1). “Chris Hedges: Lynching the Deplorables - scheerpost.com”,
March 5, 2023, Editor (Chris Hedges), 17–22 minutes, ScheerPost.com, available at < https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/05/chris-hedges-lynching-the-deplorables/ >
2). “Chris Hedges’ dishonest defense of the January 6 fascist mob”, 12 March 2023, David North, Jacob Crosse, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/12/cfhj-m12.html >
Introduction by dmorista: Chris Hedges in his essay posted here as, “Chris Hedges: Lynching the Deplorables - scheerpost.com”, addressed the pertinent, but ticklish, question of just how enthusiastic leftists should be about the prosecutions and the methods used in both the investigations and prosecutions of the January 6th insurrectionists. The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) posted some articles criticizing Hedges, of which one, “Chris Hedges’ dishonest defense of the January 6 fascist mob”, is posted here.
I have admired Chris Hedges for many years, I have read several of his great books and frequently looked at or read his articles, and listened to interviews and discussions he posted at a variety of internet outlets. The place where Hedges currently posts his essays, Scheer Post, is run by Robert Scheer, who was an editor and major figure at the venerable 1960s and 1970s American Leftist Magazine Ramparts (of which I was a regular reader for years). Hedges has consistently stood with the popular forces attempting to resist the various outrages and the general tyranny of the American Ruling Class. This included the nearly 2-month encampment by Occupy Wall Street at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan from September 17 - November 15, 2011, and other similar events. Also Hedges has been a plaintiff in a number of lawsuits filed against Bush the Younger, Obama, and Trump along with other left-wing luminaries, such as Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, He has been in the forefront of warning the American Populace about the danger of Christo-Fascism arising in our body politic. He reported as an on-the-ground reporter from some of the various “Colonial Wars” and after serving as Middle Eastern Bureau Chief for the New York Times he resigned after an incident where he gave a strongly anti-war commencement address, on May 17, 2003 at Rockford College in Illinois; in which he criticized the, at the time, recent U.S. invasion of Iraq. Hedges was heckled by right-wing Jingoistic (Chicken Hawk) students who rushed the podium at one point. He had to be escorted by police / security personnel away from the place where he spoke after cutting his speech short, (in fact WSWS reported on this incident in at article “Hecklers shout down journalist’s antiwar speech at college commencement”, May 25, 2003, Bill Vann, WSWS, at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/05/hedg-m23.html >)
In fact this truncated Commencement Address was just 16 days after the, now infamous, stunt in which a huge banner reading “Mission Accomplished” was hung from the ship’s superstructure, while Bush the Younger sat behind an actual carrier pilot who landed on the ship (San Diego was clearly visible to the East, so of course the compliant Corporate Controlled Media filmed the events looking West to make it appear that the ship was actually at sea). Hedges resigned from the New York Times when they told him he could not make public comments without vetting them with the paper’s management.
All this makes it more difficult to reconcile Hedges’ essay with the political realities of the U.S. in 2023. The obvious parallel, if we compare the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to eventual power in Weimar Germany, is the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. THe WSWS mentions the prosecutions of Jan 6th insurrectionists and their similarities to the very mild and lenient treatment Hitler and the Nazis enjoyed after the Putsch in 1923. Authors North and Cross note that: “During the post-World War I period of the rise of fascism in Europe, there were numerous incidents of wrist-slap punishment of its leaders even when they engaged in violent efforts to overthrow the government”.
The most telling criticism in the article, however, is where the authors write about the fact that Hedges quoted extensively from an attorney named Joseph McBride without pointing out just who McBride actually is. The WSWS article notes that:
“To buttress his claims of a judicial frame-up, Hedges includes a long interview with Joseph D. McBride, a lawyer representing a number of the January 6 defendants. He presents the lawyer as a champion of civil liberties and defender of the oppressed, someone who assisted Occupy Wall Street and ‘provided free legal advice as a law school student to those encamped in Zuccotti Park.’ ….
“These seemingly democratic sentiments are cited to conceal the fact that McBride is an all-out supporter of Trump who moves in top circles of the fascist right, serving as a counsel for Ali Alexander, one of the main organizers of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign, when he testified before the January 6 Select Committee. ….
“Since the failed coup, McBride has appeared on numerous ultra-right outlets, from fascist Steve Bannon’s War Room, to FOX News, Newsmax, and One America News. He has given multiple interviews to former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, championing the cause of the January 6 defendants. At the recent CPAC conference, McBride was on a panel with Donald Trump Jr. and Ashli Babbitt’s mother discussing the alleged ‘unjust”’persecution of Trump’s foot-soldiers. ….
“On December 24, 2022 McBride tweeted at Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, “[Black Lives Matter] & ANTIFA looted, burned, and rioted for hundreds of days. Packs of young People of Color still loot every day.’ ….
“ …. Hedges’ use of ‘lynching’ to describe the imprisonment and sentencing of a small number of fascistic thugs (is) both disgusting and provocative. ‘White Christians’ whose only crime was ‘protesting’ the 2020 election result are being ‘lynched’ by Democrats in Washington D.C. with the assistance of pliant black juries.”
