The “sovereign citizen” movement—comprising scam artists and their gullible followers who claim that, by filling reams of documents full of pseudo-legal babble, ordinary citizens can declare themselves free of government rule at any level, thus becoming the law unto themselves—seems to have figured out how, after a couple of decades of mostly lurking on the fringes of the extreme right, to expand its reach and revive (if not entirely rebrand) itself: Go full QAnon.

Last weekend, onetime Pennsylvania Republican candidate Bobby Lawrence boasted that he and his “American State Nationals” operation filled a room in Keene, Texas, with 650 people who paid $120 each to take their special “training”—which teaches that birth certificates are satanic documents that enslave people by subsuming them under a corporation, but they can free themselves by filing their prescribed “redemption” documents. They also ardently promote Qanon conspiracy theories, including the claim that John F. Kennedy Jr. was secretly Trump’s real vice president.

The Anti-Defamation League has been warning about this coalescence since January, with Lawrence and his cohort David Straight, who have been holding these seminars around the country and, thanks to the fresh appeal of absorbing QAnon beliefs into the similarly conspiracy-fueled worldview of sovereign citizens, have increasingly been packing them in.

As their backgrounder explained:

Lawrence teaches sovereignty with a QAnon bent, urging his followers to become “American State Nationals” before Trump is reinstated as president. “American State National” is one of many terms that sovereign citizens use to distinguish themselves from citizens under the jurisdiction of the illegitimate, de facto government. “Trump is working on the ‘Fall of the Cabal’ which will allow our Constitutional Republic to Rise again, however the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic will need We The People of restored status via ‘The Great Awakening’ to fill and function in the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic,” Lawrence posted to Telegram in October 2021. “This will only be accomplished via We The People reclaiming our Birthright by becoming American State Nationals... As the number of American State Nationals and one of the People increases, so will the Function of the [sic] our Constitutional Republic. It will start at the absolute local level (you and your neighbors) and then grow and grow and grow.”

Sovereign-citizen and QAnon beliefs meld together almost seamlessly, as the ADL explains, because their fundamental worldviews involving a massive global cabal nefariously conspiring to enslave mankind are so similar. The sovereign movement’s belief that the current U.S. government is illegitimate serves to support their view of the Biden presidency as fraudulent, as well as the means for “freeing” themselves from such “tyranny.”

Lawrence primarily promotes a version of sovereign-citizen beliefs called “Redemption Theory,” which deals with the core concept that everyone who is an American citizen is designated a “strawman” corporate entity at birth, making them subsidiary properties of America Inc. “Redemption” is the process by which they split the strawman from the flesh-and-blood human, and its purpose is two-fold. As the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains:

Once separated from the corporate shell, the newly freed man is now outside of the jurisdiction of all admiralty laws. More importantly, by filing a series of complex, legal-sounding documents, the sovereign can tap into that secret Treasury account for his own purposes. Over the last 30 years, there have been hundreds of sovereign promoters packaging different combinations of forms and paperwork, attempting to perfect the process. While no one has ever succeeded, of course, they know with the religious certainty of a true cult believer that they’re close. All it will take is the right combination of words, say the promoters of the redemption scam.

Lawrence regularly regales his audiences with his version of the “redemption” scam, but with a powerful QAnon flavor. At an April 21 “Patriots Arise” event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—where he shared the stage with Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano—Lawrence launched to into a rant that manifested that commingling two conspiracist universes produces twice the crackpottery.

He explained how modern births and the birth-certificate process are actually satanic rituals:

Fred read a quote from [Woodrow Wilson adviser] Edward Mandell House where they talk about this construct, where they’re gonna make slaves of us all, through a system of pledging, where we pledge our children as surety through something called a birth certificate, and a satanic ritual that takes place. …

So I’m gonna walk you through a satanic ritual that takes place, and it started with the birth certificate, which was actually chartered under the Department of Transportation. And everything is Admiralty. We all live under the water, and what is law, and where does law come from? Where does the word “law” come from? Land, air, and water. And where the founders of this nation thought about what law was, was the Bible, the Geneva Bible, the King James Version 1611 edition, where we got the word law from. And land, air, and water was in Genesis Chapter 1, verse 24 through 28, “and God created the heaven and the earth.” And God giveth man dominion over the earth, and God giveth man dominion over the land, and all the creatures that walk and creepeth. And God giveth man dominion over the air, and all the birds that fly, and God giveth man dominion over the water, and all the fish that swimmeth. And this is law.

Lawrence then repeated stock sovereign-citizen beliefs (all every bit as risibly false as his etymology for the word “law”) that there are three tiers of law: Canon law, common law, and Admiralty law, each reflecting rule over air, land, and water respectively. Then he went on:

So how do they get you to pledge your child, and how did our parents and our grandparents pledge us as property, as surety, in our personification, all capital names? It was through an evil, satanic ritual called the birth of a child.
You see, a mother goes into a foundling center, and she goes to see the doc—tor; a tor is a bill of lading when a ship arrives at the dock—and the mother puts her feet up on the stirrups and the mother’s water breaks, and the child comes out of the water through the birth canal, like you berth a ship, into the air, into the hands of the dock—tor. And then, historically speaking, a satanic ritual would take place—a child was smacked on the butt, turned upside down, cried out in fear and pain. And then before the child could put their feet on the land and take the breath of God as a free creation of God, a legal bond document came out. It’s on bond paper because it’s a banking instrument, it’s a surety bond.

And the child’s soul was taken on the back of that document. It was called the soul print. And then the umbilical cord and the afterbirth was thereby dead and abandoned by the mother, because that was part of your birth, part of your being born. The construct, the evil says that now that is dead, a part of you died and now you are a dead vessel, you are an all-capital legal fiction. They called you a person. If you look at your driver’s license, if you look at every document that government or any business sends you, it’s in your all-capital name. Your personification. Now the Bible tells us not to take on the persona, not to take on the person.

Lawrence also harkened to the stock radicalization belief in “red-pilling”: “We are living in Babylon right now,” he said. “It’s a corporate construct. It’s a Matrix. Keanu Reeves has said publicly that The Matrix is a documentary of how we are living our lives. Your money’s not real, you don’t own anything.”

