"Opinion: What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us." Apr 6, 2021, Opinion by Robert A. Pape, Washington Post, at < https://www.washingtonpost.
Trump to power: 'Justice for J6' was a flop — but the Jan. 6 insurrection has fueled growing support for white extremist violence", Oct 1, 2021, Chauncey Devega, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2021/10/
COMMENTARY "Steve Bannon's second act: He's back, and he wants to bring down the curtain on democracy: Maybe you thought 'Trump's brain' was off the political stage forever. But he's back — and now he smells revenge.", Oct 15, 2021, Chauncey Devega, Salon, at < https://www.salon.com/2021/10/
(Caption: Riot police push back a crowd of supporters of then-President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6. {Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images} )
Robert A. Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
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.
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.
The charges have, so far, been generally in proportion to state and county populations as a whole. Only Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri and Montana appear to have sent more protesters to D.C. suspected of crimes than their populations would suggest.
Nor were these insurrectionists typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
For example, Texas is the home of 36 of the 377 charged or arrested nationwide. The majority of the state’s alleged insurrectionists — 20 of 36 — live in six quickly diversifying blue counties such as Dallas and Harris (Houston). In fact, all 36 of Texas’s rioters come from just 17 counties, each of which lost White population over the past five years. Three of those arrested or charged hail from Collin County north of Dallas, which has lost White population at the very brisk rate of 4.3 percent since 2015.
The same thing can be seen in New York state, home to 27 people charged or arrested after the riot, nearly all of whom come from 14 blue counties that Biden won in and around New York City. One of these, Putnam County (south of Poughkeepsie), is home to three of those arrested, and a county that saw its White population decline by 3.5 percent since 2015.
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.
Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest.
CPOST also conducted two independent surveys in February and March, including a National Opinion Research Council survey, to help understand the roots of this rage. One driver overwhelmingly stood out: fear of the “Great Replacement.” Great Replacement theory has achieved iconic status with white nationalists and holds that minorities are progressively replacing White populations due to mass immigration policies and low birthrates. Extensive social media exposure is the second-biggest driver of this view, our surveys found. Replacement theory might help explain why such a high percentage of the rioters hail from counties with fast-rising, non-White populations.
While tracking and investigating right-wing extremist groups remains a vital task for law enforcement, the best intelligence is predictive. Understanding where most alleged insurrectionists come from is a good starting point in identifying areas facing elevated risks of further political violence. At the very least, local mayors and police chiefs need better intelligence and sounder risk analysis.
To ignore this movement and its potential would be akin to Trump’s response to covid-19: We cannot presume it will blow over. The ingredients exist for future waves of political violence, from lone-wolf attacks to all-out assaults on democracy, surrounding the 2022 midterm elections.
General Introduction for the 3 Articles:
The Left, more than any other segment of the U.S. Population, needs to recognize the danger of the growing Fascist Movement inside the U.S. We see numerous disquieting developments taking place in the wake of the defeat of the Trump candidacy for President, and the narrow defeats of Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The U.S. has long had potential fascist movements lurking in the wings; but with the increased severity of various socioeconomic conditions and the declining position of the U.S. in the Global Economic Hierarchy the danger is particularly acute now.
Arguments about immigration, racial groups, and “replacement theory” are among the leading issues and/or talking points used by the right-wing organizations. The simple fact is that there are numerous legitimate grievances that underly the increasing political militancy, on both the left and the right, in the U.S. and in many other places in “The West”. The fascists now are basing their appeals and recruiting / radicalizing on the obvious demographic changes; of course they do not honestly address many of the factors driving these developments. Europe has seen constant streams of migrants and refugees, most of them fleeing the horrors caused by the Global War on Terrorism, or fleeing intolerable conditions in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. for decades has seen flows of migrants and refugees, many of them fleeing the chaos caused by the Death Squad Wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras in Central America, and from the narco police state in Colombia and the ongoing attempts to undermine the attempt at Petro-Socialism in Venezuela in South America.
