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

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

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      'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers

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      Fear was the overwhelming emotion Alvin Major felt when, on a chilly November morning in 2012, he went on strike at the Brooklyn KFC where he worked.
      “Everybody was scared,” said Major. He may have been fearful, but what Major didn’t know was that he was about to make American history – an early leader in a labor movement that some historians now see as the most successful in the US in 50 years.
      Major was paid just $7.25 an hour as a cook at KFC, but the consequences of losing his job were dire, as his family was already struggling to make the next month’s rent. “Everybody was scared about going back to work,” he said. “Nobody visualized what this movement would come to.”
      The New York strike by hundreds of majority Black and brown New York fast-food workers was, at the time, the largest in US history – but it would be dwarfed by what was to come. Two years later, strikes had spread across America, and fast-food workers in 33 countries across six continents had joined a growing global movement for better pay and stronger rights on the job.
      In eight years, what became the Fight for $15 movement has grown into an international organization that has successfully fought for a rise in minimum wage in states across the US, redefined the political agenda in the US, and acted as a springboard for other movements, including Black Lives Matter. It now stands perilously close to winning one of the biggest worker-led rights victories in decades.
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      This Tuesday, fast-food workers will walk out again, hoping to push through a change that will affect tens of millions of American workers.
      For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.
      With a platform to speak, the workers talked about “how you had to be on food stamps, get rent assistance, all these kinds of things, and we’re working for these companies that are making billions”, said Major.
      At one point, a worker showed the burns on his arm he had suffered at work. In a show of solidarity, workers across the room others rolled up their sleeves to show their scars too. Even when injured on the job, workers said, they were too scared to take time off.
      This was not how Major imagined America to be when he moved to the US from Guyana in 2000. “In our family, with 14 kids, my dad’s wife never worked a day. My dad used to work, he took care of us, we had a roof over our head, we went to school, we had meals every day, he had his own transportation.”
      In America, “the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world”, he found “[that] you have to work, your wife has to work, when your kids reach an age they have to work – and still you could barely make it”.
      Industry lobbying allied to Republican and – until relatively recently – Democratic opposition has locked the US’s minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Biden’s $1.9tn Covid relief package – although it will still face fierce opposition.
      Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.

      Rep. Pramila Jayapal
      (@RepJayapal)
      I’m thrilled to announce that after working with leadership, we’ve secured a $15 minimum wage in the House’s COVID relief bill!This provision would lift nearly 1 million people out of poverty. It’s long overdue that Congress enacts a minimum wage that is a living wage.

      February 8, 2021

      The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers – and especially people of color – have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.
      Other economists have disputed the CBO’s job-loss predictions – the Economic Policy Institute called them “wrong, and inappropriately inflated”. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency – a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.
      That backlash will also cross party lines – at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.
      More people voted for that ballot initiative than voted for either presidential candidate in the state. With Florida, seven states plus the District of Columbia have now pledged to increase their minimum wage to $15 or higher, according to the National Employment Law Project (Nelp) and a record 74, cities, counties and states will raise their minimum wages in 2021.
      The movement, and this widespread support, has changed the political landscape, pushing Democratic politicians, including Biden, Hillary Clinton and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to back a $15 minimum wage, against their earlier qualms.
      Cuomo called a $13 minimum wage a “non-starter” in February 2015. By July, he was racing California to get it into law.
      In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton went from supporting a raise to $12 an hour to $15 as Sanders made ground on the issue. Even Saturday Night Live parodied the pair arguing about who was most for a $15 higher wage.

      [embedded content]

      Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Biden’s first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movement’s biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it – not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.
      For Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), this is “the David and Goliath story of our time”. She puts the public support down to the “pervasiveness of underpaid, low-wage work”.
      “Every family in America knows somebody that’s trying to make ends meet through a minimum-wage job. And the pandemic has revealed that essential work in a way that many people hadn’t noticed before, and they now understand how grocery store clerks, nursing home workers, janitors, airport workers, security officers, delivery drivers [and] fast-food workers are all people trying to do the very best job they can, and provide for their families.”
      The SEIU has been a longtime funder and supporter of Fight For $15 and for Henry, the first woman to lead the SEIU, the fight for a higher minimum wage is just the beginning of a greater push for workers’ rights – not least the right to join unions, in a service sector where women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of workers.
      “Eighty per cent of our economy is driven by consumer spending. Service and care jobs are the dominant sectors in the US economy, and we have to create the ability of those workers to join together in unions in this century, just like auto, rubber and steel were the foundation in the last century,” she said.
      “If the US Congress can’t see what the American people are demanding, in terms of ‘Respect us, protect us, pay us’, then they’re going to have a political price to pay in 2022,” she added. “Our nation’s leaders need to get this done. Congress has used its rules to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and massive corporations, so now it’s time for our nation’s leaders to give tens of millions of essential workers a raise.”
      Backing Henry will be a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in the Fight for $15 movement and have used it as a springboard into a political debate that is now centered around racial and economic justice. One of those leaders is Rasheen Aldridge, one of the first to take action when the Fight for $15 spread to St Louis, who was elected to Missouri state assembly last November.
      Aldridge was working at a Jimmy John’s restaurant in 2013 when he was approached by a community organizer asking him about his pay and conditions. Aldridge had recently been humiliated by a manager who took pictures of him and a co-worker holding signs they were forced to make, saying they had made sandwiches incorrectly and had been 15 seconds late with a drive-through order. “It was so dehumanizing and just a complete embarrassment,” said Aldridge.
      The organizer talked about the strikes in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and suggested the same could happen in conservative Missouri. More

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      in US Politics

      The Good American review: Bob Gersony and a better foreign policy

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      What adjective should describe “the American” active in foreign policy? Graham Greene chose “quiet”, as his character harmed a country he did not understand. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer used “ugly”.
      Robert D Kaplan, one of America’s most thoughtful chroniclers of foreign affairs, proposes “good” to describe Bob Gersony, who in “a frugal monastic existence that has been both obscure and extraordinary” has devoted his life to using the power and treasure of the US to serve others through humanitarian action.
      A son of Holocaust refugees, he never held a formal government position. He was instead a contractor for the state department, USAid or the United Nations. Yet his work improved the lives of millions, saving many, and corrected policies that might otherwise have been implemented by “ugly” or “quiet” figures who did not understand the countries in which they operated.
      Gersony’s method was simple: to conduct interviews through a trusted translator with individuals fleeing conflict, to stay “in continuous, tactile contact with the evidence”. It was exhausting work in extraordinarily difficult circumstances but his information, transmitted to senior policymakers in highly detailed “Gersony reports”, was both essential and frequently (as in Mozambique and Bosnia) the opposite of what the policy community believed or wished to believe.
      The truth about a place “emerges from the bottom up”, he said, and thus “you must always believe refugees”.