Hedges Scheer Post article attracted 173 comments, with some great well reasoned and well written comments on both sides of the issue. Certainly many of them question just what is going on with Chris. Here is most of one that is somewhat critical of Hedges
“Sense of proportionality …..
“Anti-Trump protesters were charged in 2017 with a rarely used ‘rioting’ charge that carried with it a 75 year federal prison penalty. Trump’s Deplorable Prosecutors used this to force plea deals on many citizens for protesting against Trump. Then they tried to go to a DC Jury with trials against those who refused to knuckle under to their threats, and the DC Jury told Trump’s Deplorable Prosecutors to take a hike.
“This was for protests that did not hurt anyone, and damaged no property. The protestors did not storm a single federal building, and did not try to interfere with the election or to prevent the Trump Presidency. They were ‘kettled’ in the streets with an aggressive police tactic, detained and then charged.”
The simple fact is that the Left in the U.S. is too weak to take any sort of significant action or, more emphatically, to influence public policy on an issue like far-right and fascist mobilizing and organizing. Heavily armed reactionaries and fascists are pretty well free to roam around with their assault rifles loaded and ready to fire. The most famous example of this is the impunity that the murderer Kyle Rittenhous enjoyed from a successful prosecution for his killing of two demonstrators and serious wounding of another. The fact that Rittenhouse shot the three men was not contested, but a reactionary judge and a right-wing jury closed the deal for finding him not guilty of any sort of crime. Rittenhouse had a $2 million dollar fund for his defense, raised by right-wing operatives and later made an additional considerable amount of money selling memorabilia online. The surviving victim is crippled for life and is not the beneficiary of any sort of massive funding efforts as far as I know.
Hedges' arguments might have been more convincing if he had revealed the extremely questionable facts about McBride, but he made an author’s decision to not do that. This issue is one we should discuss here at The Ongoing Class Struggle.
1). “Chris Hedges: Lynching the Deplorables - scheerpost.com”, 12 March 2023, Editor (Chris Hedges), 17–22 minutes, ScheerPost.com, available at < https://scheerpost.com/2023/03/05/chris-hedges-lynching-the-deplorables/ >
The criminal investigation undertaken by the federal government against hundreds of participants in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol is polarizing the country and shredding civil liberties.
Executing the Law — by Mr. Fish
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6. Their vision for America, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump and embrace of reactionary fact-free conspiracy theories leaves a very wide chasm between their beliefs and mine. But that does not mean I support the judicial lynching against many of those who participated in the Jan. 6 events, a lynching that is mandating years in pretrial detention and prison for misdemeanors. Once rights become privileges, none of us are safe.
The U.S. legal system has a very sordid history. It was used to enforce segregation and legitimize the reign of terror against Black people. It was the hammer that broke the back of militant union movements. It persecuted radicals and reformers in the name of anti-communism. After 9/11, it relentlessly went after Muslim leaders and activists with Special Administrative Measures (SAMs). SAMs, established by the Clinton administration, originally only applied to people who ordered murders from prison or were convicted of mass murder, but are now used to isolate all manner of detainees before and during trial. They severely restrict a prisoner’s communication with the outside world; prohibiting calls, letters and visits with anyone except attorneys and sharply limit contact with family members. The solitary confinement like conditions associated with SAMs undermine any meaningful right to a fair trial according to analysis by groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and can amount to tortureaccording to the United Nations. Julian Assange faces SAMs or similar conditions should he be extradited to the U.S. The Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, begun under the Reagan administration, also allows evidence in a trial to be classified and withheld from defendants. The courts, throughout American history, have abjectly served the interests of big business and the billionaire class. The current Supreme Court is one of the most retrograde in decades, rolling back legal protections for vulnerable groups and denying workers protection from predatory corporate abuse.
At least 1,003 people have been arrested and charged so far for participation in events on Jan. 6, with 476 pleading guilty, in what has been the largest single criminal investigation in U.S. history, according to analysis by Business Insider. The charges and sentences vary, with many receiving misdemeanor sentences such as fines, probation, a few months in prison or a combination of the three. Of the 394 federal defendants who have had their cases adjudicated and sentenced as of Feb. 6, approximately 220 “have been sentenced to periods of incarceration” with a further 100 defendants “sentenced to a period of home detention, including approximately 15 who also were sentenced to a period of incarceration,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C. There are six convictions and four guilty pleas on charges of “seditious conspiracy.” This offense is so widely defined that it includes conspiring to levy war against the government on the one hand and delaying the execution of any law on the other. Those charged and convicted of “seditious conspiracy” were accused of collaborating to oppose “the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” by preventing or delaying the Certification of the Electoral College vote. While a few of the organizers of the Jan. 6 protest such as Stewart Rhodes, who founded Oath Keepers, may conceivably be guilty of sedition, and even this is in doubt, the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results.
