This week, all but two Republicans in the House of Representatives went on record saying it’s okay to openly encourage the assassination of one of their own, a person of color and elected Member of the House.
That part about Representative Ocasio-Cortez not being white was no coincidence, by the way. It was really at the core of the issue: Republicans now openly refer to her and the women of color who call themselves “the Squad” as the “Jihad caucus.” As in “Muslim terrorists,” as in “the Other.”
We heard this rhetoric, too, many years ago when a much earlier generation of white supremacists tried to gin up bloodshed in America.
“The time for war has not yet come,” Stonewall Jackson said in a speech to cadets at the Virginia Military Institute in March, 1861, “but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”
Jackson and his ilk frequently tried to pretend the Civil War was about some high principle instead of just being a naked defense of legal enslavement, but their own proclamations of secession betrayed them.
No matter how much Republicans — and some white Democrats — want to try to pretend that the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties today isn’t primarily about race, it is. And it’s only a small part of a much larger Republican political strategy that, itself, is also all about race.
There was a time in America when straight white people lived in nice, comfortable white bubbles. I grew up in one of them in the 1950s; the most “exotic” people in our lower-middle-class Lansing, Michigan neighborhood were Jewish, and I didn’t even realize that distinction until I was a teenager.
The only people of color we saw were on TV; even the milkman, mailman and delivery people were white. And the non-white folks we saw on TV were always, always depicted as either criminals or buffoons. And gay people? Even discussing Liberace’s sexuality was a no-no.
Mom was in the kitchen or pregnant, and knew her place. One white man with a union job could raise a family without debt beyond a mortgage and car payment. People of color need not apply for the American Dream.
This is the straight white world today’s Republican Party wants to take America back to. They’re all but shouting it with slogans like “Make America Great Again!”
When the GOP went nuts about six Dr. Seuss books being dropped by the author’s family from publication, it was — no coincidence — the six books in which Seuss had drawn racist caricatures. And he wasn’t violating the norms of his day: caricatures of buck-toothed Asians, swarthy gun-toting mustachioed Mexicans, and big-lipped Black people were all over the cartoons we watched as children in the 1950s. They are shocking today, but they were normal and common then, and the GOP wants to go back to that.
When we studied American history in elementary school the 1950s, we learned that Christopher Columbus was a great man who defied conventional wisdom and monsters at the “edge of the earth” to discover this golden land, just waiting for white people to show up and tame it. (A woman around my age who called into my program yesterday noted that she was “really pissed off” when, in her first year of college, she took a history course and discovered Columbus was actually a rapist, child-trafficker and a slaver.)
We also learned that most slave-masters (particularly the Founding Fathers) were really, really nice and thoughtful people who took good care of the poor, uneducated, primitive folks they “had under their care.” To this day, there are still some textbooks in America that emphasize how slaveholding white people generously provided not only housing, food and clothing but also medical care for their charges.
Republicans today want to go back to that type of history for their children. They dress it all up with fancy language about “Critical Race Theory” but the bottom line for these white people is that they don’t want their kids to grow up knowing that Black people and other people of color are just like them but with a different amount of pigment in their skin. They want that pigment difference to be THE defining characteristic, and they want teachers, police, and other authority figures to enforce segregation based on it.
In the years after the Brown v Board decision in 1954, entire public school systems shut down to avoid racial integration; one Virginia county went five years without a public school opening.
There was an explosion of “religious schools,” from private elementary and high school “academies” to centers of higher education like Bob Jones University that were explicitly and entirely whites-only. Promoting these types of functionally all-white schools continued from the 1950s right through Betsy DeVos’s time as Trump’s Secretary of Education.
When white people show up at school board meetings shouting that “We know where you live!” and leaving death threats on people’s home phones, it’s not because they’re flipped out by historic and legal nuances having to do with past discrimination: it’s because they want their safely segregated schools back.
And when those schools are almost entirely “whites only” (the school districts where we’re seeing the majority of these “protests”), those “parents” want them purged of anything that might shatter for their white children the idea held by white people in this country for 400 years that everybody who’s not white — from genocidally slaughtered Native Americans to Africans brought in chains to Mexicans whose land we also stole to Asians we once excluded from immigration — are all basically sub-human.
This is how these Republican white supremacists think, and if that sounds outrageous simply check out their literature and behavior. A good starting point is with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The news media sanitized the Virginia election, saying that Republican Youngkin won “on education issues.” That’s patently false: he won on racism. And it’s damn well time that the media start pointing it out. It took them three years to start calling Trump’s lies “lies” — how long will it take to call Republican racism “racism”?
When I went into the job market in the 1960s, the headings in the “Help Wanted” part of the newspaper were “Help Wanted – Men” and “Help Wanted – Women.” There was no “Help Wanted – Black People” because everybody knew there was a very, very narrow range of jobs for which Black people could be hired. Like in much of America then, Black people (and most other minorities) were limited in where they could work, get a mortgage, live, and even walk or drive; if they pushed the boundaries, they risked violence and a horrible, painful death at the hands of police or vigilantes.
When I was a kid, Richard and Mildred Loving were rousted from their wedding bed by police for the crime of getting married; he was white and she was Black. They were sentenced to a year in prison: interracial marriage was a crime in parts of America until 1967.
When I got my first job in 1965 as a teenage hamburger-flipper in an all-white burger joint, there were large parts of Lansing where Black people simply couldn’t go. I still remember my parents taking me to a fancy downtown hotel’s restaurant for some celebration in the mid-1950s and there was a sign off to the side of the door that pointed toward the rear of the building and said, “Colored Entrance.” That, at the time, was considered enlightened: at least the hotel let Black people into its public areas.
But race has always permeated politics, and voting is at the foundation of the political process.
In 1993, no state in the union required ID to vote, even though Paul Weyrich (co-founder of the Heritage Foundation and then with the Reagan campaign) said right out loud that, “I don’t want everybody to vote. … As a matter of fact, quite candidly, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
But then Democrats in Congress pushed through the 1993 “Motor Voter” law that required states to let people register to vote when they got their drivers’ licenses. Republicans went insane, charging that “millions” of brown-skinned “illegals” would now get drivers’ licenses, get registered to vote in the process, and begin flipping elections toward Democrats.
We then used signature-matching to confirm identity (you showed ID to register to vote, and your signature was kept on record), which is the most secure form of identity confirmation easily available. You can buy a reasonably good fake ID for $50, but try forging somebody else’s signature while an election official is watching you: it’s pretty much impossible. Signatures are called “biometric markers” and they’re even more secure than ID.