And near the end, he wrapped it all up with a classic QAnon-style claim that Donald Trump is secretly One Of Them:

Yes, President Trump has done many things for us. And I won’t go into a lot of them, because quite frankly a lot of folks aren’t ready for it. And it’s hard to verify. But Donald Trump has told you all, if you go back to his speeches, he’s told you that when he comes back, he’s gonna be little letters, lower case. Look to his speech in 2021 at CPAC in Texas. He said when we go back to the White House this time it’s going to be in little letters. He told you at another rally that people are sovereign. He told you at another rally that you’re all millionaires. He told you in another rally that you’re the elite. And they’re the scoundrels. He told you at another rally that the Bar Association is corrupt. He tells you on and on—he might talk for two hours, but only four sentences are for those who are awake. And there’s a huge difference between being woke and awake, is it not?

Lawrence has formed close associations with leading QAnon influencers such as Ann Vandersteel, Allen and Francine Fosdick, the Pennsylvania-based hosts of the QAnon show Up Front in the Prophetic, and David Straight.

Vandersteel posted proudly announced on Gab that she was “officially an American State National,” meaning she no longer was beholden to the U.S. government. She touted the supposed benefits of becoming an “American state national,” such as freedom from paying federal taxes to getting to “vote as a delegate, which has the power of four votes,” in an appearance on “The Conservative Daily Podcast,” hosted by Joe Oltmann and Max McGuire.

She said she had been introduced to these ideas by Lawrence, who ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2018. Vandersteel indicated that Lawrence was radicalized afterward through his contacts with David Straight, a sovereign citizen activist who also promoted QAnon theories. Vandersteel claimed that Straight was a “commissioner on President Trump’s child sex-trafficking commission.”

ADL analyst Mark Pitcavage explained Lawrence’s rant on Twitter, noting that “redemption theory” originated with a sovereign-citizen guru named Roger Elvick back in 1999, and it became widespread within the movement.

“Basic redemption theory is something like this: In 1933, the US went off the gold standard and could therefore no longer pay its debts to the international bankers. To get around this, the government turned humans into collateral by converting birth certificates into stock,” he wrote. “They did this in part by creating fictional duplicates of every person (dubbed ‘strawmen’). You can tell when a document refers to the straw man instead of the flesh and blood person because the name will be in all caps, not upper and lower case.”

He also noted that much of the talk is devoted to explaining the sovereign-citizen belief that the conspiracy which infiltrated and subverted and replaced the original, legitimate government with a de facto tyrannical government had done so by replacing constitutional law with inferior “maritime” or “admiralty” law.

“Finally,” he noted, “the Satanic references thrown in there are derived from QAnon and presumably designed to make these theories more palatable to QAnoners.”

Given the size of Lawrence’s audiences now, and the regularity and breadth of “American State Nationalist” training sessions, the ADL’s January warning—“Given the flexibility of the sovereign citizen movement and its pseudo-legal tactics, it is quite possible that increasing numbers of QAnon adherents will find sovereign citizen ideas attractive in the future”—seems more than prescient. It may, in fact, prove to be understated.

The saturation of the ranks of our police forces with far-right extremists is one of the harsh realities of American life that bubbled up during the police brutality protests of 2020 and was laid bare by the Jan. 6 insurrection. The presence of these extremists not only is a serious security and enforcement threat—particularly when it comes to dealing with far-right violence—but has created a toxic breach between our communities and the people they hire to protect and serve them. Too often, as in Portland, the resulting police culture has bred a hostility to their communities that expresses itself in biased enforcement and a stubborn unaccountability.

Much of this originates in police training, which are the foundations of cop culture. And a recent Reuters investigative report has found that police training in America is riddled with extremists: Their survey of police training firms—35 in all—that provide training to American police authorities found five of them employ (and in some cases, are operated by) men whose politics are unmistakably of the far-right extremist variety. And these five people alone are responsible for training hundreds of American cops every year.

The most striking of these five extremist trainers is a former cop from Travis County, Texas, named Richard Whitehead, who moved to Post Falls, Idaho, several years ago and set up shop as a police trainer. He has, over the past four years, given 85 training sessions to at least 560 police officers and other public safety workers in 12 states. He also has advised officers to ignore COVID-19 health restrictions and claimed: “We are on the brink of a civil war.”

Like most of these extremist trainers, Whitehead subscribes to the so-called “constitutional sheriff” model of law enforcement—he in fact ran for Kootenai County sheriff in 2020 as a “constitutional” officer, finishing third out of four candidates in the GOP primary—which claims that county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land, empowered to overrule and ignore state and federal laws, as well as to determine what is and is not “constitutional.” None of its tenets have ever been upheld in a court of law.

Nonetheless, it’s a powerful movement that has been spreading, particularly in rural America, for well over a decade, led by a far-right “constitutionalist” named Richard Mack and his outfit, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). A number of rural sheriffs have won election claiming to be “constitutional,” and inevitably, their regimes have produced dysfunctional far-right fiefdoms and disrupted communities.

Just as important, these “constitutionalists” form much of the backbone of the far-right “Patriot” movement that formed the core of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, and continues to animate and organize the anti-democratic insurgency the right has undertaken in the ensuing year and a half. Despite wrapping themselves in red, white, and blue bunting and claiming fealty to the Constitution, they are part of a profoundly seditionist movement whose entire reason for being is to dismantle American democratic institutions.

Whitehead has quite a track record on social media as a pro-Trump “warrior,” as the Reuters report details, including calling for the public executions of government officials he sees as disloyal to Trump. Moreover, he repeats the same kind of far-right messaging in his training sessions with police officers: At one of them, according to a complaint lodged against him, he called the COVID-19 pandemic “a joke” and health measures unconstitutional. He also showed students an image of a police car with an LGBTQ flag on the side, and then asked the class: “What’s next? We have to have a Muslim flag to satisfy the goat fuckers?”

In his course materials, he at one time included a slide ridiculing transgender people: “Suspect is a gender-fluid assigned-male-at-birth wearing non-gender-specific clothing born Caucasian but identifies as a mountain panda.” Whitehead told Reuters that he just wanted to push back against pressure for police to adopt left-wing views.

