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    The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump

    The Destructionists review: brilliant study of Republican rage pre-Trump Dana Milbank of the Washington Post does not fall victim to false equivalency. He knows the GOP is a threat to democracyAfter Joe Biden’s fiery speech in defense of democracy last week, most of the Washington press corps responded with another stream of fatuous false equivalencies.Donald Trump once tried to pay a lawyer with a horse, new book saysRead more“The Two Parties Finally Agree on Something: American Democracy Is in Danger”, was the headline in the New York Times. A Washington Post editorial declared the president was “wrong to conflate upholding the rule of law with his own partisan agenda, which he called ‘the work of democracy’”.In his brilliant new book, Dana Milbank, a Post columnist, does not offer any of the squishy-soft judgements to which most of his Washington colleagues have become sadly addicted.He comes straight to the point that eluded the authors of that Times story and that Post editorial: “Republicans have become an authoritarian faction fighting democracy. There’s a perfectly logical, if deeply cynical reason for this. Democracy is working against Republicans” who have only carried the popular vote once in eight presidential elections since 1988.As America “approaches majority-minority status”, Milbank writes, “… white grievance and white fear” have driven “Republican identity more than any other factor – and drive the tribalism and dysfunction in the US political system”.Working as a political columnist for the last 16 years, Milbank has had “a front-row seat for the worst show on earth: the crack-up of the Republican party, and the resulting crack-up of American democracy”.The book has four roughly equal sections: about the Clinton presidency (“defined by the slashing style of [Newt] Gingrich”), the George W Bush presidency (“defined by the dishonesty of Karl Rove”), the Obama presidency and the era of Trump.This is meticulous history, showing how the Republicans have spent a quarter of a century “hacking away at the foundations of democracy and civil society”, conducting “their war on truth, their growing exploitation of racism and white supremacy, their sabotage of the institutions … of government, and their dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence”.Milbank traces the Republican love affair with racism back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy in his 1968 presidential campaign, and dates the beginning of government dysfunction to the four disastrous years from 1995 to 1999 when Gingrich did as much as he could to blow up the federal government when he was speaker of the House.By showing with minute detail “how extensively Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets and interest groups have been pulling at the threads of democracy,” Milbank makes it clear that the Trump presidency was far from an aberration. It represented the real Republican party, without any of the camouflage of compassionate conservatism.There was nothing new about Donald Trump’s 30,573 documented lies as president. Gingrich’s Republicans were “saturated with wild, often unsubstantiated allegations. Whitewater. Troopergate. Travelgate. Filegate. Furnituregate. Fallen Clinton aide Webb Hubbell fathered Chelsea Clinton … commerce secretary Ron Brown’s death in a plane crash … was a Clinton-arranged hit”. And so on.It was Gingrich, the Clinton special prosecutor Ken Starr, his aide Brett Kavanaugh, Rudy Giuliani and Rush Limbaugh who showed Trump “the political power of an endlessly repeated lie”.The crassness also started with Gingrich.“I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” Gingrich told college Republicans way back in 1978. “You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power.”Eleven years later, Gingrich told the reporter John Harwood (who last week left CNN after calling Trump a “demagogue”) Democrats were “grotesque”, “loony” and “stupid”.Milbank is especially strong about Ralph Reed, “a crucial figure in the perversion of the religious right into an entity more ‘right’ than ‘religious’.” There is also a long recounting of the gigantic lobbying scandal centered on Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, a former top aide to House majority leader Tom DeLay. Scanlon and Abramoff “defrauded Indian tribes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars” by telling them they were promoting their casinos. They also got Reed to mobilize evangelical Christians to oppose gambling projects that competed with his own gambling interests.Another long section reminds us that the administration of George W Bush actually did even greater damage than Trump, by promoting the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and leading America into the completely unnecessary and utterly disastrous war in Iraq.Milbank’s book is in the fine tradition of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, the 2012 book by Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann which was the first to point out the uselessness of the Washington press corps’ attempts to be “fair” to both parties.‘Donald kept our secret’: Mar-a-Lago stay saved Giuliani from drink and depression, book saysRead moreMilbank quotes from it: “The Republican party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”Herein lies the tragedy of Washington journalism. Ten years after Ornstein and Mann made those astute observations, Milbank is one of just a handful of reporters who have incorporated their wisdom into his work. As a result, he is almost alone in treating the pronouncements of the Republican party with the contempt they invariably deserve.As Ornstein tweeted on Saturday: “Tragically our mainstream media have shown that they are either AWOL in this battle or have opted on the side of the authoritarians by normalizing their behavior and minimizing their intentions.”
