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      ‘I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is’: Edel Rodriguez takes on Trump

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      Did you know Cuba has a Capitol in Havana that closely resembles its American counterpart? Edel Rodriguez does, and that’s one more reason why he, a Cuban American political cartoonist, was so disturbed by what happened in his adopted homeland on January 6.Rodriguez grew up in the shadow of a different sort of insurgency, the revolution that swept Fidel Castro to power in January 1959. He knew what it was like for a people to lose their freedoms under a dictatorship, and he knew the resulting desire to seek liberty, which he and his family did in the Mariel boatlift in 1980. So after 2016, when Donald Trump won the White House, uncomfortable memories from the not-so-distant past began to surface, never more so than on 6 January 2021.Now, Rodriguez has put it all down in a graphic-novel memoir, Worm: A Cuban-American Odyssey.“I don’t think most Americans realize what a coup is, or a coup attempt, how dangerous it is,” he says.In Worm, compelling artwork revisits January 6 and its immediate aftermath, when barbed wire surrounded the US Capitol and the national guard patrolled. Red-and-black images juxtapose Castro’s revolutionary soldiers, fists and rifles raised, with the QAnon Shaman and an American flag at half-staff.Ask Rodriguez which panels he is most proud of and he holds up a pair of two-page spreads. One, at the beginning of the narrative, depicts the Cuban revolution, Castro’s bearded army storming Havana atop tanks, that familiar-looking Capitol in the background. A panel found near the end of the memoir, meanwhile, shows the US Capitol rioters charging the seat of Congress, wearing Maga caps and brandishing multiple flags: American, Confederate, “Back-the-Blue” pro-police. The images are inverses of each other, the crowds marching in opposite directions.“It really does go to what I’m trying to say – two sides of the same coin,” Rodriguez says.“When it was back in 2015, and Trump appeared on the scene, my ears perked up. He would call people ‘scum’. In Cuba, Castro called his enemies ‘scum’. The press was the ‘enemy of the people’. These were the kind of words Castro would use.”Rodriguez’s depictions of Trump are now famous, making the covers of Time and Der Spiegel. The most striking is up for debate. Is it Trump’s face as a melting blob, which MSNBC likened to the Wicked Witch of the West? Trump holding a bloody knife in one hand and the severed head of the Statue of Liberty in the other, inspired by a picture of an Islamic State terrorist? Trump draped in an American flag, giving the Nazi salute?“I think he brought a certain kind of extremism to politics in America,” Rodriguez says. “I felt that it needed to be addressed … I’m just not a fan of extremism of any sort.“The best way to deal with problems,” he says, is to hold democratic elections, and if your candidate doesn’t win, to try again in the next go-round. What he’s seen far too often instead is the authoritarian alternative of “men with guns – communists in Cuba, the Maga crowd in the US, or Isis”.In Worm, Rodriguez examines his first-hand experiences with dictatorship. In cold war Cuba, he lived an hour away from the capital, in the small town of El Gabriel. Although he remembers being far more tuned in to nature there than in the US, he also describes being indoctrinated in school, from the red beret he wore to the Castro personality cult that was instilled by teachers. His parents lived in fear that his father’s entrepreneurial streak might get them in trouble, including neighborhood snoops who put their curiosity to the use of the Communist party.A tip-off alerted Rodriguez’s father to stepped-up scrutiny, accelerating the decision to leave. The Mariel boatlift made things easier in some ways, harder in others, as Rodriguez now explains in Worm, which unfolds memories of tense exit negotiations with authorities; a state of limbo in a tent city; and the miraculous day when a rescue vessel came. For the Rodriguez family, it was a shrimp boat called Nature Boy. Castro released prisoners to join the exodus to America, some of whom packed the boat. It and a convoy of other vessels made it to US shores.As Cubans willingly left their homeland, Castro insulted them with a choice barb, the “worm” of the book’s title.“It’s what they would call us, being underground, taking from the system,” Rodriguez says.In Spanish, it’s gusano, which the author considered for a title.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Of course, gusano has, to me, a much more guttural sound,” he says. “I wanted it to translate for an English-speaking audience.”Decades later – after studying at the Pratt Institute, getting a big break at Time, marrying and raising a family and even going back to Cuba to see family and friends – Rodriguez felt familiar enough with authoritarianism in his birthplace to speak out against it in his new home. That desire increased over the course of Trump’s 2016 campaign and ensuing four years in power. The verbal attack on a Muslim Gold Star family … the Access Hollywood tape … the Muslim ban … it’s all there, and so are Rodriguez’s graphic-art ripostes. He gives Trump a distinctive look: yellow hair, orange skin, no eyes or nose, just a wide-open mouth.Rodriguez has found approval – and backlash. He realized just how big the backlash had grown when he fielded a sympathetic audience question about his safety after giving a lecture in another country with a troubled history.“I was surprised when the man in Germany asked what was going to happen to me when I returned to America,” he says. “I did not think about it, I did not process it. It was sort of like telling a writer or an artist, ‘What’s going to happen to you if you do your work?’ … What else am I going to do with my life?”Noting that “some of my family questioned what I was doing, very close family members, including my mother,” he adds: “I don’t really think about people’s perceptions of my work as a stumbling block that will get me in trouble or go to jail. It’s hard enough being an artist.”Rodriguez will keep making waves with his art, even if it is now tinged with a sense of betrayal and loss, from an American dream that became a nightmare.“I think January 6 really did puncture a lot of what America means to people – not just myself, but many people in the world,” he says. “The US is the place you go to hope and dream. To see the US Congress get attacked, like some country in some other part of the world that has been attacked, like the parliament in Moscow getting attacked in the 1990s – to feel that shock, to see that in the US … I’m very sad, very disappointed.“At the same time, I’m very scared. I don’t think Americans have processed how messed up Trump is, if you consider the same candidate could come back. The most recent polls have him ahead.”
