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      Armed man wanted for role in Capitol attack arrested near Obama’s house

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      A man armed with explosive materials and weapons, and wanted for crimes related to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, was arrested late on Thursday in the Washington DC neighborhood where the former US president Barack Obama lives, law enforcement officials said.Taylor Taranto, 37, was spotted by law enforcement officials a few blocks from the former president’s home and fled, though he was chased by Secret Service agents. Taranto has an open warrant on charges related to the insurrection, two law enforcement officials said. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing case and spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.They said Taranto also had made social media threats against a public figure. He was found with weapons and materials to create an explosive device, though one had not been built, one of the officials said.No one was injured. It was not clear whether the Obamas were at their home at the time of the arrest.Washington’s Metropolitan police department arrested Taranto on charges of being a fugitive from justice. The explosives team swept Taranto’s van and said there were no threats to the public.Taranto was a US navy veteran and a webmaster for the Republican party in Franklin county, in Washington state, according to the Tri-City Herald newspaper. He told the newspaper in an interview last year that he was volunteering for the Republican party.It was not clear what, exactly, Taranto is accused of doing in the 2021 riot, where supporters of then president Donald Trump smashed their way into the Capitol, beat police officers and pursued leading politicians, while also invading a congressional chamber in a vain effort to overturn Trump’s defeat at the 2020 presidential election before Joe Biden’s victory being certified by Congress.More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Capitol attack. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty, while approximately 100 others have been convicted after trials decided by judges or juries. More than 550 riot defendants have been sentenced, with over half imprisoned. More

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      in US Politics

      Philadelphia museum faces backlash for hosting group with ‘oppressive views’

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      Historians, civil rights organizations and lawmakers are denouncing the Museum of the American Revolution for hosting an upcoming event with Moms for Liberty, a controversial campaign organization that has been called an extremist group by critics.Moms for Liberty (M4L), which the anti-hate watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center labeled as an extremist, anti-government group, will hold a summit in Philadelphia this weekend featuring several Republican presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. In a decision that has generated widespread backlash, the Museum of the American Revolution has agreed to host a welcome event for the organization on Thursday.Despite M4L purporting to champion parental rights in education, numerous civil rights organizations have condemned the group for its “oppressive views”, and its attempts to ban books as well as restrict classroom conversations on race, sexual orientation and gender identity.Earlier this week, the American Historical Association (AHA) sent a letter to the Museum of the American Revolution’s president, R Scott Stephenson, voicing its opposition to the museum’s decision to host the group and urging him to reconsider.“Moms for Liberty is an organization that has vigorously advocated censorship and harassment of history teachers, banning history books from libraries and classrooms, and legislation that renders it impossible for historians to teach with professional integrity without risking job loss and other penalties,” the letter said.“For the AHA, this isn’t about politics or different understandings of our nation’s past; it’s about an organization whose mission is to obstruct the professional responsibilities of historians,” the AHA added.The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender History echoed similar sentiments in a statement, saying: “The Committee on LGBT History condemns the decision made by the Museum of the American Revolution to rent event space to Moms for Liberty … This organization consistently spreads harmful, hateful rhetoric about the LGBTQIA+ community, including popularizing the use of the term ‘groomer’ to refer to queer people and attacking the mere existence of trans youth. Giving Moms for Liberty a space to share their extremist, anti-LGBTQIA rhetoric is irresponsible and dangerous.”“It is shocking that an organization dedicated to documenting and preserving American history would enter into any relationship with an organization that is so intent upon distorting the American experience,” it added.In an op-ed published in Philadelphia Gay News, Naiymah Sanchez, the senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Pennsylvania branch, wrote: “My suggestion for this group: DON’T COME TO PHILLY.”“Banning books and outlawing trans people does not make schools safer or society any better. And such hateful policies are a far cry from fighting for ‘liberty’,” Sanchez added.Several lawmakers denounced the museum, with six Democratic senators penning a letter to Stephenson, asking him to cancel the upcoming event.“Moms for Liberty, put plainly, is a hate group … It is essential for cultural institutions, like the Museum of the American Revolution, to carefully consider the impact and implications of the organizations they choose to host,” they wrote.A handful of museum employees have also voiced their opposition to the museum’s decision.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement to the Philadelphia Inquirer, despite Stephenson telling employees that they were not required to work that night if they did not feel safe, assistant curator Trish Norman said: “I don’t feel appreciated nor safe anymore.”“I don’t feel the museum necessarily has my back,” Norman, who is non-binary, added.Bee Reed, another museum employee who identifies as an LGBTQ+ community member, told Philadelphia Gay News: “I have very mixed feelings. I’ve been working for the museum for four or five years now, and I’ve always been grateful to work someplace that has been so supportive of me as a queer person. But with this – I feel a great sense of betrayal.”Comments criticizing the museum’s decision have also flooded the museum’s Instagram page.The museum defended its decision in a statement, saying: “The Museum of the American Revolution strives to create an inclusive and accessible museum experience for visitors with a wide range of viewpoints and beliefs … Because fostering understanding within a democratic society is so central to our mission, rejecting visitors on the basis of ideology would in fact be antithetical to our purpose.”This is not the first time Moms for Liberty sparked controversy. Last week, an Indiana chapter of the group prompted swift backlash after it published a quote from Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. More

