US elections 2020

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Chinese bots had key role in debunked ballot video shared by Eric Trump

      by

      A Chinese bot network played a key role in spreading disinformation during and after the US election, including a debunked video of “ballot burning” shared by Eric Trump, a new study reveals.The misleading video shows a man filming himself on Virginia Beach, allegedly burning votes cast for Donald Trump. The ballots were actually samples. The clip went viral after Trump’s son Eric posted it a day later on his official Twitter page, where it got more than 1.2m views.The video was believed to have originated from an account associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory. But the study by Cardiff University found two China-linked accounts had shared the video before this. Twitter has since suspended one of them.The same Chinese network has spread anti-US propaganda, including calls for violence in the run-up to the 6 January storming of the US Capitol building by a pro-Trump mob. Afterwards. It compared the west’s response to the DC riot to political protests in Hong Kong.The accounts previously posted hostile messages about Trump and Joe Biden, made allegations of election fraud and promoted “negative narratives” about the US response to the coronavirus pandemic.Professor Martin Innes, director of Cardiff University’s crime and security institute, said open-source analysis strongly suggested “multiple links” to Beijing.Researchers initially thought the hidden network was not especially complex, he said. Further evidence, however, revealed what he called a “sophisticated and disciplined” online operation. Accounts did not use certain hashtags in an apparent attempt to avoid Twitter’s counter-measures. They posted during regular Chinese working hours, with gaps on a national holiday, and used machine tools to translate into English.“The network appears designed to run as a series of almost autonomous ‘cells’, with minimal links connecting them,” Innes said. “This structure is designed to protect the network as a whole if one ‘cell’ is discovered, which suggests a degree of planning and forethought.“Therefore, this marks the network as a significant attempt to influence the trajectory of US politics by foreign actors.”Efforts by Russian-linked social media actors to influence US elections are well known. The special counsel Robert Mueller detailed an extensive troll operation run out of building in St Petersburg. Its goal was to “disparage” Hillary Clinton and to promulgate “divisive” content, Mueller found.The Chinese accounts cannot be definitely linked to the state. But ordinary Chinese citizens do not have access to Twitter and it appears that Beijing may be seeking to emulate Kremlin practices by setting up its own US-facing political influence operation.Last year the university’s research team uncovered more than 400 accounts engaging in suspicious activities. These were forwarded to Twitter, which suspended them within a few days. The latest analysis suggests further accounts are still working, with the network more resilient than previously thought.There is compelling evidence of links to China. Posts feature the Chinese language and a focus upon topics reflecting Chinese geopolitical interests. Some 221 accounts spread content in favour of the Chinese Communist party, encompassing some 42,618 tweets, the study found.The accounts also attacked Trump for referring to Covid-19 as the China virus. One claimed the virus originated outside China and had actually come from the US laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. The network’s main goal was “encouragement of discord” in the US, the study concluded. Most tweets about Trump were negative. The handful that were positive urged Americans to “fetch their guns”, to “fight for democracy” and to “call gunmen together” in order to win a second Trump term.The bots complained of “double standards” after the Capitol building riot, saying US politicians had hypocritically backed protesters who entered the Hong Kong legislative building. “The riots in Congress are a disgrace to the United States today, and will soon become the fuse of the American order,” one remarked. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Ohio nearly purged 10,000 voters who ended up casting 2020 ballots