His defense was typical for a “constitutionalist”: In a statement responding to the Reuters piece, Whitehead doesn’t deny any of its reportage, but complains:

What does it say about the state of our nation when believing in it’s [sic] Constitution has you deemed an extremist?

Like the other trainers, Whitehead insists that his reactionary politics are not extremist, a refrain that has become common as the identities of police officers who are members of groups associated with the Jan. 6 insurrection like the Oath Keepers are exposed. Interest in these groups among police officers, in fact, increased after the attack on the Capitol. And their well-established sympathy with extremist groups like the Proud Boys before the insurrection played a major role in the dynamic that created the riot.

Reuters reporters Julia Harte and Alexandra Ulmer detail similar extremist beliefs animating Whitehead and four other trainers as well:

The five trainers have aired views including the belief in a vote-rigging conspiracy to unseat Trump in the 2020 election. One trainer attended Trump’s January 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol that devolved into a riot, injuring more than 100 police officers. Two of the trainers have falsely asserted that prominent Democrats including President Joe Biden are pedophiles, a core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Four have endorsed or posted records of their past interactions with far-right extremist figures, including prominent “constitutional sheriff” leader David Clarke Jr. and Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, who is being prosecuted for his involvement in the Capitol riots.

The other four trainers featured in the report work in locations around the U.S.:

• Darrell Schenck, who teaches firearms classes to officers, is based in Kansas. He believes Democrats are pedophiles, the 2020 election was illegitimate (“election fraud is the real pandemic”) and has described the Jan. 6 reportage as “fake news.”
• Tim Kennedy, a Texas-based military veteran, travels widely to provide his “Sheepdog Response” training for officers, specializing in martial arts, sharpshooting, and strength-building. On social media, he has promoted the “Boogaloo” civil-war movement, and has posted screen texts of his conversations with Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, currently awaiting trial for conspiracy related to his role in leading the mob on Jan. 6, and said he would name Bigg his Interior secretary in an imaginary presidency.
• Ryan Morris, whose Pennsylvania-based Tripwire Operations Group provides police training around the region, spouts similar rhetoric, calling the 2020 election a socialist plot to seize the government: “You have just witnessed a coup, the overthrow of the US free election system, the end of our constitutional republic, and the merge of capitalism into the slide toward socialism,” read a Facebook post that Morris shared about a month after the 2020 election. Notably, a number of Tripwire employers were “employed” at the Jan. 6 insurrection, though Morris declined to say who hired them or how they were employed.
• Adam Davis, a contractor for New Jersey-based Street Cop Training, lectures police agencies nationwide and spoke at an industry trade conference hosted by the company—one of the largest private training operations—in October. On social media, he called Joe Biden as a “puppet and a pedophile,” and smeared racial-bias protesters as “pawns” in a “scheme to destroy this nation.”

All of these trainers insisted that their politics were perfectly mainstream, and that moreover they kept their personal views out of their training sessions. Davis described his political views as “middle of the road.” Morris claimed that his social media posts were about attracting clients: “It’s all marketing,” he said. “We put it out there to all different realms, hoping to spark some kind of conversation … and then we generate classes out of that.”

Police training has come under closer examination in no small part because of the deluge of biased-policing incidents of recent years, culminating in the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. In particular, organizations that encourage police to adopt a “warrior mindset” that engenders hostility with their respective communities, in no small part because of their excessive reliance on aggressive tactics and violent street arrests.

Ozzie Knezovich, the sheriff of Spokane County, Washington, has wrestled with such training in the past: His department hosted a “Killology” police training session in recent years that drew broad condemnation, including a rebuke from the Spokane City Council. Nonetheless, the company that offers that training continue to enjoy support from a variety of police departments that hire them, including police in Missoula, Montana.

Knezovich’s department, as Reuters reported, also used Whitehead as a trainer. When Reuters queried him, however, Knezovich told them he was shocked his deputies had been trained by an instructor from “the lunatic fringe.”

He vowed to end the practice: “I’ll be having a conversation with my training unit to take somebody off the list,” the sheriff said.

In a 2019 academic paper titled “KKK in the PD: White Supremacist Police and What to Do About It,” associate Georgetown Law professor Vida Johnson found that police departments across the country exhibited evidence of white supremacist ideology, citing “scandals in over 100 different police departments, in over 40 different states, in which individual police officers have sent overtly racist emails, texts or made racist comments via social media.”

She observed to the Los Angeles Times that it should be a cause for concern when officers become followers of such conspiracy theories as QAnon, or the claim that COVID-19 is a hoax, or theories that Trump’s reelection was fraudulently stolen from him.

“People who can’t separate fact from fiction probably shouldn’t be the ones enforcing laws with guns,” Johnson said.

Johnson has a roadmap for rooting extremists out of police departments: stricter and more diligent hiring practices, social media checks that could reveal extremist beliefs or organizational membership, periodic background checkups for all police veterans, and a review apparatus that is fully independent.

“They’re supposed to be protecting and serving us,” Johnson told Mother Jones. “But unfortunately it seems like a lot of departments see themselves at odds with or even at war with the rest of the community. That’s a culture within policing that needs to change.”

One of Vladimir Putin’s primary propaganda points when rationalizing his assault on Ukraine as a “denazification” program is to trot out as proof of his claims the Azov Battalion, the Ukrainian fighting unit founded by neo-Nazi nationalists and still reportedly dominated by them. In doing so, he has effectively obfuscated the reality that Russian forces are even more riddled with fascist elements—including forces currently leading their fight in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine.

The largest of these is the Russian Imperialist Movement (RIM), a white supremacist paramilitary organization listed by American authorities as a terrorist body, and the Wagner Group, a private military proxy closely linked to Putin with a history of neo-Nazi activity. Russian troops arriving in Donbas have been recorded flying the RIM flag—a combination of historical Russian flags from its imperial era—while Wagner Group’s mercenaries have been sighted in Donetsk and elsewhere; notably, German intelligence has connected them to the atrocities in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha.

