11/9/2021   Desperate, angry, destructive: How Americans morphed into a mob, By Rachel Weiner, Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman and Sahana Jayaraman, The Washington Post

“Countless videos show the mob that attacked the Capitol was violent. Everyone participating in the mob contributed to that violence.  [The harm includes] “the damage to the reputation of our democracy, which is usually held up around the world." - U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell .

 

“Democracies die, and we’ve seen it happen in the past when citizens rise up against their government and take part in the kinds of events that took place on January 6. We’re tearing our country apart.” - U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton.

 

“It’s become evident to me in the riot cases, the post-riot cases, that many of the defendants who are pleading guilty are not truly accepting responsibility.”  - U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan

11/4/2021   Capitol riot: Texas realtor sentenced to 60 days for role in Jan. 6 insurrection, by Rick Rouan, USA TODAY

11/4/2021   She said she wasn’t going to jail for Jan. 6, citing ‘blonde hair white skin.’ A judge sentenced her to 60 days behind bars, By Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post

“For better or worse, you’ve become one of the faces of January 6,” U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper of D.C. told Jenna Ryan, 50. She gained national attention by defending her conduct at the Capitol in media interviews and on Twitter. Because of that notoriety, Cooper said, people would look to her sentence as evidence of “how our country responded to what happened.”

10/31/2021   “The Attack: Before, During and After” - The Washington Post

The consequences of January 6th are still coming into focus, but what is already clear is that the insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy.

 

Since then, the forces behind the attack remain potent and growing. Trump emerged emboldened, fortifying his hold on the Republican Party, sustaining his election-fraud lie and driving demands for more restrictive voting laws and investigations of the 2020 results, even though they have been repeatedly affirmed by ballot reviews and the courts. A deep distrust in the voting process has spread across the country, shaking the foundation on which the American experiment was built — the shared belief that the nation’s leaders are freely and fairly elected.

10/31/2021   Letter from Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee about The Post’s Jan. 6 investigation, The Washington Post

Throughout much of this year, a team of 75 Washington Post journalists has been working to produce a definitive account of Jan. 6 — its causes, its costs and its aftermath. The result of that investigation, a three-part series being published today, makes clear that the violence that day was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event.

10/31/2021   Former president Donald Trump’s response to the findings of The Post’s Jan. 6 investigation, By the Washington Post Staff, The Washington Post

The Post investigation was based on interviews with 230 people and thousands of pages of court documents and internal law enforcement reports, along with hundreds of videos, photographs and audio recordings.

 

The Post provided Trump a list of 37 findings reported as part of its investigation. His spokesman Taylor Budowich provided a lengthy written response that included a series of unrelated, inflammatory claims that The Post is not publishing in full.

 

In response to the investigation’s findings, Budowich said that the former president “greatly objected” to all of them. He disputed The Post’s investigation as “fake news” and falsely cast people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 as “agitators not associated with President Trump.” The statement repeated Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was rigged.

10/31/2021

10/31/2021   After: CONTAGION, Threats and disinformation spread across the country in the wake of the Capitol siege, shaking the underpinnings of American democracy, The Washington Post

• Reported by Devlin Barrett, Aaron C. Davis, Josh Dawsey, Amy Gardner, Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Peter Hermann, Spencer S. Hsu, Paul Kane, Ashley Parker, Beth Reinhard, Philip Rucker and Cleve R. Wootson Jr.
• Written by Amy Gardner and Rosalind S. Helderman
• Visuals and design by Phoebe Connelly, Natalia Jiménez-Stuard, Tyler Remmel and Madison Walls

10/31/2021   During: BLOODSHED, For 187 harrowing minutes, the president watched his supporters attack the Capitol — and resisted pleas to stop them. The Washington Post

• Contributors to this report: Alice Crites, Amy Gardner, Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Hamburger, Spencer S. Hsu, Dan Lamothe, Carol D. Leonnig, Ellen Nakashima, Jon Swaine, Julie Tate, Ben Terris and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. contributed to this report.

10/31/2021   Before: RED FLAGS: As Trump propelled his supporters to Washington, law enforcement agencies failed to heed mounting warnings about violence on Jan. 6. The Washington Post

• Reported by Hannah Allam, Devlin Barrett, Aaron C. Davis, Josh Dawsey, Amy Gardner, Shane Harris, Rosalind S. Helderman, Paul Kane, Dan Lamothe, Carol D. Leonnig, Nick Miroff, Ellen Nakashima, Ashley Parker, Beth Reinhard, Philip Rucker and Craig Timberg
• Written by Aaron C. Davis
• Visuals and design by Phoebe Connelly, Natalia Jiménez-Stuard, Tyler Remmel and Madison Walls

 

10/29/2021   Pro-Trump rioter who declared she was 'tired of paying taxes to crooks' owed $35K in back taxes: feds

"The defendant has not consistently paid her taxes, with a history of federal and state tax liens from 2013 and 2016 that caused a deficiency of more than $35,000 in back taxes that was not resolved until April 2021," prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo for Ryan. "Despite her own history of tax delinquency, the defendant recorded herself ... on the Captiol steps declaring that she was 'tired of paying taxes' to 'crooks.'"

 

Prosecutors have recommended jail time, citing Ryan's boast on Twitter that she would skate on the charges, in essence claiming white supremicist privilege, saying: 

 

"Sorry I have blonde hair, white skin, a great job, a great future, and I'm not going to jail. Sorry to rain on your hater parade. I did nothing wrong," Ryan wrote.

10/28/2021   Chief federal judge in D.C. assails ‘almost schizophrenic’ Jan. 6 prosecutions: ‘The rioters were not mere protesters’, by Rachel Weiner, The Washington Post

“No wonder parts of the public in the U.S. are confused about whether what happened on January 6 at the Capitol was simply a petty offense of trespassing with some disorderliness, or shocking criminal conduct that represented a grave threat to our democratic norms,” Judge Beryl A. Howell said in court Thursday. “Let me make my view clear: The rioters were not mere protesters.”

 

“Is it the government’s view that the members of the mob that engaged in the Capitol attack on January 6 were simply trespassers?” Howell asked incredulously. “Is general deterrence going to be served by letting rioters who broke into the Capitol, overran the police . . . broke into the building through windows and doors . . . resolve their criminal liability through petty offense pleas?”

10/28/2021   Trump Trash ordered back to scene of crime to face consequences

 

10/6/2021   The Feds Have Made 625+ Capitol Riot Arrests. They Still Have A Long Way To Go, by Ryan J. Reilly, Huffpost

Nine months after the Jan. 6 attack, the FBI has nabbed a quarter of the estimated 2,500 potential Capitol defendants.

10/3/2021    Flynn Secretly Paid $200,000 in Middle East Nuclear Scheme—Report, by Jeff Stein, SpyTalk from NRC Handelsblad

The payment to Flynn was uncovered during an audit by one of the project’s major players, the Dutch transport company Mammoet, which envisioned shipping major parts of the nuclear plants to Saudi Arabia and other destinations in the Middle East, the paper reported. The wildly ambitious scheme imagined a consortium of U.S., Russian, Canadian and French partners building nuclear power plants in a half dozen Arab states and managing them independent of local regimes.

 

The project never jelled for numerous reasons, just one of them being the involvement of Flynn, whose willingness to take an exorbitant speaking fee from the Russians and under-the-table lobbying fees from the Turks made him toxic. He was fired from his position as Trump’s national security adviser only weeks into his tenure for lying to FBI agents and Vice President Mike Pence about a back-channel phone call to the Russian ambassador. Trump pardoned him after his guilty plea last November.

10/1/2021   Nederlands bedrijf betaalde mee aan dubieuze lobbyist Michael Flynn, by Esther Rosenberg & Carola Houtekamer, NRC Handelsblad

Politieke lobby Het Nederlandse transportbedrijf Mammoet droeg vijf miljoen euro bij aan een groot, privaat kernenergieproject. Het geld ging onder meer naar de omstreden Amerikaanse oud-generaal Flynn.

2/22/2021   How the CNP, a Republican Powerhouse, Helped Spawn Trumpism, Disrupted the Transfer of Power, and Stoked the Assault on the Capitol, by Anne Nelson, The Washington Spectator

The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory the previous year. From the beginning, its goals represented a convergence of the interests of these three groups: a retreat from advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities, tax cuts for the wealthy, and raw political power. Operating from the shadows, its members, who would number some 400, spent the next four decades courting, buying, and bullying fellow Republicans, gradually achieving what was in effect a leveraged buyout of the GOP. Favorite sons, such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, were groomed, financed, and supported. Apostates, such as John McCain and Jeff Flake, were punished and exiled. The leaders of the CNP tended to favor their conservative Christian co-religionists, but political expedience came first.

8/20/2021   Niall Ferguson on why the end of America’s empire won’t be peaceful, by Niall Ferguson, The Economist

As it leaves Afghanistan in chaos, America’s decline mirrors Britain’s a century ago. It may also invite wider conflict, warns a historian

 

“THE MULTITUDES remained plunged in ignorance… and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them.” So wrote Winston Churchill of the victors of the first world war in “The Gathering Storm.” He bitterly recalled a “refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state.” American readers watching their government’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, and listening to President Joe Biden’s strained effort to justify the unholy mess he has made, may find at least some of Churchill’s critique of interwar Britain uncomfortably familiar.

7/12/2021   Man tied to violent prison gang pleads guilty in Jan. 6 riot, by Alanna Durkin Richer, Associated Press, Detroit News

Curzio is the second defendant to be sentenced for the Jan. 6 riot.

7/6/2021   FBI: Militia-style group surveilled Capitol weeks after riot, by Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press, The Detroit News

Duong said he went to the Jan. 6 rally in Washington alone and dressed in all black to look like a “member of Antifa.” 

 

“My goal here is to outline the current ‘state of play’ in what could be called the second American Civil war,” Duong said. 

 

6/28/2021   There’s No Good Way to Protect the Presidency Anymore, By Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic

The Department of Justice is banking on a future full of upstanding presidents who are committed to rule of law. But we may not be so lucky.

 

The especially sharp contrast between the Biden administration and its particular predecessor makes for a more uncomfortable situation than most. During his time in office, Donald Trump repurposed the presidency in the service of malice and personal gain. After Trump, is it possible—or desirable—for the law to maintain a clean distinction between the office of the presidency and the person who holds it? The answer depends, in part, on whether Trump is best understood as a onetime aberration in an ongoing lineage of decent presidents, or as a man whose presidency opened the door to future leaders with no commitment to rule of law or interest in the institutions that uphold it.

 

6/27/2021   Inside William Barr’s Breakup With Trump, by Jonathan D Karl, The Atlantic

Barr also looked into allegations that voting machines across the country were rigged to switch Trump votes to Biden votes. He received two briefings from cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. “We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told me, noting that even if the machines somehow changed the count, it would show up when they were recounted by hand. “It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy.”

Sedition Tracker dotcom        Suspects (by Name) 

4/28/2021   Feds: Trump supporter on FBI's Most Wanted list was Googling Gretchen Whitmer, by Tresa Baldas, Detroit Free Press

"(Munafo) advised the 911 dispatcher that he knew where she lived, and recited accurate information about her mortgage and tax obligations," the affidavit states.

 

Then came the alleged threats.

 

Munafo told the dispatcher that he would "maim her, kill her, and attack her family if she did not put a deputy or sergeant on the line," the affidavit states.

"In one call he demanded, “[P]ut a f------ cop on the phone now you stupid bitch, or it’s going to go way worse for your family!," the FBI agent wrote. "In another he threatened, “[B]itch, I’m gonna cut your throat. I’m gonna make you eat your f----- nose. I’m gonna hurt you bad for this. It won’t be today, it won’t be tomorrow, it’ll be f------ soon though."

 

Munafo also allegedly said: “'Each one of these calls are gonna be like a charge, right? I’ll never see a judge,'” the FBI agent wrote inMu

4/27/2021   New York man arrested in Orlando for hitting U.S. Capitol police officer in riot, feds say, by David Harris, Orlando Sentinel

4/27/2021   New York Man Arrested for Assaulting Law Enforcement During Jan. 6 Capitol Breach, DOJ Press Release

4/23/2021   Statement of Facts, FBI affidavit submitted to a U.S. Magistrate

4/25/2021   Capitol riot probes home in on Oath Keepers, by Harper Neidig and Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill

A dozen co-defendants reportedly affiliated with the right-wing militia organization are facing conspiracy and other charges over their alleged roles in the storming of the Capitol.  Last week, another member of the Oath Keepers, Jon Ryan Schaffer, became the first defendant following Jan. 6 to plead guilty and agree to cooperate with law enforcement.

 

“It means they’re not treating these people as individuals anymore. They’re trying to go after networks and organizations, which is a totally different strategy and also reflects the recognition that this is no longer a problem of random lone wolves being radicalized on the internet. We’re talking about groups engaging in violent activities that they are going to pursue, and that is fascinating,” said Katrina Mulligan, a national security expert with the Center for American Progress.

 

“From the outside, if you’re trying to get into a closed network — drug conspiracy, the mob, the Proud Boys — you can try to intercept communications, you can try to tap a phone and get text messages, but you might not be getting it, because you don't know what form of communication they’re using,” said Mark Osler, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the University of St. Thomas School of Law.

“And that's something a cooperator will tell you, how and what form of communications they were using, which will allow you to go get those through warrants or subpoenas,” he added.

4/18/2021   Busted: Father of the Insurrectionista who stole Speaker Pelosi's laptop.   

Link to Twitterer @Cajsa's very long list of Republican sexual predators, a compilation begun in 2018

 

4/18/2921   Greene Cancels Launch Of Nativist Caucus After Outcry From Fellow GOPers, by Summer Concepcion, TPM

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is no longer planning to launch her “America First” caucus, which espoused nativity and white supremacist ideas, following backlash from other Republicans, according to CNN.

 

Nick Dyer, a spokesperson for Greene, said in a statement to CNN on Friday that the Georgia lawmaker would launch the caucus “very soon.”

However, Dyer issued a stark reversal a day after, telling CNN in an email on Saturday afternoon that Greene is not “launching anything.”

4/17/2021   GOP's new 'America First Caucus' follows in some blatantly white nationalist footsteps, by Kevin M. Kruse, MSNBC

A newly formed “America First Caucus” in Congress, supported by a few far-right Republicans in the House of Representatives, is looking to recruit new members with an old set of arguments.

 

These white nationalist tropes found a receptive audience in the American people.  

 

Its platform, now circulating in Washington, is little more than a retread of the white nationalist screeds of the 1910s and 1920s.

 

The Klan's imperial wizard warned in 1922 about "the tremendous influx of foreign immigration, tutored in alien dogmas and alien creeds, slowly pushing the native-born white American population into the center of the country, there to be ultimately overwhelmed and smothered." In 1923, a meeting of grand dragons of the Klan focused a great deal on the supposed threat, asserting that the only true American was “one whose every thought and interest places America first above all other nations on Earth.”

 

The popular panic over immigration and the pseudo-scientific justifications for nativism and racism came together in the push for the National Origins Act of 1924, a quota-based measure that drastically reduced immigration from southeastern Europe and banned all Asians from immigrating entirely.

 

But the white nationalist panic in America did more than change its own immigration policy. As historian James Q. Whitman and others have chronicled, the National Origins Act in turn served as a model for the “racial citizenship” laws that took root in Germany a decade later.

 

“The United States of the new world have come to understand the monstrous danger of the ‘great melting pot of races’ over the course of the last decades, and put a check on bastardization through draconian immigration law,” a Nazi Party publication noted in 1933. “To these circles of tribally related Americans we reach out our hand in friendship.”

 

America’s immigration restriction, along with the segregation statutes in the South, ultimately stood as the inspiration for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. And those laws, in turn, provided Germans with the legal justification for the Holocaust itself.

4/17/2021   Marjorie Taylor Greene scraps planned launch of controversial 'America First' caucus amid blowback from GOP, by Daniella Diaz, CNN

4/17/2021   Marjorie Taylor Greene launching 'America First' caucus pushing for 'Anglo-Saxon political tradition', by Daniella Diaz, Annie Grayer, Ryan Nobles and Paul LeBlanc, CNN

Embattled GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, who is under federal investigation over allegations involving sex trafficking and prostitution, tweeted Friday, "I'm proud to join @mtgreenee in the #AmericaFirst Caucus.

 

Congressional caucuses are voluntary groups usually made up of lawmakers seeking to advance certain policy agendas. While the groups operate outside of the formal congressional legislative structure, many have found success influencing debate and amplifying their shared policy prescriptions.

 

GOP conference chair Liz Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican, responded to the reporting about the new caucus from Greene in a tweet.

"Republicans believe in equal opportunity, freedom, and justice for all. We teach our children the values of tolerance, decency and moral courage," she wrote. "Racism, nativism, and anti-Semitism are evil. History teaches we all have an obligation to confront & reject such malicious hate."