But Republicans were so certain that hoards of Brown people were going to show up at the polls that they passed laws in state after state to require ID at the polls on top of comparing the voter’s signature. It’s a pathetic and futile effort: those “illegals” never showed up. Virtually all of the extremely rare “voter fraud” that happens in America is done by white people (most Republicans, based on those busted after 2020) or ex-felons who didn’t realize they couldn’t vote in their state.
As I lay out in The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole Your Vote and How to Get It Back, the past thirty years have seen a grotesque orgy of laws, regulations and policy changes designed specifically to make it easier for white suburban voters — and harder for college students, Black city dwellers, and social security voters — to cast a ballot.
Using the political power they get from skewing elections, Republicans want schools to help their children to grow up like many in my generation did, thinking at some unconscious (and often conscious) level that those racist caricatures were depictions of reality and only white people could be thoughtful, intelligent, peaceful problem-solvers like Dad on Leave It To Beaver or Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon or Superman. Or members of Congress or presidents.
White is good, they want their kids told: everybody else is weird, odd, comical, dangerous or “one of them.” Or a Democrat.
While it’s sometimes mentioned tangentially that Carter, Clinton, Obama and Biden all lost the white vote, a sort of parenthetic footnote to election results, it’s the foundation of the entire Republican strategy and has been since Nixon invented it with his “Southern Strategy.”
When LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964/1965 he left the white racists who’d supported the Democratic Party since before the Civil War without a home. Nixon prepared one, Reagan fluffed up the pillows, and Trump stood out front with a bullhorn and a “whites only” sign.
As it’s becoming increasingly obvious to these “racially apprehensive” white people that America as a whole is never returning to the Leave It To Beaver era, they’re falling back on their old intimidation and segregation strategies. Red counties in Oregon, for example, are teaming up with white voters in next-door Idaho and won nonbinding ballot measures to secede from Oregon. That sort of thing is popping up all over the country.
It won’t work, any more than liberal fantasies of avoiding the armed and angry racists by having California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii split off into their own country will work.
Red/Blue rhetoric aside, America is one country. The Mike Flynn’s and Donald Trump’s of the world realize this and are calling for straight white people to rise up and take over by force, imposing a single religion, rigid gender roles, putting women “back in their place,” and re-marginalizing all nonwhite minorities.
The “battle for the soul of America” so often highlighted, headlined, and bemoaned by the media is real, but they almost always miss the real story, the signal, for all the noise (to paraphrase Steve Bannon). It’s actually a battle between a vision of America that’s once again entirely under the thumb of straight white people versus one where everybody has an equal voice and an equal chance.
There are a hell of a lot of white racists out there; enough to put Trump in the White House, put race-baiting Republicans in the House and Senate, and secure control over thirty states.
But culture is inexorably changing. People from a multitude of hues and gender identities are showing up in media and business, and their numbers are growing. White supremacist school board assaults aside, educators and their students are teaching and learning the true racial history of America. (It’s increasingly hard to avoid!)
No matter how much people like Marjorie Taylor Greene talk up civil war and bloodshed, they can’t stop progress. They may win for a short while, maybe even a few years or election cycles, but time and history run against them.
The fight for democracy and humanity will continue, no matter how many people vigilantes like Kyle Rittenhouse or the cops kill, no matter how many racist white Republicans threaten the lives of their nonwhite colleagues.
Genuinely patriotic Americans who want a country that pulls together for the good of all — an E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”) America — are on the ascent across America, even as the GOP has gone insane.
Nonetheless, it will take a lot of involvement and work to overcome both our racist history and the forces (both domestic and foreign) that seek to exploit racial divisions in this country.
Racism and violence are the GOP’s brand these days, and if the media doesn’t start calling them out explicitly for it, things are going to continue to get worse.
A new poll by the Marquette Law School found that while the GOP is largely united behind a 2024 Trump run for the White House, only 28 percent of all Americans agree. Seventy-one percent of Americans want Trump to leave our politics alone and go back to being a billionaire grifter.
Racist Republicans are the outliers, but they are motivated and well armed with significant white billionaire backing.
If we want democracy and decency to ultimately prevail, we have an enormous amount of political and restorative work to do before we rest. Don’t lose faith: as Winston Churchill famously said, “Never give up!”
White Nationalists With Lanyards: Orlando Showed The Ugly Future Of The Republican Party A weekend in Florida, a major conservative conference, a white nationalist “groyper” conference, and a doomed quest to determine the difference between the two.
For days, journalists, academics and activists scoured social media for clues to solve a vexing mystery: Where was Nick Fuentes going to hold his white supremacist conference?
Fuentes and his fellow organizers had advertised the America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) — which was bound to attract hundreds of young American fascists — for Feb. 25, 2022, in Orlando, but included no other details. They planned to reveal the name of the hotel only on the day of the conference, and just to attendees.
It was a cat and mouse game. If anyone discovered the location, the hosting hotel would likely cancel the shameful shindig immediately. It would be bad press, after all, for a company to profit off providing an organizing space for a group led by a Holocaust-denying insurrectionist.
But some people did have the address — powerful people, who showed up as celebrated guests that night. Among them were two sitting members of Congress, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a rising far-right star. They appeared along with an Arizona state senator and the lieutenant governor of Idaho, both of whom have designs on higher office.
And then there was another “mystery” guest who never actually took the stage. HuffPost has learned that Thomas Homan, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under former President Donald Trump, showed up to AFPAC. He claimed to HuffPost that the whole thing was just a mix-up, and that he left the hotel quickly, before the conference began.
The decidedly white nationalist conference happened a short, 8-mile drive away at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the preeminent annual gathering of America’s conservative movement, where former President Donald Trump spoke on Saturday evening. Almost every other plausible 2024 Republican nominee, alongside a wide array of powerful GOP members of Congress, also made speeches.
The two conferences were, in many ways, very different. AFPAC was exponentially smaller, held at a secret location so that its attendees couldn’t be identified or doxxed, and livestreamed only via an obscure tech platform. And CPAC was CPAC, the media circus where rising conservative stars peacocked in the national spotlight.
But when it came to messaging, the conferences’ differences sometimes felt cosmetic, a matter of tone or degree, not substance. Both were animated by the same grievances about race, gender, and the 2020 election.
