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      ‘I see this as a global fascist moment’: author Jeff Sharlet on interviewing far-right Americans

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      Jeff Sharlet and I meet outside the Titanic museum in sleepy Springfield, Massachusetts. It seems an opportune place to meet Sharlet – journalist, author and professor – halfway between his home in Vermont and mine in Brooklyn. We are here to talk about the fragmentation of American democracy, and I knew the Titanic museum would strike Sharlet as an apt spot: a reliquary of dissolution, another ship lost at sea.Sharlet’s latest book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, is the culmination of more than a dozen years’ reporting on the US religious right and its machinations. The core of the book is Sharlet’s reporting from the midwest and the high plains, talking to ordinary people about their extraordinary predilection for violence. They see a country gone wrong under decades of “immoral decadence” and often see the expansion of rights for women, the poor and people of color as proof of this turpitude.Sharlet has been sounding the alarm for a long time – but in this moment, when newscasters and senators alike use “Christian nationalism” and “fascism” fluently, the rest of us are finally catching on.His reporting has at times been mischaracterized as sensationalist or unduly obsessed with the bleakest, darkest fringes of the US’s raiments. This criticism – in the wake of our climate crisis, millions of Covid deaths and the withdrawal of the Republican party from any effort at governance – simply no longer sticks. The stories are as necessary as they are harrowing. The writing is explicit and expansive, almost cinematic, like looking at a battlefield from above. Altogether, it’s a rare achievement, a cultural-political book that is literary.Sharlet’s work has turned out to be a warning, not of the grief to come but of the grief that is here, in places urban and rural, large and small, at the hands of politicians, police, the January 6 “protesters”, Proud Boys and the ongoing plagues on national health. “I’ve got to figure out their grief,” he says.The book has a narrative arc that captures the fever pitch of the past decade. How did you pull it together?I’ve been writing about the right for a long time; I’m always interested in the margins of things that tell us about what’s happening at the center. An undertow is a metaphor for that, for the force that’s been pulling us to this place for a long time. If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I ever thought another civil war would be possible in the United States, I would have said no. But to think so [now] is to not understand that the right in America is as dangerous as it is.I’ve watched you change your stance on the question of American fascism. You once denied that we were a fascist state.Two years ago, when I started traveling for The Undertow, suddenly civil war language, which had been fringe even on the right, was now mainstream right. Today we hear Marjorie Taylor Greene use it. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t lead, she follows. Trump doesn’t lead, he follows.Trumpism makes its own direction out of an organic flow of information, ideas, the conflation of story and fact. It’s like a swirl of ideas and language, like a bird flock, a murmuration.Even a decade ago I was so cautious because if I say, “This is fascism,” I’m going to be dismissed as hysterical. Now here we are: conservative David French, from the National Review, is writing in the New York Times, partly because the undertow has left him behind. It’s moving rightward, and he’s no longer the right. The New York Times is also moving right. Julie [Sharlet’s wife, the academic historian Julia Rabig] has colleagues, historians, who are very cautious and very aware that history moves slowly. They are saying, “This is as fragmented as we’ve ever been.”You started approaching people with signs or stickers that showed their allegiance, like Trump flags or Blue Lives Matter flags. People who were literally flagging their allegiance to the myth of the big lie, to Trump, to white supremacy. You describe your interviewees as normal, otherwise compassionate people with fully rationalized – or, at least, self-justified – violent obsessions.Near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I met a nice-looking family, dad, mom, son. You would never tag them for who they were. I see a little “Let’s go Brandon” sticker – a meme that rose among the right which means “Fuck Joe Biden”. And I get to talking to them. We talked for a long time. [The father said] he had a “Let’s go Brandon” sticker because he didn’t want to swear around his son. They’re a middle-class dad and mom. They were always gun people, but not a lot of guns. Now they’re up to 36, now they are arming up. The father had always been anti-abortion. But