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      Republican McCarthy risks party split by courting extremists amid Omar spat

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      Republican McCarthy risks party split by courting extremists amid Omar spat
      Anonymous moderate predicts rocky road to speakership
      Omar: Boebert’s ‘Jihad Squad’ bigotry is ‘no laughing matter’
      Interview: historian Joanne Freeman on congressional violence
      The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, said on Saturday he had “reached out” to Democrats over Islamophobic comments made by one of his party, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, about the Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar.While Americans mark Thanksgiving, Republicans panned over Harris attackRead moreBoebert apologised for the remarks, in which she likened one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress to a suicide bomber, on Friday, saying she wanted to meet Omar in person. Omar responded by condemning the remarks and calling for action from party leaders.In a statement to CNN, McCarthy said: “I spoke with Leader [Steny] Hoyer today to help facilitate that meeting so that Congress can get back to talking to each other and working on the challenges facing the American people.”McCarthy did not condemn Boebert’s remarks. He also faced criticism from within his own ranks, after another pro-Trump extremist, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, tweeted that she had “a good call” with McCarthy and liked “what he has planned ahead”.Greene had criticised McCarthy, seeking to cast doubt on his ambitions to be speaker should as seems likely Republicans take back the House next year.A Republican who spoke anonymously to CNN and was described as a moderate said McCarthy was “taking the middle of the conference for granted. McCarthy could have a bigger math problem [in the election for speaker] with the moderates”.The anonymous moderate said his wing of the party – more of a rump, perhaps, given Donald Trump’s dominance – was upset about McCarthy’s embrace of extremists.One such extremist, Paul Gosar of Arizona, was this month censured for tweeting a video which depicted him killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York – like Omar a leading progressive and woman of colour in Congress – and threatening Joe Biden.Gosar lost committee assignments. McCarthy said he would get them back under a Republican speakership and held out the same prospect to Greene, who was stripped of her committees in February for racist, antisemitic and generally incendiary behaviour.McCarthy has faced calls from the right to punish Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, as well as the 10 who voted to impeach Trump over the deadly Capitol riot.Two who voted to impeach, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, will retire next year. Primary challengers await the rest including Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a stringent conservative nonetheless split from the Trumpists over the Capitol attack.On Saturday, Kinzinger criticised the minority leader’s call with Greene, writing: “Here is real strength, when Kevin McCarthy has to call a freshman begging for permission to stay in power. What has Kevin promised? The people deserve to know.”He also said it had “been a while” since most “normal members … last talked to Kevin”.Congresswoman Jackie Speier: ‘Republicans are about doing what’s going to give them power’Read moreThe anonymous moderate who spoke to CNN said the party was on a “collision course” with itself, as their side “isn’t going to take this much longer”.On Sunday, Asa Hutchinson, the governor of Arkansas who is seen by some as a possible presidential nominee from the more moderate side of the party, told CNN’s State of the Union McCarthy should have condemned Boebert.“Even in our own caucus, our own members, if they go the wrong direction, I mean, it has to be called out,” Hutchinson said. “It has to be dealt with particularly whenever it is breaching the civility, whenever it is crossing the line in terms of violence or increasing divides in our country.”Earlier this week, Jackie Speier, a senior Democrat from California, told the Guardian McCarthy had “a number of radical extremists in his caucus that are very effective communicators to the right fringe, and he can’t really rein them in because reining them in means they will attack him.“So they have become the face of the House Republicans. You might as well put a brass ring in Kevin McCarthy’s nose because they’re pulling him around.”TopicsRepublicansUS politicsUS CongressHouse of RepresentativesThe far rightnewsReuse this content More

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      House Capitol attack committee subpoenas far-right leaders and groups

