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    Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’

    Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps rising in Republican ranks despite ‘loony lies’ The extremist who has supported QAnon is firmly on her way to becoming a senior figure in the party as a key ally of the House speaker, Kevin McCarthyWhen Marjorie Taylor Greene was elected to America’s House of Representatives in 2020, she became one of the most visible of a wave of extremists to enter the Republican party whose often bizarre utterings stretched the bounds of what had previously been the norm of US politics.The Georgian congresswoman, who has suggested Jewish space lasers are responsible for wildfires, speculated whether 9/11 was a hoax and supported the QAnon conspiracy theory, was part of a new wave of Trumpian Republicans and was mocked, ridiculed and reviled in equal measure – including by some in her own party.‘We don’t know his real name’: George Santos’s unravelling web of liesRead moreBut in 2023, Greene is now firmly on her way to becoming one of the senior figures in the Republican party. She has become a favorite, and key ally, of Kevin McCarthy, the new House speaker, and preparing to take up assignments on some of Congress’s most prominent committees.It’s been a remarkable rise that few could have seen coming during a checkered first half of 2021, when Greene was making her name known through her penchant for unhinged conspiracy theories and strange remarks, but her ascension to the upper echelons of the GOP was confirmed this week by McCarthy, in an interview with the New York Times.“If you’re going to be in a fight, you want Marjorie in your foxhole,” McCarthy said.“When she picks a fight, she’s going to fight until the fight’s over. She reminds me of my friends from high school, that we’re going to stick together all the way through.”This apparent fondness for a tussle has seen Greene rewarded with positions on the homeland security committee, despite her previously musing that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, and on the oversight committee, where she is expected to be part of a subcommittee investigating the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.If the latter seems problematic, given Greene’s loudly stated suspicions and conspiracy theories about the pandemic – in January she was permanently banned from Twitter for repeatedly violating rules about Covid-19 misinformation – then that’s only because lots of things Greene has said and done are problematic.In 2021 Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, condemned Greene’s “loony lies and conspiracy theories” in relation to Greene having claimed support for executing Democratic politicians and harassing the survivor of a mass school shooting.Later that year McCarthy himself, who had earlier attempted to avoid conflict, felt compelled to step in after Greene compared Covid masking rules to the treatment of Jewish people in Nazi Germany.“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” McCarthy said.“The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling,” he said.The multiple rebukes, and the egregiousness of Greene’s beliefs – whether disavowed or not – make her rise to prominence, as she takes up her seat on some of Congress’s most powerful committees, all the more remarkable.Greene’s rapid recent rise began when she backed McCarthy for the House leadership, two months ahead of the ultimately farcical vote that saw him elected after 15 ballots. Greene had got in early, declaring her support in November on Steve Bannon’s podcast.For McCarthy, who has been an unpopular figure among far-right voters and politicians – it was a selection of the latter that meant the manner of his ascension to speaker was embarrassing at best, it was a boost he needed.McCarthy and Greene had spent months forging a working relationship they believed could be beneficial for both, with Greene placating the zaniest wing of both Republicans in the House and voters at home, and McCarthy providing relevance to someone who had been stripped of her committee assignments in 2021, leaving her, essentially, having nothing to do in Washington.The New York Times reported that McCarthy, as he prepared to take up the speakership, had been mindful of the problems his centrist predecessors, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced in dealing with their furthest-right colleagues.Both Ryan and Boehner – who would later describe some of his rightwing colleagues as “assholes” – endured battles with the Freedom Caucus, a conservative and often obstructionist group of GOP congressmen, when trying to pass legislation.Greene remains one of the most popular figures among Trump supporters and believers, evidenced by her 758,000 followers on Trump’s Truth Social website – McCarthy has 113,000, Steve Scalise, the House majority leader, has 109,000 – and enjoys a close relationship with the former president, even calling Trump from the House floor during the debacle of January’s leadership vote.Greene is also a successful fundraiser, bringing in $12.5m in the 2021-22 election cycle, the fifth most of any Republican representative, her popularity among the base and alignment with Trump making her the model of the new Republican politician.On Greene’s part, she has sought to sanitize, somewhat, the ill-informed, conspiracy-minded viewpoints that have characterized her political career. In early 2022 Greene began a deliberate, “methodical” reinvention, a confidante told the Washington Post.From her position on the sidelines, with a congressional office but no meaningful role in the House, she began to think of the future. Greene, like most observers, believed McCarthy would be the next House speaker, and saw a role for herself as a bridge between the far right and the less kooky Republicans, the Post reported.As she tried to make herself palatable to a wider audience, Greene set about trying not to speak at any more white nationalist rallies, or discuss the “gazpacho police” who are apparently patrolling the US Capitol. (Her remark was widely understood to mean Gestapo.) She is also yet to repeat her 2018 claim that the Clinton family orchestrated the plane crash that killed John F Kennedy Jr more than two decades ago.In addition to this new reserve, Greene hired a new aide with a track record in conventional conservative politics, and eventually began meeting with McCarthy once a week, as the pair forged a close bond, each aware of the potential benefits.McCarthy would go on to win the speakership. But his concessions to the right, personified by his promotion of Greene, have come at a cost. Already McCarthy has pursued Greene-backed, far-right strategies on vaccines and treatment of January 6 perpetrators, something that has left Greene delighted.“People need to understand that it isn’t just me that deserves credit,” Greene told the New York Times.