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      Who is the Republican extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene?

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      Awaiting punishment for her lengthy history of extreme and violent commentary on Thursday, Marjorie Taylor Greene rose to introduce herself to the Congress. Wearing a mask embroidered with the words “FREE SPEECH”, the freshman congresswoman from Georgia regretted that she had not yet had a chance to tell her House colleagues “who I am and what I’m about”.Over the next eight minutes, Greene sought to untangle herself from the litany of dangerous and unfounded conspiracy theories that she had peddled on social media in recent years – “words of the past” that did not represent her.Greene renounced her embrace of QAnon, an ideology the FBI has called a potential domestic terrorism threat. She said school shootings in Parkland and Sandy Hook were “absolutely real”, and not so-called “false flag” events designed to build support for gun control laws, as she once suggested. “I also want to tell you 9/11 absolutely happened,” she declared, somewhat sheepishly, after previously questioning whether a plane really flew into the Pentagon.Despite a show of contrition, however, she offered no explicit apology. Instead, a defiant Greene warned that those seeking to “condemn me and crucify me in the public square for words that I said and I regret” were wading into dangerous political territory that would haunt them should Republicans reclaim the majority.She remained in the chamber for the debate, as her colleagues litigated her past – and sought to tie it to her party’s future.“The party of Lincoln, the party of Eisenhower, the party of Reagan is becoming the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the party of violent conspiracy theories,” the House rules committee chairman, Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in a floor speech.Hours later, the House rendered its verdict, stripping Greene of her committee assignments in an extraordinary rebuke of the first-term lawmaker who Donald Trump once praised as a “future Republican star”.Yet Greene’s exile – over the objection of all but 11 House Republicans – has only exacerbated the growing chasm within the party, between an emboldened extremist movement that flourished under Trump’s presidency and an increasingly isolated group of conservatives who want to move beyond the divide-and-conquer politics of the last four years.As pressure built on Republicans to discipline Greene, Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called her “looney lies” a “cancer” to the party and the nation. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, also condemned Greene’s statements, but ultimately declined to take any punitive action, arguing that she should not be punished for remarks made before she was elected.In those social media posts and videos, only some of which she disavowed and many of which came to light before she was elected, Greene indicated support for executing top Democrats, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi; claimed that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in government; and compared Black Lives Matter activists to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.She also trafficked in a slew of conspiracy theories, many of which are rooted in antisemitism, Islamophobia and white nationalism. Most notably, she embraced QAnon, a conspiracy that claims Trump is trying to save the world from a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. In posts unearthed recently, Greene wrote in 2018 that a devastating California wildfire was caused by a Jewish-controlled “laser” beamed from space.fIn another video, she accosts the gun-control activist David Hogg, who survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, as he walked down a street in Washington. He was there to lobby lawmakers in support of passing gun safety measures, while she was there to oppose them. “He’s a coward,” she said of Hogg.Greene represents an ascending far-right movement within the Republican ranks that carries the banner of Trump’s grievance politics – and the support of his loyal supporters who are now critical to the party’s future.“We’re thankful for her,” said Dianne Putnam, chair of the Whitfield county Republican party, which is situated in Greene’s district. “We’ve been waiting to have a congressman [sic] that would take a stand for conservative causes and be a voice for us that we felt we’ve never had.”In her telling, Greene was not particularly political before 2016, when she was galvanized by the billionaire’s “plain talk”. She became increasingly political – and radical.In 2017, disenchanted with mainstream news coverage of Trump’s presidency, she turned to online message boards where she discovered QAnon, at the time a fringe internet subculture. She began writing for a now defunct conspiracy blog called American Truth Seekers, publishing articles that expressed support for QAnon and other outrageous theories, among them that Hillary Clinton was behind John F Kennedy Jr’s 1999 death in an airplane crash.Greene told the House on Thursday that she “walked away” from QAnon in 2018 after discovering “misinformation, lies, things that were not true”. But as recently as late last year, she spoke openly and favorably of the movement.In 2019, Greene decided to run for Congress. She initially launched a campaign in the district where she lived, a competitive seat in suburban Atlanta held by the Democratic congresswoman Lucy McBath. But when the Republican congressman Tom Graves announced his retirement, she switched to run in Georgia’s 14th congressional district, a deep-red corner of the state that borders Tennessee to the north and Alabama to the west.Running on a “pro-Life, pro-Gun, pro-Trump” platform, the political novice cast herself as a deeply Christian mother of three who was the first in her family to graduate from college. She touted her success as a businesswoman, running a commercial construction company founded by her father, and later, a CrossFit gym.After placing first in a crowded primary field, Greene advanced to a runoff against John Cowan, a neurosurgeon who pitched himself as equally conservative and pro-Trump minus the “circus act”. “She is not conservative – she’s crazy,” he told Politico ahead of the election, adding: “She deserves a YouTube channel, not a seat in Congress.”Though her messaging raised concern among some national Republicans, there was never a concerted strategy to defeat her. A handful of party leaders and conservative groups intervened to endorse Cowan, but many remained neutral. She earned crucial support from the members of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, including Jim Jordan, the group’s founder, and Andy Biggs, its chairman.Greene won the runoff with nearly 60% of the vote, and coasted to victory in November.Since her arrival in Congress, she has continued to build on her brand as a far-right provocateur. Sporting masks that said “Stop the Steal”, Greene was a vocal proponent of the baseless claim that Trump won the presidential election, and was among a handful of conservatives who met with him at the White House to discuss overturning the election results.Greene referred to 6 January, the day Congress was set to formalize the election results, as Republicans’ “1776 moment” before a rally to defend the president turned into a deadly riot on Capitol Hill. Even after the assault, she continued to claim Trump would remain in office and decried his impeachment. Days later, she announced that she would file articles of impeachment against Joe Biden – before he was even sworn into office.Far from being a fringe figure, Greene represents the “tip of the spear” of a radical movement that is building power within the Republican party, said Adele Stan, director of Right Wing Watch, a project of People for the American Way.In Congress, she is joined by Lauren Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado who has also expressed support for QAnon conspiracy theories. Across the country, local parties and elected officials are rushing to embrace – rather than confront – the swirl of toxic conspiracy theories and disinformation coursing through their grassroots.By failing to unilaterally punish Greene, Stan said Republicans were giving “passive affirmation” to the ideology promulgated by the web of far-right and white nationalist groups who organized and led the deadly siege at the Capitol on 6 January.“If you don’t hold people accountable, then things will continue to spiral out of control, which is what we’re seeing happen in the Republican party right now – and why there was an insurrection at the Capitol,” she said. “People need to be held accountable for what they say.”Banished from her committees by House Democrats and 11 Republicans after just a month in Congress, Greene said she felt liberated. At a news conference on Friday, Greene said she would use her political sway and social-media savvy to grow the pro-Trump movement and push Republicans further to the right.“I woke up early this morning literally laughing thinking about what a bunch of morons the Democrats (+11) are for giving some one like me free time,” Greene wrote on Twitter. “Oh, this is going to be fun!” More