      by

      More than 10,000 people who Ohio believed had “abandoned” their voter registration cast ballots in the 2020 election, raising more concern that officials are using an unreliable and inaccurate method to identify ineligible voters on the state’s rolls.In August, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, released a list of 115,816 people who were set to be purged after the November election because the election officials in each of Ohio’s 88 counties flagged them as inactive. Voters could remove their name from the list by taking a number of election-related actions, including voting, requesting an absentee ballot, or simply confirming their voter registration information.Last week, LaRose’s office announced that nearly 18,000 people on the initial list did not have their voter registration canceled, including 10,000 people who voted in the November election. About 98,000 registrations were ultimately removed from the state’s rolls, LaRose’s office announced last month. There are more than 8 million registered voters in the state.In a statement, LaRose said the fact that so many people prevented their voter registrations from being canceled is a success of the state’s unprecedented efforts to notify voters at risk of being purged. But voting rights groups say the fact that Ohio nearly purged thousands of eligible voters is deeply alarming and underscores the inaccurate and haphazard way the state goes about maintaining its voter rolls.“If we have 10,000 people who on their own volition are voting, we know that there’s probably many more who are still living, breathing, eligible Ohioans, who also have not moved, who also have been removed from the rolls,” said Jen Miller, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of the League of Women Voters.Federal law requires states to regularly review their voter lists for ineligible voters, but Ohio has one of the most aggressive processes for cancelling registrations in the United States. A voter can be removed from the rolls if they don’t vote or undertake any political activity for six consecutive years and fail to respond to a mailer asking to confirm their address after the first two.Voting advocates argue Ohio’s process essentially removes people from the rolls because they don’t vote, which is prohibited under federal law, and is more likely to target minorities and the poor. The US supreme court upheld the Ohio process in a 5-4 decision in 2018.Naila Awan, a lawyer at Demos, a civil rights thinktank that helped challenge the Ohio process at the US supreme court, said she wasn’t surprised that eligible voters were flagged on the August list of people at risk of being purged.“Voting inactivity is a really poor proxy for identifying individuals who may have become ineligible by reason of having moved. The data across the board shows that this is fundamentally a flawed process and there has to be something better to use,” she said.The recent purge marks the second time in recent memory that Ohio has nearly purged scores of eligible voters from its rolls. Months ahead of a scheduled purge in 2019, the state released a list of 235,000 people who were set to be removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups found more than 40,000 eligible voters included on it and were able to prevent them from being removed.Democratic and Republican officials alike have overseen purging for years in Ohio, but a 2016 Reuters analysis illustrated the way the practice can disproportionally hurt Democrats. In the state’s three largest counties, voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods were struck from the rolls at twice the rate of those in GOP areas, the analysis found. In heavily Black areas of Cincinnati, more than 10% of voters were removed from the rolls between 2012 and 2016 because of inactivity, compared with just 4% in one of the city’s suburbs.In the months before the 2020 election, Keizayla Fambro, an organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a grassroots group that focuses on empowering people of color in the state, was focused on voter registration in counties that are home to some of Ohio’s biggest cities. She estimated her group encountered one to two people a week who were on the purge list and whom they urged to update their voter registration.“We would check them on a name and we would be like, ‘Oh my God, your voter registration needs to be updated, you could have been purged,’” she said. “Honestly, it was coincidence.”For those who move a lot, updating a voter registration was often the last thing they were thinking about, Fambro said. “You’re thinking about, ‘Oh, I have to get my kid in this school. I have to make sure we have somewhere to sleep,’” she said.People of color, the poor, non-English speakers and minorities also tend to experience more severe barriers in getting to the polls, making them more likely to be flagged for purging under a system that relies on inactivity, Awan said.“When you’re using something like the number of elections a person has missed, you’re going to, by necessity almost, be disproportionately targeting people who experience more barriers getting to the polling locations to begin with,” she said.Miller and other voting advocates have praised LaRose for taking the unprecedented step of making the purge list public months ahead of the removals to give voters adequate time to check their voter registration. But simply making the list public isn’t adequate, they say, especially because the increased transparency has underscored the way Ohio’s process can flag eligible voters for potential cancellation.“Before LaRose, we didn’t have any transparency, so we appreciate that. But what the transparency is doing is actually confirming that there are a lot of living, breathing Ohioans who are getting wrapped up in this process who shouldn’t be,” Miller said.“It’s been frustrating because to me he’s gotten this false praise of, ‘Oh, he opened up the list for the first time,’ which is all fine and dandy. To me, opening up, being transparent, doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have accountability,” said Bride Rose Sweeney, a Democrat in the Ohio state house of representatives.LaRose has called for more reform, focusing on centralizing and updating Ohio’s voter registration system. He has backed adopting automatic voter registration, which would help prevent wrongful purging by requiring state agencies to automatically update voter registration when they interact with eligible voters. Currently, counties are responsible for maintaining their voter rolls and compiling lists of people eligible to be purged, a system LaRose told USA Today last year was “prone to error” and “unacceptably messy”.“The secretary believes there are improvements to be made to the process. I certainly hope you include them in your story,” Maggie Sheehan, a LaRose spokeswoman, told the Guardian.Some changes are already in place. While the state used to only send voters one notice asking them to confirm their voter registration records, it recently started sending a second, final confirmation notice 30-45 days before the purge takes place. The state also announced in 2018 that voters at risk of being purged could confirm their addresses when they updated their driver’s licenses.But the fact that Ohio flagged so many eligible voters for removal despite those reforms is still alarming, said Stuart Naifeh, another Demos lawyer involved in the 2018 supreme court case.LaRose has insisted the purge process is outlined in state law, limiting any changes he can make. But advocates dispute that characterization, noting that LaRose has the authority to improve the process. State law does require officials to remove anyone who receives a confirmation mailer and doesn’t vote for four consecutive years from the rolls, but it doesn’t specify what triggers the confirmation notice. By relying on more reliable evidence that someone has moved, instead of two years of voting inactivity, LaRose could significantly improve the accuracy of the purge process, critics say.“He is not required by law to do this … State law allows it, it’s not barred,” said Sweeney, the Ohio state representative. “He is choosing to make this a more expansive process.” More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Twitter permanently bans My Pillow chief Mike Lindell