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      in US Politics

      After Roe’s overturn, Republicans target trans rights using extremist rhetoric

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      Americans are “frustrated and anxious”, lamented former vice-president Mike Pence. The country is “in a precarious position” assessed North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson. And Glenn Jacobs, a former professional wrestling star and current mayor of Knox county, Tennessee, declared that “these are hard times”.What could be the cause of such hardship? To the Republican presidential candidates who spoke in Washington DC on Friday at a major gathering of the religious right, the culprit was American society’s acceptance of transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community.The language and imagery is extreme and full of conspiracy theories.“We are facing the greatest challenge this country has ever seen, certainly in my lifetime,” the Missouri senator Josh Hawley said to the crowd of hundreds gathered for the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Policy Conference.He described the challenge as “a new Marxism that is rising in this country”, one that tells Americans, among other things: “That there’s no such thing as male and female, that there are not two genders. There’s 2,000 genders and it tells our children that the way God made them is wrong.“These new Marxists want to give America a new religion. They want to impose on us the religion of woke. It is the religion of transgenderism, critical race theory and open borders multiculturalism, and they are shoving it down our throats,” Hawley said.Held in the hotel where Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt, the audience of hundreds seated in its ballroom heard from several major Republican presidential candidates, including, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott, and the ex-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson.Their appearances came at an inflection point for cultural conservatives. A year ago, they had seen their long-held dream of overturning Roe v Wade become reality when the supreme court struck down the precedent after 49 years, allowing states to ban abortion. But in the realm of LGBTQ+ rights, the movement recently appeared to be on the back foot, with congressional Republicans in 2022 helping to pass a law that protected same-sex marriage nationwide, building on the supreme court’s establishment of the right in 2015.In response, groups opposed to rights for the gay, lesbian and transgender communities have orchestrated a well-funded backlash to the expansion of rights – one that is being fostered by extremists, has seen the erosion of gay rights in many states across the US and includes a growing threat of violence.“God hates pride. He hates pride in January, February, March, April, May and in the month of June,” conservative preacher John Amanchukwu proclaimed early in the event, in a reference to the LGBTQ+ Pride month that drew laughs and cheers from the crowd in Washington.The fallout has hit the trans community in America particularly hard. This year so far, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) says that 15 bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth have been passed into law, as have seven bills allowing or requiring the misgendering of transgender students, along with a handful of other measures targeting drag performances or school curriculum. All told, more anti-gay bills have been introduced in statehouses in 2023 than in the past five years, according to HRC.“The purpose of these laws is to facilitate a rise in political extremism by alienating and isolating LGBTQ+ Americans, and the impact of these laws is alarming,” said Kelley Robinson, president of HRC, in a recent statement, calling it a “state of emergency”.“In every county you represent, in every county your colleagues represent, you will find parents and children, teachers and nurses, community leaders and small business owners who are afraid that the rise in legislative assaults and political extremism has put a target on their backs.”Earlier this month, the pollster Gallup reported a drop in public support for same-sex relations, driven mostly by Republicans. The issue’s approval now stands at 64%, compared with 71% last year, with only 41% of Republicans approving – a decline of 15 percentage points from last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, rights groups Glaad and the Anti-Defamation League found that at least 356 incidences of hate directed at LGBTQ+ Americans occurred between June 2022 and the past April, including a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that left five people dead.At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference, speaker after speaker made clear their resolve to continue the campaign against trans Americans.“We will end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18,” said Pence.As governor of Florida, DeSantis has overseen a campaign against what he calls “woke ideology”, including a bill he signed earlier this year that bans gender-affirming care for minors, restricts its access for adults and allows the state to temporarily remove trans children from their parents.Polls show DeSantis in a distant second place to Donald Trump, who has maintained his lead in the Republican primary field by offering voters a familiar mix of conspiracies, charisma and promises to continue the policies he pursued during his first term as president.DeSantis stayed away from attacking the Republican frontrunner in his speech, instead promising the Faith & Freedom Coalition audience that as president, he would implement his policies in Florida across the United States.“We will fight the woke in the schools, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of government. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs,” DeSantis said. More