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      'It let white supremacists organize': the toxic legacy of Facebook's Groups

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      Sign up for the Guardian Today US newsletterMark Zuckerberg, the Facebook CEO, announced last week the platform will no longer algorithmically recommend political groups to users in an attempt to “turn down the temperature” on online divisiveness.But experts say such policies are difficult to enforce, much less quantify, and the toxic legacy of the Groups feature and the algorithmic incentives promoting it will be difficult to erase.“This is like putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” said Jessica J González, the co-founder of the anti-hate speech group Change the Terms. “It doesn’t do enough to combat the long history of abuse that’s been allowed to fester on Facebook.”Groups – a place to create ‘meaningful social infrastructure’Facebook launched Groups, a feature that allows people with shared interests to communicate on closed forums, in 2010, but began to make a more concerted effort to promote the feature around 2017 after the Cambridge Analytica scandal cast a shadow on the platform’s Newsfeed.In a long blogpost in 2017 February called Building Global Community, Zuckerberg argued there was “a real opportunity” through groups to create “meaningful social infrastructure in our lives”.He added: “More than one billion people are active members of Facebook groups, but most don’t seek out groups on their own – friends send invites or Facebook suggests them. If we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric.”After growing its group suggestions and advertising the feature extensively – including during a 60-second spot in the 2020 Super Bowl – Facebook did see a rise in use. In February 2017 there were 100 million people on the platform who were in groups they considered “meaningful”. Today, that number is up to more than 600 million.That fast rise, however, came with little oversight and proved messy. In shifting its focus to Groups, Facebook began to rely more heavily on unpaid moderators to police hate speech on the platform. Groups proved a more private place to speak, for conspiracy theories to proliferate and for some users to organize real-life violence – all with little oversight from outside experts or moderators.Facebook in 2020 introduced a number of new rules to “keep Facebook groups safe”, including new consequences for individuals who violate rules and increased responsibility given to admins of groups to keep users in line. The company says it has hired 35,000 people to address safety on Facebook, including engineers, moderators and subject matter experts, and invested in AI technology to spot posts that violate it guidelines.“We apply the same rules to Groups that we apply to every other form of content across the platform,” a Facebook company spokesperson said. “When we find Groups breaking our rules we take action – from reducing their reach to removing them from recommendations, to taking them down entirely. Over the years we have invested in new tools and AI to find and remove harmful content and developed new policies to combat threats and abuse.”Researchers have long complained that little is shared publicly regarding how, exactly, Facebook algorithms work, what is being shared privately on the platform, and what information Facebook collects on users. The increased popularity of Groups made it even more difficult to keep track of activity on the platform.“It is a black box,” said González regarding Facebook policy on Groups. “This is why many of us have been calling for years for greater transparency about their content moderation and enforcement standards. ”Meanwhile, the platform’s algorithmic recommendations sucked users further down the rabbit hole. Little is known about exactly how Facebook algorithms work, but it is clear the platform recommends users join similar groups to ones they are already in based on keywords and shared interests. Facebook’s own researchers found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”, an internal report in 2016 found.“Facebook has let white supremacists organize and conspiracy theorists organize all over its platform and has failed to contain that problem,” González said. “In fact it has significantly contributed to the spread of that problem through its recommendation system.”‘We need to do something to stop these conversations’Facebook’s own research showed that algorithmic recommendations of groups may have contributed to the rise of violence and extremism. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that internal documents showed executives were aware of risks posed by groups and were warned repeatedly by researchers to address them. In one presentation in 2020 August, researchers said roughly “70% of the top 100 most active US Civic Groups are considered non-recommendable for issues such as hate, misinfo, bullying and harassment”.