4/17/2021   Kinzinger Says GOPers Who Join Nativist Caucus Should Be Stripped Of Committees, by Zoë Richards, TPM

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) suggested on Friday that members of Congress who join a newly-formed, far-right caucus that has espoused nativist and white supremacist ideas should be stripped of their committees.

 

“I believe anyone that joins this caucus should have their committees stripped, and the Republican conference should expel them from conference participation,” Kinzinger tweeted.

4/17/2021   Rep. Greene tries to distance herself from ‘America First Caucus’ document denounced as racist, by Amy B Wang and Colby Itkowitz, The Washington Post

 

4/17/2021   Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Reportedly Joins Fellow Republicans in Forming 'America First Caucus' for 'Anglo-Saxon Political Traditions' by Zack Linly, The Root

 

4/16/2021   A new America First Caucus — led by @mtgreenee and @RepGosar, Punchbowl News, Twitter

— is recruiting people to join based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions” architectural style that “befits the progeny of European architecture”

 

4/14/2021   White Extremists Sought Murders of Politicians and Cops After Capitol Siege, by Dell Cameron and Tom McKay, Gizmodo

On Jan. 15, nine days after the fatal assault on the Capitol, analysts at one of Florida’s three intelligence “fusion centers” issued their first bulletin of the year highlighting violent extremist content. The Violent Extremist Snapshot served to notify police in Central Florida of online posts by far-right extremists abetting real-world violence and crime. High on their list were the calls for political assassinations coming from white supremacists, neo-fascists, and other “racially-motivated” extremists.

 

Across a swath of Telegram channels known widely as “Terrorgram,” diehard fundamentalists, self-proclaimed chauvinists, and maniacal flag-waivers come together with the occasional religious zealot to marinate in their collective insecurities. By and large, most of this extremist enclave has moved beyond its support for Donald Trump—and indeed, many had long viewed him as a feckless political tool, incapable of igniting the race war they’ve long promised. But the furor of the accelerationists was seemingly intensified by the Capitol coup and their frustration with its defeat.

 

“The purpose of Terrorgram channels is to be inspirational to those who might commit violence in the name of white supremacy, anti-Semitism and so forth,” Squire said. “The people behind these channels produce propaganda in the form of memes and written arguments, primarily to advance the view that there is no other solution except violence, that martyrdom in service of that violence is a worthy goal, and so on.”

 

The focus on violent white supremacists would mark a significant policy shift, particularly from the Trump years, which saw diminishing support for programs countering a superior threat in favor of more politically advantageous ones—chiefly aimed at immigrants and Muslims. In 2018, violent attacks by far-right terrorists, including white supremacists, more than doubled that of Islamic extremists in the West, according to START. That same year, Trump outlined his administration’s counterintelligence strategy, never mentioning the word “white” (except in reference to the president’s home).

 

“Islam,” conversely, made 25 appearances.

4/10/2021   Man Who Boasted He Was at Capitol Riot Is Charged in Bomb Plot, by Michael Levenson, The New York Times

A Texas man who boasted that he was at the United States Capitol when a pro-Trump mob stormed the building in January has been charged with plotting to blow up an Amazon data center in Virginia, the Justice Department said on Friday.

 

The man, Seth Aaron Pendley, 28, of Wichita Falls, was arrested on Thursday after he took what he believed were explosive devices from a bomb supplier but were in fact inert objects provided by an undercover F.B.I. agent in Fort Worth, prosecutors said. Federal officials said they had begun investigating the plot after a concerned citizen contacted the F.B.I. on Jan. 8 about alarming statements posted on MyMilitia.com, a forum dedicated to organizing militia groups.

 

In late January, Mr. Pendley began using Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to communicate with another confidential source, prosecutors said. That source told the F.B.I. that Mr. Pendley had said he planned to use plastic explosives to bomb Amazon Web Services data centers, an attack that he hoped would “kill off about 70 percent of the internet.”  In recorded conversations, Mr. Pendley told the undercover agent that he believed the attack would destroy the web servers used by the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and other federal agencies, prosecutors said. Mr. Pendley said he hoped the bombing would anger “the oligarchy.”

 4/9/2021   Clear the Capitol,’ Pence pleaded, timeline of riot shows, by Lisa Mascaro, Ben Fox and Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — From a secure room in the Capitol on Jan. 6, as rioters pummeled police and vandalized the building, Vice President Mike Pence tried to assert control. In an urgent phone call to the acting defense secretary, he issued a startling demand.

 

“Clear the Capitol,” Pence said.

 

These new details about the deadly riot are contained in a previously undisclosed document prepared by the Pentagon for internal use that was obtained by The Associated Press and vetted by current and former government officials.

 

The timeline adds another layer of understanding about the state of fear and panic while the insurrection played out, and lays bare the inaction by then-President Donald Trump and how that void contributed to a slowed response by the military and law enforcement. It shows that the intelligence missteps, tactical errors and bureaucratic delays were eclipsed by the government’s failure to comprehend the scale and intensity of a violent uprising by its own citizens.

4/6/2021   Fears of White People Losing Out Permeate Capitol Rioters’ Towns, Study Finds, by Alan Feuer, The New York Times

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

 

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

 

Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

4/6/2021   Opinion: What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us, by Robert A. Pape, The Washington Post

The Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a violent mob at the behest of former president Donald Trump was an act of political violence intended to alter the outcome of a legitimate democratic election. That much was always evident.

 

What we know 90 days later is that the insurrection was the result of a large, diffuse and new kind of protest movement congealing in the United States.

 

The Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), working with court records, has analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans, from 250 counties in 44 states, arrested or charged in the Capitol attack.

 

Those involved are, by and large, older and more professional than right-wing protesters we have surveyed in the past. They typically have no ties to existing right-wing groups. But like earlier protesters, they are 95 percent White and 85 percent male, and many live near and among Biden supporters in blue and purple counties.

 

When compared with almost 2,900 other counties in the United States, our analysis of the 250 counties where those charged or arrested live reveals that the counties that had the greatest decline in White population had an 18 percent chance of sending an insurrectionist to D.C., while the counties that saw the least decline in the White population had only a 3 percent chance. This finding holds even when controlling for population size, distance to D.C., unemployment rate and urban/rural location. It also would occur by chance less than once in 1,000 times.

4/6/2021   Capitol Rioters Face the Consequences of Their Selfie Sabotage, by Elizabeth Williamson, The New York Times

“We’ve just taken the Capitol!” Mr. Biggs shouted to the world.

 

All that was laid out in court documents, but it was also in plain view. Mr. Biggs, indicted last month on charges that included conspiracy and destruction of government property, potentially faces decades in prison for his role in the Capitol riot.

 

He has himself to blame. Like other Proud Boys, he helped document the prosecution's case.

 

“Wanting to show how smart they are, they’ve basically outlined the charges against them,” said Grant Fredericks, a forensic video analyst in Seattle who examined the online evidence against Mr. Biggs and Proud Boys facing similar charges.

 

 

4/2/2021   Chesterfield Township man Indicted

One witness gave the FBI video from a Facebook post showing Herendeen inside the Capitol crypt.

• News Story:   U.S. Capitol riot leads to charges against two Macomb County men, by Robert Snell, The Detroit News
• Complaint of Arrest Warrant
• Statement of Facts, 3/16/2021, DOJ
• Grand Jury Indictment, 4/2/2021, United States District Court for the District of Columbia

 

4/2/2021   Roseville man Indicted

A witness told investigators Schornak was inside the Capitol on Jan. 6. The witness provided a screen grab from a Facebook user who posted an update on the riot on Schornak’s behalf, according to the FBI.

“Yes I was in it, front line tear gased, pepper sprayed n batoned (sic),” the post reads.

• News Story:   U.S. Capitol riot leads to charges against two Macomb County men, by Robert Snell, The Detroit News
• Complaint of Arrest Warrant
• Statement of Facts, 3/16/2021, DOJ
• Grand Jury Indictment, 4/2/2021, United States District Court for the District of Columbia

 

4/2/2021   Ford not ruling out donations to GOP lawmakers who fought presidential certification, by Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press

The Dearborn automaker had suspended all donations. In the letter, Ford said it was "opting against a blanket ban on Republican lawmakers" involved in the fight against certification and will vet “candidates and committees on an individual basis," Reuters reported.

4/2/2021   How America’s surveillance networks helped the FBI catch the Capitol mob, by Drew Harwell and Craig Timberg, The Washington Post

The cache of federal documents lays out a sprawling mix of FBI techniques: license plate readers that captured suspects’ cars on the way to Washington; cell-tower location records that chronicled their movements through the Capitol complex; facial recognition searches that matched images to suspects’ driver’s licenses or social media profiles; and a remarkably deep catalogue of video from surveillance systems, live streams, news reports and cameras worn by the police who swarmed the Capitol that day.

 

Investigators sent “geofence” search warrants to Google, asking for the account information of any smartphone Google had detected on Jan. 6 inside the Capitol via GPS satellites, Bluetooth beacons and WiFi access points. Investigators then compiled an “exclusion list” of phones owned by people who were authorized to be in the Capitol on Jan. 6, including members of Congress and first responders. Everyone else was fair game.

 

The documents highlight just how much digital evidence an ordinary person sheds in everyday life: In one case, prosecutors said they gathered more than 12,000 pages of data from a suspect’s phone using Cellebrite, a tool popular with law enforcement for its ability to penetrate locked phones and copy their contents. The search also recovered 2,600 pages of Facebook records and 800 cellphone photos and videos.

 

Example: Investigators filed a 33-page search warrant with Facebook demanding virtually everything $uspectX had done on the site dating back to Nov. 1: all messages, draft messages, posts, comments, photos, videos, audio recordings, video calls, “pokes,” “likes,” “tags,” searches, location check-ins, privacy settings, session times and durations, calendar items, event postings (past and future), friend requests (approved and rejected), address books, friend lists and relationship status updates, as well as all dates, times, IP addresses, location information and other metadata linked to each item, plus any information he’d shared with the company, including his passwords, security questions, home address, phone number and any linked credit cards or bank accounts.

 

Investigators went beyond official databases as well, the documents say: Crowdsourced amateur “sedition hunters.”

3/31/2021   Self-Proclaimed ‘Sandwich Nazi’ Busted by His Ex-Employees as Capitol Rioter, by Jose Pagliery, Daily Beast

Just down the street from West Virginia University in the city of Morgantown, sandwich shop owner George Pierre Tanios had a terrible reputation. Ex-employees say he’d berate employees in public and physically fight customers. Online reviews show he’d even shove Trump propaganda in your face.

 

So it was no surprise to Cory Denkert, a former employee, when he checked Facebook one day and saw a selfie Tanios took during the insurrection on Jan. 6—one that law enforcement later determined was taken at the U.S. Capitol Building. It matched an FBI flyer of Photograph #254, a MAGA hat-wearing bearded guy wanted for assaulting a federal officer, including one Capitol Police officer who died. Tanios was even wearing a hoodie with his shop’s name emblazoned on the chest, “Sandwich U.”

3/28/2021   Parler users melt down after finding out the social media platform shared Capitol riot info with the FBI: report, by Tom Boggioni, RawStory

According to a report from Mashable, right-wing extremists who migrated over to Parler from Twitter are furious with their new home after learning the social media platform assisted the FBI in finding pictures and videos of violent acts and threats related to the Jan 6th. assault on the nation's Capitol.

 

Parler "referred violent content and incitement from Parler's platform over 50 times before January 6th" as well as "specific threats of violence."

3/28/2021   Parler explains 'free speech' to angry users after sharing Capitol riot posts with the FBI, by Matt Binder, Mashable

Parler found itself unironically explaining the First Amendment to its user base filled with members who declare themselves to be "Constitutionalists" and "Free Speech" advocates.

 

"Some users have raised questions about the practice of referring violent or inciting content to law enforcement," begins Parler's latest statement. "The First Amendment does not protect violence inciting speech, nor the planning of violent acts. Such content violates Parler's TOS. Any violent content shared with law enforcement was posted publicly and brought to our attention primarily via user reporting. And, as it is posted publicly, it can properly be referred to law enforcement by anyone. Parler remains steadfast in protecting your right to free speech."

 

3/27/2021   Capitol stormer to judge: I don’t need an ankle monitor because I had a ‘Christian upbringing’ by Sky Palma, DeadState

3/27/2021   Woman who took private plane to Capitol riot: I’m not going to jail — ‘I’m blonde, white, and I have a great job’ by Sky Palma, DeadState 

3/24/2021   New Photo Suggests Private-Jet Trumpers Proceeded Toward Capitol After Rally, by Abigail Tracy, Vanity Fair

The attendance of this jet-setting group of Memphians pierces the inflated narrative that “economic anxiety” is a driving force behind Trump’s base of support. “It goes to show—and more so than anything about Memphis—how the Big Lie that Trump put out there didn’t just appeal to people who were middle income and lower or lesser education.… This Big Lie attracted people that were well educated and have high-income economic status. And I think that was true throughout the country,” Congressman Steve Cohen, who represents Memphis’s district, told Vanity Fair in an interview on Monday. “It was an insurrection, it was a seditious effort to take over the government and manipulate the process so that the people’s will wouldn’t be heard through the Electoral College.”

3/11/2021   Parler wanted back into the App Store. Apple said no. by Stan Schroeder, Mashable

“There is no place for hateful, racist, discriminatory content on the App Store,” Apple wrote to Parler’s chief policy officer on Feb. 25, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

 

Apple also reportedly provided some screenshots to support the above, including those of user profile pictures with swastikas, as well as posts and user names that are racist, homophobic and misogynistic.

 

According to Bloomberg's sources, the company fired its three remaining iOS developers on Wednesday.

3/5/2021   ‘I was wrong’: Milton man, 18, held in Capitol riot appeals to judge for release, by Otis R. Tay

According to prosecutors, on Dec. 30 Cua wrote that “we just have to take back what’s ours.” Then, on Jan. 6, he wrote: “We didn’t attack American people. We attacked the swamp rats.” He also wrote that he wanted to “lock the swamp rat tyrants in the capitol and burn the place to the ground.”

3/4/2021   Federal investigators are examining communications between US lawmakers and Capitol rioters, CNN

 

 

3/4/2021   Germany's newest NeoNazi party, the AfD, is formally placed under surveillance, CNN

Germany's BfV domestic intelligence service has formally placed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) under surveillance on suspicion of trying to undermine Germany's democratic constitution, a person briefed on the move said. Four years after becoming the first avowedly anti-immigrant party to enter the German parliament, the AfD becomes the latest party to be monitored in this way since the Nazi era ended in 1945.

 

 

3/3/2021   ‘I’ll get away with anything’: 13 not-so-greatest hits from the Capitol riot arrest records, by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post

The Washington Post’s Katie Shepherd on Tuesday detailed the story of William Robert Norwood III. According to a criminal complaint, Norwood texted a group of friends and family that he was going to attend the day’s events and fool police by dressing in all black. “I’ll look just like ANTIFA,” he said. “I’ll get away with anything.” He allegedly followed up later with a photo showing him holding a police vest, apparently acquired during the riot. “It worked,” Norwood said. “I got away with things that others were shot or arrested for.”

3/1/2021   Rewriting January 6th: Republicans push false and misleading accounts of Capitol riot, by Mike DeBonis and Jeremy Barr, The Washington Post

2/22/2021   How the CNP, a Republican Powerhouse, Helped Spawn Trumpism, Disrupted the Transfer of Power, and Stoked the Assault on the Capitol, by Anne Nelson, The Washington Spectator

The Council for National Policy was founded in 1981 by a group of televangelists, Western oligarchs, and Republican strategists to capitalize on Ronald Reagan’s electoral victory the previous year. From the beginning, its goals represented a convergence of the interests of these three groups: a retreat from advances in civil and political rights for women and minorities, tax cuts for the wealthy, and raw political power. Operating from the shadows, its members, who would number some 400, spent the next four decades courting, buying, and bullying fellow Republicans, gradually achieving what was in effect a leveraged buyout of the GOP. Favorite sons, such as Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, were groomed, financed, and supported. Apostates, such as John McCain and Jeff Flake, were punished and exiled. The leaders of the CNP tended to favor their conservative Christian co-religionists, but political expedience came first.

2/5/2021   199 House Republicans have embraced anti-Semitism and violence, by Dana Milbank, The Washington Post

What I never expected I would see in my lifetime, in the United States of America, what occurred on the floor of the House this week. One hundred ninety-nine Republican members of Congress rallied to the defense of a vile, unapologetic anti-Semite in their ranks who calls for assassination of her opponents.

 

This is more than a Republican problem; it’s an American problem. You don’t have to be a scholar of 20th-century Europe to know what happens when the elected leaders of a democracy condone violence as a political tool and blame the country’s ills on the Jews.