“It is the will and the voice of our base that was heard, and Kevin listened to them. I was just a vehicle much of the time.”If Greene was displaying an amount of faux humility, her conviction that she is channeling the will of the people and willingness to make it heard are a warning as to the level of influence she now wields.In her new roles Greene said she will be investigating: “How many of our enemies got pallets of cash!?” from Covid-19 unemployment benefits, a question she posed without any context or explanation, and has pledged to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, for his perceived failures in handling immigration.From Greene’s political position in February 2021, when she was removed from her committee assignments by Democrats – and some Republicans – in a rebuke over incendiary and racist statements, which included her posting a mocked-up image of her holding a gun next to three Democratic lawmakers, all women of color, on Facebook, it has been a remarkable turnaround.Less than two years on, Greene has taken up positions on two of the most prominent committees in the House. She has a metaphorical seat at the House speaker’s right hand, and will enjoy the visibility that all this brings.It’s a testament to how quickly things can change in politics, but also a very visible reminder of what the Republican party increasingly stands for.Greene may have sought to sanitize her image, but it is clear that her brand of populism, outrage and misinformation is not the embarrassment it once was to the party leadership: this is the modern version of the Republican party.TopicsRepublicansKevin McCarthyHouse of RepresentativesUS politicsThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Four Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy

    Four Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracyMembers of anti-government militia found guilty for roles in January 6 attack at the US Capitol Four members of the Oath Keepers anti-government militia were convicted on Monday of seditious conspiracy relating to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump, after the second major trial accusing far-right extremists of plotting to forcibly keep the former US president in power.The verdict against Joseph Hackett of Sarasota, Florida, Roberto Minuta of Prosper, Texas, David Moerschel of Punta Gorda, Florida, and Edward Vallejo of Phoenix, Arizona, came a few weeks after a different jury convicted the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, in the mob’s attack that delayed the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory over Republican Trump.Proud Boys on defensive at sedition trial haunted by absent TrumpRead moreThe convictions were another major victory for the Department of Justice, which is also trying to secure sedition verdicts against the former leader of the hard-right, violent, all-male nationalist group the Proud Boys and four associates. The trial against Enrique Tarrio and his lieutenants opened earlier this month in Washington DC and is expected to last several weeks.They are some of the most serious cases brought so far in the sweeping investigation into the Capitol attack, which continues to grow two years after the riot. The justice department has brought nearly 1,000 cases and the tally increases by the week.Defense attorneys sought to downplay violent messages as mere bluster and said the Oath Keepers came to Washington to provide security at events before the riot.They seized on prosecutors’ lack of evidence that the Oath Keepers had an explicit plan to storm the Capitol before January 6 and told jurors that the extremists who attacked the Capitol acted spontaneously like thousands of other rioters.Rhodes founded the Oath Keepers, whose members include current and retired military personnel, law enforcement officers and first responders, in 2009.Members have showed up, often heavily armed, at protests and political events including demonstrations following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.TopicsUS Capitol attackThe far rightUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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    Proud Boys on defensive at sedition trial haunted by absent Trump

    Proud Boys on defensive at sedition trial haunted by absent TrumpFive leaders of the far-right group on trial for their role in the January 6 attack have tried to turn attention to the ex-president While federal prosecutors are casting the Capitol insurrection trial of five far-right Proud Boys leaders as an attempt to bring participants of an attack on US democracy to account, the members of the group are using the proceedings to ask one question even some of their opponents on the political left agree is valid.We Are Proud Boys review: chilling exposé illuminates Republicans’ fascist turnRead moreWhy have prosecutors so far only focused their energy on the supporters of Donald Trump who are accused of a coordinated invasion of the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the congressional certification of his defeat to Joe Biden in the previous year’s presidential election? Is it because they regard the former Republican president himself – who urged his supporters to “fight like hell” that deadly day – as too formidable and them as easier targets?Attorneys for the ex-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and four of his lieutenants have sought to ingrain that question in the minds of jurors chosen after a particularly turbulent selection process which began last month and gave way to opening arguments and witness testimony beginning 12 January.They do so even as the strategy has not proven effective in other cases where it has been suggested that it is really Trump who is culpable for the Capitol attack – not his less powerful sycophants and camp followers.Weeks after the seditious conspiracy convictions of two leaders of the Oath Keepers – another far-right group – in connection with the Capitol attack, prosecutors in the Proud Boys case have broadly asserted that Tarrio, Zachary Rehl, Ethan Nordean, Dominic Pezzola and Joseph Biggs mustered up a “fighting force” to halt Biden from ever assuming the presidency.Tarrio and his fellow self-described “western chauvinists” believed a Democratic Biden presidency would threaten the group’s very existence, therefore they engaged in seditious conspiracy, headed a mob that forced its way into the Capitol and tried to drive a stake through “the heart of our democracy”, prosecutor Jason McCullough contended.Tarrio and his four co-defendants have pleaded not guilty to their alleged roles in the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of law enforcement officers who protected the Capitol and were left traumatized. An attorney for Rehl, Carmen Hernandez, has insisted that her client went to the nation’s capital on 6 January not to riot but to exercise his free speech rights in protest of Trump’s loss to Biden.Meanwhile, an attorney representing Tarrio, Sabino Jauregui, argued that his client and the others were simply on trial because “it’s too hard to blame Trump,” whose full-throated defense to any prosecution would be mounted by an “army of lawyers”.