Social-media videos out of the Rostov Oblast have shown Russian troop convoys heading toward the Donbas region with soldiers bearing the RIM flag and other imperialist banners. The same flag flies at RIM marches, where the rhetoric is thick with bigotry directed at Jews and Ukrainians. Denis Valliullovich Gariev, the militant leader of RIM who was one of three RIM leaders sanctioned by the United States, was quoted as saying, “We [RIM] see Ukrainian-ness as rabies … either quarantine or liquidation, or he’ll infect everyone.”

The same flag was seen in mid-March flying with Moscow-backed separatist troops in Donetsk on a Telegram post shared by a pro-Putin channel. Much of the far-right content on these Telegram channels—as well as the Russian social-media platform VKontakte (VK)—is related to a neo-Nazi unit called Rusich that is part of Wagner Group, some of it bearing the Wagner name and logo.

Pentagon authorities estimate that about 1,000 Wagner mercenaries have been deployed in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has refocused its current war effort. Rusich militiamen have been spotted on the Russian-Ukrainian border where the offense is being launched.

Russian officials deny having any connection to the Wagner Group, which does not officially exist. An incredibly secretive organization, its true ownership and funding sources remain unclear. But experts say it has served as a tactical tool for the Kremlin in hot spots where Russia has political and financial interests, and has deep ties to Putin—in fact, it is widely considered his private army.

Putin is reported to have ordered Wagner Group operatives into Kyiv to assassinate Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has reportedly survived about a dozen such attempts. About 400 Wagner mercenaries were reported to have entered the Kyiv area from Belarus, and were offered “hefty bonuses” for killing key political and media figures, including the mayor of Kyiv, Zelenskyy, and his entire Cabinet.

According to German intelligence officials, Wagner Group operatives were primarily responsible for spearheading the butchery that has been reported and substantiated in Bucha. Der Spiegel reported that comments from troops intercepted by German intelligence—including flippant remarks about shooting men on bicycles, and orders to first interrogate soldiers and then shoot them—that demonstrate the atrocities in Bucha "were neither random acts nor the product of individual soldiers who got out of hand."

The Wagner Group mostly comprises retired regular Russian servicemen, typically aged between 35 and 55. The Kremlin has effectively used their mercenaries to wage deniable war and otherwise prop up its interests in places like Syria, Libya, Mozambique, and more recently in the Central African Republic and Mali. They also played a key role in Putin’s long war on Ukraine, with its fighters helping him illegally annex Crimea in 2014.

The group’s founder, Dmitry Utkin, named it after Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner, and is himself fond of fascist symbols; he has a Nazi eagle, along with swastikas and SS lightning bolts, tattooed on his torso. Reportedly Wagner mercenaries have left behind neo-Nazi propaganda in combat zones, including graffiti with hate symbols.

The Wagner militia unit Rusich has been spotted in southeastern Ukraine as well. It was founded nearly a decade ago in St. Petersburg by a Red Army paratrooper named Aleksei Milchakov and Yan Petrovskiy, a Norwegian neo-Nazi, after the pair met at a white supremacist RIM event.

Milchakov has previously posted horrifying pictures of himself on social media slicing off the ears of dead soldiers, as well as selfies in which he is carving the kolovrat, a Slavic far-right version of the swastika. He also has boasted about being a neo-Nazi and claims he "got high from the smell of burning human flesh."

Rusich is believed to consist of several hundred soldiers, and their signature uniform patch is a white supremacist valknut insignia. Its idea of humor on social media is a cartoon of a Russian soldier returning home with gifts for his family, stolen from Ukrainians and covered in blood. Its caption reads: “If you are a real man and a Russian, join our ranks. You will spill liters of blood from vile Russophobes, and become rich and cool."

One of Wagner’s key functions, according to the Soufan Center, a New York-based nonprofit think tank, is that it provides the Kremlin with “a thin veneer of plausible deniability as it engages in the pursuit of finance, influence, and vigilantism not in keeping with international norms.”

The Daily Beast reported in late January that dozens of Wagner mercenaries were pulled from the Central African Republic to join Russian forces massing at the Ukraine border.

The Ukraine war has a broad mix of mercenaries and extremists from all sides participating in both sides of the conflict, as a report from the Soufan Center explores in detail. As the war drags on, active online recruitment suggests that a drawn-out conflict could attract many more volunteer fighters, according to Stephan J. Kramer, the head of the domestic intelligence agency in the German state of Thuringia. An eagerness to take up arms, he noted, reflects the motivations of right-wing extremists, including within the ranks of the German military.

For neo-Nazis and white supremacists, “Ukraine could become their version of what Afghanistan was for the jihadi movement in the 1980s,” said Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute. “Being on the ground in a real-world fighting situation will allow them to gain valuable experience, as they further hone their skills in weapons, planning attacks, using technology in war including communications and encryption, and using cryptocurrency for clandestine funding of their activity.”

Outfits like Rusich are the spear tip of a much larger neofascist element within Russia, embodied by the Russian Imperial Movement. Its ideology is much more than simply nostalgic for the Russia of two centuries ago; concerned with fighting against globalization, multiculturalism, and liberalism, RIM is part and parcel of a broader international white supremacist project, which also enjoys Putin’s sponsorship and support. Its “membership is rigid and adheres to the dualistic beliefs that members should be part of the Russian Orthodox Church and conform to the group’s view of the necessity of creating a Russian Imperial state,” according to the Soufan Center.

RIM’s activism now includes running a kind of international “summer camp” for young right-wing extremists called Partisan, a paramilitary training course it sponsors near St. Petersburg. It claims to train civilians for upcoming “global chaos.” It draws participants from around Europe.

Two of its graduates from Sweden, both members of the neo-Nazi group Nordic Resistance, returned home to Gothenburg and attempted to blow up a home for asylum seekers, as well as a gathering of leftists at an alternative bookstore. (Another bomb was accidentally ignited by a garbage worker who was permanently maimed in the blast.) They likely learned how to construct the bombs at Partisan.

Jonathan Leman, a researcher for the anti-racist pressure group EXPO, explains that the training reflects a tactical shift of consciousness within European neo-Nazi movements like Nordic Resistance that occurred over the course of the Ukraine crisis.