The U.S. has taken in over 1 million legal immigrants per year since the changes to the Immigration Laws in 1965, there have also been significant numbers of undocumented immigrants certainly in the 20 million range over those same 56 years. Together these add up to around 75 million people or in the area of about 22% of the overall population. And: “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children number approximately 85.7 million people, or 26 percent of the U.S. population, according to the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS), a slight decline from 2019”. And these numbers certainly do not include a significant number of people descended from immigration in the earlier years of the post 1965 waves of immigration. We now have grandchildren and even great-grandchildren from immigrants who came to the U.S. during those earlier post 1965 years, who would certainly not be counted.
Immigration has long been a complex issue hiding the motives of the ruling class, the main beneficiary from the changes wrought by the millions of migrants who came, and inflaming working and middle class Whites who were among the main victims of those changes. The 1965 bill came, not coincidentally, during the most savage Counter-Insurgency Wars in U.S. history, the S.E. Asian / Vietnam Wars. The rulers knew that refugees and migrants would be generated by the ongoing Counter Insurgency Wars (Vietnam was far from the first of these), and the changes to immigration quotas, that favored people from the Third World nations, was useful for allowing collaborators and war criminals fleeing these ongoing conflicts. Of course easily exploitable cheap labor was always a significant part of the mix of motives for permitting large numbers of migrants to enter the country. Recently, roughly over the last 10 years, the number or migrants coming to the U.S. from Asia has exceeded the number coming from Latin America and the Caribbean. This is a very different sort of migration. Asian migrants these days arrive on jet airliners and have visas, they come to study in our universities and in our graduate and professional schools. Or they come to invest in business opportunities here or to set up subsidiaries of foreign companies. They are a very different set of migrants than were the famous “boat people” from Vietnam in the 1970s.
The facts are that, regardless of what is motivating the Trumpian Fascist forces, they are heavily armed, have the connivance of wealthy funders, and various officers and enlisted personnel from the military and police forces. They can be defeated, but should not be ignored.
White terror: Millions of Americans say they'd support violence to restore Trump to power
Two weekends ago, Trump loyalists gathered in Washington for the "Justice for J6" rally, a supposed show of solidarity with the "political prisoners" arrested for their alleged (or confessed) participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Trump's Republican-fascists and their propagandists have elevated these hooligans, vandals and (in many cases) terrorists to the status of martyrs and patriots as a way of legitimizing their anti-democratic movement, creating sympathy among Trump's faithful that can be exploited for fundraising and, of course, recruiting and encouraging more extremists to the cause.
Despite warnings from the Capitol Police, DHS and other authorities that more violence was possible, the rally on Sept. 18 was a tame and peaceful affair. No more than a few hundred Trump cultists attended, greatly outnumbered by law enforcement and the news media. This low turnout was widely mocked among the chattering class, liberals and progressives of the "resistance" and others who oppose Trump and his movement.
As I have argued before, such reactions are shortsighted and ill-advised — another example among many of the way America's political class, news media and the public at large still does not understand the nature of the threat they face from the Republican-fascist movement and the larger white right.
As seen in Michigan and elsewhere, right-wing militants are likely to focus their attention at the state and local level where law enforcement assets are more porous and likely targets are, in general, more vulnerable to attack.
But in fact the real power of Jan. 6 and its aftermath is difficult to measure by such standards. Those events, and Republican efforts to rewrite the history of that day, have increasingly normalized right-wing political violence — if not in fact made it a preferred and desired way of obtaining and keeping political power.
In keeping with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' "Big Lie" strategy, a large majority of Republican and Trump voters actually believe that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen" from Donald Trump — and, in effect, from them as well. Public opinion polls also show that a significant percentage of Republicans believe that the violence and coup attempt on Jan. 6 was a "patriotic" or at least understandable action that was necessary to "defend" democracy and Trump's presidency.
On a daily basis, neofascist white supremacist opinion leaders and other propagandists on Fox News and across the right-wing propaganda echo chamber are radicalizing millions of white Americans. Most will not personally commit acts of violence against nonwhites, Muslims, "radical socialist Democrats" and others designated to be the enemy. But they are ever more likely to tolerate or condone such crimes.
Ultimately, fascism is a type of political and social poison which manifests as violence and other antisocial and anti-human behavior. New research by Robert Pape and the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats demonstrates how far that poison has spread among the American people.
