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    Judge orders two Proud Boys leaders held in custody over Capitol attack

    A federal judge has ordered two leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group to be detained in jail pending trial for their involvement in the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington DC.Both were indicted in one of many Proud Boys conspiracy cases to stem from the investigation into the assault on the building that followed a pro-Donald Trump rally.Ethan Nordean of Washington state and Joseph Biggs of Florida, along with two other Proud Boys regional leaders, are charged with conspiring to stop the certification of the 2020 election – and with organizing and leading dozens of Proud Boys to the Capitol.Many of those followers were among the first to breach the building and cause damages in scenes of violence that shocked the world and led to five deaths.“The defendants stand charged with seeking to steal one of the crown jewels of our country, in a sense, by interfering with the peaceful transfer of power,” the US district judge Timothy Kelly said as he explained his decision on Monday. “It’s no exaggeration to say the rule of law … in the end, the existence of our constitutional republic is threatened by it.”The judge’s decision to detain the pair is a reversal of an earlier notion to release them after the Department of Justice argued for pre-trial detention based on new accusations in an updated indictment filed by prosecutors in March.The judge cited profanity-laced social media posts and encrypted messages sent by the defendants, in which Biggs said it was time for “war” if Democrats “steal” the election and Nordean called for militia groups to contact him.Though the evidence does not point to the defendants using direct physical violence against others on the day, Kelly said, their communications and movements before, during and after the riot showed they played a part in planning and leading the efforts that day, celebrated the events of the day and have not expressed remorse.Nordean will be detained in Seattle as opposed to DC after the judge granted his defense attorney’s request to cease the transfer, arguing: “Capitol defendants have been violently assaulted in DC jail.”Another alleged co-conspirator, Charles Donohoe, is set for his own detention hearing later on Monday afternoon. More

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    The Guardian view on an America First Caucus: a warning democracy is under siege | Editorial

    In 1944, George Orwell felt that the word fascism had “lost the last vestige of meaning” so liberally had it been used. But fascism remains very much alive. Decades after Orwell’s message, one of the challenges today is to identify and name it. Whether the label could be applied to Donald Trump had divided expert opinion, until the 6 January assault on Capitol Hill by a mob whose passions had been inflamed by his speech earlier that day. This melted the resistance historians of fascism like Columbia University’s Robert Paxton felt to using the f-word. The use of violence against democratic institutions, he wrote, “crosses a red line”.If anyone wondered what American fascism might look like then they could start with the proposed congressional “America First Caucus”, which emerged this weekend from the office of extremist Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Carrying the torch for Trumpism, this fringe agenda conceals its racial argument behind muscular populist ones. The caucus plans were welcomed by legislators who had fanned the flames of the Capitol riot. Before being elected to Congress, Ms Greene peddled conspiracy theories, made racist statements and indicated support for the execution of Democratic leaders and FBI agents. She renounced those beliefs on the eve of being kicked off congressional committees but made no apology for having held them.The proposed caucus platform contained not so much dog whistles as foghorns for white supremacy. America, the document claims, is based on “respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions” and decries “post-1965 immigrants” for depressing workers’ wages, highlighting the year when the US ended its policy of giving preferential treatment to western European migrants. It calls for rebuilding the US with an “aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture”. Thankfully the plan exploded on the launch pad. Republican leaders calculated it would hurt their electoral chances in moderate swing seats. Ms Greene disowned the caucus proposals.Fascism not only pursues rightwing policies, it seeks to build up mass-mobilising movements and paramilitary organisations with the aim of establishing a single-party dictatorship. Mr Trump saw armed citizens as a political asset. His heirs see despotism as a viable alternative to the current political structure. In Congress 147 Republican lawmakers promoted Mr Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Republicans in 47 states have 361 proposed laws to restrict voting access on grounds of baseless claims of electoral fraud.Around the world electorates will have to become reacquainted with fascism. Voters must attune themselves to what it looks and sounds like. In the UK, Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer was caught out earlier this year on a national radio phone-in when he failed to recognise a conspiracy theory popular with fascists, and Fox News star Tucker Carlson, known as the “great replacement”. It falsely claims that dwindling white birthrates have been orchestrated by multicultural global elites in an attempt to make whites a minority. There’s no suggestion that Sir Keir agreed with the racist caller but there was criticism in the way he handled the call. There is an urgent and pressing need to recognise both the real threat of fascism as well as the rhetorical and emotional motifs it employs. More

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    Far-right Oath Keepers member is first suspect to plead guilty in US Capitol riot

    A member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and heavy metal guitarist has become the first defendant to plead guilty to federal charges in connection with the insurrection at the US Capitol.Jon Ryan Schaffer, the frontman of the band Iced Earth, has agreed on Friday to cooperate with investigators in hopes of getting a lighter sentence, and the Justice Department will consider putting Schaffer in the federal witness security program, a US district judge said. This signals that federal prosecutors see him as a valuable cooperator as they continue to investigate militia groups and other extremists involved in the insurrection on 6 January as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win.Schaffer, a supporter of Donald Trump, was accused of storming the Capitol and spraying police officers with bear spray. He pleaded guilty in a deal with prosecutors in federal court in Washington to two counts: obstruction of an official proceeding, and entering and remaining in a restricted building with a dangerous or deadly weapon.An email seeking comment was sent to an attorney for Schaffer.Schaffer, of Columbus, Indiana, was wearing a tactical vest and baseball hat that read Oath Keepers Lifetime Member on 6 January and acknowledged in his plea agreement that he is a “founding lifetime member” of the extremist group, prosecutors said.The 53-year-old was not charged in the case involving Oath Keepers members and associates, who are accused of conspiring with one another to block the certification of the vote. The case is the largest and most serious brought by prosecutors so far in the attack.Authorities say those defendants came to Washington ready for violence and intent on stopping the certification. Many came dressed for battle in tactical vests and helmets and some discussed stationing a “quick reaction force” outside the city in the event they needed weapons, prosecutors have said.In his deal with prosecutors, Schaffer admitted to being one of the first people to force their way into the Capitol after the mob broke open a set of doors guarded by Capitol police. Schaffer was sprayed in the face with a chemical irritant that overwhelmed officers deployed and left the Capitol while holding bear spray, authorities said.Schaffer has voiced various conspiracy theories, once telling a German news station that a shadowy criminal enterprise is trying to run the world under a communist agenda and that he and others are prepared to fight, with violence.In court documents, the FBI said Schaffer “has long held far-right extremist views” and that he had previously “referred to the federal government as a ‘criminal enterprise’”.He turned himself in to the FBI a few weeks after the riot, after his photograph was featured on an FBI poster seeking the public’s help in identifying rioters.More than 370 people are facing federal charges in the deadly insurrection. More

