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      Proud Boys and Oath Keepers: what is their future with top leaders jailed?

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      The recent convictions of the Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has raised questions about the future of both extremist groups and what role they may or not play in the future path of violent extremism in the US.Researchers who monitor American far-right organizations said the Oath Keepers have in effect been decimated, with only a handful of chapters remaining, while the Proud Boys are ramping up efforts to protest at LGBTQ events and taking cues from larger national conservative conversations about hostility to transgender rights.“The impact of criminal litigation, really any litigation, legal accountability has been quite different [for both groups],” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research and analysis for the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). “So I don’t know that the solution for all groups engaged in violence and conspiracy are going to have the same outcome from the same accountability measure.”Carroll Rivas said since the arrests of Rhodes and other Oath Keepers’ members, it only took about five months for the group to go from nearly 100 chapters to just a handful remaining active. “I can tell you I don’t see as many Oath Keeper bumper stickers around,” she reported.The Oath Keepers, Carroll Rivas explained, were structured with their leader, Stewart Rhodes, assuming all the primary roles. Carroll Rivas describes Rhodes’s conviction and potential 25-year prison sentence as cutting off the “head of the dragon” and undermining the group’s strategy of recruiting law enforcement, military veterans, and public officials.They were “quasi-following some of the rules” with a legal structure and non-profit status, Carroll Rivas said, and their strategy focused on a purposeful recruitment of “people who are respected members of society” in a greater attempt to wield power. Oath Keeper members joined something they didn’t necessarily believe would participate in unacceptable activities, let alone anything criminal, she explained.“When something happens like January 6, when things get out of hand, it pushes the everyday membership away from the organization itself, not from its beliefs, but it definitely pushed them away from the Oath Keepers’ name.”Experts are most worried about the splintering of the far right when it comes to people who then act alone or in small groups unaffiliated to anyone else: a phenomenon that is extremely hard for law enforcement to track and infiltrate.There’s a “steady drumbeat” of people not trusting the government, engaging in conspiracy theories and grievances, and encouraging people to arm themselves, Siegel said, and a world of people online that share that view. That means there are alternatives to the Oath Keepers for people still wanting to be engaged in far-right activities.“Will those people look elsewhere for more extreme, like-minded groups or will they lay low? It remains to be seen,” said Warren Siegel, vice-president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.Today, extremists “can choose their own adventure”, pulling bits of ideology from white supremacy and anti-government groups. As a result, Siegel said: “There is a lot more opportunity to create strains of anti-government theory that will animate people into action and it’s much harder to track.”Worryingly, researchers are finding it difficult to know when a potential extremist is moving from rhetoric to action. “When the language of extremism is so similar to general public discussion, it’s more difficult to know where the next attack is coming from,” Siegel said.But the Proud Boys, unlike the Oath Keepers, have not splintered.In the wake of Tarrio’s conviction, the Proud Boys are ramping up their activity, and trying to disrupt LGBTQ+ events, such as protesting at drag queen story hours. The Proud Boys, which have many local chapters throughout the country and decentralized leadership, have realized they don’t need to travel thousands of miles and can “shift the social norm in their backyard”, said Siegel.He added: “They glom on to a contentious public issue in order to try to attract people.” Siegel argued that the Proud Boys were doubling down in their attempts to target the LGBTQ+ events because of the “the baseless narrative that LGBTQ community are grooming children”.Unlike the Oath Keepers, which had a specific anti-government ideology, Siegel explained the Proud Boys were taking strains from different ideologies, such as the rise of Christian nationalism and opposition to what they view as the radical left.The Proud Boys are also not the only extremist group that is targeting the LGBTQ+ community, Siegel said. White supremacists with a history of violence are engaging in it almost weekly. Siegel called it a “toxic combination” of groups with a history of violence and hateful ideology, saying it was the “challenge of our time” to mitigate that threat.Researchers expressed concerns about Proud Boys’ actions in the aftermath of January 6 and Tarrio’s conviction because of their long record of engaging in violence.“Part of their ethos, part of the attraction to others is that they are shamelessly militant,” said Siegel. Violent extremes and grievances against the government are here to stay, he explained, saying the question is how the US can minimize their impact. “Accountability is part of that despite how it’s spun,” he argued.America is “not the healthiest democracy right now”, Siegel explained. “How do you win hearts and minds in this country? There is no fairytale ending to an insurrection.” More