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      House Capitol attack committee subpoenas far-right leaders and groupsNew subpoenas aim to uncover whether there was any coordination between the groups and the White House The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack on Tuesday issued subpoenas to the leaders of the far-right Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, directly focusing for the first time on the instigators of the violence at the 6 January insurrection.The subpoenas demanding documents and testimony targeted both the leaders of the paramilitary groups on the day of the Capitol attack that sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win, as well as the organizations behind the groups.Proud Boys leader denied early release from Washington DC jailRead moreHouse investigators in total issued five subpoenas to Proud Boys International LLC and its chairman, Henry “Enrqiue” Tarrio, the Oath Keepers group and its president, Stewart Rhodes, as well as Robert Patrick Lewis, the chairman of the 1st Amendment Praetorian militia.The chair of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said in a statement that subpoenas reflected the panel’s interest in uncovering potential connections between the paramilitary groups, efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election and the Capitol attack.“We believe the individuals and organizations we subpoenaed today have relevant information about how violence erupted at the Capitol and the preparation leading up to this violent attack,” Thompson said.Dozens of paramilitary group members have been indicted by the justice department as they pursue criminal charges against rioters involved in the insurrection, but the select committee had not yet publicly sought their cooperation in its investigation.The new subpoenas are aimed to uncover whether there was any coordination between the paramilitary groups and the White House, according to a source close to the investigation, and whether Donald Trump had advance knowledge of plans about the Capitol attack.The select committee said they subpoenaed the Proud Boys group since its members called for violence leading up to 6 January and that at least 34 individuals affiliated with the group had been indicted by the justice department for their roles in storming the Capitol.Thompson suggested in the subpoena letters to Proud Boys International LLC and Tarrio that the group appeared to have advance knowledge of the violent nature of the Capitol attack, having fundraised for “protective gear and communications” in planning for 6 January.The select committee said they similarly subpoenaed the Oath Keepers for their part in leading the deadly assault on Congress, which a federal grand jury indictment in Washington DC described as a conspiracy involving at least 18 members.The members of the Oath Keepers led by Rhodes, the select committee said, planned their assault on the Capitol in advance, and travelled to Washington DC with paramilitary gear, firearms, tactical vests with plates, helmets and radio equipment.According to the indictment, the main unnamed conspirator – believed to be Rhodes – was in direct contact with his Oath Keepers members before, during, and shortly after the Capitol attack, the select committee added in the subpoena letters.The justice department has said Rhodes directed members of the Oath Keepers as they stormed the Capitol on 6 January but has not been charged with a crime and has denied any wrongdoing. He surrendered his phone to law enforcement and has sat for an interview with the FBI.House investigators also subpoenaed the leader of the 1st Amendment Praetorian, as Lewis was in constant contact with Trump operatives based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC that served as a “command center” for Trump to stop Biden’s certification.The select committee said to Lewis that he was subpoenaed in part because he claimed the day after the Capitol attack that he “war-gamed” with constitutional scholars about how to stop Biden from being certified president on 6 January.Thompson noted in the subpoena letter that members of the 1st Amendment Praetorian wore body cameras, suggesting the select committee’s interest in obtaining those recordings.The five subpoenas come a day after House investigators issued subpoenas to several Trump operatives including Roger Stone and Alex Jones. The select committee demanded documents from the groups by 7 December, and testimony from its leaders later in the month.TopicsUS Capitol attackHouse of RepresentativesThe far rightUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himself | Moira Donegan