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      in US Politics

      Dictatorship? How Hitler, Stalin and Trump show it’s easier than you think

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      Three zombies lurching your way is scary enough. Now imagine they’re Lenin, Stalin and Putin. This scene isn’t from a Kremlin-themed horror film, but rather a new graphic novel, Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa.Through their day job, as co-hosts of the Gaslit Nation podcast, the authors have long warned about the dangers of authoritarianism, whether discussing January 6 or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now they are releasing a book, illustrated by the Polish artist Kasia Babic.It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at dictatorship, a how-to manual with lessons from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Putin, Kim Jong-un and many others whose stories offer time-tested tips on how to seize and consolidate power.“We wanted to do a book on the dictator playbook to show people how unoriginal dictators are,” Chalupa says, “so they can better predict the next moves of an aspiring authoritarian.”Some such moves, such as stigmatizing minority groups or employing propaganda, are well-known from history class. Others may seem counterintuitive. According to Chalupa and Kendzior, dictators are fond of both elections and constitutions. It helps, of course, if they win the popular vote by an overwhelming margin and if constitutional rights are guaranteed on paper but not in real life.On the page, these tips and more are shared by an omniscient narrator who Chalupa says has Cary Grant’s looks and verve, Stephen Colbert’s snark and the devil’s ability to tempt.One relatively new development for dictators is the increasing usefulness of technology when it comes to keeping civilians under surveillance. Chalupa notes that when her Ukrainian grandfather was in one of Stalin’s prison camps, inmates were allowed to speak to each other relatively freely. Today, China uses technology to keep a constant eye on Uyghurs in its own camps. Chalupa and Kendzior fault companies like Apple, Facebook and Google for doing business with China.“When you have innovations in AI driven by companies in the west, it’s going to be used for authoritarian control,” Chalupa says.“It’s only a matter of time before it starts spreading everywhere. You think you live in a democracy? Every single democracy is vulnerable. Nobody is immune to the authoritarian virus. If all the surveillance technology tools go unregulated, if there’s no vocal outcry against them from the public or elected officials in the EU, North America and elsewhere, if there’s no pushback against them, it’s going to be game over.”When Chalupa and Kendzior conceived their book, they outlined it as if it were an infomercial, wondering what a Trump University course on dictatorship would look like, and proceeded accordingly. They also thought about Oscars-style awards for despots.In one sequence, the narrator becomes an Academy Awards host. He dons a tuxedo, strolls the red carpet and presents the Oscar for Best Purge to Kim Il-sung, founder of the dynasty that rules North Korea. According to the book, nowadays Kim Jong-un not only continues the tradition of purges, he has extended it to canine pets of the ruling class.As Chalupa points out, dictators can’t achieve power on their own. They require the help of “useful idiots”.“In terms of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, all the sort of people we highlight throughout the project, the larger theme of the book is useful idiots. People helped Hitler have power. Why? What did they get out of it, or think they were getting out of it?”The book looks at a Weimar Republic media baron, Alfred Hugenberg, who thought he could control Hitler and limit his danger to Germany: a fateful miscalculation. Meanwhile, Stalin’s brutality was whitewashed in the west thanks to figures including the celebrated playwright George Bernard Shaw and the New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, whose fawning coverage won a Pulitzer prize. One of Duranty’s contemporaries, the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones, who sought to expose Stalin’s atrocities, was the subject of Chalupa’s 2019 feature film, Mr Jones. Another voice of conscience spotlighted in Chalupa and Kendzior’s book is George Orwell, for his courageous opposition to Stalin and to authoritarianism in general.“I think Orwell wasn’t alone,” Chalupa says. “He had a community working with him side-by-side” including “his wife Eileen, a remarkable poet in her own right”.The rogues’ gallery wouldn’t be complete without Donald Trump. Recently indicted a second time, the 45th president plays a prominent role in the book. One aspect the authors emphasize is Trump’s dictatorial skill when it comes to inflaming supporters.They highlight his tweets on the campaign trail in 2016: “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ’em would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell – I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise.”Another sequence depicts Trump supporters drinking conspiracist Kool-Aid on January 6. A man wearing a red Maga cap downs a shot which makes his muscles expand and brain shrink. “Stop the steal!” he exclaims. Others, similarly addled, start threatening Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Egged on by Trump, the mob attacks the Capitol. With the seat of government burning, Trump feigns innocence.The book also examines US support for dictatorships abroad. In the 1970s, such support often came about through the then secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. Whether it was the coup against Salvador Allende that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile or coziness toward dirty war dictators in Argentina, Kissinger was key to the embrace of despots worldwide.“He was like a ‘Where’s Waldo?’ during our research,” Chalupa recalls, noting “all the times he kept popping up – ‘there’s Kissinger again.’”With so much material to work with, the authors had to make decisions about what to include. Their treatment of Hitler spotlights Mein Kampf and his brief alliance with Stalin, but there is not much mention of his antisemitism and the Holocaust.“We sort of focused on the dictators themselves versus their atrocities,” says Chalupa, whose next project is a Holocaust-themed work about the American second world war reporter Dorothy Thompson. “It’s sort of like the Hitchcock method.”She adds that “the focus is so much on useful idiots. It’s really the theme of the book. We’re not trying to minimize any atrocities” or “eclipse the victims”.Chalupa noted that the book is geared toward younger readers, aiming to encourage them to learn more. Sadly, with things the way they are, it seems there will be no shortage of material should a sequel ever be planned. But Chalupa maintains a sense of hope.“We’ve got to keep fighting,” she says. “We have no choice. Every single one of us, wherever [we are], should not check out, should not say, ‘OK, it’s out of my hands.’ It’s not up to you alone to fix it, but what we have the power to do, the bandwidth to do, is incredibly powerful.”
      Dictatorship: It’s Easier Than You Think! is published in the US by First Second More

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      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on Trump and political violence: more than words | Editorial