    The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party, is published in the US by Doubleday
    TopicsBooksRepublicansDonald TrumpNewt GingrichGeorge BushRichard NixonThe far rightreviewsReuse this content More

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    ‘A white nationalist pyramid scheme’: how Patriot Front recruits young members

    ‘A white nationalist pyramid scheme’: how Patriot Front recruits young members The rightwing group’s workings resemble a media production company more than a classic neo-Nazi group, researchers sayIn June, police in Idaho arrested 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front packed into the back of a U-Haul near a Coeur d’Alene Pride event. The group had planned to riot during the LGBTQ+ celebrations, authorities said, and carried riot gear, a smoke grenade, shin guards and shields.Trump sought to mount ‘armed revolution’, militia ex-spokesman saysRead moreThe mass arrest not only revealed the names of members of an extremist group that had long worked to keep those hidden, it provided extremist experts with new insight into how the group is meticulously planning, financing, organizing and publicizing armed demonstrations at public events that celebrate diversity.Patriot Front’s fundraising and mobilizing efforts, those experts say, reveal a corporate-style organization that more resembles a media production company with satellite offices than a classic neo-Nazi group.“No other white supremacist group operating in the US today is able to match Patriot Front’s ability to produce media, ability to mobilize across the country, and ability to finance,” says Morgan Moon, investigative researcher with the ADL Center on Extremism. “That’s what makes them a particular concern.”When white nationalism meets media productionPatriot Front was founded after the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville by Thomas Rousseau, a former member of the small, neo-Nazi group Vanguard America.Disaffected members of Vanguard America left to join Rousseau’s organization, and for two years, primarily stickered college campuses and dropped banners with slogans like “Reclaim America” over highway overpasses.In the 18 months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, many anti-government extremist groups, like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and Three Percenters, have lain low. But Patriot Front has geared up. The group has made unpermitted demonstrations its “bread and butter”, says Moon, making sure each event is heavily publicized on social media.Since last December, the group has organized five such flash demonstrations. Two of them – the event in Idaho and a contentious march along Boston’s Freedom Trail on the Fourth of July holiday – resulted in national media attention.At the rallies, Rousseau typically addresses the crowd, urging onlookers to rise up physically and “reclaim your country”.To capture different angles of a rally, several camera operators circulate and shoot video while members wear body-worn cameras, according to Jeff Tischauser, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then, the media team edits the footage and circulates a video package on alt-tech platforms like Gab, Odyssey and Telegram.Afterward, Patriot Front’s social media team monitors the group’s mentions, shares news coverage on private servers, and tells members which social media accounts to harass, Tischauser says.The video packages are specifically designed toward attracting a younger audience, says Stephen Piggott, program analyst with Western States Center, a Portland-based non-profit that promotes inclusive democracy. And while other far-right and white nationalist groups are engaging in meme culture and recruiting people online, the group has been effective at attracting young radicals and getting them off their laptops and into the streets, he adds.Throughout its propaganda, the group is careful to craft an image that will appeal to younger users, promoting the “idea of a young warrior” and becoming the “warrior elite”, says Moon, the ADL researcher. The group emphasizes fitness, diet and training and often holds paramilitary drills before demonstrations.Also attractive to young recruits is the premium the group puts on anonymity. Banner drops and mural defacing typically happen after dark, and members keep their faces covered. Internal chats show members using code names. At protests, Rousseau is typically the only person whose face is shown.‘A white nationalist pyramid scheme’Undergirding Patriot Front’s activities is a rigid, top-down hierarchy, researchers say.Rousseau is at the head. Lieutenants run departments of the group, including media production, recruitment and online security. Fifteen regional network directors organize local and national activities, and supervise members.Once recruits become members, they are required to attend monthly roundups, hit a weekly activism quota, and show up to demonstrations, according to Moon. If they don’t, Rousseau expels them from Patriot Front.Internal chats obtained by extremist experts show members complaining about the ongoing expenses they incur paying for stickers, stencils and other mandatory propaganda materials, which Rousseau charges them for.Rousseau charges members a premium for Patriot Front propaganda material, Tischauser said, adding that network directors are expected to push members to purchase flyers to go on several flyering runs a month. “In this sense, Patriot Front is close to a white nationalist pyramid scheme,” Tischauser notes.The tightly organized structure enables Patriot Front to be responsible for up to 14 hate incidents a day, according to the ADL. Under the direction of network directors, Patriot Front members defaced 29 murals honoring Black history, LGBTQ+ pride, migrant history and police shooting victims, said Tischauser.Patriot Front did not respond to a request for comment.‘It lifted the veil a bit’Recent events have somewhat disrupted the group’s carefully constructed image. Earlier this year, the leftwing non-profit Unicorn Riot leaked the group’s internal audio and chats, which helped investigators discover the identity of the national team, regional directors and many other members. And following the arrest in Coeur d’Alene, all 31 names of arrested members were broadcasted and published in local media outlets, along with their mugshots.“They got kind of the opposite of what they wanted: they weren’t able to disrupt the LGBTQ Pride events, and they got a whole lot of mainstream media attention,” Piggott said.The Idaho arrests also exposed that their members flew into the state from different parts of the country, Piggott added. “It lifted the veil a bit. They may not have the numbers they say they have.”Still, civil rights groups are increasingly concerned about violence breaking out at flash demonstrations. During Patriot Front’s unpermitted rally in Boston this July, for example, members of the group allegedly assaulted a Black artist and activist, Charles Murrell.Murrell did not respond to an interview request.The ADL, the Western States Center and other civil rights groups have urged the Department of Justice to launch a comprehensive investigation into the group, arguing that some of its activities could violate federal legislation.“More must be done to hold the group accountable and ensure they do not continue to intimidate historically marginalized communities,” the organizations wrote in a letter to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland.“This is particularly true at a time when Patriot Front is becoming increasingly emboldened and coordinating its activity at a national level, targeting specific locations across the country,” they added. “The Department of Justice may indeed be the only entity able to address these concerns effectively.”TopicsUS newsUS Capitol attackUS politicsThe far rightIdahofeaturesReuse this content More

