Here at esnl, we regard the Ron Cobb as the greatest editorial cartoonist of the 20th Century. We first encountered his unique style a razor-sharp insight in the late Los Angeles Free Press on moving to California in the fall of 1967. If the mark of a great artist is a body or work transcending time and place, he certainly made his mark, as exemplified in the timely offering for nearly 60 years ago:
What if the current, and global, wave of protests of Israel’s slaughter of the innocents in Palestine is a symptom of something deeper, a systemic malaise afflicting the West’s<
Consider the following from Gareth Fearn, a British academic whose research includes a deep focus on the politics of of austerity and the transition to cleaner energy sources, writing in the London Review of Books:
There is a refusal by liberals to accept accountability for the world they have created, through their support for wars in the Middle East, their acceptance of growing inequality and poverty, cuts to public services, glacial action on climate change and failure to create secure and meaningful jobs.
This could be a moment for significant reform, but it would require a challenge to at least some sections of capital. Changing university funding models means taking on Wall Street. Arms companies rely on US defence spending and its military interventions or proxy wars. Action on climate change means losses for fossil fuel companies, whose owners often fund the conservative right.
Liberals in the US and across Europe have decided they do not want to take on this challenge. Their latest wheeze is to de-risk investment in the hope that it will revitalise stagnating economies, while doing what they can to see off any challenge from the more progressive left. That means heavily policing and demonising protests, working with the right to undermine candidates and parties that do seek to challenge capital (and the status of liberal parties), and more generally polluting the political sphere with bullshit to blur the lines of accountability – as when the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, insinuated that the protests at Columbia were instigated by ‘external actors’, or a Princeton administrator allegedly fabricated stories about threats made to staff.
Liberalism has two core components: the protection of property rights and a notion of negative freedom grounded in human rights and political checks and balances. What we are now seeing in the US (and the UK, and elsewhere in Europe) is the defence of the former at the expense of the latter. Political leaders and university managers are undermining not only free expression but the role of the academy in holding political decisions to account. Large sections of the news media are engaged in holding the public to account rather than politicians. And, perhaps most fundamentally, the ballot box offers a choice only between the degree of authoritarianism and economic dysfunction available to voters. If this situation persists, not only in the US but across the world, then occupying a university building will seem like a picnic when compared with what may be coming down the road.
From Canadian journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, writing on the trucking chaos north of the border for The Tyee, in which he also reveals that much of the funding for the protest hails from the U.S. side of the border:
Welcome to the mining republic of Canada where dysfunction and disinformation accumulate daily like waste in a leaky, toxic tailing pond.
Over the last two weeks Canadians have not only been served a master class on the dismal quality of our political leadership but a pointed lecture on how to destabilize a democracy.
It is clear now that a highly organized group of militants — some with military and counterinsurgency experience — have mobilized incoherent popular frustrations created by the pandemic to shield their goal of undermining a democracy and overthrowing a government they don’t like. Many of these militants hail from Alberta and the west.
The protesters talk about individual rights and freedoms but no one talks about responsibilities and that’s how democracies fail.
They are aided by the internet, foreign funds and perhaps foreign players (the whole “freedom convoy” movement has the stink of covert Russian involvement). As they occupied Ottawa, they presented a hard face composed of a phalanx of diesel trucks and a soft face made up of rock music, fireworks, kids and hot tubs.
And people defecating on doorsteps.
Posted in Culture, Extremism, Governance, Politics, Protests
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.
From the University of Cambridge:
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.
She has also been working with the UK Government as part of an academic and practitioner network set up to help tackle extremism.
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.
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.”
Posted in Academia, Crime, Culture, Extremism, Intolerance, Media, Politics, Protests, Race, Uncategorized
Since a massive protests against new agricultural “reform” laws began 9 August, moire than 100,000 farmers have left their lands to converge on the national capital in what is perhaps India’s longest continuous protest.
The Hindu nationalist regime of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been following the usual neoliberal tactics, handing over more and more of India’s economy to the ravages of multinational corporations.
Modi’s particularly agitated over Tweets supporting the farmers, and has taken action.
First up, threats to Twitter
Just as in the U.S., social media have been a major driver of protests, and the Indian government has struck back at Twitter, reports BuzzFeed:
India’s government has threatened to punish employees at Twitter with fines and jail terms of up to seven years for restoring hundreds of accounts it has ordered the company to block. Most accounts were critical of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.
