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      Four Proud Boys leaders charged over alleged roles in US Capitol attack

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      Four men described as leaders of the far-right Proud Boys group have been charged in the US Capitol riot, as an indictment ordered unsealed on Friday presents fresh evidence of how federal officials believe members planned and carried out a coordinated attack to stop Congress certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory.At least 19 leaders, members or associates of the neo-fascist Proud Boys have been charged in federal court with offenses related to the 6 January riot, which resulted in five deaths.The latest indictment suggests the Proud Boys deployed a much larger contingent in Washington, with more than 60 users “participating in” an encrypted messaging channel for group members created a day before.The Proud Boys abandoned an earlier channel and created the new Boots on the Ground channel after police arrested the group’s leader, Enrique Tarrio, in Washington. Tarrio was arrested on 4 January and charged with vandalizing a Black Lives Matter banner at a historic Black church during a protest in December. He was ordered to stay out of the District of Columbia.Tarrio has not been charged in connection with the riots but the latest indictment refers to him by his title as Proud Boys’ chairman.Ethan Nordean and Joseph Biggs, two of the four defendants charged in the latest indictment, were arrested several weeks ago on separate but related charges. The new indictment also charges Zachary Rehl and Charles Donohoe.All four defendants are charged with conspiring to impede certification of the electoral college vote. Other charges in the indictment include obstruction of an official proceeding, obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder and disorderly conduct.Nordean, 30, of Auburn, Washington, was a Proud Boys chapter president and member of the group’s national Elders Council. Biggs, 37, of Ormond Beach, Florida, is a self-described Proud Boys organizer. Rehl, 35, of Philadelphia, and Donohoe, 33, of North Carolina, are presidents of local Proud Boys chapters, according to the indictment.A lawyer for Biggs declined to comment. Attorneys for the other three men didn’t immediately respond to messages.Proud Boys members, who describe themselves as a politically incorrect men’s club for “western chauvinists”, have engaged in street fights with antifascist activists at rallies and protests. Vice Media co-founder Gavin McInnes, who founded the Proud Boys in 2016, sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for labeling it as a hate group.The Proud Boys met at the Washington Monument around 10am on 6 January and marched to the Capitol before then president Donald Trump finished addressing thousands of supporters near the White House.Around two hours later, just before Congress convened a joint session to certify the election results, a group of Proud Boys followed a crowd who breached barriers at a pedestrian entrance to the Capitol grounds, the indictment says. Several Proud Boys entered the Capitol building after the mob smashed windows and forced open doors.At 3.38pm, Donohoe announced on the “Boots on the Ground” channel that he and others were “regrouping with a second force” as some rioters began to leave the Capitol, according to the indictment.“This was not simply a march. This was an incredible attack on our institutions of government,” assistant US attorney Jason McCullough said in a recent hearing for Nordean’s case.Prosecutors have said the Proud Boys arranged for members to communicate using Baofeng radios. The Chinese-made devices can be programmed for use on hundreds of frequencies, making them difficult for outsiders to eavesdrop.After Tarrio’s arrest, Donohoe expressed concern that encrypted communications could be “compromised” when police searched the group chairman’s phone, according to the new indictment. In a 4 January post on a newly created channel, Donohoe warned members that they could be “looking at Gang charges” and wrote, “Stop everything immediately,” the indictment says.“This comes from the top,” he added.A day before the riots, Biggs posted on the Boots on the Ground channel that the group had a “plan” for the night before and the day of the riots, according to the indictment.In Nordean’s case, a federal judge accused prosecutors of backtracking on their claims that he instructed Proud Boys members to split up into smaller groups and directed a “strategic plan” to breach the Capitol.“That’s a far cry from what I heard at the hearing today,” US district judge Beryl Howell said on 3 March.Howell concluded that Nordean was extensively involved in “pre-planning” for the events of 6 January and that he and other Proud Boys “were clearly prepared for a violent confrontation”. However, she said evidence that Nordean directed other Proud Boys members to break into the building is “weak to say the least” and ordered him freed from jail before trial.On Friday, Howell ordered Proud Boys member Christopher Worrell detained in federal custody pending trial on riot-related charges. Prosecutors say Worrell traveled to Washington and coordinated with Proud Boys leading up to the siege.“Wearing tactical gear and armed with a canister of pepper spray gel marketed as 67 times more powerful than hot sauce, Worrell advanced, shielded himself behind a wooden platform and other protestors and discharged the gel at the line of officers,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.Defense attorney John Pierce argued his client wasn’t aiming at officers and was only there in the crowd to exercise his free speech rights.“He’s a veteran. He loves his country,” Pierce said. More

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      The best way for Democrats to weaken the far right? Build up the labor movement | Brendan O'Connor

