Category Archives: Antifa

Among those still in the if-everyone-would-only-ignore-Trump-hed-simply-go-away camp, Joe Biden finally realized that the concept wasnt working. Not only was it not working, it was a disaster. And not only has it been a disaster, theres no easy way to fix it.

Some are saying Biden gave the best speech of his presidency Thursday on the anniversary of January 6 OK, a low bar but in this case, there was no need for soaring rhetoric, just plainspoken truth. It was time a year after the Capitol riot/attempted coup and the GOPs continued embrace of the Big Lie for Biden to finally and straightforwardly call out Donald Trump and his followers/enablers for holding a dagger to the throat of American democracy.

In his speech, Biden basically read out an indictment of the former president, which was, in effect, an indictment of the Trump-fully-owned Republican Party and the only plank in its platform, which is to promulgate the Big Lie. For Trump, that is basically the entirety of his message. That is, if you dont include his attacks on the media, antifa, Black Lives Matter, Democrats, Liz Cheney, immigrants, refugees from shithole countries, Adam Schiff and any Republican who dared to vote to impeach him or convict him or simply question the holy writ that is the Big Lie.

Biden called Trump a sore loser loser being for Trump the most damning epithet whose bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution. He cant accept he lost.

For Bidens part, he ran on unifying the country and couldnt seem to accept the notion that to still believe in bipartisanship is a suckers game. When nearly three in five Republicans still tell pollsters that they dont think your election was legitimate, its past time to change tactics.

Not a single Republican senator showed up for ceremonies commemorating all that was lost on that January day when the Capitol came under siege. Only one Republican House member the now-exiled-from-her-own-party Liz Cheney, accompanied by her father, Dick showed up. When you see Democrats lining up to praise Dick Cheney, you know the world has gone either upside down or sideways. A few Republican senators did leave January 6 statements, a very few. Where was Mitt Romney, whose life may have been saved as he himself has often expressed by a brave member of the Capitol police? As the New Yorkers Susan Glasser put it of the Republican boycott: Thats why the story of January 6, 2022, is also the story of the elephant not in the room.

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Maybe the most telling moment of the day came when Ted Cruz who has called the storming of the Capitol a terrorist attack had to go on Tucker Carlsons Fox News program to apologize for telling that truth. It was more groveling than apologizing, actually, but we already knew who holds the real power in Republican politics. The party line is to say either that it was just another tourist-filled day at the Capitol or that the FBI had stoked the insurrection or that the rioters were really antifa. Even in the era of the Big Lie, those talking points cant all be true at once, but no matter.

Biden mentioned Trump 19 times in his speech but never by name, which must have infuriated the former guy, even as he plots his return to power from Elba-al-Margo. And while most Americans believe the Big Lie is, in fact, a big lie, you can hardly expect Bidens words to have any impact on the Trump cultists or those GOP politicians lacking the spine to stand up either to Trump or to his base or to Tucker Carlson.

Read more of Mike Littwins columns.

But they could change the tone of the conversation, which desperately needs changing. Trump is Trump, the carnival-barking demagogic huckster he always has been. There really isnt much to learn there.

What there is to learn is how Trump managed to get elected in the first place, how more than 70 million Americans voted to re-elect him in 2020, how he has been able to tighten his hold on the GOP even when out of power. Ive seen many attempts at explaining all this, but Im not sure weve hit on the answer.

But without taking on Trump directly, you cant really take on the base of Trump cultists, the true believers who have been manipulated maybe duped is the better word by Trump, Hannity, Carlson, Bannon and the rest.

Kyle Clark, the 9News anchor, drew some national attention when he said that the media fails when applying a double standard to politicians like Lauren Boebert, who is so often so outrageous that her unstinting support for lies, Big and Little, is often overlooked because of her constant assault on the truth.

The real truth is that though Boebert may be an extreme example, shes hardly alone. While most of the responsible media now openly call out the Big Lie, they dont often press those Republicans who only sporadically parrot the lie or those who simply refuse to answer when asked about it. For me, this was the most important part of Bidens speech. He credited those courageous men and women in the Republican Party standing against Trumps lies.

But then he came after the not-so-courageous majority, including those who have passed voting laws in 17 Republican-led states Not to protect the vote, Biden said, but to deny it; not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it; not to strengthen or protect our democracy, but because the former president lost.

At this moment, Biden added, we must decide: What kind of nation are we going to be?

Thats all thats at stake, I guess. On Friday, Biden came to Colorado to console survivors of the Marshall fire, encouraging them to hang on to one another. On Tuesday, his role changes. He goes to Atlanta to call for passage of two voter-reform bills, which would counteract some of the damage to be done by those red-state, voter-suppression laws. No Senate Republican is expected to support either bill, meaning neither can pass unless all 50 Democratic senators vote to reform the filibuster rules. Biden, a self-described creature of the Senate, has reluctantly joined that cause. But at this point, at least two Democrats have refused to sign on.

Biden doesnt have to call out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema by name. But he does have to call out those Democrats who worry more about protecting a Senate rule than protecting democracy. Its time. Its past time. How else can Biden legitimately raise the question he asked Thursday: What kind of nation are we going to be?

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow.

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Littwin: It was late coming, but Biden finally said what had to be said of Trump and his enablers - The Colorado Sun

It hasbeen almost one year since a mob supportingnow-former President Donald Trump fueled by baseless voter fraud claims stormed the U.S. Capitolon Jan. 6 in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

The attack led to deaths, injuries andmore than700 arrests, and it temporarily halted Congress' certification of President Joe Bidens Electoral College win. In the following months, a flurry of falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the riot were promoted online, where debunked claimscontinue to circulate.

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With the first anniversary of the Capitol riot approaching, heres a roundup of USA TODAYs fact checksrelating to theinsurrection that touch on election misinformation, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's role in the attack, misleading images and videos, claims about politicians, comparisons to past demonstrations and even false claims that reports predicted the attack.

Capitol rioters charged in the Jan. 6 attack have cited the baseless narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by Democrats.The myth waspromoted by Trump, his closest allies and conservative media personalities, all of whom relied on false claimsabout election technology, vote counting, mail-in ballots and voter turnout.

Biden legally won the presidential race by more than 7 million votes, and his victory was certified by the Electoral College. Hand recounts and independent audits across the country did not change the election's outcome and failed to turn upany evidence of widespread wrongdoing by poll workers or voters.But that still didnt stop people from claiming otherwise.

The claim: The 2020 presidential election was 'rigged'

Our rating: False

A mountain of evidence including lawsuits, recounts, forensic audits and partisan reviewshave all affirmed the election results. Officials from both parties have repeatedly debunked claims of widespread voter fraud. With 306 electoral votes, Biden beat Trump in the election. Read more

The claim: Dominion Voting Systems deleted votes for Trump, switched votes to Biden

Our rating: False

There is no evidence Dominion, a private company supplying voting systems in 28 states, deleted or changed votes in the 2020 election, according to a national coalition and election law experts. A few counties experienced minor technology issues on Election Day, but the errors did not affect the vote counts. Read more

The claim: Several key states had more ballots cast than registered voters

Our rating: False

Data and individual state reporting reviewed by USA TODAY shows no state in the U.S. had more than 100% voter turnout in the 2020 election. Posts claiming differently are using improper data sets or flawed data analysis techniques. Read more

The claim: Nevada's presidential election included duplicate voting, dead voters, fake addresses, noncitizens voting andout of state voters

Our rating: False

Claims about widespread voter fraud in Nevada's 2020 election stem from a failed lawsuit, and a district court concluded that no illegal votes were cast and counted. Biden won Nevada's six electoral votes. Read more.

The claim: An audit 'conclusively shows'voter fraud affected Arizona's election outcome

Our rating: False

An audit of Arizona's 2020 election results conducted by cybersecurity firm Cyber Ninjas did not surface any evidence of widespread voter fraud that changed the election's outcome. The review, along with other handrecounts,confirmed Biden won Maricopa County. Read more.

The claim: An investigation found more 'illegal votes'cast in Wisconsin in 2020 than Joe Biden's margin of victory

Our rating: False

A report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty investigating the integrity of the 2020 election found no evidence of widespread fraud, and the group's findings were misstated online. A hand recount, audit and lawsuits confirmed Biden's victory in Wisconsin. Read more.