“As the role of the EU and the United States in the war becomes more apparent,” he told us, “you could see that pro-Kremlin propaganda was having a greater impact on far right websites in Sweden.”

The focus of Partisan, its website says, is to prepare civilians for “the collapse of civilization.” RIM’s leader, Stanislav Vorobyov, turned up in uniform at a summit organized by Nordic Resistance in 2015 and warned about “a full-scale war against the traditional values of Western civilization.” He told them his uniform should be regarded as a symbol of their joint fight against the “Jewish oligarchs in Ukraine.”

While the RIM has a long and well-publicized record of sponsoring far-right activities throughout Europe, its presence in North America has been limited. Matthew Heimbach, former leader of the neo-Nazi Traditional Workers Party (TWP), at one time hosted a RIM leader and visited with him at historic sites in Washington, D.C., and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Heimbach continued to cultivate those ties, traveling to Russia to return the favor by meeting with RIM leaders at their annual gathering, the World National Conservative Movement conference. “I see Russia as kind of the axis for nationalists,” said Heimbach. “And that’s not just nationalists that are white—that’s all nationalists.”

A neo-Nazi organization that recruited members online, The Base, also has potential ties to Russian intelligence, and its American founder currently resides in Russia. That group also held paramilitary training sessions in the Pacific Northwest. Several members of The Base were arrested in January 2020 just prior to a planned right-wing gun rally in Richmond, Virginia, where they reportedly intended to wreak violent havoc by opening fire on police forces and civilians.

It’s true that American extremists have long been attracted to Ukraine’s Azov Battalion as an opportunity for paramilitary training. Members of the California-based Rise Above Movement participated in such training prior to their participation in the deadly and violent 2017 Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, for which several of them have ended up facing federal charges.

The Azov Battalion formed in 2014 and later joined the country's National Guard after fighting against Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine. Experts estimate nationalists comprise about 2% of Ukraine's population, with the vast majority having very little interest in anything to do with them, but the Azov group is considered to be one of the Ukrainian army’s more potent fighting forces.

Nonetheless, according to the Soufan Center, their extremism in the current context is vastly overstated. It cites experts on the European far right like Anton Shekhovtsov, who say the Azov of 2022 is nothing like the group from eight years ago, since those seeking to fight with Azov today are motivated, for the most part, by Ukrainian nationalism and not far-right extremism. However, it notes: “Despite the evolution of the movement since 2014, its brand still remains popular with far-right extremists, and its future trajectory will bear watching.”

A Washington Post report on the battalion interviewed Azov fighters and one of its founders, as well as experts who have tracked the battalion from its beginnings, and found a more complex and nuanced situation than the Kremlin’s crude characterizations. They concede that while some extremists remain in their ranks, the militia has evolved since 2014 and, under pressure from U.S. and Ukrainian authorities, has toned down its extremist elements.

“You have fighters now coming from all over the world that are energized by what Putin has done,” said Colin P. Clarke, director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm. “And so it’s not even that they’re in favor of one ideology or another — they’re just aghast by what they’ve seen the Russians doing.

“That certainly wasn’t the same in 2014,” he added. “So while the far-right element is still a factor, I think it’s a much smaller part of the overall whole. It’s been diluted, in some respects.”

A recent article in RIA Novosti, the Russian state-owned domestic news agency, titled "What Russia Should Do with Ukraine," reveals the shallow rhetorical ruse of Putin’s claims. It author, Russian political consultant Timofey Sergeytsev, openly admits that "denazification” has nothing to do with eradicating any far-right ideology, but is simply a euphemism for "de-Ukrainization"—the annihilation of Ukraine as a nation-state and a cultural entity.

Putin has argued since at least last year that Ukraine’s very existence is “anti-Russia.” Sergeytsev follows the logic: Ukrainian national identity, he says, is "an artificial anti-Russian construct that has no civilizational content of its own"; it is a "subordinate element of a foreign and alien civilization." In a culture long accustomed to considering Nazism anti-Russian, Ukraine is easily translated into “Nazi.”

Adam Hadley, the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a London-based counterterrorism initiative, said their analysis indicated that Russian-backed forces in Ukraine, including the Wagner Group, are “almost certainly connected with extreme far-right organizations.”

Hadley added: “Given Putin’s absurd demands for the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine, we suggest he should first root out neo-Nazis in his own ranks before pointing the finger at others.”

Here’s a reality that the insurrectionists who besieged the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are now learning: When you physically attack a public institution and commit crimes against civil authorities, the criminal charges—such as “seditionist conspiracy”—you inevitably face are just the beginning. Just wait ‘til the civil courts, where the people you have harmed get to sue you for damages, weigh in.

Just ask Stewart Rhodes and his compatriots in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who already face those daunting criminal charges. This week they were added to the federal civil lawsuit filed late last year by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine seeking to hold those groups, as well as others involved in the violent attack on the Capitol, financially culpable for the millions of dollars in damage they caused, including injuries to Capitol Police officers.

“We’re committed to bankrupting the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who conspired in the attack,” Racine tweeted.

Racine filed his original lawsuit on Dec. 14, naming 31 people—all members of the two far-right organizations that played central roles in the insurrection—culpable for damages incurred during the attack. Among them were Proud Boys leaders Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, Zachary Rehl, and Enrique Tarrio, as well as key Oath Keepers such as Kelly Meggs and Joshua James. All of them have been charged criminally by federal authorities as well.

The latest round now includes Rhodes, who was charged with seditionist conspiracy in January after avoiding arrest for more than a year as evidence began piling up implicating him. He was charged along with Edward Vallejo, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel, and Brian Ulrich, who also were added to Racine’s lawsuit. So was Matthew Greene, a Proud Boy who has been cooperating with investigators after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges.

Racine told The Washington Post that the goal of the lawsuit is to expose how these groups are financed and to secure “full restitution and recompense” for the damages inflicted on Washington. The largest of these, Racine said, has involved the huge costs incurred treating scores of injured Metro Police officers, including Officer Michael Fanone. Rioters assaulted Fanone with a stun gun and dragged down the Capitol steps, during which he lost consciousness, suffered a heart attack, and had traumatic brain injury.

