Labor leader, radical, Socialist, presidential candidate: Eugene Victor Debs was a homegrown American original. He formed the American Railway Union, led the Pullman strike of the 1890s in which he was jailed and emerged a dedicated Socialist. An idealistic, impassioned fighter for economic and social justice, he was brilliant, eloquent and eminently human. As a “radical” he fought for women’s suffrage, workmen’s compensation, pensions and Social Security all commonplace today. Five times the Socialist candidate for president, his last campaign was run from federal prison where he garnered almost a million votes.
— From his entry in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor
No figure in American history better exemplifies the role socialism once played in American politics than Eugene V. Debs, whose role in the labor movement began with his time as a railroad fireman.
Shoveling tons of coal into the fireboxes of the massive steam engines that moved endless cars caring the raw materials and finished produced of American industry products and raw materials of industry and agriculture and kept people on the move in a vast and growing land.
As a union organizer he learned political skills he would then use to run for office, both as a successful legislative candidate and as presidential candidate, including one run from a prison cell after his incarceration for opposing America’s participation in the First Word War.
But today we focus on a unique work, a critique of America’s first grand film spectacle, D.W. Griffith’s infamous Birth of a Nation.
Griffith’s film, a Southerner’s paen to the “heroic” role of the Ku Klux Klan in defeating the North’s efforts at Reconstruction of the defeated South following the Civil War, is filled with execrable racist tropes and praises the lethal violence deployed against freed slaves attempting to claim their promised equality.
Debs took on the film in a letter to the editor of his hometown paper, the Terre Haute, Indiana, Post, which the editor ran as a standalone article in the paper’s January 1916 edition under the headline “Debs Says Local Elections Bad as Ones in Big Movie”:
The merits of the spectacular drama The Birth of a Nation excite bitter comment whenever it is presented. There is no question that it is a wonderful production, that many of its scenes are tense and thrilling, and that there is much in the play to approve and commend, but if the author’s studied purpose was to insult the black race and to revive and intensify the bitter prejudices which grew out of the war, he could not have better succeeded. It would be passing strange if the colored people did not protest against certain shocking features of the drama as doing them and their race grossest injustice.
If it be absolutely essential to the play to present those harrowing rape scenes, then why not round them out in their historic completeness and show the dissolute sons of the plantation owner ravishing the black daughter before her parents’ eyes?
For every white woman raped in the South by a black fiend, a thousand black women have been seduced and outraged by white gentlemen; but no hint of this is given in the series of pictures composing The Birth of a Nation. It is only the black brute that is guilty according to this and all other stories written about the Negro by Thomas Dixon, the author, who also calls himself a minister of Christ.
Four Million Mulattos
There are four million mulattos in this country, most of whom were born out of wedlock and all of whom have a white father or grandfather, and these white gentlemen are ready to fight at the drop of the hat for “white supremacy” and against “nigger equality.”
The pretended reverence for Lincoln in the play does not at all square with the facts of history. Lincoln was hated with a savage hate by the slaveowners of the South and it was this ferocious hate that culminated in his assassination. The reverence now shown him on the stage is a convenient mask behind which the same blind hate may vent itself upon the unoffending Negro.
Let it not be overlooked that all our histories have been written by white men and that Negroes had no hand in them. They simply had to take what was given them, but even at that there is no denying the fact that from the time the Negroes were first stolen from their native land by white slave-traders, whom it would be flattery to call brutes, until the last law disfranchising them in the South was put into effect and the last “Jim Crow” car put into commission to attest their standing as livestock, the whole history of the treatment of the Negro race is one of shameless exploitation and degradation, for which the white race can never atone in time nor eternity.
If the black people today could tell their story about The Birth of a Nation, it would be replete with scenes infinitely more cruel and damning than those based upon Dixon’s novel and flashed upon the screen to conceal the white man’s crimes behind the Negro’s misfortune.
Klan Glorified
The Ku Klux Klan are glorified in these pictures as spotless knights, the personification of chivalry and honor, and the audience applauds madly as they dash to the rescue of some imaginary white victim of a black fiend, but care is taken not to portray any of the outrages perpetrated upon defenseless, unoffending Negroes by these same lawless nightriders.
The pictures showing the scenes about the polling places of election day, under Negro domination, are especially calculated to subject the Negro to ridicule and contempt, and the white audience never fails to attest its appreciation by its sneers and cheers.
It’s true such election scenes with their black sluggers and their sodden corruption are disgraceful and revolting, but how much more disgraceful and revolting are they than the election scenes which have occurred in and about Terre Haute during the last few years — scenes in which the sluggers were white, instead of black, and insulted white ladies instead of black wenches; scenes unspeakably low and vile as everyone will admit who bore witness to them? How would it do to make pictures of some of these and travel through the South with them, flashing them upon a screen to show the Negroes in that section what an eminently respectable thing an election is when dominated by white men and by what pure and incorruptible methods the will of the people is expressed in a civilized white community?
Whites Also to Blame
If the white race has demonstrated its “superiority” in any one thing, it is in its politics and elections, and if Negroes should be disfranchised, the evident purpose of Dixon’s pictures, because of their disgraceful conduct at the tolls, then by the same token white men should also be stripped of the ballot and driven from the polling places.
The cheap commercial statistics exhibited at the close of the play to show the progress made by the Negro race is but a weak attempt to excuse the wanton insults heaped upon that race. Intelligent Negroes will not be deceived. The progress they have made is mainly due to themselves. They owe little to the white race as a whole, save their exploitation and degradation.
Let the colored people learn how to depend upon themselves, how to do for themselves, and to win their own way in the world. When they cut loose from the grafting politicians that use them as pawns in the political game and reward one of their number with a spittoon cleaning job in recognition of their race, and stand together; when they begin in earnest to educate themselves and to develop their minds and do their own thinking, they will then command the respect of the white race and of the world, but not before.
Debs’ essay attracted the attention of another remarkable figure, one of the first and perhaps the greatest of America’s early black journalists, Ida B Wells, whose heroic efforts to document lynchings of black Americans remain an iconic chapter in the history of the American press:
Born into slavery, Wells knew first-hand the viciousness of racism, and the terrorism employed to prevent black Americans from their aspirations for equality under the law.
For more on Debs, here’s a little documentary created in 1979 by another socialist who would later make runs at the White House, Sen. Bernie Sanders:
Swiss psychiatrist and disillusioned Freudian Carl Gustav Jung, pondering how people often turn their backs on ideals once espoused to become the opposite of their previous aspirations, coined a term for the phenomenon: Enantidromia, which he defined as “the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.”
Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, no two ideologies were more violently opposed than internationalist communism and ultranationalist fascism, accounting for at least 30 million Soviet and Nazi German deaths in World War II alone.
Given those massive losses, it would be hard to predict that as of today, the country that spilled so much blood destroying the fascist Nazi empire would become today’s embodiment of the very evil they once shed oceans of blood to destroy.
But today, in a Russia headed by a man who once served in the anti-fascist organs of state security, fascism has emerged yet again, embodied in its President, ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin.
Just call it a textbook case of entantidromia,
Alexander Motyl, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University and a New York native born to Ukrainian immigrants, makes the diagnosis in this essay from The Conversation. an plain language academic journal published under a Creative Commons license:
Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist – a political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition
When Vladimir Putin unleashed an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the Ukrainian media, public and policymakers almost unanimously began calling the Russian president and the state he leads “rashyst.” The term is a hybrid of a derogatory moniker for Russia – “rasha” – and “fascist.”
Ukrainians did so for two reasons. First, they were countering Putin’s absurd insistence that the Ukrainian authorities – including Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – were Nazis and that Ukraine needed to be “de-Nazified.” Since Ukraine’s tiny number of right-wing extremists are about as influential as the Proud Boys in the United States, what Putin really had in mind was Ukrainians with a distinct Ukrainian identity. De-Nazification thus meant de-Ukrainianization.
Second, Ukrainians were drawing attention to those features of Putin’s Russia that indicated that it was fascist and thus in need of “de-Nazification.” Putin’s Russia was aggressive, anti-democratic and enamored of Putin himself. Unsurprisingly, his Russia’s resemblance to the regimes built by Mussolini and Hitler had not gone unnoticed by Russian and Western analysts in the last decade or so.
Few policymakers, scholars and journalists listened, however, as the term fascism struck many as too vague, too political or too loaded to serve as an accurate description of any repressive regime. Having written about Putin’s Russia as quasi- or proto-fascist already in the mid-2000s, I know from personal experience that few took my claims seriously, often arguing tautologically that Putin had constructed a “Putinist” system.
But, first, a brief foray into the classification schemes that social scientists like to use, which most people find incomprehensible.
Classifications are essential for good social science, because they enable scholars to group political systems according to their shared features and to explore what makes them tick. Aristotle was one of the first to divide systems into those ruled by one, those ruled by a few and those ruled by many.
Authoritarian states rest on the state bureaucracy, military and secret police; they usually circumscribe most of the features of democracies; and they typically are led by juntas, generals or politicians who avoid the limelight.
Totalitarian states abolish all the features of democracy, empower their bureaucracies, militaries and secret police to control all of public and private space, promote all-encompassing ideologies and always have a supreme leader.
War is worshipped and justified by the state’s mendacious propaganda machine. As the brutal invasion of Ukraine shows, war is also practiced, especially if it is directed against a people whose very existence Putin regards as a threat to himself and to Russia.
Finally, fascist states are prone to wars, because members of the secret police and generals, whose raison d’etre is violence, are overrepresented in the ruling elite. In addition, the ideology glorifies war and violence, and a militarist fervor helps to legitimate the supreme leader and reinforce his charisma.
Nearly six in 10 Americans, 58%, are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the U.S. today, while 34% are satisfied. This marks an eight-percentage-point increase in dissatisfaction since last year and a return to the 2019-2020 range.
The 58% dissatisfied includes 35% of all Americans who would prefer that immigration be decreased, 9% increased, and 14% who want levels kept the same. Last year, those dissatisfied were about equally as likely to favor an increase as a decrease, but now the predominant view among the dissatisfied is for less immigration. The proportion who want less immigration has nearly doubled from 19% in 2021 and is well above where it was in 2019 (23%) and 2020 (25%). At the same time, calls for more immigration into the country have dropped.
As we’ve noted many times before, we are killing the Amazon rainforest, one of the most unique and diverse environments on the planet, and home to dozens of indigenous tribal groups.
While the Amazon rainforest had long been called “the lungs of the planet” for its ability to capture carbon through plant respiration, that role is now in danger.
A study by 18 international scholars [$32 to read for non-subscribers] published in the 14 July 2021 edition of Nature, the world’s per-eminent scientific journal, reaches a stunning conclusion: Part of the Amazon note emits more carbon that in captures, and fire is the culprit.
Here’s the summation, emphasis added:
Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades. This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change. Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a carbon source. We performed 590 aircraft vertical profiling measurements of lower-tropospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at four sites in Amazonia from 2010 to 2018. We find that total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part, mostly as a result of spatial differences in carbon-monoxide-derived fire emissions. Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere. Over the past 40 years, eastern Amazonia has been subjected to more deforestation, warming and moisture stress than the western part, especially during the dry season, with the southeast experiencing the strongest trends. We explore the effect of climate change and deforestation trends on carbon emissions at our study sites, and find that the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase in fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon. This is in line with recent studies that indicate an increase in tree mortality and a reduction in photosynthesis as a result of climatic changes across Amazonia.
The Amazon is a vast biome that spans eight rapidly developing countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname—and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.