Here are more fact-checksanalyzingwhats true and false about the 2020 electionand voting by mail.

Just hours after rioters breached the Capitol, misinformation about what happened spread rapidly on social media, and a false narrative blaming anti-fascist activists for inciting the violence made its way to the House floor that same evening. Many such claims circulated throughout 2021.

The claim: A facial recognition firm claimed Antifa infiltrated pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol

Our rating: False

Claims that members of Antifa disguised as Trump supporters orchestrated the insurrection are baseless and stem from a rumor that a facial recognition company identified left-wing activistsamong the rioters. The technology firm mentioned in the claims refuted the story, and there is no evidence Antifa was responsible for the attack. Read more

The claim: The shirtless man pictured in the Capitol breach is with Antifa and Black Lives Matter

Our rating: False

Jake Angeli, a man who was pictured at the Capitol shirtless wearing a fur hat with horns, is a well-known Trump and QAnon supporter he is not tied to Black Lives Matter or Antifa. The claim is part of the false larger conspiracytheory that Trumps supporters were not actually behind the riot. Read more

The claim: A "known Antifa member"was paid $70,000 for his video of the riot

Our rating: Partly false

News outlets paid Utah activist John Sullivan roughly $90,000 for video footage he captured during the Capitol riot, but he is not linked to any anti-fascist groups and has denied being associated with the movement. Read more

The claim: FBI operatives organized the attack on the U.S. Capitol

Our rating: False

Theres no evidence unindicted co-conspirators listed in federal charging documents related to the Jan. 6 attack are undercover FBI agents or federal informants. Legal experts say the term cant be used to describe undercover government operatives. Rioters have been identified by authorities as Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists and members of far-right groups. Read more

The claim: CNN employees took part in the riot

Our rating: False

Posts claiming CNN employees were among the Capitol rioters are unfounded. Jade Sacker, mentioned in the claims, is a freelance journalist and has never worked for the cable news outlet. Read more

The claim: A man died froma heart attack after accidentallyusinga stun gun on himself at the Capitol riot

Our rating: False

Kevin Greeson of Alabama died on the Capitol grounds after a heart attack, and his wife told USA TODAY he had a history of high blood pressure. He did not accidentally stun himself.Read more

The claim: The FBI told a Senate committee that the FBI did not recover any guns at the riot

Our rating: Missing context

Jill Sanborn, assistant director of the FBIs counterterrorism division,said the FBI did not recover any firearms at the Capitol riot. But she also noted that she cannot speak for other law enforcement agencies. The Department of Justicecharged rioters with bringing firearms to the Capitol grounds. Read more

Social media users have triedto shift blame by spreading false claims aboutPelosi in the wake of the Capitol attack.

The claim: Pelosi rejected Trump's request for 10,000 National Guard troops to be deployed before Jan. 6

Our rating: False

Trumps claim that Pelosi blocked his formal request for 10,000 National Guard troops ahead of the "Stop the Steal" rally isfalse. The Pentagon said there is no record of the request, and Pelosis office said she was not contacted about deploying the National Guard. Testimony and a Department of Defense memo about Jan. 6 also confirms that. Read more

The claim: Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on Jan. 6

Our rating: False

Pelosi was not in charge of the Capitol Police at the time of the riot. The agency is overseen by the Capitol Police Board, which is made up of the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the Capitol architect. Read more.

The claim: Nancy Pelosi refuses to take responsibility for causing the insurrection

Our rating: False

In short, Pelosi wasn't responsible. Capitol Police told USA TODAY that committees from the House and Senate and a Capitol Police Board are responsible for overseeing operations, not Pelosi. Read more

The claim: Pelosi won't let Capitol Police testify about what happened on Jan. 6

Our rating: False

The claim that Pelosi is blocking testimonyis a reversal of what actually happened. Republican lawmakers tried to stop a hearing from taking place, while Democrats pushed for one. Read more

The claim: Special forcestook Nancy Pelosi's laptop during the riot

Our rating: False

A laptop belonging to the House speaker's office was stolen by pro-Trump rioters, not special forces. Read more

Photos and videosof the Capitol riot went viral online. But in many cases, the footage was doctored, outdated or unrelated to Jan. 6.

The claim: Police officer is the man who carrieda Confederate flag during the Capitol riot

Our rating: False

An image purporting to show a police officer carrying a Confederate flag during the attack is false. The man in the photo was identified by the FBI as Kevin Seefried, who was charged in connection with the riot. He is not a police officer.

The claim: Capitol workers threw away an American flag as they prepared for the transition of power

Our rating: Missing context

Capitol employees did not throw out an American flag in preparation for Bidens inauguration. The photo was captured in the aftermath of the riot. Read more

The claim: Video shows Trump family celebrating the riot from a nearby tent

Our rating: False

Days after the riot, a video went viral purporting to show the Trump family celebrating amid the attack. But monitors seen in the clip as well asa timeline of the events on Jan. 6 prove the video was captured before Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol.Read more

The claim: Chuck Norris was at the Capitol riot

Our rating: False

Martial artist and actor Chuck Norris did not take part in the riot. His manager told USA TODAY he was on his ranchin Texas on Jan. 6 and confirmed that a photo on social media of a man resembling Norrisis not actually him. Read more

The claim: Images show pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., in January

Our rating: False

Photos of crowds at the 2018 March for Our Lives rally and 2017 Womens March were passed off on social media as pro-Trump demonstrations on Jan. 6. Read more

The claim: Image shows a caravan of Trump supporters traveling to Washington

Our rating: False

A photo purporting to show dozens of vehicles heading to Washington to protest the presidential election results on Jan. 6 was actually taken in San Francisco at a pro-Trump truck rally inOctober 2020. Read more

The claim: A viral video shows a man screaming about being placed on the no-fly listbecause of the riot at the Capitol

Our rating: False

A video shows a man being asked to leave an American Airlines flight for a mask violation, not for being placed on the no-fly list because of the Capitol riot. Read more

The claim: Demonstrators erected a cross in front of the Capitol

Our rating: Missing context

A photo showspro-Trump demonstrators erected a cross in front of the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, not in Washington.Read more

The claim: The insurrection was an event hosted by the Stanford Federalist Society

Our rating: Satire

An image of an event flyer claiming the Capitol riot took place during astudent-run Stanford Federalist Society meeting with guest speakers Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is fake. Read more

A number of hoaxes concerning the whereabouts of politicians during the Capitol riot and their responses circulated online afterthe insurrection.

The claim:Acting Pardon Attorney Rosalind Sargent-Burns said Trump was "strongly considering"pardoning Capitol rioters

Our rating: False

Trump didnt pardon Capitol rioters during his final days in office. At the time, the Justice Department issued a statement saying it was not involved in efforts to pardon people involved with the heinousacts" that took place at the Capitol. Read more

The claim: Rep. Lauren Boebert took a photo with rioters before a tour of Capitol on Jan. 5

Our rating: False

An image claiming to show Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., with rioters at the Capitol a day before the attack was actually captured in December 2019 at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. She was posing with members of several pro-Trump groups. Read more

The claim: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that Capitol rioters stole her shoes

Our rating: False

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Fact check roundup: Debunking false narratives about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot - USA TODAY

When the insurrectionists of 6 January rampaged through the Capitol, congressman Andrew Clyde of Georgia helped barricade a door, and he fled when the rest of Congress did. A photograph shows him looking panicky, mouth wide open and arm gesticulating wildly, behind what appears to be a security team member with a gun drawn, defending him. But a few months later he declared: Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures. You know, if you didnt know the TV footage was a video from 6 January, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.

Clydes account of 6 January might be a little more preposterous than those of his fellow Republican legislators. But they all joined him in pretending nothing much had happened and objecting to the investigation of the days events. After all, they were partly responsible, most of them. It was elected Republicans who supported and spread the earlier lies that Donald Trump had won the election, the lies that fed the insurrection; and then they lied some more about their own words and actions before, during and after. In the immediate aftermath, the then Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was angry and shaken, declaring: The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president. Then he too began the project of walking it all back.

What has ensued is a cover-up in plain sight. When Trump took office in 2016, Republicans faced a crisis: their party had won, but only by ushering to a minority victory one of historys most extravagantly dishonest men. They had to stand with him or against him, and most chose to stand with him. Others chose to fade away by resigning or going home when their terms were up.