“It’s easier to blame … the Proud Boys,” Jauregui added, saying his client and his fellow co-defendants were mere “scapegoats”.Similar arguments have been made before by others among the nearly 950 people who have been criminally charged with having participated in the Capitol riot, including about 540 who have been convicted. Those hefty numbers notably do not include Trump, though the former president has been recommended for prosecution by a congressional committee which investigated the attack.Just days ago, a judge ruled that a woman who helped attack the Capitol was indeed merely following orders from Trump, who fired up his supporters with false claims that he had been robbed of victory over Biden by electoral fraudsters.But, presiding over a bench trial, the judge concluded that the woman was still responsible for her actions, convicted her of charges of violent entry and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, and offered up a stark reminder of how flimsy the “Trump made me do it” defense is.Nonetheless, a recent article in Salon agreed with Jauregui that “it’s ridiculous that Trump’s not in prison” over the Capitol attack.The willingness of Jauregui and others in the Proud Boys case to so pointedly ask why low-ranking followers of Trump are having their fates tried by juries while he runs for the White House again could reflect “a growing sense of frustration in the larger public” over how the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has handled what to do about the former president.It could be a couple of weeks more, if not longer, before jurors decide the outcome of the charges against Tarrio, Rehl, Nordean, Pezzola and Biggs, who each face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of seditious conspiracy.The most powerful evidence and witnesses against the accused Proud Boys almost certainly remains ahead after court wrapped up Friday, the seventh day since jurors in the case began hearing arguments and testimony.Prosecutors have said they intend to make their case with private communications between the defendants, their statements in public, their coordinated movements at the Capitol, and their celebrations of the attack before they then tried to make it seem like they were never involved.But the trial’s already had plenty of drama.Beginning before Christmas, jury selection was turbulent, in part because Rehl’s lawyer Hernandez moved to dismiss nearly every prospective juror who mentioned having any knowledge whatsoever of the well-publicized Proud Boys, CNN reported.Then, when prospective jurors claimed they had not heard of the Proud Boys, Tarrio’s lawyers Jauregui and Nayib Hassan objected, saying those people could be lying to get on the jury in hopes of convicting their client.Prosecutors also reportedly contributed to the spectacle by blaming their failure to provide evidence binders to the defense because their office had gone through their supply of dividers and had not gotten permission to buy new ones.Then, after being seated, jurors heard grueling recordings of radio transmissions among police officers who were trying to defend the Capitol during the attack.“Send all you have!” one officer said as Trump supporters stormed their way into the building. Another voice later lamented: “Our situation here is dire.”They later also heard from a British film-maker, Nick Quested, who explained that he began following the Proud Boys and recording video of them because he wanted to document worsening political divisions across the US. He ended up capturing footage of the Proud Boys among the January 6 mob, he testified, according to the left-leaning Daily Kos website.Quested filmed as mob members screamed “treason” and “honor your oath” at police in riot gear who were desperately trying to maintain order. But the odds were overwhelmingly against the officers.“There was maybe a dozen police officers at the first line,” Quested said on the witness stand, “and you can see there are a couple hundred people at least at this point and more coming.”The Associated Press contributed reportingTopicsThe far rightUS politicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More

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    Today’s rightwing populists aim to disrupt, not to govern | Letters

    LettersToday’s rightwing populists aim to disrupt, not to govern Readers respond to an article by Jonathan Freedland on the decline of politics on both sides of the Atlantic An excellent analysis by Jonathan Freedland on the problems with the far right and their inability to govern as grownups (After Brexit and Trump, rightwing populists cling to power – but the truth is they can’t govern, 7 January). Governance has been reduced to the anarchic whims of individuals who learn their trade on social media, a platform that fuels their infantilism. It is extremely dangerous when these people have access to power. Exhibit A: Donald Trump.Suppose that during the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, the elected lawmakers and the police had rolled over and given way to the mob, let them take up residence in the Capitol and become the new lawmakers. What might have played out? Would one of them (the man in the horned helmet perhaps?) have declared himself a senator/congressman and the leader of the House? Would he have proposed some new laws to his comrades in arms, or laws to help fellow American citizens live happier and better lives? Alison HackettDún Laoghaire, Dublin, Ireland As ever, Jonathan Freedland critically analyses the descent of rightwing politics on both sides of the Atlantic. The deterioration, however, is not restricted to the right. In days gone by, politicians such as John Smith, Gordon Brown, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke sought to lead, not follow, the public. They said what they believed and tried to implement and convince. Today, politicians seem to follow rather than lead the public, following, no doubt, the latest focus groups in marginal constituencies.Politicians such as Keir Starmer and Jeremy Hunt undoubtedly know that Britain’s interests are best served by a closer relationship with (if not membership of) the European Union. Rather than be honest about this and try to persuade their fellow citizens, they coalesce around what they believe is the popular position.Brian RonsonSefton, Merseyside The truth is that today’s right wing is not motivated to govern. They have been complicit in, and echo, the rightwing media message that has droned on for decades – a message straight out of the anti-democracy playbook. This is nothing new in recorded human history. “My way or burn it down” has been a consistent theme in radical fascist or fundamentalist mentality. Concern for consequence or social justice is not a guiding principle here. In fact, there is no guiding principle other than a manic five-year-old’s ambition to control the household. When that ambition inevitably leads to a bad end, they blame everyone but themselves and/or reach for a match. Curt Chaffee Seaside, California, USTopicsUS politicsDonald TrumpThe far rightRepublicansBrexitlettersReuse this content More