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      Schumer decries Republican senator’s ‘revolting’ remarks on white nationalists

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      The Democratic US Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned as “utterly revolting” remarks in which the Alabama Republican Tommy Tuberville appeared to defend white nationalists in the US military.In an interview with the Alabama station WBHM, published on Monday, Tuberville was asked: “Do you believe they should allow white nationalists in the military?”He answered: “Well, they call them that. I call them Americans.”The Senate armed forces committee member added: “We are losing in the military so fast. And why? I can tell you why. Because the Democrats are attacking our military, saying we need to get out the white extremists, the white nationalists, people that don’t believe in our agenda, as Joe Biden’s agenda.”Tuberville is currently attempting to impose his own agenda on the US military, by blocking promotions and appointments in protest of Pentagon rules about abortion access.On Thursday, Schumer said: “Does Senator Tuberville honestly believe that our military is stronger with white nationalists in its ranks? I cannot believe this needs to be said, but white nationalism has no place in our armed forces and no place in any corner of American society, period, full stop, end of story.”Previously, Sherrilyn Ifill, a former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) legal defense fund, said: “I hope we are not getting so numb that we refrain from demanding that Mr Tuberville’s colleagues in the Senate condemn his remarks.”Schumer added: “I urge Senator Tuberville to think about the destructive spectacle he is creating in the Senate. His actions are dangerous.”On Wednesday, a spokesperson for Tuberville said he was “being skeptical of the notion that there are white nationalists in the military, not that he believes they should be in the military”.A Tuberville spokesperson told the Washington Post the senator “resents the implication that the people in our military are anything but patriots and heroes”.The same spokesperson told NBC Tuberville “has kind of a sarcastic sense of humor” and “was expressing doubt about this being a problem in the military”.Reports have shown the US military has a problem with white nationalism and white supremacy, despite the Pentagon having prohibited “active participation” in extremist groups since 1996.In October 2020, a Pentagon report warning of a problem with white supremacists in the military was sent to Congress. It was released in 2021.In February 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, co-published documents showing one in five applicants to one white supremacist group claimed ties to the US military.On Thursday, Adam Hodge, spokesperson for the White House national security council, said it was “abhorrent that Senator Tuberville would argue that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military, while he also threatens our national security by holding all pending DoD military and civilian nominations.“Extremist behavior has no place in our military. None.”Fact-checking Tuberville, WBHM, an NPR station, noted Pentagon efforts “to keep extremists, particularly fascists, out of the military”.The station also fact-checked a remark about “what [Joe Biden’s] done to our military with the woke ideas, with the [critical race theory] that we’re teaching in our military”.Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society. Republicans have turned it into an electoral wedge issue.WBHM said: “The US military is not requiring that CRT be taught and there is little evidence that it’s being discussed much at all in the ranks. According to Military Times, the one instance in which it is being used in an educational setting is at the US Military Academy at West Point.” More

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      Moms for Liberty, meet John Birch: the roots of US rightwing book bans

