bn funding for a wall along the US border with Mexico. The closure damaged Trump’s poll ratings.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat is triggering the latest imminent shutdown?In large part, the crisis is being driven by the relatively weak position of McCarthy, the Republican speaker in the House of Representatives. Working with a wafer-thin majority in the 435-seat chamber, McCarthy needed a record 15 ballots to ascend to his position last January, a position earned only after tense negotiations with a minority of far-right Republicans.Those same rightwingers are now in effect holding McCarthy hostage by refusing to vote for the appropriations bills on the basis of spending guidelines the speaker previously agreed with Biden. McCarthy could, theoretically, still pass the bills with the support of Democrats across the aisle. But rightwingers, notably the Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, have vowed to topple him as speaker in such a scenario.Is there a way out of the current impasse?Time is running out. McCarthy and other Republican leaders have been trying to deploy a stopgap spending measure called a continuing resolution (CR) that would keep the government open until 31 October, while efforts continue to agree to final spending bills for 2024.However, multiple attempts have failed to win approval of Freedom Caucus members, who are refusing to vote for it unless it has more radical conservative policies attached, such as language to address “woke policies” and “weaponization of the Department of Justice”. A list of amendments from the rightwing Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene includes a resolution preventing funds being used to aid Ukraine and a ban on funding for Covid-19 vaccine mandates.How could a shutdown affect the wider economy?According to the congressional budget office, the 2018-19 shutdown imposed a short-term cost of $11bn on the US economy, an estimated $3bn of which was never recovered after the stoppage ended.Economists have warned the effects now could be compounded by other unrelated events, including the lingering impact of inflationary pressures and the United Auto Workers strike against America’s three biggest car manufacturers, which union leaders have threatened to expand if their demands remain unmet.How has Joe Biden reacted?The president has tried to use the bully pulpit to put the spotlight on the GOP holdouts, emphasizing that they should be blamed if a shutdown does go ahead.“Let’s be clear. If the government shuts down that means members of the US military are going to have to continue to work but not get paid,” Biden said at a dinner hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation at the weekend. “Funding the government is one of the most basic responsibilities of Congress. It’s time for Republicans to start doing the job America elected them to do.”Fearing the worst, however, the White House has published a set of blueprints for how government agencies should operate if a shutdown ensues and funds run out. More

