Insurrectionists ready to ‘cross the Rubicon’ in their ongoing war against American democracy

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Monday December 12, 2022 · 3:35 PM PST

2022/12/12 · 15:35

WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 06: Pro-Trump protesters gather in front of the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Trump supporters gathered in the nation's capital to protest the ratification of President-elect Joe Biden's Electoral College victory over President Trump in the 2020 election. A pro-Trump mob later stormed the Capitol, breaking windows and clashing with police officers. Five people died as a result. (Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images) — Donald Trump's MAGA army of radicalized insurrectionists has continued to grow and organize since they began their insurgency against American democracy on Jan. 6.

Most people probably think that the insurrection against American democracy by the MAGA right was a one-day thing that happened on Jan. 6, 2021. They don’t seem to realize that Jan. 6 was only the beginning. The insurrectionists not only remain with us and among us, but are actively preparing to bring down our current democratic system and replace it with a far-right autocracy, just as they attempted back then. You could hear them talk about it at Saturday night’s gala of the New York Young Republicans Club (NYRCC).

“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” NYYRC president Gavin Wax declared. “This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power.”

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Friday December 09, 2022 · 3:28 PM PST

2022/12/09 · 15:28

THE DALLES, OR - JULY 25: Wall bushings with Corona Rings draw electricity to and from the transformers into the valves at Bonneville Powers Celilo Converter Station July 25, 2006 in The Dalles, Oregon. The Celilo plant acts as a transfer station for power travelling to and from California. Today, 2700 megawatz of DC went to Southern California and 4100 megawatz of AC to Northern California. (Photo by Greg Wahl-Stephens/Getty Images) — Right-wing extremists talking among themselves about 'civil war' have been increasingly focused on targeting electrical infrastructure.

The 40,000-plus North Carolinians who have been without power since Saturday because someone knocked out the power grid in Moore County have largely been restored to service now, thanks to workers at Duke Energy who scrambled to replace the equipment destroyed in what has all the earmarks of a domestic terrorist attack. The investigation into the attacks continues apace, with the FBI issuing search warrants both for individuals and for cell phone data.

But in the wake of the attacks, a larger national picture, much more disturbing in its implications, has emerged—one in which it’s now clear that Moore County was not an isolated incident. Utilities around the nation, ranging from the Pacific Northwest to Florida, are reporting a recent uptick in similar gunfire attacks on power substations—all of them in many ways embodying the spread of online extremist content promoting such terrorist attacks and explaining how to carry them out.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Thursday December 08, 2022 · 3:53 PM PST

2022/12/08 · 15:53

A friend of victim Raymond Green Vance lights candles in front of his portrait during a vigil for the victims of a mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub, at Acacia Park in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on November 21, 2022. - Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was arrested following the November 19 shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs that left five people dead and at least 18 injured, officials said. (Photo by Cecilia SANCHEZ / AFP) (Photo by CECILIA SANCHEZ/AFP via Getty Images) — A memorial service and prayer vigil for the victims of the Club Q mass shooting was held two days later.

In case anyone was thrown off by the red herring thrown out by the defense attorneys for the Colorado Springs mass shooter, Anderson Aldrich—namely, the assertion that Aldrich identifies as nonbinary—it’s become crystal clear that the horrific attempted massacre at Club Q last month was in fact both a hate crime motivated by anti-LGBTQ animus and an act of right-wing domestic terrorism.

We know this not only because prosecutors have in fact charged Aldrich with an anti-LGBTQ hate crime, but because an NBC News report has revealed that Aldrich operated two websites that specialized in promoting mass shootings and spewing bigoted hate speech—and one of his neighbors who participated in the sites with Aldrich says his old neighbor regularly and vehemently expressed a hatred of LGBTQ people.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Wednesday December 07, 2022 · 2:45 PM PST

2022/12/07 · 14:45

BERLIN, GERMANY - DECEMBER 07: Police stand outside a residence that they raided earlier today on December 7, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. Law enforcement agencies conducted raids nationwide today and arrested 25 people whom they claim are in an organization bent on violently overthrowing the German government. According to Germany's prosecutor general, the group is driven by a mix of conspiracy theories and far-right ideology, including influence of the Q-Anon and ReichsbÂ¸rger movements. Among its members are former members of an elite military unit and former police. The leader of the group is reportedly a German aristocrat named Heinrich Reuss, also known as Prince Heinrich XIII, who was to lead the new government following an insurrection. (Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images) — Investigators stand outside a Berlin residence where a follower of the Reichsbürger movement was arrested for allegedly participating in a plot to invade and overthrow the Bundestag.

The rise of right-wing extremism isn’t just an American phenomenon, of course: It’s been a mounting global issue, especially in Europe in recent years as a reaction both to growing nonwhite immigration and to the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, it was apparent at the time of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection that neofascist elements in Europe were watching those events unfold carefully, and drawing lessons from them: “We were following it like a soccer match,” a German far-right publisher told The New York Times.