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      Like Joe Biden’s ascent to the White House, Donald Trump’s indictment for unlawfully holding classified documents and obstructing justice offers a partial answer to one great question of American politics: can the country’s institutions contain his excesses?The backlash that the indictment has prompted highlights another: what happens when they do? When the Democrat defeated him, Mr Trump’s armed supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent the transfer of power, assaulting police officers and chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Within minutes of his indictment last week, threats and even calls for civil war were surging on social media platforms used by his supporters.The violent rhetoric doesn’t just come from the grassroots. The Arizona Republican Kari Lake announced that “to get to President Trump, you’re going to have to go through me, and you’re going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me … Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA [National Rifle Association].” Mr Trump himself previously warned of “death and destruction” if he were indicted in a separate case, over hush money payments.His bluster at such times is intended to deter action against him – despite the extraordinary case put forward in the indictment, including the now-familiar photo of boxes stacked in a bathroom. It is critical to avoid hysteria or fatalism about the threats facing US democracy. It is true that the direst prognostications did not come to pass after the 2020 election.Nonetheless, last year, research found that more than two in five Americans think a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade. The number who think violence would be justified to restore Mr Trump to the White House has fallen since last year, but still stands at 12 million. An increasingly divided country is also increasingly well armed, with almost 400m privately held guns; their owners are disproportionately white, male and Republican. According to one study, almost 3% of adults, or 7.5 million people, bought a firearm for the first time between January 2019 and April 2021.A slew of analysts have warned that the US could be heading towards widespread political violence. Prof Barbara Walter notes in her book How Civil Wars Start that two conditions are key: ethnic factionalism and anocracy – when a country is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. She believes that the US has the first, and remains close to the second, even if the short-term threat has ebbed somewhat since 2021. Others have pulled back from warnings of civil war, but think major civil disruption is entirely plausible.No one foresees a straight confrontation between forces as in the 1860s, let alone a geographic split. What some experts fear is a guerrilla-style asymmetric conflict waged by a decentralised movement, with small groups or lone attackers targeting minority targets such as synagogues or gay clubs, civilians more broadly, infrastructure, or figures such as Democratic politicians, judges and election officials. Trumpism would be best understood not as the animating principle of such a conflict, but as a catalyst. People would not be fighting for Mr Trump so much as fighting because they believed he spoke for them. And if not him, another figurehead might yet emerge.No violence broke out at the indictment hearing in Miami, as some had feared. Key figures on the extreme right are now locked up: more than 1,000 people have been charged with offences relating to January 6, and hundreds of those imprisoned. Others reportedly feel that Mr Trump has abandoned them. Nonetheless, the growth of threats and political violence in recent years is undeniable. That the language of Mr Trump and his enablers makes these more likely is surely, by now, beyond doubt.
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      in US Politics