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    Oath Keepers lawyer faces conspiracy charge in connection with January 6

    Oath Keepers lawyer faces conspiracy charge in connection with January 6Kellye SoRelle, general counsel for the extremist group, was arrested over conspiracy to obstruct official proceeding, DoJ says A lawyer for the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group has been charged with conspiracy in connection with the January 6, 2021 attack at the US Capitol, authorities said on Thursday.Kellye SoRelle – general counsel for the anti-government group – was arrested in Texas on charges including conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, the justice department said.SoRelle is a close associate of Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers’ leader who is heading to trial later this month alongside other extremists on seditious conspiracy charges.Prosecutors say Rhodes and his militia group plotted for weeks to stop the lawful transfer of power. Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers purchased weapons and set up battle plans with the goal of keeping President Donald Trump in office.SoRelle was present at an underground garage meeting the night before the riot that’s been a focus for investigators.The meeting included Rhodes and and Enrique Tarrio, the former chairman of the Proud Boys extremist group, who is charged separately with seditious conspiracy alongside other members of the group that describes themselves as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”.SoRelle told the Associated Press last year that FBI agents seized her phone and provided her a search warrant that said it was related to an investigation into seditious conspiracy, among other crimes.The indictment against SoRelle made public on Thursday does not include a charge of seditious conspiracy.SoRelle told the AP at the time that she had no knowledge of or involvement in the Capitol breach, calling the seizure of her phone “unethical” and the investigation “a witch-hunt”.SoRelle is expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Austin, Texas, later on Thursday.TopicsUS Capitol attackThe far rightUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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    ‘American rebellion’: the lockdown protests that paved the way for the Capitol riots

    ‘American rebellion’: the lockdown protests that paved the way for the Capitol riots In this extract from his book The Storm Is Here, New Yorker writer Luke Mogelson follows rightwing militias in Michigan protesting Covid restrictions in 2020. It was a lesson in the attitudes that led to the US Capitol attack the following January

    Read a Q&A with Luke Mogelson
    It started in Michigan. On 15 April 2020, thousands of vehicles convoyed to Lansing and clogged the streets surrounding the state capitol for a protest that had been advertised as “Operation Gridlock”. Drivers leaned on their horns, men with guns got out and walked. Signs warned of revolt. Someone waved an upside-down American flag. Already – nine months before 6 January, seven months before the election, six weeks before a national uprising for police accountability and racial justice – there were a lot of them, and they were angry.Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s Democratic governor, had recently extended a stay-at-home order and imposed additional restrictions on commerce and recreation, obliging a long list of businesses to close. Around 30,000 Michiganders had tested positive for Covid-19 – the third-highest rate in the country, after New York and California – and almost 2,000 had died. Most of the cases, however, were concentrated in Detroit, and the predominantly rural residents at Operation Gridlock resented the blanket lockdown.On 30 April, with Whitmer holding firm as deaths continued to rise, they returned to Lansing. This time, more were armed and fewer stayed in their cars. Michigan is an open-carry state, and no law prohibited licensed owners from bringing loaded weapons inside the capitol. Men with assault rifles filled the rotunda and approached the barred doors of the legislature, squaring off against police. Others accessed the gallery that overlooked the senate. Dayna Polehanki, a Democrat from southern Michigan, tweeted a picture of a heavyset man with a mohawk and a long gun in a scabbard on his back. “Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us,” she wrote.The next day, a security guard in Flint [a town about 50 miles north-east of Lansing] turned away an unmasked customer from a Family Dollar. The customer returned with her husband, who shot the guard in the head. Later that week, a clerk in a Dollar Tree outside Detroit asked a man to don a mask. The man replied, “I’ll use this,” grabbed the clerk’s sleeve, and wiped his nose with it.By then, the movement that had begun with Operation Gridlock had spread to more than 30 states. In Kentucky, the governor was hanged in effigy outside the capitol; in North Carolina, a protester hauled a rocket launcher through downtown Raleigh; in California, a journalist covering an anti-lockdown demonstration was held at knifepoint; ahead of a rally in Salt Lake City, a man wrote on Facebook: “Bring your guns, the civil war starts Saturday… The time is now.”I was living in Paris in 2020, where, since late March, we had been permitted to go outside for a maximum of one hour per day, and to stray no farther than a kilometre from our homes. Most businesses were closed (except those “essential to the life of the nation”, such as bakeries and wine and cigarette shops). Few complained. I’d been a foreign correspondent for nearly a decade and during that time had not spent more than a few consecutive months in the US. The images of men in desert camo, flak jackets and ammo vests, carrying military-style carbines through American cities, portrayed a country I no longer recognised. One viral photograph struck me as particularly exotic. It showed a man with a shaved head and a blond beard, mid-scream, his gaping mouth inches away from two officers gazing stonily past him, in the capitol in Lansing. What accounted for such exquisite rage? And why was it so widely shared?In early May, I took an almost-empty flight to New York, then a slightly fuller one to Michigan. My first stop was Owosso, a small town on the banks of the Shiawassee River, in the bucolic middle of the state. I arrived at Karl Manke’s barbershop a little before 9am. The neon Open sign was dark; a crowd loitered in the parking lot. Spring had not yet made it to Owosso, and people sat in their trucks with the heaters running. Some, dressed in fatigues and packing sidearms, belonged to the Michigan Home Guard, a civilian militia.A week before, Manke, who was 77, had reopened his business in defiance of Governor Whitmer’s prohibition on “personal care services”. That Friday, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, had declared the barbershop an imminent danger to public health and dispatched state troopers to serve Manke with a cease-and-desist order. Over the weekend, Home Guardsmen had warned that they would not allow Manke to be arrested. Now it was Monday, and the folks in the parking lot had come to see whether Manke would show up.