2/5/2021   Ginni Thomas went too far, by Elliot Williams, CNN

Gentleness, grace and mercy are noble sentiments. But Thomas is being disingenuous. She has a long history of incendiary rhetoric, particularly online. Was she really "speaking knowingly and gently across the divide" last summer, when she referred to the Black Lives Matter protesters as "radical extremists" who "hate America"?

 

Was she attempting to heal the "polarized" world when regularly sharing baseless memes accusing Democrats of engaging in "a silent coup...against the very premises of our constitutional republic," advancing the anti-Semitic trope of a Democratic Party run by the Soros family? When she speaks of her "side" is she speaking about the one that showed up at the Capitol building armed with nooses, gallows and riot gear, calling out threats for members of Congress they said they wanted to punish, and trashing the seat of our democracy? Or is she talking about some other side?

1/29/2021   Six degrees of sedition: Was master trickster Roger Stone behind the Capitol riot? by Roger Sollenberger, Salon

Roger Stone created the first Stop the Steal organization in April 2016, raising and spending tens of thousands of dollars for the anticipated mission of defending Trump through the contested Republican primary and later challenging an apparent Hillary Clinton general election win, neither of which proved necessary. That group was shuttered in 2017, but Stone, a Florida resident, reactivated the movement after the 2018 midterms — specifically to protect then-Florida Gov. Rick Scott's narrow victory in a U.S. Senate race over Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson. Stone even got help from fellow convicted felon Ali Alexander (formerly Ali Akbar), an itinerant provocateur who came aboard to help recruit for the effort, laying out his vision in a Periscope video, as reported in Right Wing Watch, in which Alexander said he hoped to motivate not just Republicans, but QAnon followers, Democrats and "homeless people in all the adjacent counties" to monitor the vote count.

1/24/2021   US police weigh officer discipline after rally, Capitol riot, By MARTHA BELLISLE and JAKE BLEIBERG

For two Virginia police officers who posed for a photo during the deadly U.S. Capitol insurrection, the reckoning has been swift and public: They were identified, charged with crimes and arrested.

 

But for five Seattle officers the outcome is less clear. Their identities still secret, two are on leave and three continue to work while a police watchdog investigates whether their actions in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6 crossed the line from protected political speech to lawbreaking.

1/24/2021   Bamboozled.’ Hawley mentors stunned by conduct, but early warning signs were there, by Bryan Lowry, Jonathan Shorman and Eric Adler, Kansas City Star

Hawley warned against depicting all militia members as domestic terrorists after the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who carried out the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, had ties to the Michigan Militia.

 

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote two months after the bombing.

 

He argued that middle class Americans had gravitated to anti-government organizations out of genuine concerns about federal overreach and a disillusionment with mainstream politics.

 

“Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings,” Hawley said.

 

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote two months after the bombing.

 

He argued that middle class Americans had gravitated to anti-government organizations out of genuine concerns about federal overreach and a disillusionment with mainstream politics.

 

“Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings,” Hawley said.

 

Fuhrman, whose use of racial slurs came to light during the O.J. Simpson trial, was the victim of a new censoriousness that plagued the culture, in Hawley’s estimation. “In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding,” he wrote.

1/23/2021   US judge blocks release of Tennessee man in Capitol riot, Associated Press

According to court records, an FBI search of Munchel’s home turned up the tactical gear he wore in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, five pairs of plastic handcuffs, multiple weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a drum-style magazine.

 

Munchel “perceived himself to be a revolutionary, in the mold of those who overthrew the British government in the American Revolution,” according to court filings. He was “dressed for combat” with “combat boots, military fatigues, a tactical vest, gloves, and a gaiter that covered all of his face except for his eyes,” documents state. He also wore a stun gun on his hip and mounted a cellphone to his chest to record events.

1/23/2021   FBI: Texan charged in Capitol riot tweeted ‘Assassinate AOC’, Associated Press

Authorities allege that Miller posted photos and videos on his social media accounts that show him inside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 storming of the building by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. They also say he called for violence in online posts, including a tweet that simply read “Assassinate AOC,” a reference to the liberal Ocasio-Cortez.

1/22/2021   GOP lawmaker with gun sets off House chamber metal detector, By MATTHEW DALY, AP

Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., set off the metal detector while trying to enter the chamber Thursday afternoon. The metal detectors were installed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, which left five people dead, including a Capitol police officer. The incident was witnessed by a reporter from the HuffPost website.

 

After setting off the machine, Harris was asked to step aside for further screening. At that time, an officer discovered Harris was carrying a concealed gun on his side, according to the reporter.

1/22/2021   Iowa conspiracy theorist stays in custody, ordered to DC, by David Pitt, AP

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A right-wing conspiracy theorist from Iowa seen prominently in videos taunting a U.S. Capitol police officer and pursuing him upstairs inside the building during the Jan. 6 riot must remain in custody and will be taken soon to Washington to face charges, a federal judge said Friday.

 

Washington-based U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly halted the release of Douglas Jensen that had been ordered by a federal magistrate judge in Iowa on Thursday.

1/21/2021   Seven Senate Democrats request ethics probe into Cruz and Hawley over Capi

tol riot, by Caroline Kelly, CNN

1/21/2021   Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs arrested in Florida in connection with the Capitol riot, by Katelyn Polantz, Mallory Simon and Amir Vera, CNN

Joseph Randall Biggs, 37, of Florida was arrested Wednesday and is facing three counts -- obstruction of a proceeding, entering restricted grounds and disorderly conduct -- for his part in the siege of the Capitol on January 6, according to the Justice Department and an FBI affidavit. The FBI described Biggs in the affidavit as an organizer for the Proud Boys.

 

Ahead of the Capitol riot, Biggs posted messages on Parler, the social media platform favored by the far right, telling his followers to blend in and not wear identifiable clothing, an FBI special agent wrote in the affidavit.

"The only thing we'll do that's us is think like us! Jan 6th is gonna be epic," Biggs wrote, according to the affidavit.

 

Authorities say Biggs said, "This is awesome!" on livestreamed footage of rioters entering the Capitol building, according to the affidavit.

1/20/2021   Man charged with assaulting a police officer during US Capitol riots is denied bail, By Lauren del Valle, CNN

1/19/2021   How two friends' farcical, failed schemes ended with the biggest fail of all: Stop the Steal, by Roger Sollenberger, Salon

But over those first three months of 2013, Akbar — now known to the world as Ali Alexander, architect of the 2020 Stop the Steal movement — befriended the candidate's son, Daniel Bostic, then a 20-year-old aspiring model and actor who over the next eight years would partner with Ali in a number of failed ventures, including a cryptocurrency project, a listless consulting agency, a defunct MAGA gossip blog, and a scam donation project created with right-wing trolls Jacob Wohl and Laura Loomer. The partnership's lasting contribution to the world, however, came earlier this month, when the massive pro-Trump rally they organized on the National Mall on Jan. 6 turned into a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol, defiling the seat of American democracy and leaving half a dozen people dead, including two police officers.

1/18/2021   FBI moves on alleged members of extremist groups Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, by Devlin Barrett and Spencer S. Hsu , The Washington Post

 “All these extremist groups are being looked at in terms of their participation at the Capitol,” acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin said Friday.

1/18/2021   Mob Rule in the Capitol, by Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

I introduced myself to a hopped-up guy walking away from the Senate side of the Capitol, and he said, “The New Yorker? Fucking enemy of the people. Why don’t I smash you in your fucking head?” He made an effort to draw a crowd: “Right there in the blue mask! Enemy of the fucking people!” But the people had other things on their minds, and nobody bothered to join him.

 

Five years after the Trump era began, a physical assault on American democracy felt both shocking and inevitable—a culmination of everything that had been building since 2015. What else was there to say of him that had not already been said? How much darker could his America become in its final fourteen days? Would the sight of government brought so low, so vulnerable, break the spell—or would it bring on another crescendo of fury?

1/18/2021   The Inciter-in-Chief, by David Remnick, The New Yorker

Lincoln: 

 

“Before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories and its hopes, would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it?”

1/17/2021   The Trump Administration Officials Who Resigned Over Capitol Violence, by Maggie Haberman, Annie Karni, Christine Hauser, Michael Crowley and Michael Levenson, The New York Times

The short list:  Betsy DeVos, Elaine Chao, Mike Mulvaney, Matthew Pottinger, John Costello, Tyler Goodspeed, Stephanie Grisham, Rickie Niceta, Sarah Matthews, Elinore F. McCance-Katz, Eric S. Drieband, Rob Greenway, Anthoney Ruggiero, Ryan Tully, Mark Vandroff and Erin Walsh

1/17/2021   'I had no qualms': The people turning in loved ones for the Capitol attack, by Kari Paul, The Guardian US

The majority of more than 140,000 tips sent to the FBI about the attack have come from friends and family of those involved

1/17/2021   Rallies ahead of Capitol riot were planned by established Washington insiders, by Robert O'Harrow Jr, The Washington Post

The Republican Attorneys General Association was involved, as were the activist groups Turning Point Action and Tea Party Patriots. At least six current or former members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), an influential group that for decades has served as a hub for conservative and Christian activists, also played roles in promoting the rallies.

 

The two days of rallies were staged not by white nationalists and other extremists, but by well-funded nonprofit groups and individuals that figure prominently in the machinery of conservative activism in Washington.

 

Unless Congress responds to the protests, “everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that building,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a former CNP fellow who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement. “1776 is *always* an option.”

 

On Jan. 5, at Freedom Plaza in D.C., Alexander led protesters in a chant of “Victory or death.”

 

In a video posted in late December, Alexander claimed he worked with three lawmakers — Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.) — on an unspecified plan to disrupt election ratification deliberations at the Capitol.  “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit.

1/17/2021   Non-violent, heavily armed demonstration forms at Ohio Statehouse, by Jake Zuckerman, Ohio Capital Journal 

1/17/2021   State capitol protests mostly small, but under heavy guard from troops and law enforcement, by Tim Craig, Griff Witte, Abigail Hauslohner, Peter Whoriskey and Holly Bailey, The Washington Post

The assault never came. Despite warnings from the FBI and boasts from armed, far-right extremist groups, security forces in every instance outnumbered scattered groups of demonstrators, and there were no reports of violence.

1/17/2021   Why Trump Must Go on Trial, by Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker

1/17/2021   A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege, by Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker

On January 6th, 2021, Luke Mogelson followed Trump supporters as they forced their way into the U.S. Capitol, using his phone’s camera as a reporter’s notebook.

1/17/2021   New Yorker reporter's footage provides 'clearest view yet' of Capitol rioters inside Senate chamber, The Week

1/16/2021   Man who shot video of fatal Capitol shooting is arrested, remains focus of political storm, by Tom Jackman, Marissa J. Lang and Jon Swaine, The Washington Post

“He came in to chase clout and get those media headlines,” Scott said of Sullivan. “Now, it’s not my place to ever tell anyone how to be an activist or what their goals should be … but the fact is that Black Lives Matter Utah has never had one arrest in seven years. We’ve never caused any violence, any destruction of property, and this man comes in here and taints our reputation in a day.”

1/16/2021   'I’m facing a prison sentence': US Capitol rioters plead with Trump for pardons, by Oliver Milman, The Guardian US

1/16/2021   More backlash for GOP’s Hawley as Loews Hotel cancels event, Associated Press

1/15/2021   The Trial of Donald Trump Must Tell the Full Story of the Capitol Insurrection, by Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

1/15/2021   Among the Insurrectionists, by Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker

“Bullshit! Bullshit!” the crowd chanted. It was a peculiar mixture of emotion that had become familiar at pro-Trump rallies since he lost the election: half mutinous rage, half gleeful excitement at being licensed to act on it. The profanity signalled a final jettisoning of whatever residual deference to political norms had survived the past four years. In front of me, a middle-aged man wearing a Trump flag as a cape told a young man standing beside him, “There’s gonna be a war.” His tone was resigned, as if he were at last embracing a truth that he had long resisted. “I’m ready to fight,” he said. The young man nodded. He had a thin mustache and hugged a life-size mannequin with duct tape over its eyes, “traitor” scrawled on its chest, and a noose around its neck.

1/15/2021   Videos Show How Rioter Was Trampled in Stampede at Capitol, By Evan Hill, Arielle Ray and Dahlia Kozlowsky, The New York Times

Rosanne Boyland died after losing consciousness in the crush of a pro-Trump mob as it surged against the police. Here’s how it happened.

1/15/2021   The last Statehouse protests ended in fistfights. Now officials worry for inauguration violence, by Jake Zuckerman, Ohio Capital Journal

1/15/2021   100 days of warning: inside the Boogaloo killings of US security personnel, by Lois Beckett in Los Angeles, The Guardian US

The Boogaloo movement is part of a broader rise in far-right extremism in the US, one that was predicted, and furiously denied by Republicans, in the early years of the Obama presidency. Local and federal law enforcement agencies and the US military have faced criticism in recent months for doing too little to monitor and prevent the radicalization of American citizens by violent white supremacists and other domestic rightwing extremists.

 

Social media companies, too, have faced scrutiny for allowing different strands of rightwing extremism – from the neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups that rebranded themselves as the “alt-right”, to followers of the antisemitic QAnon conspiracy theory – to flourish on their platforms, despite years of repeated warnings from researchers and journalists.

 

Now, in the wake of a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, when mobs of Trump supporters, including known extremists, invaded the building and forced terrorized lawmakers to flee, the full cost of all those choices is still being counted.

 

But several analysts who monitor extremism say that, when it comes to the growth of the Boogaloo movement, the single organization that could have made the most difference was Facebook, because Facebook was the primary platform where the Boogaloo movement was organizing in early 2020, often in plain sight.

 

By the time the social media company finally disrupted the networks of Boogaloo pages and groups on its platform in late June, some experts said, it was too late: the scattered men drawn to the idea of being soldiers in an insurgency against the American government had already connected with each other directly.

 

“There was a moment in time where you could have nipped this in the bud,” Friedfeld said. “Would it have stopped it entirely? No. But it would have made it harder for these networks to cohere.”

1/15/2021   As investigators look over videos from last week's assault on the Capitol, they are learning that some rioters used military style tactics. CBS News senior investigative correspondent Catherine Herridge reports.

1/15/2021   Kirk Burkhalter, a former NYPD detective, examined the confrontation between Capitol police officer Eugene Goodman and rioters who entered the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. YouTube Video

1/15/2021   Siblings of GOP congressman say brother 'peddles in propaganda', CNN Video

1/15/2021   Trump supporters asked how they'd feel if they found out Trump was lying to them, by Erin Burnett Out Front, CNN

1/15/2021   Trump explodes at Nixon comparisons as he prepares to leave office, by Kevin Liptak and Kaitlan Collins, CNN

Trump has been consumed by the unraveling of his presidency during his last days in office, according to people around him, which included a casual discussion among advisers recently about a possible resignation.

Trump shut the idea down almost immediately. And he has made clear to aides in separate conversations that mere mention of President Richard Nixon, the last president to resign, was banned.

 

He told one adviser during an expletive-laden conversation recently never to bring up the ex-president ever again. During the passing mention of resigning this week, Trump told people he couldn't count on Vice President Mike Pence to pardon him like Gerald Ford did Nixon, anyway.

 

 

For now, Trump is undecided on whether he will pen a letter to Biden to leave in the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Some of his advisers have encouraged him to think about continuing the tradition. Early in his presidency, Trump liked to show off to visitors the letter he received from President Barack Obama, which included the now-prescient line: "Regardless of the push and pull of daily politics, it's up to us to leave those instruments of our democracy at least as strong as we found them."

1/14/2021   How Trump rhetoric drove his Michigan faithful to DC by the busloads, by Tresa Baldas and Gina Kaufman, Detroit Free Press

When they arrived in Washington D.C., they believed the presidential election had been stolen.

 

When they left D.C., many believed Antifa and liberals staged the deadly riot that transpired.

 

Both theories have been discredited — by more than 60 courts, cyber specialists within the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. No less than former U.S. Attorney General William Barr said federal authorities had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would have overturned the 2020 election.

 

Yet, they still believe.

1/14/2021   US police three times as likely to use force against leftwing protesters, data finds, by Lois Beckett, The Guardian US

In the past 10 months, US law enforcement agencies have used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and beatings at a much higher percentage at Black Lives Matter demonstrations than at pro-Trump or other rightwing protests.

 

Law enforcement officers were also more likely to use force against leftwing demonstrators, whether the protests remained peaceful or not.

 

The statistics, based on law enforcement responses to more than 13,000 protests across the United States since April 2020, show a clear disparity in how agencies have responded to the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, compared with demonstrations organized by Trump supporters.

 

Barack Obama highlighted an earlier version of these statistics on 8 January, arguing that they provided a “useful frame of reference” for understanding Americans’ outrage over the failure of Capitol police to stop a mob of thousands of white Trump supporters from invading and looting the Capitol on 6 January, a response that prompted renewed scrutiny of the level of violence and aggression American police forces use against Black versus white Americans.