      ‘More extreme, more violent’: experts’ warning over khaki-clad Patriot Front

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      For years, there has been an element of the ridiculous to Patriot Front and their rallies, which can look like a sort of cosplay version of a white nationalist movement.At a Patriot Front demonstration in Washington in May, more than a hundred Patriot Front members marched along the National Mall wearing matching outfits of beige or brown chinos and blue button-up shirts.The ensemble was topped off with the sort of affected accessorizing that parents subject children to at weddings: each man was required to wear sand-colored suspenders, with matching hats and sewn-on arm patches.In their hands, the Patriot Front members carried shields that were a derivative version of Captain America’s defense system, and they had tight white fabric wrapped around their faces. The goal of their activity – Patriot Front aims to create a white ethno-state, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – is serious, but they found themselves ripe for ridicule.“You wear Walmart khakis!” one bystander heckled. “You are sloppy! You are not even matching! You all have different types of pants on! Cargo pants are out! Reclaim your virginity!”In the years following Patriot Front’s 2017 inception, however, they have slowly grown in influence and threat, experts say. In 2023, those who monitor hate groups say Patriot Front is increasingly moving towards public displays and violence.“If you asked me about Patriot Front in 2017 or 2018, I’d say they’re looking for attention. They’re putting up some stickers, and doing some banner drops here and there, and it’s all about just getting in the news. But now it’s gone well beyond that,” said Stephen Piggott, a researcher at Western States Center who focuses on white nationalist, paramilitary and anti-democracy groups.“I think the group is morphing from a solely propaganda-based outfit to a much more violent one, based on what we’ve seen over the past couple of years. They’re trending to much more violence, more in-person direct actions, versus putting up stickers under the cover of night.”Patriot Front formed in 2017, having splintered from the white nationalist group Vanguard America in the wake of the deadly Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Led by Thomas Rousseau, Patriot Front initially focused on clandestine propaganda efforts: dropping racist literature in neighborhoods and posting stickers in public places.According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Patriot Front was responsible for the vast majority of “hateful propaganda” in the US in 2019, 2020 and 2021. In the past couple of years, the group has begun to venture more into the daylight, and held more rallies and demonstrations.The leadership has stayed the same, under Thomas Rousseau, a Texas-based extremist. But Patriot Front has changed.“I think it’s indicative of the movement. The white nationalist movement more broadly is getting more extreme, more hardcore, more violent,” Piggott said.That violence has been seen across the US. In May, Joe Biden described white supremacy as “the most dangerous terrorist threat” to the country. This week, a University of Chicago poll found that 12 million American adults, or 4.4% of the adult population, believe violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the White House.Antisemitic incidents, meanwhile, rose in the US in 2022; there was an increase in anti-Asian American hate crimes over the past two years; and a recent FBI report found that hate crimes as a whole rose by nearly 12% from 2020 to 2021.“There’s a backlash to gains made by marginalized communities: I think marginalized communities are more represented, and have become more a political force as well. The white nationalist movement also sees what’s going on in terms of demographics, and are not happy with the diminishing white majority of the country,” Piggott said.“And then also really since the election of Donald Trump, we’ve seen white nationalist discourse being much more mainstream. That’s provided a bump for these groups in terms of they’re very happy to see when elected officials and others are kind of speaking their language, using their rhetoric.“I think it’s almost like a green light for them to conduct the activities that they’re engaged in.”For Patriot Front, those activities have meant scenes like those in June last year in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Police arrested 31 members of the group after they were found packed into the back of a rental truck with riot gear. The men, who an eyewitness told police “looked like a little army”, were charged with conspiracy to riot.A month later Charles Murrell, a Black artist, was attacked during a Patriot Front march in Boston, Massachusetts. The group has since held marches in Indianapolis and a rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This year, a group of about 25 Patriot Front members protested against a drag brunch in Nashville and conducted their Washington march.“Patriot Front worries me a lot more than other groups because of the amount of public activism that they commit to,” said Jeff Tischauser, a senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.“Any time you get these volatile, unhinged people coming into close contact with the public, situations can escalate. That’s what I worry about, because they’re in public space more than any other group.“And you’re gonna have courageous people like Charles Murrell stand up and say, ‘We don’t want you here.’ That’s going to be a combustible situation with the people that they have within the organization.”There has been a rise in white nationalism and far-right politics in countries around the world in recent years. In Germany, the far-right, anti-immigrant ​​Alternative for Germany has surged in recent polling, while last year Giorgia Meloni, whose radical-right Brothers of Italy party has neo-fascist roots, was elected prime minister of Italy.In the US, though, there is an extra threat. About four in 10 adult Americans live in a household with a firearm, and mass shootings are commonplace. A year on from Patriot Front’s march in Coeur d’Alene, the targeting of LGBTQ communities is a continuing risk, Tischauser said.“We’re worried about Pride Month. We’re worried about teachers. There are groups that are out in public, that are showing up at LGBTQ-inclusive events, harassing and intimidating participants, which include children,” Tischauser said.“And I’m worried about the high concentration of guns that we have in this country, and this contentious movement that’s becoming more hostile and more aggressive, it seems, by the day. And Patriot Front is right in the middle of that.” More