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    Millions of Americans think the election was stolen. How worried should we be about more violence?

    Three months after an insurrection at the US capitol, an estimated 50 million Republicans still believe the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to a recent national survey. But it’s far from clear how many Americans might still be willing to take violent action in support of that belief.Early research on the continued risk of violence related to Trump’s “big lie” has produced a wide variety of findings. One political scientist at the University of Chicago estimated, based on a single national survey in March, that the current size of an ongoing “insurrectionist movement” in the US might be as large as 4% of American adults, or about 10 million people.Other experts on political violence cautioned that survey results about what Americans believe provide virtually no insight on how many of them will ever act on those beliefs. Researchers who have interviewed some of Trump’s most loyal supporters over the past months say that many of them appear to be cooling down – still believing the election was stolen, but not eager to do much about it. The handful of attempts by far-right extremist groups to mobilize nationwide protests after 6 January have mostly fizzled.“Lots of people talk the talk, but very few walk the walk,” Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (Start), told the Guardian. “Only a tiny fraction of the people who adhere to radical views will act on them.”More than 800 people from a crowd of more than 10,000 are estimated to have breached the Capitol building, the acting capitol police chief said in February. Nearly 400 of them are now facing charges.Extremism experts have called the 6 January attack an example of “mass radicalization,” with a majority of people charged in the incident having no affiliation with existing extremist groups, according to early analyses. More than half of the people charged in the insurrection appeared to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family members or close friends, according to one analysis. Nearly half were business owners or had white collar jobs, and very few were unemployed, a sharp contrast with the profiles of some previous violent rightwing extremists.Today Trump’s relative silence and the gradual return to more normal life as more Americans have been vaccinated, have created very different conditions than in the days and weeks before 6 January.“The charismatic leader has been silenced for the most part. He might find his way back into the public spotlight, but as of right now, he’s been effectively muted,” Jensen said.“We were in a really unique situation with the pandemic, and the lockdowns, and people being isolated and fearful. You had a vulnerable population,” he added. Today, “people are getting back to their lives.”The ‘cooling out’In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, a large majority of Americans condemned the rioters and said they should be prosecuted.But research in the past months has also shown that many Republican voters are still loyal to Trump and receptive to lies from him and other Republican politicians about the 2020 election and the insurrection that followed.A March survey from Reuters/IPSOS found that more than half of Republicans endorsed a false claim that the attack was “led by violent leftwing protesters trying to make Trump look bad”, and also said they believed that the people who gathered at the Capitol “were mostly peaceful, law-abiding Americans”.Six in 10 Republicans in that survey also said they believed “the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.” That percentage of the sample would correspond with roughly 50 to 55 million Americans, Chris Jackson, the IPSOS senior vice-president for public affairs, told the Guardian.In mid-March, researchers at the University of Chicago attempted to home in on the percentage of Americans who still believed in Trump’s “big lie,” and who also may be willing to act violently as a result, using a nationally representative sample of a thousand American adults.Two-thirds of the respondents said they believed the election was legitimate, the researchers found. Another 27% said they believed the election had been stolen from Trump, but endorsed only non-violent protest. Only 4% said they believed the election was stolen, and also expressed a willingness to engage in violent protest.That 4% would translate to roughly 10 million American adults, said Robert Pape, a political scientist at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats who specialized in global suicide terror attacks, and who pivoted last year to focus on political violence in the United States.Other experts have argued that what survey respondents mean when they say they support using violence to achieve their political goals is far from obvious, according to Nathan Kalmoe, a political scientist at Louisiana State University who has been polling Americans about political violence since 2017.The findings of that research are concerning: as of February, 20% of Republicans and 13% of Democrats now say violence is at least “a little” justified to advance their party’s goals.But only a small fraction of the respondents who had said violence by their side was at least “a little justified” in a previous survey endorsed armed, fatal violence, Kalmoe said, instead mentioning fistfights, property destruction and non-violent actions like insults. “‘Violence’ doesn’t mean mass death or even killing even among the people who think some violence is OK,” Kalmoe said.“There are many steps from attitudes to behavioral intentions to behaviors that stop people from acting violently, even when they hold violent views,” he added. Knowing how many people might complete all of those steps is a “nearly impossible question.”Christopher Parker, a political scientist who studies race and the evolution of American rightwing movements, said that a preliminary finding that 4% of American adults believed the election was stolen from Trump and endorsed violence was a plausible survey result, given that about 7% of American adults had said they participated in a Tea Party event.A March survey by the Pew research center found a similar proportion of Americans expressing the most skeptical view of a crackdown on the Capitol rioters, with 4% saying it was “not at all important” for them to be prosecuted.But it was also very possible that the attitudes of Trump supporters were shifting over time, Parker cautioned, and that the 4% figure from mid-March may already be shrinking.In focus groups with Trump loyalists in Wisconsin and Georgia that Parker worked on, Trump supporters appeared “angry, but also despondent, feeling powerless and uncertain they will become more involved in politics.” Trump voters appeared to be much less threatened by Biden than they were by Obama, the focus groups indicated, and were interested in what Biden’s post-pandemic recovery plan might do for them personally.Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist who is currently conducting interviews in the region, found that in eastern Kentucky, even among dedicated Trump supporters, there’s been a “cooling out.”I think a lot of people have felt abandoned. Trump did not pardon [the Capitol rioters]. He went awayHochschild, the author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, said that Trump’s most ardent supporters, the ones who believe the election was stolen from him, “are in a squeeze”, feeling threatened by the law enforcement crackdown on the Capitol rioters on one hand, and a sense of abandonment at Trump’s behavior on the other.On 6 January, some Trump supporters “had felt proud, patriotic, defending democracy, and in a day’s time that had turned around to dishonor, criminalization. They were put down. The law was looking for them,” she said.At the same time, “I think a lot of people have felt abandoned. Trump did not pardon [the Capitol rioters]. He went away, disappeared into silence. They feel like: ‘Wait a minute: why isn’t he speaking up for us? Why isn’t he defending us?’”A minority of Trump supporters Hochschild is interviewing today are doubling down on their election fraud beliefs, she said, expressing paranoia about big government taking over, and feeling “monitored and unsafe”. But the majority has “divested emotion from the issue” of “election fraud”. Experts cautioned that even the tiniest fraction of people willing to use violence in support of their extreme beliefs is dangerous, particularly in the US, where political violence in recent years has often taken the form of high-casualty mass shootings in places like churches, synagogues and stores.Hochschild said she is more concerned about further political violence in the long term than the short term. “I do feel there are a lot of people whose position is extreme,” she said. “I just don’t see it mobilized at this point.”“The reality is, when you see 6 January, that was not a large share of Americans that did that,” said Jhacova Williams, a Rand Corporation economist who has studied the after-effects of lynchings in the American south.Still, she said, political violence can have devastating, lasting effects, on both people and on democracies, while being driven by relatively small numbers of people, as long as the majority does not intervene.While lynchings were held in public and attracted crowds, “If you look historically, it wasn’t as if you had masses in the south that were lynching people,” Williams said. “It was a subset of people who were doing that.” More

