Twitter is being sued for allegedly conspiring with Saudi authorities by blocking accounts of its critics, a law firm handling the case on behalf of the plaintiff has announced.

Ali al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, is the one behind the lawsuit that contains allegations of unauthorized access to his content on the platform. Al-Ahmed, a Saudi scholar, lost his citizenship and had to seek asylum in the US after supposedly exposing major news stories such as the Pentagons botched translation of the 9-11 Bin Laden tape and the video of Daniel Pearls murder.

And in addition to reportedly facing kidnapping and assassination attempts, Al-Ahmed and a number of his followers also faced censorship and deplatforming on Twitter.

The Institute for Gulf Affairs is a rights group based in Washington DC, while the law cited in the suit against Twitter is the Stored Communications Act. This legislation is meant to shore up US Constitutions Fourth Amendment rights when it comes to wire and electronic communications and transactional records.

Double your web browsing speed with today's sponsor. Get Brave.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here.

What Twitter did, according to Al-Ahmed, was suspend his account, and those of many of his 36K followers, and then forward their private information and direct messages to the Saudis.

This resulted in revealing the identities of their critics to the authorities in Saudi Arabia all the way to, according to an email Al-Ahmed sent to Twitter, exposing them to arrests and torture. Furthermore, the lawsuit alleges breach of contract and economic harm suffered by the plaintiff thanks to Twitters actions taken against him.

In an email to Twitter, Al-Ahmed says he wrote: People that I keep in contact with via twitter alone have been arrested and now being tortured by the Saudi monarchy henchmen.

The Saudi scholars legal representative said that Twitter in this way not only breached its own rules by giving personal information to a foreign government but also failed to properly supervise its employees who were behind this move.

This refers to Saudi spies allegedly managing to get jobs at Twitter, to then use the platform to further interests of their true employer by using Twitters internal tools to access data of Saudi governments critics.

To make matters seemingly even worse for the US social network, according to the lawsuit, all this was happening against the backdrop of Twitter having entities controlled by the Saudi government among its largest shareholders.

Continued here:

Twitter sued for allegedly conspiring with Saudi Arabia government to shut down dissenting voices - Reclaim The Net

A former white supremacist from Ohio got a huge swastika tattoo on his chest covered up with a rose in honor of Juneteenth saying he now proudly supports the Black Lives Matter movement.

Dickie Marcum, a 34-year-old steelworker from Cincinnati, cried tears of joy after inking away the vile symbol and explaining to his daughter, Daddy doesnt hate people anymore, he wrote in a now-viral Facebook post.

When I came home and my wife saw the cover-up, she started crying and hugged me and kept saying that shes so proud of me, he said. Im proud of myself, but I still feel shame for ever getting it.

In a lengthy confession about what led to his racist beliefs, Marcum said he first got the tattoo 13 years ago.

In high school, he was bullied by some black students and later began socializing with people who used racial slurs, solidifying his ignorant world view.

After a black man was convicted of kidnapping and attacking his then-girlfriend in 2007 an experience that left him blinded by hate he said he got the tattoo.

When I heard what a black man had [done], I was blinded by hate and immediately shut down and all I could think about was how much I hate them, he said. Its a really stupid way to think, and I cant justify how I felt and Im not going to, I was an idiot and I held onto that tattoo for 10 years as punishment to myself.

For years he was too embarrassed to go swimming for fear people would see the swastika.

Because I lived almost 20 years having that mentality, I felt like I deserved the shame that I felt, he said.

But working in construction alongside folks of different races helped him learn that people are more than their skin color.

Marcum finally went under the needle again last week at Silkworm Tattoo in Hamilton, Ohio, which offered discounts for customers covering up intolerant images in honor of Juneteeth, a holiday celebrating the official end of slavery.

My daughter doesnt really know what that [swastika] symbol is, so I explained that the tattoo meant that daddy didnt like people, and now she knows daddy doesnt hate people anymore, he said.

He then showed off his new ink social media, issuing a public apology to everyone he hurt.

Now, he feels a weight has been lifted and the responsibility to vocally support minorities.

Im absolutely in love with this tattoo and I think a rose was a lovely choice because it represents love and growth, and I think thats a perfect representation of who I am now, he said.

Go here to read the rest:

Black WaPo editor claims white women 'lucky' to be called 'Karen' - Filmy One

Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and second-degree murder for the killing of George Floyd, but further calls for justice, for Breonna Taylor, for Elijah McClain, for Layleen Polonco, for Tony McDade, for all victims of police violence, are still coming through loud and clear. In the meantime, though, we need to ask ourselves: When we call for justice, what exactly are we calling for?

Arrest the cops who murdered Breonna Taylor! is a rallying cry that became a gruesome meme, one thats been criticized both for cheapening Taylors death and for the way it plays back into the carceral system: Calling for more policing and more incarceration to deal with the problem of police violence. According to prison abolition activist Mariame Kaba, using the systems that empower police to use violence to also discipline the police who misbehave only perpetuates that violence.

A lot of people, particularly Black women like Kaba, have already put in a lot of thought as to what post-abolition justice should look like. There is already an established framework for how we can replace a system that focuses on punishment with one that focuses on rehabilitation.

There are a bunch of alternatives to arrests and jail time: Community accountability, restorative justice, and transformative justice all offer solutions that serve survivors of harm and demand that perpetrators of harm take responsibility for their actions. They directly address the kinds of crimes that law enforcement supporters think we absolutely need police for, like sexual violence, child sexual abuse, and murder.

Heres a little background on how these modes of justice work and intersect, with plenty of additional reading. (If you already know about these alternatives and are wondering, but how do we do any of this without police?!, skip to the last section.)

Community accountability relies on community members to execute justice, rather than some remote, disconnected authority like a department of law enforcement. According to a working document on community accountability from feminist collective INCITE!, rooting justice in the community rather than outsourcing it to cops (who are statistically unlikely to live in the places they police) prioritizes survivor safety over imposing order, and by doing that, promotes collective action and community building.

INCITE! suggests a range of strategies, including a sanctuary system for survivors; social ostracization of people who commit violence; deplatforming abusers; pushing for abusers to get fired; development of an alternative peer court system to adjudicate issues of violence; and open, honest conversations about violence with friends, family, and other community members.

INCITE! is careful to stress that community accountability isnt one size fits all. Instead, its supposed to provide ideas and to spark the development of additional strategies that may help promote community accountability on the issue of violence against women of color.

For more resources on community accountability, try:

Restorative justice is a term those who followed the #MeToo movement closely may have heard before as a different way to address sexual violence, something our criminal justice system notoriously sucks at doing.

Restorative justice rebuilds the survivors sense of control and agency while demanding accountability from the perpetrator. This generally involves an admission of guilt and an apology, often in public. This directly contrasts with how our courts work now, where a perpetrator may be found guilty, but isnt actually required to admit (or even agree) they did anything wrong, or demonstrate that they understand how and why what they did was wrong.

As restorative justice facilitator sujatha baliga wrote for Vox, people who have been harmed want to hear the person who assaulted them say, Youre telling the truth. I did that to you. Its my fault, not yours. They often want this admission to happen in the presence of both of their families and friends. Most survivors are also looking for some indication that the person who harmed them truly understands what theyve done and that they wont do it again.

To address sexual assault, burglarly, and even murder, baliga says we could use conference circles; confessions in the presence of family members and other loved ones; and facilitated discussions between survivors and perpetrators.

For more information on restorative justice:

While restorative justice focuses more on interpersonal healing, transformative justice means responding to crimes by changing the systems that enable crimes in the first place, in addition to taking care of the people involved.

According to TransformHarm.org, transformative justice breaks down into three parts: supporting a survivors healing process, often via confrontation with the person who harmed them; community accountability, where community members confront their own complicity and build their capacity to support these interventions; and community education and skill-building to prevent future harm.

[Transformative justice] is not only identifying what we dont want, but proactively practicing and putting in place things we want, according to the website. This includes healthy relationships, good communication skills, skills to de-escalate active or live harm and violence in the moment, learning how to express our anger in ways that are not destructive, incorporating healing into our everyday lives.

For more reading on transformative justice:

Theres no one answer to this question, but that doesnt mean its a gotcha moment, because there are actually a lot of possible answers. We might imagine that people who commit crimes will have no interest in admitting guilt or participating in any of the above without the force of police arrests and investigations, but there are indications that that largely isnt true.

The Vox piece above has an instructive example of restorative justice in a sexual assault with no witnesses. Weve seen many such cases over the last few years play out in similar ways: In our legal system, the perpetrator might be found not guilty or be awaiting trial, but the general public ostracizes them; that is, we already have some sense that arrest and the threat of prison arent sufficient solutions. In the Vox pieces example, the assaulter is given the opportunity to apologize and submit to conversations about reforming his behavior, which not only helps heal his victim, but allows him learn to be a part of the solutionbaliga mentions the assaulter sending her a draft of at research paper he wrote on sexual violence.

