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      Ron DeSantis ally Chris Rufo has close ties with ‘dissident right’ magazine

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      Chris Rufo, a rightwing culture-war celebrity and close Ron DeSantis ally, has maintained a close relationship with IM-1776, a “dissident right” magazine that regularly showers praise on dictators and authoritarians, puffs racist ideologues, and attacks liberal democracy.The outlet’s editors and writers – many of them so-called “anons” working under pseudonyms – have variously advocated for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act; celebrated figures such as the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and the proto-fascist Italian nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio; and advanced conspiracy theories about the Covid pandemic, and what they term the “regime”, a leftist power structure that they imagine unites the state, large corporations, universities and the media.Rufo and IM-1776The Guardian has previously reported on Rufo’s links with an outlet that experts described as pushing scientific racism; with a Danish data scientist who had previously co-authored scientific-racist papers; and on co-hosting an audio stream on X in which one participant advocated cooperating with a hypothetical white nationalist leader.Rufo, who played a leading role in the downfall of Harvard president Claudine Gay, has said such reporting is “guilt by association”, but his relationship with IM-1776 is explicitly collaborative and supportive, and the association is apparently mutually beneficial.Last month a “manifesto” written by Rufo – The New Right Activism – ran in the online and print versions of IM-1776, and Rufo has publicly urged his audience to buy and subscribe to the outlet. He has also co-hosted a series of Twitter spaces with the magazine’s editors, beginning in July last year.In one of them, recorded in October, he indicated an interest in incorporating the “dissident right” more fully in mainstream political discourse, saying: “I think there is a room for engaging the dissident right and the establishment right. I think we need to have a bridge between the two and and engage in thoughtful dialogue.”More recently, he has expressed a personal interest in expanding the range of acceptable political discourse.On the Pirate Wires podcast earlier this month, he told host Mike Solana of his own activism: “I try to play that game, I try to lay traps, I try to provoke certain reactions, I try to launder certain words and phrases into the discourse.”The Guardian emailed Rufo detailed questions about his relationship with IM-1776, what if any concerns he had about content on the site, and which words or phrases he had laundered into the discourse, but received no response.Dr Julian Waller, a research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses and a professorial lecturer at George Washington University, said: “Rufo is very intentionally acting as a bridging actor between people to his right – in a variety of dimensions and different ideological segments – and the more institutional establishment world: the harder right of American politics.”He said: “In the American context, the closest thing we have to a post-liberal government – and I won’t say dissident right, I’ll say post-liberal – is the DeSantis administration in Florida, and Chris Rufo’s activist legislative packages have been used by that state forthrightly.”Mark Granza, by his own account an Italian national living in Hungary, is the founder and editor-in-chief of IM-1776. He has returned Rufo’s public admiration. Granza was interviewed in February last year by the conservative Rod Dreher in the Hungarian Conservative, an outlet aligned with the authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán where Dreher writes as a fellow of the state-funded Danube Institute.Granza said of Rufo that “he doesn’t care about convincing the other side, or battling in the ‘marketplace of ideas’. He’s going to tell you what he’s going to do, and then do it, whether you agree with him or not.”Granza added: “That’s what I believe conservatives should do: use whatever power they have or can get and impose their views on to society.”Authoritarian sympathiesAuthoritarian sentiments like this also feed into IM-1776’s political enthusiasms.The magazine has been especially supportive of El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who suspended civil liberties in 2022 as part of a crackdown on alleged gang members that has seen about 75,000 people arrested without charge – more than 1% of the country’s total population.The Guardian previously reported warnings from Salvadoran opposition figures, human rights groups and journalists that Bukele’s populist, bitcoin-fueled presidency is in danger of developing into an authoritarian state: Bukele has referred to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator”.On Twitter in September 2022, Granza characterized Bukele and Orbán’s authoritarian moves on crime and immigration as reminders of “the existence of the deep state in the west”. In March last year he posted: “America needs its own Bukele. Build massive prisons and start by throwing in every single regime apparatchik.”Political figures who receive regular praise in IM-1776 include the Italian proto-fascist D’Annunzio, who was the subject of a three-article “symposium” on the