Joseph D. McBride went to law school because his brother was serving a 15-year sentence for a crime he did not commit. He provided free legal advice as a law school student to those encamped in Zuccotti Park in New York City during the Occupy movement. Following law school, he worked as a public defender and in the Legal Aid Society. He represents several of those charged in the Jan. 6 incursion, includingRichard Barnett. Barnett was photographed in Nancy Pelosi’s office with his leg propped up on her desk. Barnett was convicted by a federal jury, which deliberated for two hours, on eight counts, including disorderly conduct in the Capitol building. He faces up to 47 years in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 3.
“The post 9/11 model is being applied to American citizens,” McBride told me when I reached him by phone. “That model is the 19 hijackers. Everyone who is a religious Muslim is a suspect for the next 20 years. They should be waterboarded. They should be put in fucking jail and left in Guantanamo Bay. Lock them up. Throw away the key. Because they are psychopath extremists who believe in Allah and we don’t have time for that. They’re a threat based on who they are, what they look like, what they believe in. When the truth is, the vast majority of these guys don’t do drugs, don’t drink alcohol, they have five kids and they live pretty good lives. But because of the label of ‘terrorism’ and ‘Osama Bin Laden’ and ‘al-Qaeda’, everybody who is a Muslim is now a target. If we get on a plane next to one of these people, we get nervous about it because that’s how much it’s ingrained in us. The same thing is happening, except it’s being applied to a new group of people, primarily white Christians, Trump supporters, for now.”
“Power is going to change hands,” he warned. “The Democrats are not going to be in power forever. When power changes hands, that precedent is going to travel with it. If somebody else from the other side gets in and starts to target the people who are in power now, their families, their businesses, their lives, their freedom, then it’s over. America goes from being a free democracy to a tribalist partisan state. Maybe there’s not ethnic-cleansing in the streets, but people are cleansing each other from the workplace, from social media, from the banking system and they’re putting people in jail. That’s where we’re headed. I don’t know why people can’t see what’s on the horizon.”
The Jan. 6 protestors were not the first to occupy Congressional offices, including Nancy Pelosi’s office. Young environmental activists from the Sunrise Movement, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even congressional staffers have engaged in numerous occupations of congressional offices and interrupted congressionalhearings. What will happen to groups such as Code Pink if they occupy congressional offices with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pretrial detention? Will they be given lengthy prison terms based on dubious interpretations of the law? Will they be considered domestic terrorists? Will protests and civil disobedience become impossible?
McBride said those who walked to the Capitol were not aware that the Department of Justice had created arbitrary markers, what McBride called an “imaginary red line that they draw around the Capitol grounds.” Anyone who crossed that invisible line was charged with violating Capitol grounds.
He railed against the negative portrayal of the protestors in the media, the White House and Democratic Party leadership, as well as a tainted jury pool in Washington composed of people who have close links to the federal government. He said Change of Venue motions filed by the defense lawyers have been denied.
“The D.C. jury pool is poisoned beyond repair,” McBride said. “When you just look at what the January 6 Committee did alone, never mind President Biden’s speeches about ‘insurrectionists,’ ‘MAGA Republican extremists’ and all this stuff, and if you just consider the fact that D.C. is very small, that people who work in the Federal Government are all by definition, kind of victims of January 6 and what happened that day, their institutions and colleagues were ‘under attack.’ How can anybody from that town serve on a jury pool? They can’t. The bias is astounding.”
Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon shaman” who was adorned on Jan. 6 in red, white and blue face paint, carried an American flag on a spear-tipped pole and wore a coyote-fur and horned headdress, pleaded guilty to obstruction. He was sentenced to more than three years in prison. Chansley, who says he is a practitioner of ahimsa, an ancient Indian principle of non-violence toward all living beings, was not accused of assaulting anyone. He was diagnosed in prison with transient schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety.
Guy Wesley Reffitt, who did not enter the Capitol building, nevertheless was sentenced after three hours of deliberations to seven years and three months in prison on five charges, including “two counts of civil disorder, and one count each of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds with a firearm, and obstruction of justice.” His obstruction of justice charge came from “threatening” his two teenage children to prevent them from reporting him to law enforcement.
Daniel Ray Caldwell, a Marine Corps veteran, who sprayed a chemical irritant at a group of police officers outside the Capitol and entered through the Senate Wing doors where he remained inside for approximately two minutes, was sentenced to more than five years in prison. He spent, like many who have been charged, nearly two years in pretrial detention.
Even the charges against Rhodes, who faces 20 years in prison, and other militia leaders of groups such as the Proud Boys are problematic. The New York Times reported that, “despite the vast amount of evidence the government collected in the case — including more than 500,000 encrypted text messages — investigators never found a smoking gun that conclusively showed the Proud Boys plotted to help President Donald J. Trump remain in office.” The government has relied on the testimony of a former Proud Boy, Jeremy Bertino, who is cooperating with prosecutors to build an “inferential case” against Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola, the five defendants in the current Proud Boy case. Bertino, on cross-examination, admitted that in previous interviews with the government, he repeatedly told investigators that the Proud Boys did not have an explicit plan to halt the election certification and that he did not anticipate acts of violence on Jan. 6. The FBI had as many as eight informants in the Proud Boys that included its leader, Enrique Tarrio, during the storming of the Capitol, raising the very real possibility of entrapment.