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      The election and inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris does not represent the defeat of the far right, as even the most mainstream Democrats must rhetorically acknowledge. The more critical question, however, is whether those same Democrats are willing to support the changes necessary to actually achieve this victory: not through the introduction of new domestic terror legislation and the expansion of the security state, but through passing laws that allow poor and working people to build power for themselves, in their own organizations and institutions, on their own terms.The incoming administration has already signaled its sensitivity to the urgency of the moment: within hours of taking office, Biden signed a slew of executive orders on the pandemic, immigration, and the climate that began the work of undoing some of what the Trump administration was able to accomplish without congressional involvement. But many of these orders only return federal policy to the pre-Trump status quo, which was already insufficient; those that go beyond that previous status quo do so in the most minimal or superficial of ways. If the Biden administration is serious about legislating towards a more just and equitable society, it must not only pursue reforms to the way that Congress itself works – abolishing the filibuster, for example – but it must prioritize structural reforms like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would open the door to a transformation of the US labor movement.Mostly overshadowed by the storming of the US Capitol, the second impeachment of Donald Trump, and the inauguration of Joe Biden, a slew of worker struggles in the United States are entering critical phases. On Martin Luther King Day in New York, in two very different parts of the city, the New York police department descended upon peaceful demonstrators who had taken to the streets in support of separate, but related causes: in an encore of their performance this summer, hundreds of cops beat and arrested dozens of Black Lives Matter protesters marching through downtown Manhattan, near city hall; 11 miles and an hour’s subway ride away, in the Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood, hundreds more NYPD cops swarmed a picket line of workers on strike for a $1-an-hour raise, arresting six. The co-op that runs the market has reportedly hired a private security firm to keep fruits and vegetables moving, with help from the NYPD. Six workers at the market, mostly members of the striking Teamsters Local 202, have died since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.Without a robust labor movement, the sole bulwark against far-right violence will be the stateThis month alone, in addition to the workers who keep New York supplied with fresh produce going on strike, white-collar workers at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced the formation of a union, which grew from 225 members to more than 700 within a week. Elsewhere in California, gig workers, supported by the Service Employees International Union, are suing to overturn a ballot measure stripping them of their rights as workers that platform companies like Uber and Lyft spent $200m to get passed last year. Chicago’s formidable teachers’ union is threatening to strike over school reopenings. And a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama is headed to a vote beginning next month. Nearly half a million unionized essential workers’ contracts will be up for renegotiation this year, Luis Feliz Leon reports in the New Republic, setting the stage for a potential strike wave.Victory is not only necessary to improve the conditions of the workers engaged in these particular struggles, but because an organized working class that can fight (and win) is our only hope to defeat an increasingly militant far right. Without a robust labor movement, guided by the principles of anti-fascism and anti-racism, the sole bulwark against far-right violence will be the state – specifically, the law enforcement agencies whose repressive power has grown exponentially in the last few decades, and is inevitably turned against workers, the poor, the racialized and the left.In the weeks and months since the election, Washington’s liberal establishment dissuaded anyone from counter-demonstrating against the fascists who repeatedly marched through the city to protest Donald Trump’s election loss. The momentum those fascists were able to build carried them up the steps of the US Capitol, leaving five dead; consequently, tens of thousands of national guards members and police were ordered into DC.“Their America has always done this elsewhere,” the writer and army veteran Matt Gallagher told the Guardian, speaking of the young troops occupying the city. “Now it’s happening here.” Even though leftwing organizations weren’t actively targeted, leftwing organizing efforts were disrupted as a result, with mutual-aid networks disrupted by blockades and checkpoints.The point is not to attempt to win over people who would take up arms to oppose a multiracial, socially equitable democracy; the point is to build a movement that can fight for a society where the appeal of such ideologies is obviated. The more successful any fascist or far-right populist movement is, the more working-class people will be absorbed into it, won over by its subversiveness, its superficial anti-capitalism, and its appeals to blood and soil. But at their core, these movements are not for working people and the poor; they are based in the reactionary middle classes: the heirs to suburban fortunes; the cops and prison guards and border patrol agents; the serial entrepreneurs who never have to suffer the consequences of their failures.The struggle against fascism does not begin or end with fighting fascists in the street. In fact, the most successful antifascist mobilization is not one in which the fascists get beaten up, but one that is so well-organized, publicized, and receives such popular support that the fascists never show up at all. Admittedly, this does not make for dramatic photography or videos. It deprives journalists of the spectacle of violence, but it also keeps people safe.Sustaining such mobilization over time will not be possible without a dynamic, vital labor movement, freed to experiment with new organizational forms that reach new layers of the American working class – a movement that can also lead the fight against climate change, police violence and mass incarceration, and against the capitalist order that, when in crisis, gives rise to fascism in the first place. More