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    Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics

    Racism rebranded: how far-right ideology feeds off identity politics In an extract from his new book, the Observer columnist describes how substituting ethnic superiority with ‘cultural difference’ has allowed traditional racism to seep back into the mainstream. How can we get out of the box of racial thinking?‘The Negro is not. Any more than the white man.” So wrote Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born revolutionary and intellectual, in his 1952 masterpiece, Black Skin, White Masks. He was making an argument about the illusory character of racial categorisation. And, yet, more than 70 years after Fanon wrote those lines, they still feel unsettling, as if they are a challenge not just to racialisation but also to our identity, our very being. That they should do so exposes the deeply conflicted relationship we still possess with race.We live in an age in which in most societies there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking and obsessed with placing people into racial boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.This paradox is at the heart of my new book. Not So Black and White is a retelling of the history both of the idea of race and of the struggles to confront racism and to transcend racial categorisation, a retelling that challenges many of the ways in which we think both of race and of antiracism.Most people assume that racism emerges when members of one race begin discriminating against members of another. In fact, the opposite is the case: intellectuals and elites began dividing the world into distinct races to explain and justify the differential treatment of certain peoples. The ancestors of today’s African Americans were not enslaved because they were black. They were deemed to be racially distinct, as black people, to justify their enslavement.We think of race today primarily in terms of skin colour. But that was not how 19th-century thinkers imagined race. It was, for them, a description of social inequality, not just of skin colour. It may be difficult to comprehend now, but 19th-century thinkers looked upon the working class as a distinct racial group in much the same way as many now view black people as racially dissimilar to white people. Only in the 20th century, as the working class was drawn into the democratic process, and as the new imperialism redrew the “colour line”, did the contemporary understanding of race emerge.Many today imagine, too, that identity politics is a new phenomenon, and one that is associated with the left. I show that its origins lie, in fact, on the reactionary right and its primary expression, long before it was called “identity politics”, was in the concept of race, the belief that one’s being – one’s identity – determined one’s moral and social place in the world.If much of the history of race has been obscured, so, too, has much of the history of the challenge to racism. Until recently, those confronting inequality and oppression did so in the name not of particular identities but of a universalism that fuelled the great radical movements that have shaped the modern world, from anticolonial struggles to campaigns for women’s suffrage.These struggles expanded the meaning of equality and universality. There has developed in recent years an impassioned debate about the Enlightenment, which both supporters and critics present as a peculiarly European phenomenon. For the one, it is a demonstration of the greatness of Europe; for the other, a reminder that its ideals are tainted by racism and colonialism. Both miss the importance of the non-European world in shaping many of the ideas we associate with the Enlightenment. It was through the struggles of those denied equality and liberty by the elites in Europe and America that ideas of universalism were invested with meaning. It is the demise of that radical universalist tradition that has shaped the emergence of contemporary identity politics.There have always been identitarian strands among antiracists, from 19th-century “Back to Africa” movements to Négritude in the 20th century. Only in the postwar world, however, have they come to dominate and to be seen as progressive. The reasons lie in a myriad of social and political developments, from the erosion of class politics, to the emergence of culture as the primary lens through which to understand social differences, to the growth of social pessimism, that have helped marginalise the universalist perspective.ProfileKenan MalikShowKenan Malik is a writer, lecturer and Observer columnist. His previous books include The Quest for a Moral Compass and From Fatwa to Jihad, which was shortlisted for the Orwell prize.The embrace of identity politics by the left has ironically opened the door for the reactionary right to reclaim its original inheritance, allowing racism to be rebranded as white identity politics. We have come full circle: the politics of identity that began as reactionary claims about a racial hierarchy has been regrasped by the reactionary right in the name of cultural difference.The following edited extract from my new book shows how the far right remade itself in the postwar world and how it has exploited the language of identity to pursue its aims. It shows, too, how mainstream conservatives have allowed far-right tropes to seep into our culture.As reactionary organisations, which had enjoyed the limelight in the prewar years, were pushed into the shadows in the post-Holocaust world, many on the far right were forced to rethink their views of race, identity and difference. Alain de Benoist became a key figure in this rethinking, the founder of the Nouvelle Droite in France, and a philosophical mentor of the contemporary far right.Benoist cut his political teeth within the traditional fascist milieu, most notably through the far-right opposition to Algerian independence. In the 1960s, after the French defeat in Algeria, he recognised the need to move beyond discredited arguments rooted in biological racism, and to engage in a cultural war to reclaim intellectual ground. In 1968, Benoist helped found GRECE, the Research and Study Group for European Civilisation, a thinktank to school the far right.The Nouvelle Droite drew in part from traditional themes and sources. It proclaimed its hostility to the Enlightenment, modernity, equality, democracy and liberalism, and insisted on the importance of tradition and hierarchy. It found sustenance in the French reactionary tradition from Joseph de Maistre to Charles Maurras, and from German rightwing thinkers, especially the interwar “conservative