“We need to do something to stop these conversations from happening and growing as quickly as they do,” the researchers wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal, and suggested taking measures to slow the growth of Groups until more could be done to address the issues.Several months later, Facebook halted algorithmic recommendations for political groups ahead of the US elections – a move that has been extended indefinitely with the policy announced last week. The change seemed to be motivated by the 6 January insurrection, which the FBI found had been tied to organizing on Facebook.In response to the story in the Wall Street Journal, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice-president of integrity, who oversees content moderation policies on the platform, said the problems were indicative of emerging threats rather than inability to address long-term problems. “If you’d have looked at Groups several years ago, you might not have seen the same set of behaviors,” he said.Facebook let white supremacists and conspiracy theorists organize all over its platform and has failed to contain that problemBut researchers say the use of Groups to organize and radicalize users is an old problem. Facebook groups had been tied to a number of harmful incidents and movements long before January’s violence.“Political groups on Facebook have always advantaged the fringe, and the outsiders,” said Joan Donovan, a lead researcher at Data and Society who studies the rise of hate speech on Facebook. “It’s really about reinforcement – the algorithm learns what you’ve clicked on and what you like and it tries to reinforce those behaviors. The groups become centers of coordination.”Facebook was criticized for its inability to police terror groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida using it as early as 2016. It was used extensively in organizing of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2019, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis violently marched. Militarized groups including Proud Boys, Boogaloo Bois and militia groups all organized, promoted and grew their ranks on Facebook. In 2020 officials arrested men who had planned a violent kidnapping of the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, on Facebook. A 17-year-old in Illinois shot three people, killing two, in a protest organized on Facebook.These same algorithms have allowed the anti-vaccine movement to thrive on Facebook, with hundreds of groups amassing hundreds of thousands of members over the years. A Guardian report in 2019 found the majority of search results for the term “vaccination” were anti-vaccine, led by two misinformation groups, “Stop Mandatory Vaccination” and “Vaccination Re-education Discussion Forum” with more than 140,000 members each. These groups were ultimately tied to harassment campaigns against doctors who support vaccines.In September 2020, Facebook stopped health groups from being algorithmically recommended to put a stop to such misinformation issues. It also has added other rules to stop the spread of misinformation, including banning users from creating a new group if an existing group they had administrated is banned.The origin of the QAnon movement has been traced to a post on a message board in 2017. By the time Facebook banned content related to the movement in 2020, a Guardian report had exposed that Facebook groups dedicated to the dangerous conspiracy theory QAnon were spreading on the platform at a rapid pace, with thousands of groups and millions of members.‘The calm before the storm’Zuckerberg has said in 2020 the company had removed more than 1m groups in the past year, but experts say the action coupled with the new policy on group recommendations are falling short.The platform promised to stop recommending political groups to users ahead of the elections in November and then victoriously claimed to have halved political group recommendations. But a report from the Markup showed that 12 groups among the top 100 groups recommended to users in its Citizen Browser project, which tracks links and group recommendations served to a nationwide panel of Facebook users, were political in nature.Indeed, the Stop the Steal groups that emerged to cast doubt on the results of the election and ultimately led to the 6 January violent insurrection amassed hundreds of thousands of followers – all while Facebook’s algorithmic recommendations of political groups were paused. Many researchers also worry that legitimate organizing groups will be swept up in Facebook’s actions against partisan political groups and extremism.“I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that they’re going to be able to actually sort out what a political group is or isn’t,” said Heidi Beirich, who is the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and sits on Facebook’s Real Oversight Board, a group of academics and watchdogs criticizing Facebook’s content moderation policies.“They have allowed QAnon, militias and other groups proliferate so long, remnants of these movements remain all over the platform,” she added. “I don’t think this is something they are going to be able to sort out overnight.”“It doesn’t actually take a mass movement, or a massive sea of bodies, to do the kind of work on the internet that allows for small groups to have an outsized impact on the public conversation,” added Donovan. “This is the calm before the storm.” More

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      US hate group numbers decline but online organizing has strengthened, report finds