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      Most alleged Capitol rioters unconnected to extremist groups, analysis finds

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      Nearly 90% of the people charged in the Capitol riot so far have no connection with militias or other organized extremist groups, according to a new analysis that adds to the understanding of what some experts have dubbed the “mass radicalization” of Trump supporters.A report from George Washington University’s Center on Extremism has analyzed court records about cases that have been made public. It found that more than half of people facing federal charges over the 6 January attack appear to have planned their participation alone, not even coordinating with family members or close friends. Only 33 of the 257 alleged participants appear to have been part of existing “militant networks”, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers anti-government militia.The dominance of these “individual believers” among the alleged attackers underscored the importance of understanding the Capitol violence as part of a “diverse and fractured domestic extremist threat,” and underscored the ongoing risk of lone actor terror attacks, the George Washington researchers concluded.Other analysts have argued the Capitol attackers should be understood as “not merely a mix of rightwing organizations, but as a broader mass movement with violence at its core”.‘Mass radicalization becomes mass mobilization’While individuals associated with far-right networks were critical in escalating the violence at the Capitol, the report found that members of organized extremist groups make up only a small minority of the people charged so far.About a third of the people charged were part of “organized clusters” of family members or friends who planned their participation together. These small groups allegedly include a father and son from Delaware, a mother and son from Tennessee, several husband and wife pairs, two brothers from Montana, and a group of acquaintances from Texas, including Jenna Ryan, a real estate broker, who took a private plane to Washington together to storm the capitol.The existence of these clusters of participants “demonstrates the importance of involvement in friendship or kinship networks as a key factor in encouraging increasingly extreme beliefs and high-risk, often violent, activism”, the report notes.But the largest category of alleged rioters, according to the report, was a “hodgepodge” of individuals with a variety of extremist beliefs who made plans to come to the rally, originally billed as a “Stop the Steal” protest, on their own, and had no documented connections to existing groups, or even to small clusters of other Trump supporters. These “inspired believers” included adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, as well as people who simply believed the false claims of Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers that the election had been stolen from Trump and wanted to do something about it.Michael Jensen, a senior researcher who specializes in radicalization at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, said the results of the analysis were not surprising. “What we witnessed on January 6 wasn’t a one-off extremist plot,” he said. “We witnessed an instance of mass radicalization which turned into an instance of mass mobilization.”Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud, repeated for months across social media and traditional media platforms, had succeeded in radicalizing “potentially millions of individuals who have collectively adopted an extremist viewpoint” about the legitimacy of the election, Jensen said.“We’re seeing a lot of folks [charged] who look like pretty normal people,” he said. “They tend to be older individuals, that were married, with families, that had jobs. These are not hardcore extremists. These are individuals who got caught in a really extraordinary circumstance.”Many of the unaffiliated people charged in the attack might not have even known what an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy was, Jensen said, “but they know who the president is … and the president was providing a narrative of fraud”.A different analysis of court records by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, looking at 290 arrests connected to the Capitol attack, found very similar results to the George Washington University report, including that only 12% of alleged participants were part of militias or other organized violent groups.This initial data revealed, the Chicago analysts wrote, that “‘normal’ pro-Trump activists joined with the far right to form a new kind of violent mass movement”.The Chicago report also warned that typical counter-terrorism approaches, such as arresting members of dangerous extremist groups, would not be very effective to confront this complex threat, which may require “de-escalation approaches for anger among large swaths of mainstream society”.The George Washington University report also revealed how instrumental the alleged rioters’ own social media posts have been to building criminal cases against them. Roughly half of people charged over the riot had their own alleged social media posts used against them as evidence, while about 30% of people charged had “been possibly incriminated” by the social media accounts of friends. More

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      What the arrests of Beverly Hills residents say about the US Capitol attack