“He’s a national hero,” Michelle Gregoire, a 29-year-old school bus driver, mother of three, and Home Guard member, told me. She was 5ft 4in but hard to miss. Wearing a light fleece jacket emblazoned with Donald Trump’s name, she waved a Gadsden flag at the passing traffic. Car after car honked in support. Michelle had driven 90 miles, from her house in Battle Creek, to stand with her comrades. She’d been at Lansing’s capitol on 30 April, and did not regret what happened there. When I mentioned that officials were considering banning guns inside the statehouse, she laughed: “If they go through with that, they’re not gonna like the next rally.”Manke appeared at 9.30am, to cheers and applause. He had a white goatee and wore a blue satin smock, black-rimmed glasses, and a rubber bracelet with the words “When in Doubt, Pray”. He climbed the steps to the front door stiffly, his posture hunched. When the Open sign flickered on, people crowded inside. Manke had been cutting hair in town for half a century and at his current location since the 1980s. The phone was rotary, the clock analogue. An out-of-service gumball machine stood beside a row of chairs. Black-and-white photographs of Owosso occupied cluttered shelves alongside old radios and bric-a-brac. Also on display were flashy paperback copies of the 10 novels that Manke had written. Unintended Consequences featured an anti-abortion activist who “stands on his convictions”; Gone to Pot offered readers “a daring view into the underbelly of the 60s and 70s”.As Manke fastened a cape around the first customer’s neck, a man in foul-weather gear picked out a book and deposited a wad of bills in a wicker basket on the counter. “My father was a barber,” he told Manke. “He believed in everything you believe in. Freedom. We’re the last holdout in the world.” Manke nodded. “We did this in 1776, and we’re doing it again now.”Like the redbrick buildings and decorative parapets of Owosso’s historic downtown, there was something out of time about Manke. During several days that I would spend at the barbershop, I’d hear him offer countless customers and journalists subtle variations of the same stump speech. He’d lived under 14 presidents, survived the polio epidemic, and never witnessed such “government oppression”. Governor Whitmer was not his mother. He’d close his business when they dragged him out in handcuffs, or when he died, or when Jesus came – “whichever happens first”. “You’re getting a scoop,” he assured me when I introduced myself. “American rebellion.”Customers continued to arrive, and the phone did not stop ringing. Some people had travelled hundreds of miles. They left cards, bumper stickers, leaflets, brochures. A local TV crew squeezed into the shop, struggling to social-distance in the crush of waiting men, recording Manke with a boom mic as he sculpted yet another high-and-tight. Around noon, [rightwing political commentator and radio host] Glenn Beck called, live on air. “It’s hardly my country any more, in so many different ways,” Manke told him. “You remind me of my father,” Beck responded, with a wistful sigh.Manke seemed to remind everybody of something or someone that no longer existed. Hence the people with guns outside, ready to do violence on those who threatened what he represented. You could not have engineered a more quintessential paragon of that mythical era when America was great. One day at the barbershop, I was approached by a man clad from head to toe in hunting gear, missing several teeth. He hadn’t realised I was press. Manke had first come to the attention of the attorney general, the man informed me, because of a reporter from Detroit. He held out his arms to indicate the woman’s girth. “A big Black bitch.”In the 1950s, when Manke was in high school, Owosso was a “sundown town”: African Americans were not welcome. Like much of rural Michigan, it remained almost exclusively white. Detroit, an hour and a half to the south, was 80% Black. Because politics broke down along similar lines – less-populated counties voted Republican; urban centres, Democrat – partisan rancour in the state could often look like racial animus. While conservatives tended to ridicule any such interpretation as liberal cant, the pandemic had created two new discrepancies that were hard to ignore. The first was that Covid-19 disproportionately affected Black communities, in Michigan as well as nationwide. The second was that the people mobilising against containment measures were overwhelmingly white.On 30 April, the state representative Sarah Anthony had watched from her office across the street as anti-lockdown protesters filled the capitol lawn. Anthony had been born and raised in Lansing. In 2012, at the age of 29, she’d become the youngest Black woman in America to serve as a county commissioner. Six years later, a landslide victory made her the first Black woman to represent Lansing in the state legislature. As Anthony walked from her office to the capitol, she had to navigate a heavily armed white mob. She noticed a Confederate flag.A man waved a fishing rod with a naked Barbie doll – brown-haired, like Governor Whitmer – dangling from a mini noose. Men screamed insults. A sign declared: tyrants get the rope. Anthony was in Lansing’s House of Representatives when the mob entered the building. “It just felt like, if they had come through that door, I would’ve been the first to go down,” she recalled. We were in the rotunda, where she had insisted on giving me a tour. Her eyes brightened above her mask as she pointed out the starspeckled oculus in the apex of the dome 160ft above us. “It’s designed to inspire,” Anthony explained. Her reverence for the building had made 30 April that much more unsettling. A sanctum had been violated – its meaning changed.The structure was an equally potent symbol for the people whose cries she’d heard on the other side of the door, however. On the eve of the rally, Michelle Gregoire, the school bus driver and Home Guard member, had visited the capitol. Wearing a neon safety vest scrawled with “Covid-1984”, she and two friends filming on their phones had climbed a marble staircase to the gallery in the House of Representatives. A sergeant at arms informed them that the legislature was not in session, the chamber closed. “This is our house,” responded one of them, striding past him and sitting on a bench. The chief sergeant at arms, David Dickson, arrived and grabbed the woman by her arm, attempting to remove her.“You are not allowed to touch me!” the woman howled. Dickson turned his attention to Michelle. When she also resisted, he dragged her into the hallway, through a pair of swinging doors. “Stay out,” he told her. That night, the women posted their footage on Facebook, with the caption: “We are living in NAZI Germany!!!” Many of the protesters at the capitol the next day had watched the clips, including the man with the shaved head and blond beard in the viral photograph. He was not accosting the two officers in the image, it turns out – he was shouting at Dickson, who stood behind them, outside the picture’s frame. “You gonna throw me around like you did that girl?” the man was shouting. Other protesters called Dickson and his colleagues “traitors” and “filthy rats”.I left several messages for Dickson at his office, but he never called me back. Eventually, I returned to the capitol and found him standing guard outside the legislature. His hair was starting to grey, and beneath his blazer his collared shirt strained a little at the midriff. In 1974, Dickson had become the first Black deputy in Eaton County. He’d gone on to serve for 25 years as an officer in Lansing. After some polite conversation, I asked whether he thought that any of the visceral acrimony directed at him on 30 April might have been connected to his skin colour and to that of the white women he’d ejected the day before. Dickson frowned. “I don’t play the race card,” he said. Given his deprecating tone, I wondered if he’d been dodging my calls out of concern that I would raise this question. It was a question you could not really help raising in Michigan. To what extent was the exquisite rage behind the anti-lockdown fervour white rage? Dickson had no interest in discussing it. Of his encounter with Michelle, he told me: “I didn’t sleep for