site in 2021.D’Annunzio, a poet and a first world war pilot, led Italian nationalists in seizing the city of Fiume after it had been given to Croatia in the Versailles settlement. In the months in which he governed it as an independent regency, D’Annunzio’s innovations included the use of Roman salutes, balcony speeches to crowds, and deploying black-shirted followers to repress opponents. All of these and more were later taken up and used by Mussolini’s fascist regime.Another favorite is Russian president Valdimir Putin, of whom a pseudonymous author asked at IM-1776 this week: “Is this the last real statesman?”RehabilitationsIM-1776 regularly runs articles that attempt to rehabilitate lesser known far-right thinkers and even convicted terrorists.Benjamin Braddock bylined a May 2022 interview with Renaud Camus, the French novelist, white nationalist and conspiracy theorist who coined the “Great Replacement” as a book title and as description of a purported plot by “replacist elites” to substitute immigrants for white Europeans.Camus’s slogan inspired white nationalist chants at Charlottesville, Virginia; was borrowed as the title of the manifesto written by the man who massacred 52 Muslims in two mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019; and also motivated the man who killed 10 Black people in the car park of a market in Buffalo in May 2022.In Braddock’s deferential interview, Camus characterizes these “replacist” elites as “Davos, bankers, international finance, multinational companies, pension funds, hedge funds, big five, and all kind of more or less private powers”.Last June, IM-1776 published an obituary of Ted Kaczynski by another pseudonymous author calling themselves “The Prudentialist”.Kaczynski died in a federal prison last year at the conclusion of a life sentence he received for a 17-year mailbombing campaign that killed three of his targets and injured 23 others.Describing Kaczynski as “allegedly a lone wolf terrorist, but also a mathematical genius”, the IM-1776 author relativized his crimes and explained that Kaczynski’s “iconic status on the contemporary right can be partly attributed to the devastating critique of the left included in his famous manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future”.Charles HaywoodOther IM-1776 contributors go even further in rhetorical attacks on the left.One regular contributor to and apparent funder of IM-1776 is the former shampoo manufacturer and would-be “warlord” Charles Haywood. Haywood is bylined in six articles published on the IM-1776 website.In several of these articles, he uses eliminationist language in relation to his perceived enemies.In one, a dialogue with fellow IM-1776 regular Daniel Miller, Haywood writes that the goal of the right must be “the total, permanent defeat of the left, of the ideology at the heart of the Enlightenment”, and later that “our society is commanded to excise the limitless, satanic evils brought on us by the left”.Elsewhere, in a glowing review of Rufo’s book, America’s Cultural Revolution, Haywood says that it shows that “we might have to accept we can’t live with these people, the five or ten percent of our nation who lead or are most active in supporting the left”, and goes on to demand the repeal of the “so-called Civil Rights Act”.Waller, the political analyst, included Haywood as one of three case studies in a working paper on writers providing “advocacy in favor of genuine authoritarian regimes – ones which outright reject the basic structural and constitutional premises of modern electoral democracy”.In conversation he said that he included Haywood in the paper as one of the writers who “ … think democracy is bad, and that actually an authoritarian regime is good … it’s rare in the contemporary period for someone to be that open about these sorts of things.”In a separate review of First Do No Harm, a book on Covid by a pseudonymous author who claims to be a doctor, Haywood claims that Covid “‘vaccines’ aren’t vaccines at all, but prophylactic/therapeutic drugs of very limited efficacy”.In October 2022, Granza was interviewed on the YouTube channel of the Afrikaner nationalist activist Ernst van Zyl. In the interview, Granza indicated that beyond writing for IM-1776, Haywood stepped in at a crucial moment to keep IM-1776 alive.During the pandemic, Granza said, he was “completely incapable of continuing to fund the project. I had to find another job, and Charles Haywood pitched in.”Donations via ClaremontBeyond asking for subscriptions, IM-1776 solicits donations on a page on their website, but potential donors who click on the “tax deductible donations” are routed to a form on the rightwing Claremont Institute’s website, where Claremont advises: “The Claremont Institute is serving as a fiscal sponsor of IM-1776/the Art & Literature Foundation until they get fully established as a non-profit. Their commitment to the promotion of cultural work that draws on and promotes the beauty and truth of the natural order is well within the Claremont Institute’s mission.”The Guardian emailed Mark Granza with questions about content on the site and his own political sympathies. He did not respond directly but sent a reply email with an attached image of a hackneyed meme.The Guardian also emailed Charles Haywood with questions about funding arrangements at IM-1776, content on the site, and their own public pronouncements, but received no response. More