 

The new statistics come from the US Crisis Monitor, a database created this spring by researchers at Princeton and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED).

The researchers found that the vast majority of the thousands of protests across the United States in the past year have been peaceful, and that most protests by both the left and the right were not met with any violent response by law enforcement.

 

Police used teargas, rubber bullets, beatings with batons and other force against demonstrators at 511 leftwing protests and 33 rightwing protests since April, according to updated data made public this week.

 

The Guardian compared the percentage of all demonstrations organized by leftwing and rightwing groups that resulted in the use of force by law enforcement. For leftwing demonstrations, that was about 4.7% of protests, while for rightwing demonstrations, it was about 1.4%, meaning law enforcement was about three times more likely to use force against leftwing versus rightwing protests. 

 

1/14/2021   Reports: Group plans armed protest at Michigan Capitol Sunday, then backtracks, by Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press

Michael Lackomar of the Southeast Michigan Militia initially said his members planned to be at the Capitol, Fox 2 Detroit reported. Lackomar said his members would be armed and do not expect any trouble, but will defend themselves if necessary, the TV station said.

 

But Lansing City Pulse reported later Thursday that Lackomar had a change of heart and was advising his members to stay away from the Capitol Sunday. He told the newspaper that he was concerned the far-right Proud Boys group planned to be at the Capitol in Lansing to cause "maximum chaos," which he said could create a security risk for those attending.

1/14/2021   Peter Meijer, Republican who voted for impeachment, says he's buying body armor due to threats, by Rebecca Morin, USA TODAY

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the panel overseeing the administration of the Capitol, told reporters at the Capitol Tuesday that reimbursements for body armor were not a new policy.

 

“That is not new. That's been the case, for multiple years. People asked, you know, what were allowable expenses, and...those have been allowable expenses for years," she said.

1/14/2021   Bullied into voting against impeachment? Tell the cops and then resign, Opinion by Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post

News reports, including direct accounts from Democratic colleagues, suggest some Republicans voted against impeachment because they were afraid for their lives. Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) in a recent MSNBC interview said: "The majority of them are paralyzed with fear. I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”

 

He is not the only one. Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.), who voted for impeachment, told Reason: "I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their heart of hearts that they should’ve voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families,” he said. He added, “They felt that that vote would put their families in danger.”

 

Now, it is entirely possible the threats are exaggerated or nonexistent. In that case, this is a shabby excuse for political cowardice. If the lawmakers’ fear is nothing more than imagining tweep anarchists and vulgar Trump cultists showing up at their door, then they stand in the shoes of just about any mainstream journalist. Crying because your side attracts kooks is no justification for violating your oath. Fear of mean emails or simply losing your seat should not be grounds for capitulation.

 

Second, why in the world would Republicans knuckle under? If you leave Trump in power, Republicans will have rewarded and empowered violent and dangerous people, allowing Trump to remain in power because of criminal conduct. What Republicans seem to be describing is a sort of political mafia where the threat of violence keeps them in line. Is that the Republican Party — a batch of extortionists and the extorted?

1/14/2021   A leaked intelligence memo suggests Trump’s lies could incite more violence, Opinion by Greg Sargent, The Washington Post

1/14/2021   Republican politics is now defined by the threat of murderous violence, Opinion by Paul Waldman, The Washington Post

You may have heard this aphorism about the parties: Democrats hate their base and Republicans fear their base. We must now confront a sinister new reality. Republicans are no longer just afraid that their base will force them to defend the politically indefensible or send them packing in a primary challenge.

 

They’re afraid that their base, or at least certain elements of it, will literally kill them.

 

Each party has its own complex internal dynamics, as different factions jockey for influence and attempt to convince the party as a whole to adopt their own perspectives on ideology and tactics. In the GOP, that dynamic is now being shaped by QAnon, the new face of the Republican opposition. As The Post reports:

 

Even as Trump is set to exit the White House, QAnon’s grip on the conservative psyche is growing. Two freshman Republican members of Congress, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (Colo.), have voiced support for QAnon, while others have tweeted its slogans. State legislators across the country have further lent it credence while also backing Trump’s claims of electoral theft despite a lack of evidence and dozens of swift rejections in court.

QAnon is deranged in its beliefs about the world, opposed to the operation of the American democratic system, and built on the threat of deadly violence against anyone it considers an enemy.

1/14/2021   Capitol riot arrests: Retired firefighter accused of throwing fire extinguisher at police; man carrying Confederate flag, by Spencer S. Hsu, Rachel Weiner and Ann E. Marimow

A recently retired Pennsylvania firefighter accused of throwing a fire extinguisher at a police officer, a man photographed carrying a Confederate flag, and a Californian accused of breaking a window of the building were all arrested Thursday in last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol.

 

Robert Lee Sanford, Jr., 55, of Chester, Penn., was charged with impeding officers, civil disorder, trespassing and violent conduct with a dangerous weapon on the restricted grounds of the Capitol, charges that carry a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

 

In charging papers, the FBI said a tipster in Pennsylvania called Tuesday saying that Sanford, a friend of many years, “had confessed to the complainant that he was the person that the FBI was looking for” in connection with videos showing a man apparently wearing a stocking cap, dark jacket, plaid shirt and backpack hurling an object at a group officers.

 

A Capitol Police officer was struck in the helmet by what he later saw was a fire extinguisher, the FBI said. The officer was evaluated at a hospital and cleared to return to duty. The device also ricocheted off two others, the FBI said in a charging affidavit.

 

Watch the video here

 

The tipster said Sanford told them he traveled on a bus with a group to Washington, listened to President Trump’s speech, “and then had followed the President’s instructions and gone to the Capitol,” according to the FBI.

1/13/2021   Ohio bartender and her ‘militia’ drove to D.C. to join the Capitol breach, by Jake Zuckerman, Ohio Capital Journal

She described the scene inside the building as “patriotic” and rife with “USA! USA!” chants until it devolved into carnage and chaos.

 

“To me, it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw until we started hearing glass smash,” she said. “That’s when we knew things had gotten really bad.”

1/13/2021    Lindsey Graham had a lock on most ludicrous senator — until Josh Hawley pounced, Opinion by George F. Will, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot, by Matthew Rosenberg and Ainara Tiefenthäler, The New York Times

There were militia flags and banners of extremist groups, as well as absurd images of dinosaurs and comic book logos that belied the violence that was to unfold.

1/13/2021   Florida firefighter is arrested after photo showed him pointing at a placard for Speaker Pelosi in US Capitol Building, by Jamiel Lynch and Danielle Hackett, CNN

 

1/13/2021   Military Joint Chiefs condemn 'sedition and insurrection' at US Capitol as federal and local officials scramble to ensure security, by Nicole Gaouette, Oren Liebermann and Barbara Starr, CNN

"We witnessed actions inside the Capitol building that were inconsistent with the rule of law. The rights of freedom of speech and assembly do not give anyone the right to resort to violence, sedition and insurrection," said the statement, released Tuesday and signed by America's most senior general, Mark Milley, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is comprised of the heads of each military branch.

1/13/2021   Donald Trump is going home a loser, Opinion by David Axelrod, CNN

Biographers tell us that, early on, a cutthroat New York real estate developer imparted a dark lesson to the son who would become president of the United States.

 

There are two kinds of people in the world, Fred Trump explained to his apprentice child. There are killers, and there are losers.

The message was clear: You play to win, whatever it takes. Rules? Norms? Those are for losers. And Fred Trump had no time for losers.

 

In Trump's world, there seems to be little wrong with lying to get the advantage. In fact, it's almost wrong not to, because if you don't screw the other guys, they sure as hell are going to screw you.

1/13/2021   Trump’s stench will cling to Republicans long after he’s gone, Opinion by Karen Tumlty, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   Nation’s governors prepare for worst, warn of long-term dangers to their capitols, by Holly Bailey and Tim Craig, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   President Trump deserved impeachment. The Senate must convict him quickly, Opinion by Editorial Board, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   The president as pariah: Trump faces a torrent of retribution over his role in the U.S. Capitol siege, by David Nakamura, The Washington Post

He has been banned on social media, shunned by foreign leaders, impeached (again) in the House, threatened with censure by Republicans, deserted by Cabinet members, turned on by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), canceled by his hometown of New York City, dropped by the PGA golf tour and snubbed by New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick.

 

And that’s just in the past few days for President Trump, who after ruling Washington for nearly four years through a mix of bullying, intimidation, patronage and a sense that his willingness to spread falsehoods and misinformation would have no consequences is suddenly facing a torrent of retribution from those who long excused his behavior or were too scared or powerless to confront it.

1/13/2021   What finally got congressional Republicans to see the light? Corporate America, Opinion by Kate Cohen, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   Trump is isolated and angry at aides for failing to defend him as he is impeached again, by Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker, The Washington Post

As he watched impeachment quickly gain steam, Trump was upset generally that virtually nobody is defending him — including press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, economic adviser Larry Kudlow, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, according to a senior administration official.

 

In a stark illustration of Trump’s isolation, the White House did not mount a vigorous defense Wednesday as House members debated his fitness for office and, ultimately, voted to impeach him. The president’s aides did not blast out talking points to allies. His press secretary did not hold a briefing with reporters. His advisers did not do television interviews from the White House’s North Lawn. His lawyers and legislative affairs staffers did not whip votes or seek to persuade lawmakers to vote against impeachment.

 

This is both because there was no organized campaign to block impeachment and because many of his aides believe Trump’s incitement of the riot was too odious to defend. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who was central to the president’s defense in his first impeachment a year ago, told other staffers to make sure word got out that he was not involved in defending Trump this time, according to one aide.

 

“I just think this is the logical conclusion of someone who will only accept people in his inner orbit if they are willing to completely set themselves on fire on his behalf, and you’ve just reached a point to where everyone is burned out,” a senior administration official said. “Everyone is thinking, ‘I’ll set myself on fire for the president of the United States for this, for this and for this — but I’m not doing it for that.’ ”

 

A former senior administration official in touch with the White House said in describing the staff mind-set: “People are just over it. The 20th couldn’t come soon enough. Sometimes there’s a bunker mentality or us-versus-them or righteous indignation that the Democrats or the media are being unfair, but there’s none of that right now. People are just exhausted and disappointed and angry and ready for all this to be done.”

1/13/2021   Democrats demand investigation of whether Republicans in Congress aided Capitol rioters, by Michael Kranish, Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett, The Washington Post

Last month, “Stop the Steal” movement organizer Ali Alexander claimed that three House Republicans — Reps. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) helped plan his D.C. rally. Biggs and Brooks denied the insinuation in comments to The Washington Post this week. A spokeswoman for Gosar did not return a request for comment, and attempts to speak with Alexander were unsuccessful.

 

Democrats also have raised concerns about Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who voiced early support for the demonstrators, likening them to 18th-century American revolutionaries. “Today is 1776,” she wrote on Twitter on the morning of the rally.

 

Democrats also launched an effort to punish Brooks, who said during the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack that “today is the day that American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.” He wore a hat that said, “Fire Pelosi.”

1/13/2021   Lawmakers gave groups ‘reconnaissance’ tours of the Capitol one day before riots, Democratic congresswoman says, by Andrea Salcedo, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   A ‘Stop the Steal’ organizer, now banned by Twitter, said three GOP lawmakers helped plan his D.C. rally, by Teo Armus, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   No, Trump can’t pardon himself or other insurrectionists. Impeachment would strip him of that power, by Corey Brettschneider and Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Washington Post

1/13/2021   John Eastman, the Shitposeur ShitWeasel who advised Trump that the Vice President had the legal authority to Cancel the Electoral College votes for Biden, has been ShitCanned and shown the exit, kicked to the curb, "more time with his familied," according to reports interpreting this embarrassed Chapman University statement.

1/13/2021   ‘I feel betrayed’ — Ken Langone blasts Trump and Capitol rioters, vows to support Biden, by Kevin Stankiewicz, CNBC

Republican businessman Ken Langone on Wednesday blasted last week’s Capitol Hill riot, indicating on CNBC he felt “betrayed” by President Donald Trump’s actions that led up to the deadly events.

 

“I think the biggest mistake anybody is going to make is try and rationalize what happened last week, what the president did and what that crowd did,” Langone said on “Squawk Box.” “There should be no mitigation at all. It was horrible. It was wrong. I’m shocked.”

 

“I feel betrayed,” said Langone, who has been highly supportive of Trump’s economic policies over the years while also at times criticizing the president, such as for his response to the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

 

“Last Wednesday was a disgrace,” added Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot who has donated over the years to Republicans. “It should never have happened in this country. If it doesn’t break every American’s heart, something is wrong. It breaks my heart, for sure. I didn’t sign up for that.”

 

“I’m going to do everything I can from Day One to make sure I do my part to make Joe Biden the most successful president in the history of this country,” Langone said. “There’s a selfish reason for that, we’ve got very serious major issues in American to deal with,” such as the coronavirus pandemic and public education.

1/13/2021   Trump becomes first president to be impeached twice, as bipartisan majority charges him with inciting Capitol riot, by Jacob Pramuk, CNBC

1/13/2021   ‘I don’t know that McConnell has a lot of power,’ says GOP senator on impeachment vote, by Emily DeCiccio, CNBC

 

1/13/2021   Panic buttons were inexplicably torn out ahead of Capitol riots, says Ayanna Pressley chief of staff, by Gino Spocchia, The Independent

Congresswoman’s chief of staff says she was ‘deeply concerned’ by ‘Trump’s aims to incite violence’

 

1/12/2021   Americans across the political spectrum fear what the Capitol attack portends, Annie Gowen, Jenna Johnson and Holly Bailey, The Washington Post

In a HuffPost poll Friday, about a third of Trump voters said they sympathized with the Capitol mob, and a majority of respondents said they did not believe last week’s riot was an isolated incident. Calls for violent retribution continue to spread on conservative websites such as Newsmax and on social media apps such as Gab and Parler. The latter was suspended by Amazon’s Web-hosting service over the weekend after its users glorified the Capitol riot that resulted in five deaths, including one police officer, and left the country’s cathedral of democracy in tatters.

 

In the Philadelphia suburbs, Nora Schreiber McDonough, who is in her 60s, was so upset after watching the violence at the Capitol she took Thursday off from her job as an administrative assistant at a Catholic church.

 

The second day was just as emotionally distressing as the first, as more footage emerged and she began to hear the stories of lawmakers who feared for their lives and the details of the security breakdowns. The mob showed her that an alarming number of people have been radicalized, a phenomenon that she has watched play out in her Facebook feed over the past four years.

 

“This is a history that I never wanted to live through,” she said. “This is a history that blows my mind. It blows my mind that this great country could have reached this point because of one man’s idolatry, ideology, sense of self.”

1/12/2021   Security issues at forefront as Michigan House and Senate prepare to meet Wednesday, by Paul Egan, Detroit Free Press

1/12/2021   How a Presidential Rally Turned Into a Capitol Rampage, BBy Lauren Leatherby, Arielle Ray, Anjali Singhvi, Christiaan Triebert, Derek Watkins and Haley Willis, The New York Times

1/12/2021   McConnell believes impeachment push will help rid Trump from the GOP, but has not said if he will vote to convict, by Manu Raju, Phil Mattingly, Jeff Zeleny, Jim Acosta and Kaitlan Collins, CNN

 

 

1/12/2021   Secret Service launches massive security operation to protect Biden inauguration, by Carol D. Leonnig, Karoun Demirjian, Justin Jouvenal and Nick Miroff, The Washington Post

1/12/2021   Once Trump leaves office, the Senate can’t hold an impeachment trial, Opinion by J. Michael Luttig

 

1/12/2021   As more MAGA violence looms, impeaching Trump is insufficient, Opinion by Dana Milbank, The Washington Post

 

1/12/2021   Backlash to riot at Capitol hobbles Trump’s business as banks, partners flee the brand, by Josh Dawsey, David A. Fahrenthold and Jonathan O'Connell, The Washington Post

In November — as President Trump began his effort to overturn the election he had lost — his longtime friend Tom Barrack called him with advice: Stop, for the sake of your business.

 

The Trump Organization was already struggling, hurt by political backlash and coronavirus-related closures, facing huge unpaid loans. Barrack told Trump that he could help that business — as well as his aides, and the country itself — by ensuring a peaceful transition, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

 

An “elegant” exit, Barrack said, could preclude what could be a painful future: millions of dollars in legal costs, rampant investigations and more boycotts of his businesses.

 

Trump did not follow Barrack’s advice.

1/12/2021   Canadian internet sleuths, anti-hate group helping to identify Capitol rioters, by Matthew Pierce and Exan Auyoung, CBC News

Elizabeth Simons, deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, said her team is trying to identify three people seen in photos and video from the riot — one of them holding a Canadian flag.  "We are not sure yet if all three are Canadians or if only one of them is Canadian. We don't know the relationship between the three people yet at this point," she said. "We're just investigating to see if we can narrow it down and get confirmations."  Simons added that one prominent far-right group at the riot, the Proud Boys, was started by a Canadian.

