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      Threats against US lawmakers rose ahead of 6 January anniversary, agency says

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      Threats against US lawmakers rose ahead of 6 January anniversary, agency saysFBI and DHS flagged content that could ‘inspire violence by lone offenders against government officials’ The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned of an increase in extremist content and threats against US lawmakers in the days leading up to the anniversary of the 6 January insurrection, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.Historians mark 6 January with urgent warning on threats to US democracyRead moreThe memo, sent on Thursday to state and local law enforcement, said that DHS had no indication of a specific and credible plot, but that the agency and the FBI had “identified new content online that could inspire violence, particularly by lone offenders, and could be directed against political and other government officials, including members of Congress, state and local officials, and high-profile members of political parties, including in locations outside of [Washington DC]”.John Cohen, the head of DHS’s office of intelligence and analysis, outlined a range of content on “extremist related platforms” that was concerning.In one instance, an “unknown individual” posted a video online listing 95 members of Congress who, the video claimed, were involved in voting to certify the “fraudulent” presidential election, echoing far-right misinformation that has spread since last year. The video called for the Congress members to be hanged in front of the White House and was posted on a forum that hosts QAnon conspiracy theories and was reposted by Telegram users and on blogs.The video was viewed more than 60,000 times across platforms, the memo said. Cohen also warned of a separate posting that referenced 6 January “as an appropriate day to conduct assassinations against named Democratic political figures, including [the president], because of the perceived fraudulent election”.The US Secret Service, the Capitol Police and the DC Metropolitan Police agencies were aware of the online activity and have initiated investigations “as appropriate”, Cohen wrote in the memo, adding that the Federal Protective Service had also expanded patrols in and around federal facilities across the US. The memo comes amid reports of a sharp rise in threats against lawmakers over the last year.DHS had recently warned that the US was facing a heightened threat environment across the country, as threat actors “continue to exploit online forums to influence and spread violent extremist narratives and promote violent activity”. The agency said it would continue to monitor the uptick in threats in the coming days.After federal authorities were criticized last year for failing to act on warning signs on social media before the 6 January attack, DHS established a new domestic terrorism branch in its intelligence office, which has been focused on expanded tracking of online threats.Earlier on Thursday, Joe Biden denounced Donald Trump for spreading a “web of lies” about the 2020 election and accused Trump and his allies of holding a “dagger at the throat of American democracy”.TopicsUS Capitol attackFBISecret ServiceThe far rightUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The insurrection is only the tip of the iceberg | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The insurrection is only the tip of the icebergSidney BlumenthalBehind the insurrection of 6 January was a coup plot that was months in the making, and which involved a dastardly cast of characters After thousands of posts appeared for weeks on a website called TheDonald.win detailing plans for the 6 January attack on the Capitol, including how to form a “wall of death” to force police to abandon defensive positions; after Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned his senior aides of “a Reichstag moment” like the 1933 burning of the German parliament that Hitler used to seize dictatorial power; after insurrectionists smashed several ground floor windows of the Capitol, the only ones out of 658 they somehow knew were not reinforced, that allowed rioters to pour inside; after marching to the chamber of the House chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”; after pounding on the locked doors; and as the Capitol police led members in a run through the tunnels under the Capitol for safe passage to the Longworth Building, Congressman Jody Hice, a Republican of Georgia, raced by a Democratic colleague, who told me Hice was screaming into his phone: “You screwed it up, y’all screwed it all up!”A year after the Capitol attack, what has the US actually learned? | Cas MuddeRead moreHice, an evangelical minister, professor of preaching at a Southern Baptist seminary, and radio talkshow host before his election in 2014, has notably declared that freedom of religion should not apply to Muslims and that the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people at an elementary school by a deranged shooter occurred because liberals were “kicking God out of the public square”.He was tasked to present a challenge to Georgia’s electors before the joint congressional session convened on 6 January to certify the electoral college victory of Joe Biden. Hice performed his assignment as part of the far-rightwing Republican faction, the Freedom Caucus, directed by Congressman Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who was in constant touch that day with Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff and former Freedom Caucus member, and a watchful Trump himself. Just as the violent insurrection launched, and paramilitary groups spearheaded medieval style hand-to-hand combat against the police and burst into the Capitol, Hice posted on Instagram a photo of himself headed into the House chamber, with the caption, “This is our 1776 moment.”To whom was Hice shouting that “y’all” had screwed it all up? It seems likely it was Meadows. And what had they screwed up? They had screwed up the coup that led to the insurrection.The insurrection was not the coup itself. It was staged as the coup was failing. The insurrection and the coup were distinct, but the insurrection emerged from the coup. It has been a common conceptual error to consider the insurrection alone to be the coup. The coup, however, was an elaborate plot developed over months to claim that the votes in the key swing states were fraudulent, for Mike Pence as the presiding officer of the joint session of the Congress to declare on that basis that the certification of the presidential election on the constitutionally mandated date could not be done, to force that day to pass into a twilight zone of irresolution, for House Republicans to hold the floor