Because there arent any similar systems formally in place yet, its hard to know if that result is typical. But social workers, medics, and trained facilitators could all pick up a lot of the work normally shunted to minimally trained, unspecialized cops in fact, they already have, though on a smaller scale than the one abolitionists are currently calling for. According to a report from VICE News, programs across the country have already experimented with taking control of mental health crises, homelessness, traffic issues, drugs, and sex work out of the hands of the police and replacing them with more qualified actors.

The difficulty in policing is that we use a one-size-fits-all model, Barry Friedman, who runs New York Universitys Policing Project, told VICE News. Police just arent trained to do a lot of the things they end up doing. They are trained for force and law. So you get force-and-law results.

These new methods of justice very much map onto how we should be dealing with cops whose actions or words have harmed the people they police.

Applied to the police officers responsible for civilian deaths, a community accountability solution could include naming and shaming them (check!), termination from the police force, along with the guarantee that they will be barred from working in law enforcement or security positions for the rest of their lives (or until those positions stop existing). A restorative justice solution could involve police officers sitting down with family members of those theyve injured or killed to acknowledge the immense damage theyve done. A transformative justice solution to police violence? Thats police abolition, baby!

If all of the above sounds like a lot of hard work, thats because it is. That doesnt mean its impossible. Defund, disarm, abolish the police! is easy to chant, harder to envision, and essential to actualize, according to the activists whove been working towards a cop-free future for decades. Using these modes of justice and accountability, though, a better future is only as limited as our own collective imagination.

Follow Katie Way on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on VICE US.

Excerpt from:

Can't Imagine a World Without Police? Start Here - VICE

Late in the evening on April 11, the Texarkana, Texas, Police Department started receiving 911 calls about an imminent attack on one of their own. A man in a black Chevy truck was crisscrossing the area looking for a lone police officer to ambush and execute and streaming his search to Facebook Live. Using the video, police were able to quickly locate the truck. After a high-speed chase, 36-year-old Aaron Swenson surrendered to police, a search of his truck turning up several loaded firearms.

The ensuing investigation revealed that Swenson had been deeply immersed in the online culture of the so-called boogaloo bois: heavily armed men, often clad in armored vests and incongruously festive Hawaiian shirts, who in recent months have appeared at protests around the country against both COVID-19 lockdowns and police brutality. Swenson isnt the only member to have embraced violence: on May 30, in Las Vegas, three boogaloo bois on their way to a Black Lives Matter protest were arrested with numerous firearms and Molotov cocktail ingredientsthe trio have military backgrounds, and according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two had plotted to firebomb a power substation. Last week, two men associated with the movement were charged in the killing of a courthouse guard in Oakland, California.

Part meme, part subculture, the boogaloo is a mash-up of antigovernment apocalyptic screed, Second Amendment evangelism, and dark-humored satire. The term itself refers to a hoped-for civil war that will bring about the collapse of societyand, in some adherents vision, its replacement by a white ethnostate. (The origins of the name itself are a bit complicated, but they trace back, through countless message board conversations and in-jokes, to the 1984 break-dancing movie, Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo.)

Even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, white supremacist terrorism was a growing menace. Although the specter of jihadism has received more attention, the threat of racially motivated extremismof which white supremacy is a parthas been rising steadily over the last few years. As recently as 2016, it accounted for only 20 percent of terrorism-related deaths in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League. By 2018, that figure had increased to 98 percent. In February, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress that racially and ethnically motivated extremists had been the primary source of ideologically motivated lethal incidents and violence over the last two years. Wray also noted that 2019 marked the deadliest year of white supremacist violence since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

Just as they have for food delivery services and videoconferencing platforms, lockdowns have proved to be a time of growth and opportunity for white supremacists. Indeed, violent extremists across the ideological spectrum have exploited the pandemic to take advantage of people who are at their most vulnerable, desperate, and availablerelegated to their homes (or their parents homes) with little to distract them aside from surfing the Web. The dearth of large public gatherings and crowds moved the terrorism battle space inside and online. But with an antigovernmentmessage designed for online virality,twenty-first-century white supremacists were especially well positioned to profit from this shift. And the evidence so far suggests that they succeeded in doing so, with results that, as the recent arrests show, can all too easily become offline threats.

As with terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (or ISIS), todays white supremacist threat is both global and virtual. The war in Ukraine, for example, has attracted hundreds of foreign fighters with ties to the far right who use the battlefield as a networking space. That includes dozens of Americans, some of whom have come home with new contacts and fighting experience. Outside Ukraine, white supremacist training camps exist in Poland, Bulgaria, and even the United Kingdom, and many white supremacist organizations operate transnationally.

But whereas for ISIS the Internet is a tool to create and grow the caliphate, for white supremacists the Internet is the caliphate: a headquarters, a virtual training camp, and a staging ground all in one. This reliance on the Internet has served the group well during the pandemic. But it may also be its Achilles heel.

In the early afternoon of March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant sat parked in his car in Christchurch, New Zealand. Recording himself with his smartphone, he told viewers to subscribe to PewDiePie, a popular and deliberately provocative Swedish YouTuber with an ambiguous relationship to the far right. Tarrant then got out of his car and embarked on a shooting spree at two local mosques, killing 51 people. With a helmet-mounted GoPro camera, he livestreamed the mass murder on Facebook. Within a day of the attacks, Facebook had reportedly blocked some 1.5 million attempts to view the video.

Livestreaming crimes in progress, as Tarrant expertly didand as Swenson, the man arrested in Texarkana, tried to dois a tactic brought into the mainstream by ISIS. Amedy Coulibaly, the perpetrator of the attack on the Hyper Cacher supermarket in Paris in 2015, tried desperately to upload GoPro footage that he had taken of his assault, commissioning the help of one of his hostages in the failed effort; the next year, in the French city of Magnanville, the ISIS adherent Larossi Aballa posted a 13-minute live video on Facebook after stabbing to death a police officer and slitting the throat of the officers girlfriend. The idea was to leverage the viral power of violence, individual foot soldiers becoming content creators and influencers and using social media as a force multiplier. Turning a physical attack into a piece of propaganda in real time lets the perpetrator control the narrative.

Whereas for ISIS the Internet is a tool to create and grow the caliphate, for white supremacists the Internet is the caliphate.

At its height, ISIS deployed social media as effectively as it deployed violence. As the groups flagship magazine, Dabiq,put it, The information campaign is indistinguishable from the military campaign. . . . Violence is itself a message when you use it correctly. In addition to the beheading, immolation, and post-attack promotional videos designed to horrify the public and draw headlines, ISISs information campaign produced slick biopics lionizing individual fighters. Content was spread across official and unofficial channels to ensure its longevity. And to this day, followers worldwide are instructed to take the initiative and carry out whatever acts of violence they are able to, using whatever weapon is available (a knife, gun, or car)and attesting, preferably on video, that they are doing it for ISIS.

ISISs media strategy was a significant step up from that of previous terrorist groups, but white supremacists have continued to innovate. Formally, much of their propaganda and media strategy resembles that of ISIS: skillfully produced videos; bold graphics that use manipulated imagery from video games and movies to issue crude threats; the deliberate channeling of new followers from open social media platformseffective for recruitmentto encrypted ones, where bomb-making instructions can be shared, potential targets are discussed, and the real mobilization takes place.

With white supremacists, however, the culture of the Internet suffuses the entire movement. In a 74-page manifesto that Tarrant posted to the extremist online messaging board 8chan before his attack, he writes, Memes have done more for the ethno-nationalist movement than any manifesto. The entire document is marbled with sarcasm, and Tarrant at one point jokingly suggests that he was radicalized by the video games Spyro the Dragon and Fortnite. This is unusual manifesto territory. As with most content on the 8chan platform, the tone is not that of a religious zealot but that of a winking online trolla shitposter. The text is emblematic of a subculture that cloaks its extremist ideology in layers of ironic detachment and nihilistic jocularity, mocking mainstream liberal values of inclusivity, equality, and democracy as repressive, traditionalist, and conservative.

At a tribute to a victim of the Christchurch mosque shootings, New Zealand, March 2019

This peculiar form of discourse binds the movement together. Unlike al Qaeda and ISISorganizations with hierarchy, territory, franchises, mission, vision, and valuesthe white supremacist world is dispersed and highly dynamic. There are plenty of groups, some operating across borders, but they are often small, disorganized, and quick to fragment and reconstitute. Group members may belong to more than one group at once, which can sometimes mean little more than participating in multiple group chats on different online platforms. In this world of shifting, overlapping allegiances, the memes and the ironywho is in on the joke and who is notare the connective tissue.