“They’re changing the laws,” McBride said. “Look at the 1512 charge, the obstruction charge. That was used for document shredding in Enron. It has no applicability to Jan. 6 whatsoever. They took it. They repurposed it. They weaponised it against these people and made it impossible for them to defend themselves. When you look at the civil disorder charge, they are saying that if January 6 was one big civil disorder, and if you had any type of interaction with a police officer that day that may or may not have caused the police officer to step away from his duties for a moment, you can go down with civil disorder and get five years in jail.”
Ryan Nichols, a Marine Corps veteran, is living under house arrest in Texas after nearly two years in pretrial detention, much of it in solitary confinement, in Washington, D.C and Virginia jails. He faces five felony and three misdemeanor charges. Prosecutors say Nichols assaulted officers and obstructed an official proceeding. He has been ordered to “stay away from Washington, D.C.” except for business related to his case, according to court documents. He has had to submit to “location monitoring technology” and is denied access to the internet and his phone except to perform functions related to his case. He cannot have contact with anyone involved in the Jan. 6 events, including co-defendants. Nichols must remain in his home 24 hours a day except for medical and court appointments. He is permitted to attend Sunday church services at Mobberly Baptist Church in Longview, Texas. He is facing 20 years in prison. He is scheduled to go to trial on March 27.
I spoke with Bonnie Nichols, Ryan’s wife, by phone from their home in Longview, Texas.
Ryan was arrested on Jan. 18, 2020. The FBI surrounded their house at 5:30 am in armored vehicles. They unscrewed the bulbs from flood lights and cut the wires to the couple’s security cameras before kicking in the front door. The couple and their two children, then aged 4 and 6, were at Bonnie’s parents house during the raid. The FBI confiscated their weapons, electronics and documents, including Social Security cards.
“We wanted to cooperate,” she said. “We didn’t know anything was wrong. They asked Ryan to come in for questioning. Ryan went and turned himself in. They arrested him and I didn’t see him again for over a year and a half.”
Ryan, who had no criminal record, ran a nonprofit called Rescue the Universe where he carried out search-and-rescue operations after natural disasters. He was denied bail. He was sent to a holding facility in Grady County Oklahoma for two months before being flown to Washington, D.C. where he was met by some two dozen U.S. Marshals. His feet were shackled. His arms were shackled to a chain around his waist. He was placed in long term solitary confinement and denied video calls or visitation from his family, including his children. He was denied access to his trial documents for nearly a year and prohibited from attending religious services in the jail.
Ryan, whose most serious offense appears to be incendiary rhetoric calling for a “second American revolution,” spent nearly 22 months in solitary confinement. Depressed, struggling to cope with the physical and psychological strain of prolonged isolation, he was eventually placed on suicide watch. He was strapped to a bench in a room where a light was never turned off. Guards would periodically shout through a window “Do you feel like killing yourself?” Those on suicide watch who said “yes” remained strapped to the bench. Those who said “no” were sent back to their cells. Ryan was often prohibited from having nail clippers — the guards told him he could chew his toenails down — or getting a haircut unless he agreed to be vaccinated for COVID-19. When Ryan appeared before Judge Thomas Hogan, who finally released him on Nov. 23, 2022, he told Ryan, with his long unkempt hair and fingernails, that he looked like Tom Hanks in the film Cast Away.
Every night, for the two years Ryan was held in solitary confinement, Bonnie and her two small boys would say prayers that Ryan would one day come home. She said she and her family have received numerous death threats.
“Ryan deals with insomnia,” Bonnie said of her husband. “He deals with extreme anxiety, depression and paranoia. He will not even go outside of his backyard because he’s scared that if he goes outside, that they’re going to take him back to jail. He has liver issues from the food that he ate because they fed him baloney sandwiches and trash while he was in D.C. He’s having a lot of medical issues. He also has lower testosterone than a 60-year-old man because he wasn’t able to have any sunlight. His vitamin D levels are low. The list goes on and on. This man does not sleep at night. He has nightmares. He whimpers at night in his sleep because he has dreams that he’s back in D.C. I mean, he’s a mess. This is the result of what has happened to him. He has vision loss. He doesn’t see as good as he used to.”
Ryan’s family, like many families of those charged, are struggling financially. Bonnie said their savings are gone. She and Ryan are heavily in debt. She has set up a fundraising page here.
“We are God-loving patriots,” she said. “Who’s going to be next? It’s not about Republican or Democrat or white or Black, Christian, or Muslim. We are all children of God. We are all U.S. American citizens. We are all entitled to our constitutional rights and freedom of speech. We can all come together and agree on that, right?”
The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right. We are turning those being hounded to prison into political prisoners and martyrs. We are moving ever closer towards tyranny.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
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(Added Caption: Chris Hedges with Robert Scheer)
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
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2). “Chris Hedges’ dishonest defense of the January 6 fascist mob”, 12 March 2023, David North, Jacob Crosse, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), at < https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/03/12/cfhj-m12.html >
On March 5, under the headline “Lynching the Deplorables,” journalist Chris Hedges published a column on his Substack blog opposing the prosecution of participants in the right-wing mob attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, as part of former President Donald Trump’s failed coup attempt.