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      ‘An extreme agenda’: could a recall end far-right control of a California county?

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      In 2022, 5,000 voters, angry about Covid-era health restrictions, ousted a moderate Republican official in Shasta county, California. The vote helped put the rural region, in the state’s north, on the map for extremist far-right politics.In the two years since, the ultra-conservative majority that controls the county’s governing board has attempted to upend the voting system and spread conspiracy theories that elections were being rigged. They moved to allow people to carry firearms in public buildings in violation of state law and offered the county’s top job to the leader of a California secessionist group.Now, residents frustrated by the county’s recent governance hope another recall will force a change. They’re aiming to oust Kevin Crye, a far-right county supervisor who has been in office for just a year.The election could be a turning point for the county, said Jeff Gorder, a spokesperson for the recall group and retired county public defender.View image in fullscreen“We’re seeing an extreme agenda coming here that we don’t think people want,” he said. “The [far-right supervisors] see themselves as having the ability to disregard laws that have been enacted by the state. They’re taking it upon themselves to disregard the normal workings of the rule of law.”Shasta has long been one of California’s most conservative counties, but it became a hotbed for far-right politics during the pandemic as residents raged at moderate Republicans they felt weren’t doing enough to resist state health rules.The anger grew into a thriving anti-establishment movement that – with unprecedented outside funding from a Connecticut millionaire and support from local militia – targeted the board of supervisors. In February 2022, voters recalled Leonard Moty, a retired police chief and Republican, from his role as a county supervisor, a move that gave the far right effective control over the board of supervisors. The body of five elected officials oversees the county as well as its roughly 2,000 workers and nearly $600m budget.Crye was voted into office in November of that year, beating a moderate candidate by less than 100 votes. He pledged to unite the county and tackle government corruption.View image in fullscreenWeeks after taking office, Crye, along with the rest of the board’s hard-right majority, voted to cut ties with Dominion Voting Systems, the company at the center of baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud. The county embarked on an ill-fated and costly effort to do away with its voting machines – before establishing a replacement – and to craft a hand-count system.The move drew national attention to the region, bringing in support from key figures in the election denial movement while offering a blueprint for them on how to advance their agenda across the US.Crye was an enthusiastic supporter, even traveling on the county’s dime to meet with Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and one of the leading promoters of falsehoods about election fraud. Lindell said he would offer financial and legal support to the county if it faced lawsuits as it enacted its hand-counting plan.The supervisors continued creating controversy. In March, the board majority made a preliminary offer for its top job, the role of chief executive, to the vice-president of a group that advocates for rural California to split off and become the 51st state. The board ultimately withdrew its offer.“There was a tidal wave of bad decisions,” said Gorder, the spokesperson for the recall group.In the spring, Gorder and a group of about 50 residents gathered to decide how to push back against the county board. They decided on a tried and true route in Shasta county: a recall.“He’s doing things he said he wouldn’t do. He violated his campaign promises. He wasn’t listening to his constituents,” Gorder said. “We took it very seriously. He was freely and fairly elected. But a recall, in our view, is appropriate when someone misrepresents who they are.”The group gathered signatures from roughly 5,000 voters in the area Crye represents. The county’s election office certified the signatures in September, moving the recall forward.Crye and his supporters have criticized the recall as an attempt by Democrats to override the will of the voters, describing it on an anti-recall website as “Gavin Newsom’s attempt to control Shasta county” and pointing to the fact that California’s Democratic governor could pick a replacement for Crye. (Newsom could pick Crye’s temporary replacement if voters opt to remove him from office. He has done so in some cases, but other times left seats vacant. The recall committee sent a letter to the governor, which was also signed by a moderate county supervisor and local business leaders, asking him not to appoint a replacement.)View image in fullscreenIn an interview with One America News, a far-right media outlet, Crye said: “You have Democrats in a very red county that are trying to usurp local control and the vote of the people here in Shasta county to get me out of office. They are lying and saying anything under the sun they can to get people to jump on.”Crye said in his official response to the recall that as supervisor he had prioritized “awareness of homelessness” and public safety and sought to protect youth.Crye did not respond to a request for comment.Outside far-right figures including Kari Lake, a Donald Trump ally who unsuccessfully ran for governor in Arizona, have urged Shasta residents to vote no on the recall.Gorder said the pro-recall group includes Democrats, Republicans and independent voters frustrated by decisions they say are at odds with the image Crye presented while running for office. For example, Gorder said, Crye said he valued fiscal responsibility but risked the county paying millions of dollars in expenses to replace its voting system with a hand-count system.Gorder is hopeful the recall will be successful, but he pointed out that Crye’s campaign is well-funded. Crye has the support of Reverge Anselmo, a Connecticut millionaire who has funded the area’s far-right movement. He’s donated $2m in Shasta county since 2020, the Redding Record Searchlight reported, including $250,000 to a political action committee supporting Crye. Still, the recall group has raised enough money – $306,000 as of Thursday – to pose a formidable challenge.“There’s a lot of enthusiasm here,” Gorder said. “We’ve had a tremendous amount of support and I’m hoping that will show itself at the polls.” More

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      How to Steal a Presidential Election review: Trump and the peril to come