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      Experts warn of increased risk of US terror attacks by rightwing ‘lone wolf’ actors

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      The US is at an increased risk of domestic terror attacks by rightwing “lone wolf” actors, experts have warned, as inflammatory Republican rhetoric around a variety of issues seems likely to continue ahead of the 2024 election.The number of attacks by adherents to rightwing ideology has soared since 2016, as Republican lies about election interference, and escalating rhetoric from the right about minority groups, have served to “provide mechanisms” for individuals to become radicalized, an analyst said.As the threat of domestic rightwing terrorism rises, researchers say individuals, rather than organized groups, are now far more likely to commit what analysts call “crimes inspired by extremist ideology”.There have been a series of such attacks in recent years. In May 2022 a white supremacist killed 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The attacker said he had chosen the location because it was in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He was sentenced to life in prison earlier this year.A self-described white nationalist killed 23 people and injured 22 in a shooting in El Paso, on the border of Mexico and the US, in 2019, in an anti-immigration attack targeting Hispanic people.In recent years a white supremacist killed nine people at a Black church in Charleston, while just this week a man was arrested after he crashed a rented truck into bollards near the White House. The man subsequently praised Adolf Hitler to investigators and said he intended to “kill the president”, according to charging documents.​Michael Jensen, senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start) at the University of Maryland, said 70% of individuals committing terrorist acts in the US are individuals, or part of “isolated cliques” – small groups of three to four people.“That said, these individuals might be lone actors, but they’re not lonely actors,” Jensen said.“They are embedded in these online ecosystems where they are exchanging ideas with each other all day every day.”Jensen leads the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (Pirus) project, a database tracking how US extremists came to be radicalized.According to the data, 90% of the cases of US terrorists are classed as domestic. Of the domestic extremists, 95% are far-right, Jensen said: white supremacists, Proud Boys, anti-immigrant groups and anti-government groups.There has been a worrying increase in the number of attacks. Prior to 2016, Jensen and his team logged about 150 individuals a year who were “committing crimes inspired by extremist ideology”.Since 2016, the number of people committing such crimes has jumped to about 300-350 cases a year, Jensen said – not including a huge spike in 2021 as a result of the January 6 insurrection.As the number of incidents have risen, there have been changes in how people come to rightwing terrorism.“Before the internet and before social media, how an individual was likely to radicalize is that it was going to be through a face-to-face relationship that they had in the physical world,” Jensen said.“So they had a cousin that was involved in a skinhead gang and they recruited them, or there was a group active in their neighborhood and they saw a flyer and took an interest in it.“It was a much more labor intensive process to get people involved.”With the advent of social media, white supremacist ideas and groups are available “at the click of a button”, Jensen said. Individuals have a much easier path to becoming radicalized.At the same time, the threat of rightwing terrorism has been exacerbated by the normalizing of political violence, or violent rhetoric, by elected officials and media personalities. Prominent figures can provide a gateway for people to commit violence when they demonize immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, or indulge conspiracies like the great replacement theory, Jensen said.