The column endorses the fascist narrative of the January 6 attack as a harmless protest of frustrated and disenfranchised citizens. It covers up the political significance of the events of that day, the first ever attempt by a US president to overturn an election defeat and remain in power. And it grossly exaggerates the Department of Justice’s reaction, presenting it as the unduly harsh and possibly illegal persecution of innocent demonstrators, rather than as a limited and reluctant response to an unsuccessful attempt at a coup d’etat.
Trump supporters at the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. [Photo: Flickr?blinkofanaye]
Hedges’ column turns political reality on its head, transforming participants in a fascist political putsch, who sought to establish a presidential dictatorship, into martyrs whose prosecution is a gross assault on democratic rights.
It is one thing for socialists to warn, as the Socialist Equality Party and World Socialist Web Site frequently have done, that the working class cannot rely on the capitalist state to suppress the fascists; and that whatever repressive measures it may be legally obligated to take from time to time against the right will be employed far more broadly and viciously against the left. It is another thing entirely to oppose holding fascists accountable for actual crimes of violence, to justify their actions politically, and to portray them as martyrs who must be defended.
One usual characteristic of state repression is the gross disparity between the treatment of right-wing and fascistic groups, who occasionally clash with the police, but enjoy considerable support and sympathy within its ranks, and the savage violence unleashed against the left, not only against socialists and revolutionaries, but against even those protesting for liberal reforms.
Lessons from history
There is a long history in the United States of right-wing violence not even being investigated by the capitalist state. In the civil rights era, the killers of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers went unpunished for decades. It took a sustained struggle to hold the murderers of three voting rights activists in rural Mississippi—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—to account. The same was true for the murderers of Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife working as a volunteer during the march to Selma, who was shot to death by a carload of Klansmen. Among the killers was an FBI informant. The Workers League, predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party, was compelled to wage a three-year campaign in the labor movement, between 1977 and 1980, to force the New York police to arrest the two identified assassins of Trotskyist leader Tom Henehan.
During the post-World War I period of the rise of fascism in Europe, there were numerous incidents of wrist-slap punishment of its leaders even when they engaged in violent efforts to overthrow the government. In 1923, Adolf Hitler sought to overthrow the Bavarian state government in the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. The putsch failed, but Hitler was sentenced to only a one-year term in prison, where he lived in comfort, consolidated his leadership of the extreme right in Germany, and wrote Mein Kampf. In the years leading up to Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, Nazi thugs who murdered communists frequently went unpunished by the Weimar regime.
The Munich beer hall putsch [Photo by BundesArchiv / CC BY-SA 3.0]
The event that has the greatest similarity to the events of January 6, 2021 is the fascist attack on the French parliament on February 6, 1934, when groups of armed ex-military officers, at the head of a fascist mob, tried to overthrow the government. The police beat them back, killing 15 fascists. But one day later the center-left Daladier government fell, succeeded by a more right-wing regime, decisively shifting the trajectory of French politics and giving the fascists what they wanted.
The mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 had an even greater chance of success, since it had the backing of the sitting president and a significant section of the military-intelligence apparatus.
As a political event, the attack on the Capitol should not be trivialized and palmed off as the spontaneous expression of frustration over the results of the election. Whatever the individual motivations of disoriented and deluded individuals who bought into the Trump narrative of the “stolen election,” the attempted coup of January 6 was the end product of a massive conspiracy orchestrated out of the White House.
This first emerged publicly in June 2020, in Trump’s response to the nationwide protests against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He demanded the deployment of the National Guard and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, declare martial law, and send in the Army. This culminated in his notorious walk through Lafayette Park, trailed by top officials, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in full uniform, to pose with a bible in front of a church.
Throughout the summer of 2020, Trump deployed armed federal agents in Portland, Oregon and other cities. This led to the execution-style police murder of Michael Reinoehl, who had fled Portland after shooting a fascist attacker in self-defense during a protest march.
The focus then shifted to the presidential election. Throughout the fall campaign, Trump declared that he would not accept the result of the vote if it went against him. Even his Democratic opponent Joe Biden said that his greatest fear was that Trump would refuse to vacate the White House. But Biden did nothing to prepare the voters for the post-election crisis, instead declaring his confidence that the military-intelligence apparatus would enforce the peaceful transfer of power, making it the arbiter of American political life.
Chris Hedges has chosen to ignore the pre-history of the coup. This is a calculated political decision on his part, which contradicts his own explicit warnings, prior to the presidential election in November 2020, of fascist preparations for armed violence.
In an article written for Scheerpost, published on September 8, 2020, Hedges warned of a growing right-wing movement, whose members
stand poised to tear apart the United States, awash in military-grade weapons, unable to cope with the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic fallout, cursed with militarized police forces that function as internal armies of occupation and de facto allies of the neofascists.