brandishing the endless claims of fraud, to move the decision to the safe harbor of the House of Representatives, voting by states, with a majority of 26 controlled by the Republican party, to deny both the popular vote and the electoral college vote to retain Trump in office, for protests to breakout at federal buildings, and for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose law and order.Presumably, any gesture to forestall the coup by the joint chiefs would be communicated at once to Trump from his agent, Kash Patel, a former aide to far-right representative Devin Nunes), sworn enemy of the “Deep State”, embedded as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, and presidential orders would be issued to countermand. The rally on 6 January – “will be wild”, Trump promised – was a last-ditch attempt to intimidate the vice-president with the threat of violence into fulfilling his indispensable role in the coup, to lend support to the Republicans objecting to certification, and to delay the proceedings into a constitutional no man’s land.The insurrection may also have been intended to provide a pretext for precipitating clashes with anti-Trump demonstrators, following the example of the street violence and multiple knife stabbings perpetrated in Washington by the neo-Nazi Proud Boys chanting “1776” on 12 December, and which would then be an excuse for invoking the Insurrection Act. In the criminal contempt citation of Meadows for his refusal to testify before the select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, the committee noted that Meadows sent an email the day before the assault to an unnamed individual “that the national guard would be present to ‘protect pro-Trump people’ and that many more would be available on standby”. From whom would “pro-Trump people” be protected?In the midst of the attack, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, managed to reach a preoccupied Trump, who was riveted viewing the unfolding chaos on television at the White House, closely monitoring whether the coup would finally succeed, taking phone calls from Jim Jordan and a host of collaborators, and fending off urgent pleas to call it off from his daughter Ivanka. Trump’s first reply to McCarthy was to repeat “the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol”, according to the Republican representative Jaime Herrera Beutler.McCarthy argued: “It’s not Antifa, it’s Maga. I know. I was there.” “Well, Kevin,” said Trump, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?” McCarthy inquired in an uncharacteristic display of testosterone that soon was replaced with his regular order of servility before Trump and Jordan. The absence of antifa, and McCarthy’s refusal in the heat of the moment to lend credence to the phantom menace, may have condemned any false-flag thought of invoking the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, the bayonet-ready national guard idly awaited orders for hours to quell the actual insurrection.The coup was thwarted by the justice department’s rejection of Trump’s strong-arm tactics, the Pentagon’s denunciation of any hint of imposing martial law, the rebuff by state election officials to Trump’s claims of fraud, and, finally, Pence’s refusal to utter his scripted lines. At the 6 January rally, Trump said: “I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election.” But Pence had already stated that he would do no such thing. Then, Trump said: “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more … So, we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol …” The insurrection was on.The coup was hardly Trump’s full-blown brainchild. It was packaged for him. It was adapted, enhanced and intensified from longstanding Republican strategies for voter suppression. The coup was a variation on the theme from a well-worn playbook. Trump eagerly grasped for the plan handed to him.More than a year before the election of 2020, in August 2019, conservative operatives in closely connected rightwing organizations began preparing a strategy for disputing election results. A “Political Process Working Group” focused on “election law and ballot integrity” was launched by Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), heavily funded by the Koch brothers’ dark money syndicate, the Donors Trust.Nelson is also a member of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP), composed of more than 400 rightwing Republican leaders, a roster that includes Ginni Thomas, the ubiquitous rightwing zealot and wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, vice-president of the conservative Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, “a $250m dark money operation” to pack the federal courts and deny Democratic appointments to the bench, according to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehead.The investigative reporter Anne Nelson, in her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes the CNP as a nexus of “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of rightwing Republican political operatives”.A board member of the CNP, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer at the center of a host of rightwing groups, assumed control over the Alec-originated project and moved it forward. She is also a board member of the Bradley Foundation, which is a major funder of conservative organizations, including Alec and the CNP. Most importantly, she has directed the Bradley Foundation to serve as the chief funder of a group of which she is chairman, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), a principal conservative organization seeking to purge voter rolls of minorities and immigrants, file suits that accuse local election officials of “fraud”, and attempt to overturn election results. At a February 2020 meeting of the CNP devoted to election tactics, the Pilf president, J Christian Adams, advised: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist and so forth.”Mitchell was instrumental in devising the blueprint for the coup. On 10 December 2020, 65 leading members of the CNP signed a succinct step-by-step summary of the completely elaborated plot that went little noticed except on the coup-friendly rightwing website Gateway Pundit:
      The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states – as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups – violated the constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories. There is no doubt President Donald J Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect. Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the electoral college to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean electoral college slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice-President Biden from these states. Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the US constitution.”