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      The Trump veepstakes is under way. Senator JD Vance and Representative Elise Stefanik prostrate themselves. Both signal they would do what Mike Pence refused: upend democracy for the sake of their Caesar. The senator is a Yale Law School alum and former US marine. Stefanik is the fourth-ranking House Republican. He was once critical of the former president. She was skeptical. Not anymore.“Do I think there were problems in 2020? Yes, I do,” Vance recently told ABC. “If I had been vice-president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors … I think the US Congress should have fought over it from there.”Last month, Stefanik said: “We will see if this is a legal and valid election. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional circumventing of the constitution, not going through state legislators when it comes to changing election law.”From the supreme court down, the judiciary has repeatedly rejected that contention.As the November election looms, Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman offer How to Steal a Presidential Election, a granular and disturbing examination of the vulnerabilities and pressure points in the way the US selects its president. Short version: plenty can go wrong.Lessig is a chaired professor at Harvard Law School. He views a second Trump term as calamitous. “He is a pathological liar, with clear authoritarian instincts,” Lessig writes. “His re-election would be worse than any political event in the history of America  –  save the decision of South Carolina to launch the civil war.”Seligman is a fellow at the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford, focused on disputed presidential elections. He too views Trump uncharitably.“Former president Trump and his allies attempted a legal coup in 2020 – a brazen attempt to manipulate the legal system to reverse the results of a free and fair election,” Seligman has said. “Despite all the attention on 6 January 2021 [the attack on Congress], our legal and political systems remain dangerously unprotected against a smarter and more sophisticated attempt in 2024.”The open question is whether forewarned is forearmed. On the page, Lessig and Seligman spell out seven roads to ruin, the “inverting” of an election to force a result that thwarts voters’ expressed intentions. The authors discount the capacity of a vice-president to unilaterally overturn an election result. But they warn of the potential for havoc at state level.As they see it, the danger of pledged but not legally bound electors being coerced to vote for Trump when the electoral college convenes is “significant”. They also hypothesize a state governor “interven[ing] to certify a slate of electors contrary to the apparent popular vote”. Another path to perdition includes making state legislatures the final judges of election results. There is also the “nuclear option”, according to the authors, which is stripping the right to vote from the voters.“A state legislature cancels its election before election day and chooses the state’s electors directly,” as Lessig and Seligman put it, a potential outcome they call a “very significant” possibility under the US constitution.“State legislators are free to deny their people a meaningful role in selecting our president, directly or indirectly,” they write. “Is there any legal argument that might prevent a legislature from formally taking the vote away from its people? We are skeptical.”To say US democracy is at risk is not to indulge in hyperbole. Trump’s infamous January 2021 call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, is a vivid reminder. “What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than … we have, because we won the state.” Such words continue to haunt.In an episode that casts a similar pall, Trump and Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) chair, urged election officials in Michigan’s Wayne county to block the release of final results.“Do not sign it … we will get you attorneys,” McDaniel told the officials, regarding certification.“We’ll take care of that,” Trump said.Now, as he has for so many former enablers, Trump has taken care of McDaniel. She will shortly be gone from the RNC.Among Trump’s supporters, discontent with democracy is no secret. During the 2016 campaign, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, thought Trump needed to show some “authoritarian power”. In 2019, Mike Johnson, then a Louisiana congressman, declared: “By the way, the United States is not a democracy. Do you know what a democracy is? Two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner. You don’t want to be in a democracy. Majority rule: not always a good thing.”Johnson is now House speaker. For good measure, he claims God told him “very clearly” to prepare to become “Moses”.“The Lord said step forward,” Johnson says.On the right, many openly muse about a second civil war.“We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility,” James Pinkerton, a veteran of the White Houses of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, recently wrote in the American Conservative.“In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?”The election won’t be pleasant. In late December, 31% of Republicans believed Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was legitimate. That was eight points lower than two years before. Trump’s criminal trials loom. Through that prism, Lessig and Seligman’s work serves as dire warning and public service.
      How to Steal a Presidential Election is published in the US by Yale University Press More

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      Proud Boys member gets six years in prison for Capitol riot after insulting judge