Meanwhile, the violence spreads by contagion rather than directionanother reason white supremacists are particularly well suited to take advantage of a global pandemic. Counterterrorism analysts tend to break down global jihadism based on how connected threat actors are to a particular organizationwhether they are directed, enabled, or inspired by that organization. The taxonomy of white supremacy, on the other hand, centers on how individual threat actors influence one another. In addition to being a terrorist, Tarrant is a social media influencer, and his manifesto is as much a recruitment speech as an explanation of his worldview. Multiple attackers have cited Tarrant as an influence over the 15 months since his attackincluding John Earnest, who livestreamed his attack on a synagogue in Poway, California; Patrick Crusius, who killed 22 people in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019; and Philip Manshaus, who attacked the Al-Noor mosque in Oslo, Norway, in August 2019. Tarrant himself cites Anders Breivik, perpetrator of a horrific attack in Norway in 2011 that killed 77, most of them young people at a summer camp. The most influential figureheads are not organizational or spiritual leaders, such as al Qaedas Anwar al-Awlaki or ISISs Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, but individual attackers, who are often rhetorically sanctified onlineHail Saint Tarrant, Saint Crusius, or Saint Breivik, and so on.

All of this complicates the job of law enforcement. The veil of irony and memes makes it hard to identify who poses an imminent threat and who is simply jokingwhich, of course, is precisely the point. The remit of law enforcement is to find future Brenton Tarrants before they carry out their attacks, but when it comes to flagging incitement to violence, it is hard to tell signal from noise. And if irony generates static, contagion is often silent. The United States government is well equipped to prevent violence organized by groups or structured networks that communicate, travel, train, and carry out other activities that trip wires. Predicting which lone actor will mobilize and carry out a violent attack is much more difficult.

Ultimately, however, the online nature of white supremacist terrorism may be its weak point. For one, its an open question how scalable a movement based on leaderless resistance, influence, and contagion can be. And dependence on the Internet makes it hard to exist without it. Efforts to deplatform and remove white supremacist actors and content lag behind similar measures against jihadist groups, but if applied, they will likely be even more effective. Al Qaeda and ISIS are bigger, more lethal, and more powerful organizations thanks to social media, but they would be able to do much of what they do without it. This is not the case for racist extremists. Shutting down their content, message boards, forums, profiles, and sites can deal them a serious blow. Denying these sites protection from cyberattacks is another powerful tool, already used against Gab, a social media site popular among racially motivated extremists, in the aftermath of Robert Bowerss attack against the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, and against 8chan after the El Paso shooting.

The online nature of white supremacist terrorism may be its weak point.

These measures are no catchall solution. Committed extremists will migrate to new, often dark or encrypted platforms and groups or simply return under new names after their profiles and sites have been taken down. But making it harder for uninitiated users to engage with extremist content, or for radicalized individuals to find one another online, checks the movements spread. Deplatforming can reduce the speed of contagion. It can also deter those who arent serious, who are in it for the memes but not the violenceit can shut out the noise so that law enforcement can concentrate on the signal.

Social media companies have dedicated significant resources to removing content associated with groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda. They are starting to do the same for white supremacists, with a particular focus on content related to COVID-19, such as disinformation (guidance, for example, purporting to be from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggesting sanitizing ones house with combinations of household-cleaning materials that are toxic or explosive) or tactical and targeting advice (directives to intentionally infect minorities, law enforcement, or health-care workers by coughing, sneezing, or spitting on them). Last week, Facebook removed hundreds of accounts linked to white supremacist groups that had discussed bringing weapons to protests over the killing of George Floyd. Overall, however, these content removal efforts have not kept up with content production. In the fall of 2019, the encrypted messaging app Telegram, with the help of Europol, completed the largest and to date most successful ISIS purge, removing thousands of accounts from its platform. This action was a significant setback for the group, sending the online jihadist community reeling, decentralized, to multiple alternative platforms to try to reconstitute. Social media companies have not taken similar action against racially motivated violent extremist accounts.

Until they do, the onus is on law enforcement to identify the radicalized before they mobilize. The window of opportunity, however, is often short. Right before Robert Bowers attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018, he posted on Gab, I cant sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, Im going in. Tarrants manifesto went up moments before his attack. Well lads, its time to stop shitposting, it read, and time to make a real life effort post. Law enforcement cannot be all that stands between the virtual and the real, between the optics, the shitposting, and the real-life effort.

Loading...Please enable JavaScript for this site to function properly.

Read more:

COVID-19 and the Growing White Supremacist Menace - Foreign Affairs Magazine

In an email, the owners told me that the presence of white nationalists in the My Little Pony fandom is unfortunate. They insisted that they have always tried to act against content [that] displays genuine racist intent on behalf of the poster, adding we have not always been as strict as we would have liked to be. They also clarified that the removed images would be gone only temporarily, because of the moderation headache the images have been causing. They will later be restored to the site, the owners said, as an artifact of the moment.

Moderation is always complicated, but never more so than when a community is unsure of what it wants to be or what its willing to play host to. Derpiboorus tiny policy change has led to an uproar in the sites forums, and disgruntled users insist that it will lead to a purity spiral, or a slippery slope to censorship and authoritarianism (the standard set of arguments that come up in every major moderation dispute, which tend to conflate site rules and deplatforming with government crackdowns on free speech). Meanwhile, supporters of a stricter content policy point out that the update is toothless, and will do almost nothing to curb racism on the site.

Whats clearest from talking with those on either side of the argument is that the My Little Pony fandom has developed a totally nonsensical hodgepodge of values. Many fans who specifically support Black Lives Matter, for example, are also fans of Aryanne, a fan-invented Nazi pony with a pink swastika on her hip. They do not acknowledge a contradiction. I love Aryanne, a 25-year-old My Little Pony fan named Sam told me. Its just cute, funny, sexy art. Then he added, Black Lives Matter art is great. I welcome it. (Sam asked to go only by his first name to avoid harassment.)

When Acesential posted a drawing of a pony holding an I Cant Breathe flag, and when Henry posted art containing the initialism ACAB, for All Cops Are Bastards, commenters spat back that ponies shouldnt be used as a mouthpiece for politics, even though some of those same commenters have loved it when ponies wear Make America Great Again hats. This idea of what counts as political and what doesnt is another thing the fandom took from 4chanwhere racial slurs are just jokes but anti-racism makes you a social justice warrior.

Read: The misogynistic joke that became a goth-meme fairy tale

This is a fan community that has prided itself on a permissiveness and pushing boundaries and cloaking themselves in irony and the idea that they can make the mainstream uncomfortable, Anne Gilbert, an assistant media-studies professor at the University of Georgia who has studied the My Little Pony fandom, told me. That has been a source of pride.

That pride makes the My Little Pony fandoms problem twofold. Members who want to tear the fan community away from the active racists will also have to disentangle themselves from a long-held commitment to anything-goes uploading and a willful ignorance of the significance of political imagery. The concept of complicity has become clearer to a greater percentage of white Americans in the past several weeks, Gilbert said. A fandom that used to ignore politics is now being asked to acknowledge that it actually has made political choicesby valuing the free speech of some over the comfort and safety of many others.

See the article here:

My Little Pony Fans Are Ready to Admit They Have a Nazi Problem - The Atlantic

This story was published in partnership with The Daily Beast.

Matt Windschitl had one more chance to address colleagues in the Iowa House of Representatives before they voted on his pro-gun bill, the culmination of a yearslong effort to produce what one supporter hailed as the most monumental and sweeping piece of gun legislation in Iowas history. The veteran Republican lawmaker walked up to the chamber podium and unleashed a counterattack against an unlikely foe.

It was April 2017, and for years Windschitl had found himself absorbing broadsides from a man named Aaron Dorr, a far-right provocateur who led a gun rights advocacy organization called Iowa Gun Owners. Dorr had recently taken to Facebook to accuse Windschitl of brokering backroom deals to appease anti-gun forces in the state Capitol, saying the lawmaker was far more concerned about making sure his hair is just perfectly taken care of than fighting for gun rights.

Standing stern-faced at the microphone, Windschitl denounced the professed activist as a hype man focused on ginning up donations for his group. Dorr promoted himself as the leader of Iowas only no compromise gun lobby, but Windschitl pointed out that Dorr was not even registered as a lobbyist. When Windschitl asked whether anyone in the chamber had spoken to Dorr about the omnibus gun bill, no one raised a hand.

If youre sending this guy money, Im asking you to stop It is time for his scam to end, Windschitl said. You need and you deserve the truth: Aaron Dorr is a scam artist, a liar, and he is doing Iowans no services and no favors.