      Worm is published in the US by Metropolitan Books More

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      Renegade review: Adam Kinzinger on why he left Republican ranks

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      Adam Kinzinger represented a reliably Republican district in the US House for six terms. He voted to impeach Donald Trump over the insurrection and with Liz Cheney was one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee. Like the former Wyoming congresswoman, he earned the ire of Trump and the GOP base.A lieutenant colonel and air force pilot, Kinzinger read the terrain and declined to run again. In his memoir, he looks back at his life, family and time in the US military. He also examines the transformation of the Republican party into a Trumpian vessel. With the assistance of Michael D’Antonio, biographer of Mike Pence, he delivers a steady and well-crafted read.Kinzinger finds the Republicans sliding toward authoritarianism, alienating him from a world he once knew. On 8 January 2021, two days after the Trump-inspired coup attempt, he received a letter signed by 11 members of his family, excoriating him for calling for the president to be removed.“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!’ the letter began. “We were once proud of your accomplishments! Instead, you go against your Christian principles and join ‘the Devil’s army’ (Democrats and the fake news media).”The word “disappointment was underlined three times”, Kinzinger counts. “God once.”Elected in 2010 with the backing of the Tea Party, once in office, Kinzinger distanced himself from the Republican fringe. The movement felt frenzied. Hyper-caffeinated. He cast his lot with Eric Cantor, House majority leader and congressman from Virginia. “Overtly ambitious”, in Kinzinger’s view, Cantor also presented himself as “serious, sober and cerebral”. Eventually, Cantor found himself out of step with the enraged core of the party. In 2014, he was defeated in a primary.Cantor was too swampy for modern Republican tastes. Out of office, he is a senior executive at an investment bank.Simply opposing Barack Obama and the Affordable Care Act wasn’t enough. With America’s first Black president in the White House, performative politics and conspiracy theories took over.Kevin McCarthy, deposed as speaker last month, earns Kinzinger’s scorn – and rightly.“I was not surprised he was ousted,” Kinzinger told NPR. “And frankly, I think it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”On the page, Kinzinger paints McCarthy as weak, limitlessly self-abasing and a bully. He put himself at the mercy of Matt Gaetz, the Florida extremist, prostrated himself before Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia extremist, and endured 15 rounds of balloting on the House floor to be allowed the speaker’s gavel – an illusion of a win.McCarthy behaved like “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”, Kinzinger writes. The California congressman even tried, if feebly, to physically intimidate his fellow Republican.“Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber,” Kinzinger remembers. “As [McCarthy] passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.”Apparently, McCarthy forgot Kinzinger did stints in war zones.Kinzinger also takes McCarthy to task for his shabby treatment of Cheney, at the time the No 3 House Republican. On 1 January 2021, on a caucus call, she warned that 6 January would be a “dark day” if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.McCarthy was having none of it. “I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference,” he said. “She speaks for herself.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.These days, McCarthy faces the prospect of a Trump-fueled primary challenge. But he is not alone in evoking Kinzinger’s anger. Kinzinger also has tart words for Mitch McConnell and his performance post-January 6. The Senate minority leader was more intent on retaining power than dealing with the havoc wrought by Trump and his minions, despite repeatedly sniping at him.When crunch time came, McConnell followed the pack. Kinzinger bemoans McConnell’s vote to acquit in the impeachment trial, ostensibly because Trump had left office, and then his decision to castigate Trump on the Senate floor when it no longer mattered.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger bristles, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.”Kinzinger devotes considerable space to his own faith. An evangelical Protestant, he is highly critical of Christian nationalism as theology and as a driving force in the Republican party. He draws a direct line between religion and January 6. Proximity between the cross, a makeshift gallows and calls for Mike Pence to be hanged was not happenstance.“Had there not been some of these errant prophecies, this idea that God has ordained it to be Trump, I’m not sure January 6 would have happened like it did,” Kinzinger said last year. “You have people today that, literally, I think in their heart – they may not say it – but they equate Donald Trump with the person of Jesus Christ.”In his book, Kinzinger echoes Russell Moore, former head of public policy of the Southern Baptist Convention: “Moore’s view of Christianity was consistent with traditional theology, which does not have a place for religious nationalism. Nothing in the Bible said the world would be won over by American Christianity.”Looking at 2024, Kinzinger casts the election as “a simple question of democracy or no democracy … if it was Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don’t think there’s any question I would vote for Joe Biden”.