Almost none of them stood up against him. The famously vindictive Trump punished any signs of disloyalty, so they were loyal. And to be loyal meant joining him in corruption and lies. If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it, Lindsey Graham tweeted in the spring of 2016, before becoming one of Trumps most grovelling sycophants.

In a way, the sycophants got stronger: if truth restrains us and links us together, they unchained themselves. We make contracts with each other with words; we share information, make agreements and commitments, hold each other accountable and show who we are. Lies are broken contracts, in which words misrepresent what the speaker knows; they aim to delude, exploit and divide. The liar may get stronger, but the social fabric gets weaker. That strength is precarious, so lies have be piled atop lies to keep accountability at a distance.

Of course, politicians of all stripes are notoriously shifty, and the Republican party had no great reputation for honesty previously. Many of their campaigns long before Trump could politely be called misleading. But after 2016, they clustered around the gaslighter-in-chief like bugs around a streetlight. I often think of what Trump did as disinhibition: the pallid, bashful untruths of yore were replaced by baldfaced outrages. They lost any compunction about openly contradicting themselves, and did so often, never more than with the insurrection of 6 January.

As the mob was smashing its way into the building, congressman Jim Jordan had been on the house floor accusing election officials in six states of corruption. A week later he declared: Ive never said that this election was stolen. But, as CNN noted: Jordan claimed in October that Democrats were working to steal the election and spoke at a Stop the Steal rally in Pennsylvania two days after the election. In December, he said he didnt know how he could be convinced that Trump didnt actually win the election.

During the hours when the mob rampaged through the US Capitol building, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy called up Trump, reportedly furious. The president bears responsibility for the attack, he said shortly thereafter. Then he devoted himself to winning back Trumps favour and playing down what had happened. Pressed on whether he regretted working to overturn President Bidens 2020 victory, Mr McCarthy took the position that he did no such thing, the New York Times reported in April.

Then he worked hard to sabotage the investigation into what had happened, by trying to put two congressmen most loyal to the big lie, Jim Banks and the ever-disruptive champion shouter Jim Jordan, on the committee. The house majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, blocked their appointment. Banks was later caught sending out letters, seeking information from government agencies, claiming he was the ranking Republican on the 6 January committee, of which he was never in fact a member.

By September, McCarthy was full team cover-up: the Guardians Hugo Lowell noted that McCarthy threatened to retaliate against any telecommunications company that complied with the records requests of the congressional committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. Thats not technically lying, but its certainly an attempt to prevent the truth from being known. Theres a lot to cover up, especially if you dont want the committee to find out the extent to which Congress itself was involved in the attack on Congress.

The politicians who fled in fear thereafter threw themselves into denying the threat and protecting its chief instigator. No one did so more slavishly than the then vice-president, Mike Pence, who was pressured before and during 6 January to violate the law and exercise a power he did not possess to change the election outcome. If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency, Trump had tweeted early that day; and then, Mike Pence didnt have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution. At Trumps instigation, the mob was chanting: Hang Mike Pence!

Pence trivialised the event when he told the Christian Broadcasting Network: Im not going to allow the Democrats to use one tragic day in January to distract attention from their failed agenda and the failed policies of the Biden administration. Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonnell, who was seriously injured defending the politicians, told NPR: That one day in January almost cost my life. And we did everything possible to prevent him [Pence] from being hanged and killed in front of his daughter and his wife. And now hes telling us that that one day in January doesnt mean anything. Its pathetic. Its a disgrace.

One of the first lies to explode out of the insurrection was that somehow the attack on the Capitol was the work of Antifa. The very idea of Antifa, as they used it, was an older lie, a transformation of scattered individuals and impromptu groups of antifascists into a cohesive sinister gang that could be blamed for pretty much anything, anywhere. The New York Times described how on 6 January the right was claiming that the insurrection had been led by Antifa, not Trump supporters.

By the end of the day, Fox was promoting it, the claim was all over Twitter, and: Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had stood on the ransacked House floor and claimed that many rioters were members of the violent terrorist group antifa. The claim, the Times added, has hardened into gospel among hard-line Trump supporters, by voters and sanctified by elected officials in the party

That is, they took the position that the riot, which at the time Republican legislators begged the president to stop, was instead a riot by an essentially imaginary leftwing organisation with no conceivable motive to prevent the confirmation of Bidens victory. Now the investigation is closing in on the role that many in Congress played in the attack on Congress. Having fled their own mobs, they are now trying to flee the truth, and relying on the fact that a significant portion of the country prefers the lies.

The Republicans who helped the failed coup along and then dismissed its import are preparing to do it better next time. The Democratic senator Brian Schatz tweeted on Tuesday: They are organizing the next one, not as a secret conspiracy, but as a central organizing principle for the next election. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said: Donald Trump has infected, and thats the appropriate word, the Republican party with his big lie and with his desire to stop democracy. We have no choice but to move forward, by which he meant overturn the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation. 6 January was one confrontation; theres another one coming. The lies may implode at some point, but the liars have to be defeated.

More here:

Republicans are laying a path back to power and paving it with lies - The Guardian

After thousands of posts appeared for weeks on a website called TheDonald.win detailing plans for the 6 January attack on the Capitol, including how to form a wall of death to force police to abandon defensive positions; after Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, warned his senior aides of a Reichstag moment like the 1933 burning of the German parliament that Hitler used to seize dictatorial power; after insurrectionists smashed several ground floor windows of the Capitol, the only ones out of 658 they somehow knew were not reinforced, that allowed rioters to pour inside; after marching to the chamber of the House chanting Hang Mike Pence!; after pounding on the locked doors; and as the Capitol police led members in a run through the tunnels under the Capitol for safe passage to the Longworth Building, Congressman Jody Hice, a Republican of Georgia, raced by a Democratic colleague, who told me Hice was screaming into his phone: You screwed it up, yall screwed it all up!

Hice, an evangelical minister, professor of preaching at a Southern Baptist seminary, and radio talkshow host before his election in 2014, has notably declared that freedom of religion should not apply to Muslims and that the Sandy Hook massacre of 26 people at an elementary school by a deranged shooter occurred because liberals were kicking God out of the public square.

He was tasked to present a challenge to Georgias electors before the joint congressional session convened on 6 January to certify the electoral college victory of Joe Biden. Hice performed his assignment as part of the far-rightwing Republican faction, the Freedom Caucus, directed by Congressman Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who was in constant touch that day with Mark Meadows, the Trump chief of staff and former Freedom Caucus member, and a watchful Trump himself. Just as the violent insurrection launched, and paramilitary groups spearheaded medieval style hand-to-hand combat against the police and burst into the Capitol, Hice posted on Instagram a photo of himself headed into the House chamber, with the caption, This is our 1776 moment.

To whom was Hice shouting that yall had screwed it all up? It seems likely it was Meadows. And what had they screwed up? They had screwed up the coup that led to the insurrection.

The insurrection was not the coup itself. It was staged as the coup was failing. The insurrection and the coup were distinct, but the insurrection emerged from the coup. It has been a common conceptual error to consider the insurrection alone to be the coup. The coup, however, was an elaborate plot developed over months to claim that the votes in the key swing states were fraudulent, for Mike Pence as the presiding officer of the joint session of the Congress to declare on that basis that the certification of the presidential election on the constitutionally mandated date could not be done, to force that day to pass into a twilight zone of irresolution, for House Republicans to hold the floor brandishing the endless claims of fraud, to move the decision to the safe harbor of the House of Representatives, voting by states, with a majority of 26 controlled by the Republican party, to deny both the popular vote and the electoral college vote to retain Trump in office, for protests to breakout at federal buildings, and for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose law and order.

Presumably, any gesture to forestall the coup by the joint chiefs would be communicated at once to Trump from his agent, Kash Patel, a former aide to far-right representative Devin Nunes), sworn enemy of the Deep State, embedded as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, and presidential orders would be issued to countermand. The rally on 6 January will be wild, Trump promised was a last-ditch attempt to intimidate the vice-president with the threat of violence into fulfilling his indispensable role in the coup, to lend support to the Republicans objecting to certification, and to delay the proceedings into a constitutional no mans land.

The insurrection may also have been intended to provide a pretext for precipitating clashes with anti-Trump demonstrators, following the example of the street violence and multiple knife stabbings perpetrated in Washington by the neo-Nazi Proud Boys chanting 1776 on 12 December, and which would then be an excuse for invoking the Insurrection Act. In the criminal contempt citation of Meadows for his refusal to testify before the select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, the committee noted that Meadows sent an email the day before the assault to an unnamed individual that the national guard would be present to protect pro-Trump people and that many more would be available on standby. From whom would pro-Trump people be protected?