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      Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterBeverly Hills has seen more residents arrested for participating in the US Capitol insurrection than any other city in California.Three of the 14 California residents charged in connection with the pro-Trump riot in Washington on 6 January so far are from the wealthy Los Angeles county enclave: Gina Bisignano, a salon owner, and Simone Gold and John Strand, two rightwing activists who have spread coronavirus misinformation through their roles in America’s Frontline Doctors, an organization that Gold, an emergency room physician, founded.The 11 other Californians who have been charged in the riot are scattered across the state, from San Diego to San Francisco, with three clustered in towns around Sacramento, the state capital, and two from towns in the notoriously conservative Orange county, south of Los Angeles.The prominence of Beverly Hills and the profile of the three residents who have been charged reflects what experts say are broader trends in the backgrounds of the more than 250 people charged so far in connection with the Capitol riot.More than 90% of the people charged in the riots so far are white, researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats found. About 40% are business owners or have white-collar jobs, the researchers found, and compared with previous rightwing extremists, relatively few of them were unemployed.“There’s been this assumption that the most reactionary folks on the frontlines would be what’s often referred to as white working-class, but that’s of course not what we saw,” said Vanessa Wills, a political philosopher who studies the intersections of race and class. “The people who showed up are disproportionately small business owners.”The people charged in the attack so far also did not come exclusively from Republican states or conservative enclaves. In fact, a majority lived in counties that Biden won, like Beverly Hills, nestled next to Hollywood in liberal Los Angeles county.Only 10% of the people charged so far had identifiable ties to rightwing militias or other organized violent groups, the Chicago researchers found. Many more were people who had identified as mainstream Trump supporters.From lockdown protests to the US CapitolSalon owner Bisignano was indicted on seven counts, including destruction of government property and civil disorder.Gold and Strand, the rightwing activists, were indicted on five counts, including disorderly conduct in a capitol building. Gold’s lawyer declined to comment on the charges against her, and Strand and Bisignano’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.All three Beverly Hills defendants were already prominent rightwing protest figures before the events at the Capitol.Bisignano had gone viral in December for shouting homophobic slurs at an anti-lockdown protest outside the home of Los Angeles’ public health director, according to TMZ, which called her “coronavirus lockdown Karen”.“You’re a new world order satanist,” Bisignano told a person filming her at the protest, according to the TMZ video. “You’re a Nazi and you’re brainwashed.”“Is there something wrong with not wanting a lockdown?” she asked. “Is there something wrong with wanting freedom?”Gold, who has been labeled a “toxic purveyor of misinformation” for her public stances questioning the safety of the coronavirus vaccine and touting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus, was part of an anti-lockdown demonstration with other doctors on the steps of the supreme court in July. Video of the doctors spreading misinformation about Covid-19 was repeatedly shared by Trump and by Donald Trump Jr, and ultimately viewed more than 14m times, despite takedowns by multiple social media platforms, the Washington Post reported.Strand, the communications director for America’s Frontline doctors, was also one of the main organizers of the frequent pro-Trump rallies in Beverly Hills before and after the election, the Los Angeles Times reported.“The election is not over,” Strand said at a protest in mid-November after Trump had lost the election, according to footage posted on YouTube. “Yes, we have a chance to win the election.”All three Beverly Hills defendants had spoken out publicly about their participation in the Capitol riot before they were arrested, including in newspapers interviews and on social media.“I’m like, I didn’t know we were storming the Capitol. I should have dressed different,” Bisignano told the Beverly Hills Courier before her arrest, noting that she had worn Chanel boots as well as a Louis Vuitton sweater to the riot.•••It is not clear how wealthy or financially stable Bisignano or the other Beverly Hills defendants are. While many of the Americans charged in the Capitol riots were educated, employed and financially stable enough to afford a trip across the country to attend a pro-Trump protest, a Washington Post analysis also found that many people charged in the attack had some history of financial troubles, and that, as a group, they were twice as likely as Americans overall to have a history of bankruptcy.Understanding the background and social status of alleged domestic terrorists is important to understanding what can be done to counter this kind of radicalization and prevent future attacks. The profiles of the Capitol rioters already present a challenge for these kinds of efforts, researchers say.“What we are dealing with here is not merely a mix of rightwing organizations, but a broader mass movement with violence at its core,” the Chicago Project on Security and Threats researchers wrote in a public presentation on their initial findings. Normal strategies for countering violent extremism, like social programs for the poor, or arrests targeting organized extremists groups, would not work, the researchers concluded: what was needed was “de-escalation approaches for anger among large swaths of mainstream society”.Many Americans had reason to be angry at the failures of politicians and the federal government during the pandemic, which has led to widespread unemployment, disproportionate burdens on people of color, and half a million people dead, but the Capitol attackers were not broadly representative of the US population.Experts have emphasized the importance of recognizing the coded attacks on the legitimacy of Black voters’ ballots within Trump’s rhetoric about “election fraud”, and the value of understanding the Capitol insurrection as an act of racial violence motivated by white supremacist ideas.But the economic and class backgrounds of the alleged Capitol rioters may also be revealing, particularly as many Americans struggle to understand why so many of their fellow citizens were vulnerable to Trump’s lies about election fraud and lurid conspiracy theories like QAnon.The white Americans