 

1/12/2021   Olympic gold medallist Klete Keller identified as part of U.S. Capitol siege, Frank Pingue, Thomson Reuters

Video appears to show U.S. swimmer among Trump supporters storming building

 

1/12/2021   McConnell Reportedly Pleased about Impeachment, Wants to Purge Trump from GOP, by Mairead McArdle, National Review

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is reportedly pleased about efforts by Democrats to impeach President Trump a second time, saying he believes the move will make it easier for Republicans to purge Trump from the party.

 

McConnell has said that he believes Trump committed impeachable offenses and has indicated that he wants to see the specific article of impeachment being put forth by House Democrats, the New York Times reported.

1/12/2021   Some Rioters Could Face Prison Terms of 20 Years or More, Officials Say, by Oriana Pawlyk and Patricia Kime, Military.com

The FBI has now opened up nearly 160 cases into those involved in last week's siege at the U.S. Capitol.

 

Acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin and FBI Washington Field Office Assistant Director in Charge Steven D'Antuono announced Tuesday that federal charges brought so far against dozens of defendants are "only the beginning."

 

"We're looking at significant felony cases tied to sedition and conspiracy," Sherwin said during a news conference. Some of the felonies the Justice Department is considering have prison terms of up to 20 years, he added.

 

1/12/2021   Army Will Not Screen All National Guardsmen Deploying to DC for Extremist Sympathies, by Matthew Cox, Military.com

McCarthy agreed to take "additional measures," but they do not include the massive CID effort needed to investigate the 10,000 Guard members expected to arrive in the District of Columbia this weekend, a force that could grow to 15,000 before President-elect Joe Biden's Jan. 20 inauguration.

 

1/12/2021   Congresswoman Lauren Boebert ‘was in stand-off on Capitol Hill after refusing bag search’, by Rachel Brodsky,  The Independent

 

1/12/2021   Several Republican lawmakers threw fits over new metal detectors at the Capitol, by Catherine Garcia, The Week

 

1/12/2021   House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly snapped after the president told him 'antifa' led the Capitol insurrection: 'It's MAGA. I know. I was there.', by Julie Gerstein, Business Insider

• House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is said to have had a tense phone call with President Donald Trump on Monday in which he told the president the election was "over."

• Two sources told Axios that Trump said the Capitol insurrection was the work of antifa and that McCarthy responded: "It's MAGA. I know. I was there."

 1/12/2021   Navy Career of 'QAnon Shaman' Ended After He Refused Anthrax Vaccine, by Gina Harkins, Military.com

Jacob Anthony Angeli Chansley, a 33-year-old Navy veteran from Arizona who was arrested and charged after last week's siege at the U.S. Capitol, refused to take the anthrax vaccine while in the Navy, ending his two-year career,

 

1/12/2021    Capitol riot: Police release photos of man wanted in connection with killing of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, by Graeme Massie, The Independent

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy tweeted photos shared by US Capitol Police of an older white male with a beard wearing a blue knitted hat with “CFD” on the front.

 

1/12/2021   Capitol rioter found with homemade napalm had folder with ‘good guy, bad guy’ list and numbers for Ted Cruz, Sean Hannity, by Graig Graziosi, The Independent

 

1/12/2021   Trump was more upset that Capitol mob looked ‘low class’ than about violent attacks, reports say, by Chris Riotta, The Independent

As a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol on Wednesday, Donald Trump was reportedly unconcerned about the destruction or insurrection taking place but instead how the violent extremists appeared “low-class”.

1/12/2021   THE LAST HANDOFF, by Mattathias Schwartz, The New York Times

On Jan. 5, the night before Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, Michael Flynn — the retired three-star general, ousted national security adviser and pardoned felon — gave an interview to the prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in which he assured the viewers of Infowars.com that Donald Trump would serve as president for another four years. It was a certainty, Flynn said. He referred to his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan — “taking over countries, or running elections in countries” — and broke the present conflict down to the binary of “we” versus “they.” Flynn did not specify how, exactly, the intervention into the American election would work, though he alluded to “procedures” related to Trump’s authorities under a national emergency because of “foreign interference from multiple countries.”

 

“They tried to silence you,” Jones said, referring to Flynn’s 2017 expulsion from the White House. “They failed. Now you’ve come through the fire as a phoenix.” Later that night, Flynn addressed a crowd of several thousand (Jones said there were a million) gathered in Washington. “We are the ones that will decide,” Flynn said. The following afternoon, as the electoral votes were being counted, a pro-Trump mob invaded the Capitol.

 

1/12/2021   FBI report warned of ‘war’ at Capitol, contradicting claims there was no indication of looming violence, by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit internal warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s pro-Trump protest planned to do harm.

 

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington. D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

 

BLM is likely a reference to the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice. Pantifa is a derogatory term for antifa, a far-left anti-fascist movement whose adherents sometimes engage in violent clashes with right-wing extremists.

 

Multiple law enforcement officials have said privately in recent days that the level of violence exhibited at the Capitol has led to difficult discussions within the FBI and other agencies about race, terrorism, and whether investigators failed to register the degree of danger because the overwhelming majority of the participants at the rally were White conservatives fiercely loyal to the President Trump.

 

 

1/12/2021   Video Analysis: How a Pro-Trump Mob Overran Capitol Police, The Wall Street Journal 

The Wall Street Journal analyzed hours of video and audio from the Capitol riot to better understand how a mob of thousands overran police and attacked the U.S. Capitol. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann

 

1/11/2021   Over a dozen lawmakers joined crowds on day of Capitol riot, by Cuneyt Dil, AP

1/11/2021   State capitals face threat of armed protests, FBI warns, by Tim Craig, Holly Bailey and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post

1/11/2021   What Trump said before his supporters stormed the Capitol, annotated, by Aaron Blake, The Washington Post

1/11/2021   Inside the remarkable rift between Donald Trump and Mike Pence, by Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker, The Washington Post

Vice President Pence was in hiding from a violent mob of Trump supporters in the Capitol last Wednesday when the presidential tweet attacking him posted.

 

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” President Trump wrote at 2:24 p.m.

 

Trump never called him that day or in the days following to make sure Pence was okay — or to discuss a governmental response to the deadly riots the president incited.

1/11/2021   After Capitol Siege, Navy's Top Officer Tells Commanders to Stay Focused on the Mission, by Gina Harkins, Military.com

 

1/11/2021   WSJ Opinion: The Trump Deplorables and Their Future, by the Wall Street Journal

 

1/11/2021   Army moves to oust officer who made jokes on TikTok about Nazi concentration camps, by Dan Lamothe, The Washington Post

 

1/11/2021   How the military could bring retirees back to face charges after the Capitol riot, by Alex Horton and Paulina Villegas, The Washington Post

Any veteran who retired after 20 or more years of active duty service can be recalled and put in the military justice system, even for crimes committed after they hung up their uniform, she said. It rarely occurs and is up to the service secretaries to pursue, but it has been used more frequently in recent years, said Rachel E. VanLandingham, a former Air Force attorney, and professor at the Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles.  About 2 million retirees are subject to this rule, she previously said.

 

1/11/2021   Business titans pull back from GOP after Capitol insurrection, By Alex Isenstadt, Elena Schneider, Theodoric Meyer and Zachary Warmbrodt, Politico

The breakup between the business world and the Republican Party is rapidly accelerating in the wake of last week’s deadly pro-Trump riot at the Capitol, posing a serious financial threat to the party just as it’s being stripped of power in Washington.

 

Ten major companies so far, including some of the biggest corporate givers in politics, have decided to withhold contributions to Republican lawmakers who objected to the certification of the Electoral College votes, and dozens more are stopping all of their political donations after the riot.

 

1/11/2021  The Case for Impeaching Trump, by Meredith Bragg, Reason

"The question of whether incitement to riot is an impeachable offense is pretty easy," says the Cato Institute's Gene Healy. "Clearly, yes."

 

1/11/2021   House to vote Wednesday as Pelosi gets the votes to impeach Trump, By Kyle Cheney, Sarah Ferris, Heather Caygle and Melanie Zanona, Politico

Momentum to impeach the president a second time has only grown since last Wednesday's attack.

 

1/11/2021   Trump’s New Criminal Problem, By ANDREW G. MCCABE and DAVID C. WILLIAMS, Politico

The president could face charges for inciting the Capitol riot—and maybe even for inciting the murder of a Capitol Police Officer.

 

1/11/2021   'Hate in their heart': Lawmakers fear more violence after Capitol attacks, By Sarah Ferris, Kyle Cheney and Melanie Zanona, Politico

"What do we do to protect members of Congress and the staff and the police from this insurgency?”

 

1/11/2021   Yes, It Was a Coup. Here’s Why., by Fiona Hill, Politico

What Trump tried is called a “self-coup,” and he did it in slow motion and in plain sight.

 

These observations are based on the idea that a coup is a sudden, violent seizure of power involving clandestine plots and military takeovers. By contrast, Trump’s goal was to keep himself in power, and his actions were taken over a period of months and in slow motion.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a coup attempt. Trump disguised what he was doing by operating in plain sight, talking openly about his intent. He normalized his actions so people would accept them. I’ve been studying authoritarian regimes for three decades, and I know the signs of a coup when I see them.

 

1/11/2021   Trump declares state of emergency in D.C. ahead of inauguration, by Matthew Choi, Politico

The order, stemming from last week’s deadly riots at the Capitol, allows DHS and FEMA to assist the city in any emergency response.

 

When asked by reporters Monday whether Biden was scared of taking his oath of office outdoors in light of the recent violence, Biden responded, “No, I am not.”

 

1/11/2021   Chad Wolf steps down from DHS, by Daniel Lippman and Matthew Choi, Politico

The acting secretary’s move follows last week’s attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

 

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement that the timing of Wolf’s departure so soon before the end of the Trump administration was “questionable,” particularly with ongoing national security concerns that include reports of further violent demonstrations.

 

“The Trump Administration too often used the Department as a political weapon, left countless senior leadership positions vacant, and let morale suffer,” Thompson said in his statement. “Our homeland security has diminished as a result. “Thankfully, with a new Administration, the 240,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security will have much better leadership soon and this dark chapter will be over.”

 

1/11/2021   Horned D.C. rioter makes first court appearance, refuses to eat non-organic food in detention, by Melissa Blasius, Arizona News

  

1/11/2021   A Staten Island Republican politician ihas apologized for yelling ‘Heil Hitler’ at a rally, explaining that she actually meant to say “mein Führer”, by Chris Sommerfeldt and Cathy Burke, The Daily News

 

 

1/12/2021   Fact check: Man in airport tantrum video was kicked off plane for rejecting mask policy, not because of Capitol insurrection, by Daniel Dale, CNN

1/10/2021   Notable Arrests After the Riot at the Capitol, by Mario Fazio, The New York Times

1/10/2021   That embarrasing moment when video of your whinging about being thrown off a commercial flight for refusing to wear a mask earns you 20 million views on twitter.

 

1/10/2021   WSJ Opinion: A Senator's View of the Capitol Occupation, WSJ Opinon

Sen. Pat Toomey on claims on election fraud and calls to impeach President Trump

1/10/2021   Susan J. Demas: Fascists planted their flag in the U.S. Capitol this week. Let’s stop denying it, The Michigan Advance

The violent threats against journalists and elected officials, including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Georgia Secretary of State Brett Raffensperger and state Rep. Cynthia A. Johnson (D-Detroit), should be understood to be part of this insurrection. The fascist impulse is to remove those standing in the way of the white ethnostate they seek — whether by forcing good people to quit or holding televised show trials and executions.

 

We’ve had no shortage of warnings. So we should be clear that some Trump supporters were just fine with violence as long as the right people got hurt. That’s been the guiding principle of the Trump era. And it cannot stand.

 

At the very least, we cannot acquiesce to GOP lawmakers’ darkly farcical demands that we just turn the page from sedition and call out their claims that Democrats are being petty and partisan as the fascist-sympathizing claptrap that it is. 

1/10/2021   Far-right groups on the rise in N.B. and across Atlantic Canada, researcher says, CBC

Why the recent sudden growth in extremism?

According to Hofmann, 2016 was a watershed moment, "an absolutely pivotal moment for extremism across the globe."

 

That happens to be the year Trump was elected president of the United States. That was a key factor, Hofmann said, but not the only one.

 

"Trump's normalization and encouragement of far-right actors was part of it, but we also see in South America [President Jair] Bolsonaro in Brazil, members of far-right groups and neo-Nazi groups getting seats in Parliament in Europe and Greece," he said.

 

"This is a global phenomenon, where world leaders have legitimized these types of views. The climate for sharing these ideas has become more acceptable, which has caused these individuals to come out of the woodwork."

 

1/10/2021   After Complaints, White House Lowers Flags to Honor Slain Capitol Police Officer, by Richard Sisk, Military.com

 

1/10/2021   Lawmaker to Army Secretary: Investigate Troops Deploying to Inauguration for Domestic Terror Sympathies, by Hope Hodge Seck, Military.com

 

1/10/2021   Canada's Federal government weighs listing Proud Boys as terrorist group,  CBC News

 

1/10/2021   Outgoing Capitol Police chief: House, Senate security officials hamstrung efforts to call in National Guard, by Carol D. Leonnig, Aaron C. Davis, Peter Hermann and Karoun Demirjian, The Washington Post

House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he wasn’t comfortable with the “optics” of formally declaring an emergency ahead of the demonstration, Sund said. Meanwhile, Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger suggested that Sund should informally seek out his Guard contacts, asking them to “lean forward” and be on alert in case Capitol Police needed their help.

1/10/2021   Incitement to Riot? What Trump Told Supporters Before Mob Stormed Capitol, by Charlie Savage, The New York Times

 

1/10/2021   U.S. paid 'horrible price' for failing to halt Capitol siege, former defence secretary says, by Raisa Patel, CBC News

 

1/10/2021   Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Arrested, Charged in Capitol Riot, by Oriana Pqwlyk, Military.com

 

1/10/2021   ‘The storm is here’: Ashli Babbitt’s journey from capital ‘guardian’ to invader,  by Peter Jamison, Hannah Natanson, John Woodrow Cox and Alex Horton, The Washington Post

As she walked east along the Mall on Wednesday, wearing a backpack emblazoned with the American flag, Ashli Babbitt was elated.

 

“It was amazing to get to see the president talk,” Babbitt said, beaming in a video she streamed on Facebook early Wednesday afternoon that was later published by TMZ. “We are now walking down the inaugural path to the Capitol building. Three million-plus people.”

 

There was no crowd of three million: just a mob, lawless and maskless, that numbered in the thousands.

 

1/10/2021   FBI says no evidence of antifa involvement in Capitol riots despite GOP claims, by Graeme Massie, The Indpendent

Famous quitter Sarah Palin and Florida loudmouth Matt Gaetz are among those pushing the debunked theory that anti-fascist activists were involved in the violence.

 

“We have no indication of that, at this time,” said FBI Assistant Director Steven D'Antuono when asked whether antifa activists had disguised themselves as Trump supporters to frame them for the violence.

 

1/10/2021   A small group of sleuths had been identifying right-wing extremists long before the attack on the Capitol, by Robert Klemko, The Washington Post

The majority of people who do this work are anonymous, like their targets, though a handful have been outed and continue to dox others. They often describe themselves as antifascists and are eager to present a faction of the movement that works behind the scenes to prevent violence. They’re tech-savvy, meticulous and incensed by the rise of the far right. They reject the idea that antifa’s methods are steeped in violence — a narrative advanced by President Trump and his supporters.

 

For many, the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, where Heather Heyer was killed by a white nationalist demonstrator, was a tipping point.

“I was not super politically active prior to that,” Conger said. “I was very invested in my job and had my head down and things just got progressively worse until someone got murdered by a Nazi in my neighborhood. This is not a couple of guys on 4chan. These are people who were willing to come together in real life and do real violence. That sort of changes your perspective.

 

“So now my life is about making it a little bit harder to be a Nazi online.”

 

Abner Hauge, who runs Left Coast Right Watch, a website that monitors hate group activity and identifies far-right demonstrators, purchased a gun after receiving threats. But it’s not the threats that wear you down, Hauge says. It’s the research, listening to hours of YouTube videos and podcasts of men making sexist, homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic remarks.

 

“These people wanted blood, and we should be at least as clear about that when we talk about what they did — as they were when they talked about what they planned to do,” Conger said. “There should be no rationalizing or excusing this, no weaseling around with language about politically frustrated blue-collar Trump supporters caught up in the moment and expressing their beliefs or whatever nonsense people are bandying about.”