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      During one of the most politically divisive years in recent memory, the number of active hate groups in the US actually declined as far-right extremists migrated further to online networks, reflecting a splintering of white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that are more difficult to track.In its annual report, to be released Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center said it identified 838 active hate groups operating across the US in 2020. That’s a decrease from the 940 documented in 2019 and the record-high of 1,020 in 2018, said the law center, which tracks racism, xenophobia and anti-government militias.“It is important to understand that the number of hate groups is merely one metric for measuring the level of hate and racism in America, and that the decline in groups should not be interpreted as a reduction in bigoted beliefs and actions motivated by hate,” said the report, first shared exclusively with the Associated Press.The Montgomery, Alabama-based law center said many hate groups have moved to social media platforms and use of encrypted apps, while others have been banned altogether from mainstream social media networks.Still, the law center said, online platforms allow individuals to interact with hate and anti-government groups without becoming members, maintain connections with like-minded people, and take part in real-world actions, such as last month’s siege on the US Capitol.White nationalist organizations, a subset of the hate groups listed in the report, declined last year by more than 100. Those groups had seen huge growth the previous two years after being energized by Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, the report said.The number of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ hate groups remained largely stable, while their in-person organizing was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.Bottom line, the levels of hate and bigotry in America have not diminished, said Margaret Huang, SPLC president and CEO.“What’s important is that we start to reckon with all the reasons why those groups have persisted for so long and been able to get so much influence in the last White House, that they actually feel emboldened,” Huang told the AP.Last month, as Joe Biden’s administration began settling in, the Department of Homeland Security issued an early national terrorism bulletin in response to a growing threat from home-grown extremists, including anti-government militias and white supremacists. The extremists are coalescing under a broader, more loosely affiliated movement of people who reject democratic institutions and multiculturalism, Huang said.The SPLC’s report comes out nearly a month after a mostly white mob of Trump supporters and members of far-right groups violently breached the US Capitol building. At least five deaths have been linked to the assault, including a Capitol police officer. Some in the mob waved Confederate battle flags and wore clothing with neo-Nazi symbolism.Federal authorities have made more than 160 arrests and sought hundreds more for criminal charges related to the deadly 6 January assault. Authorities have also linked roughly 30 defendants to a group or movement, according to an AP review of court records.That includes seven defendants linked to QAnon, a once-fringe internet conspiracy movement that recently grew into a powerful force in mainstream conservative politics; six linked to the Proud Boys, a misogynistic, anti-immigrant and antisemitic group with ties to white supremacism; four linked to the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization that recruits current and former military, law enforcement and first-responder personnel; four linked to the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia movement; and two leaders of “Super Happy Fun America”, a group with ties to white nationalists known for organizing a so-called “straight pride” parade in downtown Boston in 2019.The SPLC made several recommendations for the new administration in its latest report. It called for establishing offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the justice department and the FBI to monitor, investigate and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism. It also urged improving federal hate crime data collection, training and prevention; and for enacting federal legislation that shifts funding away from punishment models and toward preventing violent extremism. More

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      Two Proud Boys arrested over Capitol attack, including one who smashed window

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      Federal law enforcement officials have arrested two members of the Proud Boys, a rightwing nationalist extremist group, for their role in the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.The riot is now the subject of a second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, who is accused of inciting the rightwing mob at a rally that immediately preceded the assault. Federal authorities have charged more than 150 people in the onslaught.Federal prosecutors indicted Dominic Pezzola, 43, of Rochester, New York, and William Pepe, 31, of Beacon, New York on charges of conspiracy, civil disorder, unlawfully entering restricted buildings, and disorderly conduct in restricted buildings.Both men were identified as members of the Proud Boys, who, federal charging documents note, describe themselves as a “pro-Western fraternal organization for men who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world; aka Western Chauvinists”. The far-right group is known for using violent tactics against its opponents.Pezzola was the subject of one of the most widely distributed videos of the Capitol riots, in which he used a protective shield ripped away from a Capitol police officer to smash a window leading into the Capitol.Michael Sherwin, the acting US attorney for Washington, said in a court filing that Pezzola had “showed perseverance, determination, and coordination in being at the front lines every step along the way before breaking into the Capitol”, and that his actions in shattering the window and allowing an initial group of rioters to stream through “cannot be overstated”.Pezzola was later seen inside the Capitol building with a cigar, having what he described as a “victory smoke” and boasting that he “knew we could take this”. Pezzola’s lawyer described his client as a self-employed family man.In a search of Pezzola’s home in Rochester, New York, FBI agents found a computer thumb drive with hundreds of files detailing how to make firearms, poisons or explosives, Sherwin wrote in arguing that Pezzola should continue to be held without bail.Pepe was also photographed inside the Capitol. Federal authorities later identified him as a Metro-North Railroad train yard laborer who called in sick to attend the Trump rally that preceded the riot. Metro-North suspended Pepe without pay. He was also forced to surrender a shotgun and a hunting rifle, according to the Associated Press.In yet another arrest, federal authorities have charged Dawn Bancroft, a woman who entered the Capitol building and took a video of herself inside, with unlawful entry into a restricted building, disorderly conduct inside a restricted building, and violent entry into a restricted building.An affidavit from the FBI said Bancroft at first denied entering the building. When she was shown her own video of the event, the affidavit said she “stated that she lied”. Bancroft’s video showed her inside the Capitol with a friend and said she was searching for “Nancy”, believed to be Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, so they could shoot her “in the friggin’ brain”.Police are still searching for a suspect in the placement of pipe bombs in front of the Republican and Democratic party headquarters on 5 January.The FBI said it believed the suspect had placed the bombs in Washington DC between 7.30 and 8.30pm, and that the suspect was wearing Nike Air Max Turf shoes in yellow, black and gray. Authorities have increased the reward for information leading to the suspect’s arrest from $75,000 to $100,000. More