And both conferences shared some of the same attendees and speakers.
There were more than a few moments over the course of the weekend observing CPAC and AFPAC that it felt possible to confuse which conference had been organized by a shitposting white nationalist, and which one had been sanctioned by the Grand Old Party.
A Secretive Gathering
From left to right: Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), America First Political Action Conference organizer Nick Fuentes, Idaho Lt. Gov Janice McGeachin, Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, former Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), all of whom appeared at AFPAC. Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty/AP
There are a lot of hotels in Orlando — roughly 450. And Fuentes wasn’t giving any clues about which hotel might host his conference, not on his regular livestream, or in his many online posts. His lieutenants didn’t slip up either. While disturbingly young — he is just 23 — Fuentes is a cunning operator. He is the leader of the America First “groyper” movement, who marched in the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
“The rootless transnational elite knows that a tidal wave of white identity is coming,” Fuentes wrote after that rally, where one of his fellow racists drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman. “And they know that once the word gets out, they will not be able to stop us. The fire rises!”
Congress recently subpoenaed Fuentes over his involvement in a different event: the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C., where he was reportedly spotted encouraging people to storm the Capitol.
It wasn’t until about 7 p.m. on Feb. 25, less than two hours before the American First Political Action Conference was set to kick off, that Fuentes’ supporters got sloppy. Jonathan Lee Riches, a notorious far-right troll, tweeted a selfie. It showed him in a hotel lobby posing with a smiling Michelle Malkin, the anti-immigrant activist.
Jared Holt, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who monitors right-wing extremists, noticed something in the background of the image. It was a blurry doormat emblazoned with a barely legible logo: Marriott.
There are many Marriotts in Orlando, so Holt looked at another photo Riches posted, this one of him posing with Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent neo-fascist gang the Proud Boys. In the background was a tiled floor with a triangle pattern.
Holt scrolled through photo galleries on Marriott hotel websites until he found the exact same triangle pattern. “Bingo,” he messaged me.
I got in my car and plugged the destination into Google Maps.
When I arrived at the Marriott Orlando World Center Friday evening, two Orange County sheriff’s deputies in bulletproof vests stood near the end of a long hallway inside the conference center. I nodded as I walked past them, toward a group of young white men in suits waving security wands over other young white men in suits.
These groypers — a nickname America First members bestowed upon themselves, a reference to their online mascot, a cartoon toad that’s a variation on Pepe the Frog, the infamous alt-right symbol — had traveled from across the country for this gathering. Most keep their groyper identities hidden in their daily lives for fear of losing their jobs and use online pseudonyms to spew racial invective. AFPAC was their chance to actually hang out in real life, to laugh loudly together at cruel inside jokes, and to bathe themselves in the glory of their dear young leader, Fuentes.
A 20-something-year-old man who seemed in charge of groyper security told me there was no way I was getting in. I walked away and tried to interview a couple of arriving attendees, but the man screamed “No!” alerting them not to talk. “Goodbye!” he yelled at me.
I walked back to the sheriff’s deputies, who had been joined by the head of Marriott security, and asked them if they knew what this event was all about. They seemed sincerely oblivious — it was just another conference for them.
As we talked, a group of about five groypers walked towards us, led by a man with long hair and sunglasses who started to film me with his phone. “Hey, the homosexual conference is that way,” he said to me, pointing to the other end of the center, as his gaggle of groypers giggled. The head of Marriott security intervened, telling them to go back into the conference room.
They obliged; there was no need to kick up a fuss, since the American First Political Action Conference was a go. Fuentes — who in a livestream just a few weeks prior said: “You know what I want? Total Aryan victory” — had successfully and secretly locked down a space in a big hotel, and sheriff’s deputies were guarding the doors.
Marriott International Inc. did not respond to multiple requests for comment as to why it hosted a white supremacist conference. The Orange County Sheriff’s Office didn’t say who requested the deputies to guard the event, but a spokesperson did say the department investigated a bomb threat made to the hotel during the conference. “A check of the area was conducted and a package was located,” the spokesperson said. “The package was deemed safe by our Hazardous Device Team.”
It is tempting to dismiss the groypers as just a bunch of online trolls, spurned nerds on a hateful revenge tour typing away from their parents’ basements. But their ranks are swelling, and they are making inroads with the Republican Party. At AFPAC in 2021, a sitting member of Congress, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), was the marquee speaker.
For weeks ahead of this year’s AFPAC, Fuentes teased even more GOP officials — Gosar again, Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and former U.S. congressman Steve King — plus two “mystery speakers.”
At about 9:30 p.m., Fuentes stepped in front of the Marriott lectern, according to a livestream viewed by HuffPost, and got the night underway. He began by praising what he felt made his movement so successful: “Our secret sauce … young white men!” The crowd — and it sounded like a sizable one; Fuentes claimed over 1,000 attendees — broke into rapturous cheers and applause.
Fuentes then, as Russian bombs fell over Ukraine, led the crowd in a chant of “Putin! Putin!”
And finally, before introducing the first mystery speaker, Fuentes issued an apology. His first choice, he explained, had a family emergency. Thomas Homan, who oversaw the Trump administration’s brutal anti-immigration policies as head of ICE, had arrived at AFPAC, Fuentes claimed, but had to rush away. He sadly wouldn’t be speaking.
Homan confirmed to HuffPost in a phone call this week that he had indeed arrived to speak at AFPAC. His assistant had arranged the appearance, he said, and Homan said they may have confused Fuentes’ group for another one. “So many names of conservative groups sound the same,” Homan said.
While sitting at a table waiting for the conference to start, Homan said he looked over the agenda for the evening and decided he’d better Google Fuentes’ name. He saw some stories labeling Fuentes a white nationalist, but he was doubtful of them — Homan said he himself has unfairly been called a bigot and a racist for “enforcing immigration laws.” But then he found a recent story that did disturb him, about Fuentes praising Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This prompted Homan to leave the conference before it started. He says he never met Fuentes. “Shame on me for not doing my research,” Homan told HuffPost.
I asked Homan if it inspired any self-reflection that someone like Fuentes would want him at AFPAC. Homan said he didn’t know why Fuentes invited him, reassuring me that he himself is not a racist, he just likes secure borders.
A few minutes later Homan called me back to make sure I understood something. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he said of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
Faith And Executions
Don’t worry, Fuentes assured his supporters after sharing the news about Homan; he had wrangled someone just as well known. “She is a standard-bearer of Trumpism in the U.S. Congress,” Fuentes said. “She is pro-life, she is proudly America first … We are honored, we are humbled and excited to welcome her to the stage right now … I think this is going to be the beginning of something great — the representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene!”