now it was like a dream had moved into his and his wife’s mind. He described, in incredibly violent detail, the process of abortion. Then he described, in incredibly violent detail, the punishment he thought he and others were going to give to abortion doctors. They were ready for executions.You call the prelude to the book Our Condition. You mean the status of our political and social health amid various crises?It’s time for us to let go of the word crisis. And that’s hard. Like we go from climate change to climate crisis, which suggests a rising arc, like now we’re going to come to the resolution. This is our condition because there is no resolution here. As a person with a heart condition, this is a condition I live with. There’s loss in it, right? I learn from that.It’s livable, is what you’re saying. Survivable.Might be. It is until it isn’t.The two pieces that open and close the book are about music, the first about Harry Belafonte, published by the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the last chapter, about Lee Hays, published by the Oxford American.I thought, “I can’t start this book with darkness,” and I tried to pull a thread of beauty and art through it. Lee Hays was part of a band called the Weavers, which people don’t necessarily know any more, from the 1940s and 50s. But they do know songs like If I Had a Hammer, or even On Top of Old Smoky. I wanted to find a kind of hope, but I did not want to find a hope of like, “We can do it!” Because I don’t know if we can. But I know that we can struggle. Lee Hays was incredibly brave at a moment in his life and was broken by it, and Harry Belafonte was brave every moment of his life. He wasn’t broken, but he didn’t win.If we’re going to pay attention to the right, we need to pay attention to the deep strata of the struggle for freedom, right? Because this fight isn’t new, it’s old. And it’s ongoing, although it does take new shapes. We are in one of the scarier moments that we have ever confronted – all the more reason to understand what came before and how they endured; not how they survived, because they didn’t win. As we confront this fascist moment – I see this as a global fascist moment – we’re going to need some imagination. There is little on the table right now.You write about how both artists coded their music with messages of resistance; they used their music for the fight for civil rights, equality, real democracy.Code works for a lot of different groups, left or right. We’re in a time where the right is reveling in code. “Let’s go Brandon.” It’s just “funny”, right? And the left is shying away from code.It wasn’t always the case. Like Belafonte, Hays understood his songs as code songs, too. He called them zipper songs. He would take a gospel song and he would zip a freedom struggle into it. Harry Belafonte bankrolled the civil rights movement; he is absolutely essential to the freedom struggle in American history. There’s a story where Belafonte and Sidney Poitier almost get killed by the Klan. [They had to get as much money as they could collect to the organizers of the Freedom Summer in the south in 1964. When they landed, members of the Ku Klux Klan chased them. They reached a safe house without getting caught.] They just made it through and they dump the money that they brought for the activists on the table. And they all start singing [Belafonte’s hit song] Day-O, but they turn it into a freedom song: “Freedom is gonna come.”The second section of the book is titled Dream On. What’s the Aerosmith connection? I mean, I know it’s on heavy rotation at Trump rallies.“Dreaming” is a word we use as positive, right? Well, they’re dreaming. That’s, to me, the whole thing about Trumpism – and maybe Trump himself – but the movement goes on without him. (He was necessary at the beginning, he was needed. Lenin was needed at the beginning too, but the Soviet Union went on a long time without him.)The free association that happens at Trump’s rallies, the ways people make connections that make no sense – it has dream logic. One minute, a scary man is crawling into the window to rape your wife [a common Trump story told at rallies to reinforce the idea that the country is not safe and that guns are necessary], and then the next minute we’re laughing at windmills, and then the next minute we’re sad for the birds that were killed by windmills. And then, in the next minute, we’re yelling, “Lock her up.”This is dream logic. And there’s vanity in it, right? “I will interpret what they’re saying and I will bend it.” It’s the vanity of the base, the vanity of the mob, the aggregate grotesque imagination of power. It becomes a spinning whirlpool that pulls more and more people in. These are people for whom reality is not enough.You know Susan Friend Harding’s The Book of Jerry Falwell [about the conservative preacher and popular televangelist]? She would go to Jerry Falwell’s church and he would tell a story, and