Dorr received an avalanche of criticism in the months and years that followed as he and two of his younger brothers Chris and Ben applied their brand of far-right activism to contentious political issues. The brothers, who were raised in Iowa, are part of a circle of far-right activists who manage more than a dozen nonprofits spread around the country, from Wyoming and Wisconsin to North Carolina and Georgia. They have built a massive grassroots fundraising machine that churns out a steady stream of messages beseeching donations to snuff out gun control, abortion rights, and other sources of conservative outrage.

In April, about a month after COVID-19 lockdowns took effect in the U.S., Reddit users placed the three brothers at the center of an astroturfing campaign against government measures designed to slow the outbreak. Chris Dorr helped organize a demonstration in the Pennsylvania capital despite official warnings about mass gatherings leading to a surge of infections. Since then, the death toll from coronavirus in Pennsylvania has climbed to more than 6,400. In recent weeks, the brothers sounded alarms about the thugs, criminals, and political terrorists who took to the streets nationwide following the May killing of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

At the center of the Dorrs efforts is the brothers own for-profit consulting firm, which has received huge sums of money from their tax-exempt organizations, fueling allegations that the brothers are deceiving their supporters.

What theyre doing is raising a lot of money by setting up nonprofits and latching onto various conservative, hot-button issues, said Scott Hubay, an Ohio attorney who specializes in nonprofit compliance and examined findings compiled by The Trace and The Daily Beast. But instead of spending that money on what they told the public their purpose was, they appear to be using it to enrich themselves.

The Dorrs affiliated outfits have hauled in millions of dollars over the years, tax returns show. But successes on the fundraising front are belied by waning political clout, as the brothers tactics draw increasing fire from across the ideological spectrum. Their enemies denounce them as parasitic gadflies bent on using the latest political zeitgeist and alarmist rhetoric to line their own pockets, sometimes at the expense of causes they claim to support. Some of the biggest criticisms have emanated from the pro-gun community, including the National Rifle Association, which accused Aaron and Chris Dorr of being scam artists.

After The Trace and The Daily Beast sent this investigations findings to the Dorr brothers, Aaron Dorr responded with a statement that he said was also issued on behalf of his siblings. The Trace and its affiliated entities have always been tops on the list of the radical Lefts Hate-America fake-news outlets, he said.

At a time when armed thugs are rioting in our streets, murdering police officers, looting stores and burning down private businesses, we Dorr brothers could not be more proud of the aggressive, vicious fighting we do for law-abiding gun owners and pro-lifers all across America, he added. We apologize for nothing, and to be attacked by the same socialist, fake-news blogs that hate President Trump means we are doing our jobs fabulously.

But the Dorrs footprint grew as widening ideological divisions and fragmenting media created fertile ground for conspiracy theories and misinformation. COVID-19 brought this infodemic into sharper relief as false claims about the coronavirus including some pushed by President Donald Trump continue to frustrate efforts to contain the disease. The Dorr brothers were early propagators of the notion that power-hungry politicians were exploiting the outbreak to weaken coveted American freedoms, a line with echoes in the gun rights debate, where proposals for stricter laws have raised the specter of mass firearm confiscation.

Leading up to early protests against COVID-19-related lockdowns, the Dorrs created Facebook groups to organize opposition in Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These groups attracted more than 200,000 members and became rallying points for conspiracy theorists. People who joined were directed to misleading web addresses http://www.ReOpenMN.com, for instance where they could ostensibly message leaders to reopen their states economy. Those who clicked on the links were taken to websites for the Dorrs gun rights groups, where they could buy memberships from $35 to $1,000.

The organizations leadership is focused on external threats, but the real crisis is of its own making.

byMike Spies

These are the kinds of things these guys do. They take advantage of rabble-rousing on the far-right, said Minnesota state Senator Ron Latz, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party whose efforts to tighten gun laws have drawn the Dorrs wrath. Its a business for them, Latz added. They know how to do it, and theyre jerks.

After The Washington Post first reported on the Dorrs role in the burgeoning anti-quarantine movement, the credit card processor handling donations to the brothers groups quietly booted them off its platform. Aaron and Chris Dorr sent out nearly identical messages in which each of them said they had been alerted to the processors action by a lifetime member who wanted to contribute $100 to their respective groups. They portrayed the de-platforming as part of a corporate gun control movement that would hamper our efforts to expose gun grabbers during the upcoming election cycle. By the time they sent out the messages, they had brought their fundraising capabilities back online. If we dont have the ammo we need to fight with, we cant fight. Its just that simple, both messages said. And thats why I want to ask you to make an emergency donation.

While the Dorrs gun rights groups have nothing close to the prowess or profile enjoyed by the NRA, theyve flourished at a time when internal feuds and financial scandals are hobbling Americas most influential gun rights organization, creating an opportunity for activists whose aggressive and unconventional tactics previously relegated them to the margins of American culture wars.

Casting themselves as the most powerful counterweight to jelly-spined Republican politicians and anti-gun socialists, the Dorrs have seized the moment to hone their image as the uncompromising wing of gun rights advocacy. But these pitches frequently involve misleading statements, embellishments, and outright falsehoods. A close look at the brothers online activity reveals numerous instances in which one of them mischaracterized a lawmakers record, attacked pro-gun Republicans as anything but, or spun criticisms of them and their groups as evidence of their influence.

After Windschitl denounced Aaron Dorr on the Iowa House floor in 2017, lawmakers approved the omnibus gun bill, which included Stand Your Ground protections for gun owners who killed in self-defense. Republican Governor Terry Branstad signed the measure into law. Despite Windschitls public assertions denying Dorrs role in the bills success, the activist has claimed credit, anyway.

Later that same year, Aaron Dorr defeated state House ethics charges brought by another Republican lawmaker who argued he had violated lobbyist registration rules. The lawmaker pointed to Facebook videos in which Dorr claimed to have conducted meetings with legislators and spent time finalizing legislation at the Capitol. Dorr defended himself by asserting that there were, in fact, no direct lobbying activities by me.

Included in his evidence: No one raised a hand when Windschitl asked whether any House members had spoken to Dorr about the omnibus gun bill.

After the House Ethics Committee dismissed the charges the chairman cited loopholes that exempted unpaid nonprofit directors from registration requirements Dorr sent out a fundraising plea characterizing the ordeal as payback for FORCING the General Assembly to pass Stand-Your-Ground and much more during the 2017 legislative session.

Revilement among mainstream gun rights advocates and GOP politicians has produced entire websites devoted to debunking the Dorrs rhetoric. Ben Dorr, the youngest of the three brothers, is the political director for Minnesota Gun Rights. He claimed to have killed every single gun control bill filed in Minnesota over the last few years, a remarkable assertion given how the states pro-gun lawmakers have publicly and emphatically denounced his group since at least 2015. In February, the House and Senate Republican caucuses joined with Republican Party leaders to launch http://www.mnscammersexposed.com, dedicated to warning constituents about the brothers attempts to cash in on unsuspecting Minnesotans sympathetic to their message.

Aaron Dorr once described himself as a graduate of numerous Rothfeld schools, an apparent reference to Mike Rothfeld, a national political consultant known for his mastery of direct-mail marketing, now a centerpiece of the brothers fundraising efforts. Rothfeld, who declined to comment for this story, has sat on the board of directors for the National Association for Gun Rights, whose strongarm methods and absolutist portrayal of Second Amendment rights blazed a trail for the Dorr brothers to follow.

The National Association for Gun Rights stepped in with early fundraising help after Aaron Dorr launched Iowa Gun Owners in 2009. It wasnt long before he tasted national notoriety. Chris Dorr, while working for U.S. Representative Michele Bachmanns presidential campaign before the 2012 Iowa caucuses, was alleged to have stolen a politically valuable Excel spreadsheet from a colleagues private computer containing contact information for members of Iowas largest homeschool organization. Chris Dorr had also clerked for state Senator Kent Sorenson, who was surreptitiously accepting payments from the Bachmann campaign for his endorsement, but was considering switching allegiance to Ron Paul, and the homeschool list would help make Sorenson more appealing as a paid surrogate.

Acting as Sorensons go-between, Aaron Dorr emailed Pauls campaign manager a list of demands: $8,000 a month for Sorenson; $5,000 a month for Chris Dorr; and a $100,000 donation to a political action committee. That committee was chaired by an Iowa Gun Owners board member. Also, one of Pauls campaign staffers would need to sign a letter apologizing for previous public statements bashing the gun rights group. One of the things the campaign would receive in exchange was the list of the main Iowa home-school group allowing for targeted home-school mail, Aaron Dorr wrote.