      by

      Twitter has permanently banned My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell, after he continued to perpetuate the baseless claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election.Twitter decided to ban Lindell due to “repeated violations” of its civic integrity policy, a spokesperson said. The policy was implemented last September and is targeted at fighting disinformation.It was not immediately clear which posts by Lindell triggered his suspension.Lindell, a Trump supporter, has continued to insist that the election was rigged even after Joe Biden has begun work in the Oval Office.Major retailers such as Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s have said they will stop carrying My Pillow products, Lindell previously said.Lindell is also facing potential litigation from Dominion Voting Systems for claiming their machines played a role in alleged election fraud. He also urged Trump to declare martial law in an attempt to overturn the election.Following the storming of the US Capitol earlier this month, Twitter has banned more than 70,000 accounts for sharing misinformation.Trump, who urged on the mob, has also had his account permanently suspended. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Dominion Voting Systems sues Giuliani for $1.3bn over baseless election claims

      by

      Complaint accuses ex-mayor of having ‘manufactured and disseminated’ conspiracy theory related to voting machinesUS politics – live updatesDominion Voting Systems, the voting equipment manufacturer at the centre of baseless election fraud conspiracy theories pushed by Donald Trump and his allies, has sued the former president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in a $1.3bn defamation lawsuit. Related: Schumer promises quick but fair trial as Trump impeachment heads to Senate Continue reading… More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump is gone but his big lie is still corrupting America's body politic