the next week he would tell the same story, but with different details. You would expect people to be distressed by it in real time, right? But no! There’s enough space within it for them to interact.This is why the right feels they are more democratic than the left. The intellectual rightwingers are like, “Fuck democracy, we don’t need it.” But the everyday people, they’re like, “This is the most democratic I’ve ever felt. I am not only receiving – I receive, I interpret and then I transmit back.”The Tick-Tock chapter rocked me. It’s a close account of the radicalization of a woman you call Evelyn. I’ve heard the deranged accusations of pedophilia from the right, even the meme that the Clintons and other Democrats eat children, but you bring us into Evelyn’s webwork of closely held conspiracies without losing her humanity. You take these individuals seriously, not in their wild ideas and beliefs, but in their conviction, in their commitment and faith. They believe they are called to save lives. This doesn’t absolve them, as you write, but it prevents them from being dismissible, from being caricatured, from being ignored.Don’t you think this is a failure of the left? Many, not all [pro-choice advocates] are like: “They just want to control women’s bodies.” Yes, the project is misogynist to the core. But it is not experienced as such by many on the right. Once you make that move, that we’re talking about children [and not fetuses, who are harmed by doctors and politicians], what kind of person are you if you don’t want to save that child?It’s astonishing there hasn’t been more violence. I think we’ve had a shield from that violence for a long time and now that shield … I sound like Jerry Falwell saying the hand of God is being removed from America.Adam Fleming Petty at the Washington Post called the book a “form of travelogue”. This is likely due in strong part to The Undertow, the long title chapter about Ashli Babbitt, the pro-Trump veteran who died on the day of the storming of the Capitol. How did you write this section?Because of my heart condition I’d been tucked in during Covid, and I live in a rural area. I remember sitting there at my kitchen table, watching January 6 on the computer, texting furiously. We heard about a white woman being killed. It was very soon after that we knew the cop was Black. And I thought, holy shit, it’s The Birth of a Nation [a 1915 movie that justifies organized white-on-Black violence with a racist depiction of Black people, including them being sexually predatory toward white women; such accusations were the pretext for lynchings for decades, with echoes remaining today]. They just did a live re-enactment of their fantasy!They would say Babbitt wore an American flag, but it’s not true. She wore a Trump cape, which is the new American flag. They would say she’s unarmed, but it’s not true. She was carrying a knife. There’s a photo of [Babbitt’s knife] on the cover of the book. You could say, well, it’s a small knife. Really? That knife is plenty big enough.You write that, almost immediately, the right tried to diminish Babbitt’s agency, to make her younger, smaller, quieter. It reminded me of Terri Schiavo [the 26-year-old woman who was found unconscious in 1984 and was the subject of a family battle for her medical decision-making, which became a national debate dominated by the Catholic church and the religious right until her death in 2005]. We see the efforts on the right to project a childlike acquiescence on to the adult woman.Yes! Ashli Babbitt’s “martyrdom” is tied up in her remaking as an innocent. You realize that the gun and the fetus, it’s an innocence cult. It’s not a death cult, people misunderstand this. It’s an innocence cult, which is to say, it’s also the erasure of history. It says, “No, no, no, there’s no original sin in American history. We were always good.”Babbitt was hurting. She was in her mid-30s, after serving eight tours of duty. She was in massive debt. And she fell in love with Trump.Babbitt resolved her grief by getting certainty. She could not mourn.You mean she was angry, hurting – but not reckoning with her circumstances, embracing her condition. What did she want? She wanted justice?She just wanted to be a person and serve her country.So what we’re talking about is a whole lot of unrealized pain, and about how we metabolize pain in different ways. You write in the prelude that “loss sometimes curdles into fury and hate or denial and delusion. Especially delusion.”Yes. I’ve been thinking about how we metabolize pain, about my own ability to metabolize pain. My new therapist is trying to figure out why I do the work I do. She thinks it must be so bad for me. But no, it’s fucking sustained me! It gives me agency. States everywhere, the forces of darkness, are moving against you. You are not imagining it, they are real. And I do not have any power.But this is my little piece of power: I can go tell the story.