Greene, who had just heard Fuentes cheer on Putin and admit to leading a movement for “young white men,” hugged Fuentes and took her place behind the lectern.
She began her speech by invoking her faith, leading the groypers to break into a chant of “Christ is king!” Then Greene — a transphobic QAnon conspiracist booted off Twitter for promoting COVID denialism who was stripped of her committee assignments last year for advocating violence against Democrats — told the assembled white nationalists that they, like her, were “canceled Americans.”
“You’ve been handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats who are the communist party of the United States of America,” she said.
The evening’s other mystery guest speaker was Janice McGeachin, the Republican lieutenant governor of Idaho, whom Trump recently endorsed in her bid for the governorship. She told the assembled white nationalists to “keep up your good work fighting for our country.”
Then McGeachin told the groypers that they were “literally in the fight for our lives” in the Republican Party. “I thank you for joining our efforts,” she said, “and together we will fight to make Idaho great again.”
Gosar, last year’s top-billed speaker, appeared via a pre-recorded video this time, delivering a brief, forgettable statement. It was his home state colleague who stole the show.
Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers appeared at AFPAC remotely, via video conference, standing in front of the Arizona state flag. She addressed the crowd as “groypers,” to great cheers, and praised Fuentes, who she said had been “de-platformed everywhere” for saying things that anger “the media and the far left.”
“I truly respect Nick because he’s the most persecuted man in America,” Rogers said, adding that AFPAC was “standing up to tyranny.”
Then the state senator called for their mutual political enemies to be executed.
“I’ve said we need to build more gallows,” Rogers said. “If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”
She wasn’t the only AFPAC speaker to call for murder.
“Tony Fauci literally unleashed a bio weapon on the world,” far-right podcaster Stew Peters told the crowd at one point, falsely blaming the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the coronavirus pandemic. “Why is this man running around free instead of hanging on the end of a noose somewhere?”
Peters was followed on stage by Vincent James Foxx, a former propagandist for the neo-fascist street-fighting club Rise Above Movement. “They want to replace you,” he said of non-white immigrants, invoking the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory frequently cited in the manifestos of white supremacist mass murderers. “Western white culture is the majority culture, to which even non-whites assimilate into today — and they’re better off for it.”
State Sen. Rogers thought this was just great.
“Vincent James run for office,” she wrote on Telegram after Foxx’s speech.
On Wednesday, the Arizona state Senate voted 24-3 to censure Rogers over her gallows remarks. The rare bipartisan resolution has no practical effect beyond rebuking Rogers, and also makes no mention of white nationalism.
“I do not apologize, I will not back down and I am sorely disappointed in the leadership of this body for colluding with the Democrats to attempt to destroy my reputation,” Rogers wrote in response to the censure.
Thomas Zimmer, who teaches 20th century history at Georgetown University, watched clips from AFPAC with horror, and was particularly alarmed by Rogers.
“This is not some far-right internet troll, but a Republican state senator, and it’s impossible to adequately understand American politics without grappling in earnest with why her radicalism is widely seen as justified on the Right and within the GOP,” Zimmer wrote in a tweet.
“I fear that — after four years of Trumpism in power, after January 6, with rightwing fascistic militancy now all around us — we have become so accustomed to outrageous political acts that we might be becoming numb to how bizarre, how extreme, how dangerous these developments are,” he added.
AFPAC dragged on for hours, long after the nightly fireworks at Disney World exploded in the nearby sky — a spectacular sight that, for Orlando locals, has been rendered routine — and as, thousands of miles away, Ukrainians repelled a Russian attack in Kyiv.
“Now, [the media is] going and saying, ‘Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing,” Fuentes said in the closing speech shortly before 2 a.m., before adding, “Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”
The room went wild.
Fuentes praised the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, too, pointing out that a few people in the crowd had been arrested for their actions that day. “I’ll reiterate just for you,” he said, “Jan. 6 was awesome.”
He paid lip service to some right-wing conspiracy theories about the attack being orchestrated by the FBI as a ruse to arrest conservatives, saying such theories “may very well be true.”
“But,” he added, “I was proud to be an American on Jan. 6, 2021. And I’d like to believe it was real. I’d like to believe Americans have the heart and the guts and the balls to do what they did on Jan. 6. I’d like to believe what they did was real.”
Fuentes wore a VIP badge to Trump’s speech in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before hundreds of people stormed the Capitol — something he encouraged. “Keep moving towards the Capitol; it appears we are taking the Capitol back!” he told them through a megaphone. “Break down the barriers and disregard the police. The Capitol belongs to us!”
In a press release, the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 said it wanted to question Fuentes over his role in the “Stop The Steal” movement, which pushed the lie that the election was stolen, and to ask him about tens of thousands of dollars he received in Bitcoin from a French computer programmer ahead of the Capitol attack. Fuentes has said he’ll plead the Fifth to the committee, unless they put him on TV.
“If they televise my appearance, I absolutely will do it,” he said on a livestream. “If I get to go to Congress, and I get to sit there, and I get to talk about groypers, and I get to go off … I absolutely will do it.”
Bleeding Into CPAC
Hours before she spoke to the groypers,soaking up cheers from a crowd of young men who savor saying racist slurs on livestreams and who would very much like it if America were a whites-only country one day, I had spotted Greene flitting around CPAC, relishing her celebrity status, posing for photos, and being interviewed at one of the many media booths.
Greene was scheduled to appear on CPAC’s main stage on Saturday at 11:15 a.m. as part of a panel on cancel culture that was set to be broadcast live on Fox Nation.
Before dawn that morning, I emailed the American Conservative Union, the group that organizes CPAC. Greene had just been the featured speaker at a conference of Nazi sympathizers; would she still be an official part of CPAC’s line-up in the morning?
I wanted to know if Greene lending the imprimatur of her office to a group of groypers was enough for CPAC to, well, cancel her. I hadn’t gotten a response by 10 a.m., so I called an ACU spokeswoman named Allison. She sounded somewhere between panicked and annoyed, either with me or with her bosses, I couldn’t tell. No comment, she said. She had passed my message along to the heads of ACU, she told me, adding: “It’s out of my hands.”
A short time later, for the second time in less than 12 hours, I watched Greene walk onto a stage to loud cheers.