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      A man who stormed the US Capitol with fellow Proud Boys far-right extremist group members was sentenced on Wednesday to six years in prison after he berated and insulted the judge who punished him.Marc Bru repeatedly interrupted chief judge James Boasberg before the sentence was handed down, calling him a “clown” and a “fraud” presiding over a “kangaroo court”.The judge warned Bru that he could be kicked out of the courtroom if he continued to disrupt the proceedings.“You can give me 100 years and I’d do it all over again,” said Bru, who was handcuffed and shackled.“That’s the definition of no remorse in my book,” the judge said.Prosecutors described Bru as one of the least remorseful rioters who assaulted the Capitol on 6 January 2021 when extremist supporters of Donald Trump, encouraged by the then outgoing US president broke into the Capitol to try to stop the certification by a joint session of Congress of Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.Lawmakers were chased out of the Capitol amid threats to their lives, as law enforcement came under siege and were physically attacked. Biden’s win was certified in the early hours of 7 January 2021, after the Capitol was cleared, and he was sworn in as president, peacefully, later that month after Trump left the White House but refused to attend the inauguration of his successor.Prosecutors said Bru planned for an armed insurrection – a so-called “January 6 2.0” attack – to take over the government in Portland, Oregon, several weeks after the deadly riot in Washington DC.“He wanted a repeat of January 6, only he implied this time would be more violent,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing ahead of his sentencing.Bru has been representing himself with an attorney on standby. He has spewed anti-government rhetoric that appears to be inspired by the sovereign citizen movement. At the start of the hearing, Bru demanded that the judge and a prosecutor turn over five years of their financial records.The judge gave him a 10-minute break to confer with his standby lawyer before the hearing resumed with more interruptions.“I don’t accept any of your terms and conditions,” Bru said. “You’re a clown and not a judge.”Prosecutors had warned the court that Bru intended to disrupt his sentencing. On Tuesday, he called in to a nightly vigil outside the jail where he and other rioters are being held. He told supporters of the detained January 6 defendants that he would “try to put on a good show” at his sentencing.Trump has taken to calling such defendants “hostages”, while out on the campaign trail as he aims to win the Republican nomination and take on Biden again in the 2024 presidential election.Boasberg convicted Bru of seven charges, including two felonies, after hearing trial testimony without a jury in October.Bru flew from Portland, Oregon, to Washington a day before Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally near the White House. Before Trump’s speech, he joined dozens of other Proud Boys in marching to the Capitol and was one of the first rioters to breach a restricted area. Bru grabbed a barricade and shoved it against police officers. He later joined other rioters inside the Capitol and entered the Senate gallery, where he flashed a hand gesture associated with the Proud Boys as he posed for selfie photos. He spent roughly 13 minutes inside the building.More than 1,200 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related crimes.
      The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump’s novel take on January 6: calling convicted rioters ‘hostages’

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      Supporters of Donald Trump have long been forced to suspend their belief in reality: expected to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that the one-term president won the 2020 election, hasn’t committed any crimes and is a successful businessman.But as another tight presidential election looms, the recent efforts by Donald Trump to reimagine the people imprisoned for their role in the January 6 insurrection as “hostages”, and to downplay the horrors of that day as a peaceful protest, could have serious ramifications for democracy and his own party, onlookers have warned.Trump, who has been charged with four federal crimes in relation to the riot at the Capitol in 2021, has repeatedly sought to whitewash the event. But in recent days – and backed up by Elise Stefanik, one of the most powerful Republicans in the House – he has used the term “hostages” prominently as a description of the hundreds of people prosecuted and jailed for their actions attacking the US Capitol.The terminology worries some experts who see it as explicitly undermining the US legal system by saying its treatment of Trump supporters is illegitimate – something he has repeatedly tried to do while he faces a multitude of prosecutions himself.At rallies and television interviews, Trump and Stefanik have also pitched a novel history of January 6 that requires anyone aware of the events that day to ignore or forget what they witnessed and read.Rather than engaging in a storming of the seat of US democracy that left 140 police officers injured and four people dead, people that day acted “peacefully and patriotically”, Trump said in a recent speech in Iowa.Of the hundreds of people imprisoned for their role in the attack, for crimes including assaulting police officers, illegally entering federal grounds with a weapon and seditious conspiracy, Trump had a similarly positive spin.“Some people call them prisoners. I call them hostages,” Trump said.“Release the J6 hostages, Joe [Biden]. Release them, Joe. You can do it real easy, Joe.”In Trump’s fresh telling, the tens of thousands of people from across the US who gathered on January 6 quietly voiced their concerns about the electoral process, apparently doing nothing more than engaging in a sort of elf-like merriment.“A beautiful day,” Trump has called it, which featured “great, great patriots”.Some have already bought into the idea.“I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” Stefanik, who as chair of the House Republican conference is one of the most powerful GOP members in Congress, said in an interview over the weekend.“I believe that we’re seeing the weaponization of the federal government against not just President Trump, but we’re seeing it against conservatives.”The idea that the Trump supporters charged in connection with the insurrection have been mistreated is false. An analysis by the Intercept found that, actually, federal judges “have overwhelmingly issued sentences far more lenient than justice department prosecutors sought”.And apart from being untrue, this sanitizing of political violence is particularly troubling ahead of a presidential election between Trump and Joe Biden that could be just as tight as the 2020 race.“People convicted of violently assaulting police officers and conspiring to overthrow the government are not ‘hostages’,” Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman who served on the January 6 select committee, wrote on X.“Stefanik must apologize to the families of 130 people being held hostage by Hamas right now. Her pandering to Trump is dangerous.”It’s not just Democrats who are concerned.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s outrageous and it’s disgusting,” said Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman who has been a vocal critic of Trump, told Face the Nation.“It’s a disgrace, and you cannot say you are a member of a party that believes in the rule of law, you cannot say you are pro-law enforcement if you then go out and you say these people are ‘hostages’, it’s disgraceful.”Some serving Republicans, including those in vulnerable swing districts, also distanced themselves from the hostages concept this week, in a sign that the revisionism of January 6 could become a source of division.“Not my choice of words, but to each his own,” Jen Kiggans, a Republican congresswoman who defeated an incumbent Democrat in 2022, told the Washington Post. “It’s not what I describe them as, no.”“They’re criminal defendants, not hostages,” Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican congressman whose Pennsylvania district voted for Biden over Trump in 2020.Don Bacon, a Republican whose district also chose Biden in 2020, told the New Republic: “I don’t defend people who hit cops, who vandalized our Capitol.”For Trump the claims of mistreatment appear to be a strand of his enduring complaint that the Biden administration has “weaponized” the justice department – mostly against himself.The treatment of January 6 convicts has generally taken second place behind Trump lashing out at the 91 charges he is facing, many relating to his attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.But even if Trump’s newfound concern for others proves to be merely an attempt to exonerate himself from blame, his supporters seem to genuinely believe his claims.In the fervid environment that is Truth Social, the social media platform Trump established in a huff after he was banned from Twitter, people have breathlessly echoed Trump’s claims about “hostages” being subjected to ill-treatment.The people convicted are variously referred to as “PRISONERS OF WAR!!!!”, victims of “CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY” and “political prisoners”.Trump’s base, it seems, are happy to continue to suspend disbelief. But the furore has illustrated an unwanted split in the Republican party in what will be a key year at the polls – and more broadly, the attempt to exculpate the people who stormed the Capitol has dark implications ahead of a stormy presidential election. More