Sorenson went on to collect $73,000 funneled to his consulting firm to mask the Paul campaign as the moneys source. Sorenson and three Paul campaign staffers were later convicted of criminal charges. Sorenson and one Paul staffer served time in federal prison, while the other two received probation. The Dorrs were never charged.

The brothers involvement in the payoff scheme came into focus after Aaron Dorrs email surfaced in the news. Chris Dorr was copied on the email. However, he told investigators he didnt read it until after the story broke. He claimed ignorance in relation to his brothers negotiations with the Paul campaign and described the taking of the homeschool list as a mistake that likely occurred while he was procuring data around the office. An Iowa Senate ethics report later concluded that the evidence was conflicting as to whether Chris Dorrs claims regarding the list were true.

Over several years after the presidential campaign, the brothers expanded by opening or affiliating with gun rights groups in Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. They have also linked up with hard-right characters leading pro-gun organizations in Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, and Missouri, among other places, spawning a network of affiliates with similar websites, messaging, and tactics.

As the executive director at Ohio Gun Owners, Chris Dorr leads operations in Columbus, where hes made enemies with gun rights activists and Republican politicians alike. Officials at the Buckeye Firearms Association blasted Ohio Gun Owners as a false flag group that was urging supporters to sign petitions to build a database for future fundraising efforts. In August, Republican Governor Mike DeWine referred Chris Dorr to State Police after he said there would be political bodies laying all over the ground and a corpse for the buzzards if lawmakers clamped down on guns following the mass shooting that killed nine people in Dayton. The police closed the investigation without filing criminal charges.

Chris Dorrs antics have become something of a joke at the Statehouse, where hes eschewed important legislative announcements to set up his tripod in the hall and film himself for supporters. He recently took his trademark bushy beard on camera to claim that George Lang, a Republican Ohio state representative and chair of the House Criminal Justice Committee, had voted against stand your ground legislation in 2018 and let a similar measure stall after it was filed one year later. In fact, Lang voted in favor of a bill containing stand your ground in 2018 before that provision was removed by the Senate. Lang co-sponsored the measure introduced the following year and, in a phone interview, he said the bill didnt advance because neither of the primary sponsors requested a hearing.

I did not watch the video at all, so I dont know what hes talking about, but if he inferred in any way that I have ever voted against stand your ground legislation, thats a bald-faced lie, Lang said in a telephone interview. He added that Ohio Gun Owners attacks had cost it a potential ally. From an ideological perspective, I probably line up with that group on about 90 percent of the issues, but I do not in any way, shape, or form condone the tactics that they use.

Gun rights advocates whove watched the brothers at work hope they will leave the game. Turf wars and funding battles are common in the nonprofit world, but the Dorrs unpopularity among would-be allies is remarkable, and underscores their penchant for sabotage. Their all-or-nothing approach dispenses with political strategizing and coalition-building in favor of a scorched-earth plan likely to be counterproductive.

We are familiar with their tactics: Theyre a fundraising organization, and they use the money for themselves, said Jerry Henry, the executive director of GeorgiaCarry.Org, a pro-gun organization thats grappled with the Dorrs Georgia chapter. Theyll introduce a piece of legislation and then come out against everybody who can pass that legislation for them.

Since the enactment of Windschitls stand your ground law in Iowa, Aaron Dorr has channeled his energies into advocating constitutional carry, which abolishes permitting requirements for carrying handguns in public. But as lawmakers rallied votes for constitutional carry legislation in 2019, Dorr attacked committee leaders whose support was crucial to moving it forward. Republican Jason Schultz, whod been guiding the bill through the state Senate, was so appalled he yanked it from consideration and then read a statement vowing to never back any bill Dorr put his hands on. Schultzs colleagues applauded.

In a phone interview, Schultz said the Dorr brothers were mostly concerned about their bottom line. Theyre only throwing gas on the fire to generate more donations, contributions, and memberships, Schultz said. I used to think they were really bad lobbyists; it turns out theyre working against the cause they claim to be fighting for.

Nonprofits are required to disclose details about yearly revenues and expenses on publicly available tax returns if their gross receipts are more than $50,000. The Internal Revenue Service can yank a groups tax-exempt status or levy fines if vendors, board members, or executives improperly enriched themselves at the expense of an organizations mission.

Tax returns for the Dorrs gun rights groups show they have seldom received compensation despite reporting that they worked as many as 70 hours per week. One of the few exceptions was in 2018, when Chris Dorr reported earning $30,000 from Ohio Gun Owners. Aaron Dorr has disclosed a total of less than $10,000 in pay since Iowa Gun Owners formed more than a decade ago.

But a closer look through the Dorrs statements and public records shows donations are steered to the brothers in multiple ways. One of the primary channels involves a for-profit consulting and direct mail business, Midwest Freedom Enterprises L.L.C. The brothers recently cut an hour-long video in which they took viewers on a tour of the warehouse where Midwest Freedom Enterprises is ostensibly headquartered, showing off some of the gadgetry they use to print, fold, and stuff mailers into envelopes.

From an ideological perspective, I probably line up with that group on about 90 percent of the issues, but I do not in any way, shape, or form condone the tactics that they use.

Aaron and Chris Dorr spoke in the video about launching the company in the early days of Iowa Gun Owners because it was cheaper to cram mailboxes with solicitations if they created them in-house. At one point, Ben Dorr held up a sheet of paper and read off the amount nearly $125,000 Minnesota Gun Rights paid for direct mail and postage pulverizing those anti-gun candidates and keeping members informed in 2016. The price tag would have been twice as high if not for Midwest Freedom Enterprises, he said.

And if these politicians dont like it, we frankly dont give a crap. We dont give a damn what you think, Ben Dorr said. Were fighting for our members and were saving them so much membership dues, so much money by doing it for pennies on the dollar because we love watching politicians cry.

He smirked. At least I do.

Direct mail has long been a favored fundraising tactic on the right. The Trace and The Daily Beast analyzed seven gun rights groups in the brothers network that had filed at least one detailed financial statement with the Internal Revenue Service between 2014 and 2018. The examination showed that these groups collectively spent more than $1.9 million on direct mail, postage, and related costs, accounting for almost half of their cumulative expenses.

Most of that money nearly $1.1 million came from Iowa Gun Owners, Minnesota Gun Rights, and Ohio Gun Owners, nonprofits managed directly by the Dorr brothers. According to their video, those three groups use Midwest Freedom Enterprises for their direct mail. Over that same five-year period, Iowa Gun Owners spent another $300,000 on management expenses, duties also performed by Midwest Freedom Enterprises, statements indicate.

Elections have also been a boon for the brothers mail business. In Iowa, candidates and political action committees paid $226,000 to Midwest Freedom Enterprises between 2010 and 2016, according to campaign finance records. At least about 30 percent $67,000 of those funds had been contributed to the Iowa Gun Owners PAC and other committees controlled by Aaron Dorr or his close associates.

In a video flagged by cleveland.com, Ben Dorr said hes gotten a cut of the consulting fees paid by Minnesota Gun Rights. Tax returns show Minnesota Gun Rights spent more than $163,000 on consulting between 2014 and 2018. Consulting cost Ohio Gun Owners and Iowa Gun Owners an additional $109,000 over the same timeframe.

Minnesota Gun Rights once faced legal action from a state Republican lawmaker when the group continued to disseminate mailers bearing his signature after hed ordered them to stop. That lawmaker later joined 15 of his colleagues in issuing an open letter denouncing the fakers and fraudsters who were trying to take advantage of gun rights supporters while doing nothing to actually advance the cause.

The IRS revoked the tax-exempt status for Minnesota Gun Rights in 2016 after it failed to file several years worth of tax returns. Nevertheless, Minnesota Gun Rights continued promoting itself as an active nonprofit. When confronted by reporters from a local Fox affiliate in 2019, Ben Dorr dismissed questions about the discrepancy as fake news only to later acknowledge that Minnesota Gun Rights had indeed fallen behind. The group filed the missing returns, and its status was restored.

Throughout their existence, Iowa Gun Owners and Ohio Gun Owners have never reported paying for fundraising. At Minnesota Gun Rights, meanwhile, tax returns show that 90 percent nearly $542,000 of all the funds spent between 2016 and 2018 went toward raising more money, a share far exceeding industry standards. The Better Business Bureau has recommended that fundraising should account for no more than 35 percent of a nonprofits expenditures.

What the Dorrs are doing goes far beyond what I would ever recommend to a client, said Hubay, the Ohio attorney and nonprofit compliance expert. 501(c)(4) organizations are supposed to be about advocacy and lobbying for legislation, but the Dorrs seem to be focused on generating contributions and then funneling those resources to themselves through management fees and direct mail. Its definitely suspicious.