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      Kyle Rittenhouse isn’t crying for those he hurt. His tears, tellingly, are for himselfMoira DoneganWhen conservative men like Rittenhouse and Brett Kavanaugh express their feelings, it is an act of thwarted entitlement – or a threat His voice choked up and his face went red. The young man squinted and panted, his mouth pulled up plaintively towards his nose, his answers to the questions coming out in gasping little bursts. Kyle Rittenhouse, on the stand testifying at his trial for killing two people and wounding a third last summer at a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was not crying for the men he killed, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was crying for himself, describing what he said was his mortal fear that night in August 2020, when he opened fire on the protesters using an AR-15. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Rittenhouse gasped, describing how he had confronted and ultimately killed the two men while he was guarding the lot of a car dealership. “I defended myself.”Rittenhouse was 17 at the time of the shooting; he is 18 now. The young man’s emotional testimony had a practical purpose: it was a performance meant to make him seem helpless and childlike, and to convince the jury in his homicide trial that there was a reasonable possibility that he was in fear for his life when he shot the three men. But to many, the emotion of Rittenhouse’s testimony seemed to stem not from his memories of the incident, but from the indignant entitlement of a white man thwarted in the enforcement of his own privilege.Many compared Rittenhouse’s tears during his testimony to those of Brett Kavanaugh, who shouted, red-faced and spitting, during his confirmation hearings, when he was asked questions about his alleged assault of Christine Blasey Ford, back when he was Rittenhouse’s age. Both of the displays prompted questions about their sincerity and opportunism. Was Rittenhouse really crying? Was Kavanaugh just putting on a show for Donald Trump to watch on TV? But they both also pointed to a peculiar phenomenon that remains little understood: the rightwing use of public displays of white male emotionalism as a political tool.In one sense, the two men’s conduct under oath was quite strange. Both of them appear to be self-conscious avatars of white conservative masculinity, and their ideology would seem to preclude male emotionalism, as traditional gender norms have historically justified male dominance precisely because of men’s supposed stoicism and self-control. As Vox’s Jamil Smith put it: “We’re generally unfamiliar with seeing boys and men exhibit their emotion in such a public way. Vulnerability and common conceptions of manhood, especially among conservatives, have not traditionally been bedfellows.”And yet conservative white men’s emotions are increasingly coming to the forefront of political life, and they seem to animate much of the Trumpist right. In practice, such men express their emotions all the time. They express them at Trump rallies, when they jeer at the mention of perceived enemies and cheer for lines of chauvinism and anger. They express their feelings when they picket abortion clinics, screaming at women walking inside and threatening the staff. They express their feelings when they fly Confederate and “Blue Lives Matter” flags; they express their feelings when they vote, and when they pick petulant fights with the service workers who ask them to wear their masks inside stores and restaurants. The common thread in these rightwing expressions of masculine emotion is that when conservative men express their feelings, they don’t do so as a gesture of humility or need. Instead, they wield their feelings as a threat.Kyle Rittenhouse judge in spotlight after angry reprimand of prosecutionRead moreArguably, both Rittenhouse and Kavanaugh were expressing their emotions when they committed their famous acts of alleged violence. It’s impossible to know what was in his mind, but Rittenhouse’s actions leading up to that night in Kenosha indicate that what brought him there was anger, or maybe a desire for glory. Rittenhouse says that he came to Kenosha to protect local businesses from demonstrators; he had appointed himself a vigilante, out avenging the interests of property and police against the protests. It’s hard not to suspect that he daydreamed about himself as a lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules, like an action movie hero who wears a bandana as a headband and a cutoff denim vest. The rifle that Rittenhouse used to kill Rosenbaum and Huber was illegal for him to possess. Asked why he didn’t use a handgun, he told the court that he had chosen the semiautomatic rifle because “it looked cool”.For Kavanaugh, the project of decoding his emotions the night he allegedly assaulted Christine Blasey Ford is also speculative, but Ford’s testimony, along with documents made public during the hearings, paints a portrait of Kavanaugh as a young man with a vivid, if not especially varied, emotional life. His calendar from what was probably the month of the party shows him working out and calling his football friends by nicknames; he goes to their houses for “’skis” (“brewskis”: beers). In Ford’s account, he sounded satisfied with himself. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. “The uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” Kavanaugh was a boy, like Rittenhouse, with an inflated sense of his own importance. The emotion he seemed to have expressed most clearly in those years was a consuming and profoundly unearned sense of his own superiority.The fact of the matter is that for Rittenhouse, the question of emotion will be central to his case. The question of his legal guilt or innocence hangs on whether he felt endangered at the time of the shootings – a subjective experience that, conveniently, only Rittenhouse himself can speak to. Meanwhile, Kavanaugh now sits in a position of superlative power. Maybe the problem is not that these white men don’t express their feelings enough. Maybe the problem is that their feelings have too much power.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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      Republican senator Josh Hawley worries feminism has driven men to ‘pornography and video games’

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      RepublicansRepublican senator Josh Hawley worries feminism has driven men to ‘pornography and video games’Far-right senator from Missouri ridiculed for his homilies on ‘manly virtues’ Adam Gabbatt@adamgabbattMon 1 Nov 2021 13.14 EDTLast modified on Mon 1 Nov 2021 14.03 EDTThe effort to combat toxic masculinity in the US has led men to consume more pornography and play more video games, the Missouri senator Josh Hawley claimed in a speech to a group of Republicans.Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Hawley addressed the issue of “manhood”, which he said was under attack, and called for men to return to traditional masculine roles.The Donald Trump supporter who notoriously raised a fist in support of a mob outside the US Capitol on 6 January appeared to echo talking points made by the likes of the Proud Boys, a far-right group that opposes feminism and believes men are under attack from liberal elites.“Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?” Hawley said.“While the left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should.”Hawley, 41, did not cite sources for his belief that men were watching pornography more frequently. Nonetheless, on Monday his speech was republished by the Federalist, a rightwing outlet. In the address, Hawley said he wanted to discuss “the left’s attempt to give us a world beyond men”.“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” he said. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues – things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness – as a danger to society.”Hawley is the son of a banker who attended private school before studying at Stanford and Yale. He clerked for the supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts, and later became a law professor.Given his background, he has repeatedly raised eyebrows for railing against elites. Hawley’s apparent claim to speak for all men, in the name of a return to a vaguely defined masculinity of old, swiftly became a new subject of ridicule on Twitter.If Josh Hawley is an expert on masculinity then I’d like to take a few minutes to share my thoughts on quantum physics.— Jason Kander (@JasonKander) November 1, 2021
      In the good old days, uncriticized American men fucked real top-heavy silicone queens and machine-gunned their way through actual space aliens on a daily basis. Also, don’t shake the junior Missouri senator’s hand until you see him wash it. https://t.co/VrN3irWqKy— David Simon (@AoDespair) November 1, 2021
      Josh Hawley says American men are “watching porn and playing video games because their masculinity is being criticized.” Mostly by their parents who keep asking, “Josh, when are you going to move out of our basement, stop picking your nose and get a job?” pic.twitter.com/NSY6sbo2aP— Paul Rudnick (@PaulRudnickNY) November 1, 2021
      Hawley, who was a staunch defender of Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault during his supreme court nomination hearings in 2018, claimed: “Boys are increasingly treated like an illness in search of a cure.”“Hollywood delivers the toxic masculinity theme ad nauseum in television and film,” he said, going on to link traditional masculinity as “vital to self-government”.“Observers from the ancient Romans to our forefathers identified the manly virtues as indispensable for political liberty,” Hawley said.As well as pornography, Hawley tied the supposed decline in masculinity to issues including unemployment, people marrying at a later age and the preservation of liberty.Hawley said: “For centuries, lovers of liberty have praised these qualities as the highest standard of manhood. That’s not to say that women don’t possess them. But it is to say that these virtues are the bright side of the aggression and competitiveness and independence that psychologists, no less than philosophers, have long observed in men.“Assertiveness and independence are strengths when used to protect and empower others.”Hawley offered few solutions to the problems he claimed to present. On Monday, he used Twitter to promote his new podcast, co-hosted with his wife.“In the second episode of This is Living, Josh and Erin Hawley share the story of how they met, what drew them to each other, and how two people so different decided to get married,” a blurb for the podcast reads.The Hawleys met while studying law at Yale. Erin Hawley also clerked for Roberts and became a law professor.TopicsRepublicansThe far rightFeminismGenderUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      FBI failed to act on tips of likely violence ahead of Capitol attack – report