In the midst of the attack, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, managed to reach a preoccupied Trump, who was riveted viewing the unfolding chaos on television at the White House, closely monitoring whether the coup would finally succeed, taking phone calls from Jim Jordan and a host of collaborators, and fending off urgent pleas to call it off from his daughter Ivanka. Trumps first reply to McCarthy was to repeat the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol, according to the Republican representative Jaime Herrera Beutler.

McCarthy argued: Its not Antifa, its Maga. I know. I was there. Well, Kevin, said Trump, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are. Who the fuck do you think you are talking to? McCarthy inquired in an uncharacteristic display of testosterone that soon was replaced with his regular order of servility before Trump and Jordan. The absence of antifa, and McCarthys refusal in the heat of the moment to lend credence to the phantom menace, may have condemned any false-flag thought of invoking the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, the bayonet-ready national guard idly awaited orders for hours to quell the actual insurrection.

The coup was thwarted by the justice departments rejection of Trumps strong-arm tactics, the Pentagons denunciation of any hint of imposing martial law, the rebuff by state election officials to Trumps claims of fraud, and, finally, Pences refusal to utter his scripted lines. At the 6 January rally, Trump said: I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so. Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. But Pence had already stated that he would do no such thing. Then, Trump said: And if you dont fight like hell, youre not going to have a country any more So, were going to, were going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And were going to the Capitol The insurrection was on.

The coup was hardly Trumps full-blown brainchild. It was packaged for him. It was adapted, enhanced and intensified from longstanding Republican strategies for voter suppression. The coup was a variation on the theme from a well-worn playbook. Trump eagerly grasped for the plan handed to him.

More than a year before the election of 2020, in August 2019, conservative operatives in closely connected rightwing organizations began preparing a strategy for disputing election results. A Political Process Working Group focused on election law and ballot integrity was launched by Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), heavily funded by the Koch brothers dark money syndicate, the Donors Trust.

Nelson is also a member of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP), composed of more than 400 rightwing Republican leaders, a roster that includes Ginni Thomas, the ubiquitous rightwing zealot and wife of supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, and Leonard Leo, vice-president of the conservative Federalist Society and the Judicial Crisis Network, a $250m dark money operation to pack the federal courts and deny Democratic appointments to the bench, according to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehead.

The investigative reporter Anne Nelson, in her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes the CNP as a nexus of the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of rightwing Republican political operatives.

A board member of the CNP, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer at the center of a host of rightwing groups, assumed control over the Alec-originated project and moved it forward. She is also a board member of the Bradley Foundation, which is a major funder of conservative organizations, including Alec and the CNP. Most importantly, she has directed the Bradley Foundation to serve as the chief funder of a group of which she is chairman, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (Pilf), a principal conservative organization seeking to purge voter rolls of minorities and immigrants, file suits that accuse local election officials of fraud, and attempt to overturn election results. At a February 2020 meeting of the CNP devoted to election tactics, the Pilf president, J Christian Adams, advised: Be not afraid of the accusations that youre a voter suppressor, youre a racist and so forth.

Mitchell was instrumental in devising the blueprint for the coup. On 10 December 2020, 65 leading members of the CNP signed a succinct step-by-step summary of the completely elaborated plot that went little noticed except on the coup-friendly rightwing website Gateway Pundit:

The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups violated the constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories. There is no doubt President Donald J Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect. Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the electoral college to support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean electoral college slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice-President Biden from these states. Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the US constitution.

Mitchell was by then a Trump campaign legal adviser, with direct access to Trump and working on the Georgia challenge to the results. The Trump campaign had filed a lawsuit a week earlier, on 4 December, claiming there were literally tens of thousands of illegal votes. On 30 December she sent the petition to Meadows with 1,800 pages of exhibits of supposed fraud, which Meadows promptly forwarded to the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, who was under tremendous pressure from Trump to intervene on his behalf to throw out the election results.

Pure insanity, the acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, told Rosen. Meadows pressured Rosen again on 1 January. Can you believe this? Rosen wrote Donoghue. I am not going to respond The next day, Trump called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to instruct him to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the vote deficit] we have, because we won the state. Cleta Mitchell was on the call with Trump. Well, Cleta, how do you respond to that? Maybe you tell me? asked Trump. She accused Raffensperger of withholding records that would prove there were more than 20,000 fraudulent votes and rigged voting machines. All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes, said Trump.

On 4 January, Trump brought Pence to the Oval Office to be pressured not to certify the results by a former Chapman University law professor, John Eastman, who was also a director of the Pilf that Mitchell chaired, and had been recruited to play professor to the slow-learning Pence, the Pygmalion of the putsch. Eastman had written a memo, January 6 scenario, laying out precisely how Pence should conduct the stoppage of the electoral college count to create a stalemate that would give the state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate slate of electors

Eastmans memo filled in stage directions for Pence that followed the well-developed coup plot. All Pence had to do was repeat the lines he was given: the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain. His general counsel, Greg Jacob, however, informed him that if he obeyed Trump he would betray his oath to uphold our laws and the constitution of the United States. That was a fools errand.

Trump electors in the swing states had already met on 14 December to prepare to usurp the Biden ones. That day Trump summoned William Barr to the White House to demand his support for claims that the election returns in the swing states were fraudulent. Barr would have undoubtedly been aware of the meeting of the Trump electors rehearsing their part in the coup. Long having done Trumps bidding from consciously lying about the Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to aid Trump onward, he now reached a line he would not cross and told Trump that his assertions of fraud were bullshit. And then he resigned. He would have no part of the coup. In came Rosen, who was subjected to rounds of coercion.

When Mitchells role was disclosed, the Washington law firm of Foley & Lardner where she was a partner forced her to resign on 5 January, the day before the insurrection. She had neglected to tell her partners of her work for Trump. The Senate judiciary committee, in its report, released on 7 October 2021, Subverting Justice: How the Former President and His Allies Pressured DoJ to Overturn the 2020 Election, recommended that Mitchells activities warrant further investigation.

The sweeping nature of the coup, involving Republican operatives, major Republican donors, organizations and members of the Congress is starkly laid out in documents the House investigating committee has obtained under subpoena.

The production of documents from Meadows revealed a 38-slide PowerPoint presentation entitled Options for 6 JAN, prepared by Phil Waldron, a retired army colonel expert in psychological warfare and proliferator of conspiracy theories who worked with Trumps lawyers. Waldron said he spoke with Meadows maybe eight to 10 times and briefed members of Congress. Besides reiterating the basic elements of the coup VP Pence rejects the electors Waldron added that China and Venezuela had INFLUENCE and CONTROL over US Voting infrastructure in at least 28 States. He urged that all electronic ballots be declared invalid and that Trump should Declare National Security Emergency.

Bernard Kerik, working with Trumps attorney Rudy Giuliani to spin fantasies of fraud, turned over to the House committee under subpoena a document, Strategic Communications Plan, to educate the public on the fraud numbers and to disregard the fraudulent vote count and certify the duly-elected President Trump. Replete with fallacious assertions (Fulton County, GA, video of suitcases of fraudulent ballots), it detailed the extensive reach of the big lie campaign, encompassing Identified Legislative Leaders in each swing state, legal teams in the key states, and ranked social media influencers to spread the message: YOU CANNOT LET AMERICA ITSELF BE STOLEN BY CRIMINALS. Kerik, a convicted felon, guilty of numerous crimes from tax fraud to lying under oath, rose from Giulianis driver to New York City police commissioner and incredibly the minister of the interior of Iraq, before serving a four-year sentence in Rikers Island jail. Like convicted felons Mike Flynn, Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, he was granted a pardon by Trump that allowed him to participate in the coup with impunity.

Though under subpoena, Kerik refused to turn over to the House committee a document entitled DRAFT LETTER FROM POTUS TO SEIZE EVIDENCE IN THE INTEREST OF NATIONAL SECURITY FOR THE 2020 ELECTIONS. The date on Keriks letter, 17 December 2020, was the day that former general Mike Flynn, Trumps disgraced national security adviser, gave an interview to the far-right Newsmax calling on Trump to seize every single one of the voting machines around the country, and take military capabilities in the key states to basically rerun an election. Flynns notions were echoed in the Waldron PowerPoint and in the Kerik letter.