      Accountability, absolute integrity, objectivity and boldness in speaking to authority were his watchwords. His independence meant personal insecurity. He often shared a simple shack with a translator and slept with his notes under his pillow. Personal danger and hardship were part of the job, yet in no other way could the truth emerge and successful policy be formulated.
      “When you listen to ordinary people,” Gersony believed, “there is so much wisdom.”
      Kaplan calls Gersony “a business-oriented math brain with a non-ideological conservative streak … think of him as an emotionally tortured character straight out of a Saul Bellow novel, engrossed throughout his life in the brooding and dangerous tropical settings defined by Joseph Conrad.”
      This is also the story of another era of US foreign policy, one in which realism and humanitarianism combined to include human rights in the national interest, against the backdrop of the cold war, so often hot in the developing world. Human rights and grand strategy complemented each other. Gersony had bosses who were “authentic, heartland Americans … the ultimate selfless public servants … deeply moral without being ideological, while operating at the top of the power structure”.
      Gersony started in Guatemala, where he began a language school and after the 1976 earthquake worked with relief organizations. He took charge of hurricane relief in Dominica, standing up to the prime minister, asserting, “If you empower people, they won’t be corrupt.” Moving on to El Salvador in the civil war, he recommended massive employment programs for displaced persons, building sewage canals and cobblestone streets – practical improvements that also discouraged guerrillas from attacking the people.
      His solutions were often elegantly simple because they provided the dignity of work and reflected what people actually wanted. And yet, as Kaplan writes, “He still had no credentials … in the ordinary careerist sense, he had risen as far as he ever would.” For Kaplan, as for Gersony, “a meaningful life is about truth, not success.”
      The assignments kept coming: Vietnamese boat people in Thailand; Sudan and Chad; Honduras, where his counterintuitive but accurate recommendation showed once again that “ground-level fieldwork … triumphs over the discussion of big abstract ideas”. In Uganda’s Lowero Triangle, he uncovered genocide with the unexpected help of a British officer advising President Obote. The secretary of state, George Shultz, cut off aid.
      As Kaplan writes, “History pivoted in southern Africa thanks to Bob Gersony.” After an unusual meeting with Shultz and Maureen Reagan, daughter of the president, the US did not aid Renamo guerrillas in Mozambique. Gersony tackled a highly complex situation in Somalia and in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide worked with UNHCR on the repatriation of Hutus. As one official said, his unwelcome truth-telling “stopped the killing machine”. He worked in northern Uganda with World Vision long before Joseph Kony became a hashtag. Knowing the dangers of travel in that region, “he treated the motor pool chief like a high official”.
      Gersony worked tirelessly. “If we skipped lunch,” he said, “we could interview one more refugee, and each refugee was precious – you never knew which one would yield a breakthrough in understanding.”
      By Kaplan’s own admission, his book is also something of his own story, a lament for a time when internationalist moderates dominated both parties and the foreign service enjoyed “the last golden age of American diplomacy … when the bureaucracy at all levels had sufficient money and rewarded talent” in furthering “that sturdy, moderate national security consensus that no longer exists”.
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      Kaplan does not quite regret the end of the cold war but he does note the resulting separation between idealism and power.
      Indeed, Gersony’s career ended in a very different world. Kaplan sees Plan Colombia, an early 2000s push against leftwing guerrillas and drug cartels, as “a precursor for the fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq”, where gigantic projects and a “dysfunctional interagency process” often failed for lack of perspective. Gersony’s later tasks included tracking food assistance for North Korea, examining the Maoist insurgency in Nepal (and wishing USAid had continued road-building there), and disaster planning in Micronesia, where “in this emerging naval century … Oceania was indeed at the heart of geopolitics” and control of shipping lanes.
      Can realism and idealism combine again? Only through what the French academic Gérard Prunier wrote about Gersony’s “great respect for the factual truth. The world is not just an interpretation or a place for competing narratives.” In the end, Kaplan’s life of Gersony recalls the advice of another quintessential American, Mark Twain: “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
      The Good American is published in the US by Random House More