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      US Capitol attackFBI failed to act on tips of likely violence ahead of Capitol attack – report
      Washington Post publishes wide-ranging report on Capitol riot
      ‘Roadmap for a coup’: inside Trump plot to steal the presidency
      Reuters in WashingtonSun 31 Oct 2021 15.32 EDTThe FBI and other key law enforcement agencies failed to act on a host of tips and other information ahead of 6 January that signaled a potentially violent event might unfold that day at the US Capitol, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.Republican Adam Kinzinger: I’ll fight Trumpism ‘cancer’ outside CongressRead moreAmong information that came officials’ way in the weeks before what turned into a riot as lawmakers met to certify the results of the presidential election was a 20 December tip to the FBI that supporters of Donald Trump were discussing online how to sneak guns into Washington to “overrun” police and arrest members of Congress, according to internal bureau documents obtained by the Post.The tip included details showing those planning violence believed they had orders from the president, used code words such as “pickaxe” to describe guns, and posted the times and locations of four spots around the country for caravans to meet the day before the joint session.On one site, a poster specifically mentioned Mitt Romney, a Republican senator from Utah, as a target, the Post said.Romney was later one of seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Trump on one charge of inciting an insurrection, leveled by the House of Representatives during a second impeachment of the former president.An FBI official who assessed the tip noted that its criminal division received a “significant number” of alerts about threats to Congress and other government officials. The FBI passed the information to law enforcement agencies in Washington but did not pursue the matter, the Post said.“The individual or group identified during the assessment does not warrant further FBI investigation at this time,” the internal report concluded, according to the Post. Trump seeking to block call logs and notes from Capitol attack panelRead moreThat detail was among dozens included in the report, which the newspaper said was based on interviews with more than 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.A special congressional committee is investigating events which exploded into violence after a rally Trump held near the White House to rail against the results of the election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.Four people died on 6 January, one shot by police and the others of natural causes. More than 100 police officers were injured, one dying the next day. Four officers have since taken their own lives.More than 600 people have been charged with taking part in the violence.TopicsUS Capitol attackFBIUS politicsThe far rightWashington PostUS press and publishingUS crimenewsReuse this content More

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      Resilience: the one word progressives need in the face of Trump, Covid and more | Robert Reich

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      OpinionUS politicsResilience: the one word progressives need in the face of Trump, Covid and moreRobert ReichThe climate crisis, the economy, Biden’s struggle to enact his spending agenda. The list goes on. The lesson? Be strong Sun 31 Oct 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 31 Oct 2021 01.09 EDTI often tell my students that if they strive to achieve full and meaningful lives, they should expect failures and disappointments. We learn to walk by falling down again and again. We learn to ride a bicycle by crashing into things. We learn to make good friends by being disappointed in friendship. Failure and disappointment are prerequisites to growth.