After the Insurrection: Keeping Up With Conspiracies, GOP Extremism
Before the January 6th Trump Insurrection, I wrote this informal guide to following the extremism developing due to conspiracy thinking and demagogic falsehoods from the GOP. Much of it still holds up, and I’ve added several more useful resources. We were lucky, with the addition of roughly 25,000 National Guard troops guarding the nation’s capital, that the new administration was able to safely hold an outdoor inauguration despite the recently shut-down Parler producing extremist videos like this The mounting news of insurrectionist arrests and the FBI reports of threats to all 50 US capitals and Washington, D.C. on inauguration day led to sparsely attended protests and no significant attacks. But the new Biden-led Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a rare alert on rising domestic terrorist threats from grievance-fueled extremists.
The best, most definitive recent books on extremism, conspiracies and rising authoritarianism:
Brynn Tannehill’s American Fascism: How the GOP Is Subverting Democracy and Mike Rothschild’s The Storm Is Upon Us: How Qanon Become A Movement, Cult and Conspiracy Theory of Everything.
What will Proud Boys, extremists do in the months ahead?
Follow Megan Squire, https://twitter.com/megansquire0?lang=en https://twitter.com/jaredlholt; Ben Collins, https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__; https://twitter.com/willsommer; @jimstewartson and the Atlantic Council’s @DFRlab, @davetroy, @cultexpert, among others, to follow the conspiracy, #MAGA , Stop the Steal extremist protests, actions, gun-smuggling plans ahead. NBC’s Ben Collins gave a well-informed explanation of how extremists were motivated and energized by both the Trump administration and social media — -and what lies ahead: https://podcast.thebulwark.com/ben-collins-why-we-should-be-alarmed
A good new overview is the PBS Frontline/Pro Publica show American Insurrection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5o6ala_kec&ab_channel=PBS
Here’s an October 2020 Ted Talk that explains the underpinnings of Qanon, a critique of the hand-wringing media coverage and conspiracy theories — with a clear-eyed explanation of how to better understand it and counteract it, even if undermined by its own far-flung conspiracy thinking about who is behind “Q.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QbEcG8O-L8&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=tedxmidatlantic.
A good introduction is found in the first episode in the new Vice.com documentary, Qanon, The Search for Q: https://video.vice.com/en_us/video/what-is-q/5fff7b077348553645286832. But that film series is marred by its own conspiracy orientation that the entire project was a “psy ops” planned from the beginning by skilled ex-military intelligence officials, including General Mike Flynn.
A far better documentary is HBO’s Q: Into the Storm. It includes remarkable access starting in 2018 to the main YouTube influencers and website hosts, including Jim and Ron Watkins, who enabled the movement to spread.
A humorous and very well-informed take on Qanon and related conspiracy theories can be found in the free and Patreon versions of the Qanon Anonymous (QAA )podcast. That’s supplemented in turn by occasional live streams on Twitch.tv where the hosts analyze and poke fun at unhinged extremists, including the Watkins family, doing bizarre live streams.
Some of the most sophisticated and digital-savvy analysis of the role of misinformation on COVID-19, election fraud and Qanon conspiracy theories can be found in the work of Abby Ohleiser of MIT Technology Review. Last year, she wrote this important article: “It’s too late to stop QAnon with fact checks and account bans.” We’re facing a challenge of an “omniconspiracy” that’s poisoned our information ecosystem, she notes, quoting some leading scholars and reformers.
In the last few weeks, my own Twitter feed has been focusing — with some exceptions for posts on health care and entertainment — on the risks to our democracy, drawing on a variety of experts and journalists on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArtL7
Important new insights from an expert review of the arrested insurrectionists, from The Atlantic: “The Capitol Rioters Aren’t Like Other Extremists.”
Key takeaways:
First, the attack on the Capitol was unmistakably an act of political violence, not merely an exercise in vandalism or trespassing amid a disorderly protest that had spiraled out of control. The overwhelming reason for action, cited again and again in court documents, was that arrestees were following Trump’s orders to keep Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the presidential-election winner…
“ Second, a large majority of suspects in the Capitol riot have no connection to existing far-right militias, white-nationalist gangs, or other established violent organizations. We erred on the side of inclusion; we counted an arrestee as affiliated with such an organization if any court documents or news articles describe the person as a member, refer to social-media posts expressing an affinity for a certain group, or attest to patches or apparel that directly indicate support.