The landscape contains:
▪ one in 10 known species on Earth ▪ 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests ▪ the 3,977-mile-long Amazon River, the second-longest river on Earth after the Nile ▪ 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America
The Amazon contains millions of species, most of them still undescribed, and some of the world’s most unusual wildlife. It is one of Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, and pink river dolphins, and home to thousands of birds and butterflies. Tree-dwelling species include southern two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys. The diversity of the region is staggering:
▪ 40,000 plant species ▪ 2,400 freshwater fish species ▪ more than 370 types of reptiles
There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation releases significant amounts of this carbon, which is having negative consequences around the world.
Uncontacted tribes at risk, too
In addition to the vast array of plants and animals endangered by deforestation, the Amazon basin is also home to a wide array of indigenous tribal groups, manyu of which have had little contact with modern civilization.
Deep in the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest area containing isolated and uncontacted tribes is under increasing threat from illegal logging and gold mining, advancing coca plantations and drug trafficking violence, a new report warns.
An undetermined number of indigenous people that could number several thousand inhabit a vast swathe of forest twice the size of Ireland that overlaps the Brazil-Peru border.
Their longhouses in jungle clearings have been spotted from planes but encounters with outsiders or clashes with invaders are anecdotal.
In the most comprehensive study to date of the so-called Javari-Tapiche corridor, a Peruvian indigenous organization says the world’s largest number of uncontacted people are in danger. Anthropologists have recorded groups crossing to Brazil looking for food, metal utensils and clothing to the south of the corridor, reportedly moving away from violence in Peru.
Beefing up deforestation
While mining and logging pose considerable dangers to the rainforest and its inhabitants, as the WWF reports, feeding the global demand for beef is the leading driver of deforestation in the Amazon basin:
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation. Alone, the deforestation caused by cattle ranching is responsible for the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, equivalent to 3.4% of current global emissions. Beyond forest conversion, cattle pastures increase the risk of fire and are a significant degrader of riparian and aquatic ecosystems, causing soil erosion, river siltation and contamination with organic matter. Trends indicate that livestock production is expanding in the Amazon.
Brazil has 88% of the Amazon herd, followed by Peru and Bolivia. While grazing densities vary among livestock production systems and countries, extensive, low productivity, systems with less than one animal unit per hectare of pasture are the dominant form of cattle ranching in the Amazon.
And in Brazil, one company dominates, a Brazilian agroindustrial giants which just happens to dominate the U.S. meat market as well.
JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing company [by sales] in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás. As of 2017, the company had 150 industrial plants around the world
In addition to its Brazilian operations, JBS also ranks as the leading meant supplier in the U.S., having acquired Swift & Company, Pilgrim’s Pride, Smithfield Foods’ beef operations, the prok business of Cargil, as well as Mexican and Brazilian operations of Tyson Foods, Inc.
More from Bloomberg on the company’s impact on the Amazonian rainforest:
Understanding how Brazil’s beef industry and rainforest destruction are inextricably intertwined reveals a truth that JBS doesn’t acknowledge: As the region’s biggest beef producer, its supply chain is also among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation the world has ever known. While marketing itself as a friend of the environment, JBS has snapped up more cattle coming out of the Amazon than any other meatpacker in an industry that’s overwhelmingly to blame for the rainforest’s demise. It has helped push the world’s largest rainforest to a tipping point at which it’s no longer able to clean the Earth’s air, because large swaths now emit more carbon than they absorb. Late last year, at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, governments and financial institutions—including JBS investors—made ambitious green commitments to drastically alter their business models to save the environment. With Amazon deforestation at a 15-year high, JBS is a case study illustrating how difficult it is to keep such promises.
For more than a decade, JBS has committed to ridding its supply chain of animals born or raised on deforested land. Bloomberg analyzed about 1 million delivery logs that JBS accidentally posted online to show just how far its footprint has reached into the Amazon in that period. A 10-day trip into the heart of Brazil’s cattle country put on full display how easily and openly cows from illegally cleared land flood supply chains. JBS says it sets the highest standards for its suppliers, but it’s using a greenwashed version of an animal’s origin and working within a legal system so full of loopholes that prosecutors, environmentalists and even ranchers themselves consider it a farce.
Asked to respond to this article, JBS said “it has no tolerance for illegal deforestation.” The São Paulo-based company added that it “has maintained, for over 10 years, a geospatial monitoring system that uses satellite imagery to monitor its suppliers in every biome” in Brazil.
On a positive note, Reuters reported in December that six major European supermarket chains have announced they will stop all beef imports from Brazil.
For more on the role of Big Beef in the plunder of the Amazonian read Beef, Banks and the Brazilian Amazon. a December 2020 investigation by Global Witness.
Fires accelerate ecological catastrophe
Published in the open source academic journal Remote Sensing last month, “Fires Drive Long-Term Environmental Degradation in the Amazon Basin,” a study by team of Brazilian and French scholars, offers an alarming look at the acceleration of ecological destruction wrought by the most commonly employed means of forest “clearance”:
In recent years, the frequency and intensity of fires have increased worldwide, especially during dry years. Globally, fires and deforestation are the main causes of biodiversity loss in the tropics], and the expectation is that without, a reduction in the present disturbance rates, undisturbed forests will have entirely disappeared in large tropical humid regions by 2050. In the Amazon, the use of fire is the fastest, most efficient, and least expensive way to clear a forested Amazonian agricultural frontier area and is often employed in protected areas, such as conservation units (CUs) and indigenous lands (ILs). Ranchers, farmers, miners, and land grabbers all employ this practice. A recent study that determined different types of fires that occur in the Amazon showed that deforestation fires are fires in areas that have been previously cleared and can invade standing forests; their drivers and positive feedbacks can lead to more fires in the region. Such fires lead to the release of a significant amount of GHGs [greenhouse gases] into the atmosphere.
In the Amazon region, fires are ubiquitous at the end of the dry season (September-October), but have often worsened in years of extreme drought (i.e., 2005, 2010, and 2015). Anomalously dry years are associated with tropical seas surface temperature anomalies; high temperatures and low humidity provide favorable conditions for the rapid spread of fires. These extreme-drought events have the potential to destabilize large areas by reducing rainfall and thereby increasing the risk of forest death, which could, in turn, lead to the further intensification of regional droughts as a result of vegetation loss. A warmer and drier climate can lead to the mortality of plant species adapted to wetter climates, as well as a decrease in water recycling in the central part of the Amazon Researchers forecast a possibility of doubling of the burned area south of the Brazilian Amazon in the coming decades]. This projection is in accordance with the scenarios proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are based on global numerical models] that indicate increased environmental degradation in the near future. Indeed, the Amazon ecosystem has been identified as a region with the highest vulnerability index in ecosystem function, particularly in areas of large-scale forest degradation and fragmentation.
The great Brazilian land grab continues
Just as White settlers and corporations swallowed up land belong to indigenous tribes in the U.S. starting with the arrival of the first settlers [who were brought over from Europe to populate corporate-owned colonies, encouraged and assisted by an expropriating monarchy] so too the Amazon is being grabbed up with the aid of a government headed by a verybigoted Right-wing populist.
So show does it work?
Consider the following from three University of Florida scholars – Gabriel Cardoso Carrero, graduate student Fellow and doctoral candidate in Geography; Cynthia S. Simmons, Professor of Geography; and Robert T. Walker, Professor of Latin American Studies and Geography – and published in The Conversation, an open source online academic journal written in everyday language:
The great Amazon land grab – how Brazil’s government is turning public land private, clearing the way for deforestation
Imagine that several state legislators decide that Yellowstone National Park is too big. Also imagine that, working with federal politicians, they change the law to downsize the park by a million acres, which they sell in a private auction.
Outrageous? Yes. Unheard of? No. It happens routinely and with increasing frequency in the Brazilian Amazon.
The most widely publicized threat to the Amazonian rainforest is deforestation. Less well understood is that public lands are being converted to private holdings in a land grab we’vebeenstudying for the past decade.
Our research provides a complete account across all classes of public land. We looked at Amazonia’s most active deforestation frontier, southern Amazonas State, starting in 2012 as rates of deforestation began to increase because of loosened regulatory oversight. Our research shows how land grabs are tied to accelerating deforestation spearheaded by wealthy interests, and how Brazil’s National Congress, by changing laws, is legitimizing these land grabs.
How the Amazon land grab began
Brazil’s modern land grab started in the 1970s, when the military government began offering free land to encourage mining industries and farmers to move in, arguing that national security depended on developing the region. It took lands that had been under state jurisdictions since colonial times and allocated them to rural settlement, granting 150- to 250-acre holdings to poor farmers.
Federal and state governments ultimately designated over 65% of Amazonia to several public interests, including rural settlement. For biodiversity, they created conservation units, some allowing traditional resource use and subsistence agriculture. Leftover government lands are generally referred to as “vacant or undesignated public lands.”
Tracking the land grab
Studies have estimated that by 2020, 32% of “undesignated public forests” had been grabbed for private use. But this is only part of the story, because land grabbing is now affecting many types of public land.
Importantly, land grabs now impact conservation areas and indigenous territories, where private holdings are forbidden.
We compared the boundaries of self-declared private holdings in the government’s Rural Environmental Registry database, known as CAR, with the boundaries of all public lands in southern Amazonas State. The region has 50,309 square miles in conservation units. Of these, we found that 10,425 square miles, 21%, have been “grabbed,” or declared in the CAR register as private between 2014 and 2020.
In the United States, this would be like having 21% of the national parks disappear into private property.
In Pará State, Amazonas State’s neighbor, deforestation in the 1990s was dominated by poor family farms in rural settlements. On average, these households accumulated 120 acres of farmland after several decades by opening 4-6 acres of forest every few years in clearings visible on satellite images as deforestation patches.
Since then, patch sizes have grown dramatically in the region, with most deforestation occurring on illicit holdings whose patches are much larger than on legal holdings.
Land grabbers benefit by selling the on-site timber and by subdividing what they’ve grabbed for sale in small parcels. Arrest records and research by groups such as Transparency International Brasil show that many of them are involved in criminal enterprises that use the land for money laundering, tax evasion and illegal mining and logging.
In the 10-year period before President Jair Bolsonaro took office, satellite data showed two deforestation patches exceeding 3,707 acres in Southern Amazonas. Since his election in 2019, we can identify nine massive clearings with an average size of 5,105 acres. The clearance and preparation cost for each Bolsonaro-era deforestation patch, legal or illicit, would be about US$353,000.
Legitimizing land grabbing
Brazil’s National Congress has been making it easier to grab public land.
A 2017 change in the law expanded the legally allowed size of private holdings in undesignated public lands and in rural settlements. This has reclassified over 1,000 square miles of land that had been considered illegal in 2014 as legal in southern Amazonas. Of all illegal CAR claims in undesignated public lands and rural settlements in 2014, we found that 94% became legal in 2017.
Our research also shows that the federal government increased the amount of public land up for grabs in southern Amazonas by shrinking rural settlements by 16%, just over 2,000 square miles, between 2015 and 2020. Large ranches are now absorbing that land. Similar downsizing of public land has affected Amazonia’s national parks.
Other countries have helped Brazil with billions of dollars to protect the Amazon for the good of the climate, but in the end, the land belongs to Brazil. Outsiders have limited power to influence its use.
At the U.N. climate summit in 2021, 141 countries – including Brazil – signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. This pledge holds potential because, unlike past ones, the private sector has committed $7.2 billion to reduce agriculture’s impact on the forest. In our view, the global community can help by insisting that supply chains for Amazonian beef and soybean products originate on lands deforested long ago and whose legality is longstanding.
Until 2020, the word “radicalization” was linked most often with accounts of of groups like ISIS and the Taliban, defining the transformation of Muslims from believers to activists willing to die for a radical variant of a mainstream faith.