      Renegade is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America

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      The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, knows how he will rule: according to his Bible. When asked on Fox News how he would make public policy, he replied: “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” But it’s taking time for the full significance of that statement to sink in. Johnson is in fact a believer in scriptural originalism, the view that the Bible is the truth and the sole legitimate source for public policy.He was most candid about this in 2016, when he declared: “You know, we don’t live in a democracy” but a “biblical” republic. Chalk up his elevation to the speakership as the greatest victory so far within Congress for the religious right in its holy war to turn the US government into a theocracy.Since his fellow Republicans made him their leader, numerous articles have reported Johnson’s religiously motivated, far-right views on abortion, same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ rights. But that barely scratches the surface. Johnson was a senior lawyer for the extremist Alliance Defending Fund (later the Alliance Defending Freedom) from 2002 to 2010. This is the organization responsible for orchestrating the 303 Creative v Elenis legal arguments to obtain a ruling from the supreme court permitting a wedding website designer to refuse to do business with gay couples. It also played a significant role in annulling Roe v Wade.The ADF has always been opposed to privacy rights, abortion and birth control. Now Roe is gone, the group is laying the groundwork to end protection for birth control. Those who thought Roe would never be overruled should understand that the reasoning in Dobbs v Jackson is not tailored to abortion. Dobbs was explicitly written to be the legal fortress from which the right will launch their attacks against other fundamental rights their extremist Christian beliefs reject. They are passionate about rolling back the right to contraception, the right to same-sex marriage and the right to sexual privacy between consenting adults.Johnson’s inerrant biblical truth leads him to reject science. Johnson was a “young earth creationist”, holding that a literal reading of Genesis means that the earth is only a few thousand years old and humans walked alongside dinosaurs. He has been the attorney for and partner in Kentucky’s Creation Museum and Ark amusement park, which present these beliefs as scientific fact, a familiar sleight of hand where the end (garnering more believers) justifies the means (lying about science). For them, the end always justifies the means. That’s why they don’t even blink when non-believers suffer for their dogma.Setting aside all of these wildly extreme, religiously motivated policy preferences, there is a more insidious threat to America in Johnson’s embrace of scriptural originalism: his belief that subjective interpretation of the Bible provides the master plan for governance. Religious truth is neither rational nor susceptible to reasoned debate. For Johnson, who sees a Manichean world divided between the saved who are going to heaven and the unsaved going to hell, there is no middle ground. Constitutional politics withers and is replaced with a battle of the faithful against the infidels. Sound familiar? Maybe in Tehran or Kabul or Riyadh. But in America?When rulers insist the law should be driven by a particular religious viewpoint, they are systematizing their beliefs and imposing a theocracy. We have thousands of religious sects in the US and there is no religious majority, but we now have a politically fervent conservative religious movement of Christian nationalists intent on shaping policy to match their understanding of God and theirs alone. The Republicans who elected Johnson speaker, by a unanimous vote, have aligned themselves with total political rule by an intolerant religious sect.The philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard eloquently explained that religion is a “leap of faith”, not susceptible to reasoned discourse. The framers of the constitution and Bill of Rights thought the same. Under the first amendment, Americans have an absolute right to believe anything we choose and courts may not second-guess whether a believer’s truth is supported in reason or fact. For a believer, their belief is their “truth”, but for the republic, it is simply one of millions of beliefs across a country where all are free to believe. Thus, a scriptural originalist is by definition incapable of public policy discussions with those who do not share their faith.The grand irony is that being a “scriptural originalist” is oxymoronic. The colonies were first populated by those fleeing the theocracies of Europe – a fact the founders knew and respected. Millions were killed during the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish and Roman inquisitions, because only one faith could rule. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, as well as many other kings and queens, ordered apostates killed, imprisoned or exiled. Current theocracies underscore this historical reality. The Pilgrims fled England because they were at risk of punishment and even death for observing the wrong faith. So did the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians. Despite the ahistorical attempts of rightwing ideologues to claim we are or were a monolithic “Christian country”, this was always a religiously diverse country, and they did not all get along at first. Jews arrived in 1654. Early establishments faded away in the early 19th century as they could not be sustained in the face of our diversity.The primary drafter of the first amendment, James Madison, was keenly aware of these realities as he reflected on the dangerous history of theocracies in his famous Memorial and Remonstrance, opposing Virginia taxes for Christian education, asking: “Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?”Madison further invoked the Inquisition, stating that a bill funding religious education through taxes “degrades from the equal rank of citizens all those whose opinions in religion do not bend to those of the legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.” US history is proving him correct.Johnson isn’t just talking about a tax to support his brand of Christian nationalism, though the right’s religious movement, with the approval of the supreme court, has gone all out to ensure that as many tax dollars flow to their mission as possible. Johnson has asserted the hackneyed conservative theory of original intent – that the constitution must be interpreted precisely according to what the founders said – but with a twist. According to Johnson, George Washington and John Adams and all the others “told us that if we didn’t maintain those 18th-century values, that the republic would not stand, and this is the condition we find ourselves in today”. The founders, according to Johnson, were scriptural originalists and he’s here to take us back to their “true” Christian beliefs. In fact, the founders’ 18th-century enlightenment values directly repudiate Johnson’s 21st-century theocratic dogma.The Constitutional Convention itself shows how little support there is for the view that America started from a dogma-soaked worldview. During debates, Benjamin Franklin proposed bringing in a member of the clergy to guide them with prayer. Only three or four out of 55 framers agreed. The matter was dropped.Less than a decade ago, it looked like the religious right had lost the culture wars. The turning point seemed to be the decision in Obergefell v Hodges in 2015, which established same-sex marriage as a constitutional right. “It’s about everything,” Focus on the Family’s James Dobson mourned, “We lost the entire culture war with that one decision.”But instead of surrendering, the truest believers vowed to supplant democracy. They doubled down on furiously grabbing political power, to force everyone else to live their religious lives. Led by the likes of Leonard Leo, a reactionary Catholic theocrat who is chair of the Federalist Society’s board of directors, Dobson and many other Republicans, including the then little-known Mike Johnson, remade the supreme court and instituted stringent religious litmus tests for Republican candidates. Unable to control the culture, they have mounted a legal-political crusade against all who refuse to embrace their religious worldview.In little over a year, since Dobbs, the theocrats have converted their belief in the divinity of the fetus and disdain for the life of the pregnant into law, in one Republican-dominated state after another. But that is just a preview. Johnson and his crusaders would like to insert their scriptural originalism into every nook and cranny of federal law and public policy, to create a blanket of religious hegemony. Conservative governors and legislators have shamelessly invoked their God as the legislative purpose behind such draconian limitations.In the US, the peaceful coexistence of thousands of faiths was made possible in great part by the separation of church and state, which was demanded by Baptists in Massachusetts, Virginia and other places where they were being ostracized, taxed, flogged, imprisoned and even killed for their beliefs. That separation, which is the wall that protects religious liberty and prevents religious hegemony, was engraved in the constitution. How cruel an irony that some of the spiritual descendants of those persecuted Baptists should, like Mike Johnson, pervert American history and the constitution to impose a theocracy that would mean the end of democracy.
      Marci A Hamilton is a professor of practice and the Fox Family Pavilion non-resident senior fellow in the Program for Research on Religion at the University of Pennsylvania More

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      Bannon used Confederate code words to describe Trump speech, book says

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      The far-right Donald Trump ally and adviser Steve Bannon used Confederate code words linked to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to describe a speech by the former US president before his historic first criminal indictment, a new book says.On 6 March this year, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Trump took aim at Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney then widely expected to bring charges over hush-money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, thereby making Trump the first former president ever criminally indicted.Trump told his audience: “I am your warrior; I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.”In a forthcoming book, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party, Jonathan Karl, chief Washington correspondent for ABC News, writes: “When I spoke with Bannon a few days later, he wouldn’t stop touting Trump’s performance, referring to it as his ‘Come Retribution’ speech.“What I didn’t realise was that ‘Come Retribution’, according to some civil war historians, served as the code words for the Confederate Secret Service’s plot to take hostage – and eventually assassinate – President Abraham Lincoln.”Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington on 14 April 1865, by John Wilkes Booth, an actor. The president died the following day.Karl is the author of two bestsellers – Front Row at the Trump Show and Betrayal – about Trump’s rise to the presidency, time in the White House and defeat by Joe Biden.In his third Trump book, excerpted in the Atlantic on Thursday, Karl quotes from a 1988 book, Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and Assassination of Lincoln.“The use of the key phrase ‘Come Retribution’ suggests that the Confederate government had made a bitter decision to repay some of the misery that had been inflicted on the south,” the authors write. “Bitterness may well have been directed toward persons held to be particularly responsible for that misery, and Abraham Lincoln certainly headed the list.”Bannon, Karl writes, “actually recommended that I read that book, erasing any doubt that he was intentionally using the Confederate code words to describe Trump’s speech.“Trump’s speech was not an overt call for the assassination of his political opponents, but it did advocate their destruction by other means. Success ‘is within our reach, but only if we have the courage to complete the job, gut the deep state, reclaim our democracy, and banish the tyrants and Marxists into political exile forever,’ Trump said. ‘This is the turning point.’”In Karl’s estimation, the “Come Retribution” speech “was a turning point for Trump’s campaign” for re-election.Trump began his 2024 campaign sluggishly but then surged to huge leads over his Republican party rivals in national and key-state polling, despite a charge sheet now totaling 91 criminal counts and two civil trials, one over his business practices and one concerning a defamation claim arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKarl writes: “The [federal] trial date for the charge of interfering in the 2020 election has been set for 4 March [2024]; for the hush-money case, it’s 25 March; for the classified-documents case, it’s 20 May.“As election day approaches and [Trump] faces down these many days in court, he will be waging a campaign of vengeance and martyrdom. He will continue to talk about what is at stake in the election in apocalyptic terms – ‘the final battle’ – knowing how high the stakes are for him personally. He can win and retake the White House. Or he can lose and go to prison.”Bannon is quoted as saying: “Trump’s on offense and talking about real things. The ‘Come Retribution’ speech had 10 or 12 major policies.”But, Karl writes, “Bannon knew that the speech wasn’t about policies in a traditional sense. Trump spoke about whom he would target once he returned to power.“‘We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers,’ Trump said. ‘We will drive out the globalists; we will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country … We will beat the Democrats. We will rout the fake news media. We will expose and appropriately deal with the RINOs. We will evict Joe Biden from the White House.“‘And we will liberate America from these villains and scoundrels once and for all.’” More