who showed up at the Capitol did not appear to represent big business or the country’s financial elite, Wills, the political philosopher, said. Instead, they appeared to largely represent people who felt squeezed by bigger companies, resentful towards the government, which had provided a small business pandemic relief program that failed to help many small businesses, and also resentful towards “working-class demands that they see as hostile to their interests as small business owners”.It was no accident that chaotic anti-lockdown protests at state capitols during the early months of the pandemic were a precursor to the attack on the Capitol in Washington, Wills argued: the public health lockdown measures were specifically threatening to small businesses, and their ability to ensure that their employees would return to work.While susceptibility to conspiracy theories involves many factors, she argued, people would likely be more open to embrace wild theories if the theories justified them acting on what was already in their economic interest.“Most people would find it hard to think well of themselves if they confronted the fact that they woke up that morning and decided they are going to frustrate society’s attempts to contain a pandemic for their own private financial benefit,” Wills said. 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      Trump to tell CPAC he is Republican 'presumptive 2024 nominee' – report

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      Donald Trump will reportedly tell the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this week he is Republicans’ “presumptive 2024 nominee” for president.Trump will address CPAC on Sunday, his subject the future of the party he took over in the 2016 primary then led from the White House through four tumultuous years. On Monday, citing anonymous sources, the news site Axios reported his plan to assume the mantle of challenger to Joe Biden – or another Democrat, should the 78-year-old president decide not to run for a second term.An unnamed “longtime adviser” was quoted as saying Trump’s speech to the rightwing event will be a “show of force” with the message: “I may not have Twitter or the Oval Office, but I’m still in charge.”A named source, close adviser Jason Miller, said: “Trump effectively is the Republican party. The only chasm is between Beltway insiders and grass-roots Republicans around the country. When you attack President Trump, you’re attacking the Republican grass roots.”Thousands have left the party since the Capitol riot of 6 January, which Trump incited in his attempt to overturn an election defeat he has not conceded, and in which five people including a police officer died. Trump lost his Twitter account, his favoured means of communication throughout his time in office, and access to other social media over his lies and inflammatory behaviour before, during and after the attack on Congress.Polling of Republicans who have not left the party, however, shows the former president with a clear lead over a range of potential 2024 candidates, supportive of him or not, in a notional primary.Ten members of the House voted to impeach Trump a second time over the Capitol attack and seven senators voted with Democrats to convict. That was short by 10 votes of the majority needed but it made it the most bipartisan impeachment ever.The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, voted to acquit but then turned on Trump, branding him responsible for events at the Capitol. But House leaders have not followed suit, as they deal with vocal extremists in their caucus and the loyal party base.As Trump lashed out at McConnell, calling him “a dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack”, so Republicans in the House and Senate who turned against Trump have been censured by state parties and reported vitriol aimed their way from the grassroots – and even family members.Trump’s grip on his party is clear. New polling from Suffolk University and USA Today showed 46% of Trump voters would follow him if he formed his own party while 42% said his impeachment had strengthened their support. The same poll said 58% of Trump voters subscribed to an outright conspiracy theory: that the Capitol riot was “mostly a [leftwing] antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters”.In reality, many of more than 250 individuals charged over the attack have been found to have links to far-right groups.On Sunday a key member of House leadership, Steve Scalise, repeatedly refused to say Trump lost the election or bore responsibility for the Capitol breach.The former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said Scalise was “saying that America isn’t a democracy. That’s become the new standard of the Republican party. Not since 1860s has a large part of the country refused to accept election. The Republican party is an anti-democratic force.”Scalise also told ABC News he had visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort.“I noticed he was a lot more relaxed than in his four years in the White House,” he said. “He still cares a lot about this country and the direction of our country. But, you know, it was a conversation more about how he’s doing now and what he’s … planning on doing and how his family is doing.”Axios cited an unnamed source as saying some potential 2024 contenders have sought Trump’s endorsement. It also noted that the former president, who would be 78 on election day and faces considerable legal threats now he has left office, may be planning to string the party along but ultimately not to run.Funds raised around Trump’s lie about his clear election defeat by Joe Biden being the result of fraud may be ploughed into funding primaries against those who have crossed him.Either way, CPAC has obligingly moved close by, from its usual venue in Maryland. Party moderates and figures who have criticised Trump, among them the Maryland governor, Larry Hogan, and the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, have not been invited to speak. Mike Pence, the vice-president whose life was placed in danger during the Capitol attack, reportedly turned down an invitation.Crowds at the conservative event were initially suspicious of Trump when he emerged on the national Republican scene, but came to embrace his flag-hugging displays with evangelical fervour.Axios’s source reportedly said: “Much like 2016, we’re taking on Washington again.” More