      The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (Norton, 2023) is out now. Ann Neumann is the author of The Good Death More

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      FBI informant testifies for Proud Boys defense that January 6 ‘not organized’

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      An FBI informant who marched to the US Capitol with fellow Proud Boys on January 6 testified on Wednesday that he did not know of any plans for the far-right extremist group to invade the building and didn’t think they inspired violence that day.The informant, who identified himself in court only as “Aaron”, was a defense witness at the trial of the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four lieutenants charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to keep Donald Trump in the White House after the 2020 election.The informant was communicating with his FBI handler as a mob breached police barricades at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.The Proud Boys “did not do it, nor inspire”, the informant texted his handler. “The crowd did as herd mentality. Not organized.”The handler’s response was redacted from a screenshot a defense attorney showed to jurors.“Barriers down at capital [sic] building. Crowd surged forward, almost to the building now,” the informant texted.The informant said he contacted the agent because he saw it as an “emergency situation”. He testified that the FBI didn’t ask him to go to Washington or march with the Proud Boys that day.“If there was any violence and all that, they would have wanted to know,” he said of the FBI.“Aaron” is one of several Proud Boys associates who were FBI informants before or after the January 6 attack. He is the first to testify at one of the most important trials to come out of the justice department investigation of the Capitol riot.Prosecutors have employed an unusual theory that Proud Boys leaders mobilized a handpicked group of foot soldiers – or “tools” – to supply the force necessary to carry out their plot by overwhelming police and breaching barricades. The informant who testified on Wednesday was not one of those “tools”.Defense attorneys have argued there is no evidence the Proud Boys plotted to attack the Capitol and stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory.The informant testified that marching from the Washington Monument to the Capitol appeared to be a photo opportunity for the Proud Boys.“I didn’t know the specific purpose other than just being on the streets and being seen,” he said.Earlier in the trial, jurors heard from two former Proud Boys members who agreed to cooperate with the government after they were charged with riot-related crimes. Those witnesses, Matthew Greene and Jeremy Bertino, testified they did not know of any specific plan to storm the Capitol. Greene said group leaders celebrated the attack but did not explicitly encourage members to use force.Tarrio, a Miami resident who was national chairman of the group, and the other Proud Boys could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.Also on trial are Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola.Nordean, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter leader. Biggs, of Ormond Beach, Florida, was a self-described organizer. Rehl was president of the chapter in Philadelphia. Pezzola was a member from Rochester, New York.The informant, who joined the Proud Boys in 2019, said he was not a group leader and did not know any of the leaders on trial.The trial started in January. Prosecutors rested their case on 20 March. Jurors are expected to hear several more days of testimony from defense witnesses before they hear closing arguments.Nordean’s attorney, Nicholas Smith, called the informant as a witness. The witness said the FBI interviewed him within 10 days of returning home from Washington.“It wasn’t very specific,” he said. “Just a lot of random questions.”The informant entered the Capitol on January 6 and was inside for about 20 minutes. He said he felt justified in entering the Capitol because he thought he could prevent rioters from destroying items of “historic significance”.“I didn’t want to be in there any longer than I had to,” the informant testified.The defense attorney Carmen Hernandez asked: “When you entered the Capitol, did you think that was something minor?”“I wasn’t thinking like that at the time,” the informant said.The informant said he believed he would not get into trouble with the FBI for something “minor” like breaking a window, as long as it could be seen as an “act of self-preservation” in a confrontation with antifascist activists. More

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      Senator Josh Hawley says Nashville shooting was an attack on Christians

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      A Democratic opponent of Josh Hawley labelled the Republican “a fraud and a coward” after the far-right Missouri senator demanded that the killing of three nine-year-old children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, be investigated as a federal hate crime.Less than two years ago, Hawley was the only US senator to vote against a bill to crack down on hate crimes against Asian Americans during the Covid pandemic.That bill, Hawley said, would “turn the federal government into the speech police [and] give government sweeping authority to decide what counts as offensive speech and then monitor it”.Federal and state authorities have said any motive in the Nashville attack has not yet been established.On Tuesday, Lucas Kunce, a Missouri Democrat running to oppose Hawley in 2024, said: “One out of 100 senators voted against the anti-hate crime bill in 2021. His name is Josh Hawley. He’s a fraud and a coward. Some days it’s more obvious than others.”Hawley addressed the Nashville attack in remarks on the Senate floor, in a Senate resolution and in a letter to the FBI director, Christopher Wray, and the secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas.Condemning the “murderous rampage at a Christian school known as the Covenant School”, Hawley wrote: “It is commonplace to call such horror senseless violence. But properly speaking, that is false. Police report the attack here was targeted … against Christians.