revolutionaries”, such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt.It drew, too, upon a very different tradition: that of the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s. From the New Left, the French New Right borrowed arguments about the significance of culture, its hostility to globalisation, its anti-Americanism and its embrace of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Benoist took from Gramsci the belief that conquest of power comes only after conquest of culture. Liberalism was so entrenched that its values survived irrespective of who was in power. Anti-liberals, Benoist argued, had to fight battles not on the streets but in people’s minds, at the level of ideas, and of “metapolitics”. This he called the tactic of “rightwing Gramscianism”.At the heart of Benoist’s philosophy was the abandonment of racial superiority in favour of cultural difference, and the reworking of the relationship between community, identity and diversity. “The true wealth of the world”, he insisted, “is first and foremost the diversity of its cultures and peoples.” It is in being different that a people finds its meaning and identity, both of which are drawn, indeed in certain senses are inseparable, from its culture and heritage. “Different cultures provide different responses to essential questions”; hence “all attempts to unify them end up destroying them”. It was a völkisch vision: “Everyone inherits a ‘constituent community’ which precedes him and which will constitute the root of his values and norms.” The individual “discovers his goals rather than choosing them”, and builds his identity through that discovery. So, “to find out who I am, I first have to know where I am”.Such “ethnopluralism” seemed not to possess the taint of biological racism; but by fixing cultures to specific geographic locations and by insisting that to belong to a culture one had to be descended from the original inhabitants of that location, the Nouvelle Droite found in “culture” the synonym for “race”; a find later borrowed by many conservatives and “postliberals”.Immigrants, Benoist insisted, must always remain outsiders because they were carriers of distinct cultures and histories, and so could never be absorbed into those of the host nation. Citizenship should be reserved for those who are “one of us”. Immigrants could – or, at least, should – never be citizens. Democracy only works where “demos and ethnos coincide”.“We are Generation Identity… We have stopped believing that Khader is our brother, the planet our village and humanity our family. We have discovered that we have roots and ancestors – and thus a future. Our only inheritance is our blood, our soil, and our identity… This is not a mere manifesto, it’s a declaration of war.”It was a declaration of war on a YouTube video. But for all its comically dramatic music and overheated rhetoric, the launch in 2012 of Génération Identitaire, or Generation Identity, marked an important point in the development of modern reactionary identitarianism. Ten years earlier, a group of French far-right activists, many linked to the Nouvelle Droite, had formed the Bloc Identitaire, which became the heart of a network of far-right identitarian groups and of which Génération Identitaire was the youth wing. The movement was banned by the French government in March 2021 for “incitement of discrimination, hatred and violence”. By then it had spawned a dozen other groups across Europe, and its influence had crossed the Atlantic, too.The Bloc Identitaire drew on the Nouvelle Droite for both individuals and themes. Its key leitmotifs are familiar: opposition to globalisation, defence of ethnopluralism and white identity, hostility to immigration and Islam. The Identitarians feared that demographic change would sweep away white Europeans. “The cradle”, writes Adriano Scianca, a leading figure in the Italian identitarian movement, is “the most powerful weapon” and when “the baby cots are empty, civilisation dies”, an echo of future US president Theodore Roosevelt’s claim at the end of the 19th century that “competition between the races” reduced itself “to the warfare of the cradle”. For late-19th-century white supremacists, the declining birth rate of Anglo-Saxons created the alarming possibility of the only “true white race” in America being overrun by “the immigrant European horde”. A century later, the fear is of Europeans being swamped by hordes from beyond the continent – and in particular by Islam.Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”), coined the term “Eurabia”. It described a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell Europe to Muslims in exchange for oil. Europe, Ye’or told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world”. Europeans would be reduced to the condition of “dhimmitude” – the permanent status of second-class subjects of Islamic rule. The Israeli historian Robert Wistrich dismissed Ye’or’s fantasies as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”. In the wake of 9/11, however, the fantasies took flight, and not just on the fringes of politics. The mainstream British writer Melanie Phillips has become an advocate of the “dhimmitude” thesis, as have influential figures such as Niall Ferguson and Bruce Bawer in the US.Generation Identity is no mass movement; membership of its various groups is tiny. Nevertheless, it has helped shape public debate, promoting an aggressive form of reactionary identitarianism that has percolated far beyond the far right. “Europe is committing suicide… by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world we had to call home.” That could be Alain de Benoist or Guillaume Faye or any number of Nouvelle Droite or Génération Identitaire polemicists. In fact, it is Douglas Murray, in the opening to his 2017 bestseller The Strange Death of Europe. Murray is a leading figure in British conservative circles, associate editor of the Spectator magazine and author of a string of popular books. He writes of “the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people” and worries that “London has become a foreign country” because “in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs ‘white Britons’ are now in a minority”, again echoing Generation Identity.The main themes in Murray’s argument were steeped in traditional racial thinking. The term “race suicide” was coined in the late 19th century by the American sociologist Edward Ross, and popularised by Theodore Roosevelt, to express their fears that Anglo-Saxons were being out-bred by inferior immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The white supremacist Theodore Lothrop Stoddard warned in the early 20th century that the white ancestral “homeland” of the Caucasus had become a “racially brown man’s land in which white blood survives only as vestigial traces of vanishing significance”. The same was happening in Europe, too. “What assurance”, he wondered, could there be “that the present world order may not swiftly and utterly pass away?” These ideas were for much of the