But with the growing violence accompany Donald Trump’s failed reelection bid, the word came to be applied primarily to Republicans stoked to violent actions by the inflammatory rhetoric of incumbent who fanned the flames of militant Christian zealotry, racism, resentment and xenophobia.
As Darren M. Slade, president of the Global Center of Religious Research, noted soon after the 6 January failed Capitol Hill coup:
“The radicalization of the Trump supporters in Washington, D.C., and the people who continue to support them, follows the same psychological pattern of radicalization that we see among Islamic terrorists (or, “Islamists”). This extremism typically occurs in a four-stage process where 1) a particular group undergoes an identity crisis due to feeling disenfranchised and subjugated by outside influences; 2) the group then refuses to abandon or adjust their ingroup’s mytho-identity about their own superiority, which causes cognitive dissonance and paranoia; 3) to maintain their mytho-identity, the group identifies a scapegoat to blame for their perceived subjugation; and finally 4) the group is provoked or incited to violence in order to correct a perceived cosmological and political injustice.
None of this goes to say that neither the Islamists nor the Trumpistas lacked legitimate grievances.
The United States and its allies have for more than a century ruthlessly exploited the Islamic world in the sustained effort to control their vast oil reserves, and both major U.S. political parties are subservient to plutocratic corporate and financial sector interests, the source of financial polarization of America that has seen the lion’s share of economic growth in urban, Democratic precincts while suburban and rural Republican districts have seen significant declines over the past decade, exemplified in this graphic from the Brookings Institution:
What other factors predispose to radicalization?
But economic despair isn’t the sole reason a motley horde of ever-Trumpers invaded the national legislature during the certification of the electoral vote. That mob numbered in the thousands, not the millions who still believe the Democrats stole an election Trump won.
What else differentiates those willing to, say, livestream themselves committing violent criminal felonies on behalf of an overtly malignant lie- and hate-spewing narcissist?
Perhaps more of the reasons lie in the realm of mental predispositions. And, if so, what are they?
A team of researchers from one of the world’s most elite universities has ideas, and they’re backed by extensive research.
Psychological ‘signature’ for the extremist mind uncovered
A new study suggests that a particular mix of personality traits and types of unconscious cognition – the ways our brain takes in basic information – is a strong predictor for extremist views across a range of beliefs, including nationalism and religious fervour.
These mental characteristics include poorer working memory and slower “perceptual strategies” – the unconscious processing of changing stimuli, such as shape and colour – as well as tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation seeking.
This combination of cognitive and emotional attributes predicts the endorsement of violence in support of a person’s ideological “group”, according to findings published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The study also maps the psychological signatures that underpin fierce political conservatism, as well as “dogmatism”: people who have a fixed worldview and are resistant to evidence.
Psychologists found that conservatism is linked to cognitive “caution”: slow-and-accurate unconscious decision-making, compared to the fast-and-imprecise “perceptual strategies” found in more liberal minds.
Brains of more dogmatic people are slower to process perceptual evidence, but they are more impulsive personality-wise. The mental signature for extremism across the board is a blend of conservative and dogmatic psychologies.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge say that, while still in early stages, this research could help to better identify and support people most vulnerable to radicalisation across the political and religious spectrum.
Approaches to radicalisation policy mainly rely on basic demographic information such as age, race and gender. By adding cognitive and personality assessments, the psychologists created a statistical model that is between four and fifteen times more powerful at predicting ideological worldviews than demographics alone.
“Many people will know those in their communities who have become radicalised or adopted increasingly extreme political views, whether on the left or right,” said Dr Leor Zmigrod, lead author from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.
“We want to know why particular individuals are more susceptible.”
“By examining ‘hot’ emotional cognition alongside the ‘cold’ unconscious cognition of basic information processing we can see a psychological signature for those at risk of engaging with an ideology in an extreme way,” Zmigrod said.
“Subtle difficulties with complex mental processing may subconsciously push people towards extreme doctrines that provide clearer, more defined explanations of the world, making them susceptible to toxic forms of dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies.”
The research is published as part of a special issue of the Royal Society journal dedicated to “the political brain” compiled and co-edited by Zmigrod, who recently won the Women of the Future Science award.
The new study is the latest in a series by Zmigrod investigating the relationship between ideology and cognition. She has previously published findings on links between cognitive “inflexibility” and religious extremism, willingness to self-sacrifice for a cause, and a vote for Brexit.
A 2019 study by Zmigrod showed that this cognitive inflexibility is found in those with extreme attitudes on both the far right and far left of the political divide.
The latest research builds on work from Stanford University in which hundreds of study participants performed 37 different cognitive tasks and took 22 different personality surveys in 2016 and 2017.
Zmigrod and colleagues, including Cambridge psychologist Professor Trevor Robbins, conducted a series of follow-up tests in 2018 on 334 of the original participants, using a further 16 surveys to determine attitudes and strength of feeling towards various ideologies.
Study participants were all from the United States, 49.4% were female, and ages ranged from 22-63.
Part of the study used tests of the “executive functions” that help us to plan, organise and execute tasks e.g. restacking coloured disks to match guidelines, and keeping a series of categorised words in mind as new ones are added.
Additionally, results from various rapid decision-making tests – switching between visual stimuli based on evolving instructions, for example – were fed into computational models, allowing analyses of small differences in perceptual processing.
Researchers took the results of the in-depth, self-reported personality tests and boiled them down to 12 key factors ranging from goal-directedness and emotional control to financial risk-taking.
The examination of social and political attitudes took in a host of ideological positions including patriotism, religiosity and levels of authoritarianism on the left and right.
The Cambridge team used data modeling techniques such as Bayesian analyses to extract correlations. They then measured the extent to which blends of cognition and personality could help predict ideological attitudes.
From the report. Click on the image to enlarge
Political conservatism and nationalism was related to “caution” in unconscious decision-making, as well as “temporal discounting” – when rewards are seen to lose value if delayed – and slightly reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain.
Personality traits for conservatism and nationalism included greater goal-directedness, impulsivity and reward sensitivity, and reduced social risk-taking. Demographics alone had a predictive power of less than 8% for these ideologies, but adding the psychological signature boosted it to 32.5%.
Dogmatism was linked to reduced speed of perceptual “evidence accumulation”, and reduced social risk-taking and agreeableness but heightened impulsivity and ethical risk-taking in the personality domain. Religiosity was cognitively similar to conservatism, but with higher levels of agreeableness and “risk perception”.
Adding the psychological signatures to demographics increased the predictive power for dogmatism from 1.53% to 23.6%, and religiosity from 2.9% to 23.4%.
Across all ideologies investigated by the researchers, people who endorsed “extreme pro-group action”, including ideologically-motivated violence against others, had a surprisingly consistent psychological profile.
The extremist mind – a mixture of conservative and dogmatic psychological signatures – is cognitively cautious, slower at perceptual processing and has a weaker working memory. This is combined with impulsive personality traits that seek sensation and risky experiences.
Added Zmigrod: “There appear to be hidden similarities in the minds of those most willing to take extreme measures to support their ideological doctrines. Understanding this could help us to support those individuals vulnerable to extremism, and foster social understanding across ideological divides.”
QAnon might seem a uniquely American group, with its reliance on the purported leaks of an American intelligence insider and its virulent espousal of Trumpism, but the movement has found fertile soil in Germany, a nation with a dark legacy of political capture by the 20th Centuries most infamous white nationalist regime.
The movement’s grew five-fold in Germany over the course of the past year, and there’s no sign that the surge has ended.
Prior to 2020, the QAnon movement was largely considered a niche phenomenon in Germany. But within a year, Germany has become home to the largest QAnon community outside of the English-speaking world.
The German government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, such as lockdowns and social distancing measures, prompted QAnon influencers and far-right sympathizers to stoke fear and propagate the movement’s conspiracy theories on social media platforms.
The Dubai-based messenger service Telegram became particularly popular among QAnon supporters, largely as a result of its lax policy towards cracking down on extremist content.
In December, the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation found that German QAnon groups and channels hosted on Telegram had experienced significant growth during the first lockdown of the pandemic in March 2020.
Back then, Qlobal — now today’s largest German-language QAnon channel — had roughly 21,000 subscribers. Three months after, it had garnered more than 110,000 users. The channel now boasts more than 160,000 followers, with other QAnon groups and channels mirroring the rise in interest.
According to estimates provided by the Amadeo Antonio Foundation, there are at least 150,000 QAnon followers in Germany — and that figure is steadily rising. However, gauging the size of the QAnon community is difficult, largely because estimates lean on public online engagement.
While the coronavirus might be the biggest threat in the short term, the mental virus that is QAnon may well pose an even bigger threat in the long run as it spreads its way through social media.
Google, one of the world’s leading practitioners of surveillance capitalism, makes hundreds of billions by exploiting public and private information and serving it up to the public and to corporations [who use that data to seduce us into consuming more in a world drowning in waste].
The brilliance of Google’s strategy lies in its ability to exploit information gathered by others, often at considerable cost, and serve it up without paying a cent to the creators and originators of that information.
Google’s business plan, which mixes commercial advertising seamlessly into their search results, has been devastating for news media,capturing what’s left of their dwindling advertising revenues while simultaneously service up for free the information gleaned by journalists paid with those dwindling ad dollars.
Google has been recording records profits, evident in this chart of revenues from Statista:
Meanwhile, news media has sustained massive hits, a crisis made much worse by COVID, which has forced the closure of and/or restrictions on the business which news media rely on for their advertising revenues.
This graphic from a joint survey conducted by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the International Center for Journalists reflect the reality in global newsrooms since the pandemic began:
But new laws, one about to take effect in Australia and the other now in preparation in the European parliament would share some of Google’s gargantuabn gleanings with the media that created it.
Australia is on track to the push through the legislation that would require digital platforms to pay for news, according to the country’s communications minister.
The government expects the likes of Google and Facebook to comply with the law, Paul Fletcher told CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Tuesday.
“This bill will pass into law fairly soon,” Fletcher said. “The democratically elected government of Australia expects that businesses that are doing business in Australia will comply with our laws.”
The media bill was introduced in parliament last December. Referred to as the “news media bargaining code,” it would require digital platforms to pay local media outlets and publishers to link their content in news feeds or search results. If both sides are unable to reach a commercial deal, government-appointed arbitrators can decide on the price.
EU lawmakers overseeing new digital regulation in Europe want to force Big Tech companies to pay for news, echoing a similar move in Australia and strengthening the hand of publishers against Google and Facebook.
The initiative from members of the European parliament would be a serious blow to Google, which has threatened to leave Australia in protest at a planned new law that would compel it to pay for news. Facebook has also warned it will stop users in Australia from sharing news if the legislation is passed in its current form.
MEPs working on two landmark draft European digital regulations, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA), told the Financial Times the laws could be amended as they pass through the EU parliament to include aspects of the Australian reforms.
These include the option of binding arbitration for licensing agreements and requiring tech companies to inform publishers about changes to how they rank news stories on their sites.
Transforming a corporate parasite into a symbiote
It might be useful to consider Google ass a parasite, and entity that survives by sucking off the nutrients needed by another organism to survive without any complementary benefits to the infected organism.
The new laws would transform a parasite into a symbiote, an organism that establishes a mutually beneficial relationship with its partner.
Google should remember that parasites die when they bled so much nutrition from their host that the host dies.
The news laws won’t kill Google, but they could be an important first step in transforming the relationship between Google and the media is relies on for its vast profits into a symbiotic relationship, and important measure to ensure the survival of the community news platforms on which democracy depends for its very survival.
In an earlier report today we noted that the Proud Boys, those militant White nationalists who played a starring role in the 6 January U.S. Capitol insurrection, have been formally identified as a terrorist group by the Canadian government.