“… I urge you to immediately open an investigation into this shooting as a federal hate crime. The full resources of the federal government must be brought to bear … Hate that leads to violence must be condemned and hate crimes must be prosecuted.”At the White House, Joe Biden was asked about Hawley’s contention. The president said: “Well, I probably don’t [think so] then. No, I’m joking – I have no idea.”In the Senate, the US attorney general was asked by John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, if he would open a hate crimes investigation.Merrick Garland said: “As of now, motive hasn’t been identified. We are certainly working full time with [federal agencies and Nashville and Tennessee law enforcement] to determine what the motive is and of course motive is what determines whether it’s a hate crime or not.”In Tennessee, authorities continued to investigate. Police said the shooter, who was killed, wrote a “manifesto” and planned the attack extensively. The police chief, John Drake, told NBC that “resentment” over attending the school might have played a role in the shooting.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Monday, police said the 28-year-old shooter, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, was transgender.LGBTQ+ rights groups have expressed concern that Hale’s writings could be published, a step police have said they will not take while the investigation continues.Gun law reform group Gays Against Guns, formed after the Pulse nightclub massacre of 2016, condemned the Nashville shooting but also criticised Republican policies and laws.Gun violence and mass killings, the group said, “cannot be separated from the efforts of the cisgender white supremacist patriarchy to keep us divided along lines of race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation”.“Until our society confronts these realities, rather than hide from or obscure them as ‘Don’t Say Gay’ and anti-‘Critical Race Theory’ laws proliferating across the nation … intend, we can, sadly, expect many more incidents like today.”The group also said that “expectations and demands can take their toll on members of our LGBTQ+ communities who, instead of receiving support and understanding from their families and communities, receive hatred, ridicule, denigration and persecution”. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene led delegation to visit Capitol attack defendants in jail

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      A jail in Washington DC has become the latest focal point of the US culture wars after a congressional delegation led by the Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene visited defendants charged in 2021’s deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and championed them as “political prisoners”.Greene high-fived the detainees and shook their hands, according to the Associated Press. As the tour group was leaving, the defendants chanted “Let’s go Brandon!”, an offensive phrase denigrating Democratic president Joe Biden.Greene was joined by fellow far-right Republican members of the House oversight committee during a two-hour tour of the DC jail on Friday. The group included extremist Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, who embraced Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot dead by police as she participated in the Capitol riot, NBC News reported.This is at least the second visit that Greene has made in a campaign to reframe the incarcerated January 6 rioters from alleged violent insurrectionists into martyrs of the far-right cause. This time, however, her stunt was joined by Democratic members of the oversight committee who attended the tour so that they could hold their Republican peers to account, they said.“We won’t let Marjorie Taylor Greene and these … extremists tell lies about the insurrectionists and their attack on our democracy,” one of the Democratic visitors, Robert Garcia of California, said before the tour began.In a later interview with MSNBC, Garcia said he had seen Greene and Boebert and other Republican delegates treat the January 6 defendants “like celebrities, they were interacting with them, they were patting them on the back. It was completely shameful to see – these were people who tried to overthrow our government and they were being treated like rock stars and heroes.”A second Democratic representative, Jasmine Crockett of Texas, drew on her previous experience as a public defender to assess the relative merits of the conditions in which the prisoners were being held. She said that what she saw was far preferable to routine conditions in state lockups in Texas or Arkansas.“Listen, this is so much different and so much better. I don’t think the January 6ers would want to go the other way,” she was reported to say by the New York Times.The idea that the January 6 defendants being held in DC are patriotic political prisoners appears to have first emerged as a marketing message to raise money for the inmates’ legal fees. Within weeks of their detention, online crowdfunding sites had been set up for the prisoners and their families.One of the sites, American Gulag, was created by the founder of the conspiracy theory outlet Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft. It describes the rioters as “good Americans whose only crime was being invited into a political building”. It has so far raised almost $180,000.The celebration of the rioters as political prisoners then appears to have moved into the Republican mainstream. Donald Trump has called the prosecution of those who participated in the insurrection – which was inspired by his own lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – “persecution of political prisoners”.At the first official rally of his 2024 White House campaign, the former president played a recording of the Star-Spangled Banner sung by the so-called J6 Prison Choir, which consists of men convicted for their participation in the Capitol attack. It reached the top of the iTunes chart.