On 18 December, Flynn met at the White House with Trump at which he proposed invoking the National Emergency Act. (Flynn had circulated a call for Limited Martial Law To Hold New Election weeks earlier, on 1 December.) The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, and the army chief of staff, Gen James McConville, issued a statement on the day Flynn met with Trump disavowing Flynn and any suggestion of martial law. There is no role for the US military in determining the outcome of an American election, they stated.

The criminal citation of Meadows for contempt from the House committee to the justice department notes that he was in nonstop communication throughout the day of January 6 with Kash Patel at the Pentagon, and among other things, Mr Meadows apparently knows if and when Mr Trump was engaged in discussions regarding the national guards response to the Capitol riot. The House resolution also references Meadows contacts with Republican state legislators, private individuals who planned and organized a January 6 rally, and members of Congress prepared to object to the election certification a panoply of people involved in the coup. The committee also released texts from Fox News personalities to Meadows on 6 January imploring him to get Trump to stop the insurrection. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy, wrote an anxious Laura Ingraham. The familiar relationship suggested the intertwining of Fox News as the chief outlet for Trump messaging about the big lie up to the insurrection. But the ties went further.

On 4 January 2022, the House committee requested the voluntary testimony of Sean Hannity as a fact witness. The committee wrote him that it had in its possession dozens of texts from Hannity to Meadows indicating that you had advance knowledge regarding President Trumps and his legal teams planning for January 6th, and that you were expressing concerns and providing advice to the president and certain White House staff regarding that planning. On the evening of 5 January, Hannity texted Meadows: Pence pressure. WH counsel will leave. He also appeared to have had a conversation directly with president on the evening of January 5th (and perhaps at other times) regarding his planning for January 6th. What did Sean Hannity know and when did he know it?

When the riot was finally subdued and the Congress reconvened to certify the election, the House Republicans still rose to object. Hice, with QAnon proponent representative Marjorie Taylor Greene standing at his side, declared: Myself, members of the Georgia delegation and some 74 of my Republican colleagues object to the electoral votes from the state of Georgia on the grounds the election conducted on November 3 was faulty and fraudulent due to unilateral actions by the secretary of state to unlawfully change the states election process.

Of the thousands involved in the Capitol riot, 725 so far have been charged with various crimes. But those sentenced, mostly true believer foot soldiers of the Trump mob, were not the originators of the coup, the most dangerous sedition against the constitutional order since secession. Nor were the leaders of the militias, of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, present at the creation.

The 6 January attack was a spawn of the coup; it was its effect, not its alpha and omega. Only those incited to sacrifice themselves in the Picketts Charge of the insurrection have paid the price, but none of those who conceived the coup a year earlier have been brought before a federal grand jury, charged, or apparently are even being investigated by the Department of Justice.

It would be as if only the Watergate burglars were prosecuted and that was the end of the affair. All of the higher-ups involved in the scandal chief of staff Bob Haldeman, his deputy John Ehrlichman, attorney general John Mitchell, the entire cast of complicit characters and President Richard Nixon would have remained untouched in power.

There will be more to know about the coup from the House investigation. The committee has gathered more than 30,000 documents and interviewed more than 300 witnesses. Two, three, many John Deans may testify before the cameras. Criminal referrals will probably be made.

The coup of 2020 gestated within the central organizations of the Republican right, and it was a learning experiment for the Republican party as a whole. Hice has announced he will run in the Republican primary against Raffensperger for Georgia secretary of state. He is only one of the Republicans focused on taking over the states electoral apparatus to ensure that the next time there will be no obstacles. By December, Republicans had proposed 262 bills to politicize, criminalize, or interfere with the non-partisan administration of elections, with 32 becoming law in 17 states, according to the non-profit Protect Democracy group.

The threat of intimidation, coercion and intimidation hangs over American politics. The coup may have failed, but it rolls on.

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The insurrection is only the tip of the iceberg - The Guardian

Stickers reading "Fck Antifa" are stuck on a broken window at the U.S. Capitol after the building was breached by rioters on Jan. 6. Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

Stickers reading "Fck Antifa" are stuck on a broken window at the U.S. Capitol after the building was breached by rioters on Jan. 6.

Nearly as soon as the tear gas settled on the U.S. Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, the conspiracy theory began to pick up steam.

"Earlier today, the Capitol was under siege by people who can only be described as antithetical to the MAGA movement," Laura Ingraham told her viewers on Fox News that night. "They were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd."

Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson echoed similar sentiments on Fox that night, and in the day following the attack, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Rep. Paul Gosar, R.-Ariz., and Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., all repeated the conspiracy theory as well. The morning after the riot, so did Rush Limbaugh.

In those 24 hours, the lie that the rioters were actually antifa was mentioned more than 400,000 times online. It peaked on the anonymous imageboard site 4chan around 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, according to the Social Media Analysis Toolkit, which is around the same time that the barriers at the Capitol were breached. Then the sowing of doubt spread further: first on Parler and Twitter, then on Reddit, then on Fox News and in the halls of Congress.

There was no evidence for these claims then, and there still isn't any now. Shortly after the riot, the FBI directly refuted the conspiracy theory, saying there is "no indication" that antifa a decentralized collection of far-left groups and individuals was involved. To date, no one who has since been charged in the attack appears to have any connection to the anti-fascist movement either.

Still, the idea has stuck. On Feb. 12, one of former President Donald Trump's attorneys echoed it at Trump's second impeachment trial. On Feb. 23, during the first hearing regarding the breach at the Capitol, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., blamed the attack on "fake Trump protesters" and "agents provocateurs" presumed to be antifa or "leftist agitators." And in a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released last week, 58% of Trump voters said they viewed the events of Jan. 6 as "mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters."

But an NPR analysis of more than 280 people charged in the Capitol insurrection reveals a far different picture of the attack than the one painted by this baseless conspiracy theory and it comes from the perspective of the rioters themselves.

The individuals charged for their alleged involvement on Jan. 6 show a dogged fixation on antifa, not unlike the right-wing media. More than 1 in 10 specifically mentioned antifa by name regarding Jan. 6 at some point before, during or after the riot, according to court documents. They spoke of antifa to law enforcement but also in text messages, on Facebook, Twitter and Parler, and to some of the people who ultimately turned them in to the FBI.

A handful repeated the conspiracy theory that antifa individuals were among the mob in a significant and organized way, but the vast majority did not, according to NPR's analysis.

In fact, some rioters seemed annoyed that antifa was getting the credit for the Capitol attack, and they took to social media to say so.

"Listen up: I hear so many reports of 'Antifa' was storming the capital [sic] building. Know that every single person who believes that narrative have been DUPED AGAIN!" Ryan Taylor Nichols, a Marine Corps veteran charged in the attack, posted on Facebook on Jan. 7, according to court documents. "Sure, there may have been some 'Antifa' in DC, but there wasn't enough to 'Storm the Capital' [sic] themselves."

Court documents show another man charged in the riot, Brandon Straka, wrote on Twitter on Jan. 6: "It was not Antifa at the Capitol. It was freedom loving Patriots who were DESPERATE to fight for the final hope of our Republic."

Jonathan Gennaro Mellis, charged with assault for allegedly trying to stab police officers with a large stick, put it simply on Facebook: "Don't you dare try to tell me that people are blaming this on antifa and BLM. We proudly take responsibility for storming the Castle."

The birth of a "boogeyman"

Many alleged rioters spoke of antifa as if the movement were an enemy combatant in a war, court documents show, and they were doing so before Jan. 6. The chatter on 4chan ahead of the riot, for instance, wasn't just about "stopping the steal," says Randy Blazak, the chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crime, who has researched extremist movements for 30 years.

"There was also this notion that if you come to Washington, not only [do] you have a chance to stop the steal, you'll get to bulldoze your way through the antifa folks who are there hand in hand with Congress ... so it was kind of a bonus," Blazak says.

Several rioters said they brought a weapon to the Capitol because of the perceived threat of antifa, according to court documents. David Alan Blair, who is accused of hitting a police officer with a lacrosse stick that had a Confederate flag taped to it, told police he had a knife on him because he was "worried about Antifa and other people trying to jump me," according to court documents. Another man charged in the riot, Dana Joe Winn, said he brought a flagpole with him to D.C. to "hit antifa in the head if need be."