      Mitchell was by then a Trump campaign legal adviser, with direct access to Trump and working on the Georgia challenge to the results. The Trump campaign had filed a lawsuit a week earlier, on 4 December, claiming there were “literally tens of thousands of illegal votes”. On 30 December she sent the petition to Meadows with 1,800 pages of exhibits of supposed fraud, which Meadows promptly forwarded to the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, who was under tremendous pressure from Trump to intervene on his behalf to throw out the election results.“Pure insanity,” the acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, told Rosen. Meadows pressured Rosen again on 1 January. “Can you believe this?” Rosen wrote Donoghue. “I am not going to respond …” The next day, Trump called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to instruct him to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the vote deficit] we have, because we won the state”. Cleta Mitchell was on the call with Trump. “Well, Cleta, how do you respond to that? Maybe you tell me?” asked Trump. She accused Raffensperger of withholding records that would prove there were more than 20,000 fraudulent votes and rigged voting machines. “All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” said Trump.On 4 January, Trump brought Pence to the Oval Office to be pressured not to certify the results by a former Chapman University law professor, John Eastman, who was also a director of the Pilf that Mitchell chaired, and had been recruited to play professor to the slow-learning Pence, the Pygmalion of the putsch. Eastman had written a memo, “January 6 scenario”, laying out precisely how Pence should conduct the stoppage of the electoral college count to “create a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors …”Eastman’s memo filled in stage directions for Pence that followed the well-developed coup plot. All Pence had to do was repeat the lines he was given: the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. His general counsel, Greg Jacob, however, informed him that if he obeyed Trump he would “betray his oath to uphold our laws and the constitution of the United States. That was a fool’s errand.”Trump electors in the swing states had already met on 14 December to prepare to usurp the Biden ones. That day Trump summoned William Barr to the White House to demand his support for claims that the election returns in the swing states were fraudulent. Barr would have undoubtedly been aware of the meeting of the Trump electors rehearsing their part in the coup. Long having done Trump’s bidding from consciously lying about the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to aid Trump onward, he now reached a line he would not cross and told Trump that his assertions of fraud were “bullshit”. And then he resigned. He would have no part of the coup. In came Rosen, who was subjected to rounds of coercion.When Mitchell’s role was disclosed, the Washington law firm of Foley & Lardner where she was a partner forced her to resign on 5 January, the day before the insurrection. She had neglected to tell her partners of her work for Trump. The Senate judiciary committee, in its report, released on 7 October 2021, Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DoJ to Overturn the 2020 Election, recommended that Mitchell’s activities “warrant further investigation”.The sweeping nature of the coup, involving Republican operatives, major Republican donors, organizations and members of the Congress is starkly laid out in documents the House investigating committee has obtained under subpoena.The production of documents from Meadows revealed a 38-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled Options for 6 JAN, prepared by Phil Waldron, a retired army colonel expert in psychological warfare and proliferator of conspiracy theories who worked with Trump’s lawyers. Waldron said he spoke with Meadows “maybe eight to 10 times” and briefed members of Congress. Besides reiterating the basic elements of the coup – “VP Pence rejects the electors” – Waldron added that China and Venezuela had “INFLUENCE and CONTROL over US Voting infrastructure in at least 28 States”. He urged that all electronic ballots be declared “invalid” and that Trump should “Declare National Security Emergency”.Bernard Kerik, working with Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani to spin fantasies of fraud, turned over to the House committee under subpoena a document, Strategic Communications Plan, “to educate the public on the fraud numbers” and “to disregard the fraudulent vote count and certify the duly-elected President Trump”. Replete with fallacious assertions (“Fulton County, GA, video of suitcases of fraudulent ballots”), it detailed the extensive reach of the “big lie” campaign, encompassing “Identified Legislative Leaders in each swing state”, legal teams in the key states, and ranked social media influencers to spread the message: “YOU CANNOT LET AMERICA ITSELF BE STOLEN BY CRIMINALS.” Kerik, a convicted felon, guilty of numerous crimes from tax fraud to lying under oath, rose from Giuliani’s driver to New York City police commissioner and incredibly the minister of the interior of Iraq, before serving a four-year sentence in Rikers Island jail. Like convicted felons Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, he was granted a pardon by Trump that allowed him to participate in the coup with impunity.Though under subpoena, Kerik refused to turn over to the House committee a document entitled “DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS”. The date on Kerik’s letter, 17 December 2020, was the day that former general Mike Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser, gave an interview to the far-right Newsmax calling on Trump to “seize every single one” of the voting machines “around the country”, and “take military capabilities” in the key states to “basically rerun an election”. Flynn’s notions were echoed in the Waldron PowerPoint and in the Kerik letter.On 18 December, Flynn met at the White House with Trump at which he proposed invoking the National Emergency Act. (Flynn had circulated a call for “Limited Martial Law To Hold New Election” weeks earlier, on 1 December.) The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, and the army chief of staff, Gen James McConville, issued a statement on the day Flynn met with Trump disavowing Flynn and any suggestion of martial law. “There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election,” they stated.The criminal citation of Meadows for contempt from the House committee to the justice department notes that he was in “nonstop” communication “throughout the day of January 6” with Kash Patel at the Pentagon, and “among other things, Mr Meadows apparently knows if and when Mr Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the national guard’s response to the Capitol riot.” The House resolution also references Meadows’ contacts with Republican state legislators, “private individuals who planned and organized a January 6 rally”, and members of Congress prepared to object to the election certification – a panoply of people involved in the coup. The committee also released texts from Fox News personalities to Meadows on 6 January imploring him to get Trump to stop the insurrection. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy,” wrote an anxious Laura Ingraham. The familiar relationship suggested the intertwining of Fox News as the chief outlet for Trump messaging about the “big lie” up to the insurrection. But the ties went further.On 4 January 2022, the House committee requested the voluntary testimony of Sean Hannity as a “fact witness”. The committee wrote him that it had in its possession dozens of texts from Hannity to Meadows “indicating that you had advance knowledge regarding President Trump’s and his legal team’s planning for January 6th”, and “that you were expressing concerns and providing advice to the president and certain White House staff regarding that planning”. On the evening of 5 January, Hannity texted Meadows: “Pence pressure. WH counsel will leave.” He also appeared to have had “a conversation directly with president on the evening of January 5th (and perhaps at other times) regarding his planning for January 6th”. What did Sean Hannity know and when did he know it?When the riot was finally subdued and the Congress reconvened to certify the election, the House Republicans still rose to object. Hice, with QAnon proponent representative Marjorie Taylor Greene standing at his side, declared: “Myself, members of the Georgia delegation and some 74 of my Republican colleagues object to the electoral votes from the state of Georgia on the