As tax-exempt social-welfare organizations under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, the brothers groups are different from charities in that they can spend money swaying voters toward specific candidates, as long as thats not their primary purpose. Groups must report the amount they spent on such activities to the IRS and may have to pay a tax.

Forms for the Dorrs groups show they have never reported engaging in political campaigns even while theyve solicited funds for the explicit purpose of boosting or defeating candidates. At Iowa Gun Owners, Aaron Dorr thanked donors for funding a $150,000 election program aimed at targeted races across the state, and in a separate instance, he complained about being betrayed by a state senator for whom his group had bought TV and radio ads, along with 12,000 pieces of direct-mail.

Hubay said the law is hazy about what activities constitute reportable political campaign expenses, but the fact that they described their program as a political program and talked about targeting certain races is something that the IRS could look at as evidence of unreported expenditures.

Meanwhile, the Dorrs keep finding ways to stoke right-wing rage.

On June 9, Chris Dorr issued an Action ALERT to Ohio Gun Owners email subscribers amid nationwide demonstrations against police brutality. Dorrs missive misportrayed the calls for defunding police departments as a campaign by antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs to savage our great nation with lawlessness. He added: I cannot begin to describe the anarchy, the social destruction that would ensue if America disbanded our police forces and let the left-wing nutjobs who run Americas major cities implement their leftwing community-based social solutions.

Dorr went on to denounce Sandy Hook Promise an organization founded by parents of the elementary school children slain in the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut for recent expressions in favor of police reform and racial justice. Dorr uged his readers to contact Ohio lawmakers and demand that they vote against a Sandy Hook Promise-backed bill to increase education on violence and suicide prevention in schools.

Once you are finished, please also consider chipping in $10 or $20 to help us cover the continual costs of fighting back against these gun-control bills, Dorr wrote. Every penny you can donate is being put to use immediately in this fight to mobilize more and more Ohians to this fight [sic], and we gratefully appreciate your support!

Read the original post:

The Brothers Behind an Extreme Gun-Rights Network That Republicans Call a Big Scam - The Trace

Antifa, the group that fancies itself as the face of modern anti-fascism, has a handbook. Really. It is named, appropriately enough, Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook. The author, Mark Bray, also wrote Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street, and co-edits Anarchist Education and the Modern School, so we can see where he is coming from. And, as a lecturer at Dartmouth College, a prestigious Ivy League institution, he is also teaching your children, or someones children.

The obvious thing about Antifa is that they oppose fascism, which, on its face, is a good thing. Fascism has a horrid history of oppression, genocide, racism, and all manner of other violations of rights or human decency. Who wouldnt be against that? Antifa, the book, gives the history of atrocities at the hands of fascists, where and how it gets initiated, and how prior anti-fascists handled the situations, from which lessons are taken.

Antifas marketing program proposes that its purpose is the denial of any fascists or potential fascists to any platform to speak, disrupting or preventing any event held by any fascist, anywhere, any time. If fascists are not allowed to gather and to communicate, they can prevent such things as the Nazi genocide of the Jews in war-time Germany, or so the rhetoric goes.

What is not so obvious about anti-fascism to outside observers is what gets included under the umbrella of fascism. As it turns out, anything that radical leftists dont like fits the bill. Since they are primarily far left socialists or anarchists, capitalism takes center stage, and anyone who promotes capitalism, free markets, or freedom in general falls within their scope. If you disagree with leftist policies, no matter how bad they are in reality, you may be a target. If you think people shouldnt be compelled to say things they know are not true, you might be treading on thin ice. If you show any support for the ultimate evil, the Darth Vader of modern capitalism, President Donald Trump, then you have a big swastika on your back.

Being against genocide is good, right? Killing millions of people because I dont like them, because they dont support my policies, because they are not of the proper race or nationality, or because they are obstacles to my own power is certainly something that should be vigorously opposed.

That, however, is not what Antifa opposes. They only oppose genocidal murderers who are purportedly on the right. Not a single word in the book mentions the Soviet gulags, where millions of prisoners died, usually after a hellish nightmare they didnt deserve. No criticism of the annihilation of entire Russian villages who resisted. No mention of the deliberate murder of millions of Ukrainians by starvation by Soviets or Chinese by Maoists after they confiscated all food, destroyed all crops, and sealed the borders. The list goes on and on and on. As long as the brutal murderer is a leftist, all is well. As long as the oppression comes from the correct part of the political spectrum, then no fascism and no foul.

Antifa, however, in spite of their rhetoric, is not just deplatforming. As the well organized and coordinated violence they instigated and participated in during the recent protests makes obvious, the groups real purpose is to destabilize American society, to cause economic and social collapse so they can usher in their perfect Utopia. The anarchists and communists can fight about the details later.

What we know, though, is that there is very little difference between the Nazi Brown Shirts and the Antifa Black Suits. The purpose of both groups is intimidation, disruption, and mayhem. Both groups were and are made up of anti-social criminals, thugs who should be treated as such.

Dan McLaughlin is the author of Compassion and Truth-Why Good Intentions Dont Equal Good Results. Follow him at daniel-mclaughlin.com.

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

Continued here:

Antifa, The Left-Wing Version Of Fascism | News, Sports, Jobs - Jamestown Post Journal

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence.

Matt Windschitl had one more chance to address colleagues in the Iowa House of Representatives before they voted on his pro-gun bill, the culmination of a years-long effort to produce what one supporter hailed as the most monumental and sweeping piece of gun legislation in Iowas history. The veteran Republican lawmaker walked up to the chamber podiumand unleashed a counterattack against an unlikely foe.

It was April 2017, and for years Windschitl had found himself absorbing broadsides from a man named Aaron Dorr, a far-right provocateur who led a gun rights advocacy organization called Iowa Gun Owners. Dorr had recently taken to Facebook to accuse Windschitl of brokering backroom deals to appease anti-gun forces in the state Capitol, saying the lawmaker was far more concerned about making sure his hair is just perfectly taken care of than fighting for gun rights.

Standing stern-faced at the microphone, Windschitl denounced the professed activist as a hype man focused on ginning up donations for his group. Dorr promoted himself as the leader of Iowas only no compromise gun lobby, but Windschitl pointed out that Dorr was not even registered as a lobbyist. When Windschitl asked whether anyone in the chamber had spoken to Dorr about the omnibus gun bill, no one raised a hand.

If youre sending this guy money, Im asking you to stop It is time for his scam to end, Windschitl said. You need and you deserve the truth: Aaron Dorr is a scam artist, a liar, and he is doing Iowans no services and no favors.

Dorr received an avalanche of criticism in the months and years that followed as he and two of his younger brothersChris and Benapplied their brand of far-right activism to contentious political issues. The brothers, who were raised in Iowa, are part of a circle of far-right activists who manage more than a dozen nonprofits spread around the country, from Wyoming and Wisconsin to North Carolina and Georgia. They have built a massive grassroots fundraising machine that churns out a steady stream of messages beseeching donations to snuff out gun control, abortion rights, and other sources of conservative outrage.

I used to think they were really bad lobbyists; it turns out theyre working against the cause they claim to be fighting for.

GOP State Sen. Jason Schultz

In April, about a month after COVID-19 lockdowns took effect in the U.S., Reddit users placed the three brothers at the center of an astroturfing campaign against government measures designed to slow the outbreak. Chris Dorr helped organize a demonstration in the Pennsylvania capital despite official warnings about mass gatherings leading to a surge of infections. Since then, the death toll from coronavirus in Pennsylvania has climbed to more than 6,400. In recent weeks, the brothers sounded alarms about the thugs, criminals, and political terrorists who took to the streets nationwide following the May killing of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.

At the center of the Dorrs efforts is the brothers own for-profit consulting firm, which has received huge sums of money from their tax-exempt organizations, fueling allegations that the brothers are deceiving their supporters.

What theyre doing is raising a lot of money by setting up nonprofits and latching onto various conservative, hot-button issues, said Scott Hubay, an Ohio attorney who specializes in nonprofit compliance and examined findings compiled by The Trace and The Daily Beast. But instead of spending that money on what they told the public their purpose was, they appear to be using it to enrich themselves.

The Dorrs affiliated outfits have hauled in millions of dollars over the years, tax returns show. But successes on the fundraising front are belied by waning political clout, as the brothers tactics draw increasing fire from across the ideological spectrum. Their enemies denounce them as parasitic gadflies bent on using the latest political zeitgeist and alarmist rhetoric to line their own pockets, sometimes at the expense of causes they claim to support. Some of the biggest criticisms have emanated from the pro-gun community, including the National Rifle Association, which accused Aaron and Chris Dorr of being scam artists.