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      Moms for Liberty is a Florida-based pressure group which campaigns for book bans in US public schools, an issue at the heart of the national debate as Republican-run states seek to control or eliminate teaching of sex education, LGBTQ+ rights and racism in American history.But rightwing calls for school book bans are by no means a new phenomenon – and a look at the Moms for Liberty website indicates why.Moms for Liberty seeks to organise “Madison Meetups”, events it describes as “like a book club for the constitution!”, featuring discussion of “liberty, freedom and the foundation of our government”. Under “resources that we have found helpful”, the only resource offered is The Making of America, a book by W Cleon Skousen.In the early 1960s, Skousen was a hero to and a defender of the John Birch Society, a far-right group that campaigned against what it claimed was the communist threat to America.Matthew Dallek, a professor of political management at George Washington University, is the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right. He points out that though the Birchers were not the only ones promoting book bans in the 60s, “they were likely the most visible group promoting book bans or promoting the policing of content in schools, libraries, movie theaters, even on newsstands”.The Birchers, Dallek adds, focused on “the so-called erosion of the moral fiber of the United States, but also the struggle to rid the country of what they regarded as really the socialist left wing”.The society still exists but its influence is greater than its presence, most obviously through a resurgence of Bircher-esque thought and action in the Republican party of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.In the society’s heyday, Dallek says, book bans and school board elections, another current battlefield, “gave Birchers a way to take action in their community.“They looked at where their kids went to school and their local library and the movie theater they would pass by. Part of their agenda was to insert what they considered Americanist publications, as opposed to communist propaganda.“What’s frightening now is that I don’t recall a time where those efforts were so often successful. Moms for Liberty and the other successors to the John Birch Society, they’re having a lot more success at actually implementing their vision.”Last month, the writers’ organisation Pen America reported a 28% rise in public school book bans in just six months. As the 2024 election approaches, attacks on the place of race in history classes and teaching on LGBTQ+ issues seem certain to feature in Republican debates and town halls.Dallek considers the Birchers’ influence on the Republican party over more than 60 years. But he can’t recall the society inspiring “any sweeping legislation like Florida has now passed, through three major bills. And one in particular, it’s very Orwellian. They have these education minders who have to approve all texts in school libraries. That was certainly a dream of the Birch Society.”Tactics are familiar too. Birchers often protested against what they called pornography in books and teaching, as a vehicle for communistic thought. Now, the hard right sees pornography in books on LGBTQ+ rights, in drag queen story hours, or in the casting of children’s plays.Dallek says: “Whatever the language is, whether it’s ‘woke’, or ‘progressive’, or ‘pornographic’, or ‘communistic’, in a way the brilliance of the Birchers and other groups is in the way they use language. They’re able to distill ideas and aspects of the culture they find offensive and brand them as something evil, something un-American, something that will twist and pollute the minds of kids.“I don’t know that they meant that it was literally communistic to teach sex ed in schools but it was a kind of brilliant shorthand, because they were able to mobilise a lot of supporters by saying this was a civilizational battle. A battle for whether your children will grow up being moral or not, whether they’ll have a decent life.“And if we want to bring it back to today, Ron DeSantis is out there claiming, ‘We’re only banning books that are pornographic or that kids should not be exposed to.’ But then when you’re talking about banning Toni Morrison? I mean, come on. It’s ridiculous.”But it’s real. The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s first novel, and her masterpiece Beloved have been removed from some Florida libraries.Dallek notes other echoes. For instance, the role of rightwing women.“Historically, schools have been in terms of teaching jobs often reserved for women. And so, ironically, in the 1960s and 70s, as feminism becomes a major force in the culture and many women expect to work outside the home and be active politically, conservative, really far-right women take an element of that and get active in their communities.“Women have been on the frontlines of many of these fights to ban books, to police what kids are learning. Parental rights, the whole idea … is I think focused at the moms and … imposing their version of Christian morals on public education and many public spaces.“To go back to the W Cleon Skousen thing” on the Moms for Liberty website, “it does suggest a link to the past. Skousen continued to write in the 1980s and 90s. He was a defender of the John Birch Society and was held up as a hero.”Skousen died in 2006. Seventeen years later, to Dallek his recommendation from Moms for Liberty “suggests there really is a tradition in modern American politics, on the far right, that has become much more mainstream.“Groups like Moms for Liberty understand that. That there’s a set of ideas, and a literature, and a whole kind of subculture around this effort to police ideas and morality in schools. And they are tapping into that very effectively.”
      Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Proud Boys: four found guilty of seditious conspiracy over Capitol attack

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      Four members of the Proud Boys extremist group, including its former leader Enrique Tarrio, were on Thursday convicted of seditious conspiracy for their roles in planning and leading the January 6 Capitol attack, in a desperate effort to keep Donald Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat.The verdicts handed down in federal court in Washington marked a major victory for the US justice department in the last of its seditious conspiracy cases related to the January 6 attack. Prosecutors previously secured convictions against members of the Oath Keepers, another far-right group.Seditious conspiracy is rarely used but became the central charge against the Proud Boys defendants after the FBI identified them as playing crucial roles in helping storm the Capitol in an effort to interrupt and stop the congressional certification of electoral results.“Evidence presented at trial detailed the extent of the violence at the Capitol on January 6 and the central role these defendants played setting into motion the unlawful events of that day,” attorney general Merrick Garland later said at a news conference at justice department headquarters.“We have secured the convictions of leaders of both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for seditious conspiracy, specifically conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transfer of presidential power. Our work will continue,” Garland said.Those convicted now await sentencing. The verdicts were partial, and hours after the initial four were found guilty of seditious conspiracy, the jury found another Proud Boys member Dominic Pezzola, who smashed a window to gain entry to the Capitol, not guilty of seditious conspiracy.Tarrio, who was not in Washington for the Capitol attack, as well as Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs and Zachary Rehl were also convicted of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. All five were convicted of obstructing an official proceeding.The trial, which lasted more than three months and tested the scope of the sedition law, was particularly fraught for the defense, the prosecution and the presiding US district court judge, Timothy Kelly. Clashes in court and motions for mistrial were frequent.Trump played an outsized role in the trial, given the reverence the Proud Boys accorded the former president. In closing arguments, the prosecution said they acted as “Donald Trump’s army” to “keep their preferred leader in power” after rejecting Joe Biden’s victory.The former president has long been considered the lynchpin for the involvement of the Proud Boys and others in the Capitol attack when he called for a “wild” protest on 6 January 2021 in an infamous December 2020 tweet and told supporters to “fight like hell” for his cause.More than a thousand arrests have been made in connection to the Capitol attack and hundreds of convictions secured. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting an insurrection but acquitted by Senate Republicans. He still faces state and federal investigations of his attempted election subversion.In court, prosecutors said Tarrio and his top lieutenants used Trump’s December tweet as a call to arms and started putting together a cadre that they called the “Ministry of Self-Defense” to travel to Washington for the protest, according to private group chats and recordings of discussions the FBI obtained.Around 20 December 2020, Tarrio created a chat called “MOSD Leaders Group” – described by Tarrio as a “national rally planning committee” – that included Nordean, Biggs and Rehl. The chat was used to plan a “DC trip” where all would dress in dark tones, to remain incognito.The prosecution argued that Tarrio’s text messages about “Seventeen seventy six”, in reference to the year of American independence from Britain, suggested the leadership of the Proud Boys saw their January 6 operation as a revolutionary force.Lacking evidence in the hundreds of thousands of texts about an explicit plan to storm or occupy the Capitol, the prosecution used two cooperating witnesses from the Proud Boys to make the case that the defendants worked together in a conspiracy to stop the peaceful transfer of power.The first witness, Jeremy Bertino, told the jury the Proud Boys had a penchant for violence and there was a tacit understanding that they needed to engage in an “all-out revolution” to stop Biden taking office, testimony meant to directly support a sedition charge.The second witness, Matthew Greene, told the jury he did not initially understand why the Proud Boys marched from the Washington monument to the Capitol to be among the first people at the barricades surrounding Congress, instead of going to Trump’s speech near the White House.Once the Proud Boys led the charge from the barricades to the west front of the Capitol, Pezzola using a police riot shield to smash a window, Greene said he realized there may have been a deliberate effort to lead the January 6 riot.The prosecution persuaded the judge to allow them to use a novel legal strategy: that though the Proud Boys leaders did not really engage in violence themselves – Tarrio was not even in Washington – they got other rioters to do so, using them as “tools” of their insurrection conspiracy.The defense protested the ruling allowing prosecutors to show the jury videos of other low-level Proud Boys and random rioters committing violence at the Capitol, saying that it amounted to making the five defendants guilty by association.Notwithstanding the other evidence, the defense’s complaint was that if the jury had to assess whether the defendants’ limited use of violence alone met the threshold to “destroy by force the government of the United States”, the outcome might have been affected. 