Antifa, an abbreviation of the term anti-fascist, has been around as long as fascism itself. But much of the right's focus on antifa recently has come out of the protests against police brutality that erupted last summer in cities across the U.S. and, in particular, the images of violence from those protests, Blazak says. Antifa, he says, became a sort of "boogeyman."

A federal officer fires crowd control munitions at protesters on July 24, 2020, in Portland, Ore. Some critics say media coverage of the protests in Portland and elsewhere last summer helped conflate Black Lives Matter protesters with individuals who associate with antifa. Noah Berger/AP hide caption

A federal officer fires crowd control munitions at protesters on July 24, 2020, in Portland, Ore. Some critics say media coverage of the protests in Portland and elsewhere last summer helped conflate Black Lives Matter protesters with individuals who associate with antifa.

"They point to places like Portland as being hotbeds of left-wing activism and the way Portland went over the summer as sort of a future vision of what's going to happen to America in their mind," Blazak says. "They used antifa as sort of a kind of simplification of the forces they face on the left. And it serves them well because it rallies people."

One man charged in the riot, Joseph Randall Biggs, an Army veteran and an organizer in the Proud Boys hate group, encouraged others to travel to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 rally with specific instructions. He told them not to dress "in colors," according to court documents. And he allegedly directed an online message at antifa groups, whose members are known for wearing black to counterprotests:

"We will be blending in as one of you. You won't see us. You'll even think we are you," Biggs allegedly wrote on Parler on Dec. 29. "We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you. The only thing we'll do that's us is think like us!"

Donovan Crowl, who has been charged with conspiracy, is a Marine veteran and a member of the Ohio State Regular Militia, which has links to the far-right Oath Keepers militia group. On Jan. 5, Crowl received a message on Facebook warning him to "keep eyes on people with Red MAGA hats worn backwards," who were rumored to be antifa. Crowl wrote back: "Thanks Brother, but we are WAY ahead on that. We have infiltrators in Their ranks." He added that they were expecting good "tifa" hunting, according to court documents.

But experts say this warlike rhetoric is not how antifa works.

"Antifa is not one specific group. I often liken it to feminism. There are feminist groups, but feminism itself is not a group. Similarly, there are antifa groups, but antifa itself is not a group," says Mark Bray, a historian and the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. "It's a way of doing politics to oppose the far right. It's a kind of ideology or political tendency that any group of people can put into action. There's no chain of command."

Some people who identify as antifa do use physical confrontation as a strategy, which was well documented at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. But attacks perpetrated by far-left groups like antifa groups make up a small percentage of attacks in the U.S., according to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies of domestic terrorism incidents from Jan. 1 to Aug. 31 of last year. In that time period, 67% of attacks were attributed to far-right groups, compared with the 20% committed by far-left groups. To date, there has been one possible antifa-related murder, which occurred in Portland last summer, according to the Anti-Defamation League.

Far-right demonstrators and counterprotesters face off at the entrance to Emancipation Park (now named Market Street Park) in Charlottesville, Va., during the Unite the Right rally in August 2017. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Far-right demonstrators and counterprotesters face off at the entrance to Emancipation Park (now named Market Street Park) in Charlottesville, Va., during the Unite the Right rally in August 2017.

But despite those differences, Bray says media coverage of antifa at last summer's protests and earlier has created a sort of "horseshoe" effect, framing antifa as the exact opposite of white supremacist or far-right extremist groups.

"I see that notion coming primarily from the political center and from liberal media, which seeks to demonize what they consider to be the extreme left and the extreme right," he says.

The "BLM-Antifa" phenomenon

Once the far right had painted a clear foe in antifa, the umbrella for who fit that description grew larger.

"It's pretty clear that in far-right circles, anyone that they deem an enemy is essentially an enemy combatant and is worthy of being attacked," Bray says. "The rhetoric that the far right uses about queer and trans people or people of color or Jews or the media or antifa is all kind of variations of the same flavor of violence."

That wide net for whom to target was echoed among the Jan. 6 rioters too, according to the court documents analyzed by NPR.

In the months before the Capitol riot, William Calhoun Jr., who was charged in the attack, was making threats on social media, according to court documents, to "kill every last communist who stands in Trump's way." In a detention order after the attack, the judge in his case said Calhoun wanted to "wage a civil war against political opponents whom he described as Democrats, communists, the Deep State, and BLM-Antifa."

The melding of Black Lives Matter protesters, in particular, and antifa into one perceived group also has its roots in last summer's protests, says Shirley Jackson, a sociology professor at Portland State University who studies social movements.

"When the protests were occurring in Portland in summer 2020, the media was not always making it clear that the things that were occurring in downtown Portland were not always about Black Lives Matter. And in fact, some of the events that were happening were clearly done by groups that associate or by individuals that associated themselves with antifa," Jackson says.

She says that this conflation served to demonize the Black Lives Matter movement and that right-wing groups capitalized on that.

"They were aware that this would also turn the tables, if you will, on support for Black Lives Matter," Jackson says. "Once you start to equate Black Lives Matter with antifa, erroneously as it is, for those people who don't know any better, it means that they can have a clear sense of the enemy, and the enemy is anyone who is not them."

And once the enemy is clear, it becomes easier to deflect responsibility away from who is really to blame.

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Antifa Didn't Storm The Capitol. Just Ask The Rioters.

One year after thousands of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to protest and disrupt the certification of Joe Bidens victory in the 2020 presidential election, the results of a new national University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll released today show 71% of Republicans and one-third of the nation continue to believe that Bidens victory was illegitimate, and that Republicans continue to blame Democrats, Antifa and the Capitol Police for the events of Jan. 6. They also oppose both the continuation of law enforcement efforts to prosecute the rioters and attempts to learn more about what happened that day.

The poll of 1,000 respondents found that only 58% of Americans believe that Bidens electoral victory was legitimate, with more than a fifth (22%) saying that it was definitely not legitimate, numbers nearly identical to an April 2021 UMass Amherst Poll (59% / 24%). Only one-fifth of Republicans (21%) view Bidens victory as legitimate.

Given the continued questioning of Bidens victory by prominent Republican elected officials, conservative media personalities and former President Trump, it is no surprise that 7 in 10 Republicans, conservatives and Trump voters view the results of the 2020 election with skepticism, if not outright disbelief, says Tatishe Nteta, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst and director of the poll. However, overall American opinion on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election has remained steady since April, as close to 6 in 10 Americans view Bidens victory as legitimate.

Public officials need to shore up faith in how we vote, says Raymond La Raja, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and associate director of the poll.The top reason voters dont think Bidens victory was legitimate has to do with belief in fraud 83% of the polls respondents cited fraudulent ballots being counted by election officials to help Biden win in several states. Roughly the same percentage 81% claim that absentee ballots from dead people also helped him. Meanwhile, 76% blamed non-citizens and other ineligible voters who cast ballots.These are extremely worrisome perceptions, and improved faith in the electoral process wont happen until Republicans stop saying the election was stolen.

Republicans continue to defend the events of Jan. 6 and those who perpetrated the attacks on the capitol, with 80% describing the events as a protest, while the majority (55%) of all respondents of the poll use the term riot. While 62% of Republicans said the perpetrators were protestors, more than a quarter (26%) deemed the pro-Trump horde patriots, while similar numbers (27%) also said they were Antifa. Democrats, meanwhile, nearly equally described them as insurrectionists, white nationalists and rioters (68% each), a mob (67%) and terrorists (64%).

Women and people of color are more likely to use negative words such as insurrection and riot to describe the events of January 6, La Raja says. Meanwhile older, wealthier, conservatives and whites are more likely to use the term protest than other groups. Very few Trump voters view the events as anything worse than a protest.

Regarding who should be held responsible for the days events, a broad majority of Democrats blame Trump, while Republicans continue to blame the Democratic Party (30%), the Capitol Police (24%) and Antifa (20%), all of which show little movement from Aprils polling results.

As we approach the anniversary of Jan. 6, Americans continue to point at former President Trump who famously told his supporters that morning to fight like hell and if you dont fight like hell youre not going to have a country anymore as the driving force behind the violence that occurred outside and within the U.S. Capitol, Nteta says.