On Monday, Twitter complied with the government’s order and prevented people in India from viewing more than 250 accounts belonging to activists, political commentators, a movie star, and the Caravan, an investigative news magazine. Most accounts had criticized Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, and his government. But the company restored the accounts approximately six hours later after a Twitter lawyer met with IT ministry officials, and argued that the tweets and accounts constituted free speech and were newsworthy.
India’s government disagreed. On Tuesday, the IT ministry sent a notice to Twitter, ordering it to block the accounts once again. It also threatened people who work at Twitter’s Indian arm with legal consequences, which could include a fine or a jail term of up to seven years.
“This is really problematic,” said Nikhil Pahwa, editor of MediaNama, a technology policy website, and an internet activist. “I don’t see why the government of India should wade into this territory of trying to censor tweets when they have much bigger problems to deal with.”
A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment.
Celebrities add to Modi’s headache; action follows
The digital has deepened of late, with some pointed comments from international celebrities.
From the Los Angeles Times:
It took just one tweet from pop star Rihanna to anger the Indian government and supporters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party. “Why aren’t we talking about this?!” the singer wrote, with a link to a news story on the massive farmer protests that have gripped India for more than two months.
Now, senior Indian government ministers, celebrities and even the foreign ministry are urging people to come together and denounce outsiders who they say are trying to destabilize the country.
“It is unfortunate to see vested interest groups trying to enforce their agenda on these protests, and derail them,” India’s foreign ministry said in a rare statement Wednesday, without naming Rihanna and others who followed her example.
But it was another celebrity, a young Swede, who really got Modi’s blood boiling.
From Aljazeera:
The creators of an Indian farmers’ protest “toolkit” shared by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg will be investigated by police, authorities said, claiming it was designed to “encourage disaffection and ill-will” against the government.
<snip>
Police in the capital New Delhi, where a farmers’ tractor rally last week turned into a deadly rampage where one person died and hundreds of police officers were injured, said they had filed a complaint against the toolkit’s makers.
The complaint does not name Thunberg.
“Preliminary enquiry has revealed that the ‘toolkit’ in question appears to have been created by a pro-Khalistani Organisation ‘Poetic Justice Foundation’,” police said in a statement, citing Sikh separatists who want to create a homeland of Khalistan in India’s northern Punjab state.
Many of the protesting farmers hail from Punjab.
Police said the toolkit creators appeared to “create disharmony among various social, religious and cultural groups and encourage disaffection and ill-will against the (government) of India”.
More from Deutsche Welle:
Police in New Delhi on Thursday registered a case against the creators of a “toolkit” that was previously shared online by climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Swedish environmental crusader responded to the backlash by the police saying that despite the “hate”, she still supports the widespread farmers’ protest in India. She tweeted:
“No amount of hate, threats or violations of human rights will ever change that.”
The “toolkit” document shared by Thunberg encourages people to sign a petition which condemns the “state violence” against the protesters. It also urges the Indian government to listen to the protestors rather than mock them. The toolkit also mentions different hashtags to use on Twitter to support the farmers’ protests. Additionally, it asks for people worldwide to organize protests near Indian embassies or local government offices on the 13th and 14th February.
,snip>
Indian news channels initially reported that a police case has been filed against Greta Thunberg. News channel reported that the police complaint included charges of sedition, an overseas “conspiracy” and an attempt to “promote enmity between groups.” However, the police was later quoted as saying that its case does not name the climate activist.
Why farmers are striking, and why it matters
Bhavani Shankar, Professorial Research Fellow in Food Systems and Health at University of Sheffield examines the roots of the massive protest in an article for The Conversation, an open source academic journal written in everyday English:
Why Indian farmers are so angry about the Modi government’s agricultural reforms
India’s farmers have been protesting since the autumn, with a growing intensity that culminated in a violent breaching of barriers in the Red Fort in Delhi during India’s Republic Day celebrations on January 26.
The protests were spurred by the passing of a set of agricultural reform bills in parliament in September 2020 that aimed to fundamentally transform the way in which farm produce is marketed in the country. India’s farming population of more than 100 million is comprised largely of small farmers who fear that the reforms will add considerable uncertainty to their already meagre livelihoods.
India has historically had a strongly regulated marketing system for agricultural produce, originally devised to enable farmers to sell to the market but at the same time to protect the small, often poor farmers from the vagaries of the open market.