Just like their counterparts south of the border, Canadian Proud Boys have infiltrated the government and staged counter-protests when Canadian progressives challenged statutes of white historical figures who treated darker skinned people atrociously.
What that earlier post didn’t do was describe the 3 July 2017 event that originally alerted the government to the group’s existence under the maple leaf flag.
The outgoing commander of Canada’s military says he first realized the Canadian Armed Forces had a real problem with hate and racism three years ago, when navy sailors identifying themselves as “Proud Boys” confronted Indigenous protesters in Halifax.
Captured on video, the confrontation in July 2017 propelled the right-wing group, which officials are considering adding to Canada’s list of terrorist organizations, into the public consciousness.
Gen. Jonathan Vance says it also embarrassed the military – and served as a wake-up call about the threat that hate and racism pose to the Armed Forces.
“Before that, I was quite confident that our stance on values was strong and well articulated,” Vance told The Canadian Press on Wednesday. “I did not see this as a dangerous phenomenon, but one that needed to be dealt with. Proud Boys, that got me.”
Vance was speaking during one of his last media interviews before handing command of the Canadian Armed Forces to Vice-Admiral Art McDonald on Thursday, more than five years after he first took over as Canada’s chief of the defence staff.
The incident he refers to happened in Halifax, Nova Scotia,when a posse of Proud Boys, clad in their distinctive polo shirts, crashed a 3 July 2017 tribal ceremonial, as the CBC News reported:
On Canada Day, dozens of people were gathered around the statue of Edward Cornwallis in downtown Halifax to mourn the atrocities committed against Indigenous people when the group of five men clad in black polo shirts approached.
Cornwallis, a governor of Nova Scotia, was a military officer credited by the British for founding Halifax in 1749. Later that year, he issued a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq people. There has been ongoing debate over the use of his name on public parks, buildings and street signs.
The off-duty members were carrying a Canadian Red Ensign flag and announced they were members of “The Proud Boys, Maritime chapter.” On Facebook, the group describes itself as “a fraternal organization of Western Chauvinists who will no longer apologize for creating the modern world.”
According to Global News, “Rebecca Moore, who organized the Indigenous ceremony, told the Canadian Press that dozens of people were gathered around the statue of Edward Cornwallis as Chief Grizzly Mamma, who is originally from British Columbia, shaved her head in an act of mourning.”
Following an investigation, the military closed the incident without arrests of any of the sailors, although they were placed under a monitoring program.
The alarmed general’s alleged alarming behavior
Today also marked a nadir in the departing general’s career, as the government opened an investigation in alleged improper sexual conduct, including a much verboten affair was a junior officer.
The country’s former top military commander will be investigated following a published report of inappropriate behaviour involving female subordinates.
The allegations were levelled against former chief of the defence staff general Jonathan Vance in a Global News story, which was broadcast and published online on Tuesday.
Admiral Art McDonald, who replaced Vance only two weeks ago, issued an internal statement to personnel Wednesday morning saying trust and support of commanders must be sacrosanct, but also earned.
<snip>
As the country’s top military commander for five years, Vance was the architect of the effort to stamp out sexual misconduct in the ranks, known as Operation Honour.
Following up on our previous post about the Boogaloo Bois, one of the leading groups at the 6 January Capitol insurrection comes some bad news for another outfit integral the lethal violence at the national legislature.
Their colleagues in arms on Capitol Hill, the Proud Boys, have just been officially declared terrorists by the government of Canada.
Public Safety Minister Bill Blair announced today that the federal government will designate 13 groups as terrorist entities, adding some white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups to a list already populated with militant Islamist organizations.
The federal government will now classify the Proud Boys (a neo-fascist organization with chapters in Canada and the U.S.), the Atomwaffen Division, AWD (a group that calls for acts of violence against racial, religious and ethnic groups), and the Base (another neo-Nazi organization that advocates for violence to incite a race war), as terrorist entities under the Criminal Code.
The government considers these three groups, along with another new addition, the Russian Imperial Movement (a Russian paramilitary group with ties to neo-Nazi groups worldwide), as “ideologically motivated violent extremists.”
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) defines the term as extremism driven by a range of grievances and ideas from across the traditional ideological spectrum.
<snip>
A security official, speaking on background, said the Proud Boys have been under review for some time and the Jan. 6 attack “wasn’t the only factor and it wasn’t the driving factor” in designating the group as a terrorist entity.
“It’s a group that we’ve been looking at as a community for a while,” the official said.
The official said the Commons motion, pushed by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, was also not a motivating factor in designating the Proud Boys as terrorists. There was “no political motivation whatsoever,” the official said, adding Canada’s national security agencies alone determine which groups should be legally branded with this terrorist label.
Who are the Boobaloo Bois and why do they want to overthrow the government?
A joint investigation by ProPublica and Frontline has found disturbing connections between the militant white nationalist extremists and the U.S. military, links that raise disturbing questions about the future of America’s future.
From ProPublica, a report by the non-profit’s A.C. Thompson and Lila Hassan and Karim Hajj of Frontline:
The Boogaloo Bois Have Guns, Criminal Records and Military Training. Now They Want to Overthrow the Government.
Hours after the attack on the Capitol ended, a group calling itself the Last Sons of Liberty posted a brief video to Parler, the social media platform, that appeared to show members of the organization directly participating in the uprising. Footage showed someone with a shaky smartphone charging past the metal barricades surrounding the building. Other clips show rioters physically battling with baton-wielding police on the white marble steps just outside the Capitol.
Before Parler went offline — its operations halted at least temporarily when Amazon refused to continue to host the network — the Last Sons posted numerous statements indicating that group members had joined the mob that swarmed the Capitol and had no regrets about the chaos and violence that unfolded on Jan. 6. The Last Sons also did some quick math: The government had suffered only one fatality, U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, 42, who was reportedly bludgeoned in the head with a fire extinguisher. But the rioters had lost four people, including Ashli Babbitt, the 35-year-old Air Force veteran who was shot by an officer as she tried to storm the building.
In a series of posts, the Last Sons said her death should be “avenged” and appeared to call for the murder of three more cops.
The group is part of the Boogaloo movement — a decentralized, very online successor to the militia movement of the ’80s and ’90s — whose adherents are fixated on attacking law enforcement and violently toppling the U.S. government. Researchers say the movement began coalescing online in 2019 as people — mostly young men — angry with what they perceived to be increasing government repression, found each other on Facebook groups and in private chats. In movement vernacular, Boogaloo refers to an inevitable and imminent armed revolt, and members often call themselves Boogaloo Bois, boogs or goons.
In the weeks since Jan. 6, an array of extremist groups have been named as participants in the Capitol invasion. The Proud Boys. QAnon believers. White nationalists. The Oath Keepers. But the Boogaloo Bois are notable for the depth of their commitment to the overthrow of the U.S. government and the jaw-dropping criminal histories of many members.
Mike Dunn, a 20-year-old from a small town on Virginia’s rural southern edge, is the commander of the Last Sons. “I really feel we’re looking at the possibility — stronger than any time since, say, the 1860s — of armed insurrection,” Dunn said in an interview with ProPublica and FRONTLINE a few days after the assault on the Capitol. Although Dunn didn’t directly participate, he said members of his Boogaloo faction helped fire up the crowd and “may” have penetrated the building.
“It was a chance to mess with the federal government again,” he said. “They weren’t there for MAGA. They weren’t there for Trump.”
Dunn added that he’s “willing to die in the streets” while battling law enforcement or security forces.
In its short existence, the Boogaloo movement has proven to be a magnet for current or former military service members who have used their combat skills and firearms expertise to advance the Boogaloo cause. Before becoming one of the faces of the movement, Dunn did a brief stint in the U.S. Marines, a career he says was cut short by a heart condition, and worked as a Virginia state prison guard.
Through interviews, extensive study of social media and a review of court records, some previously unreported, ProPublica and FRONTLINE identified more than 20 Boogaloo Bois or sympathizers who’ve served in the armed forces. Over the past 18 months, 13 of them have been arrested on charges ranging from the possession of illegal automatic weapons to the manufacture of explosives to murder.
Most of the individuals identified by the news organizations became involved with the movement after leaving the military. At least four are accused of committing Boogaloo-related crimes while employed by one of the military branches.
Examples of the nexus between the group and the military abound.
Last year, an FBI task force in San Francisco opened a domestic terror investigation into Aaron Horrocks, a 39-year-old former Marine Corps reservist. Horrocks spent eight years in the Reserve before leaving the Corps in 2017.
The bureau became alarmed in September 2020, when agents received a tip that Horrocks, who lives in Pleasanton, California, was “planning an imminent violent attack on government or law enforcement,” according to a petition to seize the man’s firearms, which was filed in state court in October. The investigation, which has not previously been reported, links Horrocks to the Boogaloo movement. He has not been charged.
A petition asking an Alameda County, California, court to bar Aaron Horrocks from owning firearms and ammunition. (Superior Court of California, County of Alameda)
Horrocks did not respond to a request for comment, though he has uploaded a video to YouTube that appears to show federal law enforcement agents, in plainclothes, searching his storage unit. “Go fuck yourselves,” he tells them.
In June 2020 in Texas, police briefly detained Taylor Bechtol, a 29-year-old former Air Force staff sergeant and munitions loader with the 90th Aircraft Maintenance Unit. While in the service, Bechtol handled 1,000-pound precision-guided bombs.
The former airman was riding in a pickup truck with two other alleged Boogaloo Bois when the vehicle was stopped by Austin police, according to an intelligence report generated by the Austin Regional Intelligence Center, a multi-agency fusion center. Officers found five guns, several hundred rounds of ammunition and gas masks in the truck. The men expressed “sympathetic views toward the Boogaloo Bois” and should be treated with “extreme caution” by law enforcement, noted the report, which was obtained by ProPublica and FRONTLINE after it was leaked by hackers.
One of the men in the vehicle, Ivan Hunter, 23, has since been indicted for allegedly using an assault rifle to shoot up a police precinct in Minneapolis and helping to set the building ablaze. No trial date has been set for Hunter, who has pleaded not guilty.
Bechtol, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with the traffic stop, did not respond to a request for comment.
Taylor Bechtol, then an Air Force staff sergeant, with munition at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on Oct. 26, 2018. Bechtol has been linked to the Boogaloo Bois. (Jonathan Valdes/USAF)
Linda Card, a spokeswoman for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which deals with the service’s most complex and serious criminal matters, said Bechtol left the service in December 2018 and was never investigated while in the Air Force.
In perhaps the highest-profile incident involving the group, several Boogaloo Bois were arrested in October in connection with the widely reported plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. One of those men was Joseph Morrison, a Marine Corps reservist who was serving in the 4th Marine Logistics Group at the time of his arrest and arraignment. Morrison, who is facing terrorism charges, went by the name Boogaloo Bunyan on social media. He also kept a sticker of the Boogaloo flag — it features a Hawaiian floral pattern and an igloo — on the rear window of his pickup truck. Two other men charged in the plot had spent time in the military.
The Marine Corps is working to root out extremists from its ranks, a spokesman said.
“Association or participation with hate or extremist groups of any kind is directly contradictory to the core values of honor, courage and commitment that we stand for as Marines and isn’t tolerated,” Capt. Joseph Butterfield said.
No reliable numbers exist about how many current or former military members are part of the movement.
There’s no love lost between Fox News gargoyle Laura Ingraham and her gay brother Curtis, who gave up Wall Street banking to teach school in Marin County, California.