‘A deliberate, orchestrated campaign’: the real story behind Trump’s attempted coupRead moreThe real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience: how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back.This is a hard lesson for high-achievers used to jumping over every hoop put in front of them. It’s also a hard lesson for people who haven’t had all the support and love they might have needed when growing up. In fact, it’s a hard lesson for almost everyone in a culture such as ours, that worships success and is embarrassed by failure and is inherently impatient.Why am I telling you this now? Because we have gone through a few very difficult years: Donald Trump’s racist nationalism and his attacks on our democracy, a painful reckoning with systemic racism, angry political divisions, a deadly pandemic accompanied by a recession, and climate hazards such as floods and wildfires.We assumed everything would be fine again once these were behind us. But we now find ourselves in a disorienting limbo. There is no clearly demarcated “behind us”. The pandemic still lurks. The economy is still worrisome. Americans continue to be deeply angry with each other. The climate crisis still poses an existential threat. Trump and other insurrectionists have not yet been brought to justice. Democracy is still threatened.And Biden and the Democrats have been unable to achieve the scale of change many of us wanted and expected.If you’re not at least a bit disappointed, you’re not human. To some, it feels like America is failing.But bear with me. I’ve learned a few things in my half-century in and around politics, and my many years teaching young people. One is that things often look worse than they really are. The media (including social media) sells subscriptions and advertising with stories that generate anger and disappointment. The same goes for the views of pundits and commentators. Pessimists always appear wiser than optimists.Another thing I’ve learned is that expectations for a new president and administration are always much higher than they can possibly deliver. Our political system was designed to make it difficult to get much done, at least in the short run. So the elation that comes with the election of someone we admire almost inevitably gives way to disappointment.A third thing: in addition to normal political constraints, positive social change comes painfully slowly. It can take years, decades, sometimes a century or longer for a society to become more inclusive, more just, more democratic, more aware of its shortcomings and more determined to remedy them. And such positive changes are often punctuated by lurches backward. I believe in progress because I’ve seen so much of it in my lifetime, but I’m also aware of the regressive forces that constantly threaten it. The lesson here is tenacity – playing the long game.The US should cut the Pentagon budget to fund social | Emma Claire FoleyRead moreWhich brings me back to resilience. We have been through a difficult time. We wanted and expected it to be over: challenges overcome, perpetrators brought to justice, pandemic ended, nation healed, climate saved, politics transformed. But none of it is over. The larger goals we are fighting for continue to elude us.Yet we must continue the fight. If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game. The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed.
      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 politicsOpinionUS domestic policyJoe BidenBiden administrationDemocratsDonald TrumpRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      Rigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s base

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      BooksRigged review: shameless – and dangerous – catnip for Trump’s baseMollie Hemingway says the 2020 election ‘went terribly wrong’. In a divided America, her deeply flawed book will find readers Lloyd GreenSun 17 Oct 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 17 Oct 2021 02.01 EDTThe state of the union is sulfurous. Donald Trump’s defeat did not change that.More than 80% of Trump and Biden voters think elected officials from the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy”. Half of Trump supporters and two-fifths for Biden think secession would be a good idea.Into the fray leaps Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway with Rigged, 488 pages on “How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections”. Hemingway’s is an immovable feast. It’s about owning the libs.“If you believe things went terribly wrong in the 2020 election, well, you’re not crazy, and you’re not alone,” she writes. “But most of all, you’re not wrong.”In 2015, Hemingway branded Trump a “demagogue with no real solutions”. Now, like so many Republicans, she’s a fan. She discounts Charlottesville, where in August 2017 far-right marchers earned kind words from the president, as a “hoax”. She castigates those who denounce the events of 6 January this year, when Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol.“People who call the few-hour riot at the Capitol by unarmed protesters an ‘insurrection’ are bad people who are harming the country,” she tweeted in July.The riot was an attempt to overturn the election. Five people died, a police officer among them. Rigged is catnip for Trump’s base.“They used Covid to rig an election,” Trump whines, in an interview. “There was nothing I could do.” He has been singing that song since May 2020. And then there is reality: the administration’s performative nonchalance in the face of Covid undermined Trump’s chances of reelection.That was understood by his campaign as early as spring 2020. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, in April Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, warned that Covid could cost the boss re-election.“We have seen the enemy and it is us,” Fabrizio wrote. “It isn’t [Trump’s] policies that cause the biggest problem, it is voters’ reactions to his temperament and behavior.”Hemingway looks in other directions, pointing a finger at Democratic lawyers and voters for supposedly gaming the system amid a pandemic, berating Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell for pursuing the wrong legal strategies, and ignoring comments by Bill Barr, who she interviews but who as attorney general let Trump know he had not “seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome of the election”.It’s true that Trump might have mounted more of a fight. His campaign and the GOP had real lawyers on the payroll and Republicans were secretary of state in Arizona and Georgia. But the party had squandered the advantages of incumbency. Trump and Hemingway both go at Silicon Valley with a vengeance, reserving a special place in hell for Mark Zuckerberg.“Big tech got meaner, bigger, stronger, and they were crazed,” Trump says. As for Zuckerberg, he “should be in jail”. One suspects many Americans might agree.Hemingway criticizes the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) for funding election operations in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. She contends that such private-public partnerships undermine the public’s faith in electoral integrity. For the record, courts repeatedly denied pre-election efforts to block CTCL funding. One federal judge, William C Griesbach, a George W Bush appointee, acknowledged the “receipt of private funds for public elections may give an appearance of impropriety” – but dismissed the lawsuit. Hemingway does not examine Team Trump’s own relationship with Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2014, Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct company part-owned by the Mercer family, Trump benefactors, used Facebook to illegally harvest personal data. Steve Bannon, who would become Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, was a board member and officer. He denies personal culpability.There’s more that Hemingway leaves untouched. According to The Contrarian, a recent book by Max Chafkin of Bloomberg News, in a 2019 meeting between Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump and Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, Zuckerberg basically agreed to champion “state-sanctioned conservatism”. Zuckerberg has called the claim “pretty ridiculous”. Thiel, an original Facebook investor, still sits on the board.It doesn’t end there. A recent lawsuit commenced by the Rhode Island Retirement System against Facebook, Zuckerberg, Thiel and his company, Palantir, alleges “significant damage” caused by the data-harvesting scandal. The suit quotes the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, in alleging that Palantir employees “regularly worked in person, during normal business hours, at the offices of Cambridge Analytica in London”.Back on the page, it seems Hemingway cannot resist the siren song of race. In Justice on Trial, her last book, about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, she rubbished the legal underpinnings of Brown v Board of Education, the 1954 supreme court ruling that made state-imposed school segregation unconstitutional. Such decisions, she wrote, “may have been correct in their result but were decided on the basis of sociological studies rather than legal principles”.It’s a unique take, with which even Trump’s three supreme court picks would not agree. Amy Coney Barrett has called Brown a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overrule. Kavanaugh has said the same. Neil Gorsuch concedes it was properly decided.Stephanie Grisham: Trump turncoat who may be most damaging yetRead moreUndeterred, Hemingway now takes aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, resurrecting Barry Goldwater’s contention that it evinced “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government”. Hemingway also derides Lyndon Johnson’s support for civil rights as a blatant appeal to black voters.In 1964, Senator Goldwater lost to Johnson in a landslide. That was the last time a Democrat accomplished that feat – or won the “white vote”, for that matter.The news remains a battleground. Ryan Williams, president of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has made it known his mission is to save western civilization.“We believe in truth and reason,” he recently told the Atlantic. “The question is whose truth and whose reason.”Williams also said “a third of the country thinks the election was given to Biden fraudulently”. Hemingway is sure to find an audience.