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    How the far-right group ‘Oath Enforcers’ plans to harass political enemies

    A national online network of thousands of rightwing self-described “Oath Enforcers” is threatening to unleash harassment tactics on elected officials and government workers around the country, the Guardian can reveal.While the network’s founder insists that the group is neither violent nor a militia, internal chats indicate that some members are planning for confrontations with law enforcement and their perceived political enemies.The chats also indicate that white supremacists and others connected with the militia movement are aiming to leverage the group’s success in recruiting disillusioned supporters of former President Donald Trump and the “QAnon” conspiracy movement, who are being exposed to a wide range of conspiracy theories, white nationalist material, and rightwing legal theories inside the groups.The group’s founder, who makes videos and organizes under the name Vince Edwards, lives off grid in a remote corner of Costilla county, in Colorado’s high desert region. Arrest records from 2016 indicate that he has also used the name Christian Picolo, and other public records associate him with the name Vincent Edward Deluca.Experts say that Edwards’s personal history reflects the potential danger in the spread of sovereign citizen ideology – along with voluminous online propaganda, that history includes an armed standoff with Costilla county sheriffs deputies in 2016.Edwards initially published videos and a printable flyer promoting the formation of “oath enforcement teams” of at least 30 people in every county in the nation during late January 2021, just weeks after his own self-documented attendance at a rally at the national Capitol on 6 January.His initial videos explicitly appealed to QAnon supporters, pointing out that “Q”, the supposed Trump administration insider whose gnomic forum posts animated the conspiracy-minded social movement, had not communicated with the movement since December, and that rather than “trusting the plan”, as adherents are enjoined to do, they should begin taking action.In the wake of the Capitol attack his efforts seem to have resonated with a growing pool of grassroots right-wingers. The Guardian found over 3,100 members in 50 state-based Telegram chats and a national chat. Some state based groups – such as Texas’s, Washington’s, and Alabama’s – were very active and had hundreds of members.The stated aims of the group include posting flyers designed by Edwards, the formation of “constitutional enforcement groups”, for every person to hand out 1,000 of Edwards’s flyers, and the creation of local hotlines to help “enforce the contract we made with our public servants” by live-streaming interactions with them or lodging spurious legal claims against them.In an introductory video entitled “OE training”, Edwards encourages new recruits to the network to emulate so-called “First amendment auditors” (FAAs).Professor Brian Levin is the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (CSHE) at California State University, San Bernardino. In a telephone conversation he explained that FAAs are a social media driven movement of libertarian provocateurs who “go to sensitive locations to see if law enforcement, security guards, or property owners will interfere with their activities which are annoying, but not usually illegal”.Meanwhile, some local groups show that well known extremists are seeing opportunities in the group’s fast growth.The Oregon Oath Enforcers group, for example, was joined on 5 February by Chester Doles of Dahlonega, Georgia. Doles, a long-time former member of the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi National Alliance, who was imprisoned in 1993 for beating a black man, and later marched in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.Doles received media attention recently as he and other members of the organization he currently leads, American Patriots USA, were among an armed crowd which protested outside the Georgia capitol on 6 January, am action which led Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who had been demonized by the far right for his role in Georgia’s election count, to flee the building.In recent months, Doles has reportedly been seeking to build alliances with Three Percenters and other militia organizations in Georgia.A former member of far-right group Patriot Prayer, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, joined the Oregon Oath Enforcers chat on 9 February. Toese, a Proud Boy, was a prominent and frequently violent participant in a long string of brawling, contentious street protests in Portland throughout the Trump era. He was jailed in Clark county, Washington, last October after violating the condition of his probation after earlier being convicted for assault over an unprovoked daylight attack on a man in Portland.In a video message to the Oath Enforcers group, Toese said: “You guys organizing? Me and my people will be there to take a stand with you.”Elsewhere in the Oath Enforcers instructional Telegram channel, Edwards and others have shared documents from a range of organizations around the country which promote false legal and constitutional doctrines associated with the so-called sovereign citizen movement.One document is presented as a judgment by a self-styled human rights tribunal, which orders the arrest order for a range of officials and philanthropists including Anthony Fauci and Bill and Melinda Gates for the crime of genocide.The sovereign citizen movement does not hold a universally consistent set of beliefs, but most adherents believe in a false alternative history of the United States, and that the present, and especially the law, reflects a conspiracy ordered by esoteric rules. Many treat all legal and governmental authority as illegitimate.In the Oath Enforcers’s chats, sovereign doctrine is presented side by side with false beliefs about vaccinations and masks, assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, and conspiracy theories about links between antifascist “Antifa” activists and powerful figures like billionaire George Soros.Vince Edwards and Chester Doles did not immediately respond to requests for comment.In intelligence assessments and public statements, federal agencies have advised that sovereign citizens pose an ongoing and specific threat to law enforcement officers.Levin, the extremism researcher, says of the apparent synergies between sovereign citizens and white supremacists that “there has been a realignment on the far-right extremist fringe”, wherein “law enforcement is viewed as an arm of a tyrannical government in much the same way that Sovereign Citizens viewed them decades prior.”Levin adds that “not only is the ideology getting a rebranding, so too are many far-right figures like former Klan Leader Chester Doles”.In a 28 March post on the Oregon Oath Enforcers page, a user reposted white nationalist broadcaster, Vincent James’s commentary on a clash between antifa and far-right street protesters in Salem the previous day.In part, the post read: “Cops never were and never will be your friend. They’re also the American regime. Not allies.” More