I’ve written this story — about Republicans openly organizing with, promoting, endorsing, parroting, and aligning themselves with white supremacists — many times over the last five years. When Greene walked off the CPAC stage, I knew what would happen next. She would be hounded by reporters asking her for comment.
She wouldn’t apologize, and then she would lie, claiming ignorance about the groypers’ beliefs. She’d say the media was just trying to cancel her again by playing a game of guilt-by-association. She’d say she just wanted to talk to a group of young, civically engaged conservatives.
That’s exactly how it played out. “I talked about God and liberty,” Greene tweeted about her AFPAC appearance. “I’m also not going to turn down the opportunity to speak to 1,200 young America First patriots because of a few off-color remarks by another speaker, even if I find those remarks unsavory.”
Then the reporters would press her Republican colleagues: Do you denounce Greene? Will she face any punishment? Her colleagues would mostly demur, claiming not to be familiar with what happened. Eventually Ronna McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnel (R-Ky.) would issue statements that did notdirectly denounce her.
They would use the same boilerplate phrasing they always do. There is “no room,” “no space” and “no home” for white supremacists in the GOP, their statements would say, a claim rendered absurd by the sheer number of times they’ve had to respond to requests for comment about the latest white supremacist in the GOP.
Eventually House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Cali.) would promise to give Greene a good talking-to. The press would move on to other stories.
It’s a frustrating and exhausting news cycle that, in the Trump era, presumes far-right luminaries like Greene are somehow fringe members in the Republican Party, that their racist and conspiratorial views are an anomaly, and that older, allegedly respectable conservative leaders — McConnell, McCarthy, Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) — have the power to put her in her place.
But that’s all make-believe. As Ben Lorber, a research analyst at Political Research Associates and one of the foremost chroniclers of the groypers, noted recently: “The rising hard-right flank — represented in Congress by [Greene], Gosar and others — is setting the conservative agenda, and they view these leaders (correctly) as the out-of-touch establishment.”
Republican candidates across the country, including Senate hopeful and “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, have all sought Greene’s endorsement. A stroll around CPAC showed how the GOP is, in many ways, her’s and the groypers’ party now.
Shortly after Greene’s speech, an 89-year-old man sat down at a table inside CPAC’s expo hall and started to sign copies of his book, “Sheriff Joe Arpaio: An American Legend.”
Arpaio — the former Maricopa County sheriff who terrorized Arizona’s Latino population for a quarter century, unlawfully detaining undocumented people in a jail he once proudly likened to a “concentration camp” — had also spoken to the groypers mere hours earlier, at 1 a.m., regaling the young fascists with tales of putting his prisoners in chain gangs, or emasculating them by forcing them to wear pink jumpsuits. (He even brought one of the jumpsuits with him to AFPAC, showing it off to the crowd from behind the Marriott lectern.)
An estimated 160 people died in Arpiao’s jails, many by suicide. This long, cruel career made him a national conservative star and, in 2020, Trump pardoned him on charges stemming from a ruling requiring him to stop racial profiling.
“Finished a great book signing at CPAC and a keynote speech in front of over 1000 young people at AFPAC,” he tweeted Saturday.
Near Arpaio’s book signing were booths for organizations hoping to recruit college-aged conservatives: Young Americans for Liberty; Students for Life of America; Turning Point USA.
TPUSA, the premiere MAGA organization on college campuses across the country, has done its best to distance itself from the groypers, but often fails. In 2019, TPUSA dismissed its brand ambassador after she was photographed at a dinner with Fuentes.
And just this past January, TPUSA’s social media account on Gab went rogue and wrote: “I’m glad everyone on Gab is based enough to see through TPUSA’s bull shit. Guess I’d rather be kicked from the organization than go on with their homosexual zionist crap….Follow @realnickjfuentes.”
Young groypers stalked the halls of CPAC this year, distinguishable only by their blue America First baseball hats. “White boy summer!” I heard one yell, using a slogan the group adopted last year.
Another groyper posed for a photo with CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp.
Fuentes is not allowed at CPAC, likely because he’s too antagonistic of a figure, and would generate too much bad press. But that doesn’t mean CPAC bans white nationalists.
Reporters spotted AFPAC attendee Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist organization American Renaissance, in the halls of CPAC Saturday, sporting a conference lanyard around his neck.
CPAC didn’t respond to a request for comment on why Taylor (who once wrote, “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears”) was allowed in the conference.
Meanwhile on the CPAC main stage attendees could see speakers like Pizzagater Jack Posobiec, QAnon congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and COVID denialist Alex Berenson.
Scott Presler, an anti-Muslim activist who played a big role in organizing 2020’s “Stop The Steal” rallies, talked to his fans in the hallway. Mark and Patricia McCloskey — the wealthy St. Louis couple who gained right-wing fame for pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters — were in the hallway too, passing out photos commemorating their viral moment to promote Mark’s senate campaign.
Everywhere, MAGA merchandise and videos and books declared the movement’s opposition to “critical race theory” and “cancel culture.” CPAC’s motto for the weekend was “AWAKE NOT WOKE” and the entire gathering felt like a festival of unrepentance, a celebration of the refusal to apologize for being anti-vaccine, for being racist, for being transphobic, and for Jan. 6.
The Only Good Nazi, Fascist or White Supremacist is a dead one.
The Worst Is Yet To Come
To varying degrees, the Republican Party has always kept the far-right around. But sometimes the animal breaks out of the cage. Jan. 6, 2021 was the day the GOP’s aggrandizement of wild conspiracies and its elevation of radical groups and fringe figures — many of whom found homes at CPAC — boiled over and changed history.
This year, CPAC treated the events of that day as an embarrassing family secret. Only one event on the agenda specifically addressing the insurrection: a conspiracy-laden speech by Julie Kelly, author of the book “January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”
But attendees were not nearly so sensitive. The first two people I interviewed at the conference both admitted to being at the Jan. 6 rally in Washington D.C. that turned into the attack. Neither had gone into the Capitol, and neither believed that those who did were actually Trump supporters, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.
Anna Villalobos is the proud owner of a company called MAGA Hammocks. She swayed back and forth in one of her “TRUMP 2024” hammocks inside the CPAC expo hall, remembering Jan. 6 as a “peaceful” event. Infiltrators, she claimed falsely, had been “paid” by the Democrats to stir up violence.
I asked her what her evidence was for this claim.
