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

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      ‘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

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

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      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

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      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

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      America First is laying plans to perpetuate Trumpism beyond Trump

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      America First is laying plans to perpetuate Trumpism beyond TrumpThe rightwing group is planning a future more authoritarian, more extreme and more ruthless – with or without the former president He spoke in lurid detail of cities overrun by violent crime. He railed against the media, deep state and liberal elites. And he touted his wall with a dire warning: “Millions of illegal aliens are stampeding across our wide open borders, pouring into our country. It’s an invasion.”Donald Trump’s return to Washington this week was deja vu all over again. The former US president’s 90-minute speech at a luxury hotel was eerily reminiscent of the nativist-populist campaign that won him the White House in 2016. But while Trump himself never evolves, his audience this time around was different.While the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a rightwing thinktank, was happy to indulge the garrulous showman at its inaugural summit, it also maintained a cold-eyed focus on the future. Over two days Trump’s allies and alumni laid out a blueprint for a return to power and a second term more authoritarian, more extreme and more ruthless than the first.The institute – evidently untroubled by the associations of the phrase “America First” with Nazi sympathisers who wanted to keep the US out of the second world war – has 150 staff, including nine former Trump administration cabinet officials and more than 50 former senior staff and officials. Familiar faces such as Kellyanne Conway, Larry Kudlow and Mark Meadows were feted at the conference.The AFPI is led by Brooke Rollins, a former domestic policy adviser in the White House, who boasted how the 15-month-old organisation put “boots on the ground” in 32 states on issues from “election integrity to school choice and patriotic education to health care transparency to taxes and spending to fatherhood initiatives to border security to big tech censorship”.The institute has sued Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for alleged censorship, she added, while fighting Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates all the way to the supreme court and opposing his Build Back Better plan for climate and social spending.Critics have described the AFPI as a “grift” for Trump hangers-on to make money but others perceive a “White House in waiting”, determined to avoid the mistakes of his uniquely turbulent presidency and, through 22 “policy centres”, guarantee the survival of Trumpism beyond Trump.Conway, a former senior counselor to the president, told the Guardian: “It certainly is a way to preserve the legacy and for some people it’s also a way to make sure that the entire body of work of the America First movement is all in one place. It’s about policies and principles, not about personalities and politics.”She added: “I actually believe, and I’ve heard Brooke Rollins say more than once or twice, privately and publicly, that we have this in place in case President Trump runs again and, if he doesn’t, then it’s in place for whomever runs again.“Whoever the Republican nominee is next time, whether it’s Trump or someone else, will run the way all of these Republican candidates for House and Senate and governor this time, with very few exceptions if any, are running on the America First agenda. They all are doing that this time.”The summit revelled in apocalyptic portrayals of Biden and Democrats posing an existential threat to the American way of life. It also described America First principles such as making the economy work for all, putting patients and doctors back in charge of healthcare, protecting the second amendment right to bear arms and giving parents more control over the education of their children.The list of priorities included “finish the wall, deliver peace through strength, make America energy independent, make it easy to vote and hard to cheat, fighting government corruption by draining the swamp”.Handouts of reading material offered another insight. A “parent toolkit” warned of the perils of “wokeness”, “critical race theory” and “the 1619 Project”, citing examples such as an elementary school in Philadelphia that “forced fifth-grade students to simulate a black power rally”. It offered advice on how to run for school boards.An op-ed by Rollins about the supreme court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion quoted the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war: “Just rejoice at that news.”A document on school safety and gun violence emphasised fortifying schools, improving access to mental health services and “understanding the relationship between culture and violence” rather than limiting access to firearms. Another paper was entitled: “Fatherlessness and its effects on American society”.During one panel