Clearly anticipating Trump’s plan to overthrow the election results, Hedges continued:
Donald Trump and the Republican Party, along with media outlets such as FOX News, in a bid to retain power, are fanning the flames of violence, seeing in the incitement of far-right mobs a route to a ruthless police state.
Covering up Trump’s coup attempt
In a thoroughly cynical display of calculated political amnesia, Hedges has chosen to forget his prior warnings and characterization of the forces being mobilized by Trump. In fact, there is almost no reference to Trump in the course of the entire column and nothing at all about his role on January 6. Hedges quotes defense lawyer Joseph McBride, a principal source for his column, denying any connection between the Proud Boys who spearheaded the attack on the Capitol and the instigator in the White House.
Hedges makes no mention of Trump’s instruction to the Proud Boys, during a nationally televised campaign debate, to “stand back and stand by.” Nor does he mention Trump’s notorious public call for supporters to come to Washington on January 6, closing with the promise that it “will be wild!” Nearly every January 6 defendant has cited Trump’s summons as the reason for their presence. Nor does Hedges note that the January 6 attack was immediately preceded by a rally outside the White House where Trump ordered the armed mob he had assembled with his Republican allies to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” or else “you won’t have a country anymore.”
Hedges even disputes the charge of seditious conspiracy that has been brought against only a handful of ringleaders of the attack on the Capitol, while most of the thousand or so cases filed by the Justice Department against January 6 defendants involve misdemeanors or low-grade felonies carrying little or no jail time. Of the more serious charges, he writes:
While a few of the organizers of the Jan. 6 protest such as Stewart Rhodes, who founded Oath Keepers, may conceivably be guilty of sedition, and even this is in doubt, the vast majority of those caught up in the incursion of the Capitol did not commit serious crimes, engage in violence or know what they would do in Washington other than protest the election results. (emphasis added)
He ignores evidence that members of the Oath Keepers, another paramilitary group, brought guns and “suitcases full of ammunition” to Washington. He does not discuss why Trump was furious with the active use of magnetometers before his January 6 speech, preventing the armed fascists from getting too close. “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons,” Trump stated. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.”
Hedges depicts the mob of well over 1,000 people as perhaps overly rambunctious but seeking to do no more than express their legitimate frustration over the election. He never poses the question of what would have happened if those who broke through police lines into the Capitol had succeeded in their goal of capturing Vice President Mike Pence, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or another prominent congressional figure.
Members of Congress shelter in the House gallery as rioters try to break into the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. [AP Photo/Andrew Harnik]
There was a gallows set up outside the Capitol for a reason. It is more than likely that congressmen seized by the rioters would have been either killed or used as hostages to pressure Congress to call off the certification vote entirely and negotiate on the terms for Trump to remain in the White House.
Such a scenario was certainly in Trump’s mind when he demanded that his Secret Service entourage take him to the Capitol so he could lead the mob inside to pose his challenge to the congressional certification directly. That is why he foamed at the mouth and struck his own guard when the agent refused to take him.
Are the January 6 attackers being persecuted?
Much of Hedges’ column is taken up with attempts to generate sympathy for those who attacked the Capitol, exaggerating the punitive consequences they now face, and providing tear-jerking life stories for several of the most notorious defendants.
The truth is that only a select few high-level militia members and ultra-violent fascists, like ex-N.Y.P.D cop and former Marine Thomas Webster, have received multi-year prison sentences for, in his case, choking a policeman and beating him with a flagpole. The vast majority of those convicted for participating in the failed coup have faced misdemeanor or minor felony charges and received short prison terms, home confinement, or nothing beyond fines and probation.
In an update last week, the Department of Justice (DoJ) confirmed that of the “approximately 420 federal defendants” who have been sentenced for criminal activity on January 6, just under half, 200, were never incarcerated after being found guilty. Instead, “approximately 100 defendants” the DoJ wrote, “have been sentenced to a period of home detention,” with only 15 of those 100 having previously been sentenced to a period of incarceration.
For those who have been sentenced to jail, their stay has been brief. A recent Washington Post report, analyzing the “light sentences” handed down to January 6 criminals by federal judges, found that out of 357 people sentenced at that time, 249, or 70 percent, received either a sentence of less than two months in jail (95), home detention (66) or probation (88). The same report found that only eight people at that time had been sentenced to more than five years in prison.
Even more important is the fact that the architect of the coup, ex-president Donald Trump, and his high-level accomplices in the Republican Party, the military-intelligence apparatus and the Supreme Court, have yet to face a single charge for attempting to overthrow the Constitution.
Hedges’ first profile is of the so-called QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley, who marched through the Capitol wearing a horned helmet, carrying a spear with an American flag, with a bizarre paint job on his face and open chest.
Fascist supporters of President Donald Trump inside the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. At center is Jacob Chansley, wearing fur hat with horns: a regular at pro-Trump events and a follower of QAnon. [AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta]
He says the shaman “was sentenced to more than three years in prison,” and that Chansley “is a practitioner of ahimsa, an ancient Indian principle of non-violence toward all living beings, [who] was not accused of assaulting anyone.”