Laura Ingraham is notoriously intolerant of anything that strikes her as even modestly inclusive, undoubtedly part of the reason for the familial discord. And then there’s this from a 6 March 2018 Tweet by Curtis Ingraham: “We grew up with an abusive father who was a Nazi sympathizer, racist, anti-Semite and homophobe. Like father like daughter???”
The brother of Fox News host Laura Ingraham has called his sister “pathetic” for criticising Dr Anthony Fauci on Twitter.
On Sunday, Ms Ingraham shared an article on Twitter about Dr Fauci discussing the deadliness of the new strain of Covid-19 found in the UK, commenting: “Dr Doom is back.”
Curtis Ingraham retweeted his sister, commenting: “My sister is pathetic! Criticizing Dr. Fauci?! What is your expertise exactly Laura beyond spinning lies and conspiracies? Apologies Dr Fauci and huge thanks!!!”
It is not the first time that Mr Ingraham has gone after his sister online and in his bio on Twitter he describes himself as a “seeker of justice, accountability and honesty”, a “sibling fact checker” and that he has “hypocrisy in my sights”.
A former Wall Street banker turned educator, his political views are very different from the host of The Ingraham Angle, one of the staunchest supporters of Donald Trump during his presidency.
And a bonus Fun Fact of the Day
Laura and a fellow Republican provocateur according to a 1996 article in the National Law Journal, co-planned “the first annual ‘Dark Ages’ weekend in Miami — the Republicans’ semi-flip answer to the Democrats’ Renaissance Weekend, held every New Year’s Eve.
“The GOP bash was a hit. Attending the parties and panel discussions (in that order, and proudly) were 300 revelers, including such GOP heavy-hitters as Tennessee’s and Hollywood’s Sen. Fred Thompson, activist Richard Viguerie, ex-federal appellate Judge Robert Bork, ex-con G. Gordon Liddy, the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed, President Bush’s former chief of staff John Sununu and political fund-raiser Arianna Huffington.”
Federal law enforcement officials are examining a number of threats aimed at members of Congress as the second trial of former President Donald Trump nears, including ominous chatter about killing legislators or attacking them outside of the U.S. Capitol, a U.S. official told The Associated Press.
The threats, and concerns that armed protesters could return to sack the Capitol anew, have prompted the U.S. Capitol Police and other federal law enforcement to insist thousands of National Guard troops remain in Washington as the Senate moves forward with plans for Trump’s trial, the official said Sunday.
The shocking insurrection at the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob prompted federal officials to rethink security in and around its landmarks, resulting in an unprecedented lockdown for Biden’s inauguration. Though the event went off without any problems and armed protests around the country did not materialize, the threats to lawmakers ahead of Trump’s trial exemplified the continued potential for danger.
Similar to those intercepted by investigators ahead of Biden’s inauguration, the threats that law enforcement agents are tracking vary in specificity and credibility, said the official, who had been briefed on the matter. Mainly posted online and in chat groups, the messages have included plots to attack members of Congress during travel to and from the Capitol complex during the trial, according to the official.
We’ll begin with some implicit threats, starting with a new member of the House whose campaign included this little gem:
The implicit threat posed by a colleague still resonates with the members of the the progressive Squad, as the Guardianreported 23 January:
Nobody should have to go to work every day wondering whether one of their colleagues is going to kill them. And yet, that’s precisely what some Democrats – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the Squad, in particular – are having to do. The Squad are a favourite target of rightwingers; they’ve had reason to worry about their safety long before the Capitol riots. Last year, for example, the QAnon supporter and new congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted an image on Facebook of her holding an assault rifle alongside Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” her post’s caption read. A Florida Republican running for Congress also openly suggested that Omar be executed for treason. “The fact that those who make these violent threats very publicly without hesitation reaffirms how much white supremacy has spread within the [Republican party],” Tlaib tweeted at the time.
Following the Capitol riots, AOC spoke out about how she feared for her life. She wasn’t just afraid of the rioters, she was worried that “white supremacist members of Congress” would disclose her location and endanger her safety. Squad member Ayanna Pressley was probably thinking the same thing: somehow every panic button in her office had been torn out before the riots.
“[Many of us] still don’t yet feel safe around other members of Congress,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday. “One just tried to bring a gun on the floor of the House today.” Gun culture in America is so warped that instead of agreeing that bringing guns to work was bad, Cuomo suggested the armed congressman might have been trying to keep everyone safe. “I don’t really care what they say their intentions are,” AOC replied. “I care what the impact of their actions are and the impact is to put 435 members of Congress in danger … it is absolutely outrageous that we even have to have this conversation.”
I know the last four years have warped our idea of “normal” but there is absolutely nothing normal about members of Congress having to worry that their colleagues might murder them. “GOP lawmakers campaigned with images of them cocking guns next to photos of myself,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Friday. “Now they are trying to violate DC law and House rules to sneak guns onto the House floor two weeks after a white supremacist insurrection that killed 5 people. Why?”
Why, indeed? That’s a question that we all need to be asking. Trump may have left the White House but the violence he helped incite has not been eliminated. The Capitol isn’t just a hostile working environment at the moment, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
After Facebook purged her Squad ad last year, Greene tweeted back a response:
So who is Marjorie Taylor Greene?
The short answer: a white nationalist neo-fascist, a latter-day Silver Shirt, espousing a militant latter-day fascism of the sort mobilized and energized by Donald Trump.
A zealous adherent of Alex Jones and other spewers of virulent paranoiac bile, she is an exemplar of what happens when the delusional arouse the disaffected by incantations of hate and promises of cathartic violence.
She is a traitor, not to the nation as much as the very concept of humanity itself.
Two years before she was elected to Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene hopped on Facebook to respond to a comment falsely claiming that the Parkland, Fla., school shooting was staged, according to screenshots posted by Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog group. Instead of rejecting the false claim surrounding the mass shooting that killed 17 people, Greene enthusiastically agreed with the conspiracy theory.
“Exactly!” she wrote in response.
<snip>
Greene’s office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment as of early Friday. Facebook removed Greene’s comments for violating its policies following the watchdog group’s report, a Facebook spokesperson told The Post.
In 2018, Greene suggested on Facebook that Democrats cooked up school shootings to limit gun access. She wrote “I am told that Nancy Pelosi tells Hillary Clinton several times a month that ‘we need another school shooting’ in order to persuade the public to want strict gun control.” Now, a first-term congresswoman, Greene has said she intends to be the strongest defender of gun rights on Capitol Hill and has signed onto to legislation to expand access to suppressors and ease transfers of firearm accessories.
The false, extremist theory that the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people, including 20 children, was a hoax, has plagued Newtown families for years, promoted by Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and others. Now even Jones doesn’t believe it was staged, like he did in 2014, according to court documents. But other extremists continue to hound and harass Sandy Hook families over the falsehood.
And the Donald loves her
Her biggest fan celebrated her Republican primary victory victory, as the Detroit News reported 12 August:
“Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent,” Trump said on Twitter. “Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up – a real WINNER!”
“You inspired me to run and fight to Save America and Stop Socialism!!” Greene responded to Trump’s tweet. “No one will fight harder than me!!”
Greene has amassed tens of thousands of followers on social media, where she often posts videos of herself speaking directly to the camera. Those videos have helped propel her popularity with her base, but also drawn condemnation after videos surfaced in which she complains of an “Islamic invasion” into government offices, claims Black and Hispanic men are held back by “gangs and dealing drugs,” and pushes an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, collaborated with the Nazis.
On 4 November, the day after she won her seat in Congress, the Washington Post wrote about some of her beliefs:
Greene, who co-owns a commercial construction and renovation company with her husband, has been unambiguous about her support for QAnon. In the past, she has posted videos elevating QAnon and praising “Q,” its anonymous leader.
“Q is a patriot. He is someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump,” she said in a 2017 video posted to YouTube that has since been made private.
In that same video, she talks about an “awakening” that will reveal deep corruption and encourage Americans to support Trump.
“I’m very excited about that now there’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” she said.
Forbes reported on 17 January about another Greene social media takedown, this time over her election fraud claims:
Twitter on Sunday temporarily suspended the account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who first gained a social media following by promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory and who routinely posts outlandish content online, after the freshman Georgia congresswoman sparred with a state election official over baseless voter fraud allegations.
Greene’s personal account was suspended for 12 hours following “multiple violations” of Twitter’s “civic integrity policy,” a company spokesperson told Forbes on Sunday.
Twitter did not specify what content led to the action—and the congresswoman herself said she was in the dark about the suspension—though three of her tweets in the last 24 hours were labeled by Twitter for spreading false claims about the election.
In a string of tweets Sunday, Greene harassed Georgia voting systems manager Gabriel Sterling, calling him a “moron” and “little,” after the Republican election official held Greene, former Rep. Doug Collins and President Donald Trump responsible for Republicans’ loss in two Senate runoffs in the state.
Sterling claimed Greene, Collins and Trump drove down Republican voter turnout by making false claims about voter fraud.
ProPublica has collected pages of her deleted Tweets, including this gem, sent the day before the Capitol insurrection:
I’m fighting with everything I have to defend our 2A rights! I’m standing STRONG for election integrity & objecting to the Electoral College certification! The Democrats want me GONE & they’re working on it. Donate today so I can stay & fight FOR YOU!
And her accomplices, armed and dangerous
Greene’s not the only Republican who loves her concealed weapons.
House Democrats told CNN that they are worried some lawmakers are ignoring House rules regarding firearms.
“There have been increasing tensions with certain incoming freshmen for months, who have been insistent on bringing firearms in violation of law and guidelines,” one House Democrat said, in a reference to Republican Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina and others.
Boebert was filmed in a campaign advertisement vowing to carry her Glock handgun around Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. and has said she would carry her gun to Congress. The District has strict gun laws and Washington’s police chief has warned the congresswoman that she is subject to the same laws as everyone else in the nation’s capital.
Cawthorn, meanwhile, said in an interview with Smoky Mountain News last week that he was armed when a mob stormed the Capitol.
“Fortunately, I was armed, so we would have been able to protect ourselves,” Cawthorn told the paper.
It’s illegal to carry a loaded firearm in the Capitol, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered House members to pass through metal detectors before entering the chamber, a measure vigorously opposed by the Boebert and her allies.
After a couple of incidents where Republicans tried to bypass the devices, Pelosi announced that she was introducing hefty fines for violations, sums to be deducted from Congressional paychecks. But the House won’t vote on the proposal before next month.
Another certifiable wingnut, armed and dangerous
Another tactic is a sort of legislative terrorism, throwing sands in the gears of the legislative process, what lawyers call malicious compliance, conforming to the rules in a way that disrupts system functioning.
And here’s a classic disruptor, fucking up other people’s lives just to get self-righteous jollies. a pistol packin’ GOPer profiled by the Washington Monthly on 22 January:
“Congressman Massie,” former Secretary of State John Kerry tweeted last March. “has tested positive for being an asshole.”
This view of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is shared across the political spectrum. Massie’s habit of clogging up the House with objections to measures that otherwise would otherwise pass by unanimous consent has made him unpopular with his colleagues. His objection to a coronavirus relief bill last spring required members of the House who were sheltering from the virus to return to the Capitol in person—where, needless to say, they were exposed to fellow members without masks.
This unpopularity may partially explain Massie’s apparent eagerness to arm himself on the House floor. Earlier this month, after Speaker Nancy Pelosi placed metal detectors at the doors to the chamber, Massie pushed through the detectors. He says, by cracky, the Constitution lets him do that. Stopping armed members from entering the chamber, he told the New York Post, violates “the part [of the Constitution] that says you can’t be stopped coming or going, you can’t be detained coming or going from the House. It just says that, very specifically.”