weeks. You don’t feel good about those kinds of things.” For others, the answer to the question was self-evident. After 30 April, Sarah Anthony acquired a bulletproof vest. Though she was an optimist by nature, her outlook had dimmed. “People are angry about being unemployed, about having to close their businesses – I get that,” she said. “But there are elements, extremists, who are using this as an opportunity to ignite hate. Hate toward our governor, hate toward government, and also hate toward Black and brown people. These conditions are creating a perfect storm.”The 30 April protest had been organised by a few men on Facebook calling themselves the American Patriot Council. Two and a half weeks later, they held a second demonstration, in Grand Rapids, at a plaza known as Rosa Parks Circle. This time, there were no Confederate flags. On the periphery, dozens of armed white men in tactical apparel surveilled the plaza. A few held flags with the Roman numeral III – a reference to the dubious contention that only 3% of colonists fought the British, and a generic emblem signifying readiness to do the same against the US government. (Americans who displayed the symbol and embraced the mentality that it represented often identified as “Three Percenters”.) Some were Home Guard. Others belonged to the Michigan Liberty Militia, including the heavyset man with the mohawk whose picture Dayna Polehanki had tweeted from the senate floor. He wore a sleeveless shirt and a black vest laden with ammunition. A laminated badge read Security. His habit of pressing a small gadget embedded in his ear with his index and middle fingers felt like an imitation of something he had seen onscreen. He appeared to be having an excellent time.A general atmosphere of cheerful make-believe was accentuated by the presence and intense engagement of actual children. One of them, materialising suddenly, interrupted my conversation with a Home Guardsman: “Excuse me, what kinds of guns are those?”We looked down to find a 10-year-old boy with a businesslike expression.“This is an AK-47,” the Home Guardsman told him.“With a flashlight or a suppressor?”“That’s a suppressor. This is a flashlight with a green dot.”“What pistol is that?”“That is a Glock. A 9mm.”The boy seemed underwhelmed.“I’ve heard a lot of people say that,” he said.“Before you ever pick up a gun, you have to have your 100 hours of safety classes, right?” admonished the Home Guardsman, bristling a little.“I already have them.”The keynote speaker was Dar Leaf, a sheriff from nearby Barry County who had refused to enforce Governor Whitmer’s executive orders. Diminutive, plump and bespectacled, with a startling falsetto and an unruly mop of bright yellow hair, Leaf cut an unlikely figure in his uniform, the baggy brown trousers of which bunched around his ankles. Nevertheless, he promptly captivated his audience by inviting it to imagine an alternate version of the past – one in which Alabama officers, upholding the constitution, had not arrested Rosa Parks. To facilitate the thought experiment, Leaf channelled a hypothetical deputy boarding the bus on which Parks – in the real world – was detained. “Hey, Ms Parks,” said the sheriff, playing the part. “I’m gonna make sure nobody bothers you, and you can sit wherever you want.” The crowd cheered. “Thank you!” a white man cried out.In Alabama, during the 60s, sheriffs and deputies were often more ruthless than their municipal counterparts toward Black citizens. The sheriff Jim Clark led a horseback assault against peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, and habitually terrorised African Americans with a cattle prod that he wore on his belt. Dar Leaf, though, saw himself as heir to a different legacy. According to him, the weaponisation of law enforcement to suppress Black activism arose from the same infidelity to American principles of individual freedom that in our time defined the political left. “I got news for you,” Leaf said. “Rosa Parks was a rebel.”And then, for those minds not yet wrapped around what he was telling them: “Owosso has their little version of Rosa Parks, don’t they? Karl Manke!” The equivalence was all the more incredible given that Leaf belonged to the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, or CSPOA. The notion of the “constitutional sheriff” had been first promulgated by William Potter Gale, a Christian Identity minister from California. Christian Identity theology held that Europeans were the true descendants of the lost tribes of Israel; that Jews were the diabolic progeny of Eve and the serpent; and that all non-whites were subhuman “mud people”. In the 70s, Gale developed a movement of rural resistance to federal authority that expanded the model of white vigilantism in the south to a national scale, adding to the fear of Black integration the spectre of governmental infiltration by communists and Jews. He called his organisation Posse Comitatus, which is Latin for “power of the county”, and it recognised elected sheriffs as “the only legal law enforcement” in America. Posse Comitatus groups across the country were instructed to convene “Christian common-law grand juries”, indict public officials who violated the constitution, and “hang them by the neck”.Gale’s guidance on what offences merited such punishment was straightforward: any enforcement of federal tax regulations or of the Civil Rights Act. The CSPOA argued that county sheriffs retained supreme authority within their jurisdictions to interpret the law, and that their primary responsibility was to defend their constituents from state and federal overreach. In Grand Rapids, Sheriff Dar Leaf told the anti-lockdowners, “We’re looking at common-law grand juries. I’d like to see some indictments come out of that.” At the end of his speech, he called the Michigan Liberty Militia on to the stage. “This is our last home defence right here,” he said. Glancing at the heavyset man with the mohawk, Leaf added: “These guys have better equipment than I do. I’m lucky they got my back.”Later, while reviewing my videos from Rosa Parks Circle, I noticed a woman with a toothbrush moustache painted on her upper lip. Looking closer, I saw that she also wore a wig. It was brunette and wavy, intended to resemble Governor Whitmer’s hair. The woman wasn’t doing Hitler, in other words: she was doing Whitmer doing Hitler. She would probably have said that she was doing “Whitler”. While comparing pandemic measures to the atrocities of the Third Reich might have constituted its own kind of antisemitism, it also suggested how desperate many anti-lockdowners understood the situation to be. Nazis were a frequent topic of conversation in the barbershop – which, for Karl Manke’s supporters, represented a bulwark against the kind of creeping authoritarianism that had gradually engulfed Germany in the 1930s.Manke himself had a lot to say on the subject. His great-grandfather had immigrated from Germany, and Manke had grown up attending a Lutheran church with services in German. He often cited the victims of the Holocaust as a cautionary tale. “They would trade their liberty for security,” he told a customer one afternoon. “Because the Nazis said to them: ‘Get in these cattle cars, and we’re gonna take you to a nice, safe place. Just get in.’” “I would rather die than have the government tell me what to do,” the man in the chair responded. In mid-May, when Attorney General Nessel suspended his business licence, Manke exclaimed: “It’s tyrannical! I’m not getting in the cattle car!” But the longer I stayed in Michigan, the clearer it became that many anti-lockdowners sincerely placed mask mandates and concentration camps on the same continuum. “This has nothing to do with the virus,” a 68-year-old retiree told me outside the barbershop. “They want to take power away from the people, and they want