      by

      Sign up for the Guardian’s First Thing newsletterWhen the back wheels of Air Force One finally lifted off the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday bound for Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s White House-in-exile in West Palm Beach, cheers erupted in millions of households across America and around the globe.Four years of screeching tweets and ugly divisiveness were over, and for many it felt like the hope of a calmer, more civil world had swept in.In one respect, though, the acrid, bitter smell of Trump continues to hang in the air: he left the presidency having never conceded that he lost the election to Joe Biden.Trump’s decision to shun Biden’s inauguration – the first outgoing president to do so in 152 years – can be explained away as the hissy fit of a sore loser. But there’s a darker side to it. By forgoing the ritual of the peaceful handover of power that has been a pillar of American democracy since the country’s founding, he leaves a black cloud over the incoming administration.Trump’s refusal formally to pass the baton means that the terrible events of 6 January are unfinished business. The armed mob of Trump supporters and white supremacists who stormed the Capitol Building, fired up by Trump’s lies about the “stolen election” and hunting for members of Congress to lynch, still have their marching orders. It is a legacy, made manifest on inauguration day by the 7ft non-scalable fences and the war zone-like presence of thousands of national guard troops in Washington DC.As Trump legacies go, this one could prove much harder to unpick than those he left behind on the pandemic, immigration or the climate crisis that Biden tried to reverse with the flick of a pen on day one.The legacy of the “stolen election”, by contrast, has the potential to endure. Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary under George W Bush, told the Guardian recently that domestic terrorism inspired directly by Trump “is going to be the security challenge for the foreseeable future”.Current intelligence chiefs agree. They are primed to have to deal with a lasting threat posed by Trump’s ongoing refusal publicly to accept the will of the American people.An intelligence bulletin obtained by the Washington Post that was written just a week before the inauguration spelled out the intelligence community’s anxieties. The memo concluded that “amplified perceptions of fraud surrounding the outcome of the general election … very likely will lead to an increase in DVE [domestic violent extremist] violence.”At the center of this new domestic terrorism threat is the seed of doubt that Trump has implanted in the minds of millions of Americans that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. It is the “animating lie”, as the former homeland security official Juliette Kayyem has put it, that drove the mob to storm the US Capitol and that now hangs in the air like a toxic gas.Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election amounted to a “big lie” familiar to those who study demagogic propaganda. Embedded within it are many of the core elements of what the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called Trump’s post-truth, “pre-fascism”.The lie was simple – able to be repeated and shared on TV and social media in six short words: “They stole the election from me.” That “they” was important too – by signaling a clear enemy, it allowed his supporters to direct their frustration and anger at identifiable targets.Trump lashed out repeatedly at the media, which he denounced as the “enemy of the people”. He attacked “cowardly” Republican election officials who refused not to do their jobs, his own vice-president, and finally the heart of US democracy, Congress itself.For Bandy X Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert, there was another key aspect to the “stop the steal” big lie – it was rooted in paranoia. In her analysis, paranoia, perceiving threat where none exists, is the most common symptom to cause violent behaviour.“The fact that Trump actually believes himself to have been wronged and persecuted, or has paranoid ideations, spreads and finds resonance in paranoia that already exists in the population. That will increase the chances of violence,” Lee said.As any student of tyrannies will tell you, for big lies to work they have to be repeated and repeated. Trump certainly fulfilled that requirement. He has been working assiduously to spread his animating lie for years. Consider the headline in the New Yorker, “Trump and the truth: the ‘rigged’ election”. The article beneath it reported that Trump was “trying to delegitimize a national election even while campaigning for the presidency” and that his ploy was working – about half of his supporters thought the election was cooked.That New Yorker piece was published on 8 October 2016.Trump’s efforts have paid even greater dividends in this election cycle. The most recent opinion polls suggest that more than a third of the total US electorate still believe that Trump won the November election, a proportion that rises above 70% when you ask Republicans. Nor is there any sign such a stunningly large number of Americans who bought Trump’s make-believe is on the wane. As Snyder wrote in the New York Times, “the lie outlasts the liar”.Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Trump’s sleight of hand is that he presented himself in the cloak of the protector of American democracy precisely in order to undermine American democracy. He invoked patriotism in order to legitimize the ultimate act of sedition – overthrowing the electoral will of the American people.Fashioning yourself as a patriot makes it easier to justify, in your own mind, participating in acts that might lead to violenceThat is what most concerns David Gomez, a former FBI national security executive who spent many years countering domestic terrorism. He fears that Trump, by wrapping his actions in the cloth of patriotism, has given his blessing to violent action that could linger beyond his presidency.