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      For Trump, V is for victory – while his lawyers flick a V-sign our way | Richard Wolffe

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      You may have thought the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump was somehow connected to the fascist mob that staged an insurrection on Capitol Hill last month.According to Trump’s lawyers, you are clearly an idiot.In actual fact, the former president was impeached for using the word “fight” – a crime committed by everyone in Congress and a good number of other people you might know.Madonna, for instance. Johnny Depp too. Seriously, America. If it’s OK for Madonna to talk about fighting, or voguing, or being a material girl, what’s the big deal?If the star of Pirates of the Caribbean can talk about walking the gangplank or shivering his timbers, then who is to deny our beloved former president the right to also don an eyepatch and wave a cutlass in our general direction?There was lots of video on the day of the greatest Trump lawyering of all. Mostly the same video, played over and over again, sometimes two or three times in quick succession like a Max Headroom compilation of politicians saying the word “fight”.There was President Biden, and Vice-President Harris. There were a bunch of former Democratic presidential candidates. Also some House impeachment managers.The only challenge for Trump’s lawyers is that none of them led an insurrection. None of them urged a mob to storm Congress. None of them timed their fight song for the precise moment when elected officials were carrying out their constitutional duty to certify an election’s results.[embedded content]But we digress. Back to the best lawyering in the land, a veritable elite strike force of jurists not seen since the last one outside that landscaping business next to the sex shop in a particularly lovely corner of Philadelphia.The strike force featured a new striker. Not the bumbling, rambling Bruce Castor, or the endlessly pedantic David Schoen. No, this time Trump bestowed upon his historic impeachment trial a personal injury lawyer from – yes, you guessed it – Philadelphia. An ambulance chaser, best known in Philly for his radio ads, asking if you’ve tripped while walking down the street.“If the walkway isn’t clear, and you fall and get hurt due to snow and ice, call 215-546-1000 for Van der Veen, O’Neill, Hartshorn and Levin,” the ads say, according to the Washington Post. “The V is for Victory.”Last year Mr V was actually suing Trump for his unfounded claims about mail-in voter fraud. This year, he is not so much chasing the ambulance as driving it.First, Mr V claimed that Trump was encouraging his supporters to respect the electoral college count, not to “stop the steal” as the entire mob was screaming in front of him. Then he claimed that the first of the mob to be arrested was a lefty antifa stooge, not a Trumpy fascist thug.But mostly he claimed that he – and his client – were defending the constitution at the precise moment when they were burning it to crispy charcoal husk.OK, so the Trump mob unleashed violence to stop the constitutional counting of the electoral college votes. But the idea that Congress might stop Trump’s free-speech rights to whip up that mob is an outrageous, unconstitutional human rights abuse that threatens to silence all politicians everywhere.OK, so the Trump mob might have silenced Mike Pence permanently by hanging him on the gallows they built on the steps of Congress. But if Congress tries to stop a president from using a mob to intimidate Congress, where will it end?Pretty soon, Mr V argued, we won’t even have access to lawyers. The hallowed right to counsel, if not ambulance chasers, might be threatened. “Who would be next,” he asked, indignantly. “It could be anyone. One of you! Or one of you! It’s anti-American and sets a dangerous precedent forever.”To his great, sighing chagrin, Mr V lamented the state of political discourse. “Inflammatory rhetoric from our elected officials – from both sides of the aisle – has been alarming frankly,” he said, in sorrow, as if his client were just a hapless symptom of a bigger sickness: a pandemic of mean words from Democrats.“This is not whataboutism,” he declared, after rolling his whataboutist video for the second or third or fourth time. “I’m showing you this to show that all political speech must be protected.”The key to the defense was about incitement to violence and the legal test of Brandenburg v Ohio. Appropriately enough, the Brandenburg in question was a leader of the Ku Klux Klan and the test – as Trump’s lawyers helpfully explained – was about whether the free speech in question “explicitly or implicitly encouraged the use of violence or lawless action”.“Mr Trump did the opposite of advocating for lawless action,” said Mr V. “The opposite!”The worst news of all was that Bruce Castor was at the microphone, pretending to be a half-decent lawyerThis is only true if it’s opposite day, when opposite means the opposite of opposite. As it happens, it was indeed just that day at the impeachment trial of our great defender of the constitution, free speech and peaceful politics.Which is why Mr V’s partner, the now legendary Bruce Castor, concluded the defense case. Castor explained that because he was the lead attorney in this legal shenanigan, he was going to take “the most substantive part” of the case for himself. That wasn’t to say, he added hastily, that his learned friends had done a bad job, oh no. The good news, he said, was that the case was almost over. The bad news was that it would take another hour for it to be over.The worst news of all was that Castor was at the microphone, pretending to be a half-decent lawyer.“Did the 45th president engage in incitement – they say insurrection,” began Castor. “Clearly there was no insurrection,” he continued, defining the word as “taking the TV stations over and having some idea of what you’re going to do when you take power”.As a description of the Trump presidency, that sounded pretty accurate. Unlike the part Castor read from his notes about Trump’s attitudes towards mobs in general.“By any measure,” the lawyer said in his most Trumpy way, “President Trump is the most pro-police, anti-mob president this country has ever seen.”From that point on, the defense case smooshed together some condemnation of the Black Lives Matter protests, some justification of Trump’s campaign to overturn the election results in Georgia, and some accusation of a supposed effort to disenfranchise Trump voters – who lost the election.Like so much else connected to the scrambled neural networks inside one Florida resident’s cranium, it made no sense. It was a radio echo bouncing around the cosmos from a distant star that collapsed into a black hole of disinformation and delusion long ago.“Spare us the hypocrisy and false indignation,” said Mr V, as he wrapped up another hypocritical and falsely indignant response to the same old video of Democrats saying fiery things.Now all we have left is the hypocrisy and false indignation of Republican senators who value their own careers above their own lives or the democracy that elected them. The V is for venal. More