postwar era pushed to the racist fringes. Sustained by the Nouvelle Droite and Génération Identitaire, these fringe arguments have now become appropriated by many strands of mainstream conservatism.The 2010s saw a series of books warning of Europe “committing suicide”, such as Thilo Sarrazin’s Germany Abolishes Itself and Éric Zemmour’s The French Suicide. Sarrazin, former SPD finance minister for the state of Berlin, and executive board member of Germany’s central bank, bemoaned the declining white population and the high level of immigrant fertility, the combination leading to Germany being both less intelligent, less moral and no longer Germany. For Zemmour, a television journalist who became a candidate in the 2022 presidential elections, Europe was committing “premeditated suicide”, the left having “betrayed the people in the name of minorities”.The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, a staple of the far right, has also gained a foothold in mainstream conservatism. In 2011, the novelist and white nationalist conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus published Le Grand Remplacement in which he claimed that globalists had created the “replaceable human, without any national, ethnic or cultural specificity”, allowing “the replacing elites” to swap white Europeans for non-Europeans. He described non-Europeans in Europe as “colonists”, the “replacing elites” as “collaborationists”, and the process of replacement as “genocide by substitution”. Camus dedicated his book to the two “prophets” that had shaped his thinking, the British anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell and the French writer Jean Raspail, whose 1973 dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints tells of a fleet of immigrants from India overwhelming France, and its white population, and has become a cult hit for identitarians across the globe.In Britain, too, similar fears have become part of the conservative conversation. Like Douglas Murray, the London-based American novelist Lionel Shriver fears the de-whitening of London and projects her version of replacement theory. “The lineages of white Britons in their homeland commonly go back hundreds of years,” she writes, and yet they have to “submissively accept” the “ethnic transformation” of the UK “without a peep of protest”. Westerners, she adds, are being forced “to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired”. The distinguished economist Paul Collier is another figure apprehensive about “the indigenous British” becoming “a minority in their own capital”. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann thinks it legitimate to promote white “racial self-interest” and to use such racial self-interest to limit immigration, so that in a majority white country, immigrants should be mainly white to enable “assimilation”.Identitarian arguments have become even more entrenched on the other side of the Atlantic, from the far right to mainstream Republicanism. The white nationalist and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, who claims to have invented the term “alt-right”, replays many of the themes of reactionary identitarianism: white people as victims of cultural “dispossession”, immigration as a “proxy war” against white people. He advocates “peaceful ethnic cleansing” and the creation of “an ethno-state that would be a gathering point of all Europeans”, one “based on very different ideals than… the Declaration of Independence”.The presidential victory of Donald Trump in 2016 provided new opportunities, as alt-right identitarians such Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon entered the White House. Even before the Trump ascendancy, conservatives were humming to many of the European refrains. In the question at the heart of Christopher Caldwell’s 2009 book, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe – “Can Europe be the same with different people in it?” – is embedded the idea that Europe was made by a particular group of people and that immigrants – different people – would undo it. He echoes, too, the claim that migration is a form of “colonisation” and that migrants come to “supplant” European culture. Caldwell hails Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints as capturing “the complexity of the modern world”.After 2016, the Great Replacement theory became commonplace in Republican circles. “We can’t restore our civilisation with somebody else’s babies”, Iowa congressman Steve King tweeted. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has constantly charged the Democrats with trying “to change the racial mix of the country… a policy [that] is called ‘the great replacement’, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries”. Polls show that one-third of Americans and nearly two-thirds of Trump supporters believe in the Great Replacement theory and that a secret cabal “is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains”.One of the ironies is that many of the conservatives who fret most about “white decline” are also among the most strident critics of identity politics. According to Douglas Murray, identity politics “atomises society into different interest groups”, and its “consequences… are deranged as well as dementing”. But not, apparently, when worrying that “Only 44.9% of London residents are now white British” or that Europeans are being driven out of their homeland. Taking part in a debate in defence of the proposition that “identity politics is tearing society apart”, Lionel Shriver argued that she had been a “fierce advocate” of the US civil rights movement because its goal was “to break down the artificial barriers between us” and “to release us into seeing each other not as black or white… but as individual people”. “The colour of my skin,” she added, “is an arbitrary accident” and “the boxes into which I have been born are confinements I have struggled to get out of and I would wish that liberation to everyone else.” Except, it seems, if you are a non-white immigrant. Then, the “arbitrary accident” of birth becomes an essential feature of one’s identity, the “artificial barriers between us” need to be recognised as insurmountable impediments to assimilation, the “confinements” of ethnic boxes maintained and people seen not as “individuals” but as “black or white”.The reactionary right – Nouvelle Droite, Generation Identity, the alt-right in America – uses the language of diversity and identity as a means of rebranding racism. Many on the mainstream right rehearse elements of this rebranding, even as they castigate the excesses of white nationalism. Murray “unequivocally” condemns the “racism exhibited by people pursuing white ethno-nationalism” while also giving a nod to the Great Replacement theory and to the importance of whiteness. It is occupying the grey zone in which one can claim attachment to the moral framework of postwar antiracism but also maintain the freedom to replay perniciously racist arguments, helping to normalise them.