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      Merrick Garland vows to target white supremacists as attorney general

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      At his Senate hearing on Monday, attorney general nominee Merrick Garland will pledge to prosecute “white supremacists and others” who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January, in support of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat.The pledge was contained in Garland’s opening testimony for the session before the Senate judiciary committee, released on Saturday night.“If confirmed,” Garland said, ‘I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January – a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy: the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”Five people including a police officer died as a direct result of the attack on the Capitol, before which Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” against the result of the presidential election. Trump lost to Joe Biden by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. More than 250 participants in the Capitol riot have been charged. As NPR reported, “the defendants are predominantly white and male, though there were exceptions. “Federal prosecutors say a former member of the Latin Kings gang joined the mob, as did two Virginia police officers. A man in a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt took part, as did a Messianic Rabbi. Far-right militia members decked out in tactical gear rioted next to a county commissioner, a New York City sanitation worker, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist.”In his testimony, Garland made reference to his role from 1995 to 1997 in supervising the prosecution of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City Bombing, a white supremacist atrocity in which 168 people including 19 children were killed.Trump was impeached for a second time on a charge of inciting an insurrection but was acquitted after only seven Republicans joined Democrats in the Senate in voting to convict, 10 short of the majority needed.“It is a fitting time,” Garland said, “to reaffirm that the role of the attorney general is to serve the rule of law and to ensure equal justice under the law.”The 68-year-old federal appeals judge was famously denied even a hearing in 2016 when Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell blocked him as Barack Obama’s third pick for the supreme court.Biden’s selection of Garland for attorney general is seen as a conciliatory move in a capital controlled by Democrats but only by slim margins, the Senate split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote.In his testimony, Garland said he would be independent from Biden, being sure to “strictly regulate communication with the White House” and working as “the lawyer … for the people of the United States”.Trump pressured his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, to do his bidding, then saw his second, William Barr, largely do so, running interference on the investigation of Russian election interference and ties between Trump and Moscow. If confirmed, Garland will face sensitive decisions over matters including Trump, now exposed to criminal and civil investigation, and Hunter Biden, the new president’s son whose tax affairs are in question as he remains a target for much of the right.Some on the left have expressed concern that Garland might be too politically moderate. Black Lives Matter founder LaTosha Brown, for example, told the Guardian: “My concern is that he does not have a strong civil rights history … even when Obama nominated him, one of the critiques was that he was making a compromise with what he thought was a ‘clean’ candidate to get through.”In his testimony, Garland said justice department civil rights work must be improved.“Communities of colour and other minorities still face discrimination in housing, education, employment, and the criminal justice system,” he said, “and bear the brunt of the harm caused by pandemic, pollution, and climate change.”Garland is expected to be confirmed. More

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      Donald Trump to address CPAC on future of Republican party

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      Former president Donald Trump will address the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, in Florida next week, about the future of the Republican party and the conservative movement, a source familiar with the plan told Reuters on Saturday.
      The CPAC meeting will be held in Orlando, Florida from 25 to 28 February, with Trump speaking on the final day, Reuters reported.
      “He’ll be talking about the future of the Republican party and the conservative movement,” the source reportedly said. “Also look for the 45th president to take on President [Joe] Biden’s disastrous amnesty and border policies.”
      Trump lost the presidency to Biden, who beat him by 306-232 in the electoral college and more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. The former president has refused to accept that result but now lives at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
      Last week he survived a second impeachment, for inciting the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, as part of his attempt to overturn his defeat.
      Seven Republican senators voted to convict, 10 short of the figure needed but indicative of a party split between supporters of Trump and an establishment seeking to move on.
      Ten House Republicans voted to impeach and Trump has expressed anger their way. On Tuesday he aimed fire at Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, the most senior elected Republican.
      The loss of the White House to Biden and control of the Senate, which Democrats picked up in a pair of upset Georgia election runoff victories last month, coupled with the rise of extreme rightwing figures who vocally support Trump, has left Republican leaders on edge as they plot how to win Congress back in 2022.