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      Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant

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      Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, has a past as an informer for federal and local law enforcement, repeatedly working undercover for investigators after he was arrested in 2012, according to a former prosecutor and a transcript of a 2014 federal court proceeding obtained by Reuters.In the Miami hearing, a federal prosecutor, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Tarrio’s own lawyer described his undercover work and said he had helped authorities prosecute more than a dozen people in various cases involving drugs, gambling and human smuggling.Tarrio, in an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, denied working undercover or cooperating in cases against others. “I don’t know any of this,’” he said, when asked about the transcript. “I don’t recall any of this.”Law enforcement officials and the court transcript contradict Tarrio’s denial. In a statement to Reuters, the former federal prosecutor in Tarrio’s case, Vanessa Singh Johannes, confirmed that “he cooperated with local and federal law enforcement, to aid in the prosecution of those running other, separate criminal enterprises, ranging from running marijuana grow houses in Miami to operating pharmaceutical fraud schemes”.Tarrio, 36, is a high-profile figure who organizes and leads the rightwing Proud Boys in their confrontations with those they believe to be antifa, short for “anti-fascism”, an amorphous leftist movement. The Proud Boys were involved in the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January.The records uncovered by Reuters are startling because they show that a leader of a far-right group now under intense scrutiny by law enforcement was previously an active collaborator with criminal investigators.Washington police arrested Tarrio in early January when he arrived in the city two days before the Capitol Hill riot. He was charged with possessing two high-capacity rifle magazines, and burning a Black Lives Matter banner during a December demonstration by supporters of Donald Trump. The DC superior court ordered him to leave the city pending a court date in June.Though Tarrio did not take part in the Capitol insurrection, at least five Proud Boys members have been charged in the riot. The FBI previously said Tarrio’s earlier arrest was an effort to pre-empt the events of 6 January.The transcript from 2014 shines a new light on Tarrio’s past connections to law enforcement. During the hearing, the prosecutor and Tarrio’s defense attorney asked a judge to reduce the prison sentence of Tarrio and two co-defendants. They had pleaded guilty in a fraud case related to the relabeling and sale of stolen diabetes test kits.The prosecutor said Tarrio’s information had led to the prosecution of 13 people on federal charges in two separate cases, and had helped local authorities investigate a gambling ring.Tarrio’s then lawyer Jeffrey Feiler said in court that his client had worked undercover in numerous investigations, one involving the sale of anabolic steroids, another regarding “wholesale prescription narcotics” and a third targeting human smuggling. He said Tarrio helped police uncover three marijuana grow houses, and was a “prolific” cooperator.In the smuggling case, Tarrio, “at his own risk, in an undercover role met and negotiated to pay $11,000 to members of that ring to bring in fictitious family members of his from another country”, the lawyer said in court.In an interview, Feiler said he did not recall details about the case but added, “The information I provided to the court was based on information provided to me by law enforcement and the prosecutor.”An FBI agent at the hearing called Tarrio a “key component” in local police investigations involving marijuana, cocaine and MDMA, or ecstasy. The Miami FBI office declined comment.There is no evidence Tarrio has cooperated with authorities since then. In interviews with Reuters, however, he said that before rallies in various cities, he would let police departments know of the Proud Boys’ plans. It is unclear if this was actually the case. He said he stopped this coordination after 12 December because the DC police had cracked down on the group.Tarrio on Tuesday acknowledged that his fraud sentence was reduced, from 30 months to 16 months, but insisted that leniency was provided only because he and his co-defendants helped investigators “clear up” questions about his own case. He said he never helped investigate others.That comment contrasts with statements made in court by the prosecutor, his lawyer and the FBI. The judge in the case, Joan A Lenard, said Tarrio “provided substantial assistance in the investigation and prosecution of other persons involved in criminal conduct”.As Trump supporters challenged the Republican’s election loss in often violent demonstrations, Tarrio stood out for his swagger as he led crowds of mostly white Proud Boys in a series of confrontations and street brawls in Washington DC, Portland, Oregon and elsewhere.The Proud Boys, founded in 2016, began as a group protesting against political correctness and perceived constraints on masculinity. It grew into a group with distinctive colors of yellow and black that embraced street fighting. In September their profile soared when Trump called on them to “Stand back and stand by.”Tarrio, based in Miami, became the national chairman of the group in 2018.In November and December, Tarrio led the Proud Boys through the streets of DC after Trump’s loss. Video shows him on 11 December with a bullhorn in front of a large crowd. “To the parasites both in Congress, and in that stolen White House,’” he said. “You want a war, you got one!” The crowd roared. The next day Tarrio burned the BLM banner.Former prosecutor Johannes said she was surprised that the defendant she prosecuted for fraud is now a key player in the violent movement that sought to halt the certification of President Joe Biden.“I knew that he was a fraudster, but had no reason to know that he was also a domestic terrorist,” she said. More