Such regulation is a state-level responsibility in India’s federal governance structure. Accordingly, each state devised a system wherein the initial purchase and sale of agricultural products had to be conducted at state-regulated wholesale markets called mandis. These mandis had licensed middlemen and traders who could be regulated by the government to ensure that farmers were not exploited.
The broader legislative framework also acted to limit private sector storage of key food products (to prevent hoarding) and discourage direct contracting between private agribusiness and farmers. There were important variations in regulations across states, and legislation has changed over time, but the broad intention was to protect farmers by limiting the power of agribusiness.
However, the regulatory system did not always work as intended in practice, and deficiencies became apparent over time. Despite the idea of monitoring, traders and middlemen in wholesale markets were found to often collude to the disadvantage of the farmer. Pricing practices were opaque and farmers too often received a very low share of the price.
Variations in regulations across states also hindered interstate trade opportunities. As the Indian economy was liberalised, private enterprise and agribusiness was growing, but found itself shackled by the regulatory framework. Many commentators agreed that reform was needed.
The three bills
A set of three complementary bills was rushed through parliament by the Modi government in September 2020. The first seeks to erode the role of the regulated mandis in marketing farm produce by allowing parallel trade, including electronic trading, outside the mandi system within and across states.
The second loosens the restrictions on private sector storage and stocking of produce, allowing restrictions only in case of strong price spikes when hoarding becomes a strong concern.
The third bill sets up a framework for direct formal contracting between farmers and the agribusinesses that buy from them.
Taken together, these bills are a radical departure from the tightly regulated system for marketing agricultural produce that existed before. The bills would curb the regulatory power of states, allowing the central government to set the agenda more firmly.
The reforms provide a significant fillip to the operation of private enterprise, especially large agribusiness in India. The expectation of the government is that the strengthening of these parallel market channels will create competition for the farmers’ produce from both within and across states, leading to improved remuneration for farmers.
What are the farmers unhappy about?
Although the reforms are ostensibly about empowering farmers, there is deep concern that they will largely boost private agribusiness to the detriment of the livelihoods of small farmers. The bills propose new market channels that are largely unregulated, potentially leaving farmers at the mercy of powerful private sector players.
A related concern is that the emergence of these parallel channels will undermine the longstanding regulated mandi system that farmers understand and are used to operating in, despite its numerous flaws.
Contract farming, which would become more commonplace if the bills become law, theoretically offers farmers the option of cutting out middlemen and their fees to deal directly with a downstream buyer. But experience from India and around the world shows that large buyers often prefer to deal with larger farmers located in well-developed regions who can supply assured large volumes with minimal friction. Thus small farmers from less developed areas with poor infrastructure may find themselves frozen out of such channels.
These serious concerns have led protesting farmers to demand not just alterations to the new bills, but their complete repeal. The direction of travel of the bills – towards private sector entry and government withdrawal – has also left farmers worrying about the future of other government policies that have long supported their livelihoods, such as Minimum Support Prices (MSPs).
MSPs are minimum prices announced periodically by the government for certain essential farm products, and used when the government buys these crops from the farmers for distribution to poor consumers. The MSPs help provide a measure of stability and certainty to prices received by farmers, and the protesting farmers want MSPs to be legally guaranteed in the future. This and a set of other demands, ranging from the cancellation of penalties for crop residue burning that contributes to air pollution, to enhancements to energy subsidies, have now also been added to the farmers’ core demand to cancel reforms.
Posted in Agriculture, Asia, Corpocracy, Culture, Debt, Family, Food, Governance, Law, Politics, Protests, Uncategorized
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.
So here tis, starting with a report from the Toronto Globe and Mail:
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.
From CBC News:
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.
Posted in Ethnicity, Extremism, Governance, Intolerance, Law, Politics, Protests
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.
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.
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.
Lots more, after the jump. . .
Continue readingAs President, Donald Trump had a lot in common with his Brazilian counterpart: Both are hard Right nationalists given to inflammatory rhetoric; both downplayed the coronavirus; and both led nations that became leading global COVID hotspots during their administrations.
Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro remains in office, but his hold on power is slipping, evidenced by massive protests over the weekend decrying his handling of the raging pandemic.
From MercoPress:
Brazilians took the streets over the weekend calling for the impeachment of President Jair Bolsonaro, who is under fire for his government’s handling of COVID-19, which has raged through the country claiming more than 216,000 lives and 8,9 million contagions.
Cars with claxons paraded through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and a dozen or more other cities as other protesters marched on foot, some calling, “Get out Bolsonaro!”