      Trump and McConnell parted ways in the weeks after the November election, with Trump angered that the Kentucky Republican recognised Biden as the winner in mid-December. They have not spoken since, a former White House official said this week.
      The gap widened when McConnell declared after the Senate acquittal that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the Capitol attack and open to criminal prosecution. In return, Trump called McConnell “a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack” and said that if Republicans stay with him “they will not win again”.
      Polling shows that though thousands have left the party since the Capitol attack, a clear majority of those left support Trump and would vote for him if he entered the primary for the presidential nomination in 2024.
      It was also reported this week that the former White House strategist Steve Bannon thought Trump was suffering from early onset dementia while in office.
      A number of top Republicans who are considered possible candidates for the 2024 presidential nomination are also due to speak at CPAC, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Kristi Noem, the governor of South Dakota.
      Two notable figures not on the CPAC speaker list are former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley and former Vice-President Mike Pence.
      Another anonymous source told Reuters Trump had rebuffed a request by Haley to meet with him recently after she was critical of him in a Politico article.
      Pence’s life was threatened by the Capitol mob, when he refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.
      Conservatives and CPAC attendees were slow to accept Trump when he first ran for office, leading him to withdraw from the event during the 2016 primaries. But he has come to dominate the event, offering red meat to a party base apparently entirely in his thrall.
      “Do you remember I started running and people would say, ‘Are you sure he’s a conservative?’” he asked its audience in 2018. “I think now we’ve proved that I’m a conservative, right?” More

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      The decline of Proud Boys: what does the future hold for far-right group?

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      During the the Trump era, the far-right Proud Boys rode high, enjoying presidential support, recruiting thousands of men, and, as the self-nominated nemesis of leftist Antifa activists, participating in a string of violent street altercations around the country.But now since Trump’s election loss and the aftermath of the 6 January attack on the Capitol in Washington DC, a series of blows dealt by law enforcement, elected officials and their own leaders have shaken the extremist fraternity that the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as a hate group.The cumulative impact has experts wondering about the Proud Boys’ long-term future.Since their foundation in 2016 by the far-right Canadian media personality and entrepreneur Gavin McInnes, the all-male group – who wear uniform clothing, enforce bizarre initiation rituals, eschew masturbation, and reward violence with higher degrees of membership – have been an outsized presence on the landscape of pro-Trump extremism, and successful in promoting themselves as the most militant part of his coalition.But their role in the Capitol insurrection especially has brought far less welcome attention.Law enforcement agencies have connected at least 10 Capitol arrestees with the Proud Boys in criminal complaints and affadavits. Those charged include leaders like the Florida combat veteran and conspiracy theorist Joe Biggs and Washington state’s Ethan Nordean, whose prominence rose in the group after he was caught on film attacking an antifascist during a 2018 riot in downtown Portland, Oregon.Biggs – a former employee of Alex Jones’s conspiracy-minded Infowars network – was central in organizing incursions into the city of Portland in 2019 and 2020, each of which drew Fred Perry-clad militants from around the country to confront antifascists and city authorities.He is now charged with impeding Congress, unauthorized entry to the Capitol, and disorderly conduct. However, the affidavit supporting the charges also alleges Biggs was involved in extensive radio communications with other Proud Boys on the day. The allegations of coordination between members of the group may hint at more charges to come.Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, said in a telephone conversation that it was likely that “more conspiracy charges being levied on some of these people in the future”.Shannon Reid, an assistant professor in criminology at the University of North Carolina, said the strategy in these cases resembles the one prosecutors often use in pursuit of criminal enterprises, where the aim is to “pick up as many people as humanly possible and to hope that they just plead out”.The cases against Biggs and Nordean turn what had been the Proud Boys’ greatest weapon – social media – against them as authorities have detailed their alleged misdeeds using material that they and others posted online.For example, a grand jury indictment of a Texan, Nicholas Decarlo, and the founder of the group’s Hawaiian chapter, Nicholas Ochs, alleges that they together inscribed “Murder the media” on the front door of the Capitol before stealing a Capitol police officer’s handcuffs. In an affidavit, an FBI special agent says that they determined that Ochs had been in the building from his own Twitter account.Meanwhile, Dominic Pezzola and William Pepe allegedly conspired with each other in a sequence of events which included Pezzola assaulting a Capitol police officer, stealing his riot