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn investigation by Just Security has found that there are 20 Capitol attack inmates still being held in the DC jail, out of a total of about 1,000 who have been arrested over the insurrection. Of those, 17 have been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers during the attack.Of the remaining three, two are members of the extremist militias the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and one has already been convicted.The 20 who have been lionized by Greene as political prisoners include Thomas Ballard, who has been charged with assaulting law enforcement officers with a baton, and Christopher Quaglin, a member of the Proud Boys who is accused of pepper-spraying officers.Garcia, speaking for the Democratic members of the jail delegation, observed that the prisoners were being housed in a newer part of the institution where conditions were among the best in an institution whose standards have drawn criticism. “They were outside, they each had tablets where they can communicate, watch movies, text their families, talk to their attorneys,” he said.Greene has rebutted the description, claiming that the inmates had been made to clean and repaint the prison before the congressional visit to make it look good. She ridiculed the Democrats, saying: “Either they like jails … or are easily fooled by fresh paint.” More

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      Witness expected to testify for defense at Proud Boys trial was government informant

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      Federal prosecutors disclosed on Wednesday that a witness expected to testify for the defense at the seditious conspiracy trial of the former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four associates was a government informant for nearly two years after the January 6 US Capitol attack.Carmen Hernandez, a lawyer for Zachary Rehl, a former chapter leader in the far-right group, asked a judge to schedule an immediate emergency hearing and suspend the trial “until these issues have been considered and resolved”. Lawyers for the other four defendants joined in Hernandez’s request.Hernandez said in court papers the defense was told by prosecutors on Wednesday afternoon the witness they were planning to call on Thursday had been a government informant.The judge ordered prosecutors to file a response to the defense filing by Thursday afternoon and scheduled a hearing for the same day, putting testimony in the case on hold until Friday. The US attorney’s office did not immediately comment.In her court filing, Hernandez said the unnamed informant participated in “prayer meetings” with relatives of at least one of the Proud Boys on trial and had discussions with family members about replacing one of the defense lawyers. The informant has been in contact with at least one defense lawyer and at least one defendant, Hernandez wrote.It is the latest twist in a trial that has been bogged down by bickering between lawyers and the judge. Defense lawyers have repeatedly asked the judge to declare a mistrial.The trial in Washington federal court is one of the most serious cases to emerge from the January 6 attack. Tarrio, Rehl and three other Proud Boys – Joseph Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Dominic Pezzola – are charged with conspiring to block the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.Tarrio, a Miami resident, was national chairman for the far-right group, whose members describe it as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”. He and the other Proud Boys could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.Defense attorneys have argued there is no evidence the Proud Boys plotted to attack the Capitol and stop Congress certifying Biden’s victory.Hernandez did not name the informant in her filing but said he or she was a “confidential human source” for the government since April 2021 through at least January 2023. Prosecutors knew in December the person was a potential witness, she said.It is not the first time government use of informants has become an issue in the case. Defense attorneys have pushed for more information about informants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAn FBI agent, Nicole Miller, testified last week that she was aware of two informants in the Proud Boys, including one who marched on the Capitol.Hernandez said there were “reasons to doubt the veracity of the government’s explanation and justification for withholding information about the (confidential human sources) who have been involved in the case”.Law enforcement routinely uses informants in criminal investigations but methods and identities can be closely guarded secrets. Federal authorities have not publicly released much information about their use of informants in investigating the Proud Boys’ role on January 6. More

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      Four Oath Keepers members convicted of obstruction in January 6 trial