After The Trace and The Daily Beast sent this investigations findings to the Dorr brothers, Aaron Dorr responded with a statement that he said was also issued on behalf of his siblings. The Trace and its affiliated entities have always been tops on the list of the radical Lefts Hate-America fake-news outlets, he said.

At a time when armed thugs are rioting in our streets, murdering police officers, looting stores, and burning down private businesses, we Dorr brothers could not be more proud of the aggressive, vicious fighting we do for law-abiding gun owners and pro-lifers all across America, he added. We apologize for nothing, and to be attacked by the same socialist, fake-news blogs that hate President Trump means we are doing our jobs fabulously.

But the Dorrs footprint grew as widening ideological divisions and fragmenting media created fertile ground for conspiracy theories and misinformation. COVID-19 brought this infodemic into sharper relief as false claims about the coronavirusincluding some pushed by President Donald Trumpcontinue to frustrate efforts to contain the disease. The Dorr brothers were early propagators of the notion that power-hungry politicians were exploiting the outbreak to weaken coveted American freedoms, a line with echoes in the gun rights debate, where proposals for stricter laws have raised the specter of mass firearm confiscation.

Leading up to early protests against COVID-19-related lockdowns, the Dorrs created Facebook groups to organize opposition in Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. These groups attracted more than 200,000 members and became rallying points for conspiracy theorists. People who joined were directed to misleading web addresseswww.ReOpenMN.com, for instancewhere they could ostensibly message leaders to reopen their states economy. Those who clicked on the links were taken to websites for the Dorrs gun rights groups, where they could buy memberships from $35 to $1,000.

These are the kinds of things these guys do. They take advantage of rabble-rousing on the far right, said Minnesota state Senator Ron Latz, a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party whose efforts to tighten gun laws have drawn the Dorrs wrath. Its a business for them, Latz added. They know how to do it, and theyre jerks.

After The Washington Post first reported on the Dorrs role in the burgeoning anti-quarantine movement, the credit card processor handling donations to the brothers groups quietly booted them off its platform. Aaron and Chris Dorr sent out nearly identical messages in which each of them said they had been alerted to the processors action by a lifetime member who wanted to contribute $100 to their respective groups. They portrayed the de-platforming as part of a corporate gun control movement that would hamper our efforts to expose gun grabbers during the upcoming election cycle. By the time they sent out the messages, they had brought their fundraising capabilities back online. If we dont have the ammo we need to fight with, we cant fight. Its just that simple, both messages said. And thats why I want to ask you to make an emergency donation.

While the Dorrs gun rights groups have nothing close to the prowess or profile enjoyed by the NRA, theyve flourished at a time when internal feuds and financial scandals are hobbling Americas most influential gun rights organization, creating an opportunity for activists whose aggressive and unconventional tactics previously relegated them to the margins of American culture wars.

Casting themselves as the most powerful counterweight to jelly-spined Republican politicians and anti-gun socialists,the Dorrs have seized the moment to hone their image as the uncompromising wing of gun rights advocacy. But these pitches frequently involve misleading statements, embellishments, and outright falsehoods. A close look at the brothers online activity reveals numerous instances in which one of them mischaracterized a lawmakers record, attacked pro-gun Republicans as anything but, or spun criticisms of them and their groups as evidence of their influence.

After Windschitl denounced Aaron Dorr on the Iowa House floor in 2017, lawmakers approved the omnibus gun bill, which included Stand Your Ground protections for gun owners who killed in self-defense. Republican Governor Terry Branstad signed the measure into law. Despite Windschitls public assertions denying Dorrs role in the bills success, the activist has claimed credit anyway.

Later that same year, Aaron Dorr defeated state House ethics charges brought by another Republican lawmaker who argued he had violated lobbyist registration rules. The lawmaker pointed to Facebook videos in which Dorr claimed to have conducted meetings with legislators and spent time finalizing legislation at the Capitol. Dorr defended himself by asserting that there were, in fact, no direct lobbying activities by me.

Included in his evidence: No one raised a hand when Windschitl asked whether any House members had spoken to Dorr about the omnibus gun bill.

After the House Ethics Committee dismissed the chargesthe chairman cited loopholes that exempted unpaid nonprofit directors from registration requirementsDorr sent out a fundraising plea characterizing the ordeal as payback for FORCING the General Assembly to pass Stand-Your-Ground and much more during the 2017 legislative session.

Revilement among mainstream gun rights advocates and GOP politicians has produced entire websites devoted to debunking the Dorrs rhetoric. Ben Dorr, the youngest of the three brothers, is the political director for Minnesota Gun Rights. He claimed to have killed every single gun control bill filed in Minnesota over the last few years, a remarkable assertion given how the states pro-gun lawmakers have publicly and emphatically denounced his group since at least 2015. In February, the House and Senate Republican caucuses joined with Republican Party leaders to launch http://www.mnscammersexposed.com, dedicated to warning constituents about the brothers attempts to cash in on unsuspecting Minnesotans sympathetic to their message.

Aaron Dorr once described himself as a graduate of numerous Rothfeld schools, an apparent reference to Mike Rothfeld, a national political consultant known for his mastery of direct-mail marketing, now a centerpiece of the brothers fundraising efforts. Rothfeld, who declined to comment for this story, has sat on the board of directors for the National Association for Gun Rights, whose strong-arm methods and absolutist portrayal of Second Amendment rights blazed a trail for the Dorr brothers to follow.

The National Association for Gun Rights stepped in with early fundraising help after Aaron Dorr launched Iowa Gun Owners in 2009. It wasnt long before he tasted national notoriety. Chris Dorr, while working for U.S. Representative Michele Bachmanns presidential campaign before the 2012 Iowa caucuses, was alleged to have stolen a politically valuable Excel spreadsheet from a colleagues private computer containing contact information for members of Iowas largest homeschool organization. Chris Dorr had also clerked for state Senator Kent Sorenson, who was surreptitiously accepting payments from the Bachmann campaign for his endorsement, but was considering switching allegiance to Ron Paul, and the homeschool list would help make Sorenson more appealing as a paid surrogate.

Acting as Sorensons go-between, Aaron Dorr emailed Pauls campaign manager a list of demands: $8,000 a month for Sorenson; $5,000 a month for Chris Dorr; and a $100,000 donation to a political action committee. That committee was chaired by an Iowa Gun Owners board member. Also, one of Pauls campaign staffers would need to sign a letter apologizing for previous public statements bashing the gun rights group. One of the things the campaign would receive in exchange was the list of the main Iowa home-school group allowing for targeted home-school mail, Aaron Dorr wrote.

What the Dorrs are doing goes far beyond what I would ever recommend to a client.

Scott Hubay, attorney

Sorenson went on to collect $73,000 funneled to his consulting firm to mask the Paul campaign as the moneys source. Sorenson and three Paul campaign staffers were later convicted of criminal charges. Sorenson and one Paul staffer served time in federal prison, while the other two received probation. The Dorrs were never charged.

The brothers involvement in the payoff scheme came into focus after Aaron Dorrs email surfaced in the news. Chris Dorr was copied on the email. However, he told investigators he didnt read it until after the story broke. He claimed ignorance in relation to his brothers negotiations with the Paul campaign and described the taking of the homeschool list as a mistake that likely occurred while he was procuring data around the office. An Iowa Senate ethics report later concluded that the evidence was conflicting as to whether Chris Dorrs claims regarding the list were true.

Over several years after the presidential campaign, the brothers expanded by opening or affiliating with gun rights groups in Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. They have also linked up with hard-right characters leading pro-gun organizations in Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, and Missouri, among other places, spawning a network of affiliates with similar websites, messaging, and tactics.

As the executive director at Ohio Gun Owners, Chris Dorr leads operations in Columbus, where hes made enemies with gun rights activists and Republican politicians alike. Officials at the Buckeye Firearms Association blasted Ohio Gun Owners as a false flag group that was urging supporters to sign petitions to build a database for future fundraising efforts. In August, Republican Governor Mike DeWine referred Chris Dorr to State Police after he said there would be political bodies laying all over the ground and a corpse for the buzzards if lawmakers clamped down on guns following the mass shooting that killed nine people in Dayton. The police closed the investigation without filing criminal charges.

Chris Dorrs antics have become something of a joke at the Statehouse, where hes eschewed important legislative announcements to set up his tripod in the hall and film himself for supporters. He recently took his trademark bushy beard on camera to claim that George Lang, a Republican Ohio state representative and chair of the House Criminal Justice Committee, had voted against stand your ground legislation in 2018 and let a similar measure stall after it was filed one year later. In fact, Lang voted in favor of a bill containing stand your ground in 2018 before that provision was removed by the Senate. Lang co-sponsored the measure introduced the following year and, in a phone interview, he said the bill didnt advance because neither of the primary sponsors requested a hearing.