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    Why aren't we calling the Capitol attack an act of treason?

    During Donald Trump’s presidency, the UC Davis law professor Carlton Larson spent a lot of time on the phone telling journalists: “It’s not treason.”Trump’s behavior towards Russia: not treason. All the FBI investigations Trump labeled as treason: also not treason. Then came the 6 January attack on the Capitol by hundreds of Trump supporters. That was treason according to the founding fathers, Larson wrote in an op-ed the next day.But in the three months since 6 January, however, there has been little public discussion of “treason” as the framework for understanding what happened, Larson said. “Everything was ‘Treason, treason, treason,’ when it wasn’t, and now you have an event that is closer to the original 18th-century definition of treason than anything that’s happened, and it’s almost silent. Nobody is using the term at all,” he said.Federal prosecutors have brought cases against more than 300 people allegedly involved in the Capitol insurrection. So far, many of the rioters have been charged with lower-level offenses, like “disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building”. A few members of extremist groups, including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, are facing more serious conspiracy charges.There has been some public discussion of whether some rioters should face “sedition” charges, including an early comment by then president-elect Joe Biden that the rioting at the Capitol was an “unprecedented assault” on democracy that “borders on sedition”.A federal prosecutor who had been working on the Capitol cases told 60 Minutes in late March that he personally believed “the facts do support” sedition charges against some suspects. Michael Sherwin, the prosecutor, was publicly criticized by a federal judge for the media appearance, and is now the subject of an internal review over whether he spoke out inappropriately.Treason is defined in the US constitution as “levying war” against the United States, or “adhering” to the enemies of the United States and “giving them aid and comfort”. The framers had in mind “men gathering with guns, forming an army, and marching on the seat of government”, Larson said.Sedition, in contrast, is “a broader term for disloyal behavior” against the government, Larson said.There are two main types of sedition in US law: one is sedition associated with speech, or “seditious libel”, a charge which has been repeatedly used in the US to target anti-war and leftist activists, particularly during wartime, according to Jenny Carroll, a professor at the University of Alabama school of law. The other is “seditious conspiracy”, defined under federal law as taking action either to “overthrow” the US government, to use force “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States” or “to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States”.While treason is a crime still punishable by death in the United States, the maximum penalty for seditious conspiracy is 20 years.‘If that’s not seditious conspiracy, I don’t know what is’In his book On Treason: A Citizen’s Guide to the Law, Larson argued that Americans were unlikely to mount an internal rebellion against the United States in modern times. Then the Capitol attack proved him wrong.What was distinctive about the Capitol riot, he said, was the use of force, which is necessary for something to count as “levying war” against the United States.He compared the insurrection to the anti-tax Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, which was forcefully put down by George Washington, and resulted in multiple indictments for treason.“If you asked a lawyer in 1790 if [6 January] was an act of treason or levying war against the United States, they would have almost certainly said yes,” Larson said.Yet Larson said he did not expect prosecutors would file treason charges in the 6 January cases, because the charge would probably add too many legal complications. A legal precedent from 1851 set a higher bar for the definition of treason, he wrote, defining it only as an attempt to overthrow the government itself, not simply the obstruction of one particular law.The definition of “seditious conspiracy”, in contrast, seems like a much easier match, Larson and Carroll agreed, particularly because it includes conspiracies “to prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law”, which the Capitol invaders appear to have accomplished by forcing lawmakers to hide and delaying the certification of the 2020 election results.“Seditious conspiracy captures the flavor of January 6,” said Steve Vladeck, a federal courts expert at the University of Texas school of law. “You had a whole lot of people – who may not have had exactly the same motive, or may not have committed the exact same acts – who were in a very large degree involved in a common plan, the goal of which was to somehow, in some way, keep President Trump in office.”“If that’s not seditious conspiracy, I don’t know what is.”Seditious conspiracy charges have been rare in US historyIt remains unlikely that the majority of the rioters will face seditious conspiracy charges, experts said.The crime of “seditious conspiracy” requires proof, not just of the action, but of agreement, Carroll said. “The global chatter among US attorneys is that there has been a lot of work to trace electronic communications individuals engaged in to figure out who was talking to who,” she added.