“If it so happens that it bankrupts or puts these individuals and entities in financial peril, so be it,” the attorney general said in an interview when the case was filed.

The lawsuit seeks damages under the modern version of the federal Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, a Reconstruction-era law that, besides outlawing the notorious hate group, also allows individuals to sue when they are injured by their criminal plots. It is modeled in that regard on the recent federal civil lawsuit that found the organizers of the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, financially culpable for millions and rendering them bankrupt.

Such lawsuits have been used for years by organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center to hold violent far-right extremists such as Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance and the Idaho-based Aryan Nations culpable for their members’ violence, similarly bankrupting them. While the strategy has a few critics—Glenn Greenwald once described it as an “abuse of the court system”—it has historically proven to be one of the most powerful tools for enabling communities to hold far-right extremists accountable for the violence they perpetrate.

Assisting Racine’s lawsuit are two nonprofit groups: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the States United Democracy Center (SUDC).

“There is no substitute for bringing a civil suit that seeks damages against each of the individuals and groups responsible,” said Norman Eisen of the SUDC, a veteran of the Obama White House Counsel’s Office. “It is a way to assure those bad actors never do it again.”

Tucker Carlson is utterly baffled that people would think he is rooting for Vladimir Putin and Russia in its war on Ukraine. “You know, it’s such an awful thing to say,” he said on his Fox News show Monday, after playing a clip of Congressman Eric Swalwell saying he and other Republicans were on Putin’s side. “We hesitated to play that, even—it’s very common, you hear it every day. The question is: Why are they saying that? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Gaslighting, of course, has become Carlson’s specialty. In reality, Carlson spent most of the month prior to the invasion praising Putin and echoing Russian propaganda: running down Ukraine, deriding it as a “State Department client state”—not a democracy, but “a tyranny”—and claiming that Russia just wants to keep its borders secure, everything the fault of Joe Biden. So much so that he became the hero of Russian state television, where his rants were translated and replayed, and he was praised as an astute American.

Now that the horror is hitting home, Carlson suddenly has realized that he backed the wrong horse and is scurrying hard to dig his way out. The first step in that, of course, is gaslighting his audience about what he had been saying just the week before, and blaming the war on Putin now—yet somehow it’s still all Joe Biden’s fault. Those clips have yet to appear on Russian TV.

The major tone shift occurred Friday, a day after the invasion: “It’s a tragedy, because war always is a tragedy, and the closer you get to it, the more horrifying it seems,” he said. He also squarely put the onus on Russia and Putin: “He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine.”

“Vladimir Putin started this war, so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it,” he said. “He fired the first shots.”

It’s a sharp and complete reversal of his previous arguments. On Feb. 17, he spouted Russian propaganda in claiming that Ukraine is not a legitimate nation. He also attacked U.S. officials who provided military aid to Ukraine.

“These people are so ghoulish,” Carlson said. “Of course they’re promoting war, not to maintain the democracy that is Ukraine. Ukraine is not a democracy. It has never been a democracy in its history, and it’s not now. It’s a client state of the Biden administration.”

This narrative became a staple of Carlson’s defense of Russia’s war. On his Feb. 22 show, he again spouted Putin’s propaganda: “The point here is to defend democracy. Not that Ukraine is a democracy. It’s not a democracy. Ukraine’s president has arrested his main political opponent, he has shut down newspapers and television stations that have dared to criticize him. So in American terms, you would call Ukraine a tyranny. But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”

The next day, he again dismissed Ukraine as “a State Department client state,” claiming that Democrats wanted Americans to “wholeheartedly support jumping with both feet into a highly complicated conflict in a part of Eastern Europe where we have no national interests.”

The most noteworthy part of that Feb. 22 episode, however, was how Carlson defended Putin against his “haters” by comparing him to American liberals, who he clearly saw as far more nefarious:

It might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, ‘What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my kids to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?’ These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that. So do why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

The day after the invasion began, on Feb. 24, it was more of the same. The invasion, he claimed, demonstrated that Biden was a foreign-policy failure who had promised he would keep it from happening, making Putin’s war a “humiliating defeat for Joe Biden.”

Russian state media promptly began re-airing Carlson’s rants with translated subtitles, particularly the Putin-didn’t-call-me-a-racist episode. His attacks on Ukraine’s legitimacy also received heavy play. They also replayed Carlson’s Feb. 24 interview with ex-Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who told him: "Sanctions don't work. This is the whole problem with the Biden administration: They are so focused on how do we punish Putin."

The clips became the topic of Russian TV news talk shows, where Carlson was uniformly praised. “Excellent performance,” the editor of a Russian national defense journal commented. “We can only have solidarity with this view.”

Of course, Carlson is hardly alone in spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Fox News. On Feb. 24, just before bombs began falling on Ukraine, host Laura Ingraham interviewed ex-president Donald Trump by phone, who praised Putin—“I do know him very well. We’ve had many, uh, times together. I got along with him fantastically”—and ranted at length that the invasion was Biden’s fault, and the war never would have happened if the election hadn’t been stolen from him.

Near the end of the interview, Ingraham asked Trump about the speech given earlier that day by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, describing it as “a kind of really pathetic display” and described Ukraine’s United Nations ambassador as “looking like a defeated man.”

And despite the seeming change in tone, Carlson’s “pivot” still found him ardently defending Russian propaganda, and serving as its useful tool. Angry that authorities and platform owners in the U.S., Canada, and in Europe are taking action against the Kremlin-owned American news outlet Russia Today and other agitprop producers like Sputnik—both of whom also heavily replayed his pro-Russia rants—Carlson fumed that it all constituted “moral blackmail,” gaslighting away his previous remarks: “No one in America takes pride at the sight, feels anything but revulsion at the sight, of Russian troops within Ukraine.”

Sure enough, RT promptly retweeted Carlson’s clip: “Tucker Carlson defends media freedom as Senators use their power to shut down free speech on social media—especially so-called ‘Russian propaganda.’”