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      in US Politics

      Fight, fight, fight: Trump lawyers subject senators to repetitive strain | David Smith's sketch

      by

      Fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. The first rule of Fight Club is just keep bashing your audience with the same word ad nauseam.A video in which Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and other Democratic politicians uttered the word “fight” 238 times, according to a count by the MSNBC TV network, was the most bizarre turn yet at Donald Trump’s impeachment trial.The montage was played by Trump lawyer David Schoen on Friday in an attempt to demonstrate that such language is common in today’s political discourse, and protected by the first amendment to the constitution, so Trump’s call for his supporters to “fight like hell” should not be blamed for the insurrection at the US Capitol.“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Schoen told senators, many of whom had seen themselves on TV screens inside the chamber. “It’s a word people use, but please stop the hypocrisy.”He was not wrong that it’s a word people use. Hillary Clinton, who was seen in the video, made Fight Song the theme of her ill-starred 2016 campaign against Trump. The world champion “fighter” is surely Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sprinkles the word in interviews liberally and wrote a book called This Fight is Our Fight.But what Schoen was also doing was displaying whataboutism in its purest form – a wonder to behold, like a flawless diamond or pristine snow.Whataboutism is a dodge often seen in rightwing media. If allegations are made against Trump’s connections in Russia, respond: what about Clinton’s emails? If Trump’s family are accused of exploiting their position, respond: what about Joe Biden’s son Hunter? If white supremacists are running riot, respond: what about antifa? It doesn’t matter if the equivalence is false because it’s all about attacking the opponent in order to muddy the waters.The Trump legal team’s relentless “fight” video was a case in point. Some of the Democrats were quoted out of context due to selective editing. We heard Biden, for example, say “never, never, never give up this fight” but did not hear the full quotation: “I looked into the eyes of people who survived school shootings, and I made each of them a promise: I will never, never, never give up this fight.”(Speaking of hypocrisy, Schoen accused the impeachment managers of “manipulating video” during his presentation.)Still, the Trump defence cleared the very low bar set by their Laurel-and-Hardy opening on TuesdayIn addition, these Democrats were urging supporters to fight for a political cause. Trump was urging supporters to fight against democracy: his cause was based on the mendacious claim of a stolen election. And as the impeachment managers laid out on Thursday, he had spent years deploying incendiary rhetoric and demonising opponents.Still, the Trump defence cleared the very low bar set by their opening Laurel-and-Hardy gambit on Tuesday. On Friday they provided talking points for rightwing media, straws for Republican consciences to clutch at and a boost for Trump’s spirits after some very grim days.It was not hard to imagine the ex-president at Mar-a-Lago, his luxury estate in Florida, nodding in approval as lawyer Michael van der Veen kicked off in Trumpian style: “The article of impeachment now before the Senate is an unjust and blatantly unconstitutional act of political vengeance. This appalling abuse of the constitution only further divides our nation when we should be trying to come together.”Van der Veen even described it as a “politically motivated witch-hunt”, a phrase the former president has used even more often than Warren has uttered “fight”.In a first salvo of whataboutism, Van der Veen played video clips of Jamie Raskin, the lead impeachment manager, and other Democrats objecting to Trump’s victory in the electoral college in 2016. “To litigate questions of election integrity within the system is not incitement to insurrection,” he argued. “It is the democratic system working as founders and lawmakers have designed.”The lawyer then falsely asserted that one of the first people arrested after the insurrection was a leader of antifa, when that individual denies any such affiliation and indeed antifa is a broad spectrum of far-left, anti-fascist groups, and not an organisation with a leader.He claimed that Democrats had encouraged “mob violence” during the Trump presidency and played clips accompanied by ominous music.The impeachment is “about Democrats trying to disqualify their political opposition”, he said, accuse them of indulging “constitutional cancel culture” – another phrase sure to play well on Fox News, Newsmax and the One America News Network.Later, lawyer Bruce Castor argued that the attack on the Capitol was pre-planned – pipe bombs were planted a day earlier, for example – and so Trump’s fiery speech on 6 January could not have been the cause. However, the president had tweeted in December that the rally “will be wild”, and the prosecutors have shown Trump spent months laying the groundwork.Castor also misnamed the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, referring instead to the NFL star Ben Roethlisberger, and quibbled over the definition of “insurrection” . After two and a half hours, the defence case rested. They had put up a fight, of sorts, but it was unlikely to be remembered alongside Winston Churchill’s “fight them on the beaches”.Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, tweeted drily: “Of all impeachment defense speeches in American history, Castor’s was the most recent.” More

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      in US Politics

      Trump impeachment: defense wraps up, claiming free speech is at stake – live

      by

      Key events

      Show

      3.27pm EST15:27
      Trump’s legal team has wrapped up its defense

      2.02pm EST14:02
      Afternoon summary

      12.00pm EST12:00
      Trump’s defense team expected to push for swift conclusion of trial