“Because we don’t act like that,” she said. “Conservatives, we don’t do that. I’ve been in a lot of rallies for Trump with thousands and thousands and thousands of people and never ever, ever, ever saw any behavior like that …That’s my evidence.”
This abiding MAGA belief was shared by Katie, clad in red, white and blue cowboy boots, who didn’t want to provide her last name or her job. She told me she traveled to D.C. on Jan. 6 from her home in Boulder, Colorado. “I’m sure what you have been told or understand to have happened is a complete fiction,” she said, rattling off a series of conspiracies about “antifa” and FBI agents infiltrating the protest to goad Trump supporters towards violence.
She carried on trying to convince me the election was stolen, citing a video of Georgia poll workers purportedly stuffing ballot boxes with fake votes. (They were not.)
At CPAC, it was an article of faith that the election was stolen, the Capitol attack was a false flag, and that the Capitol attackers still in pre-trial detention were now political prisoners.
A man climbs down after being photographed with a noose in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of people stormed the Capitol. The Washington Post via Getty Images
One of my final interviews at CPAC was with Angel Harrelson, 44, who I spotted wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “DUE PROCESS DENIED: FREE MY January6er.”
When I approached her, she was on the phone with her husband, Kenneth Harrelson, who is currently in jail in Washington, D.C.
Kenneth Harrelson and nine fellow members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia group, were arrested last year for storming the Capitol. In January, they were hit with seditious conspiracy charges — the most serious charges yet in relation to Jan. 6. He faces decades in prison.
“They keep calling it a militia group, it’s an organization,” Angel told me. “I don’t know why they do that because, I mean, it’s not, I don’t think it is, anyway. It might be. I don’t know.”
She feels her husband is being treated unfairly, that he should’ve been able to get out on bond, and she worries about the conditions in the jail where the government is detaining him.
“They’re being fed rotten food,” she said. “They are living inside these pods that still has black mold in it. Marjorie Taylor Greene actually went in there with a few people, so did the U.S. marshal. They went in there, they told them they need to fix this and it’s still not fixed. … It’s a horrible situation, not just for my husband but for all of them.”
Angel and Kenneth Harrelson live here in central Florida — the cradle of the insurrection, where a high number of Capitol rioters have been arrested — and have not seen each other since his arrest March 2021.
“I haven’t seen him in a year,” she said, claiming the jail in D.C. doesn’t allow virtual visits. (HuffPost couldn’t independently verify if this is true.) “He hasn’t seen his kids or talked to his kids in a year.”
I asked her how the folks at CPAC were responding to her T-shirt and to her story.
“I’ve gotten a lot of hugs and a lot of prayers,” she said.
There are bound to be more Angels among the MAGA faithful — conservatives so committed to a gospel of insurrection that they or their loved ones will embrace political violence, with assurances from cynical, power-hungry preachers like Trump and Fuentes that their sacrifice was worth it
There was a moment maybe, in the months immediately following Jan. 6, that the Capitol attack seemed like it could’ve been the climax of MAGA violence. But what I witnessed in Orlando last weekend made Jan. 6 feel like a mere preview of the tumult to come.
GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Speaks At White Nationalist Conference The congresswoman from Georgia spoke at the America First Political Action Conference, organized by white nationalist “groyper” leader Nick Fuentes.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke at a white nationalist conference in Florida on Friday evening.
Greene, a QAnon conspiracist and rabidly anti-trans Republican, was the surprise speaker at the third annual America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, organized by white nationalist figurehead Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes, an antisemite and racist who attended the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and who was recently subpoenaed for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, excitedly introduced Greene as the featured speaker from behind a lectern inside the Marriott Orlando World Center, according to a livestream of the event. (HuffPost was denied entrance to AFPAC.)
In her speech, Greene referred to the assembled AFPAC crowd — among them prominent right-wing extremists who have been photographed giving the Nazi salute and reciting the infamous “14 words,” a white supremacist slogan — as “canceled Americans.”
“You’ve been handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats who are the communist party of the United States of America,” Greene said.
She also took time to attack transgender people, claiming Democrats have destroyed “gender” and “pronouns.”
Her speech was immediately followed by a series of virulently racist and homophobic diatribes from prominent extremists.
“They want to replace you,” said Vincent James Foxx, a former propagandist for the white supremacist street-fighting club Rise Above Movement. “Western white culture is the majority culture, to which even non-whites assimilate into today — and they’re better off for it.”
Then far-right podcaster Stew Peters called for the execution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom he falsely blamed for causing the coronavirus pandemic.
“Tony Fauci literally unleashed a bio weapon on the world. Why is this man running around free instead of hanging on the end of a noose somewhere?”
The crowd roared.
Greene’s presence at AFPAC underscores the thin line separating the Republican Party from the white nationalist extremist movement in America. Greene, after all, was not the only public official who spoke at AFPAC on Friday night.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who spoke at last year’s AFPAC, made an appearance via a pre-recorded video, as did Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers and Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin, both Republicans.
Greene is also scheduled to speak Saturday morning from the main stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the pre-eminent annual gathering of the conservative movement in America, a few hours before former President Donald Trump is set to speak from the same stage.
HuffPost also spotted Greene at CPAC on Friday — only a few miles from the site of AFPAC — where she was treated like a celebrity, posing for photos and conducting interviews with right-wing media outlets.
Last year, Greene was stripped of her committee assignments for promoting violence against Democrats.
I would prefer these traitors like Marjorie Traitor Greene? Be hung. The electric chair is done in a chamber in prison, firing squad is too quick and painless. Just like the treasonous Trump shitstains erected a noose on the Capitol grounds on Jan 6th to lynch Democrats and Pence? These scum should be hung, with a slow, painful hanging, no quick snapping of the neck, let them dance and giggle at the end of a fucking rope.
Marjorie Taylor Greene Tries To Squirm Out Of Jewish Space Laser Conspiracy Theory She claims she was a “regular American” when she came up with the idea and was unaware that attacks on the Rothschilds are often code for anti-Semitism.
A reporter in Georgia questioned Greene about the theory after she voted early in the Republican primary. The lawmaker indicated she couldn’t clearly remember her 2018 Facebook post floating the idea, and also said she was largely ignorant about such issues then.