Newly elected Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), half of the House QAnon caucus, also insists on entering the chamber strapped. “The metal detector policy for the House floor is unnecessary, unconstitutional, and endangers members,” she said. Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), a leader of the established crazy caucus, also refused the detector. “Article 1, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution contains specific language prohibiting Members of Congress from being impeded on the way to a session of the House or to a vote,” Gohmert said.
No wonder members of the Squad fear for their lives and the lives of loved ones and allies.
A direct threat to assassinate AOC
These people are not rational, and the evidence can be found in the words of the insurrectionists who seized the Capitol on 6 January, inspired by by the likes of Trump, Boebert, Greene, and Massie.
Here’s one instance of a would-be assassin who takes the logic of Congressional rants to their logical and lethal conclusion, via the Independent:
The Justice Department has charged a Texas man who allegedly participated in the 6 January mob at the US Capitol with threatening to assassinate congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Garret Miller of Texas is charged with five offenses including trespassing and making death threats towards the New York representative and a US Capitol Police officer.
According to court documents, Mr Miller tweeted “assassinate AOC,” and that a Capitol officer who fatally shot a Trump supporter during the attack “deserves to die” and won’t “survive long” because it’s “huntin[g] season.”
The man posted extensively before and during the Capitol attack, according to prosecutors, writing on his now-banned social media accounts that a “civil war could start” and “next time we bring the guns.”
A sign of the times
Here’s a billboard that greeted Southern motorists in August 2019:
A controversial North Carolina billboard targeting four female members of Congress is coming down.
The sign for Cherokee Guns shows Reps. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, who have come to be known as “The Squad” – with “The 4 Horsemen Cometh” written above their photos. The “cometh” is crossed out and replaced with “are Idiots.”
The store’s owner, Doc Wacholz, said that he chose the women because of their “their message of turning this country into a socialist country,” he told CNN affiliate WTVC.
President Donald Trump recently tweeted that “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” He did not name them, but four congresswomen of color – Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley and Tlaib – have been outspoken about Trump’s immigration policies. Three of the four are natural born US citizens, and Omar, who was born in Somalia, became a US citizen in 2000.
“I don’t care if it was four white women or four white guys that had their view – they’d be on the billboard,” he said.
After a flood of protest and negative stories, the billboard came down.
Though QAnon started in America, it’s become a global movement, where thousands of activists hung their hopes on a Donald Trump post-election seizure of power, reports Deutsche Welle.
In an investigative report, German journalists established that the shadowy group has a solid presence in a country still grappling with its fascist past.
Prior to 2020, the QAnon movement was largely considered a niche phenomenon in Germany. But within a year, Germany has become home to the largest QAnon community outside of the English-speaking world.
The German government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, such as lockdowns and social distancing measures, prompted QAnon influencers and far-right sympathizers to stoke fear and propagate the movement’s conspiracy theories on social media platforms.
The Dubai-based messenger service Telegram became particularly popular among QAnon supporters, largely as a result of its lax policy towards cracking down on extremist content.
In December, the Berlin-based Amadeu Antonio Foundation found that German QAnon groups and channels hosted on Telegram had experienced significant growth during the first lockdown of the pandemic in March 2020.
Back then, Qlobal — now today’s largest German-language QAnon channel — had roughly 21,000 subscribers. Three months after, it had garnered more than 110,000 users. The channel now boasts more than 160,000 followers, with other QAnon groups and channels mirroring the rise in interest.
According to estimates provided by the Amadeo Antonio Foundation, there are at least 150,000 QAnon followers in Germany — and that figure is steadily rising. However, gauging the size of the QAnon community is difficult, largely because estimates lean on public online engagement.
QAnon’s presence in Germany second only to the U.S.
A 2 September report in Foreign Policy offered some numbers of the group’s presence on German soil:
Germany has the second-highest number of QAnon believers after the United States. NewsGuard has identified more than 448,000 QAnon followers in Europe. On YouTube, Facebook, and Telegram, accounts dealing with the QAnon conspiracy have over 200,000 followers in Germany alone. Telegram Channels related to QAnon (such as Frag uns doch! WWG1WGA and Qlobal-Change) have gone from 10,000 to nearly 200,000 followers combined in the past five months. The German-language QAnon YouTube channel Qlobal-Change has over 17 million views. Public figures such as the former national news anchor Eva Herman, the rapper Sido, and Hildmann have all expressed sympathy with the conspiracy theory. The German pop star Xavier Naidoo, a former judge on the German version of American Idol—Deutschland Sucht den Superstar—regularly shares QAnon content and tearfully lamented the supposed shadowy globalist sex-trafficking ring on YouTube.
In Germany, most QAnon followers are people under 50. This tracks a pattern in Germany’s anti-establishment right. In the 2019 elections in the East German states of Brandenburg and Saxony, voters under 50 supported the AfD more than any other party. Establishment parties were only able to cling to power because of overwhelming backing from voters over 60.
Many of these conspiracist groups risk violating Germany’s constitution, which has limitations on anti-Democratic and pro-Nazi speech owing to the country’s dark past. Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann pointed at QAnon’s use of anti-Semitic tropes. (Imagines of supposed conspirators drinking the blood of children draws directly on medieval anti-Semitic conspiracies that led to pogroms in Germany.) Vocabulary associated with QAnon-adjacent conspiracies has also been drawn on by the right-wing terrorists responsible for the June 2019 assassination of Walter Lübcke in Kassel, the October 2019 synagogue attack in Halle, and the Hanau shisha bar attack that left 11 people dead and 5 injured this February. In June, Germany’s federal and state interior ministers began thinking about a strategy to combat coronavirus-based disinformation and conspiracy theories, including raising questions around the constitutionality of some of them. A strategy should be adopted at their next meeting in the fall.
Using AI tools developed by data company Textgain, we analysed about half-a-million Twitter messages related to QAnon to identify major trends.
By observing how hashtags were combined in messages, we examined the network structure of QAnon users posting in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian and Spanish. Researchers identified about 3,000 different hashtags related to QAnon used by 1,250 Twitter profiles.
Every fourth QAnon tweet originated in the US (300). Far behind were tweets from other countries: Canada (30), Germany (25), Australia (20), the United Kingdom (20), the Netherlands (15), France (15), Italy (10), Spain (10) and others.
We examined QAnon profiles that share each other’s content, Trump tweets and YouTube videos, and found over 90% of these profiles shared the content of at least one other identified profile.
Seven main topics were identified: support for Trump, support for EU-based nationalism, support for QAnon, deep state conspiracies, coronavirus conspiracies, religious conspiracies and political extremism.
Hashtags rooted in US evangelicalism sometimes portrayed Trump as Jesus, as a superhero, or clad in medieval armour, with underlying Biblical references to a coming apocalypse in which he will defeat the forces of evil.
Overall, the coronavirus pandemic appears to function as an important conduit for all such messaging, with QAnon acting as a rallying flag for discontent among far-right European movements.
Storming the Reichstag
When QAnon members stormed the Capitol in Washington on 6 January, they were following a precedent set on 29 August 2020 in Berlin, when German QAnons were in the forefront of an attempted takeover of Reichstag building, the seat of Germany’s national legislature.
Unlike the subsequent action across the Atlantic, Berlin police were able to block the assault.
The August 29 demonstration was publicized by various far-right media, for example by the magazine Compact, which offered the whole front page of its September 2020 issue to tie together “Querdenken” with the “Q” of QAnon—the absurd conspiracy theory popular in the US, claiming that (democratic) politicians are kidnapping children to extract a rejuvenating substance (adrenochrome) from them, which also has fallen on fertile ground in Germany. The headline reads: “Q – Querdenker – Will the freedom movement topple the Corona dictatorship?” Compact’s editor, Jürgen Elsässer appeared together with a prominent figurehead of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, Martin Sellner.
One of the main QAnon promoters in Germany, Attila Hildmann, a vegan cook and (former) TV celebrity, who has earned the nickname of “Avocadolf.” According to Deutsche Welle “The vegan chef claims Adolf Hitler was a “blessing” compared to Angela Merkel, accusing her of preparing a global genocide.” He had been detained by the police in front of the Russian embassy during the August 29 demonstration.
It was, of course, the burning of the Reichstagbuilding on 27 February 1933 that led to the Enabling Act that gave Adolf Hitler the dictatorial power he needed to wage war on the world.
Der Spiegel makes the Nazi connection
As Just Security noted in a report filed ten days after the Reichstag assault, “The QAnon conspiracy theory has now spread to neo-Nazis in Germany.”
Germany’s leading news magazine, in a post-Reichstag takeover attempt report published 24 September 2020 noted the disturbing parallels.
QAnon’s followers spread disturbingly familiar themes: a supposed conspiracy of rich elites, including many Jewish businesspeople, targeting the rest of the world; a supposed group of corrupt left-wing politicians infiltrating democracies; journalists who spread propaganda as accomplices to the powerful. These centuries-old fictions from the right-wing, anti-Semitic fringe have been spread into the international public sphere via 21st-century media – part Dreyfus Affair, part Dan Brown.
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QAnon is on its way to becoming the most dangerous cult in the world – the first ideology to come from the digital realm and to emerge from an online niche into real life, aided by Donald Trump-supporters and right-wing demagogues. The “Q” cult is fueled by one or several anonymous users who regularly post to the web and who claim to have access to top-secret U.S. government documents – a claim that is more than questionable.
Just as disturbing is how QAnon builds on age-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that, centuries ago, claimed Jews drink the blood of Christians and seek to control the world. At the same time, the movement’s potential for violence is also becoming clearer. In March 2019, a QAnon believer shot an alleged mafia boss in New York because he believed the man was a member of the “deep state.” In April, U.S. police officers took a woman into custody who had threatened Hillary Clinton on Facebook because she had allegedly abused a child. In 2018, a man in Florida sent mail bombs to prominent Democrats whom he believed to be members of a “deep state” conspiracy.
The gunman in the central German city of Hanau who killed 10 people and then himself in February alluded to topics circulating in the QAnon cosmos. In a YouTube video, he argued that there were subterranean military installations in the U.S. where children are abused and killed and where the devil is worshipped.
QAnon followers also played a role in the storming of the Reichstag, the seat of German parliament, in Berlin in late August by a group protesting the authorities’ measures to control COVID-19. Naturopath Tamara Kirschbaum, who called on people to run up the building’s stairs to the entrance, is identified online as a “freelance employee” of Qlobal-Change, a portal of QAnon followers. She describes herself as “the voice” of the “X22 Report,” a YouTube show about QAnon-related topics that is also translated into German. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German domestic intelligence agency, in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia classifies her as a member of the Reichsbürger (or “citizens of the Reich”) scene, a group that does not believe in the legitimacy of the modern German state.
Two of the wingnut militias who breached the Capitol in the failed Trump Insurrection [also known as the Beer Gut Putsch] are busily abandoning their would-be Fuhrer in the wake of his ignominious disavowal of their efforts and his subsequent flight to Floridian exile.
We begin with QAnon, secular religion embraced by two new pistol-packin’ House Republicans.
The baseless QAnon theory suggests, without any evidence, that argued that a group of powerful, Satan-worshipping people running a cannibalistic child sexual abuse ring. It argues that Donald Trump is planning to take down the group – and that those plans could not be revealed publicly, but have been disseminated by an anonymous individual named Q.
In a series of posts, originally on website 4chan, Q laid out those theories in cryptic language. As those posts accrued, so did large numbers of followers, many of whom attended Mr Trump’s rallies and received some encouragement from him and his family.
QAnon’s adherents came to believe that the cabal would eventually be exposed and arrested in an event known as the Storm and orchestrated by Mr Trump. But despite repeated predictions of dates for such an event – including an initial indication from the person going by the name Q that it would happen in 2017 – and an insistence that it would eventually arrive, nothing happened.