“This is what makes this particular moment in time more dangerous,” he told the Guardian. “Fashioning yourself as a patriot makes it easier to justify, in your own mind, participating in acts that might lead to violence.”The patriotic rhetoric acts like an ethical get-out clause, Gomez said. “It provides the average person a face-saving scenario to participate. ‘Oh, I’m not a bad guy, I’m a good guy acting as a patriot to save my country.’”Into this mix has been poured the even more poisonous influence of far-right and white supremacist groups, motivated by racial animus and wielding their Confederate flags inside the Capitol building. Trump made repeated overtures to them throughout his presidency, from his “you had very fine people, on both sides” comment about the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, to his notorious invitation to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”.White supremacists have enthusiastically heeded his call. For them, this was the break for which they had long been waiting, the welcome gesture that would usher them into the fold.Shortly before the storming of the Capitol, the Three Percenters, an extreme anti-government militia network, put out a statement in which they aligned themselves overtly with Trump’s “stolen election”. They name-checked Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas who was complicit in Trump’s big lie, as well as the ever more erratic Rudy Giuliani and the former national security adviser and pardoned criminal Michael Flynn.“We are ready to enter into battle with General Flynn leading the charge,” the group said.This all presents the incoming administration with a bilious soup of disaffected Trump supporters and their white supremacist allies hooked on the idea that Biden is an illegitimate president. Given the millions of Americans who have bought into the fantasy, should even a tiny fraction of them harbor violent aspirations or find themselves drawn to the newly elevated white supremacist groups, that would give rise to a national security challenge of monumental proportions.Biden himself has vowed to tackle the trouble head-on. In his inauguration speech he addressed the threat directly, talking about the “rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat”.But the new president may find himself hamstrung by the relative lack of attention that has been paid up until now to the phenomenon.Some 80% of the FBI’s counter-terrorism budget goes on fighting international terrorism, and only 20% on domesticLast year Chris Wray, the FBI director who Biden intends to keep in post, told Congress that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists” were the main source of ideological killings, overshadowing international jihadism that has dominated US intelligence thinking for 20 years.Yet the way the FBI dishes out its resources is the exact opposite. Some 80% of its counter-terrorism budget goes on fighting international terrorism, and only 20% on domestic.Gomez, the former FBI supervisor, said that any residual sluggishness on the part of the FBI in refocusing its sights on far-right violence will have vanished on 6 January. The storming of the Capitol was a “call to action for the FBI as it showed that there are individuals and groups within these political movements that are violent and willing to act out their frustrations and ideations in public”.The FBI’s immediate priority, Gomez said, was likely to be on identifying the main conspirators behind the attack. “The FBI are going to focus on those groups that wore color-coordinated clothing at the Capitol, used communications and tried to organize specific actions,” he said.The longer-term ambition will be to flip many of the more than 150 suspected rioters who have already been arrested and turn them into informants who can act as the feds’ eyes and ears. In all, Gomez expects a “paradigm shift” within the FBI away from international terrorism towards far-right and white supremacist domestic terrorism similar in scale and significance to the seismic change that followed 9/11.As they scramble to make up for lost time, federal agencies will face some daunting obstacles. How do you begin to identify individuals who have the capability of violence when they are embedded in such a vast mass of American citizenry?As the Atlantic has pointed out, the mob that breached the Capitol was full of “respectable people” – business owners, real-estate brokers, Republican local and state legislators. The only indication that they would take part in a rabble that beat a police officer to death was their shared belief that they have, in the Atlantic’s words, an “inviolable right to rule”.Also among the mob were current and former law enforcement officers and at least six people with military links, signaling what may become the largest challenge of all – the fact that an unknown number of heavily armed and weapons-trained servants of the federal government are indirectly or even actively engaged in white supremacy. That’s a problem that long precedes Trump, but that has been supercharged by his presidency.Here, too, what amounts to a crisis in American society has been largely overlooked. Two years ago, the Department of Defense revealed that out of almost 2 million serving military personnel only 18 had been disciplined or discharged for extremist acts over the previous five years.The growing threat of rightwing nationalism in the military has been ignored, it hasn’t been emphasized enoughSo when security chiefs in charge of protecting dignitaries at Biden’s inauguration realized they had a fundamental problem, and called in the FBI to vet some 25,000 national guard troops brought to Washington for the event, they were acting exceptionally late in the day.“The growing threat of rightwing nationalism in the military has been ignored, it hasn’t been emphasized enough,” Jeff McCausland said.McCausland, a retired army colonel and former dean of the US Army War College, said that only now was the scale of far-right infiltration in the military being properly assessed. “Throughout the Trump administration, there was no focus on this problem because it did not fit their narrative that the threat was coming from the left.”Asked whether the Pentagon was finally taking the matter seriously, McCausland replied: “Their words suggest they are stepping up the effort. Let’s see how well they have done in a year.”Working in Biden’s favor will be the hope that with Trump off the scene – banished both from Washington and from social media – the allure of the stolen election myth will fade. “Now that Trump has been removed, much of his impact will dissipate,” said Bandy X Lee.She added that it would remain important that Trump is discredited and disempowered to curtail his pull. “Prosecution and firm boundaries will be critical to keeping his influence under check.”On Monday the article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection” will be handed to the US Senate, and his second trial will begin in the week of 8 February. But the chances of conviction look slim. For now at least the nation remains on alert. The big lie outlasts the liar, suspended in air and obscuring Biden’s sun. More