Peter Wehner: Republicans own this insurrection
By these standards, 20 of the Capitol arrestees we studied — one-tenth — can be classified as supporters of gangs, militias, or militia-like groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters. The role that such groups played in the riot has attracted considerable news coverage. But 89 percent of the arrestees have no apparent affiliation with any known militant organization.
Third, the demographic profile of the suspected Capitol rioters is different from that of past right-wing extremists. The average age of the arrestees we studied is 40. Two-thirds are 35 or older, and 40 percent are business owners or hold white-collar jobs. Unlike the stereotypical extremist, many of the alleged participants in the Capitol riot have a lot to lose. They work as CEOs, shop owners, doctors, lawyers, IT specialists, and accountants. Strikingly, court documents indicate that only 9 percent are unemployed. Of the earlier far-right-extremist suspects we studied, 61 percent were under 35, 25 percent were unemployed, and almost none worked in white-collar occupations.
Increasingly, major newspapers are digging into the full scope of Donald Trump’s enjoyment and inaction in the face of the violent, potentially deadly storming of the Capitol he unleashed.
“The president saw these people as allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen,” Sen. Lindsey Graham told The Washington Post.
Here’s the New York Times latest overview on the multiple police agency failures at the federal, Capitol Hill and DC level, but there’s still much CYA leaks from various agencies pointing the finger at other law enforcement leaders. To see the latest on the fallout and new findings from the Insurrection, the New York Times has a breaking news page. Here is The Washington Post’s own breaking news page covering the transition to Biden and the riot fall-out.
LATEST NEWS, VIDEOS AND ANALYSIS ON THE TRUMP INSURRECTION
https://twitter.com/txtianmiller/status/1350903470685995008?s=20:
“Today, @propublica published a searchable data set of videos from the Capitol hill attack. Amazing work by our team.”
A leftist, yet comprehensive, overview perspective on neo-fascist white supremacists, violent extremists and conspiracy believers who brought us the Trump Coup, from professor Jared Sexton, author of American Rule: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIQciMLvBHg&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=jsexton3
RECOMMENDED READING AND LISTENING:
To follow relatively “mainstream” hard-right publications and Fox News without having to read the horrific misinformation and demagogic appeals yourself, I recommend this curating website: https://www.therighting.com/ This next website tracks even more extreme postings and websites from the far right but it’s colored by its own sensationalist left-wing ideology, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy for all its aggregations, especially since they’re often posted without full, real names. Still it’s a peek into far-right obsessions: https://leftcoastrightwatch.org/
The journalist doing the best sustained coverage on threats to our democracy and efforts to undermine our elections is arguably Brad Friedman, with his daily radio show The BradCast, widely syndicated on Pacifica radio: https://bradblog.com/?p=13706. He’s also worth following at @thebradblog.
Now there are centrists or conservatives worried about the future of the republican party, especially in the wake of the phone call by Trump to Georgia’s Secretary of State, along with traditional critics of Trump. e.g: https://www.nationalreview.com/.../the-folly-of-the-cruz.../; https://thebulwark.com/its-time-to-speak-for-america/; a very alarmed Steve Schmidt on twitter, interviews and podcast he co-hosts with Plouffe; Dick Cheney who organized the letter of former Defense Secretaries who say military shouldn’t be used in election controversies — clearly he and others felt that risk might exist, presumably; joined by an outgunned leader in the House, his daughter, Liz; and standard criticism from liberals like tom Nichols and other Atlantic writers about how the majority support of Republicans for undoing the election results or viewing Biden as illegitimately elected is a dangerous sign of Trump’s hold on GOP, is seditious, dangerous, etc. Tim Alberta, Charlie Sykes, etc. argue in interviews, podcasts and some columns that all the incentives looking forward for Republicans is to hew to hard-right, pro-Trumpian perspective . Mainstream commentary: https://www.newyorker.com/.../trumps-authoritarian-moment... Also, what’s happening now is the legacy of GOP vote suppression: https://www.msn.com/.../trump-is-trying-to.../ar-BB1cu2DD Schmidt on his podcast batleground with david plouffe: https://www.stitcher.com/.../battleground-with-david... and Sykes on the Bulwark, both conservative anti-Trumpers: https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-bulwark Also listen to experts and smart commentary on the events of the day at LPTV, Lincoln Project on YouTube, and the podcasts Lawfare Podcast, and hosted by David Rothkopf of deep state radio. https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-lawfare-podcast and https://www.stitcher.com/show/deep-state-radio and Lincoln Project youtube channel w/guests: Marc Elias was on recently, Tuesday through thursday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIpsO8XngV8...