The inauguration and Mr Trump’s final day in office came to symbolise for many the final opportunity for the beliefs within QAnon to be realised. Followers suggested that the ceremony would not go as planned: that Mr Trump was gathering people together so that they could be more easily arrested, for example, or even that Joe Biden was working on behalf of his predecessor.
Keeping the faith wasn’t easy when Inauguration Day didn’t usher in “The Storm,” the apocalyptic reckoning that they have believed was coming for prominent Democrats and Trump’s “deep state” foes. QAnon followers grappled with anger, confusion and disappointment Wednesday as President Joe Biden was sworn into office.
Some believers found a way to twist the conspiracy theory’s convoluted narrative to fit their belief that Biden’s victory was an illusion and that Trump would secure a second term in office. Others clung to the notion that Trump will remain a “shadow president” during Biden’s term. Some even floated the idea that the inauguration ceremony was computer-generated or that Biden himself could be the mysterious “Q,” who is purportedly a government insider posting cryptic clues about the conspiracy.
For many others, however, Trump’s departure sowed doubt.
“I am so scared right now, I really feel nothing is going to happen now,” one poster wrote on a Telegram channel popular with QAnon believers. “I’m just devastated.”
One QAnon channel on Telegram with 40,000 subscribers noted that the last sentence of Eric Trump’s farewell tweet — “ … the best is yet to come!” — was also a common slogan for QAnon adherents, failing to mention that the phrase is a commonly used cliche. Another QAnon channel with 35,000 Telegram subscribers, devoted to the “Great Awakening,” highlighted Trump’s final remarks as president: “We will be back in some form — Have a good life. We will see you soon.”
“It simply doesn’t make sense that we all got played,” one QAnon channel on Telegram said.
Some of the most notable figures in QAnon’s online universe said they were having a change of heart. After Biden’s inauguration, Ron Watkins — the longtime 8kun administrator who critics have suspected may have helped write Q’s posts himself, a charge he denies — said on Telegram that it was time to move on.
“We need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able,” said Watkins, who in recent months had become one of the loudest backers of conspiracy theories suggesting Biden’s win was a fraud.
As Biden took the oath of office just before noon on Wednesday, a QAnon channel on Telegram lit up with laments.
“We’ve been lied to,” wrote one person. “I think we have been fooled like no other,” another responded, adding: “Hate to say it. Held on to hope til this very moment.” “I feel like I’m losing my mind,” said a third. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Anyone else feeling beyond let down right now?” read a popular post on a QAnon message board. “It’s like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and realize it was a lump of coal the whole time.”
QAnon adherents are used to dealing with predictions that have not come true. The conspiracy theory began in October 2017 when an anonymous internet user posing as a government insider posted on 4chan that Hillary Clinton was about to be arrested, that her passport had been flagged, and that the government was preparing for “massive riots”. None of that happened, nor did any of the myriad other arrests, declassifications, executions, resignations or revelations that the anonymous poster, who came to be known as Q, has promised believers for the past three years. But the movement has nevertheless grown in size and influence, becoming a meaningful force in theRepublican party and a motivating factor for many of the insurrectionists who attacked the US Capitol on 6 January.
Some were furious they had been led to believe the so-called ‘storm’ would occur on Inauguration Day.
‘Wake up. We’ve been had,’ one wrote. Another simply said: ‘It’s over.’
They described feeling duped, saying: ‘Been played like fools’, ‘the silence is deafening’ and ‘OMG none of this was real’. Another wrote: ‘Well I’m the official laughing stock of my family now. Awesome.’
‘Where was Trump? Where is the military? Where was the insurrection act? What about his EO’s? I’m losing my sh*t right now. Absolutely losing my sh*t’.
Proud Boys, too, jump off Trump bandwagon
The Proud Boys are the bellicose far-Right fanatics Trump incited during the 29 September Presidential debate. Asked to condemn violent extremists, the Republican candidate declared “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem.”
After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump.
In a Nov. 8 post in a private channel of the messaging app Telegram, the group urged its followers to attend protests against an election that it said had been fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump. “Hail Emperor Trump,” the Proud Boys wrote.
But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday.
As Mr. Trump departed the White House on Wednesday, the Proud Boys, once among his staunchest supporters, have also started leaving his side. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Mr. Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” according to messages reviewed by The New York Times. They have also urged supporters to stop attending rallies and protests held for Mr. Trump or the Republican Party.
The comments are a startling turn for the Proud Boys, which for years had backed Mr. Trump and promoted political violence. Led by Enrique Tarrio, many of its thousands of members were such die-hard fans of Mr. Trump that they offered to serve as his private militia and celebrated after he told them in a presidential debate last year to “stand back and stand by.” On Jan. 6, some Proud Boys members stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Proud Boys provocateur busted
The Proud Boys suffered another major setback Wednesday when a key organizer was arrested and hauled into court by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a key organizer of the group’s participation in the Capitol coup attempt.
The FBI on Wednesday arrested a Florida-based member of the right-wing Proud Boys group on charges of storming the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago in a crowd of Donald Trump supporters challenging his election defeat, the Justice Department said.
Joseph Randall Biggs, 37, faces charges of corruptly obstructing an official proceeding before Congress, unlawful entry, and disorderly conduct in the attack on the seat of government while lawmakers were certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s Nov. 3 election win.
Biggs was released on a $25,000 bond on Wednesday afternoon.
The FBI affidavit traced Biggs’ role in organizing the Proud Boys in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot, as well as his movements through Washington, D.C., on the day that the attempted insurrection occurred.
The FBI said Biggs and Enrique Tarrio, the South Florida-based chairman of the Proud Boys, posted messages in late December to the social media site Parler, which had become popular as a right-wing alternative to mainstream social media sites, urging members to turn out in D.C. on Jan. 6
Unlike at past events, Tarrio and Biggs urged Proud Boys adherents to show up without the black-and-yellow attire they typically wear.
“[W]e will not be attending DC in colors. We will be blending in as one of you,” Biggs allegedly said, in a message directed at Antifa, the anti-fascist protest movement. “You won’t see us. You’ll even think we are you. … We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you.”
Jan. 6, he added, “is gonna be epic.”
On that date, agents said Biggs was spotted among other Proud Boys members on the east side of the U.S. Capitol, identified in a video — by name — by another member in an interview published online days later.
On InfoWars, Alex Jones—for whom the Trump era represented both a glorious rise and equally precipitous fall—seemed subdued. For commentary, he brought on Elmer Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, who appeared sitting in his car, shot from below at the most unflattering possible angle, apparently on his cellphone. “We no longer have a legitimate sitting president,” Rhodes told Jones, who nodded, grimly.
Moments later, Jones, sounding especially hoarse, pivoted joylessly to one of his signature supplement ads. “With all these pressures, you need a high quality multivitamin,” he told his audience tonelessly.
A remarkable and tragic overthrow of a democratically elected government in the United States more than a century ago bears eerie parallels to the 6 January insurrection in the nation’s Capitol.
White resentment, lies about an honest election and inflammatory media played their part in both events, and their resonances evoke a tragic and unealed legacy from the nation’s past.
Kathy Roberts Forde, Associate Professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Kristin Gustafson, Associate Teaching Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Washington, Bothell examine one of the darkest moments of American history in a report for The Conversation, the open source academic journal written in everyday English:
A white supremacist coup succeeded in 1898 North Carolina, led by lying politicians and racist newspapers that amplified their lies
While experts debate whether the U.S. Capitol siege was an attempted coup, there is no debate that what happened in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, was a coup – and its consequences were tragic.
These two events, separated by 122 years, share critical features. Each was organized and planned. Each was an effort to steal an election and disfranchise voters. Each was animated by white racist fears.
And each required the help of the media to be successful.
Those who study Reconstruction and its aftermath know the U.S. has deep experience with political and electoral violence. Reconstruction was the 12-year period following the Civil War when the South returned to the Union and newly freed Black Americans were incorporated into U.S. democracy.
But few understand that the Wilmington coup, when white supremacists overthrew the city’s legitimately elected bi-racial government, could not have happened without the involvement of white news media. The same is true of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6, 2021.
The news media, it turns out, have often been key actors in U.S. electoral violence. This history is explored in a chapter one of us – Gustafson – wrote for a book the other – Forde – co-edited with Sid Bedingfield, “Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South,” which comes out later this year.
A major obstacle lay in his path to the governor’s office. Several years earlier, Black Republicans and white Populists in North Carolina, tired of Democrats enriching themselves off public policies favoring banks, railroads and industry, joined forces.
Known as Fusionists, they rose to power in the executive branch, the legislature and the governments of several eastern towns, but most importantly, the thriving port city of Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina.
Wilmington, with its majority Black population and successful Black middle class, was a city that offered hope for Black Southerners. Black men had higher rates of literacy than white men, ran some of the city’s most successful businesses, such as restaurants, tailors, shoemakers, furniture makers and jewelers, and, to the dismay of Democrats, held public office.
Using anti-Black disinformation spread through newspapers and public speeches across the state, they would whip up white racial fears of “Negro domination” and “black beasts” that preyed on the “virtue” of white women. The goal: drive a wedge in the Fusionist coalition and lure white Populists back to the Democratic fold.
The press and political power
The News & Observer, the most influential newspaper in the state, was the Democratic Party’s most potent weapon. Its editor called it “the militant voice of white supremacy.”
For months in advance of the November election, the paper ran articles, editorials, speeches and reader letters telling lies about Black malfeasance, misrule, criminality and sexual predations against white women. White newspapers across the state, from big cities to tiny hamlets, republished the News & Observer’s content.
“The prevalence of rape by brutal negroes upon helpless white women has brought about a reign of terror in rural districts,” the paper said. Daniels admitted years later this claim was a lie.
Knowing the power of images, Daniels hired a cartoonist to create viciously racist images for the front page.
Roughly a year after Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent white Georgian, gave a speech advocating the lynching of Black men for their supposed assaults on white women, white newspapers across North Carolina reprinted and discussed it for days to gin up racist hostility.
Many of the Capitol Police officers who served as the front line in the defense of the national legislature during the 6 January insurrection may have had more in common with the insurrections than with the black colleagues, according to a searing report from ProPublica by Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien.
Their findings raise troubling questions about the ease with which armed radical nationalists were able to see a building that hadn’t fallen since the War of 1812.
“No One Took Us Seriously”: Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years
When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.
Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”
In case after case, agency lawyers denied wrongdoing. But in an interview, Dine said it was clear he had to address the department’s charged racial climate. He said he promoted a Black officer to assistant chief, a first for the agency, and tried to increase diversity by changing the force’s hiring practices. He also said he hired a Black woman to lead a diversity office and created a new disciplinary body within the department, promoting a Black woman to lead it.
“There is a problem with racism in this country, in pretty much every establishment that exists,” said Dine, who left the agency in 2016. “You can always do more in retrospect.”
Whether the Capitol Police managed to root out racist officers will be one of many issues raised as Congress investigates the agency’s failure to prevent a mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol while lawmakers inside voted to formalize the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
Already, officials have suspended several police officers for possible complicity with insurrectionists, one of whom was pictured waving a Confederate battle flag as he occupied the building. One cop was captured on tape seeming to take selfies with protesters, while another allegedly wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he directed protesters around the Capitol building. While many officers were filmed fighting off rioters, at least 12 others are under investigation for possibly assisting them.
Two current Black Capitol Police officers told BuzzFeed News that they were angered by leadership failures that they said put them at risk as racist members of the mob stormed the building. The Capitol Police force is only 29% Black in a city that’s 46% Black. By contrast, as of 2018, 52% of Washington Metropolitan police officers were Black. The Capitol Police are comparable to the Metropolitan force in spending, employing more than 2,300 people and boasting an annual budget of about a half-billion dollars.