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      Four people associated with the far-right Oath Keepers militia were convicted on Monday of conspiracy and obstruction charges stemming from the insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021 by extremist supporters of Donald Trump in a failed attempt to keep him in office, in the latest trial involving members of the antigovernment group.A Washington DC jury found Sandra Parker, of Morrow, Ohio, Laura Steele, of Thomasville, North Carolina, William Isaacs, of Kissimmee, Florida, and Connie Meggs, of Dunnellon, Florida, guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and other felony charges.In a rare loss for prosecutors, Sandra Parker’s husband, Bennie Parker, was acquitted of obstruction as well as one conspiracy charge, and a sixth defendant – Michael Greene, of Indianapolis – was acquitted of two conspiracy charges.Jurors said they couldn’t reach a verdict on another conspiracy charge for Bennie Parker and the obstruction charge for Greene, so the judge instructed them to keep deliberating. All six defendants were convicted of a misdemeanor trespassing offense.Conspiracy to obstruct Congress and obstruction of Congress both carry a sentence of up to 20 years behind bars.They were the third group of Oath Keepers members and associates to be tried on serious charges in the riot that temporarily halted the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election, and left dozens of police officers injured. Unlike other Oath Keepers, they were not charged with seditious conspiracy – the most serious offense prosecutors have levied so far in the January 6 Capitol attack.The verdict comes as the prosecution on Monday rested its case in another high-profile Capitol riot trial, against former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four others who are charged with seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors say was a plot to forcibly overturn Biden’s election victory.Authorities said Sandra Parker, Connie Meggs, Issacs and Steele were part of the group of Oath Keepers who stormed into the Capitol after marching in military-style “stack” formation up the steps of the building.More than half of the roughly 1,000 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes have pleaded guilty, including more than 130 who pleaded guilty to felony crimes. Of the 400 who have been sentenced, more than half have gotten terms of imprisonment ranging from seven days to 10 years, according to an Associated Press tally. More

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      Birchers review: how the Republican far right gave us Trump and DeSantis

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      Out of sight but not forgotten, the John Birch Society is a husk of its old self. Still, its penchant for conspiracy theories courses in the veins of the American right. A mere 37% of Republicans believe Joe Biden beat Donald Trump legitimately. “January 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime,” says Tucker Carlson, the face of Fox News.Back in the day, the society trashed Dwight D Eisenhower and his successor as president, John F Kennedy. That Ike and JFK were war heroes made no difference. They were suspect. Eisenhower attempted to navigate around the Birchers. Kennedy used them as a foil. Dallas, where JFK was assassinated, was a Bircher hotbed.“Birchers charged that President Eisenhower abetted the communists, distributed flyers calling President John F Kennedy a traitor, and repudiated Nato,” Matthew Dallek writes in his in-depth examination of the society’s rise, fall and continued relevance.Dallek, a professor at George Washington University, is the son of Robert Dallek, a legendary presidential biographer. Under the subtitle How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, Dallek’s book is quick-paced and well researched. However troubling, it is a joy to read.Dallek argues convincingly that despite the end of the cold war, amid which the Birchers were born, its antipathies and suspicions continue to animate and inflame, a reality Trump and his minions remember and Democrats forget at their peril.Dallek looks at how the Birchers’ ideas came to pollenate and populate the Republican party. It didn’t happen randomly or suddenly. The society never disappeared and nor did its ideas and resentments. The “quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq” coupled with the “financial crisis and Great Recession” breathed fresh currency into isolationism, nativism and scorn for elites.Founded in 1958, at a secret meeting in Indianapolis led by Robert Welch, the candy manufacturer, the group took its name from a missionary and intelligence officer killed in 1945 by communists in China. Birch’s Christianity and the circumstances of his death were central to the society’s message.Original members included Fred C Koch, founder of Koch Industries and father of Charles and David, the hard-right political activists and billionaire donors.“In the 1930s [Fred Koch] had helped build oil refineries, first in Stalin’s Soviet Union and then in Hitler’s Germany, and his brushes with both regimes shaped his cold war philosophy,” Dallek writes.“In the USSR, he knew people who had been purged by Stalin … In contrast, he liked what he saw when he inspected his refineries in Nazi Germany.”Fascism came with the trappings of prosperity. These days, the Koch-funded Quincy Institute takes a dim view of US and western assistance to Ukraine.The John Birch Society is now obscure yet basks in undreamed-of success. Instead of railing against fluoridated water and embracing laetrile (an apricot derivative) as a cancer cure, the Birchers’ intellectual heirs dump on the Covid vaccine, roll the dice on polio and worship ivermectin as a miracle drug.Ron DeSantis, Florida governor and Trump mini-me, is all in with his nonstop attack on modernity and vaccination. Trump no longer reminds voters of Operation Warp Speed, the great success in combating the latest plague.The mortality gap between precincts populated by red and blue America says plenty, but Republican animus to vaccine mandates appears baked in. Fringy need not mean down and out. Just look at Ginni Thomas and her husband, Clarence Thomas, the conservative supreme court justice.Ginni Thomas, a longtime far-right activist entangled in Trump’s attempt to overturn the election up to and including January 6, grew up nestled in comfort. As Dallek points out, many in the Birchers’ ranks possessed a firm foothold in the middle and upper-middle classes.