discussion, Rick Perry, a former energy secretary, insisted that the next Republican administration would not be “genuflecting at the altar of the religion of environmentalism”, adding: “We don’t need to apologise to anybody for being for fossil fuels and how they have changed the world that we live in today, the flourishing of the world.”The gathering also heard about plans to follow through on what Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist, described as the “deconstruction of the administrative state”, centralising power in the presidency like other strongmen around the world.In his speech on Tuesday, Trump said: “We need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy or, at a minimum, just want to keep their jobs. Congress should pass historic reforms empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent or unnecessary for the job can be told – did you ever hear this? – ‘You’re fired. Get out. You’re fired.’ Have to do it. Deep state.”The comments followed recent in-depth media reporting about the dramatic scope and scale of planning for President Trump 2.0. The Axios website described how his aides are aiming to transform the federal government by replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists to him and America First.Axios wrote that the plan owes much to an executive order known as “Schedule F” that was secretly developed in the second half of Trump’s presidency only to be thwarted by his election defeat.The site added: “The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the justice department – including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the state department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say.”The AFPI could prove central to this authoritarian vision. Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House of Representatives, drew a comparison with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank that he said was crucial to the Ronald Reagan administration, to the extent that Reagan gave each cabinet secretary a copy of its experts’ report and told them to implement it.“The America First Policy Institute is going to do for the next few years what the Heritage Foundation did in 1979, 1980,” Gingrich said. “I think because of the experience over four years under President Trump, we have a seasoned enough cadre that, if we work at it methodically, we can actually have enormous impact on profoundly reshaping the federal government.”Trump remained the undisputed master of the AFPI universe in Washington, with some panelists expressing nostalgic yearning for what they perceived as the golden age of his presidency, seemingly oblivious to the revelations of the congressional committee investigating his role in the deadly January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.Rollins described him as “one of the greatest Americans of all time”. Board chair Linda McMahon added: “Our nation greatly misses President Trump and we need his voice and perspective more than ever.” Senator Lindsey Graham opined that Trump was “good” for the Republican party and proclaimed: “I hope he runs again.”But the thinktank is also seeking to trace an ideological thread in the chaos and carnage of the Trump years, laying the foundation for the future of America First after he has left the political stage or if the mantle passes to another Republican such as Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida.Marc Lotter, chief communications officer at AFPI, said: “There’s no question that President Trump is the visionary that put all this in place and started it but the voters will decide who should carry that leadership forward and, if they’re America First, then they’ll have the benefit of our work.”He added: “One of the differences between AFPI and many of our fellow folks in the conservative think space is we were actually the ones there doing it in the White House and so know what you need to do when you hit the ground running, whether it is in January ’23, when America First retakes control of Congress, or in a state house or a governor’s office, or eventually in ’25 in the White House. That’s what we’re preparing for.”Policy experts remain sceptical of the AFPI. Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “I looked at the website yesterday and I was astonished by the number of people who appear to be in salaried positions and also by the unimpressive and unoriginal quality of what they turned out on the policy front.“A small team of legislative assistants to a Republican congressman could have written papers with those titles in a week because there’s nothing very original about being pro-patriotic and pro-family in the Republican party. Let me know if they come up with anything more impressive than that.”But Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton, also noted the Axios report about Trump acolytes’ plans to purge disloyal civil servants. “A second Trump term would be even more dangerous than the first because they now realise how unprepared they were to assume power,” he added.“I don’t think they’re going to make that same mistake again, and they now have a much clearer idea of what to do to institutionalise their power should they regain it. The next two and a half years will be a game for very high stakes in the United States.”TopicsRepublicansThe far rightDonald TrumpUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party