      8.37am EST08:37
      US fast food workers hold Black History Month strike to demand $15 an hour

      8.07am EST08:07
      Trump advisor: legal team expected to use just four hours today in Senate for defense

      7.45am EST07:45
      Trump’s laywers expected to concede violence was traumatic and unacceptable, but argue Trump had nothing to do with it

      7.09am EST07:09
      Georgia officials investigate groups that mobilized Black voters in state crucial to election outcome

      Live feed

      Show

      4.36pm EST16:36

      Democratic senator Ed Markey asks when Trump learned of the breach at the Capitol, and what he did about it. (It’s the same question Collins and Murkowski asked earlier.)
      Stacey Plaskett, a House delegate from the Virgin Islands and an impeachment manager, says we do not know. “The reason this question keeps coming up is because the answer is nothing.”
      Mitt Romney, Republican senator and Trump foe, asks if Trump knew whether Mike Pence had been removed from the Senate when the president criticized him in a 2.24pm tweet.
      Defense lawyer Van der Veen says “the answer is no, at no point was the president informed that the vice president was in any danger”. Van der Veen then criticizes the House impeachment managers for rushing the trial.
      I don’t see the connection.

      Eli Stokols
      (@EliStokols)
      van der Veen responds: “At no point was the president informed the vice president was in any danger.”Says the q is irrelevant: “This is an article of impeachment for incitement.”

      February 12, 2021

      David Frum
      (@davidfrum)
      Which is untrue of course. And then van der Veen went on to argue that even if Trump did recklessly endanger the life of VP Pence, it’s nobody’s business. https://t.co/cdC4kN81cy

      February 12, 2021

      Updated
      at 4.37pm EST

      4.24pm EST16:24

      Republican senator Tim Scott has a question: “Isn’t this simply a political show trial that is designed to discredit President Trump […] and shame the 74m Americans who voted for him?”
      Bruce Castor, for the defense: “Thats precisely what the 45th president believes this is about.”
      Castor says the purpose of the trial – which is actually related to an insurrection that left five people dead – is to “embarrass” Trump.

      4.14pm EST16:14

      A question for the defense team, from GOP senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski:
      “Exactly when did President Trump learn of the breach of the Capitol” and what actions did he take to bring the riot to an end?
      Van der Veen, for the defense, doesn’t give a proper answer.

      Neal Katyal
      (@neal_katyal)
      Woah. Trump lawyer can’t answer it. At all. He just rants about the lack of due process. Seems to me this would be the first thing I would ask if I were Trump’s lawyer while getting ready. Devastating silence.

      February 12, 2021

      Collins and Murkowski are believed to be swing voters on whether to convict Trump.

      4.06pm EST16:06

      Senator Lindsey Graham has a question for the defense. The question is on behalf of Graham, Senator Ted Cruz, and others – all ardent Trump defenders.
      “Does a politician raising bail for rioters encourage more rioting?” the defense is asked.
      One of the defense lawyers – I think it’s Castor says: “Yes.”
      This is part of the Republican strategy to compare the Capitol rioters to Black Lives Matter protesters.

      Joy WE VOTED!! WEAR A MASK!! Reid 😷)
      (@JoyAnnReid)
      Of course @LindseyGrahamSC uses his question to throw a bomb at Black Lives Matter who are who he means when he says “rioters.” (Narrator: BLM protesters were not “rioters,” and insurrectionist Lindsey Graham would fit in perfectly in the Confederacy.)

      February 12, 2021

      Updated
      at 4.09pm EST

      4.03pm EST16:03

      “Isn’t it the case that the attack [on January 6] would not have happened if not for Donald Trump?” was the first, strangely worded question. It’s posed by Democratic senators to the House impeachment managers (essentially, the prosecution.)
      Rep Joaquin Castro, one of the impeachment managers, answered. Castro said – essentially – yes.
      He said Trump, as far back as mid-December, directed his supporters to travel to the Capitol on January 6. Once there, Trump told his supporters to “fight like hell”, and told them “they could play by different rules”, Castro said.