That reality struck home in startling fashion Wednesday when German authorities arrested at least 25 people in a carefully coordinated sweep, all of them alleged participants in a conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government. Among those arrested were a minor member of the German aristocracy, and a former member of the German parliamentary body. And it was clear they drew their inspiration from their American counterparts.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Wednesday December 07, 2022 · 1:33 AM PST

2022/12/07 · 01:33

Power grid attacked in NC — Crew from Duke Energy work frantically to repair the power substations that were shot in North Carolina's Moore County on Saturday night, but officials say full restoration of power to the area may not take place until Thursday.

Whoever it was who shot two power substations in rural Moore County, North Carolina, on Saturday—and so far investigators do not appear to be anywhere close to identifying them—did more than just inconvenience their neighbors with a power outage: They have caused a full-fledged state of emergency in the affected areas, which left about 45,000 people and several towns completely without power for several more days.

More than that, however, is the ominous cloud that lingers from the act: Was it domestic terrorism? The circumstances of the attacks on the substations—including the fact that two of them were disabled by gunfire directed precisely at targets that would bring down the grid, indicating possible coordinated action and the likelihood of more than one perpetrator, as well as their timing at around the same time as a scheduled drag queen show that drew far-right protesters—certainly point in that direction.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Monday December 05, 2022 · 3:45 PM PST

2022/12/05 · 15:45

Nazis in Lakeland, FL — A threatening group of neo-Nazis marched outside a Lakeland, Florida, drag-queen story hour on Saturday.

Last month’s mass shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club—or more precisely, the mainstream right’s “they had it coming” response—seems to have spurred far-right extremists to a higher level of action. Since those murders, groups like the Proud Boys, armed militiamen, and various neofascist groups that have been turning out to harass LGBTQ communities under the rubric of labeling them “groomers” since this summer have begun ratcheting up their politics of menace.

This past weekend alone, as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports, neofascist thugs showed up to menace planned LGBTQ events—all of them drag shows—in Columbus, Ohio; in Lakeland and Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and in New York City. Additionally, there are suspicions that the gun attacks on two electrical substations resulting in a massive power outage in Moore County, North Carolina, may have been targeted at a drag show there.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Friday December 02, 2022 · 3:04 PM PST

2022/12/02 · 15:04

Kanye West in mask on Infowars — Kanye West, wearing a black wool mask for his interview on Infowars, spouted praise for Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial, and antisemitic smears.

Kanye West’s bizarre meltdown on Thursday—first, when he repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler and German Nazis in a bizarre interview on Alex Jones’ Infowars show, followed by his suspension from Twitter by Elon Musk himself after posting a meme with a Star of David twisted into a swastika—will certainly reverberate for a while, and not in good ways.

Aside from the immediate toxic career consequences, both for West (who mostly goes by Ye nowadays) and anyone associated with him, the supposedly mainstream conservatives who enabled the spectacle in the weeks preceding it—including Donald Trump, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, and House Republicans, not to mention Jones and YouTuber Tim Pool—will do what they always do: scurry away and pretend they had nothing to do with it. But in the meantime, the incoming tide of antisemitic and conspiracist hatred Ye’s diatribes enable has risen another few feet, and right-wing media—including Twitter—continue to deepen it.

Case in point: Hours before Musk gave Ye the boot, the account of Andrew Anglin—one of the most notorious neo-Nazis in America, and the current subject of a U.S. Marshals Service arrest warrant—was restored to Twitter, nearly 10 years after it had been suspended.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Thursday December 01, 2022 · 3:27 PM PST

2022/12/01 · 15:27

Boise cop Matt Bryngleson — Matthew Bryngleson, a 22-year Boise Police veteran, accidentally revealed himself as an active white nationalist just as he retired this year.

Boise city officials backed up their pre-Thanksgiving promises to dig deeply into the scandal that has cast a cloud over the city’s police department—the revelation that a longtime police captain was also a pseudonymous contributor to a white-nationalist organization and scheduled speaker at its annual conference—with Wednesday’s announcement by Mayor Lauren McLean that the city would hold an independent investigation into the matter conducted by a former Justice Department prosecutor.

However, the press conference itself provided a jarring reminder that the now-retired police captain’s brand of far-right extremism isn’t relegated only to the police rolls: A well-known far-right activist, acting as a pseudo-reporter for a right-wing news website, asked flustered city officials whether the (utterly bogus) Black crime statistics touted by the officer in his writings and in videos were accurate—to which, fortunately, the interim chief responded pointedly that, manipulated numbers aside, what mattered was Matthew Bryngleson’s toxic white supremacist beliefs and whether they infected the Boise Police Department (BPD).

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Tuesday November 29, 2022 · 4:54 PM PST

2022/11/29 · 16:54

Elon Musk attends Heidi Klum's 21st annual Halloween party at Sake No Hana at Moxy Lower East Side on Monday, Oct. 31, 2022, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP) — Under Elon Musk's ownership, Twitter is being transformed into 'Gab with crypto scams.'