    Not So Black and White by Kenan Malik is published by Hurst (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
    TopicsRaceThe ObserverThe far rightPolitics booksHistory booksSociety booksUS politicsextractsReuse this content More

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    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reveals why she was talking to far-right Republicans

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reveals why she was talking to far-right RepublicansNew York Democrat was seen speaking with rightwingers, one of whom once tweeted an anime-style video depicting him killing her During a succession of votes for House speaker on Tuesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was seen talking on the House floor with the far-right Republicans Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar, the latter who once tweeted video depicting him slashing her in the neck with a sword.McCarthy faces long battle for House speaker after he falls short on third vote Read moreThe New York Democrat, a progressive star, told MSNBC: “In chaos, anything is possible, especially in this era.”The chaos in Congress on Tuesday concerned the California representative Kevin McCarthy’s attempt to become House speaker, against opposition from the right of his party.Gosar, from Arizona, was censured in November 2021 for tweeting an anime-style video of violence done to Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Biden.On Tuesday, he was among 20 Republicans opposing McCarthy by the third ballot. So was Gaetz of Florida, a ringleader who nominated Jim Jordan of Ohio, a rightwinger loyal to McCarthy, to give the rebels someone to vote for.Ocasio-Cortez, popularly known as AOC, was seen talking to Gosar and Gaetz. She told the Intercept her conversation with Gaetz was a “factcheck”.“McCarthy was suggesting he could get Dems to walk away to lower his threshold,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “And I factchecked and said absolutely not.”00:28To be speaker, any candidate must reach a majority of representatives present. At one point on Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez was absent when her name was called. She voted, for Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, when those absent were called on again.Votes for speaker go on until they are resolved. The last multi-ballot process, in 1923, lasted three days. In 1855-56, it took months to resolve the issue.Ocasio-Cortez said she discussed adjournment strategy with Gosar.“Some of us in the House of Representatives are independent in certain ways from our party,” she told MSNBC. “And … these machinations are happening on the floor.“And sometimes the leadership of your party, in this case, the Republican party, will be making claims in order to try to twist arms and get people in line. And a lot of times, information and truth is currency.“So sometimes to be able to factcheck some of the claims that McCarthy is making, whether Democrats are going to defect or not, etc, is important in order to keep him honest and to keep people honest in general.”On Tuesday, the House adjourned after three ballots. It was scheduled to reconvene at noon on Wednesday.“I was honestly surprised,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I did not think that Kevin McCarthy was going to have the votes in the first round, but I didn’t think that it was going to be as catastrophic for him as it actually was …“For him to have several months since the November elections and still not be able to clinch it, I think, is very much a testament to a lack of leadership.”McCarthy, she said, “failed as a coalition-builder, not once, not twice, but three times … And I’m not quite sure what he could or would do that would change the calculus between today and tomorrow.”TopicsAlexandria Ocasio-CortezHouse of RepresentativesUS CongressDemocratsRepublicansThe far rightUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    Highest-profile January 6 trial begins with Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio

    Highest-profile January 6 trial begins with Proud Boys leader Enrique TarrioChairman of militia group and four others are charged with seditious conspiracy related to Capitol insurrection The January 6 committee investigating the attack on the Capitol may have issued its huge final report, but the wheels of the justice system in the US are grinding on and one of the most high-profile trials emerging from the insurrection is about to begin in earnest.Jury selection began last week with the seditious conspiracy trial against ex-Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio and four others involved in the far-right, often violent militia group.From Liz Cheney to Donald Trump: winners and losers from the January 6 hearingsRead moreTarrio and his co-defendants in the Washington DC federal court trial – Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Proud Boy organizer Joe Biggs – are charged with seditious conspiracy and other counts related to the attack that delayed congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, injured dozens of police officers and is linked to multiple deaths. They have all pleaded not guilty to the charges.A fifth man charged in this case, Charles Donohoe, pleaded guilty in April to conspiring to attack the Capitol. Under Donohoe’s plea deal, he agreed to cooperate against his co-defendants. Approximately 900 people have now been arrested in the Capitol attack, with prosecutors securing convictions against hundreds.The start of the trial comes amid a wider reckoning with those responsible for the January 6 attack.Several hours after jury selection started on Monday in the Proud Boys trial, the House committee probing the deadly insurrection issued some of its findings – and made a criminal referral against Trump to the US Department