“To the extent that there are charges for seditious conspiracy, it would be against particular little cells of people,” Larson said. “It would be impossible to show that all of those people [at the Capitol] had some type of prior agreement with each other.”Sherwin, the federal prosecutor, told 60 Minutes in late March that there were “over 400 criminal cases” in total, but that only 10% of cases were “the more complex conspiracy cases” involving militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who “did have a plan”.Seditious conspiracy charges have been rare in US history. That’s largely because seditious conspiracy itself “doesn’t happen that much”, Larson said.In 1995, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and several followers were convicted of seditious conspiracy in a case related to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Oscar López Rivera, the leader of a Puerto Rican independence group, served 35 years in prison for seditious conspiracy before Barack Obama commuted his sentence in 2017.Some previous attempts by federal prosectors to convict far-right extremists for seditious conspiracy have failed.In 2012, a Michigan judge dismissed sedition charges against the five members of the Hutaree militia, a Christian militia group, ruling that the government’s case had relied too much on “circumstantial evidence”. Members of the group pleaded guilty to lesser weapons charges and were sentenced to time served.In 1988, an all-white jury acquitted 13 white supremacists of sedition charges in a high-profile trial in Fort Smith, Arkansas.More recently, Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, called last summer for prosecutors to file seditious conspiracy charges against demonstrators against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by police. Barr was particularly focused on protesters in Portland, where there had been property damage to a federal building, Carroll said.This was “entirely inconsistent with how previous protest movements” had been treated, Carroll said, and prompted concern and outrage from legal experts.The US government, Carroll said, “has not been great about being consistent about how it treats different types of dissenters”. “Dissenters calling for change in social conditions or racial conditions or class conditions tend to be much more heavily prosecuted than folks who do things like engage in voter intimidation or engage in acts of white-based maintenance of power.”Sedition laws in the early 20th century, including the Sedition Act of 1918, was “not only focused on World War I”, but “really focused on shutting down socialists and communists, who the government thought were going to be a threat to democracy”, said Roy Gutterman, the director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University.The supreme court at the time upheld convictions of “small groups of dissidents” who were “distributing fliers speaking out against the US government”, Gutterman said. That included socialists passing out flyers advocating that Americans peacefully resist the draft, which the supreme court at the time ruled was not protected as free speech.When a law originally designed to crack down on leftist and labor organizers were used to prosecute a Ku Klux Klan leader after a cross burning in the 1960s, the supreme court set a new standard, concluding that the law violated the Klan leader’s free speech rights. More

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    Oath Keepers founder swapped calls with members during Capitol attack

    The founder of far-right group the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, his lieutenant, and three members of the militia who guarded Donald Trump ally Roger Stone swapped numerous phone calls in a three-hour period on 6 January when the Capitol was attacked by a mob, prosecutors said Thursday.These exchanges coincided with the initial assault on police barricades outside Congress, and continued into when the three guards breached the US Capitol building, according to the Washington Post.Prosecutors made this claim in a new indictment, which added two of these guards – Joshua James and Roberto Minuta – to an ongoing Oath Keepers conspiracy case. James and Minuta were both previously charged.The case has 12 defendants, who are facing charges such as conspiracy, and obstruction of an official proceeding. Four of these co-defendants, including James and Minuta, have yet to enter pleas. The others have pleaded not guilty.“In response to a call for individuals to head to the Capitol after the building was breached, James and Minuta drove to the Capitol in a golf cart, at times swerving around law enforcement vehicles with Minuta stating, ‘Patriots are storming the Capitol … so we’re en route in a grand theft auto golf cart to the Capitol building right now … it’s going down guys’,” federal prosecutors said.Rhodes has previously denied there was a plan to breach Congress and insisted that authorities were trying to establish a bogus conspiracy. “I may go to jail soon, not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes,” he remarked to Texas Republicans during a recent rally in Laredo.Rhodes also implored ex-president Trump’s supporters to “not cower in fear”, maintaining that federal authorities were “trying to get rid of us so they can get to you”. Rhodes also reportedly said: “If we actually intended to take over the Capitol, we’d have taken it, and we’d have brought guns.”Neither Rhodes nor Stone have yet been accused of wrongdoing, The Post noted. More

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    The father, the son and the racist spirit: being raised by a white supremacist