    • 188 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Donald Trump is gone but his big lie is a rallying call for rightwing extremists

      by

      Donald Trump is gone but his big lie is a rallying call for rightwing extremists The myth of the ‘stolen election’ – simple and endlessly repeated – is likely to be a rallying call for far-right terroristsWhen the back wheels of Air Force One finally lifted off the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on Wednesday bound for Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s White House-in-exile in West Palm Beach, cheers erupted in millions of households across America and around the globe.Four years of screeching tweets and ugly divisiveness were over, and for many it felt like the hope of a calmer, more civil world had swept in.Will Trump start his own political party? | Lloyd GreenRead moreIn one respect, though, the acrid, bitter smell of Trump continues to hang in the air: he left the presidency having never conceded that he lost the election to Joe Biden.Trump’s decision to shun Biden’s inauguration – the first outgoing president to do so in 152 years – can be explained away as the hissy fit of a sore loser. But there’s a darker side to it. By forgoing the ritual of the peaceful handover of power that has been a pillar of American democracy since the country’s founding, he leaves a black cloud over the incoming administration.Trump’s refusal formally to pass the baton means that the terrible events of 6 January are unfinished business. The armed mob of Trump supporters and white supremacists who stormed the Capitol Building, fired up by Trump’s lies about the “stolen election” and hunting for members of Congress to lynch, still have their marching orders. It is a legacy, made manifest on inauguration day by the 7ft non-scalable fences and the war zone-like presence of thousands of national guard troops in Washington DC.As Trump legacies go, this one could prove much harder to unpick than those he left behind on the pandemic, immigration or the climate crisis that Biden tried to reverse with the flick of a pen on day one.The legacy of the “stolen election”, by contrast, has the potential to endure. Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security secretary under George W Bush, told the Guardian recently that domestic terrorism inspired directly by Trump “is going to be the security challenge for the foreseeable future”.Current intelligence chiefs agree. They are primed to have to deal with a lasting threat posed by Trump’s ongoing refusal publicly to accept the will of the American people.An intelligence bulletin obtained by the Washington Post that was written just a week before the inauguration spelled out the intelligence community’s anxieties. The memo concluded that “amplified perceptions of fraud surrounding the outcome of the general election … very likely will lead to an increase in DVE [domestic violent extremist] violence.”At the center of this new domestic terrorism threat is the seed of doubt that Trump has implanted in the minds of millions of Americans that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged”. It is the “animating lie”, as the former homeland security official Juliette Kayyem has put it, that drove the mob to storm the US Capitol and that now hangs in the air like a toxic gas.Trump’s campaign to overturn the results of the presidential election amounted to a “big lie” familiar to those who study demagogic propaganda. Embedded within it are many of the core elements of what the Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called Trump’s post-truth, “pre-fascism”.The lie was simple – able to be repeated and shared on TV and social media in six short words: “They stole the election from me.” That “they” was important too – by signaling a clear enemy, it allowed his supporters to direct their frustration and anger at identifiable targets.Trump lashed out repeatedly at the media, which he denounced as the “enemy of the people”. He attacked “cowardly” Republican election officials who refused not to do their jobs, his own vice-president, and finally the heart of US democracy, Congress itself.For Bandy X Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and violence expert, there was another key aspect to the “stop the steal” big lie – it was rooted in paranoia. In her analysis, paranoia, perceiving threat where none exists, is the most common symptom to cause violent behaviour.