We’re witnessing in real time what happens when a billionaire gets red-pilled. Elon Musk not only is demonstrating that he has no business taking over a corporation like Twitter, in which he has zero expertise or experience—taking the company into a steep financial nosedive—but also that he has been radicalized by conspiracist right-wing extremism, and so his vision of “free speech” is a recipe for freely spreading neofascist ideas and behavior and driving out democratic discourse in the process. It’s a plutocratic authoritarian’s wet dream—and a nightmare for democracy.

Musk, who began his tenure at Twitter by retweeting far-right conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, isn’t just restoring the accounts of a long list of far-right trolls, QAnon conspiracy cultists, misogynists, and hatemongers, who are now free to do their thing on the platform—including spread their threats of genocide and mass murder. He’s also taking the advice of faux journalist Andy Ngo and other right-wing trolls to suspend the accounts of prominent left-wing and antifascist activists (who appear to have no recourse for reinstatement), making ineluctably clear that when Musk talks about “free speech,” the principle only applies to right-wing extremists. As one of his victims observed, he’s turning Twitter into Gab with crypto ads and a much larger user base—for now.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Monday November 28, 2022 · 2:32 PM PST

2022/11/28 · 14:32

Nick Fuentes gloats — Nick Fuentes was in a celebratory mood after his dinner with Donald Trump last week.

Nick Fuentes is boasting about his dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago alongside Kanye West last Tuesday. Trump himself is claiming he had no idea who Fuentes is, but is refusing nonetheless to denounce him. And while a handful of Republicans have chastised Trump for dining with two notorious antisemites, the GOP members of Congress are all playing mum.

There’s a reason Fuentes and his white-nationalist cohorts are tickled pink: The whole fiasco is a huge propaganda victory for them. As Greg Sargent observes at The Washington Post: “It will be read by them as another sign that they are successfully infiltrating the far-right flank of mainstream GOP politics. So will the silence from many Republican leaders since Trump’s dinner with Fuentes.”

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Sunday November 27, 2022 · 3:00 PM PST

2022/11/27 · 15:00

no image description available — Marine Corps war veteran Charles Dyer gained brief notoriety in 2009-2010.

The first time I came across the Oath Keepers back in the summer of 2009, it was all because of a then-29-year-old ex-Marine wearing a skull mask and ranting about the need for “Patriot” militiamen to “rise up” in “a violent revolution.” It was a telling introduction.

The Marine’s name was Charles Dyer. He was an Iraq War combat veteran, and his videos began turning up in late 2008 and early 2009 on YouTube. I was monitoring the rapid increase in militia organizing that began occurring around the time Barack Obama began running for president, which then skyrocketed for the next four years. Dyer’s videos, which attracted hundreds of thousands of views, made me concerned—especially as I realized that he was a spokesman for this new organization that focused on recruiting military veterans into a far-right ideological army, and which was closely associated with the blossoming Tea Party movement.

David Neiwert

Daily Kos Staff Emeritus

Sunday November 27, 2022 · 7:00 AM PST

2022/11/27 · 07:00

The endangered Island Marble butterfly. It can now only be found on San Juan Island.

Friday Harbor, Washington: San Juan Island is home to a remarkable bounty of wildlife, from killer whales to bald eagles to foxes. But probably none of its many creatures are as revered, fawned over, and fiercely protected as its Island Marble butterflies.

The Island Marbles are delicate, wispy creatures with beautiful green mottling. They’re also extremely endangered. Once believed to be extinct, they now can only be found on San Juan Island, and really only at one locale. Seattle Times reporter Nicholas Turner and photographer Daniel Kim recently paid this location a visit and got a terrific behind-the-scenes look at the efforts to preserve the species.

Newer
Older

RSS

Insurrectionists ready to ‘cross the Rubicon’ in their ongoing war against American democracy

The far right’s power grid fetish becomes a likely threat as reports of substation attacks roll in

Red herrings aside, Colorado Springs shooter’s clear motivation was rabid anti-LGBTQ hatred

German authorities arrest dozens of far-right extremists who plotted to overthrow government

Suffering in Moore County shadowed by fear that power outage was act of domestic terrorism

Extremists appear emboldened to show up armed to LGBTQ events around the country

Ye’s public meltdown may spur brief recoil, but it reflects how deep the antisemitic tide has gotten

As Boise officials announce investigation into racist police captain, extremists voice their dismay

At the same time Musk opens doors to far-right trolls and conspiracists, leftist accounts suspended

Fuentes gloats, Trump doubles down, and Republicans wave white feather over dinner date

The rise and fall of ‘July4Patriot’ Charles Dyer, the Oath Keepers’ original far-right celebrity

A look inside the efforts to save the ultra-endangered Island Marble butterfly on a remote island