She said she wasn’t aware that attacks on the Rothschilds are often coded anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semetic, Fascist, Nazi, White Supremacist, QAnon Scum, Pathological Liar and Treasonous Traitor Marjorie Traitor Greene
During the confrontation, Greene initially adopted the persona she presented when she was questioned in court last month about her role in last year’s Jan. 6 insurrection: Forgetful, confused, patient, smiling. Then she wasn’t so much.
“This is your post under your name,” the reporter said. “You’re talking about the Rothschild family, which has been at the center of anti-Semitic conspiracies since the 19th century.”
“I did not know that,” Greene replied. “I have no idea. I’m telling you.”
Greene insisted she was just a “regular American” when she wrote that post. “Never been in politics. Could not even have told you most people back in politics or families’ names, don’t know their background.”
Nevertheless, she was confident enough to link the Rothschilds to a bonkers plot to set wildfires in California using space lasers to make way for high-speed rail.
“Now that you’ve been told … anti-Semitism is on the rise at an alarming rate,” the reporter told Greene.
“I’m fully against anti-Semitism,” she replied, appearing to be increasingly annoyed. “You’re mixing two things together. You’re accusing me of something I did not do, and then you’re trying to blame me for anti-Semitism. You are such a liar. You need to stop.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin Flames Putin ‘Cheerleader’ Marjorie Taylor Greene “My friends: We have to decide which side we’re on,” Raskin said in a powerful House speech before calling for a “National Day of Reason.”
Directly calling out his Republican colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) scorched Vladimir Putin’s “cheerleaders” in Congress and urged Americans to stand on the “right side of history.”
Raskin, a member of the House committee investigating the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lashed “the very distinguished gentlelady from Georgia” for her comments last month on a radio program in which she blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Russia because it “just kept poking the bear.”
“We have members of Congress who are cheerleaders for Vladimir Putin, and are voices of nothing but defeatism, fatalism and pessimism for democracy in Europe,” Raskin said, “and so they try to distract us with a lot of phony rhetoric about other issues.” He then referenced Greene’s claim that NATO was supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s own justification for its invasion.
“My friends, we have to decide which side we’re on,” he continued.
Raskin said Americans during World War II did not watch Nazis march down the street in Europe and say there were “very fine people on both sides,” a reference to former President Donald Trump’s comments about the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2019.
“They did not start cheerleading for Mussolini and Hitler and Franco,” he added. “And yet we have people here who go out and speak on the side of Vladimir Putin.”
Why are some of our colleagues repeating Putin’s propaganda justifying his bloody war against the people of Ukraine? Why are they promoting appeasement, defeatism and pessimism? Strong democracies stand up for strong democracies. pic.twitter.com/cdNV8S1Ya4
The resolution is a “call to celebrate reason, empirical inquiry, knowledge, facts, and science as the guideposts for democratic progress,” the lawmakers said in a statement.
“Right now, authoritarian despots from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago are promoting conspiracy theories, bigotry and propaganda to undermine the habits of critical thinking and logical reasoning that are central to our democracy,” said Raskin. “We need to combat the flood of disinformation and lies in order to restore truth and reason to their rightful place in our democracy.”
If you’ve had it with conspiracy theory, disinformation, fake news and propaganda, let’s stand strong for reason, science and Enlightenment values. Join Rep. Huffman and me in pushing for a #NationalDayofReason. A nation’s mind is a terrible thing to waste.
Yes, this sewer hole from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene is in fact? A treasonous traitor to the US and should be treated as such
Extremist GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) wondered in a weekend interview why people are picking on homicidal white supremacists.
She said that there are so many other criminals to complain about instead — like undocumented immigrants. She also said people should be talking about the “Asian man” who killed a member of a California church last week, and the “Black man” who drove his car into Wisconsin shoppers last year.
She added, incongruously, that it “shouldn’t be about race.”
Greene made the comments as she attacked Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) for railing last week in the House against the avowed white supremacist suspected in the horrific assault at a Buffalo supermarket targeting Black people last week that killed ten people.
Why is there a “target” on white supremacists? she asked in an interview from her car (below) with the right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice.
“White supremacy shouldn’t be the main target,” the lawmaker argued. “We should be more concerned about the illegal invasion at the border, the crime happening every single day on our streets, especially in cities like Chicago. We should go after criminals that break the law and not pursue people based on their skin color.”
But race clearly is critically important in hate crimes. The FBI reported last year that the number of hate crimes in the U.S. in 2020 was the highest in two decades, triggered by a surge in assaults largely by white men on Black and Asian Americans, Hispanics and Jews.
There were 51 hate-crime murders in America in 2019, the highestat that time since the FBI began tracking the toll in the 1990s. Most murder victims were Blacks, Hispanics and Jews.
“Preventing racial hate crimes means tackling white supremacist ideology,” said a position paper posted last week by the Brookings Institution. Over the past 20 years, the number of hate groups in the U.S. has jumped 100%, it noted.
Nadler’s reference to the Buffalo shootings that so incensed Greene was part of his argument to pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act to crack down on the problem. The bill is supported by Democrats, but Republicans are lukewarm.
The killings all involved white shooters inspired by the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which baselessly claims there’s a plot to replace whites with people of color, immigrants and Jews. Greene’s reference to an immigrant “invasion” was a clear dog whistle to believers in the imagined plot.
Hey Marjorie Traitor Greene
You really need to go fuck yourself by shoving one of your goddamn weapons of death up your fucking ass and pulling the trigger and blowing your brains out, because that is exactly where your unevolved brain resides.
YOU deserve to be in Gitmo, right now you treasonous, traitorous troglodyte, up against the wall, blindfolded, and receive a true Ashli Babbit treasonous traitor salute, 21 gun, right to your fucking ugly mug, you horse faced rabid bitch for fascists, white supremacists, Nazis and Traitor Trump.
The only good Marjorie Traitor Greene? Is a fucking dead one, but after she is arrested, tried and convicted for High Treason, Sedition and Insurrection against the United States.
TREASON: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” – 18 U.S. Code § 2381.Treason
By Richard Cook for VT
The first action Joe Biden should take when he is inaugurated president on January 20, 2011, is to issue orders to arrest Donald Trump on charges of treason.
Donald Trump’s actions in refusing to allow the federal government to begin the required steps for the presidential transition are not just the pique of a sore loser. They are actions intended to cripple the U.S. government at a time when a lawfully-elected president must begin to take power to preserve the security of the United States.
Particularly egregious are Trump’s as yet unexplained decapitation of the Defense Department, along with Secretary of State Pompeo’s verbal remarks about a second Trump term and Pompeo’s own failure to support the transition.