shield, and then using it to smash in one of the Capitol’s windows. The evidence cited in affidavits includes Pezzola’s account on the shuttered conservative-friendly social media service, Parler, and videos posted online by other rioters.The FBI says that another arrestee, Bryan Betancur, was wearing a Proud Boys cap at the rally. They also say that Betancur is a “self-professed white supremacist” who discussed carrying out school shootings and expressed support for Charlottesville killer, James Fields.He was placed inside the Capitol building by signals from his court-ordered ankle monitoring device, a parole condition related to an earlier offense.Newhouse said that voluminous social media evidence suggests that “this was carefully planned and extensively communicated in the moment”. The connection between Proud Boys and other extremist organizations – previously noted on several occasions by US law enforcement – has now led to the first instance of the group being outlawed. Last Wednesday, the Canadian parliament formally declared the Proud Boys a terrorist group, citing their “misogynistic, Islamophobic, antisemitic, anti-immigrant and/or white supremacist” ideology and their association with “white supremacist groups”.The designation opens the way for any crimes committed by Proud Boys to be prosecuted as terrorist acts. It also means that any fundraising, travel, recruitment and training for the group can be prosecuted, and members can be added to no-fly lists or denied entry to Canada.Meanwhile, parliamentarians in Australia are pushing their government to follow suit, after McInnes was denied entry to the country on character grounds in 2018.In the US, while criminal acts can be prosecuted as domestic terrorism, it has not been possible to designate domestic groups as terrorist, and, at least in theory, the first amendment prevents authorities from surveilling domestic groups on the basis of their political beliefs, even if those beliefs encompass an advocacy of violence.Increasingly over the life of the Trump administration, however, Democratic politicians advocated for just such an approach to rightwing extremists.Now, the first bill aimed at addressing rightwing extremism as domestic terrorism has been introduced to Congress by the Illinois Democrat Brad Schneider and has attracted bipartisan sponsorship.If passed it would set up dedicated domestic terrorism units within the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. It would also require those departments to report to Congress twice a year on domestic terrorism incidents and hate crimes, and their progress in dealing with such cases.In a telephone conversation, Schneider said that while he had first proposed a version of the bill in 2017, before he had become aware of the group, the Proud Boys were “certainly a troubling group, in their rhetoric and their actions”.“We have seen what they’ve done in various places, whether it was in Washington last year or it with the insurrection in the capital last month,”Schneider added, calling the latter event an attack “not just members of Congress, but the foundation of our government, our constitution, and our republic”.Other events have compounded the effects of the additional scrutiny. During the Trump presidency, police in cities from California to Kalamazoo were regularly accused of having a soft touch when it came to the Proud Boys and their far-right allies, and these claims have been borne out in nationwide studies. But since the election, local agencies around the country have appeared more ready to respond with force when the group’s street protests become violent.Police have used batons, gas and other “non-lethal” weapons on Proud Boys in Salem, Oregon, and Washington DC during December and January. Some Proud Boys have remarked on the apparent sea change: in a podcast released on 4 January, Nordean, the Washington state arrestee, said that “the police are starting to become a problem,” even though “we’ve had their back for years”.On 2 February, those comments were quoted in the criminal complaint detailing Nordean’s alleged participation in the riot.Just before the riot, Enrique Tarrio, the chair of the Proud Boys, was arrested on charges related to the vandalism of a black church and illegal weapons. Then, last week, it was revealed that he had been a “prolific” police informant.Since the revelation that he had been a police informant, Proud Boyschapters in Nevada, Missouri and Alabama have publicly announced theirdeparture from the main organization on the messaging platform,Telegram. On the same platform, the also-departed Oklahoma Proud Boyshave exchanged barbs with Tarrio and other leaders.Tarrio took over leadership of the group after McInnes ostentatiously resigned as a member following Guardian reporting that revealed that federal authorities considered them an extremist group.Notwithstanding his earlier public disavowals, in 2020 McInnes attended and spoke at the group’s annual WestFest event in Las Vegas in 2020, and has persisted in advocating for the group in the online outlets available to him, including his Telegram and Parler accounts.Though the Proud Boys may be reeling now, Newhouse warns that opposing a Democratic president gives them a similar opportunity to previous waves of rightwing militancy, like the militia movement in the Clinton years, and its revival as the so-called Patriot Movement during Obama’a time in office.“I don’t think they’re going anywhere,” he said. “The more extreme fringe actors are going to gain influence,” with some Proud Boys drifting into adjacent extremist groups in the Boogaloo movement or neo-Nazism.“De-radicalization is one of the hardest problems,”Newhouse said, “harder even than preventing acts of terrorism.” More