The Capitol Police did not immediately respond to questions for this story.
Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, a former Capitol Police officer who was the lead plaintiff in the 2001 discrimination lawsuit filed against the department, said she was not surprised that pro-Trump rioters burst into the Capitol last week.
In her 25 years with the Capitol Police, Blackmon-Malloy spent decades trying to raise the alarm about what she saw as endemic racism within the force, even organizing demonstrations where Black officers would return to the Capitol off-duty, protesting outside the building they usually protect.
The 2001 case, which started with more than 250 plaintiffs, remains pending. As recently as 2016, a Black female officer filed a racial discrimination complaint against the department.
“Nothing ever really was resolved. Congress turned a blind eye to racism on the Hill,” Blackmon-Malloy, who retired as a lieutenant in 2007, told ProPublica. She is now vice president of the U.S. Capitol Black Police Association, which held 16 demonstrations protesting alleged discrimination between 2013 and 2018. “We got Jan. 6 because no one took us seriously.”
Retired Lt. Frank Adams sued the department in 2001 and again in 2012 for racial discrimination. A Black, 20-year veteran of the force, Adams supervised mostly white officers in the patrol division. He told ProPublica he endured or witnessed racism and sexism constantly. He said that before he joined the division, there was a policy he referred to as “meet and greet,” where officers were directed to stop any Black person on the Hill. He also said that in another unit, he once found a cartoon on his desk of a Black man ascending to heaven only to be greeted by a Ku Klux Klan wizard. When he complained to his superior officers, he said he was denied promotions and training opportunities, and suffered other forms of retaliation.
In an interview, he drew a direct line between racism in the Capitol Police and the events that unfolded last week. He blamed Congress for not listening to Black members of the force years ago.
“They only become involved in oversight when it’s in the news cycle,” said Adams, who retired in 2011. “They ignored the racism happening in the department. They ignored the hate.”
Hawley, the virulent embodiment of animus, has emerged as the Republican Party’s most effective advocate of reaction, smug, intense, and fiercely zealous.
As a summa cum laude Stanford grad and holder of a doctorate in law from Yale, he possesses a singular ability to embody the rage of the left-behinds that Trump so assiduously harvested.
He’s smart enough to know the ballot counts were accurate, but shameless enough to harvest the rage Trump nurtured and.
He is, quite possibly, the most dangerous man in the country, a religious zealot and a passionate authoritarian, honing his message for the inevitable White House run.
For 20 years Hawley’s political fortunes came together neatly: Stanford University, Yale Law School, clerkship for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a few years of litigation at a powerhouse D.C. firm, a few years as an admired professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, two years as attorney general of Missouri and two years so far in the U.S. Senate, pampered with chatter about presidential prospects.
As this avowed populist prepared to take a stand in the Senate, he raised his fist in solidarity with pro-Trump protesters who had massed by the Capitol. An hour later, the worst of populism stormed the building, assaulted police officers and parkoured around the seat of the republic in a mockery of the process.
Democrats, pundits and some Republicans saw a connection between the mob’s siege and Hawley’s procedural objection, which he announced Dec. 30 ahead of others like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). Hawley’s Democratic colleagues in the Senate have demanded their resignations and — in the case of Republican Ben Sasse (Neb.) — called Hawley’s actions “really dumbass.” He is now “public enemy No. 1” for the Lincoln Project, the posse of anti-Trump conservatives. The businessman in Joplin, Mo., who helpedlaunch Hawley’s political career called him “anti-democracy.” Simon & Schuster is refusing to publish his new book, titled “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” because of “his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy.” He has “blood on his hands,” according to the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. Hallmark, based in Kansas City, sent Hawley a card asking him to refund its contributions.
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Admirers of Hawley see glimmers of Barry Goldwater and William Jennings Bryan. Critics see Hawley cobbling a coherent philosophy from the garbage of Trump’s grievance politics. Wall Street is spooked by his aggression toward China and Silicon Valley. LGBT and abortion rights activists are worried about Christian nationalism creeping toward the presidency.
And as the Kansas City Star, the largest newspaper in his home state of Missouri noted in a memorable editorial about his drive to overturn the presidential election:
Missourians must see Hawley’s decision for what it is: misguided ambition, coupled with a shockingly cynical approach to democracy. Hawley’s lust for the White House, he is telling us, is more important than your right to vote.
Plus dozens of others are under investigation, as evidence that major players in the Capitol invasion were folks who took an oath to defend the Constitution.
Here’s the introduction to a very chilling report:
As President Donald Trump’s supporters massed outside the Capitol last week and sang the national anthem, a line of men wearing olive-drab helmets and body armor trudged purposefully up the marble stairs in a single-file line, each man holding the jacket collar of the one ahead.
The formation, known as “Ranger File,” is standard operating procedure for a combat team that is “stacking up” to breach a building — instantly recognizable to any U.S. soldier or Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a chilling sign that many at the vanguard of the mob that stormed the seat of American democracy either had military training or were trained by those who did.ADVERTISEMENT
An Associated Press review of public records, social media posts and videos shows at least 21 current or former members of the U.S. military or law enforcement have been identified as being at or near the Capitol riot, with more than a dozen others under investigation but not yet named. In many cases, those who stormed the Capitol appeared to employ tactics, body armor and technology such as two-way radio headsets that were similar to those of the very police they were confronting.
Experts in homegrown extremism have warned for years about efforts by far-right militants and white-supremacist groups to radicalize and recruit people with military and law enforcement training, and they say the Jan. 6 insurrection that left five people dead saw some of their worst fears realized.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” — Children’s saying
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.” — Stephen Fry
No President has ever deployed violent language against his own people in the way Donald Trump has.
Samira Sarano, Kone Foundation Senior Researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland, examined Trump’s rhetoric in the 2016 election in The Meta-violence of Trumpism, research published in the European Journal of American Studies, an open-access academic journal.
Here’s a telling passage [emphasis added]:
Rather than denouncing violence, Trump frequently praised the “passion” and “energy” of his supporters, and he even promised to pay the legal fees of supporters caught in violent altercations.At a March 4, 2016 rally, he commented on a protestor’s removal: “Try not to hurt him. If you do, I’ll defend you in court. Don’t worry about it.” At times, Trump explicitly condoned the use of violence against protestors. On February 1, 2016, he stated: “If you see someone getting ready to throw tomatoes knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK. Just knock the hell… I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” Though Trump himself wished he could “punch [a protestor] in the face,” he recognized that such tactics were unpopular: “Part of the problem and part of the reason it takes so long [to remove protestors] is that nobody wants to hurt each other anymore.” Trump praised violent action against protestors: “I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There’s a guy totally disruptive, throwing punches. We’re not allowed to punch back anymore. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.”
Donald Trump: Aggressive Rhetoric and Political Violence, a more recent study, published in October in the journal Perspectives on Terrorism, was authored by two Columbia University scholars, political scientist and journalist Brigitte L. Nacosis and Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government and International and Public Affairs Robert Y. Shapiro, and Yaeli Bloch-Elkonis Senior Lecturer/Assistant Professor of Communications and Political Science at Bar Ilan University.
Here’s one key excerpt [emphasis added]:
Examining whether correlations existed between counties that were venues of Donald Trump’s 275 campaign rallies in 2016 and subsequent hate crimes, three political scientists found that “counties that had hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226 percent increase in reported hate crimes over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.” While cautioning that this “analysis cannot be certain it was Trump’s campaign rally rhetoric that caused people to commit more crime in the host county,” the researchers also found it “hard to discount a ‘Trump effect’ since data of the Anti-Defamation League showed “a considerable number of these reported hate crimes referenced Trump.” Moreover, investigative reporting identified 41 cases of domestic terrorism/hate crimes or threats thereof, in which the perpetrators invoked Trump favorably in manifestos, social media posts, police interrogations, or court documents. Almost all of this violence was committed by White males against minorities or politicians singled out frequently by Trump for rhetorical attacks, and journalists. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker recorded a total of 202 attacks on U.S. journalists from 2017, Trump’s first year in office, through mid-2020.
Trumpspeak and the assault on the Capitol
And now another study parses Trump’s speeches in the lead-up to and in the aftermath of 6 January insurrection at the nation’s Capitol.
Two scholars from the University of Memphis, Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis, and Leah Cathryn Windsor, Research Assistant Professor, parse presidential speech in a report for The Conversation, the open access, plain language academic journal:
How Trump’s language shifted in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot – 2 linguists explain
On Jan. 6, the world witnessed how language can incite violence.
One after another, a series of speakers at the “Save America” rally at the Ellipse in Washington redoubled the messages of anger and outrage.
This rhetoric culminated with a directive by the president to go to the Capitol building to embolden Republicans in Congress to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“Fight like hell,” President Donald Trump implored his supporters. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
Starting with a speech he made on Dec. 2 – in which he made his case for election fraud – we analyzed six public addresses Trump made before and after the riot at the Capitol building. The others were the campaign rally ahead of the runoff elections in Georgia, the speech he made at the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, the videotaped message that aired later that same day, his denouncement of the violence on Jan. 7 and his speech en route to Texas on Jan. 12.
Together, they reveal how the president’s language escalated in intensity in the weeks and days leading up to the riots.
Finding patterns in language
Textual analysis – converting words into numbers that can be analyzed as data – can identify patterns in the types of words people use, including their syntax, semantics and vocabulary choice. Linguistic analysis can reveal latent trends in the speaker’s psychological, emotional and physical states beneath the surface of what’s being heard or read.
This sort of analysis has led to a number of discoveries.
Textual analysis continues to offer fresh political insights, such as its use to advance the theory that social media posts attributed to QAnon are actually written by two different people.
The ‘official’ sounding Trump
Contrary to popular thinking, Trump does not universally use inflammatory rhetoric. While he is well known for his unique speaking style and his once-frequent social media posts, in official settings his language has been quite similar to that of other presidents.
Researchers have noted how people routinely alter their speaking and writing depending on whether a setting is formal or informal. In formal venues, like the State of the Union speeches, textual analysis has found Trump to use language in ways that echo his predecessors.
In addition, a recent study analyzed 10,000 words from Trump’s and President-elect Joe Biden’s campaign speeches. It concluded – perhaps surprisingly – that Trump and Biden’s language was similar.
Both men used ample emotional language – the kind that aims to persuade people to vote – at roughly the same rates. They also used comparable rates of positive language, as well as language related to trust, anticipation and surprise. One possible reason for this could be the audience, and the persuasive and evocative nature of campaign speeches themselves, rather than individual differences between speakers.
After studying Trump’s speeches before the storming of the Capitol building, we found some underlying patterns. If it seemed there was a growing sense of momentum and action in his speeches, it’s because there was.
Nearly a third of Black U.S. military servicemembers reported experiencing racial discrimination, harassment or both during a 12-month period, according to results of a long-withheld Defense Department survey that underscore concerns about racism in the ranks.
The 2017 survey, whose results have not previously been reported, also showed that U.S. troops who experienced racial discrimination or harassment had high levels of dissatisfaction with the complaint process and largely did not report it.
The data support the findings of a 2020 Reuters investigation here, which found that servicemembers feared that reporting discrimination would likely backfire and was not worth the risk.
“Overall, results reveal much work is needed to improve the reporting process for those who experience racial/ethnic harassment and discrimination,” the Defense Department acknowledged in a report that accompanied the survey data.
The Pentagon’s release of the data followed a Reuters article last month here disclosing how the Defense Department sat on the 2017 survey data during President Donald Trump’s administration, even last month denying a Reuters Freedom of Information Act Request.
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