 

“These people need consequences,” Exoo said. “The consistent ideology across the far right is that human hierarchy is natural and desirable, that some people should have power over other people. And they all think violence is a path to power for them.”

 

1/9/2021   As Told To: The Pelosi Staffer Keith Stern on the Breach of the Capitol, by Zach Helfand, The New Yorker

“Ma’am, we’ve got to go.”

 

We ran down some stairs, underground into these old, old spaces. Some older folks can’t move all that quickly. It took us a while, but we finally got to, essentially, a holding area.

 

We looked around the room. We didn’t know what was happening, but we knew the Capitol had been overrun. And then you have this din, the mechanical filter of a hundred and fifty gas masks—this high-pitched whirring. It sounded like a hundred and fifty kazoos.

 

It was a weird mix. Remember, this was everyone who’d been on the floor.

 

In one corner, you had all the Republicans who think we stole the election. You can see people looking, thinking, The people outside are here because of what you’re doing. We were also concerned about the fact that many of them don’t wear masks. Some of them were saying they were glad the “protesters” were there.

 

Everybody else, including many Republicans, was figuring out what’s happening, what’s going on with our institution, with our society, with our democracy. And how do we get back?

 

We knew we had to finish that night. It was never a question of if—it was how.

 

1/9/2021    An Air Force Combat Veteran Breached the Senate, by Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker

Brock’s family members and his friend said that his service in the Air Force was central to his identity. Several of Brock’s e-mail addresses and social-media accounts featured his call sign and military nickname, Torch. One family member said that Brock derived “this weird sense of power” from his time as a military pilot, along with a Manichean world view. “He used to tell me that I only saw the world in shades of gray, and that the world was black and white,” the other family member said. “He doesn’t understand the fallout and the people he’s hurting. And I can’t imagine what he was doing there with zip ties, or what he thought he was going to accomplish.”

1/9/2021   Covid killing nearly 3,000 in U.S. every day as CDC warns of ‘surge event’ from Capitol riots, by Will Feuer, CNBC

1/9/2021   National Guard Troops Deploying to DC Will Come With Lethal Weapons, by Richard Sisk, Military.com

 

1/9/2021   Oakland Co. man says he climbed scaffolding to get into U.S. Capitol, by Kayla Ruble, Detroit News

The Trump supporter said he climbed up some scaffolding that was surrounding the stage and seating set up for the inauguration events scheduled for later this month. He said it took him another 30 minutes to get to the building itself.

 

At one point, Cash took a selfie smoking a joint outside, with the lit-up white marble facade of the building in the background. Cash said he eventually got inside the building, but said police started turning people away before he made it too far.

 

The longtime legalized marijuana advocate said he didn’t learn until later that night that he was among hundreds of people who made it into the Capitol. “It felt like history,” Cash said.

1/9/2021   ‘He's Going To Be More Unleashed And Unhinged Than Ever’, By Christopher Mathias, HuffPost US

A scholar of authoritarians discusses the MAGA insurrection and how the end of Trump’s presidency might be the beginning of a phase of extremist violence.

 

You’ve been at the forefront of identifying and documenting how Trump and the “Make America Great Again” movement represent a real authoritarian or fascist insurgency. Were you still surprised to see what you saw Wednesday?

 

No, I wasn’t surprised. I was extremely calm when it happened because I just kind of expected it. Of course, it was shocking to then see the lawmakers cowering, and then I became very angry at the arrogance and lawlessness, and the fact that the police didn’t do anything and that these guys went out for drinks later, these insurgents. But no, this has been set up since Trump’s presidential campaign, when he actively cultivated all of these various militias and far-right forces, so it’s that cultivation entwined with this victim cult.

 

Because this doesn’t work if you don’t have the cult leader. And the leader is the victim. So the leader is the protector, he’s going to save the nation, blah, blah, blah, but once they bonded to him, it’s very fascistic. It’s very fascist. If he’s in trouble, their duty is to save him. And so Trump has played them like a violin all these years, doing exactly what he needs to do to string them along and keep them loyal. Give them just enough crumbs of affirmation.  - Ruth Ben-Ghiat, history professor at New York University

 

1/9/2021   ‘Our President Wants Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed the Capitol, by Dan Barry, Mike McIntire and Matthew Rosenberg, The New York Times

They came from around the country with different affiliations — QAnon, Proud Boys, elected officials, everyday Americans — united by one allegiance.

 

It was the table setter for what would come, with nearly 2,000 people gathering in Washington on Tuesday evening for a “Rally to Save America.” Speaker after angry speaker stoked stolen-election conspiracy theories and name-checked sworn enemies: Democrats and weak Republicans, Communists and Satanists.

 

Still, the crowd seemed a bit giddy at the prospect of helping President Trump reverse the result of the election — though at times the language evoked a call to arms. “It is time for war,” one speaker declared.

 

As the audience thinned, groups of young men emerged in Kevlar vests and helmets, a number of them holding clubs and knives. Some were aligned with the neofascist Proud Boys; others with the Three Percenters, a far-right militia group.

 

“We’re not backing down anymore,” said a man with fresh stitches on his head. “This is our country.”

 

1/9/2021  Couy Griffin, 47, a Republican county commissioner from New Mexico, spoke of organizing another Capitol rally soon — one that could result in “blood running out of that building” — in a video he later posted to the Facebook page of his group, Cowboys for Trump.  “At the end of the day, you mark my word, we will plant our flag on the desk of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,” he said. He paused before adding, “And Donald J. Trump if it boils down to it.”

 

1/8/2021   F.B.I. says there is no evidence antifa participated in storming the Capitol, by Davey Alba, The New York Times

Among those pushing the falsehood were Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, who said while objecting to the electoral votes for Mr. Biden that people in the mob were “in fact members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, also said antifa was involved.

 

Even President Trump acknowledged that the people who supported him — not liberal activists — had invaded the Capitol. At one point on Wednesday he told the mob, “we love you.”

 

An analysis by the media insights company Zignal Labs found that the unfounded rumor had been mentioned 411,099 times across cable television, social media, and in print and online news outlets on Wednesday and Thursday. It was by far the most widely shared false or misleading claim about the Capitol Hill mob, Zignal said.

1/8/2021   Trump Must Be Held Accountable, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

A similarly nostalgic culture will follow Trump after he leaves office. The maga movement shares with the Lost Cause a rejection of historical fact, a consuming cult of personality, and a valorization of violence.

 

“There has to be some accountability,” Blight said. People loved to quote from the final passage of Lincoln’s second Inaugural Address, with its call to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” But Blight said that was a selective reading. In the same speech, Lincoln said, of the war, “If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

 

Healing was a secondary consideration. Blight said, “Most of that speech is about retribution.”

 

1/8/2021   Rioters fired, face company boycotts after storming Capitol, by Joseph Pisani and Cathy Bussewitz, Associated Press

1/8/2021   Prosecutors won't proceed with charges against Michigan woman arrested during Capitol insurrection, by Riley Beggin, Detroit News

After spending a full day in a Washington, D.C., jail, Grimes headed back to Grand Rapids Friday, her father said. The 54-year-old Cadillac man said his whole family is opposed to the sitting president, and it's been "horrible" to see his daughter's name associated with violent acts committed in President Donald Trump's name.

1/8/2021   Trudeau says 'shocking' riot in Washington was incited by Trump, by Kathleen Harris, CBC News

 

1/8/2021   FBI focuses on whether some Capitol rioters intended to harm lawmakers or take hostages, By Devlin Barrett, Spencer S. Hsu and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post

 

1/8/2021   Calls Grow For Sens. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz To Resign For Subverting Democracy, By Arthur Delaney and Igor Bobic, HuffPost

“Any Senator who stands up and supports the power of force over the power of democracy has broken their oath of office,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the No. 3 Senate Democrat, said Friday in calling for Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to resign.

 

“There must be consequences for senators who would foment a violent mob for personal gain,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said later Friday. “I call on Senators Hawley and Cruz to resign and accept the responsibility which they so clearly bear.”

 

1/8/2021   Must-See New Video Shows Capitol Riot Was Way Worse Than We Thought, MSNBC

1/7/2021   When Rioters Stormed the Capitol: How the Day Unfolded, WSJ Video

1/7/2021   The Mob Is Gone, but the Crisis of the Republican Party Has Only Begun, by Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker

1/7/2021   The Capitol Invaders Enjoyed the Privilege of Not Being Taken Seriously, by Masha Gessen, The New Yorker

1/7/2021   Six Michigan residents arrested in U.S. Capitol insurrection, by Riley Beggin, The Detroit News

1/7/2021   The 147 Republicans Who Voted to Overturn Election Results, by Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan and Denise Lu, the New York Times

 

 

1/7/2021   Michigan lawmaker questions how rioters were able to enter U.S. Capitol, CBC News

Siege had 'same vibe' as April incident at Michigan legislature, says Dayna Polehanki

 

"I go to work next week in our Capitol. I have a bulletproof vest under my desk, and you better believe I'm going to be wearing it," she said.

 

1/7/2021   D.C. Mayor Bowser: ‘Trumpism will not die on Jan. 20’, by Michael Brice-Saddler, The Washington Post

 

1/7/2021   U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund to resign later this month; new Capitol fence in place for 30 days, by Washington Post Staff

The secretary of the Army and the chief of D.C.’s police force acknowledged Thursday that they did not expect President Trump’s supporters to try to enter the Capitol building, despite extensive online conversations in which far-right groups publicly discussed their plans to do just that.

 

When that breach did occur, the Capitol Police called D.C. police to help, and eventually the D.C. National Guard moved in to help.

 

1/7/2021   Kayleigh McEnany compares riot to scene this summer outside St. John’s Church, By Michelle Boorstein, The Washington Post

1/7/2021   A photographer and a fist pump. The story behind the image that will haunt Josh Hawley, by Katie Bernard, The Kansas City Star

“His clenched fist in front of the Capitol will seal his fate,” said former Missouri Rep. Tom Coleman. “He thought he was getting the mantle of leadership from Donald Trump and his followers, but there’s not enough of them to ever give him a future in politics.”

1/7/2021   U.S. Capitol Police rejected offers of federal help to stop pro-Trump rioters, by Colleen Long, Lolita Baldor, Michael Balsamo and Nomaan Merchant, The Associated Press ·

1/7/2021   Canadian Premier Ford condemns Proud Boys after calls from NDP to do so, by Kate Bueckert, CBC News

1/7/2021   Trump supporters storm U.S. Capitol, with one woman killed and tear gas fired, by Rebecca Tan, Peter Jamison, Carol D. Leonnig, Meagan Flynn and John Woodrow Cox, The Washington Post

1/7/2021   Capitol breach prompts urgent questions about security failures, by Carol D. Leonnig, Aaron C. Davis, Dan Lamothe and  David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post

The storming of the U.S. Capitol by a mob of President Trump’s supporters on Wednesday was a disastrous failure of security: In a city on high alert, in a building with its own 2,000-officer police department, people forced their way into the sanctums of American democracy with nothing more than flagpoles, riot shields and shoves.

1/7/2021   Woman dies after shooting in U.S. Capitol; D.C. National Guard activated after mob breaches building, by Washington Post Staff

1/6/2021   This Violent Insurrection Is What Trump Wanted, by John Cassidy, The New Yorker

“We love you,” Trump told the rioters. “You are very special.”

1/6/2021   The Rioters in the Senate Chamber, by Vinson Cunningham, The New Yorker

On a day of startling images—a senator arguing with bureaucratic blasé that the U.S. Congress should overturn the results of a months-old election, a feral mob of Trump supporters fighting hand to hand with the Capitol Police, the Vice-President, then several other representatives, being escorted in a panicked rush away from the Senate floor—the one that first fully stopped me short was a photograph shared, on Twitter, by Igor Bobic, a reporter for HuffPost. A man wearing a black jacket, black gloves, a big, dark, draping scarf, and a black beanie vivisected by bright red stripes stands at the dais of the Senate chamber, behind the desk, raising his fist. Behind him are the familiar blue drapes, folded neatly. Above his head are the words “e pluribus unum.”

1/6/2021   Photos: Scenes from U.S. Capitol as rioters storm building, by the Washington Post staff

1/6/2021   Le parlement américain pris d'assaut par des pro-Trump, L'ILLUSTRÉ

Des partisans du président américain Donald Trump ont manifesté mercredi devant le Capitole à Washington avant de forcer les portes du parlement, créant une situation de chaos et la suspension de la certification des résultats de la présidentielle.

1/6/2021   A Single Day Shakes Two Presidencies, Two Parties and One Nation to the Core, by Gerald F. Seib, The Wall Street Journal {Free read]

The effects will ripple out for years to come, and the full consequences will be left for historians to sort out. It seems likely, though, that the chances that other Republicans will see Mr. Trump as the leader of their party after he leaves office have been diminished significantly. As Mr. Trump himself tried to remind his supporters after violence broke out, Republicans like to be seen as the party of law and order, and that is hardly the image he is now projecting.

1/6/2021   How pro-Trump insurrectionists broke into the U.S. Capitol, by the Washington Post Staff

 

1/4/2021   In a Taped Call, Trump Pressures a Georgia Official to Overturn the State’s Election Results, The New Yorker

In a phone call on January 2, 2021, President Trump falsely insisted he won the state and threatened Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, with vague legal consequences.

 

This is the Audio and a Transcript of the call.

 

[Mark] Okay, all right, Mr. President,

everybody is on the line, and just so, this is Mark Meadows,

the Chief of Staff, just so we all are aware.

On the line is Secretary of State and two other individuals,

Jordan and Mr. Germany with him.

You also have the attorneys that represent the president,

Kurt, and Alex, and Cleta Mitchell,

who is not the attorney of record,

but has been involved, myself, and then the president.

So Mr. President, I'll turn it over to you. ...

12/14/2020   AG calls GOP lawmaker’s Electoral College comments ‘open sedition’, by Ken Coleman, Michigan Advance

“I can’t go into a lot of it,” said Eisen during the interview with host Paul Miller. “I’m on a football team, we have one more play, and am I going to give up or am I going to do that Hail Mary?” 

 

“Can you assure me that this is going to be a safe day in Lansing, nobody’s going to get hurt?” Miller asked Eisen at the end of an 11-minute interview.

 

“No,” Eisen responded. “I don’t know because what we’re doing today is uncharted. It hasn’t been done.”

 

10/2/2021 

 

10/2/2021  

 

10/2/2021

 

9/27/2021   Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls Trump-driven Tiktok deal ‘strangest thing’ he’s ever worked on, by Kif Leswing, CNBC

In August 2020, TikTok was in talks to sell its U.S. operations because the Trump administration threatened to ban the app unless parent company ByteDance found a U.S. buyer for it.

TikTok’s U.S. operations never got sold. In June, President Joe Biden signed an executive order revoking the Trump administration order to ban the app.

7/11/2021   YouTube deletes an asshat's video, freezes account of Fascist poseurs (CPAC), by Victor Morton, Washington Times

That loss of access to its video account meant the ACU, which runs the Conservative Political Action Conference, could not upload Mr. Trump’s speech or any other live content from its CPAC 2021 Part 2 in Dallas over the weekend.

 

According to the ACU, YouTube said in a note it had removed the July 9 episode of the conservative group’s “America UnCanceled” program for “medical misinformation,” though it did not specify the statement.

 

Translated from bullshitese: the asshole Donald Trump isn't backing off the lie that chickenshit and snake oil will cure Covid19.

 

5/6/2021   Twitter Suspends Trump’s New Account For Trying To Evade The Ban On His Old Account, by Tommy Beer, Forbes

The new site, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” went live Tuesday, as did its accompanying Twitter handle, @DJTDesk.

By late Wednesday night, the account had been suspended.

5/5/2021   Trump, Republicans Vow Facebook Will Pay A Price For Upholding His Ban, Forbes

5/5/2021   Trump Still Banned From Facebook: Oversight Board Upholds Decision, Forbes

 

4/7/2021   National Archives can’t resurrect Trump’s tweets, Twitter says, by Quint Forgey, Politico

Twitter will not allow the National Archives to make former President Donald Trump’s past tweets from his @realDonaldTrump account available on the social media platform, the company told POLITICO on Wednesday, in the latest display of Silicon Valley’s power over communications channels used by the U.S. government.

 

The statement came as the National Archives and Records Administration has been working to create an official online archive of Trump’s tweets as president, including those that prompted Twitter to permanently suspend him earlier this year as a threat to public safety. NARA already maintains archives for the institutional and personal accounts of many other former Trump administration officials, in which the old tweets live on the Twitter platform and users can retweet, like and otherwise interact with them.

 

Twitter, though, is adamant that no version of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets reappear on its platform. The company permanently suspended Trump’s personal account in January, accusing him of repeatedly glorifying violence after a throng of his supporters staged a deadly rampage through the Capitol. It had previously slapped warning labels on a number of Trump’s tweets, including one last spring in which he warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

 

While @realDonaldTrump will remain banned from Twitter even in archival form, at least 45 other personal accounts of Trump administration officials are available on Twitter as archives maintained by NARA, including those of former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SHSanders45) and former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino (@Scavino45). Those archived accounts — as well as archived versions of institutional Twitter accounts such as @POTUS45 and @PressSec45 — can also be found linked to Twitter from the Trump Presidential Library website.