to control us. We’re never gonna get our freedoms back from this if we don’t stop it now.” Given the stakes, violence was inevitable. “We’re a trigger pull away,” he said. “You’re gonna see it. We’re getting to the point where people have had enough.” We had to raise our voices to hear each other over a Christian family loudly singing hymns. But I had the sense that the retiree would have been yelling anyway. “You got storm troopers coming in here!” he shouted, referencing the officers who’d served Manke with a cease-and-desist order. “They weren’t cops, they were storm troopers! They deserve to wear the Nazi emblem on their sleeves.”When I went back inside, the phone was ringing. An anonymous caller wanted Manke to know that the national guard was on its way. “We need more people,” a customer in a pressed shirt announced. I’d met him earlier. A self-described “citizen scientist”, he’d given me a flier explaining that masks prevented the body from detoxifying and therefore did more harm than good. “If we get more people, we can stand them off,” he told Manke. “I would hope it’s a rumour,” Manke said. “Whatever it is, we could use more people.” “Well, if they come with a tank…”“Like Tiananmen Square!” the citizen scientist agreed. He lapsed into pensive silence, as if calculating how many people it would take to stand off a tank. Finally, a solution occurred to him: “The sheriff can stop them. The sheriff has the power to stop the National Guard, the federal government, everybody.”Someone looked up the number. Reaching a voice mail, the citizen scientist left a message: “Attention, sheriff. We need you over here at the barbershop. Please come here immediately to attend to a situation. We need your help here to defend our constitutional rights. Please hurry up.”After a while, it became apparent that neither the sheriff nor the national guard was coming. I went back outside. The family had stopped singing and was now reciting scripture. Psalm 2: “Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” The patriarch was joined by his son, daughter, and one-year-old grandson. “If there’s children, they won’t shoot tear gas,” he said. “That’s my hope, anyway – if we’re here, they back off.” “Who backs off?” I asked. “The Nazis.”TopicsUS Capitol attackThe ObserverUS politicsMichiganThe far rightPolitics booksextractsReuse this content More

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    The Storm is Upon Us review: indispensable QAnon history, updated

    The Storm is Upon Us review: indispensable QAnon history, updated Donald Trump welcomed the conspiracy at the White House. Its followers stormed Congress. Big Tech still seems not to care. Mike Rothschild’s book should sound the alarm for us allWhat is it that has hypnotized so many addled souls who devote themselves to decoding the Delphic clues of the QAnon conspiracy?QAnon’s ‘Q’ re-emerges on far-right message board after two years of silenceRead moreWhat they think they’re getting is “secret knowledge”, from “Q” and a bunch of other military insiders working for Donald Trump, about “the storm … a ringside seat to the final match” in a “secret war between good and evil” that will end with the slaughter of all “enemies of freedom”.In short, an irresistible mix of “biblical retribution and participatory justice”.The bad guys are “Democrats, Hollywood elites, business tycoons, wealthy liberals, the medical establishment, celebrities and the mass media … They’re controlled by Barack Obama” – a Muslim sleeper agent – and Hillary Clinton, “a blood-drinking ghoul who murders everyone in her way … and they’re funded by George Soros and the Rothschild banking family (no relation to the author)”.This updated edition of Mike Rothschild’s exhaustive history of the Q movement is more important than ever. Why? Partly because of the crucial role played by so many QAnon devotees in the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 but mostly because Rothschild documents how much of this insanity has penetrated to the heart of the new Republican party, propelled by many of America’s most loathsome individuals, from Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr to Alex Jones, Michael Flynn and Roseanne Barr.As Rothschild writes of Trump’s first national security adviser, “Flynn’s family even filmed themselves taking the ‘digital soldier oath’… part of what would become a total enmeshment between members of the Flynn family and QAnon.”In the two years before the 2020 presidential election, “nearly 100 Republican candidates declared themselves to be Q Believers” while Trump “retweeted hundreds of Q followers, putting their violent fantasies and bizarre memes into tens of millions of feeds”.Asked about a movement which has repackaged most of the oldest and harshest racist and antisemitic conspiracies for a new age, Trump gave his usual coy endorsement of the behavior of America’s most damaged internet addicts.“I don’t know much about the movement,” he mumbled, “other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”In winter 2021, as the Omicron variant sent Covid cases skyrocketing, “QAnon promoters were among the most visible anti-vaccine advocates pushing out lies and conspiracy theories” to “dissuade people from getting vaccinated”.As with so many of QAnon adherents’ positions, the message was “both clear and completely contradicted by the available evidence: they believed the pandemic was over and any mandates related to vaccines or masks were totalitarian control mechanisms that were actually killing people”.More than anything else, this is the latest horrific confirmation of what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently described as “the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached”.Like so many other ghastly conspiracies of recent decades, especially the blood libel that the Sandy Hook massacre was a staged event in which no one was actually killed, QAnon was propelled at warp speed by a combination of the incompetence and greed of all the big-tech big shots: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.Rothschild describes the usual futile internet game of Whac-A-Mole.Reddit “abruptly banned the 70,000-member r/Great Awakening board because members had started harassing other users” and had released the personal information “of at least one person they incorrectly claimed to be a mass shooter”.No matter: Q followers just migrated to Twitter and “closed Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members … Just in 2018, Q believers shared Q YouTube videos over 1.4m times, and drove hundreds of thousands of shares to Fox News, Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit”.By 2019, “Trump was routinely retweeting QAnon-promoting accounts.” By the 2020 election, “Trump had retweeted hundreds … and was regularly sharing memes created by the movement”.When Twitter and Facebook finally started “cracking down on Q iconography in the summer of 2020”, much of the movement just moved on to Instagram. Amazon and Etsy joined in the fun with books and merchandise and there were even “Q apps on the Google Play Store”.‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theoristsRead moreQ’s legacy includes what now looks like the permanent deformation of the Republican party. A December 2020 poll by NPR/Ipsos found about a third of Americans believed in a shadowy “deep state” and a robust 23% of Republicans “believed in a pedophilic ring of Satan-worshiping elites”.Rothschild ends by asking behavioral experts if there is anything the rest of us can do to help those who have gone far down this wretched rabbit hole. They say the only effective solution is a complete “unplugging” from the internet.Every time I read another book like this one, I’m increasingly inclined to the idea that this could be the only road back to sanity for all of us.