The @GaslitNation podcast used to be seen by some mainstream liberals as too alarmist, but @SarahKendzior and @AndreaChalupa have proven, sadly, all too prescient. Their Patreon version is well worth subscribing to because of bonus episodes and detailed web links as part of their show notes. Catch up here at their website https://www.gaslitnationpod.com/archive and on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/gaslit-nation
GAB, adding 600,000 new members overnight, is the still- existing platform that openly features unfettered far-right conspiracy theories and misinformation along with conventional right-wing shaped news: https://gab.com/news. Read it if you dare. I guess because they don’t openly call for killing politicians is it hasn’t been deplatformed yet?
On COVID, I recommend the reports from @First DraftNews, led by Carol Wardle, who is also an expert on misinformation: https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/under-the-surface-covid-19-vaccine-narratives-misinformation-and-data-deficits-on-social-media/
The young reporter from Vice who dug deep into Charlottesville, Elle Reeve, is now with CNN and gave a remarkable, nuanced interview for Reliable Sources that goes beyond her video package to explain how the conventional narrative of the Web/Trump giving a platform to existing extremists is much, much worse: Trump — and now GOP Trumpism — and the Web are creating extremist conspiracy-mongers among otherwise normal folk with jobs and families that can be ramped up into a dangerous mob mentality. That helps account for 80 percent of Republicans or those who voted for Trump don’t believe that Biden was legitimately elected. These aren’t the isolated young “incel” losers who turned to extremism after rage at women was exploited by far-right groups into farther reaches of racism, bigotry and right-wing rage.
Here are two must-follow experts and authors on white supremacist and extremist terrorism:
https://twitter.com/intelwire, JM Berger of Harvard and Dr. Cynthia Miller Idris from AU
Here’s their joint appearance on the Monday night PBS News Hour:
https://twitter.com/NatSecMicah/status/1348786240888434689?s=20
THE essential book to understand and address this conspiracy-driven moment is Red Pill, Blue Pill by David Neiwert, and he can also be followed at Daily Kos. The podcasts Qanon Anonymous and Behind the Bastards take a light, historical context look at conspiracy theories and some of the evil people who set the stage for our current polarized politics, offered from a progressive perspective. Here are four smart takeaways from the book, summarized by a Daily Kos colleague of Neiwert: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/23/1986170/-Four-lessons-on-today-s-toxic-far-right-conspiracy-theories-from-Neiwert-s-Red-Pill-Blue-Pill
The best new overview on authoritarianism in the wake of the insurrection, and the split between the different factions of the GOP, is by Timothy Snyder for the upcoming New York Times magazine: The American Abyss. Synder’s books, including On Tyranny, and Jason Stanley’s indispensable How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, can help you understand how we got here. The best guide to understanding the motivations of cynical, self-deluded or opportunistic collaborators with Trump — including, most recently, Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz — is Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic, taken from her new book The Twilight of Democracy, looking at the enablers of authoritarians and their justifications.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s new book, Strongmen, is an important addition to the literature by providing a close look at Trump’s predecessors in fascistic tactics over the last century, such as Mussolini, even if the governments they ran were different in policies. She explains why his radicalized followers pose such a profound challenge in a new episode of Democracy Now! Her latest opinion piece for CNN should be alarming to all: “Trump’s Endgame? Power at all costs.”
Pioneering early scholars on the authoritarian playbook and its connection to Trump’s rise were Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 book How Democracies Die, ably explained in a series of video lectures.
This will be updated with important resources, some drawn from my and others’ Twitter accounts.