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      Sedition Hunters: how ordinary Americans helped track down the Capitol rioters

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      For one rioter at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, wearing a Caterpillar hoodie proved a bad fashion choice. Admittedly, with an American flag-patterned cap and some shades, the garment helped shield his identity as he manhandled a police officer. Yet it came back to haunt him. Investigators used an app and facial-recognition technology to zero in and eventually got their man: Logan Barnhart, a construction worker in Michigan with a passion for fitness. His résumé included bodybuilding and modeling for romance novel covers. While hitting a punching bag in a workout video, he wore some familiar attire: a Caterpillar sweatshirt. Cue the Dragnet music.There was something else remarkable about this investigation: the sleuths were ordinary Americans, part of a spontaneously formed citizen network volunteering their time to track down Capitol rioters. Now their story is shared in a book that takes its name from the movement, Sedition Hunters: How January 6 Broke the Justice System, by Ryan J Reilly, an NBC News justice reporter.“They were really just random Americans who got together and decided they wanted to do something about what happened on January 6,” Reilly says.Those random Americans did not just identify Barnhart. They sought and found other rioters who stormed the Capitol after Donald Trump refused to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden and invited supporters to rally in Washington on the day Congress was to certify the results. Now, one of the Sedition Hunters, Forrest Rogers, is using his talents to siphon out misinformation of a different sort – as a journalist reporting on the conflict between Israel and Hamas for Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a newspaper based in Zurich.In the wake of January 6, the citizen sleuths proved invaluable to the FBI, which Reilly describes as reeling from the fallout of the riots and overwhelmed by the subsequent federal investigation, the largest in American history, as an initial estimate of 800 rioters entering the Capitol ballooned to more than 3,000.While the FBI approached the task with antiquated technology, the Sedition Hunters had all the latest tools, including the app that helped catch Barnhart, which was designed in a garage by one particular sleuth, known only as Alex in Reilly’s book. Many others did such critical work. Like Alex, “Joan” used an article of clothing to pin down a suspect. In her case, it was a blue-and-white sweatshirt from a school in her home town, Hershey, Pennsylvania, worn by a Capitol window-smasher. Its wearer had also been seen inside but all she had was a nickname: “Zeeker.” Joan searched the school’s Facebook page. Zeeker turned out to be Leo Brent Bozell IV, scion of a conservative dynasty.By the time of Bozell’s arrest, two other people had identified him to authorities. Both knew him. Although there are occasional mentions in the book of people who turned in rioters they knew, the Sedition Hunters focused on tracking down hard-to-find individuals who they had never met.“It was easy to get the person virtually if they posted their own crime, built their own case on a social media post,” Reilly says. “Some of them were making efforts to hide their identity in some way.”In his hoodie, baseball cap and sunglasses, one of many faces in a mob, Barnhart was tough to identify. Alex’s app proved a gamechanger. It created a virtual library of images of the attack collected by the Sedition Hunters, which they could now search to unmask the culprit. Each suspect was given a relevant nickname: Barnhart was “CatSweat”, for his Caterpillar garb. Ironically, an image from the rightwing social media platform Parler delivered the coup de grace. Facial recognition technology confirmed CatSweat as Barnhart. His social media accounts yielded further confirmation: a hat he wore in one photo matched his headgear on January 6. On Twitter, he promised Trump he would “be there” at the Capitol that day.Asked if any of the Sedition Hunters were secretly FBI agents, Reilly discounts the possibility with a quip: “They were way too skilled.” More seriously, he adds: “I think that really is what they brought to bear.”The Sedition Hunters sometimes outperformed their professional counterparts. The FBI made some wrong hits. John Richter, a Biden campaign worker, shared his name with a rioter who reached the Senate floor. Guess who was apprehended first? Although the Democratic Richter convinced them they had the wrong guy, with help from his puppy, two years would pass before the feds arrested the actual rioter.“This guy worked for Joe Biden, got him elected,” Reilly says. “He was probably not the man to look for … Stopping the election of a man he worked for did not make a lot of sense.”Reilly also notes that conservative elements within the FBI supported Trump and were lukewarm on investigating those who rioted for him.“Despite what we heard the past seven or eight years from Donald Trump, at its core, it’s a conservative organization,” Reilly says. “A lot of people generally lean conservative. It does not mean they’re all Trump supporters, but there was a lot of whataboutism in the FBI after the Capitol attacks.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionReilly does provide many examples of FBI personnel acting on tips from the Sedition Hunters. After Joan made her initial identification of Zeeker as Bozell and communicated this to the bureau, she kept scanning images from the riots for that blue-and-white sweatshirt. This uncovered further evidence of his violent actions, which she also transmitted. A special agent thanked her, promised to update prosecutors and made good on that vow, an additional charge against Bozell being brought within 24 hours.Reilly is mindful of some developments still on the horizon. There is a five-year statute of limitations for Capitol rioters – 6 January 2026 – so the window to bring remaining fugitives to justice is about two and a half years wide. There’s a wild card too: what happens if Trump wins the presidency again and decides to issue pardons?“I think it’s very real,” Reilly says of that possibility. “He said he’s going to. To me, it really depends on what the extent is going to be … You can easily see him pardoning everybody who committed misdemeanors, something like that.”Of more serious charges, he adds: “I don’t know across the board.”Who knows what will happen. For now, readers can savor the unheralded work of the Sedition Hunters, best summed up in Joan’s reflection about helping bring Bozell to justice: “He probably would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling sleuths.”