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      Wisconsin: far-right group bids to recall speaker for resisting Trump’s big lie

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      A far-right group in Wisconsin has launched a long-shot bid to oust the Wisconsin assembly speaker, Robin Vos – the latest salvo in a running feud between the powerful Republican lawmaker and conspiracy-minded hardliners.The recall campaign is the newest attempt by election-denying activists to punish politicians and state officials whom they view as insufficiently loyal to Donald Trump and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Vos has become a particular target for refusing to accept their claims that the election was rigged.Jay Schroeder, a conservative activist who has promoted election misinformation online and ran a failed campaign for Wisconsin secretary of state in 2022, is leading the effort.“The whole system has been putting doubt in people’s minds,” said Schroeder, who pointed to Vos’s refusal to aggressively pursue impeaching Meagan Wolfe, the state’s top election official, as a primary motivation for the recall campaign.The recall announcement was received with fanfare by Wisconsin conspiracy theory groups on the messaging app Telegram, some of whom used the language of the QAnon conspiracy community to promote its efforts. One post included the phrase “WWG1WGALL”, shorthand for “Where we go one, we go all”, the slogan of the movement.Vos fired back at the recall attempt, calling it “a waste of time, resources and effort” in a statement on Wednesday.“The effort today is no surprise since the people involved cannot seem to get over any election in which their preferred candidate doesn’t win,” he said.The push also marks the latest mobilization by the conspiracy theory-fueled far-right movement in Wisconsin which is animated by Christian nationalism, misinformation about elections administration and unwavering support for Trump. Vos barely survived a primary challenge after Trump endorsed his primary opponent in the 2022 elections.Since then, Wisconsin’s far right has mobilized frequently against Vos. Its fury was triggered most recently by Vos’s decision not to push hard to impeach Wolfe, the state’s nonpartisan elections administrator who has been the target of harassment and a failed legislative effort to oust her.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVos has tried to tread an impossible path between appeasing the state’s election-denying activists and defending his own conviction that trying to overturn the 2020 election – a proposition Trump pushed on him personally – would be illegal and unconstitutional.In a bid for rightwing support, Vos called for an investigation into the 2020 election, appointing former Wisconsin supreme court justice Michael Gableman, a Stop the Steal promoter, to lead it. The investigation routinely generated scandals and produced no evidence of widespread fraud in the Wisconsin presidential election. Vos eventually fired Gableman, said he regrets the effort and has been increasingly critical of Trump over the past year.“Donald Trump’s unhealthy obsession with 2020 is not what Americans want to hear about in 2024,” Vos told the Guardian in December. More

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      Neo-Nazis in the US no longer see backing Ukraine as a worthy cause