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      Far-right extremism in the US is deadly serious. What will Biden do about it? | Cas Mudde

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      “The cry for survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can’t be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.”
      This sentence, in Joe Biden’s inauguration speech, was manna from heaven for anti-fascists, including me, and in many ways a direct refutation of President Donald Trump’s “American carnage” speech four years ago. After decades of presidents minimizing the white supremacist threat, and four years of emboldening and protecting it, finally there is a president who dares to call the threat by its real name: white supremacy.
      My relief was somewhat short-lived, however. A few days later Biden both narrowed and broadened his focus. While there were still implicit references to the far right, most notably the storming of the Capitol on 6 January, the focus was now on “domestic violent extremism”. Why we needed yet another neologism, rather than the common term “domestic terrorism”, was not explained – nor was the fact that most definitions of extremism include the threat or use of violence, which makes the phrase “violent extremism” redundant.
      But leaving aside semantics, much more problematic was the generalization of the threat. Did jihadis storm the Capitol? Were “eco-terrorists” involved? Or antifa? No, the only people storming the Capitol were a broad variety of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and other far-right adherents. (To make this absolutely clear, given that conservative and far-right media and politicians keep spreading this lie, antifa was not involved in the storming of the Capitol.)
      So why focus on “domestic violent extremism” and not, specifically, on white supremacy or, perhaps better, the far right? I know that there are other “violent extremisms” in the US, but with the exception of the far right, they have not been ignored or minimized by the state. The threats from leftwing extremism, from antifa to the Animal Liberation Front, and Muslim extremism too, have been overemphasized for decades by intelligence agencies and politicians of both parties. It is far-right extremism, including white supremacy, that has generally been ignored.
      My second disappointment came from the fact that Biden called for a “comprehensive assessment of the threat of domestic violent extremism” by the director of national intelligence, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, thereby reducing it to a militarized security issue. This not only prioritizes a certain type of expertise and experts (eg military and security), at the expense of others (eg social sciences), it also tends to operate in the grey zones of democracy, with limited oversight from Congress and little to none from the public.
      Obviously, there is a security angle here, given the violent core in many far-right subcultures, including the alt-right, self-described “sovereign citizens”, QAnon conspiracy theorists and militia groups. In fact, most of these threats have long been acknowledged by agents on the ground. An FBI report in 2006 warned of far-right infiltration of law enforcement, while in 2014 a national survey of 175 law enforcement agencies ranked sovereign citizens as the most important terrorist threat in the country. Even Trump’s own FBI director and the acting secretary of homeland security called white supremacist extremists the most important domestic terrorist threat.
      However, the core of the far-right threat to US democracy goes well beyond these still relatively small groups of potentially violent extremists. That is why these extremists have been minimized and protected by sympathizers in law enforcement and the political mainstream. If Biden really wants to fight far-right “domestic violent extremism”, he has to go to the core of the issue, not limit himself to the most violent outliers. In fact, the “domestic violent extremism” threat can already be reduced significantly by simply providing political cover for FBI and homeland security agents who have been investigating them for decades. No new agencies, laws or resources are necessary – just a refocus of existing resources away from jihadi terrorism and towards the domestic far right.
      The real threat comes from the broader political and public context in which these “domestic violent extremists” operate – such as the enormous media and social media infrastructure that promotes white supremacist ideas and spreads conspiracy theories. Banning extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories from social media might help a bit, but it doesn’t do anything about more powerful voices in traditional media, such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity on Fox News. Similarly, it is easy to focus on relatively marginal groups such as the Proud Boys, but their actions are insignificant compared with those of Republican senators such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.
      That is why the fight against the far right is, first and foremost, a political one. Our task is to call out the far right in all its guises, irrespective of connections and power. It is to reject far-right frames and policies, including the ones that have been part of the country’s fabric since its founding and those that have been mainstreamed more recently by the Republican party and Donald Trump. If Biden is not willing to go to the root of the problem, much of his fight against far-right “domestic violent extremism” will fail too, just as it did during the presidency of his friend, Barack Obama.
      In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security published an intelligence assessment of “rightwing extremism” in the US, which warned that veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan might be particular targets for recruitment by extremist groups. The report sparked a conservative backlash which accused the Obama administration of unfairly targeting conservatives and veterans. Within days, secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, apologized, the report was effectively shelved, rightwing extremism was deprioritized, and the main author of the report resigned. The situation has not gotten better since. We know that the military, and police departments across the country, have been infiltrated and compromised by hate groups and far-right sympathizers. We also know that nearly one in five defendants in Capitol storming cases have served in the military.
      So, the real questions are: does Biden understand how broad and entrenched the far-right threat to US democracy really is, and is he willing to boldly go where Obama did not dare? Or is he going to take the easy way out, as so many others have done before? I fear the Biden administration will engage in some rhetorical grandstanding and throw the might of the national security state at some of the more marginal far-right groups and individuals, further eroding civil liberties, while staying silent about the broader far right. While this might prevent some far-right terrorist attacks in the margins, it will also permit the further legitimization and mainstreaming of the far right at the heart of US politics and society.
      Cas Mudde is Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, the author of The Far Right Today (2019), and host of the podcast Radikaal. He is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      New York Times fires editor targeted by rightwing critics over Biden tweet