    From an exposed bluff in Mill Point, West Virginia, Kelvin Pierce surveyed the remote place where his father chose to live and die. In a sense, he knew why. Kelvin is an avid outdoorsman, and even on a stark February day, with snow blanketing the earth and bitter wind whistling through the trees, he was moved by Appalachia’s subtle splendor. He understood why a man might settle there.“I love West Virginia,” Kelvin had said earlier, on the four-and-a-half-hour drive from his home just outside Washington. “It’s absolutely my favorite place on the planet.”It’s also full of sorrow.When Pierce’s father bought 346 acres in Mill Point, and relocated there permanently in 1985, he left his family behind. He started building a compound where a new kind of family – men and women of like mind – could live off the land and be free of outside influences. He moved into a rambling trailer home, where he lived with a series of wives who weren’t Pierce’s mother. He had divorced her, declaring the split “necessary in order for me to have the peace of mind I need to do most effectively what I must do with my life”.Nothing was more important to Kelvin’s father than white supremacy. The abandonment and the hate – the abandonment for hate – is what Kelvin has spent the better part of his life struggling to understand.To family and friends, his dad was Bill. To everyone else, he was William Luther Pierce III, one of America’s most prominent white nationalists.A physics professor turned neo-Nazi, William Pierce led a hate group called the National Alliance and a business empire that, at the time of his death from cancer in 2002, raked in $1m a year. He published books and magazines, hosted a radio program, and owned a music label, all of which promoted white supremacy. His work galvanized violent gangs, such as the Order and the Aryan Republican Army. Most infamously, it inspired the architect of the Oklahoma City bombing – Timothy McVeigh designed the attack based in part on Pierce’s 1978 novel The Turner Diaries.Reportedly called “the bible of the racist right” by the FBI, The Turner Diaries is a fantasy about white militants overthrowing the US government as part of a bloody race war. A 2016 report found that the book had been tied to at least 200 murders, committed in 40 terrorist attacks and hate crimes. This year, during the 6 January coup attempt, there were echoes of the novel’s core ideas in insurrectionists’ calls to kill members of Congress, and in a gallows erected near the Capitol.William Pierce raised Kelvin to hate Jews, Black people, immigrants – anyone who wasn’t white. Now 60, Kelvin has long rejected his father’s ideology, but only recently has he reached the point where he’s ready to talk about his upbringing, and how his story illuminates the toxic currents roiling America. “If I can help one other person that felt the way I used to feel, to feel better and to make different choices, then that’s what I want to do,” Kelvin said. “And I think I can help more than one person.”When he was little, Kelvin would sneak into his dad’s home office in northern Virginia to look at the bust of Adolf Hitler and the glass paperweight in the shape of a swastika that sat on the desk. Kelvin didn’t know what the items meant, and William Pierce wasn’t interested in explaining. He rarely spent time with Kelvin and his twin brother, Erik, preferring to fraternize with George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi party, or to lock himself away writing articles decrying Jewish power and interracial marriage.Kelvin’s strongest memories of his dad involve abuse. Any disobedience or perception of bad behavior led to beatings with whatever was at hand: a belt, a wire hanger, a two-by-four. The violence left Kelvin with bruises and a deep well of self-loathing.His mom, Patty, didn’t approve of the cruelty, but she didn’t do much to intervene. She took a similar approach to her husband’s extremism, which he’d nurtured since at least the early 1960s. A math professor and the family breadwinner, because her husband had given up his own academic career to become an ideologue of hate, Patty did all of William Pierce’s accounting and typing. Kelvin said his mom was “absolutely terrified” when her husband started a firearms business – not because he advertised his stock as “Negro control equipment” necessary for “the coming race war”, but because it prompted newspapers to publish articles about him. Patty worried that someone might come to the house and hurt her family.When her sons told her that neighborhood kids made fun of them by calling them Nazis, she lamented that “it’s a terrible world” and “people are awful”. She didn’t answer when Kelvin asked her what a Nazi was, and she didn’t tell her boys that their father was to blame for what was happening to them.As a teenager, Kelvin was a bigot because he didn’t know any other way to be. He also hoped it would impress his dad. In high school, he gave a presentation on Hitler’s virtues and used the N-word to talk about Black classmates. By the time he went to college, he was “a mobile advertisement” for his father’s beliefs.“It made me feel superior to be part of the white race,” Kelvin later wrote. “Yet deep, deep down, something didn’t quite feel right about it either.”He began to change when he transferred from a small Christian college to Virginia Tech. He roomed with a young man from South America who was “thoughtful, caring, and very intelligent” – all things that Kelvin’s father insisted people who weren’t white couldn’t be. He took classes with students who saw the world very differently than he did. When Ronald Reagan was elected president and many of his liberal peers were visibly upset – including his roommate, who drew a dagger and drops of blood on a photo of Reagan – he wanted to understand why. He started paying attention to politics and watching the evening news, which his dad had always said was worthless because Jews controlled the media. Kelvin wondered if everything he’d been taught was wrong.He met a fellow student named Susan when they were both engineering interns with the navy one summer. Kelvin thought she was beautiful, but while his racism was rapidly dissipating, his shame – the feeling that his dad had abused him for a reason, that he deserved it – was not. He couldn’t imagine making the first move, but Susan could. “You know, if you were to ask me out, I would say yes,” she announced one day.They were married in 1986. William Pierce came to the wedding. His gift to the bride and groom was a box of 9mm ammunition. “To keep the wolves away from your door!” his note read. Kelvin didn’t even own a gun.By then, William Pierce had divorced Patty, decamped to Mill Point, and curtailed contact with his sons. Kelvin only confronted his dad once, asking why he’d chosen white supremacy over everything else in his life. “It was the only responsible thing I could do,” his father replied.For her part, Susan didn’t think that William Pierce’s worldview mattered. “Thank goodness that’s a dying thought process,” she recalled thinking – an assumption she now sees as optimistic, or perhaps naive. It was also hard for her to fathom the extent of the abuse Kelvin suffered.