As Lis Wahl, a former anchor at Russia Today, explained to The Daily Beast, the distinction between a propaganda operation like RT and what’s aired on Fox News has essentially vanished:

While the American voices Russian media uses to influence Western audiences hail from the far-left and the far-right, the poison of disinformation asymmetrically originates on the ideological right. Research has demonstrated that followers of the former president stick to hyper-partisan and conspiracy-laden sources such as Breitbart, Info Wars, and Fox News. During Trump’s election and throughout his presidency, the rightwing ecosystem grew more conspiratorial, extreme, and anti-democratic. It is during this time that Russian media and right-wing media became indistinguishable.
Today, the chief purveyors of pro-Russian disinformation in the U.S. are now on Fox News. I have warned that quite often the pro-Putin claims on Fox and RT essentially mimic each other. But much of the American public, and even many in the mainstream media, fail to realize the extent to which this disinformation has become part of the fabric of the new media landscape, and therefore, American political discourse.

Last week’s indictment of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes for seditionist conspiracy revealed more than simply the mountain of evidence that the Justice Department has acquired in the prosecutions of key players in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. It also made clear the DOJ’s larger strategy of moving up the food chain of players in the historic attack—with Donald Trump and his inner circle now only steps away.

Much of the attention has focused on former Trump adviser Roger Stone, whose connections to the “Patriot” movement—and particularly to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who spearheaded the siege of the Capitol—are well established; indeed, earlier on Jan. 6, two Oath Keepers now charged alongside Rhodes with sedition in the conspiracy were part of Stone’s personal security detail. But as Marcy Wheeler incisively reports, more recent court documents also make clear that the investigation into militia groups’ activities that day now encompasses Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Stone’s connections to the Oath Keepers and Rhodes, as Jennifer Cohn recently laid out, date back to at least 2014, when he was part of the scene at the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada, where the Oath Keepers formed a significant presence. After Trump was elected, Stone became an ardent proponent of issuing a pardon for the Bundys in both the Nevada standoff and 2016 Malheur standoff prosecutions, appearing onstage with them in Las Vegas.

Those prosecutions ended up failing, so Trump instead pardoned the two Oregon ranchers whose imprisonment had fueled the Malheur standoff. Stone nonetheless remained a public ally of the Bundys; when Ammon Bundy announced his campaign for the Idaho governorship in 2021, Stone proudly endorsed him.

Stone also had a long relationship with another group that played a key role in the conspiracies to besiege the Capitol—the Proud Boys. In 2018, he was photographed flashing a white-nationalist “OK” sign with a group of Oregon Proud Boys in a tavern. He also was investigated by the FBI in 2019 for posting a message on Instagram that appeared to threaten a federal judge, which he blamed on Proud Boys, including national chairman Enrique Tarrio, who had been “helping” him with his social-media account.

Both Stone and Tarrio live in Florida and appear to have had multiple associations, including a meeting on Dec. 12, 2020, in Washington, D.C., during the “Stop the Steal” rally that served as a warmup for Jan. 6. Stone was seen in the video conferring both with Tarrio—who was arrested by D.C. police two days before the insurrection—and with Ethan Nordean, one of the key leaders of the group of Proud Boys who attacked the Capitol.

As Wheeler reported earlier, Stone also met with Kelly Meggs—leader of the Florida Oath Keepers and one of the key figures in the seditionist conspiracy case—two days before telling his cohorts that he was working out a cooperative agreement with Proud Boys leading up to what Meggs himself described as an “insurrection.”

However, most of the evidence introduced in the Oath Keepers conspiracy case so far offers little information about that connection on Jan. 6, and there’s little in the evidence to suggest that Stone was directing or assisting them while they were providing security for him at the Ellipse, where Trump was speaking that morning. The most tantalizing clues involve the period when Stone was embedded in the Trump “War Room” at the Willard Hotel earlier that day.

Key figures in Trump’s circle—including Giuliani, as well as Steve Bannon, John Eastman, and other hardcore defenders of Trump’s “Big Lie” that he won the 2020 election—were circulating around the “command center” they had set up at the Willard. As it happens, so were members of a militia group called the 1^st Amendment Patriots, who also had members stationed around the Capitol.

Oath Keepers, as Wheeler has reported, were providing security for the operations at the Willard. And after Stone departed for the Ellipse, according to text messages from indictee Joshua James—the Oath Keeper overseeing the detail—he complained bitterly that the detail at the Ellipse had failed to provide him with “VIP treatment.”

The Willard Hotel “War Room” happens to be the same nexus that has drawn Giuliani into the investigation, as Wheeler observed this week. While a Washington Post story this weekend concluded that the FBI doesn’t appear to be investigating the activities at the Willard, it also contained information indicating that FBI investigators have been pressing several defendants—all Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—about key figures at the morning rally and later at the Willard, including both Stone and Giuliani.

Rob Jenkins, a defense attorney representing multiple people linked to the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, another far-right group, said prosecutors have been “pretty aggressive” in “seeking out information … that points to others’ involvement and culpability.”

They are interested, he said, in “preplanning, and participation in those preplanning on the part of the individuals who may not have come to D.C. on Jan 6 but were certainly part of the planned effort.” That includes both leaders in the groups and people who spoke at the rally on Jan. 6, including close Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone, he said.

The DOJ, of course, already possesses most of Giuliani’s communications from that period as part their investigation into his business dealings, and may be hunting for further corroboration of evidence already in hand or perhaps suggested in his texts. And if Trump’s personal lawyer is in their sights, the former president himself may well be next. Giuliani also has been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee, but it is not known how he will respond.

What’s become abundantly clear, however, is that DOJ is moving through these indictments strategically—only including evidence that builds their case publicly as well as internally, with the intent of inducing other defendants to turn state’s evidence as cooperating witnesses. It’s being extraordinarily careful about tipping its hand regarding its targets or its long-range strategy. It may be wisest to allow them to keep gathering and sifting, because that approach has proven the likeliest way to win in court and bring the insurrectionists—hopefully, all of them, all the way up the ladder—to accountability.