      Sedition Hunters is published in the US by PublicAffairs More

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      The Conspiracy to End America review: Trump and the fascist threat

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      Donald Trump’s supporters want an American Caesar. Back in 2016, Paul LePage, then governor of Maine, made it explicit. “We need a Donald Trump to show some authoritarian power in our country,” he declared. Joe Sitt, a major player in New York real estate and an early Trump backer, chipped in: “We don’t have a president, we have a king.”Five years later, January 6 and its aftermath crystalized another reality: Trump found fair and free elections useless. He and his allies had grown weary of democracy. After all, they had lost.The Republican party had a new credo: “Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.”The last time the GOP won the popular vote was in 2004, and before that 1988. Seeking to return to office, Trump has threatened the media with charges of treason and hankered for the execution of Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff.Against this dystopian backdrop, Stuart Stevens delivers his second book, The Conspiracy to End America, on what happened to the party he served for so long, this one under the subtitle Five Ways My Old Party Is Driving Our Democracy to Autocracy. The words are jarring but dead-on. Once a senior campaign operative, Stevens knows of what he speaks. In his view, only the Democratic party values democracy as an end in itself.He did media for George W Bush’s White House runs, then helped guide Mitt Romney to the Republican nomination in 2012. Now, though, Stevens is at the Lincoln Project, a haven for never-Trumpers. Their commercials got under Trump’s skin – to the delectation of Democrats. They were mean and funny. On the page, Stevens picks up where he left off in It Was All a Lie, his book of 2019. Four years furnished plenty of new material. At present, Trump faces 91 felony counts across multiple jurisdictions yet is the odds-on favorite to capture the 2024 presidential nomination. Truth is stranger than fiction.“Trump understood the true nature of the Republican party better than those who were the party’s leaders,” Stevens writes of Trump’s first campaign, launched in 2015, a tacit admission that the author himself did not fully comprehend the world around him. It was about resentments, not upward arc: “Hate was creating a surge of appeal.”Trump beat Hillary Clinton, then lost to Joe Biden. His ambitions were only momentarily derailed. His chief challenger, the hard-right Florida governor Ron DeSantis, faded in primary polling. The rest of the field is running in place or approaching asterisk status. None can land a punch.As Stevens sees it, the late Weimar Republic and the US today have plenty in common. As was the case 90 years ago, democracy could be made expendable, particularly if the donor class goes along for the ride.Back then, in Stevens’ telling, the German aristocracy lost touch with the workers. Fearing communism, they and the industrialists made peace with Adolf Hitler – much as GOP donors opened their wallets to Trump. Stevens leaves little to the imagination: “Like Adolf Hitler, Trump hated the establishment figures who supported him, and they despised him.”He quotes Mitch McConnell, the living embodiment of the Republican establishment, the Senate majority leader when Trump won the White House. With hindsight, McConnell sounds clueless, oblivious to the approaching storm.“I think we’re much more likely to change [Trump] because if he is president, he’s going to have to deal with the sort of the right-of-center world, which is where most of us are,” McConnell told CNBC.“Going to have to deal”? Really?After McConnell helped Trump’s judicial nominees over the finishing line, the senator became expendable. He emerged as a target for Trump’s rants and loathing, including potshots at Elaine Chao, McConnell’s Chinese American wife, who resigned from Trump’s cabinet – if only after January 6. At times, McConnell’s disdain seeped out. Ultimately, though, he maintained sufficient devotion to his Caesar: McConnell blamed Trump for January 6 but refused to vote to convict at the second impeachment trial.In the same quisling spirit, McConnell has said he would vote for Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee again. A coda: just like Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, McConnell never responded to the barbs Trump aimed at his wife.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs for Cruz, Trump linked his father to the assassination of John F Kennedy and, for good measure, called his wife ugly. No matter: “lyin’ Ted,” as Trump nicknamed him, was there to polish Trump’s boots with his tongue.Not surprisingly, Stevens shines an unflattering light on Cruz. He also stresses that McConnell wasn’t alone in trashing Trump and then acquiescing to his dominance: he namechecks the former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, the former vice-president Mike Pence, the New York Republican Elise Stefanik and senators Lindsey Graham, Marsha Blackburn and Tim Scott, all for condemning the insurrection only to backslide swiftly.“Two weeks after the insurrection, Kevin McCarthy was once again the aging fraternity rush chairman who would do anything to be accepted by the Big Man on Campus fraternity president,” Stevens writes.This month, in McCarthy’s hour of need, Trump did not rally to his side. The Californian became the first House speaker ever ejected by his own party – while Trump toyed with the idea of becoming speaker himself. Meanwhile, out on the presidential campaign trail, Pence and Scott go nowhere. The Republican party really is The Trump Show.On Wednesday, House Republicans tapped Steve Scalise, reportedly a David Duke wannabe, as their guy for House speaker. But his candidacy was short lived. On Thursday, he pulled the plug. Other far-right connections continue. Eric Trump was slated to share the stage with Ian Smith, a Nazi apologist, at Trump Doral in Florida this week.“The collapse of American democracy is like the pandemic,” Stevens warns. “Whatever you say at the beginning will sound alarmist but likely prove inadequate at the end.”