I did not watch the video at all, so I dont know what hes talking about, but if he inferred in any way that I have ever voted against stand your ground legislation, thats a bald-faced lie, Lang said in a telephone interview. He added that Ohio Gun Owners attacks had cost it a potential ally. From an ideological perspective, I probably line up with that group on about 90 percent of the issues, but I do not in any way, shape, or form condone the tactics that they use.

Gun rights advocates whove watched the brothers at work hope they will leave the game. Turf wars and funding battles are common in the nonprofit world, but the Dorrs unpopularity among would-be allies is remarkable, and underscores their penchant for sabotage. Their all-or-nothing approach dispenses with political strategizing and coalition-building in favor of a scorched-earth plan likely to be counterproductive.

We are familiar with their tactics: Theyre a fundraising organization, and they use the money for themselves, said Jerry Henry, the executive director of GeorgiaCarry.Org, a pro-gun organization thats grappled with the Dorrs Georgia chapter. Theyll introduce a piece of legislation and then come out against everybody who can pass that legislation for them.

Since the enactment of Windschitls stand your ground law in Iowa, Aaron Dorr has channeled his energies into advocating constitutional carry, which abolishes permitting requirements for carrying handguns in public. But as lawmakers rallied votes for constitutional carry legislation in 2019, Dorr attacked committee leaders whose support was crucial to moving it forward. Republican Jason Schultz, whod been guiding the bill through the state Senate, was so appalled he yanked it from consideration and then read a statement vowing to never back any bill Dorr put his hands on. Schultzs colleagues applauded.

Were fighting for our members and were saving them so much membership dues, so much money by doing it for pennies on the dollar because we love watching politicians cry.

Ben Dorr

In a phone interview, Schultz said the Dorr brothers were mostly concerned about their bottom line. Theyre only throwing gas on the fire to generate more donations, contributions, and memberships, Schultz said. I used to think they were really bad lobbyists; it turns out theyre working against the cause they claim to be fighting for.

Nonprofits are required to disclose details about yearly revenues and expenses on publicly available tax returns if their gross receipts are more than $50,000. The Internal Revenue Service can yank a groups tax-exempt status or levy fines if vendors, board members, or executives improperly enriched themselves at the expense of an organizations mission.

Tax returns for the Dorrs gun rights groups show they have seldom received compensation despite reporting that they worked as many as 70 hours per week. One of the few exceptions was in 2018, when Chris Dorr reported earning $30,000 from Ohio Gun Owners. Aaron Dorr has disclosed a total of less than $10,000 in pay since Iowa Gun Owners formed more than a decade ago.

But a closer look through the Dorrs statements and public records shows donations are steered to the brothers in multiple ways. One of the primary channels involves a for-profit consulting and direct mail business, Midwest Freedom Enterprises L.L.C. The brothers recently cut an hour-long video in which they took viewers on a tour of the warehouse where Midwest Freedom Enterprises is ostensibly headquartered, showing off some of the gadgetry they use to print, fold, and stuff mailers into envelopes.

Aaron and Chris Dorr spoke in the video about launching the company in the early days of Iowa Gun Owners because it was cheaper to cram mailboxes with solicitations if they created them in-house. At one point, Ben Dorr held up a sheet of paper and read off the amountnearly $125,000Minnesota Gun Rights paid for direct mail and postage pulverizing those anti-gun candidates and keeping members informed in 2016. The price tag would have been twice as high if not for Midwest Freedom Enterprises, he said.

And if these politicians dont like it, we frankly dont give a crap. We dont give a damn what you think, Ben Dorr said. Were fighting for our members and were saving them so much membership dues, so much money by doing it for pennies on the dollar because we love watching politicians cry.

He smirked. At least I do.

Direct mail has long been a favored fundraising tactic on the right. The Trace and The Daily Beast analyzed seven gun rights groups in the brothers network that had filed at least one detailed financial statement with the Internal Revenue Service between 2014 and 2018. The examination showed that these groups collectively spent more than $1.9 million on direct mail, postage, and related costs, accounting for almost half of their cumulative expenses.

Most of that moneynearly $1.1 millioncame from Iowa Gun Owners, Minnesota Gun Rights, and Ohio Gun Owners, nonprofits managed directly by the Dorr brothers. According to their video, those three groups use Midwest Freedom Enterprises for their direct mail. Over that same five-year period, Iowa Gun Owners spent another $300,000 on management expenses, duties also performed by Midwest Freedom Enterprises, statements indicate.

Elections have also been a boon for the brothers mail business. In Iowa, candidates and political action committees paid $226,000 to Midwest Freedom Enterprises between 2010 and 2016, according to campaign finance records. At least about 30 percent$67,000of those funds had been contributed to the Iowa Gun Owners PAC and other committees controlled by Aaron Dorr or his close associates.

In a video flagged by cleveland.com, Ben Dorr said hes gotten a cut of the consulting fees paid by Minnesota Gun Rights. Tax returns show Minnesota Gun Rights spent more than $163,000 on consulting between 2014 and 2018. Consulting cost Ohio Gun Owners and Iowa Gun Owners an additional $109,000 over the same timeframe.

Minnesota Gun Rights once faced legal action from a state Republican lawmaker when the group continued to disseminate mailers bearing his signature after hed ordered them to stop. That lawmaker later joined 15 of his colleagues in issuing an open letter denouncing the fakers and fraudsters who were trying to take advantage of gun rights supporters while doing nothing to actually advance the cause.

The IRS revoked the tax-exempt status for Minnesota Gun Rights in 2016 after it failed to file several years worth of tax returns. Nevertheless, Minnesota Gun Rights continued promoting itself as an active nonprofit. When confronted by reporters from a local Fox affiliate in 2019, Ben Dorr dismissed questions about the discrepancy as fake newsonly to later acknowledge that Minnesota Gun Rights had indeed fallen behind. The group filed the missing returns, and its status was restored.

Throughout their existence, Iowa Gun Owners and Ohio Gun Owners have never reported paying for fundraising. At Minnesota Gun Rights, meanwhile, tax returns show that 90 percentnearly $542,000of all the funds spent between 2016 and 2018 went toward raising more money, a share far exceeding industry standards. The Better Business Bureau has recommended that fundraising should account for no more than 35 percent of a nonprofits expenditures.

What the Dorrs are doing goes far beyond what I would ever recommend to a client, said Hubay, the Ohio attorney and nonprofit compliance expert. 501(c)(4) organizations are supposed to be about advocacy and lobbying for legislation, but the Dorrs seem to be focused on generating contributions and then funneling those resources to themselves through management fees and direct mail. Its definitely suspicious.

As tax-exempt social-welfare organizations under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, the brothers groups are different from charities in that they can spend money swaying voters toward specific candidates, as long as thats not their primary purpose. Groups must report the amount they spent on such activities to the IRS and may have to pay a tax.

Forms for the Dorrs groups show they have never reported engaging in political campaignseven while theyve solicited funds for the explicit purpose of boosting or defeating candidates. At Iowa Gun Owners, Aaron Dorr thanked donors for funding a $150,000 election program aimed at targeted races across the state, and in a separate instance, he complained about being betrayed by a state senator for whom his group had bought TV and radio ads, along with 12,000 pieces of direct-mail.

Hubay said the law is hazy about what activities constitute reportable political campaign expenses, but the fact that they described their program as a political program and talked about targeting certain races is something that the IRS could look at as evidence of unreported expenditures.

Meanwhile, the Dorrs keep finding ways to stoke right-wing rage.

On June 9, Chris Dorr issued an Action ALERT to Ohio Gun Owners email subscribers amid nationwide demonstrations against police brutality. Dorrs missive misportrayed the calls for defunding police departments as a campaign by antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs to savage our great nation with lawlessness. He added: I cannot begin to describe the anarchy, the social destruction that would ensue if America disbanded our police forces and let the left-wing nutjobs who run Americas major cities implement their leftwing community-based social solutions.

Dorr went on to denounce Sandy Hook Promisean organization founded by parents of the elementary school children slain in the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticutfor recent expressions in favor of police reform and racial justice. Dorr uged his readers to contact Ohio lawmakers and demand that they vote against a Sandy Hook Promise-backed bill to increase education on violence and suicide prevention in schools.

Once you are finished, please also consider chipping in $10 or $20 to help us cover the continual costs of fighting back against these gun-control bills, Dorr wrote. Every penny you can donate is being put to use immediately in this fight to mobilize more and more Ohians to this fight (sic), and we gratefully appreciate your support!

See the original post here:

Meet the Brothers Behind an Extreme Gun Rights Network Republicans Call a Big Scam - The Daily Beast