“You know, he hit me every day,” he told her once.“Every day?” she replied, incredulous.Susan had grown up in a home where, as she put it, “We were always hugging each other, and we always said, ‘I love you.’”She and Kelvin had kids only because they agreed to adopt them. “I was just terrified of furthering my genes,” Kelvin said. “I was so messed up and so damaged as a human being that I couldn’t fathom the idea of trying to make another human being.” Their daughters, Mariame and Marieka, are from the country of Georgia. Kelvin vowed to love them like he’d never been loved. He coached their softball teams and took them on camping trips.William Pierce never met his granddaughters. For seven years prior to his death, he didn’t reply to the letters and photos documenting their childhood that Kelvin sent him. Despite everything, Kelvin kept reaching out. His anger at how he’d been raised collided with yearning for paternal approval. When he first heard of the connection between The Turner Diaries and the Oklahoma City bombing, his knee-jerk reaction was a perverse kind of pride that his dad was in the news. He was ashamed his mind went there, but at a loss for how to stop it.Kelvin was battling his demons without armor or weapons. He was also doing it alone. “You’re a mystery to me,” Susan would tell him sometimes. “I don’t understand why you won’t tell me how you’re really feeling.”In July 2002, his uncle called to tell him that his father was dead. Kelvin hadn’t even known he was sick. He surprised himself by crying, then realized what he was really mourning: he had to let go of the futile hope that his father might one day love him. He went to West Virginia for the memorial service, where neo-Nazis offered their condolences and said Kelvin must have admired his father very much.How little they know, he thought.He looked like his dad – tall and lanky, with mournful eyes, a long, square jaw, and prominent ears. He shared William Pierce’s introspection and his dislike of being told what to do. But the similarities ended there.After the service, he began to feel something new: he was sad for his father and the life he’d led. It could have been different. But again and again, William Pierce had made the wrong choices, leaving heartache and hate in his wake.Kelvin wanted to start making better choices of his own.To Mariame Pierce, her dad’s bookshelf told the story. When she was little, it held volumes about Kelvin’s hobbies – mountain climbing, for instance. Over time, new titles appeared, ones about self-discovery and philosophy, written by Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. While she was growing up, her dad was changing too. “He became more present and thoughtful, more conscious and intentional,” said Mariame, now 25.Kelvin had embarked on a “healing” journey, as he describes it. He read, reflected, and prayed. He worked with a counselor to process his childhood trauma, including his father’s belief system. He and Susan, who already ran a successful construction business together, started a charitable foundation to support orphanages in Georgia. When he posted pictures from visits to his daughters’ native country, friends remarked that he looked uncharacteristically happy. “To make a child feel like at least somebody in the world loves them, it’s the most amazing thing in the world,” Kelvin said.He told his life story publicly for the first time at his local Rotary Club. He described how, in his youth, he’d fantasized about traveling to Washington with a gun and opening fire on Black people. His teenage dreams now repulsed him. Afterward, audience members came up to thank him. Some of them were crying.The more he talked about his experiences, the more people told Kelvin he should write a book. It took a seismic national event for him to decide they were right.On 12 August 2017, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly. Watching the events unfold, “I was immediately transported back to my childhood,” Kelvin said. “The hatefulness of their energy and what they were saying, the way they were saying it, especially ‘You will not replace us’ – it was just like being an eight- or nine-year-old kid, when my dad took me to an American Nazi party picnic.”He started writing what would become Sins of My Father, which he self-published in February 2020. In addition to telling Kelvin’s personal story, the book draws on private letters and other archival documents that reveal how perceived grievances, personal disappointment, and twisted self-regard led William Pierce to dedicate his life to white supremacy.Though it’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when his father’s beliefs began to curdle – stories of radicalization are never so precise – Kelvin finds seeds of discontent in the years when William Pierce was a new husband, a new father, and newly endowed with his physics doctorate. “I think Dad was becoming angry and resentful and was suddenly frightened of the future and the heaviness of it all,” Kelvin writes. “He hated the idea of working for someone else. He never wanted to have to answer to anyone else, even his wife.”This period in William Pierce’s life coincided with the rise of progressive identity politics – the acceleration of the civil rights movement, for instance, and the dawn of second-wave feminism. He wanted to be a man who mattered, a man people listened to. White nationalism allowed him to be that. His life became one long ideological devolution, nourished by the power and attention he accrued evangelizing about hate.If the story sounds familiar, it is. America is still plagued by the forces of rightwing radicalization. Sins of My Father draws parallels between William Pierce and Donald Trump, who “emboldened white supremacists and mass-shooters by his words and deeds,” as Kelvin writes. “In many ways, Trump has succeeded where Dad failed. He has taken hate and discrimination mainstream.”Other evidence of his father’s enduring impact hit closer to home. After Marieka Pierce enrolled in a police academy in Virginia, one day in class, her instructors showed the room a picture of her grandfather, describing him as an example of a homegrown extremist. “My hand went up,” Marieka later told her mom.The instructors were stunned to hear about the family connection. William Pierce was a staple in their curriculum about hate crimes; they’d been teaching recruits about him for as long as they could remember. They asked to meet Kelvin to get a fuller picture of the man who, in obituaries, was remembered as “a cold and calculating racist” and “the godfather of hate in this country.”Donny MacMullen has his own take on William Pierce: he thinks Kelvin’s father was a great man.MacMullen, who is in his 30s, with reddish brown hair, a full beard, and striking blue eyes, moved to Mill Point from Massachusetts a few years ago to help preserve Pierce’s legacy. Today, he’s the caretaker of the National Alliance compound, which amounts to