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      Hungary’s far-right PM calls for Trump’s return: ‘Come back, Mr President’

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      The Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has called for Donald Trump’s return to office, claiming their shared brand of hard-right populism is on the rise around the world, in a speech to US Republicans and their European allies in Budapest.Orbán was addressing the second annual meeting of the US Conservative Political Action Coalition (CPAC) in the Hungarian capital, aimed at cementing radical rightwing ties across the Atlantic. He said that conservatives have “occupied big European sanctuaries”, which he listed as Budapest, Warsaw, Rome and Jerusalem. He added that Vienna “is also not hopeless” .He noted that Washington and Brussels were still in the grip of liberalism, which he described as a “virus that will atomize and disintegrate our nations”.The Orbán government has made tentative approaches to open contacts with Ron DeSantis, with the Hungarian president, Katalin Novák, flying to meet the Florida governor in Tallahassee in March, but at Thursday’s CPAC conference it was overwhelmingly Trumpist, and Orbán threw his full-throated support behind the former US president.He said: “I’m sure if President Trump would be the president, there would be no war in Ukraine and Europe. Come back, Mr President. Make America great again and bring us peace.”The prime minister, who last year won his fourth consecutive term in office, portrayed Hungary’s self-described “illiberal Christian democracy” – widely criticised for its constraints on media and academic freedom, and for its anti-LGBTQ+ legislation – as a model for the world.“Hungary is an incubator where the conservative policies of the future are being tested,” Orbán said.The conference site, a modernist building called the Bálna, or whale, was festooned with messages echoing that theme. A gateway on the main path to the entrance declared it a “no-woke zone”. Inside, a huge map of Hungary was emblazoned with the words: “No country for woke men.”Some guests arrived in T-shirts that displayed Orbán and Trump together as “peacemakers” and “saviors of the world”. The event’s 2023 motto was “United we stand”.On its first day, the CPAC conference watched a 25-second video greeting from Tucker Carlson, a keen admirer of Orbán, which was clearly recorded before he was fired by Fox News last week.“I wish I was there in Budapest. If I ever get fired, have some time, and can leave, I’ll be there with you,” Carlson promised.Most independent journalists were refused accreditation for the event, in a country where the International Press Institute has said media freedom “remains suffocated”. During the Covid outbreak, Orbán’s government passed a law imposing prison sentences of up to five years for spreading disinformation. Hungarian journalists say the law was being used to deny them access to information, and on occasion to threaten them.The CPAC chair, Matt Schlapp, said Hungary was a model for dealing with journalists. He said that he told the event’s Hungarian organisers his team “would determine who a journalist is”, adding that was “quite revolutionary for the Americans, because in America a journalist tells them who is a journalist and we treat them like a journalist”.Schlapp said that in Hungary journalists had to follow certain rules about writing the truth and presenting “both sides” of a story.Orbán could point to a widening of the radical right coalition this year, with the presence of the Georgian prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, who praised his Hungarian counterpart as “far-sighted” and stressed his party Georgian Dream’s commitment to prioritising “family values” over “LGBTQ propaganda”. More

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      Far-right California county’s bid to hand count votes will cost millions