grounds the election conducted on November 3 was faulty and fraudulent due to unilateral actions by the secretary of state to unlawfully change the state’s election process.”Of the thousands involved in the Capitol riot, 725 so far have been charged with various crimes. But those sentenced, mostly true believer foot soldiers of the Trump mob, were not the originators of the coup, the most dangerous sedition against the constitutional order since secession. Nor were the leaders of the militias, of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, present at the creation.The 6 January attack was a spawn of the coup; it was its effect, not its alpha and omega. Only those incited to sacrifice themselves in the Pickett’s Charge of the insurrection have paid the price, but none of those who conceived the coup a year earlier have been brought before a federal grand jury, charged, or apparently are even being investigated by the Department of Justice.It would be as if only the Watergate burglars were prosecuted and that was the end of the affair. All of the higher-ups involved in the scandal – chief of staff Bob Haldeman, his deputy John Ehrlichman, attorney general John Mitchell, the entire cast of complicit characters and President Richard Nixon – would have remained untouched in power.There will be more to know about the coup from the House investigation. The committee has gathered more than 30,000 documents and interviewed more than 300 witnesses. Two, three, many John Deans may testify before the cameras. Criminal referrals will probably be made.The coup of 2020 gestated within the central organizations of the Republican right, and it was a learning experiment for the Republican party as a whole. Hice has announced he will run in the Republican primary against Raffensperger for Georgia secretary of state. He is only one of the Republicans focused on taking over the states’ electoral apparatus to ensure that the next time there will be no obstacles. By December, Republicans had proposed 262 bills “to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with the non-partisan administration of elections”, with 32 becoming law in 17 states, according to the non-profit Protect Democracy group.The threat of intimidation, coercion and intimidation hangs over American politics. The coup may have failed, but it rolls on.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
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      A year after the Capitol attack, what has the US actually learned? | Cas Mudde

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      A year after the Capitol attack, what has the US actually learned?Cas MuddeThe government is finally taking the threat of far-right militia groups seriously. But the larger threat are the Republican legislators who continue to recklessly undermine democracy One year ago, he was frantically barricading the doors to the House gallery to keep out the violent mob. Today, he calls the insurrection a “bold-faced lie” and likens the event to “a normal tourist visit”. The story of Andrew Clyde, who represents part of my – heavily gerrymandered – liberal college town in the House of Representatives, is the story of the Republican party in 2021. It shows a party that had the opportunity to break with the anti-democratic course under Donald Trump, but was too weak in ideology and leadership to do so, thereby presenting a fundamental threat to US democracy in 2022 and beyond.The risk of a coup in the next US election is greater now than it ever was under Trump | Laurence H Tribe Read moreClyde is illustrative of another ongoing development, the slow but steady takeover of the Republican party by new, and often relatively young, Trump supporters. In 2015, when his massive gun store on the outskirts of town was still flying the old flag of Georgia, which includes the Confederate flag, he was a lone, open supporter of then-presidential candidate Trump, with several large pro-Trump and anti-“fake news” signs adorning his gun store. Five years later, Clyde was elected to the House of Representatives as part of a wave of Trump-supporting novices, mostly replacing Republicans who had supported President Trump more strategically than ideologically.With his 180-degree turn about the 6 January insurrection, Clyde is back in line with the majority of the Republican base, as a recent UMass poll shows. After initial shock, and broad condemnation, Republicans have embraced the people who stormed the Capitol last year, primarily referring to the event as a “protest” (80%) and to the insurrectionists as “protesters” (62%), while blaming the Democratic party (30%), the Capitol police (23%), and the inevitable antifa (20%) for what happened. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Republicans (75%) believe the country should “move on” from 6 January, rather than learn from it. And although most don’t care either way, one-third of Republicans say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who refuses to denounce the insurrection.The increased anti-democratic threat of the Republican party can also be seen in the tidal wave of voting restrictions proposed and passed in 2021. The Brennan Center for Justice counted a stunning 440 bills “with provisions that restrict voting access” introduced across all but one of the 50 US states, the highest number since the Center started tracking them 10 years ago. A total of 34 such laws were passed in 19 different states last year, and 88 bills in nine states are being carried over to the 2022 legislative term. Worryingly, Trump-backed Republicans who claim the 2020 election was stolen are running for secretary of state in various places where Trump unsuccessfully challenged the results.At the same time, the situation of the non-Republican far right is a bit less clear. While some experts warn that the militia movement, in particular, has turned toward more violent extremism, the violent fringes of the far right are also confronted by a much more vigilant state. This is particularly true for groups linked to the 6 January attacks, such as the Oath Keepers, which has faced increasing public and state scrutiny after 21 of its members were alleged to have participated in the attacks. Similarly, Proud Boys leaders are facing trial over the event, and some have agreed to cooperate with authorities in their investigations.After decades of the US government ignoring or downplaying the threat of far-right violence, President Biden has made “domestic violent extremism” a key concern of his new administration, regularly singling out white supremacists as “the most lethal terrorist threat in the homeland”. Partly in response to reports that former military personnel were prominently involved in the 6 January attack, the Pentagon has acknowledged “the threat from domestic extremists, particularly those who espouse white supremacist or white nationalist ideologies,” to the military and the country at large.This is not to say that the state is in control of the violent far right. While more than 700 suspected insurrectionists have been arrested, only some 50-plus have been convicted so far, mostly facing fines and probation, after judges rebuffed the DoJ. And media reports found that both the military and law enforcement have struggled to rid themselves of far-right ideas and supporters. But potentially violent far-right individuals and groups are now surveilled much more than they have been since 9/11 – we’re in a moment perhaps more similar to the short period after the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, still the most deadly domestic terrorist attack in US history.In short, a year after the Capitol attack, US democracy is in a different but still fragile place. Most importantly, the extremists are no longer in the White House, encouraging and protecting the far-right mob. In fact, the state is more aware of and vigilant towards the far-right threat than ever before this century. The threat of far-right direct violence is probably less severe than before – not because the movement is weaker, but because the state is stronger.At the same time, the Republican party has become increasingly united and naked in its extremism, which denies both the anti-democratic character of the 6 January attack and the legitimacy of Biden’s presidency, and is passing an unprecedented number of voter restriction bills in preparation for the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential elections. As long as the White House mainly focuses on fighting “domestic violent extremism”, and largely ignores or minimizes the much more lethal threat to US democracy posed by non-violent extremists, the US will continue to move closer and closer to an authoritarian future.
      Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist
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      Extremist groups continue to ‘metastasize and recruit’ after Capitol attack, study finds

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      Extremist groups continue to ‘metastasize and recruit’ after Capitol attack, study findsThe report says that while some groups were gripped with paranoia by the arrests, others began targeting local politics In the year since the 6 January insurrection, many US extremist groups haven’t fully recovered from blows landed by increased scrutiny of law enforcement and purges from big tech social media platforms, a new report has found.Will the hundreds of Capitol rioters in court ever be held truly accountable?Read moreThe research, by the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, found that 12 months after the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob some far-right groups had been gripped by paranoia as authorities traced and arrested participants. But others had reorganized, often with an emphasis on local-level politics and a developing eco-system of far-right social media.The report warned some groups have “made troubling progress by shifting to alternative online platforms, embracing rhetoric to engage more broadly with the mainstream conservative base and engaging in new political activities, particularly public health and education issues at the local level”.The report’s author, Jared Holt, combined investigative reporting along with monitoring and analysis of open source information to produce a report on the characteristics of US extremism movements a year after the Capitol attack.The report details how extremist movements were riddled with paranoia following the capitol riot, with members holding widespread suspicion of each other and law enforcement, leading many members to be discouraged from attending public events.Big tech companies also purged many extremists off their platforms, forcing them to disperse across the internet on to smaller, more obscure sites, without a unifying place to congregate online. The Guardian has reported how the adoption of smaller platforms and less sophisticated alt-tech made extremists vulnerable to data scrapes, breaches and hacks.The report links how some entrepreneurs have responded by creating alternative platforms, independent from current mainstream digital providers. The report quotes the Gab chief executive, Anrew Torba, who says he is trying to build a “parallel Christian economy”.The report warns of the rise of far-right influencers inside these alternative social media platforms and the dangers that they could bring.It said: “These developments offer extremists sufficient conditions to continue metastasizing and recruiting. Though most online tools adopted by extremists enable them to reach smaller audiences than those possible on mainstream social media, they may be more effective in intensifying the radicalization of individuals already engaged with them.”Some extremist movements have tried to re-enter the mainstream by hitching on to suburban conservative causes, even adopting traditional political methods like forming non-profits, phone banking and hosting conferences.“As fruitful opportunity for creating outrage and hate, extremists have embraced emotionally charged social issues as an entry vehicle into mainstream online discourse,” the report said.Far-right figures like the former top Trump aide Steven Bannon have encouraged a “precinct by precinct” strategy, a ground-up approach that focuses on local politics. The Guardian recently reported how far-right groups have shifted their focus to local communities.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

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      The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it

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      The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it The right has recognized that the system is in collapse, and it has a plan: violence and solidarity with treasonous far-right factionsNobody wants what’s coming, so nobody wants to see what’s coming.On the eve of the first civil war, the most intelligent, the most informed, the most dedicated people in the United States could not see it coming. Even when Confederate soldiers began their bombardment of Fort Sumter, nobody believed that conflict was inevitable. The north was so unprepared for the war they had no weapons.In Washington, in the winter of 1861, Henry Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, declared that “not one man in America wanted the civil war or expected or intended it”. South Carolina senator James Chestnut, who did more than most to bring on the advent of the catastrophe, promised to drink all the blood spilled in the entire conflict. The common wisdom at the time was that he would have to drink “not a thimble”.Next Civil War book illustrationThe United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible.The legal system grows less legitimate by the day. Trust in government at all levels is in freefall, or, like Congress, with approval ratings hovering around 20%, cannot fall any lower. Right now, elected sheriffs openly promote resistance to federal authority. Right now, militias train and arm themselves in preparation for the fall of the Republic. Right now, doctrines of a radical, unachievable, messianic freedom spread across the internet, on talk radio, on cable television, in the malls.The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. The Capitol police have seen threats against members of Congress increase by 107%. Fred Upton, Republican representative from Michigan, recently shared a message he had received: “I hope you die. I hope everybody in your family dies.” And it’s not just politicians but anyone involved in the running of the electoral system. Death threats have become a standard aspect of the work life of election supervisors and school board members. A third of poll workers, in the aftermath of 2020, said they felt unsafe.Under such conditions, party politics have become mostly a distraction. The parties and the people in the parties no longer matter much, one way or the other. Blaming one side or the other offers a perverse species of hope. “If only more moderate Republicans were in office, if only bipartisanship could be restored to what it was.” Such hopes are not only reckless but irresponsible. The problem is not who is in power, but the structures of power.The United States has burned before. The Vietnam war, civil rights protests, the assassination of JFK and MLK, Watergate – all were national catastrophes which remain in living memory. But the United States has never faced an institutional crisis quite like the one it is facing now. Trust in the institutions was much higher during the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act had the broad support of both parties. JFK’s murder was mourned collectively as a national tragedy. The Watergate scandal, in hindsight, was evidence of the system working. The press reported presidential crimes; Americans took the press seriously. The political parties felt they needed to respond to the reported corruption.You could not make one of those statements today with any confidence.Two things are happening at the same time. Most of the American right have abandoned faith in government as such. Their politics is, increasingly, the politics of the gun. The American left is slower on the uptake, but they are starting to figure out that the system which they give the name of democracy is less deserving of the name every year.An incipient illegitimacy crisis is under way, whoever is elected in 2022, or in 2024. According to a University of Virginia analysis of census projections, by 2040, 30% of the population will control 68% of the Senate. Eight states will contain half the population. The Senate malapportionment gives advantages overwhelmingly to white, non– college educated voters. In the near future, a Democratic candidate could win the popular vote by many millions of votes and still lose. Do the math: the federal system no longer represents the will of the American people.The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism.Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counter-terrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watchlist and determine that they are their friends.” The watchlists are among the most effective techniques of counter-terrorism, but the FBI cannot use them. The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.Recent calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias or policing techniques. The protesters are, in a sense, too hopeful. Activist white supremacists in positions of authority are the real threat to American order and security. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the government says, ‘Oh my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.”Anti-government patriots have used the reaction against Black Lives Matter effectively to build a base of support with law enforcement. “One of the best tactics was adopting the blue lives matter patch. I’m flabbergasted that police fell for that, that they actually support these groups,” German says. “It would be one thing if [anti-government patriots] had uniformly decided not to target police any more. But they haven’t. They’re still killing police. The police don’t seem to get it, that the people you’re coddling, you’re taking photographs with, are the same people who elsewhere kill.” The current state of American law enforcement reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces that provoke domestic terrorism.Just consider: in 2019, 36% of active duty soldiers claimed to have witnessed “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military”, according to the Military Times.At this supreme moment of crisis, the left has divided into warring factions completely incapable of confronting the seriousness of the moment. There are liberals who retain an unjustifiable faith that their institutions can save them when it is utterly clear that they cannot. Then there are the woke, educational and political elites dedicated to a discourse of willed impotence. Any institution founded by the woke simply eats itself – see TimesUp, the Women’s March, etc – becoming irrelevant to any but a diminishing cadre of insiders who spend most of their time figuring out how to shred whoever’s left. They render themselves powerless faster than their enemies can.What the American left needs now is allegiance, not allyship. It must abandon any imagined fantasies about the sanctity of governmental institutions that long ago gave up any claim to legitimacy. Stack the supreme court, end the filibuster, make Washington DC a state, and let the dogs howl, and now, before it is too late. The moment the right takes control of institutions, they will use them to overthrow democracy in its most basic forms; they are already rushing to dissolve whatever norms stand in the way of their full empowerment.The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.There will be those who say that warnings of a new civil war is alarmist. All I can say is that reality has outpaced even the most alarmist predictions. Imagine going back just 10 years and explaining that a Republican president would openly support the dictatorship of North Korea. No conspiracy theorist would have dared to dream it. Anyone who foresaw, foresaw dimly. The trends were apparent; their ends were not.It would be entirely possible for the United States to implement a modern electoral system, to restore the legitimacy of the courts, to reform its police forces, to root out domestic terrorism, to alter its tax code to address inequality, to prepare its cities and its agriculture for the effects of climate change, to regulate and to control the mechanisms of violence. All of these futures are possible. There is one hope, however, that must be rejected outright: the hope that everything will work out by itself, that America will bumble along into better times. It won’t. Americans have believed their country is an exception, a necessary nation. If history has shown us anything it’s that the world doesn’t have any necessary nations.The United States needs to recover its revolutionary spirit, and I don’t mean that as some kind of inspirational quote. I mean that, if it is to survive, the United States will have to recover its revolutionary spirit. The crises the United States now faces in its basic governmental functions are so profound that they require starting over. The founders understood that government is supposed to work for living people, rather than for a bunch of old ghosts. And now their ghostly constitution, worshipped like a religious document, is strangling the spirit that animated their enterprise, the idea that you mold politics to suit people, not the other way around.Does the country have the humility to acknowledge that its old orders no longer work? Does it have the courage to begin again? As it managed so spectacularly at the birth of its nationhood, the United States requires the boldness to invent a new politics for a new era. It is entirely possible that it might do so. America is, after all, a country devoted to reinvention.Once again, as before, the hope for America is Americans. But it is time to face what the Americans of the 1850s found so difficult to face: The system is broken, all along the line. The situation is clear and the choice is basic: reinvention or fall.TopicsThe far rightRepublicansUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warns

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      US could be under rightwing dictator by 2030, Canadian professor warnsCanadian political scientist warns in op ed of Trumpist threat to American democracy and possible effect on northern neighbor

      The Steal: stethoscope for a democracy near cardiac arrest