“The fact that Trump actually believes himself to have been wronged and persecuted, or has paranoid ideations, spreads and finds resonance in paranoia that already exists in the population. That will increase the chances of violence,” Lee said.As any student of tyrannies will tell you, for big lies to work they have to be repeated and repeated. Trump certainly fulfilled that requirement. He has been working assiduously to spread his animating lie for years. Consider the headline in the New Yorker, “Trump and the truth: the ‘rigged’ election”. The article beneath it reported that Trump was “trying to delegitimize a national election even while campaigning for the presidency” and that his ploy was working – about half of his supporters thought the election was cooked.That New Yorker piece was published on 8 October 2016.Trump’s efforts have paid even greater dividends in this election cycle. The most recent opinion polls suggest that more than a third of the total US electorate still believe that Trump won the November election, a proportion that rises above 70% when you ask Republicans. Nor is there any sign such a stunningly large number of Americans who bought Trump’s make-believe is on the wane. As Snyder wrote in the New York Times, “the lie outlasts the liar”.Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Trump’s sleight of hand is that he presented himself in the cloak of the protector of American democracy precisely in order to undermine American democracy. He invoked patriotism in order to legitimize the ultimate act of sedition – overthrowing the electoral will of the American people.That is what most concerns David Gomez, a former FBI national security executive who spent many years countering domestic terrorism. He fears that Trump, by wrapping his actions in the cloth of patriotism, has given his blessing to violent action that could linger beyond his presidency.“This is what makes this particular moment in time more dangerous,” he told the Guardian. “Fashioning yourself as a patriot makes it easier to justify, in your own mind, participating in acts that might lead to violence.”The patriotic rhetoric acts like an ethical get-out clause, Gomez said. “It provides the average person a face-saving scenario to participate. ‘Oh, I’m not a bad guy, I’m a good guy acting as a patriot to save my country.’”Into this mix has been poured the even more poisonous influence of far-right and white supremacist groups, motivated by racial animus and wielding their Confederate flags inside the Capitol building. Trump made repeated overtures to them throughout his presidency, from his “you had very fine people, on both sides” comment about the 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, to his notorious invitation to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”.White supremacists have enthusiastically heeded his call. For them, this was the break for which they had long been waiting, the welcome gesture that would usher them into the fold.Shortly before the storming of the Capitol, the Three Percenters, an extreme anti-government militia network, put out a statement in which they aligned themselves overtly with Trump’s “stolen election”. They name-checked Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas who was complicit in Trump’s big lie, as well as the ever more erratic Rudy Giuliani and the former national security adviser and pardoned criminal Michael Flynn.“We are ready to enter into battle with General Flynn leading the charge,” the group said.This all presents the incoming administration with a bilious soup of disaffected Trump supporters and their white supremacist allies hooked on the idea that Biden is an illegitimate president. Given the millions of Americans who have bought into the fantasy, should even a tiny fraction of them harbor violent aspirations or find themselves drawn to the newly elevated white supremacist groups, that would give rise to a national security challenge of monumental proportions.Biden himself has vowed to tackle the trouble head-on. In his inauguration speech he addressed the threat directly, talking about the “rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat”.But the new president may find himself hamstrung by the relative lack of attention that has been paid up until now to the phenomenon.Last year Chris Wray, the FBI director who Biden intends to keep in post, told Congress that “racially and ethnically motivated violent extremists” were the main source of ideological killings, overshadowing international jihadism that has dominated US intelligence thinking for 20 years.Yet the way the FBI dishes out its resources is the exact opposite. Some 80% of its counter-terrorism budget goes on fighting international terrorism, and only 20% on domestic.Gomez, the former FBI supervisor, said that any residual sluggishness on the part of the FBI in refocusing its sights on far-right violence will