      The Conspiracy to End America is published in the US by Hachette More

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      ‘No enemies to the right’: DeSantis ally hosts debate hedging white nationalism

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      Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is a close ally of Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, hosted a social media debate in which one participant argued that conservatives should cooperate with a hypothetical white nationalist dictator “in order to destroy the power of the left”.Rufo, a Manhattan Institute fellow who has been a hugely influential figure in DeSantis’ culture war policies in Florida, did not disagree with the participant’s sentiments. Instead he commended speakers for their “thoughtful points” and presenting the discussion as a model for engagement with “the dissident right”.Rufo is a high-profile conservative activist who in books, columns, media appearances and a Substack newsletter has encouraged conservatives to oppose “wokeness”. He has been credited with mobilizing conservatives against communities of color, first with a distorted version of critical race theory; then by linking LGBTQ-inclusive education practices to pedophilic “grooming”.Rufo has exercised a particular influence on DeSantis. Rufo reportedly consulted on the drafting of DeSantis’s “Stop Woke Act”, which bans schools and workplaces from teaching that anyone is inherently privileged due to race or sex, and was invited by DeSantis to witness the bill’s signing in April 2022.Later, DeSantis appointed Rufo to the board of trustees of Florida’s New College in January. New College was a traditionally liberal college, but under Rufo is now transforming into a more conservative institution – a move that many say heralds DeSantis’ view of the future of academia in Florida and the US.Rufo hosted the debate on X, the social media network formerly known as Twitter.Participating in the debate was Charles Haywood, a former shampoo magnate who the Guardian previously reported is a would-be “warlord” who founded a secretive, men-only fraternal society, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).The debate concerned Haywood’s promotion of a strategy he calls “no enemies to the right”, which urges people on the right to avoid any public criticism of others in their camp, including extremists.Early in the Rufo-hosted discussion last Tuesday, Haywood raised the hypothetical possibility early in the discussion: “Let’s say a real white nationalist arose who had real political power … and therefore [could] be of assistance against the left.”Responding to the hypothetical, Haywood said: “I think that the answer is that you should cooperate with that person in order to destroy the power of the left.”Later in the broadcast, Haywood responded to concerns about rightwing authoritarianism by saying: “When we’re talking about people like Franco or Pinochet or even Salazar … they did kill people. They killed people justly, they killed people unjustly, and that’s just a historical fact.”“But,” Haywood added, “they saved a lot more people than they killed.”Augusto Pinochet was military dictator of Chile from 1971 to 1990, and after coming to power in a coup he tortured, exiled or killed tens of thousands of his regime’s opponents.Francisco Franco was dictator of Spain from 1936 until his death in 1975, and his regime killed 100,000 to 200,000 people during the so-called “white terror”. António de Oliveira Salazar was the head of Portugal’s authoritarian, one-party state from 1932 until 1968; his regime repressed domestic opposition and oversaw brutal colonial policies in Africa that permitted forced labor and other abuses.In closing the discussion, Rufo credited speakers with raising “some provocative points on all sides, some thoughtful points on all sides”, and told listeners: “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 engage in thoughtful dialogue.”The Guardian emailed Christopher Rufo and the DeSantis campaign detailed requests for comment prior to publication, but received no response.After publication, Rufo said in a statement to the Guardian that he was “against rightwing racialism and against an unrestricted policy of no enemies to the right”. He said that in announcing the debate he had said, in reference to some on the far right, “some elements on the fringes of any political movement are moral non-starters – they should be given no deference, much less support”.During the debate, Rufo also criticized the US white nationalist Richard Spencer, calling him “wrong morally, politically, practically”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHeidi Beirich, an extremism expert who co-founded the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, called the discussion and its framing “a disaster” in an email.“By engaging true extremists – white supremacists and authoritarians – Haywood’s vision of ‘no enemies to the right’ will sanction and empower those movements,” Beirich wrote.Beirich also wrote: “Conservative cowardice on white supremacy is the road to losing a democracy and possibly much worse in terms of hate-driven political violence and autocracy.”She compared the “no enemies to the right” doctrine to the situation in “Germany in the 1930s when conservatives worked with Hitler, seeing him as less of a problem than communists”.Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence project, said: “There’s sizable segments of the right that want the best of both worlds, namely the energy and the vigor of reactionary far-right movements but without any of the baggage.”Gais added: “The idea that the ‘dissident right’ – a sort of umbrella term used within the movement to refer to white nationalists and others on that political spectrum – could make some kind of viable political partner seems to be an extension of this line of thought.“What disturbs me the most about these comments is it makes clear that some on the right are more than comfortable with the fact that the guardrails are off.”In July Mark Granza, Italian-born editor of far-right online magazine IM-1776, hosted a Twitter space to celebrate the launch of Rufo’s latest book, America’s Cultural Revolution. Haywood was an invited speaker at that recording, and he said he was “extremely impressed” by Rufo’s book, calling it “exquisitely written”, and praising its “explicit call for a counter-revolution” and its “aggressive approach”.Following the Guardian’s reporting on Haywood’s involvement in founding the Society for American Civic Renewal, conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck condemned him and his ideas on air.The Guardian emailed Haywood for comment on his appearance on Rufo’s space but received no response.The Guardian also previously reported that Haywood is a featured speaker at a “natalist” conference planned for December in Austin, Texas, where he is scheduled to appear alongside other far-right figures and advocates of eugenics.