“They get this disinformation and conspiracy theories that are a bit more watered down: does not make calls to violence, but they provide the mechanisms for people to follow that narrative to the places where they will encounter that rhetoric.”Susan Corke, Intelligence Project Director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the far right has been “increasingly mobilized since the beginning of the Trump era”.“Currently, the level of mobilization, coordination and sustained focus of the far right’s anti-LGBTQ+, particularly anti-trans, is much worse.“The past year saw unprecedented violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and the most frequent victims were women of color, especially black transgender women,” Corke said.Corke said terror attacks by individuals should be seen within the wider context of hate-filled rhetoric and extremist platforms.“While a shooter or someone who takes violent action may act on their own, I would say that they are not solo actors,” she said.“People do not ‘self-radicalize’ – they exist within social and political structures that perpetuate these ideas, often through deliberate disinformation and active recruitment from groups espousing hateful ideologies.”Corke said the way to combat and prevent rightwing terrorism is to educate young people and work towards early intervention.“Communities and governments need to adopt a public health approach to preventing extremism by engaging communities, mental health experts, social workers and, especially, people involved in the day-to-day lives of young people,” she said.In 2021 a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – the head of the US Intelligence Community – warned that racially motivated extremists posed the most lethal domestic terrorism threat. It echoed post-January 6 warnings from Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, that the threat from domestic violent extremism was “metastasizing” across the country.But despite the FBI and US intelligence pronouncements, a major problem with combating rightwing terrorism is that law enforcement does not adequately track of instances of violence, said Michael German, a former FBI special agent infiltrated white supremacy groups in the 1990s who now works at the Brennan Center for Justice.“The FBI doesn’t know how many people white supremacists killed last year in the United States. They don’t collect that information,” German said.When attacks by white supremacists do happen, “they often get parsed in a way that minimizes them,” he said. White supremacist violence is frequently recorded under the category of gang violence, rather than domestic terrorism, while attacks conducted by individuals who have far-right beliefs are frequently classified as hate crimes – outside of the domestic terrorism umbrella.“You would think that if the FBI and the justice department had a real interest in significantly suppressing this type of crime, they would at least count them,” German said.German said a significant change from the time he spent undercover to investigating neo-Nazi organizations in the 1990s to the modern environment is the language elected officials use to talk about certain groups.“Back in the 90s there were Republicans who used dog whistle politics, they used phrases and arguments that the far-right militant crowd understood as speaking to them about their issues,” German said.“Now you see sitting politicians who exalt in violence, and call for more of it and call for exonerating the people who committed violence because they committed violence in furtherance of their political cause.”That’s the kind of rhetoric that led to the January 6 insurrection, German said – and could continue to cause problems in the future.“If the government is saying: ‘Do it, and do it for me, and I’ll pardon you, or I’ll pay your legal bills, which are things that are said today. Then it’s easier [for members of the far right] to say: ‘Okay, this is this is authorized.’“That’s how you get 10,000 people attacking the US Capitol.” More