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      Newt and the Never Trumpers: Gingrich, Tim Miller and the fate of the Republican party In two new books, a partisan warrior and a repentant operative paint an alarming portrait of a party gone rogueIn 1994, after 40 years in the wilderness, a Republican party led by Newt Gingrich recaptured the House of Representatives. Eventually, scandals of his own making, the impeachment of Bill Clinton and a drubbing in the 1998 midterms forced Gingrich to step down. But he did not leave public life.Newt Gingrich: Democrats are trying to ‘brainwash the entire next generation’Read moreThe former Georgia congressman ran for the presidential nomination in 2012, seamlessly adapted to the rise of Donald Trump in 2016, and kept on publishing all the while. His latest book, the catchily titled Defeating Big Government Socialism, comes as his party anticipates another congressional takeover in November.Tim Miller is another long-term Republican operative, if not a frontline politician. He served in a number of GOP campaigns, demonstrating media savvy and a knack for opposition research. After Jeb Bush left the presidential race in 2016, Miller emerged as vocal Trump critic. Now, in the footsteps of Never Trumpers Rick Wilson and Stuart Stevens, he has penned a political memoir. His subtitle – A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell – refers to a route many would say was partly paved by Gingrich.The former speaker’s new book is heavy on familiar bombast and predictably short on introspection. Its opening pages deliver a familiar beat-down of China and its financial allies.“Many of our elites refuse to even recognize the threat from Beijing,” Gingrich writes. “For many, it is because they make so much money from China.”He would have done better to check his own financial disclosures.By 2018, Newt and Callista Gingrich – ambassador to the Vatican under Trump – had invested at least $100,000 and possibly as much as $250,000 in certificates of deposit issued by the Bank of China.For what it’s worth, Trump maintained a bank account in China. Further, in such spirit of US-Sino amity, the late Sheldon Adelson funded Gingrich’s 2012 presidential run with $20m, courtesy of the blackjack tables and roulette wheels of his casino in Macau.In other words, Gingrich was cool with China until he wasn’t. Government records also show a $368,334 advance for a book with a simple working title: Trump vs China.Gingrich has long known that reality need not be a constraint. He has compared himself to William Pitt the Younger, the British prime minister who was in office for nearly 19 years, rather than Gingrich’s four as speaker. Gingrich has also suggested Brad Pitt should play him onscreen.A little more substantively, Gingrich uses his new book to demand fiscal responsibility, hammering Joe Biden and the Democrats for budgetary profligacy. The first chapter is titled “Big Government Socialism Isn’t Working and Can’t”. Once again, Gingrich should have thought twice.Gingrich’s presidential run to nowhere doubled as a poor man’s Trump University – the scheme by which Trump pulled in money for a product somewhere between shoddy and non-existent. According to the Federal Elections Commission, the Gingrich 2012 campaign remains more than $4.6m in debt. As Business Insider put it, “No presidential campaign from any election cycle owes creditors more money.”As for extravagance, in 2011 Gingrich maintained a credit line of between $250,001 and $500,000 at Tiffany’s, the Fifth Avenue jeweler.On the page, Gingrich also blames the left for America’s high Covid death rate – despite significantly lower post-vaccine mortality in Democratic states. So it goes: at a recent rally in Alaska, Trump declined to use the word “vaccine”, lest he anger the crowd.In Congress, Gingrich wrapped himself in gun rights, opposing the assault weapons ban in Clinton’s 1994 anti-crime bill and subsequently sending a written promise to the National Rifle Association that no gun control legislation would be considered as long as he was speaker.The assault weapons ban expired almost 20 years ago. As Gingrich’s latest book comes out, mass shootings fill the headlines. To the author, no matter: “The Founding Fathers insisted on the second amendment so that armed citizens would make a dictatorship impossible.”Amid all this, Gingrich calls for civility. In case folks forgot, he was the speaker who shut down the government in a snit after he was seated in the back of Air Force One en route to the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and also called Hillary Clinton a bitch. How will his speakership be remembered? The late Robert Teeter, pollster to George HW Bush, accurately observed: “Gingrich makes a great backbencher.”So to Tim Miller. Like Lot’s wife, he cannot resist looking back. At the same time, he is overly repentant. But his attempt to explain why he stuck with the Republican party for as long as he did is revealing.Miller lets us know that he is gay, married and a dad. His rationales for rejecting his party are understandable but not necessarily satisfying. For him and other Republican operatives, the game was fun – until it wasn’t. The metamorphosis of the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump occurred in broad daylight, a train wreck a long time coming. The Never Trumpers could have spoken out sooner.As long ago as 1968, clashes between demonstrators and Chicago police during the 1968 Democratic convention offered a glimpse of simmering cultural tensions. At the same time, the discontent and racism voiced by the Alabama governor George Wallace found a home with a Republican party following Richard Nixon’s southern strategy. Fast forward three decades and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and Pat Buchanan’s quests for the presidency revealed the darker impulses of the pre-Trump right.Working-class resentment and pitchfork populism appeared long before the Iraq war and the great recession. The rise of Trumpism seems entirely predictable.Miller does deliver a searing indictment of officials and appointees who became Trump’s enablers, listing no less than 11 categories. His portraits of Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s senior senator, and Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, are devastating.“More than anything,” he writes, Graham “just wanted to be on the golf cart next to Trump. To be on the right hand of the father. Whether or not Trump did as Graham asked was merely icing on the cake.”Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative factsRead moreAs reward for doubling as a human doormat, Graham now battles a subpoena from prosecutors in Fulton county, Georgia, concerning his part in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The senator cloaks himself in congressional immunity and invokes the constitution. It turns out he was fine with attempting to subvert an election but doesn’t like the idea of appearing before a grand jury. Funny, that.As Miller puts it, the same obsequious spirit made Spicer a peddler of lies for the ages, “happy to put up with Trump’s lunacy as long as he became a star. He didn’t see anything wrong with shining a poison apple … And you’d better believe he’d do it all over again.”Both Gingrich and Spicer may get another chance to ride the Trump rodeo. The 45th president is gearing up for 2024. By then, Biden and Gingrich will be octogenarians, Trump 78. Who says America is no country for old men?
      Defeating Big Government Socialism: Saving America’s Future is published in the US by Center Street

      Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell is published in the US by Harper
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