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      In Shasta county, a deep red enclave in far northern California, officials are intensifying their push to replace voting machines with a costly and experimental hand-count system that could cost an additional $4m over two years.The decision of the far-right majority on the region’s governing body, the Shasta county board of supervisors, to press ahead with the controversial plan comes as half the county’s workforce is preparing to strike over wages. Officials on the board recently said the county did not have enough money to pay requested wage increases for workers.The move has deepened divisions in a small county where public spending budgets are tight, with critics denouncing the price tag of an overhaul based on lies about election fraud.In a tense meeting that saw one county supervisor served with recall paperwork, the board’s ultra conservative majority renewed their support for a system that will cost three times more than the voting machines the county previously used.“We’re going to have free and fair elections in Shasta county,” said Patrick Jones, the chair of the board of supervisors, at a meeting on Tuesday. “Apparently money seems to be more important than making sure our elections are fair.”The board of supervisors has pushed the rural county of 180,000 people into the national spotlight with its decision this year to upend the county’s voting system without a replacement, and attempt to create a new system from scratch.Conspiracy theorists who believe that voting machines helped to steal the presidency from Donald Trump have seized on the county with high-profile figures in the movement, such as the MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, offering their support.Some in Shasta, which has became a hotbed for far-right politics in the pandemic years, have cheered the board’s decision.Since Trump’s loss, a group of residents had spoken regularly at county meetings, urging the board to cut ties with Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. They argued that the machines were a threat to elections both nationally and locally.Their vision became a reality shortly after an ultra-conservative majority took hold of the board of supervisors and, against the advice of colleagues and elections staff, decided in a 3-2 vote to cut ties with Dominion and pursue a hand tally.“We have disenfranchised roughly 110,000 voters and that is truly the epitome of denying our residents their first amendment right and they should be outraged,” said supervisor Mary Rickert, who voted against the decision.Meetings on the matter have drawn large crowds, including election deniers and dozens of residents who begged the county not to do away with Dominion machines, pointing out that the supervisors themselves had been elected by voters using the technology.The official who oversees voting had warned against a hand-count system, arguing that it is “exceptionally complex and error prone” and could cause the county to miss state elections deadlines, and ultimately disenfranchise voters.Cathy Darling Allen, Shasta’s registrar of voters, told officials in March the new system would require at least 1,200 additional temporary employees, funding to pay them, and a space large enough to accommodate them.This week the county’s deputy executive told the board that moving to a hand-count would increase costs by a minimum of $3.8m in the fiscal year 2024-2025, which she described as a conservative estimate.But despite financial concerns and protests from residents, the county board has once again opted to move ahead with the effort, and this week agreed to fund seven new positions to implement it. Rickert, the supervisor, again urged the board to reverse its previous decision, which she deemed “reckless and irresponsible” and unsuccessfully tried to a call a vote to do so.Her constituents are deeply concerned, she said recently.“I’ve had many people come up to me and say ‘whats going on’? These are people that are rock solid conservative as you will find – ranchers and farmers,” she said. “Those are the people who are most upset, they see total fiscal irresponsibility with their tax dollars.” More

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      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Tucker Carlson is not an antiwar populist rebel. He is a fascist | Jason Stanley

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      Fox News has finally broken ties with its most popular star, Tucker Carlson. His ousting has been bemoaned by some commentators, who have taken Carlson to be a rebellious anti-war populist, evading easy political characterization. But is it really so complicated to classify Carlson’s political ideology?In late February 2022, then Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, in the face of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, began a pro-Russia monologue urging his audience to ask themselves the question: “Why do I hate Putin so much?” The gist of Carlson’s comments about Russia’s leader is that Putin should not be regarded as an enemy. Instead, the real enemies of America are those who call white Americans racist, those who teach so-called critical race theory in schools, business elites who ship jobs abroad, and those who imposed Covid lockdowns on the United States.In short, Carlson urged, the real enemies of America are internal – racial minorities, doctors and politicians, professors and educators, and large corporations who shift jobs to other countries. Carlson has been resolutely against US support for Ukraine. Insofar as Carlson has since that point gone to war, it has rather been against these supposed internal enemies.So, is Tucker Carlson hard to classify? On the one hand, he spreads tropes central to neo-Nazi propaganda, such as “white replacement” theory, suggesting that leftist elites seek to replace “legacy