a few scattered buildings and the rocky sprawls of land between them.The place is in a state of disrepair, and people rarely visit, but there are reminders of the community Kelvin’s dad was trying to build before he died: an AV facility stocked with equipment that was first-rate in the early aughts; a library that once housed several thousand volumes; stacks of slickly produced magazines promoting racism; a meeting house where William Pierce presided over annual National Alliance conferences. Today, even as Pierce’s ideas continue to find adherents, the organization he started is a shade of its former self.MacMullen was happy to welcome Kelvin to the compound in February. Indeed, members of the National Alliance had long made clear that William Pierce’s son could visit anytime. For more than 15 years after his father’s death, however, Kelvin stayed away. He wasn’t ready to make peace with it, because he wasn’t at peace with himself.It was a steep drive up switchbacks to the heart of the compound, where MacMullen was waiting, wearing a knit cap with a swastika stitched to the front. When Kelvin asked him about the symbol, MacMullen laughed. It just represents love for the white race, he insisted. Kelvin pointed out that it was associated with hate and genocide, and MacMullen shifted gears. If you love something deeply, he said, then you have to hate anything that threatens it.This was another way of expressing the sentiment of a meme MacMullen once posted on his Facebook page: “I’m white but that doesn’t mean I’m racist … I will put my boot in your ass, my knife to your throat, and your body in the dirt if you f**k with me and mine.”Kelvin and MacMullen walked for a while on the property, just the two of them. If it was painful to talk with a man who revered his father – who saw virtue in a racist who beat him every day of his childhood – Kelvin didn’t let it show. They talked about their divergent beliefs, and neither man was interested in budging.“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” MacMullen said at one point.When Kelvin recounted the conversation to his best friend, Gil Jullien, who’d come on the trip as moral support, Jullien was furious. “Oh, that’s bullshit!” he said. “I don’t agree to disagree!”Jullien was speaking from experience. He was troubled that a close childhood friend had become a vociferous Trump supporter, the sort who regularly posts racist and sexist content on Facebook. Once, when the two men were at a high school reunion talking politics, Jullien’s friend had told him they’d have to agree to disagree. Jullien wasn’t having it. “In my opinion, he’s ruining our country, and I’m not,” he later explained.Kelvin shares Jullien’s moral compass. “Aggression and hate and violence are the epitome of cowardice,” he said. But he doesn’t want to feel antagonism or resentment toward anyone, not even white nationalists.He prefers to listen and question, not to confront; to offer the possibility of connection rather than writing people off. His approach might not be for everyone, but for Kelvin it’s vital. If he could be redeemed, why not someone like MacMullen?“I’m putting myself out there for people that want help and want change,” Kelvin said.Before Kelvin left the compound, MacMullen gave him a copy of a book – a tome, really, at more than 1,000 pages. Written in 1978 by William Gayley Simpson, a white nationalist who ran in the same circles as William Pierce, Which Way Western Man? bemoans the supposed decline of white civilization, the rise of feminism and multiculturalism, and the alleged chokehold liberal orthodoxy has on modern society – it’s a collection of white supremacy’s greatest hits.MacMullen said the text meant a lot to him. Back home in Virginia, in the spirit of listening and questioning, Kelvin cracked the book and read the first 50 or so pages. “It kind of boils down to, do you live your life stuck in the rat race, within society’s norms, or do you break out from that and try to live a more authentic life, doing what you want to do, what you feel is right versus what society says is right?” he said.The language struck a chord. He heard echoes of his own transformation, of setting a new course for himself. Whereas Kelvin chose a path defined by hope and inclusivity, people who admire his father have let bigotry be their guide. Still, in their journeys’ common origin, Kelvin saw promise – the possibility of trying again, and getting it right this time.“It’s not as insurmountable a task to start a recovery process as some people think. It does take discipline, but it actually works,” he said. “I’m living proof of that, right?”The last time Kelvin saw his father, he jumped off a mountain.Kelvin had started hang-gliding in his 20s, and during his first visit to the compound in West Virginia – the only one he took while William Pierce was alive – his dad had suggested he glide off one of the property’s peaks. No way, Kelvin told him. There weren’t open areas below where he could land. At best he’d come away injured; at worst he could die.A few years later, in 1995, Kelvin traveled to Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia, for a series of flights over the Labor Day weekend. He invited his dad to come watch him. He didn’t expect him to show, but as Kelvin was untying his glider from its rack on his truck, he heard a familiar voice.“You need a hand with that?” his father asked.“You actually came,” Kelvin replied.With his father’s help, Kelvin made quick work of maneuvering his 80lb glider to the launch site. Before them was a pleated vista, gentle peaks and valleys thick with late-summer green. Kelvin suited up and pointed to the landing field where his father could meet him. “Clear!” he yelled, before taking a few running steps and leaving the earth.The flight was perfect. A swell of wind – a lift, as hang-gliders say – allowed Kelvin to pilot much higher than he’d planned, rendering his dad a dot on the ground. He stayed in the sky for an hour. The view was majestic: forests and farms and fields stretching beneath him.He touched down with ease in a wide field. As he was packing up his gear, he heard the familiar voice again: “Wow, Kelvin, that was absolutely amazing.”It was the first time in his life that Kelvin knew for certain he’d impressed his father.They stood in the landing field talking for a bit longer. Then father and son said their goodbyes and went their separate ways: William Pierce to what Kelvin called “his life of hate at the compound”; he to new chapters of his existence. Some, such as parenthood, would be joyous. Wrestling with his past would be torment. But just like he navigated the wind high above the mountains, Kelvin would steer himself to a place where he could land, safe and whole, and invite others to join him, if only they too have the courage to leap.Seyward Darby is the editor-in-chief of the Atavist Magazine and the author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism. Johnathon Kelso is an editorial photographer working on long-form projects related to history and race in the American south More