      3.56pm EST15:56

      The impeachment trial has restarted shortly. In the next phase, Senators will have four hours to ask the defense and the prosecution questions.
      It’s not clear how late they’ll run tonight. There’s a dinner break scheduled for 5pm, but the questioning could resume after. The Senate will reconvene at 10am ET Saturday, and a final vote could take place later that day, at 3pm.

      3.27pm EST15:27

      Trump’s legal team has wrapped up its defense

      That was a bit of an anti-climax. Castor finished by pivoting back to the free speech argument Trump’s lawyers made earlier – that Trump’s speech to his supporters on January 6 was protected under the first amendment.
      “This trial is about far more than President Trump,” Castor said. He said the trial is instead about canceling speech that “the majority does not agree with”.
      “Are we going to allow canceling and silencing to be sanctioned in this body?” Castor asked.
      Trump’s defense argument seems to hinge both on a) Trump’s speech on January 6 did not incite the riot (although the defense team did not address Trump’s previous statements) and b) in any case, what Trump said is protected by free speech laws.

      Updated
      at 3.28pm EST

      3.15pm EST15:15

      Castor suggested that Trump’s speech on January 6 did not incite the riot
      The lawyer hasn’t addressed the broader issue of whether Trump’s months-long tirade against the election result had anything to do with it.
      “The January 6 speech did not cause the riots,” Castor said.
      Castor then moved onto the January phone call between Trump and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. During that call Trump pressured Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” votes so that Trump could be announced the winner in Georgia.
      Georgia prosecutors have opened a criminal inquiry into Trump’s call.
      Castor read from a transcript of the call and said Trump was expressing legitimate concern over the election result.
      For some context, here is some of what Trump said in that Georgia phone call:
      “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

      Updated
      at 3.28pm EST

      3.03pm EST15:03

      Bruce Castor continues. He says the House impeachment managers “manipulated” Trump’s words when they presented their case.
      Castor then speaks Latin for a little bit and suggests House impeachment managers are “trying to fool you”.
      “President Trump was immediate in his calls for calm,” Castor says. (Trump wasn’t.)
      “President Trump’s words couldn’t have incited the events at the capitol,” Castor said, because people were already gathering at the Capitol before Trump gave his speech at the Ellipse, which a 15 minute walk away.

      Trip Gabriel
      (@tripgabriel)
      Castor — the lawyer who’s rambling, unfocused opening statement on Tuesday enraged Trump — begins by going over ground argued earlier, and showing the same clips.

      February 12, 2021

      Andrew Desiderio
      (@AndrewDesiderio)
      DOJ has specifically referred to the events of Jan. 6 as an insurrection. https://t.co/msWzru3fXd

      February 12, 2021

      Eliza Collins
      (@elizacollins1)
      Trump’s lawyers are arguing that he is not guilty because 1. The trial is unconstitutional 2. The trial is politically motivated 3. Trump’s use of word “fight” and other language was ordinary political talk 4. Trump loves law and order. Our full coverage: https://t.co/RMwlZdYR56

      February 12, 2021

      Updated
      at 3.08pm EST

      2.48pm EST14:48

      Castor began his defense by showing a video, most of which is cribbed from the video Trump’s legal team played earlier.
      It contrasts Democrats defending Black Lives Matter protesters, spliced in with selected clips of violence at some of the BLM demonstrations, with Trump talking about “law and order”. Law and order is frequently used as a racist dog whistle.
      “January 6 was a terrible day for our country,” Castor conceded, but he continued: “President Trump did not incite or cause the horrific violence.”
      This tactic from the defense – that Trump’s supporters storming the Capitol was bad, but it wasn’t Trump’s fault – is something we expected.
      Castor added: “Political hatred has no place in the American justice system, and certainly no place in the congress of the United States.”

      2.42pm EST14:42

      Donald Trump’s legal team has resumed their defense. Bruce Castor, who reportedly left Trump furious after a lackluster performance earlier this week, will handle the next section.
      During the break, Democratic senators lined up to pan the defense.
      “Donald Trump was told that if he didn’t stop lying about the election people would be killed,” Senator Tim Kaine told reporters, according to the Washington Post. “He wouldn’t stop, and the Capitol was attacked and seven people are dead who would be alive today.”
      Senator Richard J. Blumenthal said the Trump defense team is “trying to draw a false, dangerous and distorted equivalence”, the Post reported.
      “And I think it is plainly a distraction from Donald Trump’s inviting the mob to Washington, knowing it was armed; changing the route and the timing so as to incite them to march on the Capitol; and then reveling, without remorse, without doing anything to protect his own vice president and all of us,” Blumenthal said.
      “I think that the case is even more powerful after this very distorted and false argument.” More