      The US could be under a rightwing dictatorship by 2030, a Canadian political science professor has warned, urging his country to protect itself against the “collapse of American democracy”.America is now in fascism’s legal phase | Jason StanleyRead more“We mustn’t dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,” Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.“In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.”Homer-Dixon’s message was blunt: “By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship.”The author cited eventualities centered on a Trump return to the White House in 2024, possibly including Republican-held state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic win.Trump, he warned, “will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance” of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.A “scholar of violent conflict” for more than four decades, Homer-Dixon said Canada must take heed of the “unfolding crisis”.“A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of Covid-19, reconciliation and the accelerating effects of climate change.“But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unraveling of democracy in the United States. We need to start by fully recognising the magnitude of the danger. If Mr Trump is re-elected, even under the more optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable.”Homer-Dixon said he even saw a scenario in which a new Trump administration, having effectively nullified internal opposition, deliberately damaged its northern neighbor.“Under the less-optimistic scenarios, the risks to our country in their cumulative effect could easily be existential, far greater than any in our federation’s history. What happens, for instance, if high-profile political refugees fleeing persecution arrive in our country and the US regime demands them back. Do we comply?”One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollRead moreTrump, he said, “and a host of acolytes and wannabes such as Fox [News]’s Tucker Carlson and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene”, had transformed the Republican party “into a near-fascist personality cult that’s a perfect instrument for wrecking democracy”.Worse, he said, Trump “may be just a warm-up act”.“Returning to office, he’ll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles,” Homer-Dixon said.“Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he’ll be able to thin the ranks of his movement’s opponents within the state, the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law.“Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr Trump, to bring order to the chaos he’s created.”TopicsUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansUS elections 2024US foreign policyThe far rightCanadanewsReuse this content More

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      Twitter permanently suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account

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      Twitter permanently suspends Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account Georgia Republican’s Covid misinformation violation prompts move, after being issued a ‘fourth strike’ in August The personal Twitter account of the Georgia Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been permanently suspended, for violating policies on Covid misinformation.One in three Americans say violence against government justified – pollRead moreThe action against Greene on Sunday came under the “strike” system Twitter launched last March, which uses artificial intelligence to identify posts about the coronavirus misleading enough to cause harm.Two or three strikes earn a 12-hour account lock, four strikes prompt a weeklong suspension and five or more can get an account permanently removed. Twitter had previously suspended Greene’s account for periods ranging from 12 hours to a week. She was issued a “fourth strike” this summer, for saying vaccines were failing.“We’ve been clear that … we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy,” a Twitter spokeswoman said on Sunday. The congresswoman’s official account remains active.The Republican is a determined controversialist and extremist who courts controversy and confrontation.On social media, she has voiced support for racist views, QAnon conspiracy theories such as the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, and calls for violence against Democrats including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.Last February, the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, called Greene’s embrace of conspiracy theories and “loony lies” a “cancer for the Republican party”. The Democratic-led House ejected her from committee assignments.In July, Twitter suspended Greene for a week after Joe Biden urged tech companies to take stronger action against bogus vaccine claims that the president said were “killing people”. Twitter has said it has removed thousands of tweets and challenged millions of accounts.Greene has regularly been fined for refusing to follow Covid guidelines in Congress, including regarding mask-wearing on the House floor.In a statement on the Telegram app on Sunday, she called Twitter “an enemy to America” and said it could not “handle the truth”.She also accused Twitter of seeking “a communist revolution” and said: “Social media platforms can’t stop the truth from being spread far and wide. Big tech can’t stop the truth. Communist Democrats can’t stop the truth. I stand with the truth and the people. We will overcome.”Greene said her account was suspended after tweeting statistics from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, a government database which includes raw data.Among Greene’s final tweets was one that falsely referenced “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths”, according to her Telegram account, which appears to mirror her now-banned Twitter feed.More than 825,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the US, out of a caseload of nearly 55m. Many states are experiencing a surge of cases and disruption to everyday life caused by the highly infectious Omicron variant.On Sunday, Biden’s top medical adviser, Dr Anthony Fauci, said the US had been seeing almost a “vertical increase” of cases, now averaging 400,000 a day with hospitalisations up too.Resistance to vaccinations and other public health measures has fueled the pandemic and political tensions. Last week, Greene boasted on Twitter about talking to Donald Trump by phone. She said she had received the former president’s permission to clarify his stance that he is against vaccine mandates though he encourages people to get the shot and booster.Trump was booed by some audience members in Dallas on 19 December, when he said he had received a booster shot.TopicsRepublicansThe far rightUS politicsCoronavirusVaccines and immunisationnewsReuse this content More

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      The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hope | Robert Reich