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      A row has broken out over accusations that a New York Times journalist was fired after being targeted by rightwing critics for tweeting she had “chills” at seeing Joe Biden’s plane land at Joint Base Andrews.Lauren Wolfe, who had been working as an editor at the Times, posted the message on 19 January, as Biden arrived ahead of his inauguration as president the next day.Two days later, Wolfe was let go by the Times, after her tweet was picked up by rightwing social media users and news outlets, who used Wolfe’s tweet to allege claims of media bias.Wolfe, a seasoned journalist who has written for the Guardian, said she has since been subjected to a torrent of abuse in the wake of the incident, including being followed by a photographer as she walked her dog.The New York Times responded to criticism on Sunday, after many members of the media rallied to Wolfe’s defense.“There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, told the Washington Post.“For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters, but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we don’t plan to comment further.”The Times added that Wolfe was not a full-time employee but was instead working on a contract basis. On Sunday, The Times workers’ union, however, said it was “investigating the situation”.“We believe all our members deserve due process and just cause protections, the very rights that are fundamental to independent, objective journalism,” the TimesGuild said.CNN host Jake Tapper was among those to share details of Wolfe’s situation, while journalists Kirsten Powers and Jeremy Scahill also criticized the Times.Late to this–I can’t believe the @nyt FIRED @Wolfe321 for a few tweets! This is not a proportionate response. There’s a middle ground that doesn’t involve revoking someone’s employment. To all those who worked to get her fired: don’t ever complain about ‘cancel culture’ again.— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) January 24, 2021
      I think it’s absurd and wrong that the NYT fired Lauren Wolfe. Also, does anyone remember how MSNBC’s Chris Matthews literally cried over an Obama speech, compared him to Jesus and said he “felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke? https://t.co/ZA6iZ6892t— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 24, 2021
      The attention from the right did not stop once it emerged Wolfe was no longer working at the Times. Wolfe shared some of the abusive messages she had been sent, one of which called for her to develop cancer, while the conservative New York Post ran a series of paparazzi-style photos of Wolfe walking her dog in New York City,The Daily Mail, a rightwing British newspaper with a popular website, extrapolated from Wolfe’s tweet that there had been a “huge amount of gushing” towards Biden in the media, something the Mail said will “do nothing to restore any kind of trust in the media”.Many of Wolfe’s defenders noted that the Times did not fire reporter Glenn Thrush after multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior in 2017. The Times suspended Thrush for two months, and executive editor Dean Baquet said the journalist had “behaved in ways that we do not condone”, but Thrush kept his job. More

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      in Elections

      Here’s how to understand the politics of the US Capitol breach | Heinrich Geiselberger