Actually, Chansley pleaded guilty two years ago to one felony charge of obstruction after prosecutors agreed to drop multiple other charges he was facing including civil disorder, violent entry and disorderly conduct. At his sentencing hearing in November 2021, Chansley renounced QAnon and Trump and told the judge ,“I have no excuse. No excuses whatsoever. My behavior is indefensible.”
Hedges says nothing about the fascistic, anti-Semitic and violent character of the QAnon ideology, which presents Trump as a liberating figure who will massacre his Democratic Party opponents and anyone else who gets in the way.
After whitewashing Chansley, Hedges moves on to convicted Texas III Percenter Guy Wesley Reffitt. Hedges lists the numerous charges for which Reffitt was convicted, then writes, “His obstruction of justice charge came from ‘threatening’ his two teenage children to prevent them from reporting him to law enforcement.”
The use of quotation marks around the word “threatening” is highly revealing. There is no dispute Reffitt threatened to murder his children for turning him in to the police for participating in the coup.
During the trial Reffitt confirmed he traveled to Washington on January 6 with a pair of flex-cuffs and a pistol. Prosecutors told the jury, which found Reffitt guilty after less than five hours of deliberations, that Reffitt intended “to use his gun and police-style flexicuffs to forcibly drag legislators out of the building and take over Congress.”
After Reffitt returned to Texas following the attack on the Capitol, his teenage son Jackson, who testified against his father at the trial, saw his father in a TV news report on January 6. At the trial, then 19-year-old Jackson testified that his father told him and his sister that if they turned him in to the police they would be “traitors” and “traitors get shot.”
Hedges’ defense of the fascist right
In the first sentence of his column, Hedges writes, “There is little that unites me with those who occupied the Capitol building on Jan. 6” (emphasis added). He lists their noxious views with which he presumably disagrees—“Christian nationalism, white supremacy, blind support for Trump”—but does not answer the obvious question: what is that little? That “little” is an unspecified political quantity.
Hedges says nothing about the central contention of the fascist right, which was the basis of the January 6 attack, that the 2020 election was stolen and Biden is an illegitimate usurper. He ignores Trump’s continuing claim that he won a “landslide” victory, his message to the attackers as they were driven back from the Capitol, and the basis of his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.
Hedges avoids such questions, focusing instead on what he presents as the heavy-handed prosecution of the attackers, whose actions he describes benignly as a “protest,” an “incursion,” or an “occupation.”
He writes:
The Jan. 6 protestors were not the first to occupy Congressional offices. Young environmental activists from the Sunrise Movement, anti-war activists from Code Pink and even congressional staffers have engaged in numerous occupations of congressional offices and interrupted congressional hearings. What will happen to groups such as Code Pink if they occupy congressional offices with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and the courts? Will they be held for years in pretrial detention? Will they be given lengthy prison terms based on dubious interpretations of the law? Will they be considered domestic terrorists? Will protests and civil disobedience become impossible?
The comparison of Code Pink and environmental activists to the Proud Boys is grotesque. They are pacifists, not violent thugs. They were not armed and did not storm congressional offices, breaking windows and cracking skulls in the process. They were seeking to appeal to Congress to listen to their point of view, not shut it down to prevent the certification of a presidential election, keep the president in office, in violation of the US Constitution, and effectively establish a presidential dictatorship in America.
Even more outrageous is the comparison of the treatment of some of the more notorious January 6 attackers to the brutal state persecution of Julian Assange, the founder-editor of WikiLeaks, which has provided invaluable documentation of the crimes of US imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. To compare in any way Assange’s heroic actions with the violence of the fascist riff-raff on January 6, 2021 is politically obscene.
Chris Hedges knows the circumstances in which Assange has been held and the 175 years in a federal Supermax prison that he faces if extradited, and has spoken out against his persecution. What January 6 defendant faces anything comparable?
Who is Joseph McBride?
To buttress his claims of a judicial frame-up, Hedges includes a long interview with Joseph D. McBride, a lawyer representing a number of the January 6 defendants. He presents the lawyer as a champion of civil liberties and defender of the oppressed, someone who assisted Occupy Wall Street and “provided free legal advice as a law school student to those encamped in Zuccotti Park.”
He quotes McBride comparing the treatment of the January 6 defendants to the government-backed campaign against Muslims that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001: “The same thing is happening, except it’s being applied to a new group of people, primarily white Christians, Trump supporters, for now.”
These seemingly democratic sentiments are cited to conceal the fact that McBride is an all-out supporter of Trump who moves in top circles of the fascist right, serving as a counsel for Ali Alexander, one of the main organizers of the “Stop the Steal” campaign, when he testified before the January 6 Select Committee. Alexander is a close friend of Hitler-lover Nick Fuentes.