of Justice, recommending charges. The trial also comes several weeks after two leaders of the Oath Keepers – another far-right group – were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the insurrection.Federal prosecutors allege that Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and Pezzola were among the 100 Proud Boys who convened alongside the Washington Monument at 10am on 6 January. They met around the time that Trump was addressing thousands of supporters in a park called the Ellipse.These soon-to-be rioters in that group then made their way to the Capitol. Around 1pm, one of them broke through police, spurring the violence that would consume Capitol Hill, court documents allege.Nordean, Rehl, Biggs and Pezzola allegedly led the mob and were among the first people to push past police. Biggs allegedly recorded a video where he observed the mob and said: “We’ve taken the Capitol,” per court documents.Tarrio was not in Washington DC during the insurrection, as he had been arrested two days prior for allegedly vandalizing a Black Lives Matter sign at a historical Black church during a December 2020 demonstration. Prosecutors contend that Tarrio was among the leaders of this conspiracy to thwart election certification.Several days before the riot, Tarrio posted about “revolution” on social media, prosecutors said in court papers. In an encrypted messaging group which prosecutors maintain was created by Tarrio, one member purportedly said: “Time to stack those bodies in front of Capitol Hill,” per the Associated Press.Despite being arrested several days prior, Tarrio heralded the rioters’ attack, writing “don’t [expletive] leave” on social media and later posting “we did this…” prosecutors said.While there appears to be extensive evidence against these men, much of which has long been in the public record, prosecutors must show more than their in-person or social media presence that day to prove seditious conspiracy.“They’re going to have to show an agreement between two people or more, they’re going to have to show a common scheme or a common plan,” said Los Angeles criminal defense and appellate attorney Matthew Barhoma, founder of Barhoma Law.“Showing up on January 6 at the same time doesn’t mean that a conspiracy indeed existed. They’re going to have to go a little bit beyond that to show there is a common agreement – basically a smoking gun in the sense that they intended to overthrow the government,” he added. “They’re going to have to show that they wanted to act in a common plan in furtherance of that plan to overthrow the government or to delay or hinder the United States government.”‘These are conditions ripe for political violence’: how close is the US to civil war?Read moreThat said, “seditious conspiracy is actually in some ways, much easier to prove than regular criminal conspiracy,” explained longtime attorney Ron Kuby, a longtime criminal defense attorney with a focus on civil rights.“Seditious conspiracy is the only conspiracy that does not require proof of an overt act on the part of participants,” Kuby said. “Generally speaking, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to do something unlawful, and in all other conspiracy cases, at least one of the participants has to take a substantial step toward that unlawful purpose.”“Here, it’s really a sidenote, footnote, endnote and asterisk. They don’t have to prove an overt act, what they they have to prove there was an agreement to oppose the lawful authority of the United States of America by force.“There’s a tsunami of evidence, both in terms of what was said among the participants, which the FBI has obtained and decrypted as well as what they did, which is all well-documented on video.”Although evidence appears to abound, one possible defense strategy would be to portray the alleged plotters as buffoons. “These guys were angry knuckleheads but you know, they’re not planning to overthrow the government,” Kuby said of this possible approach.It’s unclear whether these Proud Boys members would go along with that, even if this could help their cases.“The natural impulse of every defense lawyer is to portray their clients in a fashion which is most likely to result in acquittal, but that’s not necessarily the way most defendants want to be portrayed,” Kuby said. “The Proud Boys may not want to be portrayed as loud-mouthed knuckleheads who were just egging each other on to say dumber and dumber things because they’re not that bright.”Tarrio’s attorneys have contended that he didn’t tell or encourage anyone to storm the Capitol or act violently, while Nordean’s lawyer alleged that justice department prosecutors were singling him out because of his political beliefs, the AP reported.In an email to the Guardian, Tarrio’s attorney, Nayib Hassan, said: “Mr Tarrio is looking forward to the start of the trial. We look forward to making our presentation of the evidence and acquitting Mr Tarrio of the governments allegations.”Rehl’s lawyer reportedly wanted the judge to dismiss the indictment on First amendment grounds, claiming the charges were rooted in free speech issues. Asked for comment, Biggs’s attorney, Norm Pattis, said in an email: “We look forward to the presentation of evidence in this case. We stand by his plea of not guilty.”TopicsUS Capitol attackJanuary 6 hearingsLaw (US)The far rightUS politicsJoe BidenDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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    Revisited – Jon Ronson on Alex Jones: Politics Weekly America podcast

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    Politics Weekly America is taking a break. So this week, Jonathan Freedland revisits the conversation he had in April with the journalist and film-maker Jon Ronson about the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones

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