Sunday’s protests were called by conservative groups that had once backed the president, while those on Saturday had come from left groupings.
Sunday protestors complained about their disappointment, and now with the situation in Manaus, capital of Amazon state, where hospitals have run out of oxygen for the interned with the virus.
However Thomaz Favaro, a political analyst at consultancy Control Risks, said Bolsonaro faces little risk of impeachment, though that could change if his allies lose a Feb. 2 vote for leadership of the lower house. “Bolsonaro’s base in congress is unstable, but it is robust,” he said, though it could be dented by the president’s flagging popularity.
What’s peculiar about these latter-day nationalist leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro is their failure to learn from history of successful fascists of the past.
Take the case of Adolf Hitler, a man who implemented massive public health campaigns, including a drive against smoking and funding for medical research on cancer cures.
Nationalist leaders cast themselves as heroes, and what could be more heroic than fighting for the health of the citizens of the nation?
But Trump and Bolsonaro are also narcissists, and admitting that a pandemic might happen on their watch, especially a pandemic that might inconvenience the masses on whose adulation they crave, would have been tantamount to an admission of weakness, of failure. And narcissists are incapable of that,
Republic Day, held annually on 26 January, is celebrated in the India’s capital with a major military parade marking the birth of the nation as a constitutional republic in 1950.
But this year, all eyes are on another Republic Day parade, a caravan of thousands of tractors, driven by farmers protesting agricultural “reform” laws [previously] passed by the government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
From BBC News:
Tens of thousands of farmers gathered on the outskirts of India’s capital New Delhi on Tuesday, ahead of a tractor procession aimed at protesting a controversial set of agricultural laws.
Growers, angry at what they see as laws that help large, private buyers at the expense of producers, have been camped outside Delhi for almost two months.
Thousands more, on tractors decorated with the flags of India and farm unions, have been streaming into the capital from neighbouring states for several days ahead of the rally that coincides with India’s Republic Day.
“We will follow the instructions of our leaders and conduct a peaceful march,” said Sukhjinder Singh, a 30-year-old protestor from Punjab at Singhu, one of the main protest sites.
Tens of thousands of tractors carrying groups of farmers travelled to the city in the past few days, in addition to thousands that have already been blocking several entrance points of the city for more than a month.
More from Reuters:
Police have allowed farmers to rally along pre-approved routes on the outskirts of Delhi on Tuesday.
But the tractor march threatens to overshadow the annual Republic Day military parade in the centre of the capital, held to mark the anniversary of the introduction of India’s Constitution in 1950.
“They (farmers) could have chosen any other day instead of January 26 but they have announced now,” India’s Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar told local media on Monday.
“Conducting the rally peacefully without any accident would be the concern for farmers as well as police administration.”
While the protestors are deeply serious about their goals since launching their protest 26 November, that’s no not say that the protesters don’t enjoy some levity, as exemplified in this clip from midday India:
Farmers dance to tribal music at Azad Maidan during protest rally
Program notes:
Despite traveling for long hours, some of the farmers and their families danced to tribal music before calling it a night at Azad Maidan on 24th January. Using traditional musical instruments, men and women gathered in circles as they played songs and danced to the music. Watch this video to find out more.
Posted in Agriculture, Asia, Governance, Law, Politics, Protests, Video
And threats come from both without and within.
We begin with the latest warning, via the Associated Press:
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 Guardian reported 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.
From the 22 January Washington Post:
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.
Greene, the first open supporter of the QAnon conspiracy theory to win a seat in Congress, has also continued to repeat former president Donald Trump’s baseless claims of mass election fraud. Earlier this week, Twitter temporarily suspended her account after she posted a clip with false claims about the election.
More from the 22 January Connecticut 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.
From a 12 January story from CNN:
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:
The story, via CNN:
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.
But it’s message has endured.
Posted in Crime, Extremism, Governance, Idiocy, Intolerance, Law, Media, Politics, Protests, Uncategorized
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.
From their report:
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.
What their Tweets reveal
In “Trump’s time is up, but his Twitter legacy lives on in the global spread of QAnon conspiracy theories,” a report for the open source academic journal The Conversation, Verica Rupar, Professor at Auckland University of Technology, and Tom De Smedt, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Antwerp, examined the spread of QAnon by a detailed examination of Tweets related to the group.
From their report:
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.
A report on the assault in Covert Action Magazine noted the QAnon connection:
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 Reichstag building 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.
From Der Spiegel:
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.
<snip>
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.