Recent tweets from Joseph McBride showing him having dinner with Donald Trump Jr. and appearing on fascist Steve Bannon's podcast. [Photo: @McBrideLawNYC]
Since the failed coup, McBride has appeared on numerous ultra-right outlets, from fascist Steve Bannon’s War Room, to FOX News, Newsmax, and One America News. He has given multiple interviews to former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka, championing the cause of the January 6 defendants. At the recent CPAC conference, McBride was on a panel with Donald Trump Jr. and Ashli Babbitt’s mother discussing the alleged “unjust” persecution of Trump’s foot-soldiers.
In a January 2023 interview with Gorka, McBride explained that he defends January 6 “political prisoners” because “I believe it is my calling ... it is my mission in life. Win, lose or draw my team and myself will be counted amongst the people who looked communism in the face and said in the United States of America, if you are going to succeed here you are going to have to run through us. That’s the only way, there is no way around it.”
On December 24, 2022 McBride tweeted at Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, “[Black Lives Matter] & ANTIFA looted, burned, and rioted for hundreds of days. Packs of young People of Color still loot every day. You are enabling them & setting them up to FAIL. Your problem is not with extremism. It’s [with] the White MAGA Republicans that you’re exploiting for political gain.”
But the foulest comment by McBride is given to Hedges himself and reproduced uncritically in his column. Hedges quotes, without objection, McBride’s false assertion that Trump’s persecuted “white Christians” cannot possibly get a fair trial in Washington D.C., because, according to McBride, the “bias” in the “jury pool” is “astounding.” He tells Hedges, “The D.C. jury pool is poisoned beyond repair.”
Hedges claims this is because there are many federal workers in the District of Columbia, the seat of the federal government, and they might regard themselves as victims of the January 6 attack. But there is a more obvious reason for racists and fascists to decry a Washington D.C. jury pool as “tainted.” The city’s population, from which juries are drawn, is 50 percent African American.
This makes Hedges’ use of “lynching” to describe the imprisonment and sentencing of a small number of fascistic thugs both disgusting and provocative. “White Christians” whose only crime was “protesting” the 2020 election result are being “lynched” by Democrats in Washington D.C. with the assistance of pliant black juries. This is full-out pandering to the white supremacists.
Conclusion
Hedges ends his column on his knees, begging “the left” to stop the persecution of Trump’s foot soldiers lest it upset the fascists. “We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right. We are turning those being hounded to prison into political prisoners and martyrs,” he concludes.
Actually it is Hedges who has transformed the January 6 defendants into martyrs, abandoning both critical judgment and whatever political principles he once professed.
Given Hedges’ reputation as a left-wing journalist who has written a book and numerous articles on the danger of American fascism, his unrestrained defense of the mob who attempted to carry out the coup of which he had previously warned will come as a shock to his many readers. “What is Hedges smoking?” will be a common reaction.
Chris Hedges
Hedges has frequently ridiculed attempts by liberals to develop a dialogue with fascists. In his 2006 book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Hedges wrote:
Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school. Naive attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed.
This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal—its destruction. Alvin Toffler wrote that if you don’t have a strategy you end up being part of someone else’s strategy.
In a much more recent column, posted on Scheerpost on June 27, 2022, Hedges stressed the present-day relevance of his book on fascism for an understanding of the events of January 6, 2021:
The book was a warning that an American fascism, wrapped in the flag and clutching the Christian cross, was organizing to extinguish our anemic democracy. This assault is very far advanced. The connecting tissue among the disparate militia groups, QAnon conspiracy theorists, anti-abortion activists, right-wing patriot organizations, Second Amendment advocates, neo-Confederates and Trump supporters that stormed the Capitol on January 6 is this frightening Christian fascism.
In recent months Hedges has carried out what appears to be an astonishing political transformation, which has been demonstrated not only in what he now writes, but also in his current political activities.
Only three weeks ago, Hedges stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Libertarians, anti-Semites and right-wing militia elements at the “Rage Against the War Machine” rally in Washington, claiming that a “left-right” alliance was the only way to fight back effectively against the US-led war against Russia in Ukraine.
How can this shift in Hedges’ political orientation—from a bitter opponent of fascists to their supine apologist and opportunist ally—be explained?
Marxists who have followed his writings over the years have noted two significant characteristics of his political outlook that make his present unmistakably right-wing orientation not entirely surprising.
The first is the mood of despair that pervades his writings. It is not merely a strange attraction for the macabre that leads Hedges to illustrate his columns with images of skulls, skeletons and other symbols of death. These images convey Hedges’ view of the future. His denunciations of fascism invariably read as the desperate lamentations of one who is convinced of its unstoppable victory.
The second characteristic, and the source of Hedges’ malignant pessimism, is his rejection of and opposition to Marxist theory and politics that define the working class as the basic revolutionary force in society and assign to it the leading and decisive role in the struggle against capitalism. As he does not believe that there exists any social force that can overthrow capitalism, Hedges is left with a perspective of hopelessness. This, in turn, has led Hedges to conclude that the struggle against war requires an alliance with fascists. But to secure that alliance, Hedges is compelled to renounce his past opposition to fascism and serve as its apologist.
Hedges’ present political course will deeply disappoint his many readers who respected his past denunciations of the crimes of American imperialism. He would do well to critically reexamine his present political trajectory.
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