In a new essay at The Conversation, Pape summarizes these findings, beginning with the most startling result:
We have found that 47 million American adults – nearly 1 in 5 – agree with the statement that "the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president." Of those, 21 million also agree that "use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency."
Our survey found that many of these 21 million people with insurrectionist sentiments have the capacity for violent mobilization. At least 7 million of them already own a gun, and at least 3 million have served in the U.S. military and so have lethal skills. Of those 21 million, 6 million said they supported right-wing militias and extremist groups, and 1 million said they are themselves or personally know a member of such a group, including the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.
Only a small percentage of people who hold extremist views ever actually commit acts of violence, but our findings reveal how many Americans hold views that could turn them toward insurrection.
Pape's polling found that 9% of American adults agreed that "Use of force is justified to restore Donald J. Trump to the presidency, while 25% agreed that "The 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president."
Pape reports a margin of error of 4 percentage points, meaning that the proportion of American adults who hold both those views is somewhere between 4% and 12%. "The best single figure," he writes, "is the middle of that range, 21 million." He continues:
People who said force is justified to restore Trump were consistent in their insurrectionist sentiments: Of them, 90% also see Biden as illegitimate, and 68% also think force may be needed to preserve America's traditional way of life.
In an interview with the CBS News podcast "Intelligence Matters," Pape further explained what this new research reveals about the relationship between the white supremacist "great replacement" theory, the QAnon cult and right-wing violence:
Sixty-three percent of the 21 million adamant insurrectionists in the country believe in the "Great Replacement," the idea that the rights of whites will be overtaken by the rights of Blacks and Hispanics. The second most important driver was a QAnon belief, where 53 percent of the 21 million believed that our government is run and controlled by a satanic cult of pedophiles. Those are the two radical beliefs that are really ... the key drivers of the insurrectionist sentiments in the country today.
This is about, what are the prospects for other instances of collective violence, especially related to elections going forward? ... I think that we need to be aware that we are moving into already a politically tumultuous 2022 election season just in the last month with the events in Afghanistan, which has created tremendous amount of anger in many of our military circles, military communities; with the new mandates for COVID, which President Biden has just announced, which are already generating tremendous pushback against the federal government. ... We need to understand the risks that that could break out into violence.
For all of these escalating warnings about the potential for serious right-wing political violence, America's political class remains largely unwilling to properly respond to the clear and present danger. Such an outcome is in part explained by the very language that is most often used in these discussions.
For example, "right-wing terrorism" or "right-wing extremism" is often presented in a race-neutral fashion.
A more accurate description would be to say "white right-wing terrorism" or "white supremacist violence." Similarly, the events of Jan. 6 could be described as a "white insurrection" or "white riot," which more clearly captures the role of race and racism in the violence of both that day and the Age of Trump as a whole.
To be clear, there are Black and brown people who belong to Trump's cult. Some are among his most militant supporters. Regardless of their skin color, such people are loyal to Whiteness as a social and political force. As such, Black and brown Trumpists and other neofascists want to access white power and white privilege for themselves. For them, the end goal is to somehow "earn" a type of transactional honorary whiteness.
Trumpism and other forms of American neofascism and racial authoritarianism are an extreme personal and existential problem for nonwhite people and others who are marginalized as the Other. They are also a problem spawned by and of White America.Until that distinction is internalized by America's elites, and widely accepted as common sense by the American people, neofascism will continue to gain momentum and the country's democracy crisis will continue to escalate toward full-on disaster, from which no return to "normal" will be possible. America's past and America's present (again) runs along and through the color line.
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Steve Bannon's second act: He's back, and he wants to bring down the curtain on democracy
n the trailer for the new season of the horror-thriller series that is American politics, the screen goes black and ominous music begins to play. In bright white letters the first words appear on screen: "They thought he was gone. They thought he was defeated. They said he would never be back — but he was here all along." Then, after a pause: "Steve Bannon is back for revenge!"
For several years, beginning with the 2016 campaign, the American and global news media was obsessed with Steve Bannon. This was at least somewhat justified: Bannon was considered to be Donald Trump's "brain" and the mastermind behind his unlikely victory over Hillary Clinton. Bannon accomplished this through what many viewed as a "shocking" and "brilliant," if nihilistic, political strategy that leveraged right-wing populism, racism and the subterranean longing for an authoritarian leader.