have vanished on 6 January. The storming of the Capitol was a “call to action for the FBI as it showed that there are individuals and groups within these political movements that are violent and willing to act out their frustrations and ideations in public”.The FBI’s immediate priority, Gomez said, was likely to be on identifying the main conspirators behind the attack. “The FBI are going to focus on those groups that wore color-coordinated clothing at the Capitol, used communications and tried to organize specific actions,” he said.The longer-term ambition will be to flip many of the more than 150 suspected rioters who have already been arrested and turn them into informants who can act as the feds’ eyes and ears. In all, Gomez expects a “paradigm shift” within the FBI away from international terrorism towards far-right and white supremacist domestic terrorism similar in scale and significance to the seismic change that followed 9/11.As they scramble to make up for lost time, federal agencies will face some daunting obstacles. How do you begin to identify individuals who have the capability of violence when they are embedded in such a vast mass of American citizenry?As the Atlantic has pointed out, the mob that breached the Capitol was full of “respectable people” – business owners, real-estate brokers, Republican local and state legislators. The only indication that they would take part in a rabble that beat a police officer to death was their shared belief that they have, in the Atlantic’s words, an “inviolable right to rule”.Also among the mob were current and former law enforcement officers and at least six people with military links, signaling what may become the largest challenge of all – the fact that an unknown number of heavily armed and weapons-trained servants of the federal government are indirectly or even actively engaged in white supremacy. That’s a problem that long precedes Trump, but that has been supercharged by his presidency.Here, too, what amounts to a crisis in American society has been largely overlooked. Two years ago, the Department of Defense revealed that out of almost 2 million serving military personnel only 18 had been disciplined or discharged for extremist acts over the previous five years.So when security chiefs in charge of protecting dignitaries at Biden’s inauguration realized they had a fundamental problem, and called in the FBI to vet some 25,000 national guard troops brought to Washington for the event, they were acting exceptionally late in the day.“The growing threat of rightwing nationalism in the military has been ignored, it hasn’t been emphasized enough,” Jeff McCausland said.McCausland, a retired army colonel and former dean of the US Army War College, said that only now was the scale of far-right infiltration in the military being properly assessed. “Throughout the Trump administration, there was no focus on this problem because it did not fit their narrative that the threat was coming from the left.”Asked whether the Pentagon was finally taking the matter seriously, McCausland replied: “Their words suggest they are stepping up the effort. Let’s see how well they have done in a year.”Working in Biden’s favor will be the hope that with Trump off the scene – banished both from Washington and from social media – the allure of the stolen election myth will fade. “Now that Trump has been removed, much of his impact will dissipate,” said Bandy X Lee.She added that it would remain important that Trump is discredited and disempowered to curtail his pull. “Prosecution and firm boundaries will be critical to keeping his influence under check.”On Monday the article of impeachment against Trump for “incitement of insurrection” will be handed to the US Senate, and his second trial will begin in the week of 8 February. But the chances of conviction look slim. For now at least the nation remains on alert. The big lie outlasts the liar, suspended in air and obscuring Biden’s sun.TopicsDonald TrumpUS politicsUS elections 2020featuresReuse this content More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Gondor has no king’: pro-Trump lawsuit cites Lord of the Rings

      by

      Texas case offers baseless mix of allegations of electoral fraud but cites the imaginary kingdom of Gondor as evidenceDonald Trump’s diehard supporters are often accused of living in fantasyland, but one court case recently launched to try to reinstall him as president has surprised even the most hardened observers of Trumpian strangeness by citing as evidence a mythological realm from The Lord of the Rings. Related: Pittsburgh official goes viral by rebuking Ted Cruz – and looking like Jeff Daniels Continue reading… More