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      Oath Keeper sentenced to eight and a half years for role in Capitol attack

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      A member of the far-right Oath Keepers on Friday was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for her role in the deadly 6 January 2021 assault on the US Capitol by extremist supporters of Donald Trump who tried to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential election victory over the Republican.Jessica Watkins was convicted in November by a federal jury in Washington of obstruction of an official proceeding for her role in the storming of the Capitol, which saw rioters battle police, smash windows and send lawmakers running for their lives.Watkins was also convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of officers during the riots.The US district judge Amit Mehta on Friday said it was “particularly hard” to issue a sentence for Watkins after she testified during trial about the struggles she faced with her transgender identity and her cooperation with law enforcement officials during their investigation of her conduct on January 6.But he said that “doesn’t wipe out” what she did during the attack. “Your role that day was more aggressive, more assaultive, more purposeful than perhaps others,” Mehta said.Kenneth Harrelson, another Oath Keeper convicted of obstruction of an official proceeding, was also found guilty of conspiring to prevent members of Congress from certifying Biden’s election win as well as tampering with documents and proceedings. He will be sentenced later on Friday.Watkins and Harrelson were acquitted of seditious conspiracy charges.Watkins told the judge: “My actions and my behavior that fateful day were wrong and, as I now understand, criminal,” she said.Friday’s court proceedings were taking place one day after Mehta sentenced the Oath Keepers’ founder, Stewart Rhodes, to 18 years in prison for crimes including seditious conspiracy, or using force to try to overthrow the federal government. That is the steepest penalty yet against those charged in the January 6 violence.Members of the Oath Keepers, founded by Rhodes in 2009, include current and retired US military personnel, law enforcement officers and first responders. More