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      in Elections

      Revealed: far-right Oath Keepers kept up dues payments after Capitol attack

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      Oath Keepers members paid dues to the rightwing militia’s then vice-president for up to almost a year after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and months after the organization and its founder, Stewart Rhodes, were named in court filings as participants in the assault, according to publicly accessible transaction records on the payment platform Venmo.Those who made payments to an Oath Keepers leader on Venmo include an engineer whose employer provides satellite technology to US government agencies including the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Homeland Security, a former Department of Homeland Security employee whose tenure at the agency overlapped with his membership in the group, and a 2022 candidate for the Wyoming state senate.Others connected on Venmo to Rhodes or other organizational leaders include a US navy recruiting officer.The Guardian corroborated the identity of some of the individuals making payments using earlier hacks and leaks of Oath Keepers membership rolls, payment records and internal communications.Venmo transactions were public by default throughout most of the service’s history. Megan Squire is deputy director for Data Analytics and OSINT at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, and from 2017 she was one of the first to use Venmo transactions to understand the internal structure of groups like the Proud Boys.Squire said: “Venmo has had security issues since its inception. They have tried to fix them but only after high-profile privacy breaches involving people like Joe Biden.”The Oath Keepers transactions were recorded on the profile of Jason Ottersberg, a Cheyenne, Wyoming, man who has been publicly identified as a senior leader in the Oath Keepers.Ottersberg’s name, email address and a username – “seebeewyo” – were all revealed in a leak of information from the Oath Keepers website in 2021. Ottersberg is also named as the recipient on an Oath Keepers fundraising page on the extremist-friendly fundraising site Givesendgo.Ottersberg’s current username on Venmo is based on his name, but a scrape of his account with the open-source intelligence tool Venemy shows that his original user name was nationalokvp, indicating that he was presenting himself as the Oath Keepers national vice-president.The account’s transaction history shows payments to and from Ottersberg along with explanations of the payments.On 1 September 2021, an account carrying the name Michael Ray Williams made a payment to Jason Ottersberg on Venmo with the message “OK dues”. The account’s avatar is a promotional image for Williams’s political campaign bearing the slogans “Michael Ray Williams Wyoming Senate District 11” and “Giving the power back to the people”.In 2022, Michael Ray Williams ran for the Constitution party for the Wyoming state senate, but lost handily to the Republican Larry S Hicks. On the Constitution party’s website and Ballotpedia’s candidate survey he expressed anti-abortion, pro-gun and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.Williams told Buzzfeed News in October 2021 that he was an Oath Keeper, but his payment of dues the month before confirms his ongoing links to the group at the time of his election campaign.The Guardian contacted Williams for comment via email.Others identified by the Guardian hold sensitive positions in business, the military and government. One of those identified is a senior figure at Space Systems Engineering at Echostar Corporation, headquartered in Englewood, Colorado.Echostar is also a major government contractor in potentially sensitive areas. Last year, the company announced that its subsidiary Hughes won a contract to create a private 5G network at a US navy base on Whidbey Island in Washington state, and the previous year trumpeted its success in bidding for satellite services to the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Advanced Battle Management System project.Historically, the DoD has been Hughes’s biggest client, according to US government spending records. Current Hughes contracts include supplying satellite services to the Department of Homeland Security. The person identified by the Guardian was involved in developing satellite-related technologies, including a project to gain limited access to Nasa satellites.Another separate payment on 4 October 2021 came from an account of someone who was a DHS employee until June 2021, according to their LinkedIn profile. They had also recently applied for a job in a state department of corrections. A third person connected to Stewart Rhodes on Venmo and identified by the Guardian works in US navy recruitment in Texas.Venmo records show that other accounts are connected to Stewart Rhodes and Ottersberg. A Venmo “friend” connection does not necessarily indicate that the parties have exchanged money, but it does indicate that the parties have recorded one another as telephone contacts.Throughout 2021, at least nine people paid Ottersberg or were charged by him on Venmo with comments indicating that the payment was for dues, membership or a new membership.In turn, Ottersberg appeared to funnel money onwards to Rhodes. On 24, 25 and 26 October, payments from him all mention “Stewart”, including one to an account in the name of Chad Rogers.In January 2022, Rhodes was arrested in Plano, Texas, at the home of Chad Rogers, a licensed security officer. Later, during Rhodes’s trial, prosecutors detailed a 10 January 2021 meeting between Rhodes and Jason Alpers, a man who Rhodes believed could pass on his plea to Trump to retain the presidency by force if necessary. Alpers testified that Rogers was present at the meeting.Squire, the SPLC deputy director, said of the new Oath Keepers revelations that “it’s amazing to me that they’re still using open, non-privacy focused payment solutions”.She added: “They don’t seem to have institutional knowledge about previous things that have happened to other groups, so they repeat their mistakes.”Despite Ottersberg’s apparently senior role in the Oath Keepers, and his access to key players including Rhodes, he has faced no known legal consequences for his membership in the group. The last publicly visible payment from his Venmo account, however, is to his wife, and is simply captioned “Lawyer”. More

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      in US Politics

      Far-right Marjorie Taylor Greene ridiculed for Yom Kippur error

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      Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has drawn ridicule for using an image of a Hanukah menorah in an attempt to commemorate the unrelated Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.The derision the Georgia representative brought upon herself comes after she was previously criticized for perpetuating antisemitic conspiracy theories.Green on Sunday posted a message on X – previously known as Twitter – on Sunday wishing observers a meaningful fast for Monday’s observation of Yom Kippur. She tried to add a traditional Yom Kippur greeting but misspelled it: “Gamar Chasima Tova!”The backlash soon ensued.Critics noted that Greene’s use of a menorah in her message recognized a completely unrelated Jewish holiday observed in December. Past comments of hers which alluded to antisemitic tropes also undermined her message to Jewish observers.Florida congressman Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, corrected his Republican counterpart by noting that the solemn Yom Kippur and celebratory Hanukah were completely different occasions.Mentioning that Yom Kippur focused on the atonement of sins, Moskowitz added: “Lord knows you will be very busy.”Greene subsequently deleted the original post without an apology and reposted the original text without the menorah image.MeidasTouch, a liberal political action committee, criticized Greene for the “wildly offensive” gaffe.The group also called her “Ms Jewish Space Lasers” – a reference to her false conspiracy claim that California’s devastating wildfires in 2018 were started for profit by a space laser funded by corporate interests, including the Rothschild banking firm.State investigations concluded that the 2018 wildfires were “caused by electrical transmission lines owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electricity”, the state’s largest utility.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a separate tweet, MeidasTouch’s co-founder Brett Meiselas added: “Frankly, Jews don’t need an antisemitic maniac who gives speeches at Nazi events sending out holiday messages in the first place.”Greene had previously downplayed speaking at the America First Political Action Conference, which was founded by the white nationalist Nick Fuentes in 2020.Even as she deleted the menorah image, Bill Prady – the co-creator of the TV series The Big Bang Theory – knocked Greene for preserving the “bad Hebrew” in the post.MeidasTouch pointed out on its website that the accepted Yom Kippur greeting is “g’mar chatima tovah”, which translates to “a good final sealing”.The greeting refers to the belief that one’s fate is written on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah and then sealed on Yom Kippur. More