A large plurality of Americans 44% blame Donald Trump for the events of Jan. 6 compared to any other person or group, La Raja says. Only 4% blame Joe Biden. Stunningly, almost one-in-three Republican voters blame the Democratic Party for the events of the day.On the flip side, just 8% of Democrats voters blame the Republican Party. They blame Trump by a wide margin, with 75% saying he is the cause of it all.

While 86% of Democrats support continuing law enforcement efforts to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of the Capitol attack, only 29% of Republicans support them, and 52% replied that they oppose the efforts. Three-quarters of Republicans also said the nation should move on from investigating the events, while 84% of Democrats say we need to learn more about what happened on Jan. 6. Overall, women are more supportive of both law enforcement efforts (61-53) and congressional investigations (62-50) than men.

As we close a year that featured a shocking attack on the U.S. Capitol and persistent, baseless claims by the former president and his sycophantsthat the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen, we continue to see Republicans and Democrats living in diametrically opposed realities, says Alexander Theodoridis, associate professor of political science at UMass Amherst and associate director of the poll.

Perceptions Remain Unchanged Over Past Year

Perceptions of the events of Jan. 6 have remained strikingly stable over the past year, despite the dramatic and disturbing revelations of the January 6 Commission, says Jesse Rhodes, professor of political science at UMass Amherst and associate director of the poll. This stability reveals the remarkable power of ideology and partisanship in shaping these perceptions,even in the face of contrary evidence. Significant majorities of Americans want prosecutions of participants in the events of Jan. 6 and want further investigation of what happened, but a substantial share do not. The commissions work is seriously complicated by polarization over what happened that day, a problem intentionally abetted by politicians.

Sixty-two percent of Republicans and 37% of the polls respondents overall said that former Vice President Mike Pence should have used his role in certifying the electoral vote to challenge Bidens victory as the protestors chanted for his execution that day.

Republicans also downplay the potential severity of the days violence, with 72% saying they believe Pence and members of Congress were not in danger of harm by the Capitols invaders, while 84% of Democrats say that the lawmakers faced physical threat.

Looking ahead to the 2022 midterm elections, 55% of Republicans say that a candidate questioning the legitimacy of Bidens victory would be more likely to receive their vote. Such claims would entice only 23% of independents, however, while 38% of independents said it would make the candidate less likely to garner their support. More than a third of Republicans (36%) said that a candidate refusing to say that Biden was legitimately elected president would make them more likely to vote for the candidate, while half (49%) of independents say it would make the candidate less likely to receive their vote.

Republicans say they will punish GOP candidates who voted to impeach Donald Trump or establish a commission to investigate Jan. 6 and reward those who question Biden's legitimacy, says Theodoridis.

The one question in which the poll found nearly identical bipartisan response pertained to whether Congress and the vice president should hold the power to certify and possibly nullify presidential elections. Forty-four percent of Democrats and 43% of Republicans responded that the power should not rest with the vice president and Congress, while 23% of Republicans and 21% of Democrats said that it should.

The events of Jan. 6 and the Trump administrations attempts to overturn the 2020 election highlighted the potential dangers associated with the nations current process of certifying the presidential election, and a plurality of Americans oppose giving the U.S. Congress and the sitting vice president the power to certify and potentially nullifyelectoral results moving forward, Nteta says. Given the increased politicization of the process by which presidential electoral results are certified, it is not shocking that a plurality of Americans oppose giving this power to the Congress and sitting vice president.

Methodology

This University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll of 1,000 respondents nationwide was conducted by YouGov Dec. 14-20. YouGov interviewed 1036 total respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 1,000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race and education. The frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2019 American Community Survey (ACS) one-year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements, using the person weights on the public use file.

The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity and years of education. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.

The weights were then post-stratified on 2016 and 2020 Presidential vote choice, and a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories) and education (4-categories) to produce the final weight.

The margin of error within this poll is 3.1%.

Topline results and crosstabs for the poll can be found at http://www.umass.edu/poll

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One Year Later, New UMass Amherst Poll Finds Continued National Political Division Over the Jan. 6 Attack on the US Capitol - UMass News and Media...

Berry Craig| Opinion Contributor

Two Kentucky historians agree its past time for Democrats to start warning voters loudly, clearly and unceasingly where Donald Trump and his truest true believers in the GOP are steering the country: Straight toward white supremacy and authoritarianism.

This is real, this is seriousand its frightening, said Brian Clardy, a Murray State University history professor. We must build a democratic resistance that amounts to a counter-fascist coup In short, we must all become antifa, or antifascists, said John Hennen, a Morehead State University history professor emeritus.

Clardy said Trump largely won on a white backlash triggered by Barack Obamas election. Clardy was in the crowd when our first African American president was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009.

While were celebrating here in Washington, folks back home are seething, he said to a woman standing near him. He meant white folks.

Hennen said Trumpism has deep roots. The eruption of violent white nationalist authoritarianism in our country is the shocking manifestation of less noisy currents of fascist politics which have evolved for decades.

More from Berry Craig: No, the Democratic Party isn't socialist. It's just what GOP voters want to hear | Opinion

Trump and his sycophants ceaselessly demagogue against President Joe Biden and his party, falsely portraying them as radical socialists and even communists who conspired to steal the 2020 election. Yet most Democrats resist calling Trumpism what it is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic and religiously bigoted movement that is anti-democratic and embraces violence and vigilantism.

Clardy and Hennen say Democrats are wrong if they think beating back COVID-19 and boosting the economy via their economic program will be enough to hold the House and Senate in 2022 and earn Biden a second term in 2024. The Democrats have to remind people that next year and in 2024, democracy itself will be on trial, Clardy said.

He and Hennen are hardly alone in begging the Democrats to denounce Trumpism forcefully and stop the hand-wringing over polls in which Biden's approval ratings are sagging and which suggest Republicans have a real shot at retaking the House and maybe the Senate next year.

"Democrats have real power," wrote Salons Amanda Marcotte, adding, A lack of imagination and political cowardice, however, is inducing this attitude of helplessness in Democrats. And its one that Trump will all too easily exploit to get his way.

Declared Kimberly Wehle in The Hill: At the very least, Democrats need to wake up from their frightening state of denial and take whatever measures they can in the scant remaining months of their congressional majority to try to salvage democracy from single-party authoritarian rule."

More: Kentucky tornado updates: What we know after Christmas about relief efforts, death toll

Meanwhile, a lot of Democrats seem content to let never-Trump Republicans or former Republicans sound the alarm. The anti-democratic forces seem stronger at the end of 2021 than they were at the beginning, William Kristol recently wrote in The Bulwark, where he is editor-at-large. The Republican party seems to be more captive to authoritarian demagoguery today than it was a year ago following Trumps defeat.

He poured it on: Establishment Republicans seem to be even more willing to appease a rising anti-democratic Right than ever. The trajectory of the Republican party heading into 2022 is worrisome. At the start of 2020, people believed that the Republican party might become explicitly anti-democratic. At the start of 2021, all doubt was removed. And neither the partys leaders nor voters have done anything to change that base fact.

At the end of 2021, Kristol found respectable Republicans…not...doing much if anything to repudiate the conspiratorial craziness, the incitements to violence, the hostility to rational discourse, that are all around us and which have moved from the fringes of conservatism to close to dead center.

He wrote that those fighting for our democracy hoped Bidens victory over Trump would be like D-Day in World War II, a decisive moment, an inflection point, a key achievement that would have signaled a forthcoming decisive success. Instead, it was more akin to Dunkirk, an escape from a terrible outcome, an occasion to heave a huge sigh of relief, but ultimately a success that simply allows us to regroup and gather our energies and forces for a longer fight.

Dunkirk was in 1940. The Allies didnt win the war over Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy until 1945, and only then after Allied troops invaded both countries. (American troops were preparing to invade Japan, in 1945 when the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced its fascist-style rulers to surrender.)

But if Trumpism topples our two-and-half century experiment in representative democracy, there is no one today who will step forth to rescue and liberate us from beyond the ocean, Kristol warned. Its not enough if we merely hold on. We have to be the source of our own rescue, the cause of our own liberation. And that work we have only just begun.

Berry Craig is a professor emeritus of history at West Kentucky Community College in Paducah and an author of seven books and co-author of two more, all on Kentucky history.