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      Two years into the war in Ukraine, once a destination for American extremists, many within the underground far-right movement in the US are avidly disavowing it and advising followers to stay away. Extremists now see the upcoming election year as tailor-made for activism on the home front.At the outset of the war, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an intelligence bulletin that far-right American extremists were heading to the conflict and could use it to hone terrorist skills to bring back stateside.After an open call for international volunteers, the Ukrainian military attracted nearly 20,000 fighters from around the world. Within weeks, there were already so-called American “Boogaloo Bois” flying out.In a November 2023 audio message on Telegram, the ex-Marine Christopher Pohlhaus – the leader of neo-Nazi network the Blood Tribe known for its racist and homophobic protests across the US – recently told followers he was not allowing his “guys” to join in the conflict.“I will still continue to support the struggle of the people there,” said Pohlhaus before explaining how a disagreement with his personal ally and Russian militia leader fighting for Ukraine, Denis Nikitin (whom Pohlhaus infamously pledged allegiance to over the summer), caused the group to cut ties.“I’m not going to allow our guys, my guys’ efforts and blood to go towards [the war],” he said.According to him, though several of his members had been “super stoked and preparing to go to Ukraine”, they would pivot all of their money and resources to focusing on domestic activism, particularly their hate rallies, seeing no benefit to fighting in the war. In the same message, Pohlhaus, who confirmed the recording to the Guardian via text message, acknowledged that he was one of the last public-facing neo-Nazi leaders in the US to support the war in Ukraine.For its part, the DHS did not respond to multiple emails from the Guardian on whether it was continuing to track rightwing extremists traveling to Ukraine.Whether or not Pohlhaus was serious about the war is another question. Some within the broader US neo-Nazi movement have used the war in Ukraine as a sort of live-action role-playing scheme to build their militant credibility, even if tales of their exploits aren’t true. Kent McLellan, a Floridian who worked with Pohlhaus and is known by the alias “Boneface”, was outed for lying about his Ukraine war bonafides over the summer.For its part, the Kremlin has been a relentless recruiter of neo-Nazis to its cause; the co-founder of the mercenary Wagner Group, Dmitry Utkin, not only named his organization after the Third Reich’s favorite composer but had the logo for the Waffen-SS tattooed on both sides of his neck.The war is also at a crisis point for Ukraine as the mainstream Republican party blocks aid to Kyiv in Congress over demands to first reinforce the southern border with Mexico and make draconian changes to the US’s asylum system.Within the wider web of neo-Nazi militancy, Ukraine chatter has all but evaporated with the conflict in Gaza and domestic issues outshining what was once a well-followed world event. Seeing no value in sending men to gain combat experience on the frontline, with too high a risk of death or arrest upon return, US rightwing extremists see Ukraine as a conflict with little upside.In September, a prominent far-right publication, linked to the disbanded American neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division, boldly declared that the war not only “doesn’t matter anymore to us”, but it would “like to refocus” on American issues.“Posting about a war half a world away while we have more pressing matters at home is frankly just not in our interests.”It’s a sentiment that recalls statements from the Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy – who have all characterized the war as a faraway problem.But only five years ago, Ukraine was seen as a fertile training ground for far-right extremists.Rinaldo Nazzaro, the Russia-based former Pentagon contractor turned founder of international neo-Nazi organization the Base, told his group in a secret meeting that he saw the war as an opportunity for a potential training pipeline. And one former member of the Base, Ryan Burchfield (a Marine Corps dropout), made the trip to Ukraine in 2019 looking to join an ultranationalist militia. Not long after his arrival, Ukrainian intelligence deported Burchfield and another American for terrorist activities.In texts to the Guardian, Nazzaro explained his view of the conflict.“I think our guys can find adequate training elsewhere without risking their lives in Ukraine,” he said, adding that the war wasn’t being led by forces that had “our best interests in mind”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJoshua Fisher-Birch, an analyst of the extreme right for the Counter Extremism Project, has kept tabs on rightwing extremists and their fascination with Ukraine.“Chatter among the American online extreme right regarding travel to Ukraine to fight against the Russian invasion has decreased in the last year,” he said, pointing out that in some cases talk about venturing to the war was “either never serious” or a blatant “attempt to raise money through crowdfunding, or was abandoned due to the brutal reality of the conflict or no longer seeing a goal for the American movement”.The threat of law enforcement has also acted as a major deterrent to rightwing extremists trying to join the Ukrainian war effort.“It’s also highly likely that efforts from both the US and Ukrainian governments made travel for these individuals more difficult,” he said.For European neo-Nazis, on the other hand, the conflict is on their doorstep. Unchecked Russian imperialism is still regarded as very much a close proximity threat by nationalist movements all over the continent. They see Americans and English speakers within their movement as ignorant to the reality of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.“We do our best to be understanding of the fact that in the Anglosphere there is a different kind of echo chamber where mostly Kremlin propaganda dominates and that you have probably never even heard the truth,” said one prominent European neo-Nazi account on Telegram in March last year, already noticing the slide away from the conflict among English speakers.“With that said, there is still a limit to how much ignorance we can tolerate,” the post continues. “Note that a lot of our guys have been on the frontlines themselves, and everybody here at least knows somebody who has.”European right nationalists from Scandinavia, Poland, Belarus and Russia, among other places, have served on the frontlines. But for many American extremists, the actual prospect of joining the conflict carries practical and logistical difficulties as well as involving a large degree of risk to life and limb.“We mistake fascination with the conflict or for certain units among the far right online with their actual presence in Ukraine fighting,” said Kacper Rekawek, a senior research fellow and programme lead at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism and an expert on foreign fighters in Ukraine.Rekawek said one of the major inhibitors for Americans joining the war, versus Europeans, is distance and language.“It’s far,” he said, “it’s in a very unknown language and it’s cold out there … It’s lonely out there.” More