Americans” by foreign non-white immigrants. On the other hand, he denounces media, intellectual and political elites, as well as US intervention in Ukraine, platforming those who identify as the “anti-war left”, such as Jimmy Dore. How should we best understand this set of views? If Carlson has fascist sympathies, as do, quite inarguably, many of those who applaud him, how do we understand his firm stance against US military and financial support for Ukraine? Surely, historically speaking, fascism is not compatible with the isolationist position Carlson has urged.We should look to history as our guide here. But the history that best informs us in this case is not European history, but American history. Before the beginning of the second world war, all of America’s pro-fascist parties opposed US intervention on the side of its allies against Nazi Germany. Often, the opposition to the US supporting Britain against Nazi Germany was represented as “isolationism”.There were openly fascist organizations during this time, such as the German American Bund. Somewhat more ambiguous was the America First movement. As the historian Bradley Hart recounts, in a packed America First rally in Madison Square Garden in 1941, the Montana senator Burton K Wheeler denounced “jingoistic journalists and saber-rattling bankers” who were pushing the nation into war against Germany.While the agenda of some members of the America First movement at the time might have genuinely been pacifist, it’s quite clear that the main agenda was in fact support for Hitler. The America First movement had strong support from American fascist movements of various stripes. Its most prominent spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, published the following words in support of his anti-war position in an essay entitled “Geography, Aviation, and Race” in Reader’s Digest in 1939:
      … It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign enemies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.
      It is simply inarguable fact that American racial fascism has a clear isolationist tradition, especially when the wars in question are against fascist opponents.But is Putin’s Russia fascist? In Russia, opposition politicians and journalists are regularly imprisoned or murdered. Russia has passed harsh laws against LGBTQ+ communities. Russia’s ideology is based on a militarized Russian nationalism, and its war against Ukraine is quite clearly genocidal in nature. Just as Nazi Germany represented itself as the defender of Christianity and Europe’s classic traditions against an existential threat posed by leftist atheist Jews, Putin represents Russia as the sole defender of the European Christian traditions against similar existential threats, such as “gender ideology”.Putin’s Russia is the international leader of the global far right, promoting ultra-nationalism, religious traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment across the world. If Russia is not fascist, then even Nazi Germany in the 1930s was not fascist. As the historian Timothy Snyder has urged, “we should finally say it”: Russia is fascist.Just as claims to be isolationists by American inter-war fascists were quite rightly taken to be expressions of support for Nazi ideology, there is good reason to take Carlson’s similar claims not as denunciations of American militarism but as expressions of support for Putinism, which he seems largely to share.What about Carlson’s scorn for the media, intellectual, financial and political elite, which he lacerates with regularity on his show? Here too there is little ambiguity. Carlson does not scorn all elites – after all, he himself was making as much as $20m a year from Fox news. He only targets certain elites. In the ideology of American fascism, the elites he targets are associated with liberal democracy and Jewish control.American fascists have always denounced the media, intellectuals and politicians. Carlson is careful to avoid explicitly antisemitic statements. But his show is the home of anti-Soros conspiracy theories. The antisemitism in his programming is clearly dog-whistled, and Jewish organizations have been among the first to cheer his ousting. Indeed, if Carlson did not regularly denounce media, intellectual, financial and political elites, regular targets of Nazi ideology, the case for calling him an American fascist would be much less clear.Nazi ideology supported strict gender roles – one of the central targets of the first mass Nazi book burning on 10 May 1933 was Magnus Hirschfeld’s collection of LGBTQ+ literature, the largest in the world and the largest documentation of gender fluidity (Hirschfeld coined the term “transsexual”). Carlson has used his platform to denounce transgender Americans as existential threats to Christianity. Fascists target cosmopolitan ways as existential threats to masculinity – a viewpoint Carlson also clearly shares.Finally, fascism praises violence against democracy, valorizing violent street mobs attacking democratic processes and institutions as martyrs to the nation. Here too Tucker Carlson fits perfectly into the tradition.It is not difficult at all to classify Tucker Carlson’s political ideology. He is an American fascist, only the latest in a long historical line. More