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      The true meaning of 6 January: we must answer Trump’s neofascism with hopeRobert ReichAs the first anniversary of the Capitol attack nears, all decent Americans must commit to deprogram this Republican cult. Doing so will mean paying attention to those we left behind 6 January will be the first anniversary one of the most shameful days in American history. On that date in 2021, the United States Capitol was attacked by thousands of armed loyalists to Donald Trump, some intent on killing members of Congress. About 140 officers were injured. Five people died.Capitol panel to investigate Trump call to Willard hotel in hours before attackRead moreEven now, almost a year later, Americans remain confused and divided about the significance of what occurred. Let me offer four basic truths:1. Trump incited the attack on the CapitolFor weeks before the attack, Trump urged supporters to come to Washington for a “Save America March” on 6 January, when Congress was to ceremonially count the electoral votes of Joe Biden’s win.“Big protest in DC on 6 January. Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted on 19 December. Then on 26 December: “See you in Washington DC on 6 January. Don’t miss it. Information to follow.” On 30 December: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” On 1 January: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington DC will take place at 11am on 6 January. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”At a rally just before the violence, Trump repeated his falsehoods about how the election was stolen.“We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”He told the crowd Republicans were constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back, respectful of everyone – “including bad people”.But, he said, “we’re going to have to fight much harder … We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong … We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”He then told the crowd that “different rules” applied to them.“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike [Pence] has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the Rinos [Republicans in Name Only] and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”Then he dispatched the crowd to the Capitol as the electoral count was about to start. The attack came immediately after.2. The events of 6 January capped two months during which Trump sought to reverse the outcome of the electionShortly after the election, Trump summoned to the White House Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania and Michigan, to inquire about how they might alter election results. He even called two local canvassing board officials in Wayne county, Michigan’s most populous county and one that overwhelmingly favored Biden.He asked Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”, according to a recording of that conversation, adding: “The people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”He suggested that the secretary of state would be criminally prosecuted if he did not do as Trump told him: “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal – that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”He pressed the acting US attorney general and deputy attorney general to declare the election fraudulent. When the deputy said the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud and warned that it had no power to change the outcome of the election, Trump replied: “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and his congressional allies.Trump and those allies continued to harangue the attorney general and top justice department officials nearly every day until 6 January. Trump plotted with an assistant attorney general to oust the acting attorney general and pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn election results. But Trump ultimately decided against it, after department leaders pledged to resign en masse.Presumably, more details of Trump’s attempted coup will emerge after the House select committee on 6 January gathers more evidence and deposes more witnesses.3. Trump’s attempted coup continuesTrump still refuses to concede the election and continues to say it was stolen. He presides over a network of loyalists and allies who have sought to overturn the election (and erode public confidence in it) by mounting partisan state “audits” and escalating attacks on state election officials. When asked recently about the fraudulent claims and increasingly incendiary rhetoric, a Trump spokesperson said the former president “supports any patriotic American who dedicates their time and effort to exposing the rigged 2020 presidential election”.Last week, Trump announced he will be hosting a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on 6 January.“Remember,” he said, “the insurrection took place on 3 November. It was the completely unarmed protest of the rigged election that took place on 6 January.” (Reminder: they were armed.)He then referred to the House investigation: “Why isn’t the Unselect Committee of highly partisan political hacks investigating the CAUSE of the 6 January protest, which was the rigged presidential election of 2020?”He went on to castigate “Rinos”, presumably referring to his opponents within the party, such as representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who sit on the 6 January committee.“In many ways a Rino is worse than a Radical Left Democrat,” Trump said, “because you don’t know where they are coming from and you have no idea how bad they really are for our country.”He added: “The good news is there are fewer and fewer Rinos left as we elect strong patriots who love America.”Trump has endorsed a primary challenger to Cheney, while Kinzinger will leave Congress at the next election. Trump and other Republicans have also moved to punish 13 House Republicans who bucked party leadership and voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill in November.4. All of this exposes a deeper problem with which America must dealTrump and his co-conspirators must be held accountable, of course. Hopefully, the select committee’s report will be used by the justice department in criminal prosecutions of Trump and his accomplices.But this in itself will not solve the underlying problem: a belligerent and narcissistic authoritarian has gained a powerful hold over a large portion of America. As many as 60% of Republican voters continue to believe his lies. Many remain intensely loyal. The Republican party is close to becoming a cult whose central animating idea is that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.Capitol rioter in Michael Fanone assault asks judge to let him use dating websitesRead moreTrump has had help, of course. Fox News hosts and Facebook groups have promoted and amplified his ravings for their own purposes. Republicans in Congress and in the states have played along.But Trump’s attempted coup could not get as far as it has without a deepening anger and despair in a substantial portion of the population that has made such Americans susceptible to his swagger and lies.It is too simplistic to attribute this anger solely to racism or xenophobia. America has harbored white supremacist and anti-immigrant sentiments since its founding. The anger Trump has channeled is more closely connected to a profound loss of identity, dignity and purpose, especially among Americans who have been left behind – without college degrees, without good jobs, in places that have been hollowed out, economically abandoned, and disdained by much of the rest of the country.Trump filled a void in a part of America that continues to yearn for a strongman who will deliver it from despair. A similar void haunts other nations where democracy is imperiled. The challenge ahead for the US as elsewhere is to fill that void with hope rather than neofascism. This is the real meaning of 6 January.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsUS Capitol attackOpinionUS politicsUS CongressDonald TrumpRepublicansThe far rightUS voting rightscommentReuse this content More