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      in US Politics

      Top Trumps: the 10 worst things the former president said this year

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      In 2015, the man who coined Godwin’s law, a famous maxim about argument on the internet, wrote a column for the Washington Post. Its headline: “Sure, call Trump a Nazi. Just make sure you know what you’re talking about.”By the lawyer and author Mike Godwin’s own definition, his law reads thus: “As an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one.” Since Republicans fell under Trump’s thrall, the law has often been invoked. Why? See our list of the 10 worst things Trump said in 2023:VerminIn November, in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump continued his dominant primary campaign. His rant was familiar but it held something new:
      We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.
      Hillary Clinton, who Trump beat in 2016, had already likened him to Hitler. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian from New York University, told the Washington Post: “Calling people ‘vermin’ was used effectively by Hitler and Mussolini to dehumanise people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”PoisonOf course, the signs were already there. In September, discussing immigration with the National Pulse, Trump said:
      Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now … It’s poisoning the blood of our country.
      He had already promised “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history”. Plans to hold migrants in camps would be reported. But Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC summed up the “poisoning” comment as “a straight-up white supremacist/neo-Nazi talking point”. Trump went there again in December, too.DictatorTrump wasn’t done. In December, at an Iowa town hall, the Fox News host Sean Hannity asked if he would promise not to “abuse power as retribution against anybody”. Trump said: “Except for day one”, then explained:
      I love this guy. He says, ‘You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?’ I say, ‘No, no, no – other than day one.’ We’re closing the border. And we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I’m not a dictator, OK?
      Noting Trump’s laughter and the crowd’s cheers, Philip Bump of the Washington Post wrote: “What fun! I guess we can put that to bed.”RetributionNo one could say such comments were surprising. In March, closing CPAC in Maryland, Trump told conservatives:
      In 2016, I declared: I am your voice. Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.
      Jonathan Karl of ABC would report that the Trump strategist Steve Bannon said Trump was speaking in code, referring to a Confederate plot to take hostage – and eventually kill – President Abraham Lincoln.DeathIn September, the Atlantic profiled Mark Milley, then chair of the joint chiefs of staff. Milley’s work to contain Trump at the end of his presidency was already widely known but the profile set Trump off nonetheless. On Truth Social, referring to a call in which Milley assured Chinese officials he would guard against any attempted attack, Trump lamented …
      … an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!
      Milley was moved to take “appropriate measures to ensure my safety and the safety of my family”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCourtsThis has been the year of the Trump indictment. He faces four, spawning 91 criminal charges regarding election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments. On 4 August, lawyers for the federal special counsel Jack Smith notified a judge of a post in which Trump appeared to threaten them, writing:
      If you go after me, I’m coming after you!
      Trump claimed protected political speech but the exchange teed up one of many tussles over gag orders and the general impossibility of getting Trump to shut up.IndictA recurring question: if re-elected, will Trump seek to use the federal government against his enemies? The slightly garbled answer, as expressed to Univision in November, was of course … yes:
      If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election.
      AnimalIn April, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, filed 34 charges over Trump’s 2016 payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who claims an affair. Trump had already made arguably racist comments about Letitia James, the New York attorney general. Aiming at Bragg, Trump used Truth Social to say:
      He is a Soros-backed animal who just doesn’t care about right or wrong.
      Calling Bragg an animal played to racism about Black people. “Soros-backed”, commonly used by Republicans, refers to the progressive financier George Soros and is widely regarded as antisemitic.Whack jobIn May, Trump was found liable for sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Caroll. Ordered to pay about $5m, he was not about to be quiet. The next night, in New Hampshire, he ranted:
      And I swear and I’ve never done that … I have no idea who the hell – she’s a whack job.
      Carroll called the comments “just stupid … just disgusting, vile, foul”. Then she sued Trump again.All-out warTrump is 77. Questions about his mental fitness for power are not going away. Recently, he has appeared to think he beat Barack Obama in 2016 and become confused about which Iowa city he was in. On 2 December, however, another Iowa gaffe seemed to point to a worrying truth:
      That’s why it was one of the great presidencies, they say. Even the opponents sometimes say he did very well … but we’ve been waging an all-out war on American democracy. More