    The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is published in paperback in the US by Melville House
    TopicsBooksQAnonThe far rightPolitics booksUS politicsSocial mediaInternetreviewsReuse this content More

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    Viktor Orbán turns Texas conference into transatlantic far-right love-in

    Viktor Orbán turns Texas conference into transatlantic far-right love-in The authoritarian Hungarian leader was embraced as a kindred spirit by Trump fans at the CPAC event in Dallas“The globalists can all go to hell,” declared Viktor Orbán. “I have come to Texas!”The crowd roared, whooped and gave a standing ovation as if at a campaign rally for former US president Donald Trump. It was evident they saw in Orbán a kindred spirit – a blunt weapon to wield against liberal foes.Orbán urges Christian nationalists in Europe and US to ‘unite forces’ at CPACRead moreThe Hungarian prime minister was the opening speaker at this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas, and perhaps the most vivid demonstration yet of the mutual and rapidly growing affinity between the far right in America and Europe.Orbán, who has been prime minister for 12 years, boasted about his hardline stance on illegal immigration, law and order and “gender ideology” in schools. He touted a rise in marriages and fall in abortions. He was unapologetic in his defence of blood-and-soil nationalism and contempt for “leftist media”.And extraordinarily for a foreign leader, he overtly sided with an opposition party – the Republicans – rather than the incumbent Democrats, paying homage to Trump at his golf club in Bedminister, New Jersey, while ignoring Joe Biden at the White House.Calling for Christian nationalists to “unite forces”, Orbán told CPAC: “Victory will never be found by taking the path of least resistance. We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movements of our troops because we face the same challenge.”He noted that US midterm elections will be later this year followed by the presidential contest and European parliamentary elections in 2024. “These two locations will define the two fronts in the battle being fought for western civilisation. Today, we hold neither of them. Yet we need both.”Rarely has the alliance between nationalist parties across the Atlantic been so bold, overt and unshackled. CPAC was once the domain of cold warrior Ronald Reagan. But in recent years guest speakers have included the Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of the far-right French politician Marine Le Pen.On Friday the lineup included Steve Bannon, who has worked with openly racist far-right leaders across Europe and once leased a medieval monastery outside Rome to run a “populism bootcamp”.Bannon is former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which he once described as “the platform of the ‘alt-right’”, a movement associated with efforts to preserve “white identity” and defend “western values”. He served as chief strategist in the Trump White House and is now facing prison after being convicted of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with the January 6 committee.CPAC Texas also heard from the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who railed against the media and told the audience: “When I said that I’m a Christian nationalist, I have nothing to be ashamed of because that’s what most Americans are.” The event will close on Saturday with Trump who, like Orbán, has faced scrutiny over his relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the non-profit group Right Wing Watch, said: “Rightwing leaders, and especially the religious right leaders in the US, love Viktor Orbán for the same reasons they love Vladimir Putin. This overt embrace of Christian nationalism, willingness to use strongman tactics and the power of the government to enforce so-called traditional values about family and sexuality.”Montgomery added: “We’ve actually seen some signs of that illiberalism and authoritarianism on the Trumpist right in their efforts to ban the teaching of racism in schools, in their aggressive attacks against LGBTQ materials and information in schools and libraries, and even their encouragement of harassment and violence that we’ve seen against election officials and school board members.“All those signs are signs of a disturbing embrace of authoritarianism on the US right and Orbán is a model and a hero for that to them.”Orbán has few bigger fans than Tucker Carlson, a Fox News host who interviewed him during a week-long broadcast from Hungary last year. Carlson has promoted “great replacement theory” – the baseless claim of a plot to turn white people into a minority through immigration – in 400 of his shows, according to an analysis by the New York Times.Orbán’s visit to the US came amid backlash over anti-migrant remarks in which he warned that Europeans must not “become peoples of mixed race” and cited The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 French novel by Jean Raspail that portrays a dystopia in which a flotilla of south Asian people invade France. The novel has also been promoted by Trump allies such as Bannon and Stephen Miller.Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said: “Orbán represents a quiet part out loud element of today’s Republican party. That quiet part out loud is the overt appeal to racial politics, the not-bothering-to-hide-it white supremacy element of the global alt-right and authoritarian movement. Donald Trump was the thing that let it loose in the US.“Orbán has struck a set of blows against the media in Hungary, which is one of their main targets here. He has overtly embraced the sort of white replacement politics that are so popular with the Tucker Carlson set and a lot of the other folks that are members of the American Maga [Make America great again] movement.”Wilson, author of Everything Trump Touches Dies, added: “Those things have all added up to giving Orbán a kind of fanboy following in the US of people who were once conservative Republicans and who are now racially driven authoritarian wannabes. He’s the guy who’s pulling it off at a scale that Donald Trump didn’t achieve in the US.”That appeal includes a stealth attack on democracy. Critics say that Hungary’s judiciary, media and other institutions are suffering death by a thousand cuts as Orbán slowly and surely consolidates power. His rightwing Fidesz party has drawn legislative districts in Hungary in a way that makes it very difficult for opposition parties to win seats – not dissimilar to partisan gerrymandering efforts for state legislative and congressional seats in America. The process currently favors Republicans because they control more of the state legislatures that create those boundaries.And at CPAC, purveyors of Trump’s “big lie” – the false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him – held prominent slots. Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow, pushed preposterous conspiracy theories about voting machines. Several speakers denounced the congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection as a sham.Kurt Bardella, an adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said of Orbán: “They see a blueprint for fascism. They see someone who embodies the Republican party’s values of obstructing free and fair elections, of undermining democratic institutions, of expanding government power and politicising the judicial branch, marginalising minority communities and corrupting the pillars of a free society.“When you talk about an autocratic regime, that’s what Prime Minister Orbán is in Hungary and it’s exactly the blueprint that Republicans are hoping to follow here in the United States of America. It’s not surprising in the least that, especially in a place like CPAC Texas, these rightwing white nationalists are embracing someone like Orbán.”Earlier this year, when CPAC held an event in Europe, it naturally chose Hungary. Orbán remains an outlier on the continent – for now. Le Pen lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, though she gained the far right’s biggest share of the vote yet. In Italy Giorgia Meloni, leader of a party with neofascist origins, is strongly positioned to become prime minister after snap elections this autumn.Robert P Jones, founder and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington and author of White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, said: “There is this identifiable movement. The difference in many of the European countries is it is represented in minority parties.“In the US now, I think it’s safe to say that this ethno-religious vision of the country has taken over one of our two major political parties. Even demographically speaking, nearly seven in 10 Republicans are white and Christian today in a country that’s only 44% white and Christian. You can see that identity taking hold as the animating beating heart of the party. It’s a really dangerous situation.”TopicsCPACThe far rightViktor OrbánUS politicsRepublicansHungaryfeaturesReuse this content More

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    US Capitol attack: militia member gets longest prison sentence yet

    US Capitol attack: militia member gets longest prison sentence yetMan with ties to Three Percenters, who said he planned to violently drag Pelosi from building, sentenced to seven years An associate of the far-right Three Percenters militia group has been sentenced to more than seven years in prison for his role in storming the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.It is the longest sentence imposed so far among hundreds of cases related to the insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump who sought to stop the official congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory over his Republican rival.Prosecutors said Guy Reffitt had told fellow members of the Texas Three Percenters militia group that he planned to drag the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi out of the Capitol building by her ankles “with her head hitting every step on the way down”, according to a court filing.Reffitt was sentenced in Washington DC on Monday after being convicted by a jury in March of obstructing Congress’ joint session, of interfering with police officers outside the Capitol and of threatening his two teenage children if they reported him to law enforcement.Justice department prosecutors recommended a 15-year prison sentence for Reffitt, with the duration warranted “for terrorism”.The longest sentence before Reffitt’s 7.25-year term was handed down was five years and three months, for two men who admitted assaulting police officers at the Capitol.Reffitt’s defense had asked for no more than two years in prison.Videos captured the confrontation between outnumbered US Capitol police officers and a mob of people, including Reffitt, who approached them on the west side of the building that afternoon, shortly after Trump had held a rally calling on the crowd to go to the Capitol and urging supporters to “fight like hell” to keep him in power.Garland promises ‘justice without fear or favor’ as DoJ digs into Trump’s January 6 roleRead moreReffitt was armed with a Smith & Wesson pistol in a holster on his waist, carried zip-tie handcuffs and was wearing body armor and a helmet equipped with a video camera when he advanced on officers, according to prosecutors.He retreated after an officer pepper-sprayed him in the face, but he waved on other rioters who ultimately breached the building, prosecutors said.Reffitt’s 19-year-old son, Jackson, testified that his father had told him and his sister, then 16, that they would be traitors if they reported him to authorities and warned them that “traitors get shot”.The Three Percenters movement refers to the myth that only 3% of Americans fought in the revolutionary war against the British.Reffitt lived with his wife and children in Wylie, Texas, a Dallas suburb. He drove to Washington with Rocky Hardie, a fellow member of the militia group.Hardie testified that both of them attended Trump’s rally.More than 840 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the riot. More than 340 of them have pleaded guilty and more than 220 have been sentenced, with nearly half of them receiving terms of imprisonment. Approximately 150 others have trial dates stretching into 2023.Reffitt is one of seven Capitol riot defendants to get a jury trial so far. Jurors have convicted all seven on all counts.The Department of Justice has not ruled out Trump and members of his cohort from its widening criminal investigation into events surrounding January 6 as well as the insurrection itself.The attorney general, Merrick Garland, last week pledged “to bring to justice everybody who is criminally responsible for interfering with the peaceful transfer of power” and to pursue wrongdoing “without fear or favor”.Separately, a bipartisan House select committee is investigating events leading up to, on and immediately after January 6 and has held a series of public hearings that are expected to resume in the fall, that also examine Trump’s role.TopicsUS Capitol attackThe far rightnewsReuse this content More