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      “When fascism comes back, it will not say ‘I am fascism’; it will say ‘I am antifascism’.” This prophecy, attributed to the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, has been appropriated by the online right and become a tired Twitter meme. Users now replace “antifascism” with basically anything. Some attempts to come to grips with the storming of the US Capitol have adopted a similar syntax: it was an (attempted) coup disguised as something else. Others insisted it wasn’t a coup but a “venting of accumulated resentments” (Edward Luttwak), “a big biker gang dressed as circus performers” (Mike Davis), an “alt-right charivari” (Alex Callinicos), or a “re-enactment” of fantasies originally tested on social media (Wolfgang Ullrich).Some of these interpretations have been accused of trivialising the events. But the semantic helplessness in face of the Washington events suggests a wider uncertainty about the more general phenomenon. The confusion about the event mirrors confusion about the movement as a whole. Is contemporary “rightwing populism” best described as “authoritarianism” or even “fascism”? The answer depends on which level one focuses on: the ideology, the structure of their institutions, the aesthetics, the supporters or the consequences of their actions. If we follow the Hungarian philosopher Gáspár Miklós Tamás, with his very broad definition of fascism as “a break with the enlightenment tradition of citizenship as a universal entitlement”, the similarities sharpen. A penchant for violence and machismo also points in that direction.But if we stick to strategies, aesthetics or demographics, the differences become more pronounced. When authors like Silone and Erich Fromm analysed interwar-period fascism, they interpreted it as an alliance between what once was called “fractions” of capital (ie business) and the petite bourgeoisie to fend off the challenge posed by workers in the labour movement. Intuitively, we think of fascism as the attempt to impose order, and deprive enemies of organisational power, with authoritarian means. The Nazis force-built a simulacra of civil society: organisations for young women and car owners (the NSDAP’s Kraftfahrkorps was the classic example). The coercive corporatism of German fascism forced employers and unions into the national Labour Front, while the goose steps of masses in brown or black shirts were strictly choreographed.What is different today? Most obviously, trade unions in Europe and the United States are weaker than they have been at any point in the last 150 years (with the exception of fascist periods). No longer threatened by its reality, the enemies of socialism can only invoke its spectre. Suddenly all kind of things are called “socialist”: demands for a speed limit on the German autobahn, stricter gun control, as well as the bond-buying programme of the European Central Bank.More glaringly, unlike in the interwar years, and despite the best efforts of political scientists, it is still not really clear which groups make up the social base of “rightwing populism” today. That certain business elites participate in “rightwing populism” – just think of Rupert Murdoch (media), Charles Koch (fossil fuels), Christoph Blocher (chemicals) and Donald Trump (real estate) – drops out of focus when “populism” is dismissed as a revolt by “hillbillies” or explained by the hardships of “the losers of globalisation”. Academics and pundits highlight the role of industrial workers who lost their jobs. But do unemployed workers still take to the streets or even vote at significant rates? Maybe the petite bourgeoisie, or the small-business-owning middle class, is the more significant second component of the alliance: the craftspeople or small shopkeepers who still have something to lose and who have been bamboozled into fear of anarchism (“Defund the police”) and socialism (higher taxes)?But categories such as petite bourgeoisie or working class are of little use when classes are disintegrating in an economy that pits permanent employees against contract workers, where an engineer at Volkswagen has more to lose than a gig driver for Uber or a woman running a boutique in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Among the crowd storming the Capitol were said to be nuns, soldiers, an Olympic swimmer, a Texas real-estate broker who flew in on a private plane and the son of a New York judge. If political attitudes themselves have always been hard to pin down, this is especially true today.The trouble with concepts such as “coup”, “fascism”, and “authoritarianism” is that they all date back to the period that the late philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “solid modernity”. By “solid” he meant societies with large groups of people bundled up in intermediary associations (churches, unions, parties) with ideologies that were at least striving for some kind of consistency, and the predictability that comes with it.Tamás spoke of “post-fascism” back in 2000. But all the “post” concepts have the disadvantage of only saying what something is not or no longer. Bauman himself bristled at the term “postmodernity”, but used a positive, content-filled counter-concept: as a lot of solid things had melted into air, he argued, western societies entered a phase of “liquid modernity” in the final quarter of the 20th century at the very latest. Atomised, volatile, swarm-like, with porous borders between gravity and earnestness, sincerity and irony.Bauman, who was born in the Polish town of Poznań in 1925 and experienced the dark sides of solid modernity, applied his concept widely: “liquid love”, “liquid time”, “liquid surveillance”. Single events are by their nature liquid or transient, so while Bauman would probably not have spoken of a “liquid putsch”, it is quite possible that he might have spoken of “liquid authoritarianism”: irony instead of grim determination; social media instead of radio broadcasts; swarms instead of orchestrated formations; merchandise instead of uniforms; followers instead of members; flashmobs instead of regular meetings; erratic policies instead of long-term projects. Trump lards his speeches with references from pop culture. “Sanctions are coming,” he tweets, like a character in Game of Thrones.Attempts to distinguish the phenomenon of Trumpism from its predecessors do not have to trivialise it. What looks liquid or carnivalesque can have terrible consequences. Pipe bombs may still lie in wait for already vulnerable groups or government employees or certain elites.Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the storming of the Capitol to the November pogroms in Nazi Germany in 1938. The Twitterati pounced and proposed the Beer Hall Putsch as the better comparison. The Nazi movement itself was still in a liquid stage in 1923 before it solidified organisationally and institutionally in the 1920s and 1930s. States of matter can change into different compounds: from solid to liquid to gas and the other way round. In this sense one could interpret “Trumpism” or “rightwing populism”, at least when it comes to its diverse base, as an attempt to use liquid-authoritarian means to react to a situation of cultural and economic liquidity. All with the goal of realising the nostalgic utopia of a more solid modernity. More