We are not surprised, given the long-established ties between some members of the military and violent militias.
From the Associated Press:
Two U.S. Army National Guard members are being removed from the security mission to secure Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration. A U.S. Army official and a senior U.S. intelligence official say the two National Guard members have been found to have ties to fringe right group militias.
No plot against Biden was found.
The Army official and the intelligence official spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity due to Defense Department media regulations. They did not say what fringe group the Guard members belonged to or what unit they served in.
Contacted by the AP on Tuesday, the National Guard Bureau referred questions to the U.S. Secret Service and said, “Due to operational security, we do not discuss the process nor the outcome of the vetting process for military members supporting the inauguration.”
At what point does incompetence become collusion?
For the disgraced ex-chief of the police force created to protect the Capitol, the line is getting thinner by the hour.
A disturbing new report from the Associated Press contains some startling revelations [emphasis added]:
Interviews with four members of the U.S. Capitol Police who were overrun by rioters on Jan. 6 show just how quickly the command structure collapsed as throngs of people, egged on by President Donald Trump, set upon the Capitol. The officers spoke on condition of anonymity because the department has threatened to suspend anyone who speaks to the media.
“We were on our own,” one of the officers told The Associated Press. “Totally on our own.”
The officers who spoke to the AP said they were given next to no warning by leadership on the morning of Jan. 6 about what would become a growing force of thousands of rioters, many better armed than the officers themselves were. And once the riot began, they were given no instructions by the department’s leaders on how to stop the mob or rescue lawmakers who had barricaded themselves inside. There were only enough officers for a routine day.
Three officers told the AP they did not hear Chief Steven Sund on the radio the entire afternoon. It turned out he was sheltering with Vice President Mike Pence in a secure location for some of the siege. Sund resigned the next day.
His assistant chief, Yogananda Pittman, who is now interim chief, was heard over the radio telling the force to “lock the building down,” with no further instructions, two officers said.
WTF?
Two words come to mind: Criminally negligent.
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.
From ProPublica:
“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.”
Lots more, after the jump. . .
Continue readingPosted in Crime, Ethnicity, Governance, Intolerance, Law, Police, Politics, Protests, Race
“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
Continue readingOn 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.”
Shortly thereafter, some of Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol.
Throughout his presidency, Trump’s unorthodox use of language has fascinated linguists and social scientists. But it wasn’t just his words that day that led to the violence.
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.
For example, researchers have used it to identify the authors of The Federalist Papers, the Unabomber manifesto and a novel written by J.K. Rowling under a pseudonym.
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.
The road to incitement
Of course, Trump has, at times, used overtly dire and violent language.
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.
More, including graphics, after the jump. . .
Posted in Academia, Crime, Culture, Ethnicity, Governance, Human behavior, Intolerance, Journalism, Noteworthy, Politics, Protests, Race, Science, Sociology
From the Daily Beast:
Two Virginia police officers, including one who is an Army veteran and trained sniper, have been arrested after they allegedly took part in the Capitol riot—then boasted about it being legal on Facebook afterward.
Jacob Fracker and Thomas Robertson, both officers with the Rocky Mount Police Department, were charged on Wednesday with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, according to a criminal complaint obtained by The Daily Beast.
Prosecutors allege the two cops, who were off-duty when they traveled to D.C., were photographed inside the Capitol “making an obscene statement in front of a statue of John Stark.” The photo was then posted on social media—where Robertson defended their actions and said he was “fucking proud” because he was “willing to put skin in the game,” according to a criminal complaint.
“CNN and the Left are just mad because we actually attacked the government who is the problem and not some random small business … The right IN ONE DAY took the f***** U.S. Capitol. Keep poking us,” Roberson wrote.
They not only drank the Kool-Aid; they distilled beforehand.
And a sniper?
House Democrats warned the officers at the end of December of threats to storm the national legislature and to assassinate the Vice President, yet nothing happened.
Add to that the fact that panic buttons installed in the offices of ‘Squad’ member Ayanna Pressley were removed before the insurrection, and numerous questions arise about just what did happen.
From The Hill:
Democratic lawmakers warned U.S. Capitol Police one week before the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that thousands of fervent Trump supporters could storm the complex and try to “kill half of Congress” to stop them from certifying Joe Biden’s election victory.
One of them also warned that Vice President Pence’s life was in danger.
On Dec. 30, Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) spoke with a police captain, informing the officer that — based on past death threats made against her by Trump supporters and the violent language she saw used in online forums — people might attack the Capitol and physically harm lawmakers counting the Electoral College votes.