      Rigged is published in the US by Regnery
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      Surprised to see US Republicans cozying up to the European far right? Don’t be | Cas Mudde

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      OpinionUS politicsSurprised to see US Republicans cozying up to the European far right? Don’t beCas MuddeBefore Trump, only relatively fringe American conservatives had open connections to the international far right. Today, the ties have mainstreamed Fri 15 Oct 2021 06.15 EDTLast modified on Fri 15 Oct 2021 07.12 EDTThis weekend Texas senator Ted Cruz spoke about how “we all face the same challenges, including a bold and global left, that seeks to tear down cherished national and religious institutions”. Nothing to see here, you might think – except that he was not addressing a local branch of the Republican party in Texas, or a conservative US media outlet. He was speaking on screen to an audience of thousands in Madrid, at a meeting of the Spanish far-right party Vox. It was one of many recent outreaches to the global far right by US rightwing figures, which seem to have increased since the ouster of Donald Trump.Is the so-called “Populist International”, so often foretold but never realized, finally taking shape? And will the US conservative movement play a leading role in it? Or is this more about domestic politics than global domination?Unsurprisingly, given that the US conservative movement, like the Republican Party, covers a broad range of different shades of often far-right ideology, different people have spoken to different types of far-right groups. There are at least four major strands of far-right international networks in which US “conservatives” of all levels participate.The first and most important is the global Christian right. The US Christian right has long been a global player and has been particularly active in post-communist Europe – as is captured well in the Netflix series The Family. They have found influential supporters in Russian president Vladimir Putin and, more recently, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. It was at the latter’s invitation, at the bi-annual Budapest Demographic Summit in Budapest, that Mike Pence recently spoke, together with a broad variety of academics, church leaders and politicians from around the globe, including the French far-right maybe-presidential candidate Éric Zemmour.Budapest has also been the new promised land for the second strand, the so-called “national conservativism” movement – the brainchild of the Israeli think-tanker Yoram Hazony. National conservatism is a kind of far right for people who read, to put it dismissively – an attempt to merge the already ever-overlapping conservative and far-right ideologies and create a far-right movement fit for the cultural, economic and political elite. Tucker Carlson gave a keynote at a national conservatism summit in Washington DC in 2019 and recently took his Fox News show to Budapest, where he raved about Orbán and his regime. And the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is said to be hosting its 2022 meeting in Budapest too.The third strand is the long-standing connections between some far-right Republicans and the usual suspects of the European far right, like the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) or French National Rally (RN), which are built on a shared ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism and populism. Connections between the European far right and Republican members of Congress go back decades; think of people like Steve King, the Iowa Republican, and Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican. They were fairly marginalized within the party – and both have, ironically, lost their seats in the Trump era. It was largely with these groups that Steve Bannon created “the Movement”, which never moved beyond media hype.And, finally, we have the party that Cruz sent a supportive video message to, Vox in Spain. Almost completely under the radar, Vox has been building a conservative-far right network in the Spanish-speaking world, partly facilitated by the party’s Dineso foundation. Focused mostly on Latin America – and piggybacking on the Latin American right’s long-standing fight against “communism” and for conservative Christianity – the foundation has published a “Charter of Madrid” signed by more than 100 politicians and political activists from Europe and the Americas, including US conservative activist Daniel Pipes (anti-Islam) and Grover Norquist (anti-tax), as well as a host of Latin American MPs. The particular meeting Cruz spoke to was attended by various European far-right leaders, including Giorgia Meloni of Brothers of Italy (FdI), currently the biggest party in the polls, and André Ventura of Chega in Portugal.Obviously, these international networks overlap on many issues, most notably in their common opposition to the “global left” but also, in different gradations, to immigration, Islam and “gender ideology”. But they also disagree on central issues, from the importance of religious doctrine to the role of Russia, and consequently have very different and shifting memberships. And they differ in the role of the US conservative movement within the network.With the exception of the Christian right, which has long dominated the global movement, the US does not play a leading role in these networks. Even the “national conservatism” network is run by an Israeli and increasingly funded by Hungarians. Moreover, the various US Republicans who have recently participated in these meetings seem to use their international connections more for domestic gains – most notably in the fight for the Republican nomination (should Donald Trump not run) – than for the sake of building a Populist International.This is not to say there is nothing new to recent developments. In the pre-Trump era, only relatively marginal rightwing conservatives and Republicans had open connections to the international far right. Today, the ties between the broader US conservative movement and the global far right have become mainstreamed, from the Republican party to National Review, with fewer and fewer dissenting voices. Still, steeped in US exceptionalism, the US conservative movement remains mostly inward-looking, using international connections and events primarily for national political struggles. And the Populist International is still more media hype than political reality.
      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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