      This article was updated on 11 October 2023 to include a response from Christopher Rufo. More

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      Democracy Awakening review: Heather Cox Richardson’s necessary US history

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      In a media landscape so polluted by politicians addicted to cheap thrills (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Orange Monster) and the pundits addicted to them (Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon), the success of Heather Cox Richardson is much more than a blast of fresh air. It’s a bona fide miracle.The Boston College history professor started writing her newsletter, Letters from an American, almost four years ago. Today her daily dose of common sense about the day’s news, wrapped in an elegant package of American history, has a remarkable 1.2 million subscribers, making her the most popular writer on Substack. Not since Edward P Morgan captivated the liberal elite with his nightly 15-minute broadcasts in the 1960s has one pundit been so important to so many progressive Americans at once.In the age of social media, Richardson’s success is counterintuitive. When she was profiled by Ben Smith in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Smith confessed he was so addicted to Twitter he rarely found the time to open her “rich summaries” of the news. When he told Bill Moyers, one of Richardson’s earliest promoters, the same thing, the great commentator explained: “You live in a world of thunderstorms, and she watches the waves come in.”Richardson’s latest book shares all the intelligence of her newsletter. It doesn’t have the news value of her internet contributions but it is an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history – and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.Like other recent books, including The Destructionists by Dana Milbank, Richardson’s new volume reminds us that far from being an outlier, Donald Trump was inevitable after 70 years of Republican pandering to big business, racism and Christian nationalism.So many direct lines can be drawn from the dawn of modern conservatism to the insanity of the Freedom Caucus today. It was William F Buckley Jr, the most famous conservative pundit of his era, who in 1951 attacked universities for teaching “secularism and collectivism” and promoted the canard that liberals were basically communists. Among Buckley’s mortal enemies, Richardson writes, were everyone “who believed that the government should regulate business, protect social welfare, promote infrastructure and protect civil rights” – and who “believed in fact-based argument”.In place of the liberal consensus that emerged with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Buckley and his henchmen wanted a new “orthodoxy of religion and the ideology of free markets”. A few years later, the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater ran on a platform opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Four years after that, Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy included promises to slow down the desegregation the supreme court had ordered 14 years before.In one of the most notorious dog whistles of all time, Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign by declaring his love for states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi – made infamous by the murders of the civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in 1964.Since the 1950s, Richardson writes, conservatives have fought to destroy “the active government of the liberal consensus, and since the 1980s, Republican politicians [have] hacked away at it” but still “left much of the government intact”. With Trump’s election in 2016, the nation had finally “put into office a president who would use his power to destroy it”. Republicans fought for 50 years for an “end to business regulation and social services and the taxes they required”. Trump went even further by “making the leap from oligarchy to authoritarianism”.Richardson is refreshingly direct about the importance of the fascist example to Trump and his Maga movement. When he used the White House to host the Republican convention in 2020, the first lady, Melania Trump, wore a “dress that evoked a Nazi uniform”. And, Richardson writes, the big lie was a “key propaganda tool” for the Nazis, which Hitler himself explained in Mein Kampf, the book Trump may have kept on his night table at Trump Tower (or maybe it was a collection of Hitler’s speeches).Richardson even uses the psychological profile of Hitler by the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency during the second world war, to remind us of similarities to Trump. The OSS said Hitler’s “primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy … never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong”.But Richardson’s book isn’t just a recitation of the evil of Republicans. It is also a celebration of progressive successes. She reminds us that before Vietnam ruined his presidency, Lyndon Johnson compiled an incredible record. In one session, Congress passed an astonishing 84 laws. Johnson’s “Great Society” included the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which provided federal aid for public schools; launched Head Start for the early education of low-income children; the social security amendments that created Medicare; increased welfare payments; rent subsidies; the Water Quality Act of 1965; and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.These laws had a measurable impact. “Forty million Americans were poor in 1960”; by 1969, that had dropped to 24 million.Addressing graduates of the University of Michigan in 1964, Johnson used words that are apt today:“For better or worse, your generation has been appointed by history to … lead America toward a new age … You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the nation.”Johnson rejected the “timid souls” who believed “we are condemned to a soulless wealth. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”
      Democracy Awakening is published in the US by Viking More