Wilson spoke to The Hill about the warning and provided notes of the hourlong phone call with the Capitol Police captain.
She warned police that those web-connected Trump devotees are influenced by the “underground chatter that the election was rigged and Mr. Trump should be the president,” and that Democrats are “stealing the election and the only way they can stop us from stealing the election is to kill off half of Congress.”
“These are not ordinary demonstrators. These are not ordinary people voicing their First Amendment rights,” Wilson told the police captain. “These are crazy people.”
Posted in Crime, Governance, Politics, Protests
From the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a map of where and which paramilitary far-Right militias were active during the run-up to the 2020 general election:
From their report [emphasis added]:
There has been a major realignment of militia movements in the US from anti-federal government writ large to mostly supporting one candidate, thereby generally positioning the militia movement alongside a political party. This has resulted in the further entrenchment of a connection between these groups’ identities and politics under the Trump administration, with the intention of preserving and promoting a limited and warped understanding of US history and culture.
These armed groups engage in hybrid tactics. They train for urban and rural combat while also mixing public relations, propaganda works, and ‘security operations’ via both online and physical social platforms to engage those outside of the militia sphere. There is an increasing narrative and trend that groups are organizing to ‘supplement’ the work of law enforcement or to place themselves in a narrowly defined ‘public protection’ role in parallel with police departments of a given locale.
Ahead of the election, right-wing militia activity has been dominated by reactions to recent social justice activism like the Black Lives Matter movement, public health restrictions due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and other perceived threats to the ‘liberty’ and ‘freedoms’ of these groups.
And right-wing militia groups are often highly competitive with one another, but many have coalesced around this period of heightened political tension, and have even brought Proud Boys and QAnon-linked groups into the fold.
There are the folks who are armed and extremely dangerous, and they’re all in Trump’s camp.
Posted in Crime, Governance, Intolerance, Politics, Protests
That’s the allegation by a Democratic Congressional Representative from Montclair, N.J.
From USA Today‘s northjersey.com:
Rep. Mikie Sherrill, during a live webcast Tuesday evening, said she witnessed some members of Congress leading people through the Capitol on Jan. 5 in what she termed a “reconnaissance for the next day” when insurrectionists took part in a deadly siege on the legislative branch.
<snip>
After laying out her reasons for seeking Trump’s removal, Sherill moved on to those of her congressional colleagues who, she said, “abetted” the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election and undermine democracy by inciting a violent mob.
“I’m going to see they are held accountable, and if necessary, ensure that they don’t serve in Congress,” she said, speaking sedately, but severely.
“We can’t have a democracy if members of Congress are actively helping the president overturn the elections results.
“And so not only do I intend to see that the president is removed and never runs for office again and doesn’t have access to classified material, I also intend to see that those members of Congress who abetted him; those members of Congress who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on Jan. 5 – a reconnaissance for the next day; those members of Congress that incited this violent crowd; those members of Congress that attempted to help our president undermine our democracy; I’m going to see they are held accountable, and if necessary, ensure that they don’t serve in Congress.”
Sherrill did not specify if the “groups” were Trump supporters nor detail what took place during the “reconnaissance.” The term refers to an exploratory mission for the purpose of gaining information.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a legal rebuke when the nation’s Supreme Court struck down the trio of laws the farmers say would destroy their livelihoods.
But it’s a mixed victory, given that the ruling allows the government to fix procedural errors made in passing the laws.
The farmers have been on strike and massing in the national capital in protest of legislation they believe will strip them of protections and open the way to predatory Big Agra payments for their crops.
From CBC News:
India’s top court on Tuesday temporarily put on hold the implementation of agricultural reform laws and ordered the creation of an independent committee of experts to negotiate with farmers who have been protesting against the legislation.
The Supreme Court’s ruling came a day after it heard petitions filed by farmers challenging the legislation. It said the laws were passed without enough consultation and that it was disappointed with the way talks were proceeding between representatives of the government and farmers.
Tens of thousands of farmers protesting against the legislation have been blocking half a dozen major highways on the outskirts of New Delhi for more than 45 days. Farmers say they won’t leave until the government repeals the laws.
They say the legislation passed by Parliament in September will lead to the cartelization and commercialization of agriculture, make farmers vulnerable to corporate greed and devastate their earnings.
Posted in Agriculture, Asia, Corpocracy, Food, Governance, Law, Politics, Protests
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