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      Mike Pence's 'nuclear football' was potentially at risk during Capitol riot

      by

      The dramatic footage of the 6 January insurrection shows the mob was within 30 metres of Mike Pence, when he made his escape. But there was a chilling detail that even the House prosecutors missed. With the then vice-president on that terrifying day, was an air force officer carrying the “football”, a large black briefcase carrying nuclear launch codes.The codes in the vice-president’s football are not activated unless the president is dead or incapacitated. But the implications of it falling into the hands of rioters are still chilling.“If the mob had seized Pence’s nuclear football, they may not have been able to order an actual launch but the public may not have known that,” Tom Collina, director of policy at the Ploughshares Fund disarmament advocacy group, said. “Parading the nuclear button around would have caused widespread panic and chaos as authorities scrambled to respond.”The secret service bodyguards around Pence would most likely have defended the suitcase with deadly force, but if the pro-Trump mob had managed to seize it, they would have come away, not just with the codes used to identify the vice-president and authenticate his orders, but also the encrypted communications equipment used to make the call to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon.Most damaging of all, they would have all the nuclear attack options instantly available around the clock to the US commander-in-chief. That list of options used to be in a weighty handbook, but according to Fred Kaplan, author of The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, it has been condensed over the decades into a series of laminated cards, “like a menu at Wendy’s”, as one officer put it to Kaplan.Not only would disclosure of that menu represent one of the worst security breaches imaginable, the encrypted communication equipment would tell an adversary a lot of how the US would respond to a major attack.“They could glean all sorts of information about its structure and technology so it’s very significant,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists.Nuclear experts have questioned whether this cold war relic that provides such an obvious target for adversaries and terrorists, is still necessary. But the Trump era has also shone a bright light on the question of whether one individual should continue to have sole authority to launch the US nuclear arsenal.Collina, co-author of The Button, a book on the presidency and nuclear weapons, said: “Of course the even bigger danger was that Trump had his own football that could have been used to end civilization as we know it.”In other words, perhaps the only thing scarier than the football being surrounded by a mob is the thought of Trump being alone with it. More

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      US government appeals UK ruling against Julian Assange's extradition

      by

      The US government has appealed a UK judge’s ruling against the extradition of the WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, according to a justice department official.The appeal made clear that Joe Biden intends to have Assange stand trial on espionage- and hacking-related charges over WikiLeaks’ publication of hundreds of thousands of US military and diplomatic documents.The justice department had until Friday to file an appeal against the ruling on 4 January that Assange suffered mental health problems that would raise the risk of suicide were he extradited to the US for trial.“Yes, we filed an appeal and we are continuing to pursue extradition,” a justice department spokesperson, Marc Raimondi, told AFP.Human rights groups had called on Biden to drop the case, which raises sensitive transparency and media freedom issues.After WikiLeaks began publishing US secrets in 2009, the Obama administration – in which Biden was vice-president – declined to pursue the case. Assange said WikiLeaks was no different than other media outlets constitutionally protected to publish such materials.Prosecuting him could mean also prosecuting powerful US news organisations for publishing similar material – legal fights the government would probably lose.But under Donald Trump, whose 2016 election was helped by WikiLeaks publishing Russian-stolen materials damaging to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, the justice department built a national security case against Assange.In 2019, Assange, an Australian national, was charged under the US Espionage Act and computer crimes laws on multiple counts of conspiring with and directing others, from 2009 to 2019, to illegally obtain and release US secrets.In doing so he aided and abetted hacking, illegally exposed confidential US sources to danger and used the information to damage the US, according to the charges. If convicted on all counts, the 49-year-old faces a prison sentence of up to 175 years.John Demers, an assistant attorney general, said at the time: “Julian Assange is no journalist.”Assange has remained under detention by UK authorities pending the appeal.This week 24 organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA and Reporters Without Borders, urged Biden to drop the case.“Journalists at major news publications regularly speak with sources, ask for clarification or more documentation, and receive and publish documents the government considers secret,” they said in an open letter. “In our view, such a precedent in this case could effectively criminalise these common journalistic practices.” More