These actions raise enough suspicion that Trump is planning an armed coup that taken even by themselves undermines the standing of the U.S. with other nations. Combined with Trump’s continuing failure to honor the integrity of U.S. alliances, including those with Europe and South Korea, suspicion of treasonous intent grows even more acute.
Trump’s scorning of rational implementation of preventive measures against the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the actions of his followers, has resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths. His refusal to cooperate with the incoming Biden administration will cause delays in the roll-out of vaccines now being developed. Trump’s flippancy and failure to act amount to negligent homicide against the U.S. population whose welfare is in his keeping.
Trump’s failure to implement a coronavirus relief package in the autumn of 2020 was a direct assault by him and his administration on the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans. It has been a humanitarian disaster, tantamount to genocide, particularly harmful to minorities, who are Trump’s declared enemies, and to lower-income workers. It didn’t work for Republicans to blame Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Actually to blame were Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Senate cohorts and the willful absence of leadership from Trump.
A vast majority of the people of the U.S. are a diverse population of decent, hard-working, family-oriented individuals who want productive work, a sustainable way of life, and a clean environment. Trump has done everything within his power to turn the people of our nation against each other, to stoke violence, and to promote mutual blame and recrimination as a power play to enhance his personal wealth and ambition.
The fact that America sometimes seems to be a nation divided against itself, even to the point of being on the verge of a cultural civil war, is due in large part to the actions of Trump and his radical political predecessors and cohorts to “divide and conquer.”
Those among Trump’s followers who are screaming without evidence to “Stop the Steal” are deceived through self-indulgent victims of manipulation by skilled propagandists, who share in Trump’s treasonous culpability. Along with Trump’s arrest, Biden should order his Attorney General to begin investigating such individuals as Roger Stone, William Barr, Steve Bannon, etc., for abetting Trump’s unlawful actions against America and its Constitution. Others who should be investigated include Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, and the Republican Senate leadership.
Along with Trump’s trial, Joe Biden’s Justice Department should reopen the Muller investigation, not to examine charges of Russian interference in Trump’s election as president in 2016, but look at all other indications that Trump has acted during his presidency in ways that show preference to Russia and its president Vladimir Putin due to Trump’s having been compromised in any way through his business dealings with Russia or its agents prior to or during his presidency.
A similar investigation should be conducted with regard to Trump’s relations with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu or other agents of Israel. What did Trump get for his ongoing support of Netanyahu’s radical agenda?
It is time for the U.S. to finally get serious about who Donald Trump is, what he has done to America, whom he is acting for, and what damage he may do in the future if left at large.
Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner said he believes what former President Donald Trump did on January 6, 2021, “qualifies as treason.”
Hundreds of Trump supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol a little over 15 months ago in an apparent effort to disrupt the formal certification of President Joe Biden‘s Electoral College victory in a joint-session of Congress. Their attack came directly after Trump told them at a nearby Washington, D.C. rally to walk to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to save their country, following months of lying about the 2020 election results.
Kirschner, who now works as a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC News, gave an overview and assessment of recent remarks by Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat serving on the commission investigating the January 6 assault, outlining the next steps for the House select committee. Raskin described Trump’s actions as “a coup organized by the president against the vice president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” in an interview with Reuters, Climate One and The Guardian.
Emphasizing that Raskin worked as a constitutional law professor at American University prior to his election to Congress, Kirschner described the Democratic lawmaker as a “trustworthy politician” and a “dedicated public servant” in a video uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday. He pointed out that the congressman states, “Donald Trump launched a coup.”
“We know he did,” the legal expert continued. “I would even go so far as to say that what Donald Trump did qualifies as treason.” Kirschner then laid out how treason is defined by federal law.
8 U.S. Code § 2381 states: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”
Kirschner contended that “we know” Trump “inspired,” “encouraged” and “incited” his supporters to attack the Capitol. “We know he launched the attack by telling his angry mob that he had whipped up” to march to the Capitol and to “fight like hell.” The legal expert said, based on reporting, that “we know” members of Trump’s administration and family members urged him to “call off the attack and condemn the violence,” but he did not.
“Why? Because he wanted to violently stop the transfer of presidential power,” Kirschner said. “Now, friends, that sure sounds like someone who is levying war against the United States.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s spokesperson for comment. The former president has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with January 6. He continues to claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen,” arguing that the election results should have been overturned by his former vice president, Mike Pence.
Trump has repeatedly slammed the House select committee investigating the events of January 6 and the related effort to prevent the certification of Biden’s win. The former president argues that the probe is politically motivated and intended to prevent him from seeking another White House term in the future, if he chooses to do so. He has rejected the committee’s two Republican members — Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — saying he no longer views them as part of the GOP.
Amid the attack on the Capitol, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California reportedly spoke with Trump by phone to urge him to call off his supporters. Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Washington Republican, said that Trump responded to McCarthy by saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
Beutler joined Kinzinger, Cheney and seven other GOP representatives, along with Democrats, a week after the violence in voting to impeach Trump for inciting his supporters to carry out the attack. Trump has condemned the 10 House Republicans who backed his impeachment, endorsing primary challengers to most of them. Four of those GOP lawmakers have decided not to seek reelection.
Despite Trump’s and many of his allies’ claims, no evidence has emerged corroborating allegations that the last presidential election was fraudulent. Dozens of election challenge lawsuits filed by the former president and his supporters failed in state and federal courts. Even Trump-appointed judges dismissed the allegations. Audits and recounts across the country, including in states where the election was overseen by pro-Trump Republicans, have consistently reaffirmed Biden’s win.
Former Attorney General William Barr, who was widely viewed as one of Trump’s most loyal Cabinet members, has said repeatedly that there is “no evidence” to support claims of widespread voter fraud being behind Trump’s loss. Barr wrote in his memoir published in March that he told the former president directly to his face that the claims were “bulls**t.”
Raskin said in his interview this week that Pence “saved” the U.S. from Trump’s “coup attempt” on January 6. He said investigators would lay out their findings in public hearings in May.
“We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan,” the congressman explained.
Trump and other allies urged Pence, who oversaw the joint-session of Congress, to reject the electors from several key swing states on January 6. However, Pence and most constitutional scholars assessed that such an action would be counter to the U.S. Constitution. Trump attacked Pence for not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution” in a January 6, 2021, Twitter post.
Death to Nazis and White Supremacist Fascists 