“A childhood neighbor recalled that Ginni Thomas’s parents were active in a losing 1968 referendum campaign in Omaha to ban putting fluoride in the water supply,” Dallek notes.“My Republican parents, who knew them well, certainly considered them Birchers,” the journalist Kurt Andersen recalls.Dallek reminds us of the bookstores opened by the society and the role played by female Birchers. Phyllis Schlafly, the great hard-right crusader, was a Bircher as well as a Harvard grad. She opposed the Voting Rights Act, wrote Barry Goldwater’s 1964 manifesto and successfully opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.Aloise Josephine Antonia Steiner, a non-Birch conservative and the mother of William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, encouraged an acquaintance to establish a society chapter. Buckley eventually – and circuitously – came to stand against the Birchers. Welch heaped praise on his mom.Race was always near the surface. The society attacked Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court decision which held that de jure racially segregated schools were unequal and unconstitutional. The Birchers, as Dallek recounts, branded the decision “procommunist”.Even now, Brown sticks in the craw on the right. Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump supreme court appointee, refers to Brown as inviolate super-precedent but Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network both attack its underpinnings.Decisions such as Brown, they wrote after the confirmation fight over Brett Kavanaugh, another Trump-picked conservative justice, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.“May”? Let that sink in.Another Republican primary is upon us. Trump again leads the way. The furor over his dinner with Ye, the antisemitic recording artist formerly known as Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist, recedes. DeSantis loses ground. Authenticity and charisma matter. The governor parrots Trump and Carlson on Ukraine, flip-flopping in the process.Yet no other Republican comes close. The John Birch Society is still winning big.
      Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right is published in the US by Hachette More

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      Federal prosecutors warn court of potential deluge of January 6 charges – report

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      Federal prosecutors in Washington have reportedly told court officials a thousand more people could be charged in relation to the deadly January 6 Capitol attack.Matthew Graves, the US attorney in Washington DC, sent a one-page letter to the chief judge of Washington DC federal court, apprising her of the potential deluge of defendants, Bloomberg News reported.The correspondence provides details on what the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has described as “one of the largest, most complex and most resource-intensive investigations in our history”.Graves said in the letter that justice department officials estimated that another 700 to 1,200 defendants could face charges. That would nearly double the number of criminal cases relating to January 6, Bloomberg noted.More than a thousand people have faced charges for alleged involvement in the Capitol riot. Those who attacked Congress did so at the urging of Donald Trump, seeking to thwart certification of Joe Biden’s election win.Graves said knowing how many cases would unfold was “incredibly difficult” due to the “nature and the complexity of the investigation”. The prosecutor also said he did not know the exact proportion of misdemeanor and felony cases to come but thought there would be a larger proportion of felonies, Bloomberg said.“We expect the pace of bringing new cases will increase, in an orderly fashion, over the course of the next few months,” Graves wrote. He concluded by saying prosecutors’ estimates might shift as the justice department continues to “evaluate changing resources and circumstances”.Federal charges against participants in the Capitol riot have ranged from physical violence and property destruction to seditious conspiracy.The justice department has said 326 people have faced charges for “assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees, including approximately 106 individuals who have been charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer”.Some 140 police officers were assaulted. About 55 people have been charged with conspiracy, the justice department said.Of approximately 1,000 people arrested to date, 518 have pleaded guilty, with many facing jail or prison. Fifty-three people were found guilty at trial, justice department data showed.The DC federal judge, Beryl Howell, told Bloomberg the court “continues to manage its caseload and trial calendar efficiently, notwithstanding the delays occasioned by the pandemic”.“So far, the court has been able to manage the increased criminal caseload well,” said Howell, whose term concludes this week. “Should a ‘surge’ of filings occur at a later date, the court would assess what additional steps, if any, it should take.”Criminal investigations into Trump’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election continue. Trump also faces a hush money investigation in Manhattan, a criminal investigation relating to his alleged retention of classified documents, a New York civil suit over his financial dealings and a defamation trial arising from a rape allegation he denies. More