Before that, Bannon was also executive chairman of Breitbart News, an influential propaganda outlet for right-wing authoritarians, white supremacists and the so-called alt-right. He rode that success to a role steering Trump's presidential campaign to victory and then to the White House, where he served as Trump's senior strategist — for all of seven months. Bannon was purged from the Trump regime after serving as a source for Michael Wolff's book "Fire and Fury," and appeared to be persona non grata with the famously touchy president. But in the years since then, Bannon has repeatedly demonstrated his loyalty, and has been rewarded for it. Last year, he was charged with wire fraud and money laundering for stealing money from a charity whose proceeds were supposed to be used to build Trump's misbegotten wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump pardoned him, and apparently all is well between them.
Bannon has been in the news this week: He may be charged with criminal contempt by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, and he hosted an event in Virginia on Wednesday night where attendees reportedly recited the Pledge of Allegiance before a flag used in that insurrection.
It does indeed seem likely that Bannon appears to have played a key role in the events of Jan. 6 and perhaps also in Trump's overarching coup attempt. On a recent episode of his podcast, Bannon admitted to telling Trump, prior to that date, "You need to kill this [Biden] administration in its crib."
Bannon has also made repeated use of the technique known as stochastic terrorism to encourage right-wing violence, while disclaiming personal responsibility. As HuffPost reports, he recently told his listeners of his "War Room" podcast: "We need to get ready now. We control the country. We've got to start acting like it. And one way we're going to act like it, we're not going to have 4,000 [shock troops] ready to go, we're going to have 20,000 ready to go."
Bannon has said these "shock troops" would be used to destroy the federal government from within in a second Trump administration, as a way of tearing down what he calls "the administrative state," an anti-government euphemism that also includes multiracial democracy.
Political scientists, historians and others have shown that such rhetoric is used by Republicans and their allies (and by too many "moderate" or corporate-sponsored Democrats) to justify attacks on the very idea of government itself, in large part because they perceive it as serving the interests of Black and brown people and others deemed to be "undeserving."
Bannon's use of violent language about "shock troops" — in a military context, this means heavily armed, fast-moving elite soldiers used to break through enemy defenses — is not necessarily hyperbole or metaphor. Rather, it should be seen as part of a larger embrace of political violence and other terrorism by the Republican fascist movement.
Bannon has reportedly described himself as a "Leninist," and makes no apologies for his belief that the existing social and political order must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt according to his reactionary, revanchist, neofascist and racist authoritarian vision.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci," Bannon responded, in comments which were reported on Thursday by Media Matters.
"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone — time to stop playing games. Blow it all up, put [Trump aide] Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that'll light them up, right."
If Donald Trump manages to rig the 2024 presidential election — or even wins it legitimately, unlikely as that seems — he will indulge in many forms of vengeance and destruction. Whether or not Bannon rejoins Trump in an official capacity, he will be at his side, urging him onward.
Who else might return in a second Trump regime? Perhaps criminal and traitor Michael Flynn, in charge of the CIA, the Department of Defense, the NSA or some other key element of the country's national security state. Perhaps Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark or Rudy Giuliani, in control of the Department of Justice. The Supreme Court and the larger federal judiciary has largely been captured already by right-wing Christian theocrats.
Most or all of the U.S. government would become an appendage of Trump's malignant narcissism and other pathologies, shaped to his ultimate goal of being America's first dictator for life.
In a new interview with Politico, former National Security Council member Fiona Hill, who testified during Trump's first impeachment proceedings, offers this warning.
I feel like we're at a really critical and very dangerous inflection point in our society, and if Trump — this is not on an ideological basis, this is just purely on an observational basis based on the larger international historical context — if he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy's done.
The American people have been warned, again and again. They need to vote, organize, mobilize, engage in corporeal politics — including strikes and direct action — and raise up civil society and other pro-democracy groups and organizations. They must force Joe Biden and the Democratic Party to act with the "urgency of now" in the battle against the Republican-fascist movement. They must act as though their lives, and the future of their country and democracy, depend on the choices they make now – because they do.
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