 

As it stands, though, no official record exists of the more than 26,000 tweets Trump issued from @realDonaldTrump while in office.

4/5/2021   Supreme Court wipes away ruling that said Trump violated Constitution by blocking Twitter followers, by Ariane de Vogue, CNN

The high court dismissed the case because Trump is not in office so there is no longer a live case or controversy.

 

Trump established his Twitter account in 2009, and in May and June of 2017, while serving as President, he blocked seven individuals who had expressed displeasure with him.

Lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University sued on behalf of the individuals, arguing Trump's action violated their First Amendment rights.

3/28/2021   Parler users melt down after finding out the social media platform shared Capitol riot info with the FBI: report, by Tom Boggioni, RawStory

According to a report from Mashable, right-wing extremists who migrated over to Parler from Twitter are furious with their new home after learning the social media platform assisted the FBI in finding pictures and videos of violent acts and threats related to the Jan 6th. assault on the nation's Capitol.

Parler "referred violent content and incitement from Parler's platform over 50 times before January 6th" as well as "specific threats of violence."

3/28/2021   Parler explains 'free speech' to angry users after sharing Capitol riot posts with the FBI, by Matt Binder, Mashable

Parler found itself unironically explaining the First Amendment to its user base filled with members who declare themselves to be "Constitutionalists" and "Free Speech" advocates.

"Some users have raised questions about the practice of referring violent or inciting content to law enforcement," begins Parler's latest statement. "The First Amendment does not protect violence inciting speech, nor the planning of violent acts. Such content violates Parler's TOS. Any violent content shared with law enforcement was posted publicly and brought to our attention primarily via user reporting. And, as it is posted publicly, it can properly be referred to law enforcement by anyone. Parler remains steadfast in protecting your right to free speech."

 3/23/2021

 

3/11/2021   Parler wanted back into the App Store. Apple said no. by Stan Schroeder, Mashable

“There is no place for hateful, racist, discriminatory content on the App Store,” Apple wrote to Parler’s chief policy officer on Feb. 25, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg.

 

Apple also reportedly provided some screenshots to support the above, including those of user profile pictures with swastikas, as well as posts and user names that are racist, homophobic and misogynistic.

 

The company fired its three remaining iOS developers on Wednesday.

 

2/15/2021   Parler is back after going dark for a month, by Morgan Sung, Mashable

The social media site went down in January when Amazon Web Services, which hosted Parler, suspended it for violating Amazon's terms of service. Parler was also suspended from the Apple and Google Play app stores for its lack of content moderation, which fostered discussions openly encouraging the riot at the Capitol last month.

1/13/2021    Another day, another militia-ized App gives militias the boot, by Lois Beckett, The Guardian US

  Click Above to jump into the Twitter Thread

A WNYC Report

A WNYC Podcast

 

1/13/2021

1/13/2021   Twitter’s Jack Dorsey admits internet companies have too much power and praises bitcoin as a model to change that, by Ari Levy, CNBC

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that banning President Donald Trump was the “right decision for Twitter,” but admitted that the internet shouldn’t be controlled by a handful of private companies.

 

In a series of 13 tweets, Dorsey said that online speech resulting in real world harm requires action even if a ban on an account is divisive “and sets a precedent I feel is dangerous.” He wrote that if a company like Twitter makes a decision that people don’t like, they can go elsewhere, creating an inherent check on its power.

 

1/12/2021   YouTube suspends Trump’s account, barring uploads and comments, by Jennifer Elias, CNBC

The company said Tuesday night that Trump uploaded content that violated its policies, giving it an automatic one strike, which leads to a minimum seven-day suspension from uploading new content. It said it is also disabling the comments section.

 

The company did not specify which videos violated its policies but said it was “content” that included comments Trump made Tuesday morning. YouTube said it violated policies that prohibit content for inciting violence.

 

 

An anti-government website that was promoting armed protests in the United States ahead of the presidential inauguration was shut down by the company hosting its cloud servers Wednesday morning after CBC News revealed those servers were located in Montreal.

 

The website, Tree of Liberty, claimed to be the "press platform" for the Boogaloo movement, whose followers are radical pro-gun advocates who embrace the idea of a second American Civil War — which they call the boogaloo. 

1/11/2021   Talk-radio owner orders conservative hosts to temper election fraud rhetoric, by Paul Farhl, The Washington Post

After months of stoking anger about alleged election fraud, one of America’s largest talk-radio companies has decided on an abrupt change of direction.

 

Cumulus Media, which employs some of the most popular right-leaning talk-radio hosts in the United States, has told its on-air personalities to stop suggesting that the election was stolen from President Trump — or else face termination.

 

A Cumulus executive issued the directive on Wednesday, just as Congress met to certify Joe Biden’s election victory and an angry mob of Trump supporters marched on the Capitol, overwhelmed police and briefly occupied the building, terrorizing lawmakers and leading to the deaths of five people.

 

“We need to help induce national calm NOW,” Brian Philips, executive vice president of content for Cumulus, wrote in an internal memo, which was first reported by Inside Music Media. Cumulus and its program syndication arm, Westwood One, “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ”

 

The new policy is a stunning corporate clampdown on the kind of provocative and even inflammatory talk that has long driven the business model for Cumulus and other talk show broadcasters.

 

Atlanta-based Cumulus owns 416 radio stations in 84 regions across the country. Many of its stations broadcast a talk format, a medium that has been dominated by a conservative point of view for decades.

 

1/11/2021   Parler Sues Amazon, Seeking To Restore Web Service, by Bill Chappell, NPR

 

1/11/2021   Just in:  Trump has been banned by the payment processor, Stripe.  Over $200 Million flowed through Stripe in Trump's most recent fundraising campaign.  "Stop the Steal" was the promise, unadorned grift the reality.. 3/4 of that cash stream flowed directly into Trump's personal pockets.  Accounting will handle the rest of the wealth transfer.  Gotta love suckers who stay suckered.

 

1/10/2021    WSJ Opinion: Twitter Cancels Trump, The Wall Street Journal

Social media shutdown: Twitter permanently suspends Trump's account, as tech giants Apple and Google crack down on Parler

 

 

 

 

 

1/8/2021   President Trump permanently banned from Twitter over risk he could incite violence, by Jessica Guynn, USA Today

“No private company is obligated to provide a megaphone for a malicious campaign to incite violence. It took blood and glass in the halls of Congress – and a change in the political winds – for the most powerful tech companies in the world to recognize, at the last possible moment, the profound threat of Donald Trump," U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) said in a statement. "The question isn’t why Facebook and Twitter acted, it’s what took so long and why haven’t others?”

 

U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., called the suspension "an overdue step."

 

"But it’s important to remember, this is much bigger than one person. It’s about an entire ecosystem that allows misinformation and hate to spread and fester unchecked," he tweeted.

 

1/8/2021   Twitter Permanently Suspends Trump, Citing 'Risk Of Further Incitement Of Violence', by Bobby Allyn and Tamara Keith, NPR

Trump called Twitter his 'rocket ship'

Trump's Twitter account, which had more than 88 million followers, was removed following the company's warning the president it would happen if he did not stop abusing the platform, including his attempts to sabotage the results of the November election by peddling false claims.

 

The move is a stunning fall from grace for Trump, who assembled a massive national following, in large part through the prolific use of his Twitter feed. The platform was his preferred tool for announcing major changes in federal policy — and even changes in personnel. He occasionally fired Cabinet secretaries and aides via tweet.

 

He took pride in his ability to get around the mainstream media and drive cable news with tweets he compared to "a rocket ship."

 

"I call Twitter a typewriter," Trump told a White House summit with right-wing social media provocateurs in 2019.

 

"I go, 'Watch this.' Boom. I press it, and within two seconds, 'We have breaking news,' " he said.

 

But Trump used his Twitter account to do more: routinely disparage, attack and threaten his rivals. Researchers say Trump's tweets supercharged falsehoods about racial justice protesters, the coronavirus and the election, among many other topics.

 

The final tweet from @realDonaldTrump, sent Friday, read, "To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."

 

Some Trump supporters understood that message "as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate," Twitter said in its statement. It could also be interpreted as a disavowal of pledges by Trump's staff to have an orderly transition on Inauguration Day, the company added.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Explainer: Trump Deplatformed, Parler Dehosted 

by Dave Troy  (@davetroy on twitter)

(Source: https://threader.app/thread/1348219824506368000)

(Original Twitter thread:  https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1348219824506368000?s=20)

• THREAD: Now that @Amazon @awscloud has announced they will no longer host @parler_app, many have speculated that they will just “find another host.”Here is why that’s not so simple and what it will likely mean for the app’s future. First, let’s look at where things are...

• 2/ Google and Apple have removed the app from their app stores, effectively terminating growth on mobile devices. People can still access the (not good) web UI until Amazon terminates them today. CEO Matze has said they may be down “up to a week” while they find new hosting.

• 3/ Translated to English, that’s code for “we have no idea what’s going to happen next.” No US cloud provider (Microsoft, Google, IBM, Digital Ocean) is likely to touch this, as it could be seen as providing material support for sedition. No CEO or counsel wants to get near this.

• 4/ They could potentially “roll their own” data center by buying servers and putting them in a co-location facility. But that’s a single point of failure, and many colo providers would be just as likely to decline their business. It would be hard and risky to pursue this.

• 5/ Imagine, after they sweated like pigs to get this hardware all setup, if they get told their colo provider is booting them. That’s a lot of metal to then move somewhere else. Meanwhile, the user base is deteriorating because chaos and dying apps. They will go to other venues.

• 6/ They also have a nascent, barely existent business model that generates little to no revenue. That means this all is nothing but *expense* for the woman who took credit for this terror network, Rebekah Mercer. There may be other undocumented funders in NDMASCENDANT too.

• 7/ CEO Matze has family connections to Russia. We should assume he is getting offers of hosting there. If he hosts Parler there, it becomes open to NSA surveillance. If he accepts material support from Russia in support of sedition here, it could be seen as treason. Hm.

• 8/ Additionally any material relationship with Russian interests would require registration under FARA § 951. And all this in the context of having dead, banned apps, with only a web UX for distribution. With users leaving in droves, and funds draining rapidly.

• 9/ Other bad actor hosts like the Jim Watkins/VanWaTech group are likely also offering to help. They are enabled by a company called CNSERVERS in Vancouver, WA. Guess what ‘CN’ stands for? You guessed it. China.  Their infrastructure is sometimes backed by assets in Russia/China.

• 10/ Watkins/VanWa hosts a lot of awful stuff including brand-name Nazi sites, a range of MAGA stuff, and borderline child porn. They are able to keep this online because they use a Netherlands based firm to protect against distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks.

• 11/ It is possible that Matze and Mercer will join the Watkins portfolio of well-known Nazis and White Supremacists. But Bekah doesn’t generally enjoy that kind of limelight. I suspect she will decline to go this route.The sane answer is to GIVE UP. Here is why.

• 12/ Parler can never be a viable business, realistically. Even Twitter has struggled to make money, and it’s faaar bigger and more established. In fact, Parler is so far away from being able to make money, Mercers had to know that it would never do so. So why pursue it at all?

• 13/ They built Parler for multiple reasons.1: the user data; this is part of the same Cambridge Analytica data play they started years ago and which continues with firms like Gloo et al, 2: they wished to challenge § 230 of the Comms. Decency Act, 3: to radicalize people.

• 14/ So they now have a lot of data. Section 230 is likely to be visited for revision at some point soon. And people are now more radicalized than they were. Their app is dead. Their hosting is done. People are onto them, their funding and Russia connections. Time to stop.

• 15/ Rebekah Mercer is not stupid. Her sister is a professional poker player. They saw this “company” as a round of poker designed to provoke certain outcomes, with high upsides and low downsides. That round of poker is at a natural stopping point. https://www.wsop.com/players/profile/?playerID=85013 …

• 16/ Should Matze/Wernick/Bongino/Peikoff decide to soldier on and go full zombie mode, they can try to do that. They probably can’t do so without Mercer support. Or material help from foreign nationals. Any US person risks sedition charges. And indeed, so do they.

• 17/ Given the near zero possibility of survival, I assess that all involved will likely terminate this kamikaze mission, take the data they harvested, use it for future ops, share it with the Russian government in trade for something, and move on to a new venture.

• 18/ If for some reason they decide to do the unwise thing and try to survive this, their upstream ISP and DDOS protection vendor will become targets of derision, public pressure, and investigation by law enforcement.For all these reasons, I think Parler ends today.

• END (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1348219824506368000)

 

 

 

 Kasparov:

• Regulation is a vital element of integrating new technology and corporate power with our free societies, with all the rights and freedoms we have worked so hard for. But it takes time, and is far slower than the impact new tech can have.

• I've been writing on this balance between government & business and rights and the public good for years, mostly on my Avast blog. Coming from a totalitarian state, I obviously have a dim view of govt power, which is often abused and never conceded voluntarily.

• Govt can regulate in a pro-free market, pro-innovation way, the way Teddy Roosevelt and Taft broke Standard Oil and the trusts. Such efforts must have a place when the public good is clearly at risk.

• But today, we mostly see partisan efforts to abuse public power to curtail rights, to threaten and control individuals and companies that have angered one political group or another. If they succeed, it's a vicious cycle.

• There are many legitimate debates about Twitter's ban of Trump, for example, and we are lucky to be free to have them. But none of them should include whether they should have the right to do so.

• Lastly, if you think what Twitter and other companies did is "censorship," or "like the USSR," you don't know anything about censorship or the USSR. I do, and when the state attacks a company for offending an official is when you're getting closer, not the other way around.

 

 

With this, one hate drip has been cut for 12 million potential terrorists

 

What's left?  FOX, OAN, NEWSMAX?  Gab?  Telegram?

 

1/9/2021    Amazon Is Booting Parler Off Of Its Web Hosting Service, by John Paczkowski and Ryan Mac, BuzzFeed News

Parler, which was launched in 2018, has become a safe haven for people banned by popular sites including Facebook and Twitter. The Henderson, Nevada–based company has billed itself as a free speech alternative to mainstream social networks and taken a more relaxed approach to content moderation, attracting conspiracy theorists, hate group members, and right-wing activists who have openly incited violence.

 

People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC, with weapons on Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

 

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

 

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

 

[ Editors note:  This article includes samples of the Parler-standard hate speech & threatened violence, couched in terms of "Lord Jesus," Hell, Death, "systematic assasination," and "starts on the 6th civil war." These were cited in the Amazon termination notice.  i.e. perfectly normal and standard radical-right wannabe terrorist chat.]

 

 1/9/2021

 

 

1/9/2021  Hugely informative introduction, a Q&A session. Click to read the thread:

 

 

1/9/2021   Apple Has Banned Parler, The Pro-Trump Social Network, From Its App Store, by Adolfo Flores and John Paczkowski, BuzzFeed News

1/8/2021   Apple Has Threatened To Ban Parler From The App Store, by Ryan Mac and John Paczkowski, BuzzFeed News

In an email sent this morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Apple wrote to Parler’s executives that there had been complaints that the service had been used to plan and coordinate the storming of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wednesday. The insurrection left five people dead, including a police officer. 

Apple's warning referenced the following samples of Parler hosted hate and threats of violence:

• https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347190280492089344?s=20

• https://twitter.com/EmmanueLoree/status/1347260055410896897/photo/1

• https://twitter.com/Lovedrea/status/1347263797614972928?s=20

• https://twitter.com/Wilmographer/status/1346714000554303489?s=20

• https://twitter.com/pjg0014/status/1347265499210592256?s=20

 

1/8/2021   Twitter Has Banned Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, And Ron Watkins For Spreading QAnon Delusions, by Caroline Haskins, BuzzFeed News

Banned accounts include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, Trump attorney Sidney Powell, and 8kun co-owner Ron Watkins, who some journalists and researchers have speculated has the log-in information for the account "Q," whose posts fuel the mass delusion, but doesn’t necessarily write Q’s posts.

1/7/2021   On Radical-Right Websites, Plans To Storm Capitol Were Made In Plain Sight, by Laurel Wamsley, NPR

Since November's election, Holt has seen websites like Parler, Gab, TheDonald and MeWe fill with torrents of "conspiracy theories, disinformation and outright lies about the results of the election," he says. "And those lies often came from the top arbiters of power in the Republican Party, notably President Donald Trump himself."

 

The events of Jan. 6 brought unprecedented traffic to some niche sites. The CEO of Gab, Andrew Torba, said that the site's traffic was up 40% on Wednesday.