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Two Kentucky historians agree the GOP is steering the US straight toward authoritarianism |Opinion - Courier Journal

JonathanTurley.org:

We have been discussing the continued incarceration of many individuals for their participation in the Jan. 6th riot. Despite claims that the riot was an insurrection, the vast majority of defendants have been given relatively minor charges. Nevertheless, the Justice Department has insisted on holding many without bail and some have received longer sentences, like Jacob Chansley (aka QAnon Shaman) who was given a 41-month sentence for obstructing a federal proceeding.

Thomas Tas Alexander Starks, 31, of Lisbon, N.D., faced a strikingly different approach by the Justice Department. The self-avowed Antifa member took an axe to the office of Sen. John Hoevens in Fargo on Dec. 21, 2020. Federal sentencing guidelines suggested 1016 months in prison but he was only sentenced to probation and fined $2,784 for restitution . . .

He then reportedly mocked the FBI for returning his axe. Others declared him a hero and Democratic politicians pitched in for his legal defense.

Starks was caught on videotape axing the door of the congressional office. He pleaded guilty to a single charge of destruction of government property. The case has received little attention from the media outside of conservative sites.

Starks has made clear that he was neither apologetic nor deterred from the use of such violence. He has posted under the Facebook moniker, Paul Dunyan, an apparent reference to his preferred use of an axe as a form of political expression. He displays the Antifa symbol and, while awaiting sentencing, reportedly wrote: I am ANTIFA. I will always attack fascists, racial superiority complexes built around nationalism that promotes genocide to fuel a war machine is the worst humanity has to offer.

It is reminiscent of the defiance shown by arrested Antifa member Jason Charter,who declared The Movement is winning after his own arrest.

After his light sentence, Starksposted last month that it was all effectively a joke: Look what the FBI were kind enough to give back to me!

More at JonathanTurley.org

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ANTIFA Member who took axe to Senate office given ...

by Richard Moorhead, Big League Politics:

ANTIFA and Black Lives Matter rioters chose to commemorate the evening of Kyle Rittenhouses historic acquittal with a series of nationwide riot and looting events, raising questions about narratives from the mainstream media asserting that the movements arent criminal.

Far leftists in cities hundreds of miles away from Kenosha, Wisconsin took it upon themselves to wage property damage and violence against people with no connection to the case.

TRUTH LIVES on athttps://sgtreport.tv/

Some street actors appeared more opportunistic in nature, taking advantage of chaos to shoplift hundreds of dollars of merchandise from stores.

Portland ANTIFA staged an attack on the countys Justice Center, with Portland Police declaring an illegal assembly and ordering riot actors to leave downtown and go home.

In peculiar fashion, the masked and black-clad ANTIFA militants at the scene likened Kyle Rittenhouse to a terrorist, despite engaging in terroristic acts themselves.

Read More @ BigLeaguePolitics.com

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ANTIFA Commemorates Rittenhouse Acquittal With Night of ...

THE BACKGROUND: On Jan, 6 as Congress was meeting to certify the victory of Joe Biden, hundreds of President Donald Trumps supporters who claimed the election had been stolen violently pushed past police, broke through windows and doors and entered the Capitol, forcing legislators to interrupt their work and flee. Those whose work was upended included Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the Senate and had to hide from rioters who were calling for his hanging.

A Capitol Police officer collapsed and died after engaging with rioters who descended on the building. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes. Many other officers were injured. A woman from California was shot to death by Capitol Police and three other people died after medical emergencies during the chaos. In the weeks and months that followed, four of the officers who responded to the riot killed themselves.

Federal prosecutors charged approximately 700 rioters with such crimes as violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds, assaulting a federal law enforcement officer and threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So far, more than 120 defendants have pleaded guilty to charges related to the insurrection, primarily misdemeanors. A House committee is now investigating the origins of the attack and what Trump did or didnt do to stop it.

Here, two Associated Press journalists involved in the coverage once inside the Capitol and one outside reflect on the story and their own experiences.

___

JOHN MINCHILLO, photographer, New York, who was beaten by rioters:

I went into it with the understanding that there was going to be potential violence. thats why I was there in the first place. The place that we were assigned to was out by the Washington Monument by the White House. And we understood that this situation was rapidly degenerating even before POTUS came to speak, because the warmup acts were particularly aggressive.

There were television screens up, and it very much had the feeling of a concert. It had a circus-like quality to it. And they have big screens and in the photograph that I made that really sticks with me. They zoomed into a close-up of (Trumps) eyes and the color grading is really aggressive, very high contrast. So the darks are really dark and the lights are really light and the color is really saturated and almost seems like a movie trailer for a Michael Bay movie, like Transformers, you know, something like Rambo. And they had jets flying over and really patriotic music and there was camo and fatigues and people waving flags. It had really intense music and it was very militaristic.

___

(AP photographer Julio Cortez and I then ran to the Capitol.) We turn around and we look towards the Washington Monument and theres just a sea of people and theyre starting to trickle in. And we knew in that moment that this was going to go sideways very quickly, because we look behind us and there were 20 police officers and a few metal barricades. They put up more metal barricades for a typical parade in New York City than they had there.

___

I knew implicitly, dont hit the ground and dont fight back. You need to de-escalate. And Im thinking to myself, If I do anything to get these guys to start swinging at me, theyre going turn on everybody else. . I knew that if I started swinging . theyre going to kill me, right? Theyll stomp on your neck and youre done. And they were going to grab everybody that had a press credential. After Julio and I calmed down them down, they turned and said Hes Antifa! They go from calling me press, to Antifa, like that. And thats when I was thrown over a wall.

___

I was relieved that we got out. And then I was angry that we were pulled from the front. We tried to go back through three different doors. We were on the door opposite the mall and on top of the stairs. It got dicey again and they were attacking me again. So we understood that at that point, were not going to get in. We were very frustrated about that.

___

MARY CLARE JALONICK, congressional reporter, Washington, D.C., was in the House chamber

At 1 p.m., the electoral count started. It began normally, with the two sides debating the electoral count from certain states But as they got into it, we started getting security alerts on our phones, and you could see that there were members on the floor looking at their phones. At one point I told my editor, Im going to go outside and try to look out a window and see whats going on. And a gallery staffer and I went and looked out a front window of the Capitol. It was kind of like one of those moments in a movie where its just like, Oh my gosh, because we looked outside and there were just so many people. Usually theres a perimeter at events like this, but there was no perimeter and people were just right up against the building.

___

All of a sudden there was a lockdown at the Capitol. The House was gaveling in and out of session and there was a lot of chaos on the floor as members were trying to figure out what was going on. And then at some point they gaveled out for a final time and a Capitol Police officer went up to the rostrum and started talking in the microphone. Thats where you see the president speaking at the State of the Union that is not a normal thing for a Capitol Police officer to be talking to members from the rostrum. And he said, there has been a breach and tear gas was dispersed in the Capitol Rotunda. He said to members, you need to get your gas masks out from underneath your chairs, and I dont think many members even knew there were gas masks under their chairs. So it was total pandemonium on the floor. People are yelling out, Lock the doors! Lock the doors! There were some members who were yelling about Trump, and a Democrat yelled at Republicans, This is your fault! It was just total chaos. One member was up on his desk trying to help people get their gas masks on, and eventually they gave us gas masks in the press gallery and were trying to figure them out, and we have no idea how to open this thing or whether we should put it on. And when you open it, theres this really, really loud buzzing. So all of a sudden theres this loud buzzing just echoing through the whole chamber. And at one point we looked down and the House chaplain, who had just started a couple of days before, was saying a prayer. That was definitely a moment where it was like, OK, this is pretty serious.

___

The police evacuated all of the House members who were on the floor, but all of us in the upper gallery, press and House members, were still there because there were rioters in the hallway just outside. They moved everyone to one end of the gallery and police told us to duck down. At one point while everyone was ducking, there was a loud gunshot that rang throughout the chamber. It turned out that that was the gunshot that killed Ashli Babbitt, a rioter who was trying to get in through a broken window over a door just immediately adjacent to the House chamber. And when that happened, members really started to panic. Some of them were yelling to take off your pins, and there was obviously a lot of fear.

___

For a full overview of the events that shaped 2021, A Year That Changed Us: 12 Months in 150 Photos, a collection of AP photos and journalists recollections, is available now: https://www.ap.org/books/a-year-that-changed-us

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2021 Notebook: On Jan. 6, chaos inside the Capitol and out - WVNS-TV