 

More than 80% of the top posts on TheDonald on Wednesday about the Electoral College certification featured calls for violence in the top five responses, according to research from Advance Democracy, an independent, nonpartisan organization

 

Those who have believed in QAnon or "deep state" theories have had those ideas reinforced for years by the conspiracy-driven media they consume, as well as by elected officials who repeat them.

 

Trump avoided using the term for years even as he promoted its ideas, laying the groundwork for what is happening now, Phillips says — and when he lost the election, he then used that narrative "as a bludgeon against the American people."

 

The result is that now, amid election results contested by Trump, "this is a well-established narrative way of being in the world. It's not even a conspiracy theory — it is an identity."

 

"So what happened in the Capitol is really the culmination of months and in some cases years of belief in the sort of paradigmatic world in which you have a very clear set of bad guys who are out to get Trump, and you have a very clear set of good guys who are fighting that battle."

1/7/2021   Facebook Has Banned Donald Trump For At Least Two Weeks, by Jane Lytvynenko and Ryan Mac, BuzzFeed News

“We are extending the block indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks,” wrote CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the announcement.

1/6/2021   Twitter Threatened To Permanently Suspend Donald Trump, by Scott Lucas and Caroline O'Donovan, BuzzFeed News

In a series of tweets, Twitter Safety justified the temporary ban on the basis of three tweets that supported political violence against the United States Congress as it met to certify his loss in the presidential election. If Trump were to agree to delete those tweets, Twitter would return his access. If not, he would remain locked out permanently.

1/6/2021   The Rioters Who Took Over The Capitol Have Been Planning Online In The Open For Weeks, by Jane Lytvynenko and Molly Hensley-Clancy, BuzzFeed News

The mob that forced Congress to flee organized on both obscure and mainstream sites.

 11/14/2021   Conservatives Flock To Mercer-Funded Parler, Claim Censorship On Facebook And Twitter, by Shannon Bond, NPR

On Saturday, CEO and co-founder John Matze said one of the privately owned company's early investors is Rebekah Mercer, who along with her father, hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, has been a backer of President Trump and is also a major donor to conservative causes, including Breitbart News and former White House strategist Steve Bannon.

 

"John and I started Parler to provide a neutral platform for free speech," Rebekah Mercer wrote on Parler on Saturday. She went on to condemn "the ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords."

 

"Once you start content curation and you start fact-checking, you're introducing bias," Matze replied.

 

Radio host Mark Levin told listeners he was "fed up" with Facebook, where his page reaches 1.6 million followers, after the company restricted his account for repeatedly sharing false information.

 

 

 

 

10/5/2021   QANON Supporting /SuperCorrupt /SuperSergeant /SuperCop Raided, Quits in Disgrace

10/5/2021   Controversial chief of NYPD sergeants union resigns after FBI raids union’s Manhattan headquarters, searches his Long Island home, by By STEPHEN REX BROWN, NOAH GOLDBERG, MICHAEL GARTLAND, BRITTANY KRIEGSTEIN and LARRY MCSHANE, The New York Daily News 

 

10/5/2021   FBI raids NYPD’s Sergeants Benevolent Association offices in mail and wire fraud probe: source, by Tina Moore, Joe Marino, Ben Feuerherd, Kevin Sheehan, Elizabeth Rosner and Bruce Golding, The New York Post

High-ranking law enforcement officials said the agents were investigating the suspected misappropriation of union funds and seeking evidence of mail and wire fraud.

7/7/2020   Head of NYPD union gives Fox News interview with QAnon mug in background, by Marshall Cohen, CNN

 

10/5/2021   FBI raids New York's police sergeants union offices and the union president resigns, Associated Press via NPR

The union represents about 13,000 active and retired NYPD sergeants and controls a $264 million retirement fund.

 

 

2/26/2021   Three Percenter Truck at Capitol on Jan. 6 Belongs to Hitler-Quoting Rep’s Husband, by Adam Rawnsley, Kelly Weill and Jackie Kucinish, Daily Beast

A pickup truck parked at the United States Capitol and bearing a Three Percenter militia sticker on the day of the Jan. 6 riot belongs to the husband of freshman U.S. Rep. Mary Miller of Illinois, who approvingly quoted Adolf Hitler a day earlier.

 

The presence of a vehicle with a militia decal so close to the Capitol, inaccessible to normal vehicle traffic, raised questions about how it got there—and whether it belonged to any of the hundreds of suspects involved in the deadly riot.

 

But in an email to The Daily Beast, Chris Miller, Rep. Miller’s husband and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, conceded the truck belonged to him even as he pleaded ignorance about the militia group.

 

[In other words, I'm just a dumb hillbilly defense.]

 

 

 

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,

who put darkness for light and light for darkness. 

- Isaiah 5 

 

January 6, 2021.  Insurrection Day.  Incoming Illinois representative Mary Miller, flanked by QAnon Conspiracy Mom posters, reads prepared remarks and along the way, commends Hitler's doctrine of child rearing like he was Dr. Spock..  

Who does that?

When I was a kid, "Republican" wasn't a dirty word. 

Today - it is.

 

Click on the photograph to listen.

 

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker calls Mary Miller’s remarks quoting Hitler “unfathomable and disgusting.”

• “Illinois Republicans cannot allow this to stand, and must condemn this vile, evil streak in their party.  This is how they do it. This is how Nazis slip their ideology into the hearts and minds of desperate, angry, frightened people who make bargains with hate. This is how they normalize it. This is how it creeps out of the dark alleys into the Capitol. This is how a nation dies."

 

10/4/2021   Karst Topography

is characterized by barren, rocky ground, caves, sinkholes, underground rivers & the absence of surface streams & lakes. It results from the dissolving effects of groundwater on limestone.  Limestone dissolves fairly easily in slightly acidic water, which occurs widely in nature. Rainwater percolates along both horizontal & vertical cracks, dissolving the limestone & carrying it away in solution, creating caves & sinkholes, like Ontario's Bonnechere Caves and Central Pennsylvania's Penn Caves.

 

Light Pollution Map / World Atlas 2015 

The New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder

View 3D Globe version of this map   (Chrome may not be supported)

The Bortle Dark Sky Scale 

 

The Geological Map of the Artic: Geological Survey / Commission Géologique Canada [ @GSC_CGC on twitter ]

A different view of the world! The Geological Map of the Arctic. This circular map has the North Pole in the centre, and shows the geology of everything above the Arctic Circle. Download yours free of charge here:

 

10/26/2021   At the U.N. Climate Summit, Could India Become a Champion, Not Just a Casualty, of the Crisis? By Raghu Karnad, The New Yorker

Modi has a desire for global prestige, for the country and for himself, and a barely hidden ambition to eclipse Nehru as the icon of modern Indian statesmanship. For the former, he will need to turn the country’s hollow, histrionic debates over nationalism toward the real end of advancing national interest, survival, and renewal in ecological terms. And, to outshine his rival of seventy-five years ago, he will need to help preside over the end of an unjust, unsustainable global order.

 

If the nation’s call to leadership in the twentieth century was decolonization, in this century it is decarbonization.

10/25/2021   Where Have All the Insects Gone?  By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

The significance of the theory extended well beyond actual islands. Through logging and mining and generalized sprawl, the world was increasingly being cut up into “islands” of habitat. The smaller and more isolated these islands, be they patches of forest or tundra or grassland, the fewer species they would ultimately contain. Wilson had moved on to new research questions, and initially didn’t concern himself much with the implications of his own work. When the first surveys of deforestation in the Amazon appeared, though, he was, in his words, “tipped into active engagement.” In an article in Scientific American, in 1989, he combined data on deforestation with the predictions of his and MacArthur’s theory to estimate that as many as six thousand species a year were being consigned to oblivion. “That in turn is on the order of 10,000 times greater than the naturally occurring background extinction rate that existed prior to the appearance of human beings,” he wrote.

 

Since 1989, South America has lost at least another three hundred million acres of tropical forest, and Southeast Asia has experienced similar losses. In places like the U.S. and Britain, which were deforested generations ago, the hedgerows and weedy patches that once provided refuge for insects are disappearing, owing to ever more intense agricultural practices. From an insect’s perspective, Goulson points out, even fertilizer use constitutes a form of habitat destruction. Fertilizer leaching out of fields fosters the growth of certain plants over others, and it’s these others that many insects depend on.

Avoiding a ‘Ghastly Future’: Hard Truths on the State of the Planet, by Carl Safina, Yale School for the Environment, 1/27/2021

Within the lifetime of anyone born at the start of the Baby Boom, the human population has tripled. Has this resulted in a human endeavor three times better — or one-third as capable of surviving? In the 1960s, humans took about three-quarters of what the planet could regenerate annually. By 2016 this rose to 170 percent, meaning that the planet cannot keep up with human demand, and we are running the world down.

 

“In other words,” say 17 of the world’s leading ecologists in a stark new perspective on our place in life and time, “humanity is running an ecological Ponzi scheme in which society robs nature and future generations to pay for boosting incomes in the short term.”

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future, by Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, Rodolfo Dirzo, Anne H. Ehrlich, John Harte, Mary Ellen Harte, Graham Pyke, Peter H. Raven, William J. Ripple, Frédérik Saltré, Christine Turnbull, Mathis Wackernagel and Daniel T. Blumstein, Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2021/1/13

We summarize the state of the natural world in stark form here to help clarify the gravity of the human predicament. We also outline likely future trends in biodiversity decline (Díaz et al., 2019), climate disruption (Ripple et al., 2020), and human consumption and population growth to demonstrate the near certainty that these problems will worsen over the coming decades, with negative impacts for centuries to come. Finally, we discuss the ineffectiveness of current and planned actions that are attempting to address the ominous erosion of Earth's life-support system. Ours is not a call to surrender—we aim to provide leaders with a realistic “cold shower” of the state of the planet that is essential for planning to avoid a ghastly future.

 

Freshwater and marine environments have also been severely damaged. Today there is <15% of the original wetland area globally than was present 300 years ago (Davidson, 2014), and >75% of rivers >1,000 km long no longer flow freely along their entire course (Grill et al., 2019). More than two-thirds of the oceans have been compromised to some extent by human activities (Halpern et al., 2015), live coral cover on reefs has halved in <200 years (Frieler et al., 2013), seagrass extent has been decreasing by 10% per decade over the last century (Waycott et al., 2009; Díaz et al., 2019), kelp forests have declined by ~40% (Krumhansl et al., 2016), and the biomass of large predatory fishes is now <33% of what it was last century (Christensen et al., 2014).

9/8/2020   Canaries in the Coal Mine, by Amelie Bonney, Gale Ambassador at the University of Oxford

USGS National Water Dashboard

View over 13,000 YSGS real-time stream, lake, reservoir, precipitation, water quality & groundwater stations in context with current weather and hazard conditiont.

9/28/2021   Protected Too Late: U.S. Officials Report More Than 20 Extinctions, by Catrin Einhorn, The New York Times

The animals and one plant had been listed as endangered species. Their stories hold lessons about a growing global biodiversity crisis.

"When you can't get ice at the Canadian border, how much farther north can you go?"

 

6/29/2021   How Weird Is the Heat in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver? Off the Charts, by Aatish Bhatia, Henry Fountain and Kevin Quealy, The New York Times

Karin Bumbaco, Washington’s assistant state climatologist, said that any definitive climate-change link could be demonstrated only by a type of analysis called an attribution study. “But it’s a safe assumption, in my view, to blame increasing greenhouse gases for at least some portion of this event,” she said.

3/25/2021    What Killed These Bald Eagles? After 25 Years, We Finally Know, by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

In an extraordinarily exhaustive new study, scientists have pinpointed the cause of death for those bald eagles in Arkansas. No wonder the mystery took 25 years to solve: The birds died because of a specific algae that lives on a specific invasive water plant and makes a novel toxin, but only in the presence of specific pollutants. Everything had to go right—or wrong, really—for the mass deaths to happen. This complex chain of events reflects just how much humans have altered the natural landscape and in how many ways.

 

The team wondered if lab-cultivated cyanobacteria were somehow different from wild ones. But how? Niedermeyer went back to samples collected in the lakes, using a sophisticated technique called AP-MALDI-MSI—“like taking a picture but you don’t detect light but molecules,” he says—which revealed a novel molecule found only in the cyanobacteria growing on the hydrilla. The lab-grown cyanobacteria did not have it, nor did hydrilla by itself.

What’s more, this molecule had a formula never seen before, and, unusually, it contained five atoms of the element bromine. So the team tried adding bromine to its growing cyanobacteria. Lo and behold, the same strange molecule appeared, and this new batch of cyanobacteria caused the brain lesions in chickens. Another group of collaborators confirmed the team’s work further, by finding the cyanobacteria genes likely responsible for synthesizing the toxin. The team ultimately named this toxin aetokthonotoxin, “poison that kills the eagle.” Twenty-five years later, it finally had a name.

 

There are still more puzzles to solve. Where is the cyanobacteria getting the bromine? The element is relatively rare in fresh water, but Wilde says that hydrilla seems to sequester it. The concentration in the plant is 300 times higher than in the water column. How bromine is getting into the lakes in the first place is another mystery; the study authors suggest that it could be from, ironically, from herbicides used to kill the invasive hydrilla.

 

 

1/3/2021   Michigan's Warming Winters are a Big Problem for Winter Festivals, by Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press

Michigan's cold, snowy winters, and a way of life built around them, are being disrupted by climate change. And for winter festivals reliant on cold, snow and ice — and communities reliant on the economic boost at a slow time that those festivals bring — it's causing some scrambling to adapt, and even to survive.

 

The Great Lakes region has seen a larger increase in annual average temperatures than the rest of the continental U.S. And "winters are getting warmer more quickly than the summers are," said Richard Rood, a professor in climate and space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan.

 

"The planet overall is warming, but states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois are getting warmer, faster," said Don Wuebbles, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois.

12/29/2020   Could Covid lockdown have helped save the planet? by Jonathan Watts, The Guardian

When lockdown began, climate scientists were horrified at the unfolding tragedy, but also intrigued to observe what they called an “inadvertent experiment” on a global scale. To what extent, they asked, would the Earth system respond to the steepest slowdown in human activity since the second world war?

 

Environmental activists put the question more succinctly: how much would it help to save the planet?

12/26/2020   The Darkest Timeline, By Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times

Two years ago, “Deep Adaptation” made people confront the end of the world from climate change. 

 

Other high-profile papers, like “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” also from 2018, and Timothy Lenton’s overview of tipping points, published in Nature the following year, have galvanized the climate movement. But this self-published paper, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating the Climate Tragedy,” had a different, more personal, feel.

 

Does it matter if it’s not correct?

  

 

250 Violet-Green Swallows and 35 Wilson's Warblers collected along the Rio Grande in Velarde, New Mexico, in September, 2020 (photo: Jenna McCullough, University of New Mexico)

12/26/2020   Mass die-off of birds in south-western US 'caused by starvation' by Phoebe Weston, The Guardian

• Necropsy reveals 80% of the thousands of songbirds that died suddenly showed typical signs of emaciation

• Birds ‘falling out of the sky’ in mass die-off in south-western US

• Read more in our series Biodiversity: what happened next?

  

12/23/2020   Sugary Drinks May Be Bad for Aging, By Nicholas Bakalar, The New York Times

Consumption of both sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened drinks was tied to an increased risk for frailty in women over 60.

 

11/27/2019   Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against, By Timothy M. Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Nature

The growing threat of abrupt and irreversible climate changes must compel political and economic action on emissions.

 

9/18/2020   The hard truths of climate change — by the numbers,  By Jeff Tollefson, Nature

A set of troubling charts shows how little progress nations have made toward limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.

 

9/13/2019   ‘Ecological grief’ grips scientists witnessing Great Barrier Reef’s decline, by Gemma Conroy, Nature

Witnessing the Great Barrier Reef “go into meltdown in the space of a week” in early 2016 was a major shock for David Suggett, a coral physiologist at the University of Technology Sydney. “Nothing can prepare you for seeing it play out in real time,” he says.

A dying chestnut tree photographed in 1916 in North Spencer, New York. (Cornell University)

1/25/2017   There used to be 4 billion American chestnut trees, but they all disappeared, by Heather Giligan, Timeline

The combined powers of the public, scientists, and the governments weren’t enough to save the chestnuts. The loss was stunning, both financially and emotionally. “Efforts to stop the spread of this bark disease have been given up,” The Bismarck Daily Tribune resignedly reported in 1920. The paper estimated that the value of the trees was $400,000,000 as recently as a decade before. The kings of the Eastern forest now die as shrubs.

2017    Dos and Don'ts of Public Rights of Way on the British Isles, Ireland and Scotland

In the UK, people have the ancient legal right to cross another person's property without fear of being gunned down by the land owner.

FAQ: public rights of way in England and Wales

Open Spaces Society

As you can see from the reporting in Open Space magazine, keeping the right requires struggle.