The wheels of justice turn slowly enough as it is, and when it comes to complex cases like the Jan. 6 insurrectionist prosecutions, the pace can be positively glacial, especially because evidence is still being gathered—and arrests are still being made—nearly a year later. Moreover, because the first cases to be processed in the courts were largely simple charges for lesser offenses, the overwhelming impression so far has been that the Justice Department is not taking the matter seriously enough, undercharging defendants and dragging its feet—which in turn has produced some serious criticism from the federal bench.

But there are signs that the logjam in the courts is about to ease up. A benchmark ruling this week by one of these federal judges essentially gives prosecutors the green light to proceed with their primary strategy—namely, to prosecute most of the defendants for obstructing Congress, a charge that defense lawyers have tried to argue does not fit the crime. It could have far-reaching implications—even for high-powered players like Mark Meadows.

On Friday, District Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled against the effort by two defendants to have their “obstruction of an official proceeding” charges dismissed. The insurrectionists argued that the certification of the counting of Electoral College ballots in the 2020 election was not an “official proceeding” under the law, which in the past had primarily been used to prosecute witness tampering and evidentiary malfeasance.

Of course, no previous prosecutor has been confronted with an orchestrated mob assault on the Capitol, either. And Judge Friedrich—a Donald Trump appointee—had little trouble discerning that the Joint Session of Congress that was interrupted by the attack was, indeed, an “official proceeding” under the law. “In sum,” Friedrich concluded, “because the government has alleged that the defendants acted corruptly, or unlawfully, and with the intent to obstruct, as defined in § 1512(c)(2), the defendants were on notice that their conduct violated the statute and ‘no more is required’ at this stage of the prosecution.”

Several other defendants—notably Proud Boys leaders Ethan Nordean and Joe Biggs—have made similar arguments before different judges. It’s not clear whether these other judges will follow Friedrich’s ruling or logic, but as Marcy Wheeler observes, the trend in the courts is not going their way.

Prosecutors in the Jan. 6 cases have relied heavily on the obstructing-Congress charge, as Wheeler has also explained, in large part because it carries the same potential sentence—up to 20 years of hard time—and terrorism enhancement as a seditionist-conspiracy charge would. The difference is that the latter charge requires a higher level of evidence regarding defendants’ motives, which makes prosecuting it a more fraught proposition for many (if not most) of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

That’s not to say that there won’t be such seditionist-conspiracy charges filed in the attack on Congress. Wheeler notes that Nordean may yet face them, depending on what investigators have uncovered. And there is no small likelihood that they also await key figures who have not yet been charged in the insurrection conspiracy, particularly Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes.

Another major figure who could wind up facing very similar charges is Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The Jan. 6 Committee on Sunday produced a bill of goods practically indicting Meadows for his role in the insurrection, including his “email to an individual about the events on January 6” saying the National Guard would be present to ‘‘protect pro Trump people’’—information that we know from court evidence was part of Proud Boys’ internal discussions that day. As Wheeler observes, it’s possible he shared information that was central to the expectations of and plans by the militia that organized the assault.

In general, the outcomes for key participants in the insurrection—such as Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley—have not been encouraging for the defendants; sentences, indeed, are becoming harsher the farther down the roster the court calendar proceeds, as cases involving increasingly violent criminal behavior come bubbling upward.

A recent CNN analysis noted that fewer than half the 50 defendants sentenced so far have faced jail time. And it observes that judges so far have been largely split about the harshness of the sentences these defendants have deserved, and it’s not necessarily a partisan split.

"It doesn't look great that we're taking a bunch of people who stormed the United States Capitol and letting them go home. Not a lot of people are spending a lot of time in jail," an anonymous Justice Department prosecutor told CNN. "But jail isn't always the best outcome. A lot of them are getting significant terms of supervised release and probation, so they've got to keep their nose clean."

That dynamic is likely to change as the more serious cases come before the bench—and as more significant players in the Jan. 6 drama are charged with crimes for their participation in the attack on Congress. Especially if smirking scofflaws like Mark Meadows are among them.

Ever since a mob of pro-Trump fanatics attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, Republicans and their propagandists have been frantically engaged in a gaslighting campaign to convince the public that it didn’t see what it watched unfold that day, primarily by claiming that someone, anyone else—their favorite concocted bogeymen, “Antifa” or Black Lives Matter, or their favorite conspiracy theory, the “Deep State”—was responsible for the violence, other than the disinformation-fueled “Patriots” and their cohorts who turned out en masse to try to keep Congress from counting the Electoral College that day.

Tucker Carlson, of course, has been leading that gaslight brigade, primarily with a barrage of baldfaced lying, claiming that the people responsible were actually “Deep State” agents of the FBI, trying to set up hapless MAGA fans with a “false flag” operation. His latest iteration of this conspiracy theory, trotted out Tuesday on his Fox News show, tried to suggest that a seemingly unidentified man in the crowd, notable for his red face paint, was in fact one of these “agents provocateurs”—when a brief bit of digging by HuffPost’s Ryan J. Reilly revealed that in fact the man is a well-known St. Louis Cardinals fan, and an ardent Tucker Carlson devotee.

Tucker Carlson guest insists St. Louis Trump fan at Jan. 6 riot is actually 'law enforcement'www.youtube.com

The claim was made by a regular guest (and featured contributor to his propaganda pseudo-documentary) named Joseph McBride, an attorney for several of the Jan. 6 defendants, while Carlson pumped the claims alongside him. The focus of the segment was a particular participant in the riot photographed and recorded in key locales outside the Capitol, distinguished by his bright red facepaint and matching MAGA hat, pseudonymously named “RedFace45” by online sleuths seeking to identify various actors in the mob that day.

Carlson claimed there were “people who, on tape, encourage illegality” but “who have not been charged,” and McBride then described “RedFace45” as one of them:

He is clearly a law-enforcement officer. He interacts with uniformed personnel, he interacts with agents in the crowd. He passes out weapons—sledgehammers, poles, mace. Some of those things come into contact with other protesters who have subsequently been charged with possessing dangerous weapons and using dangerous weapons at the Capitol. That is clearly entrapment. It’s clearly the government creating conditions of dangerousness, and entrapping members of the crowd to possess weapons and possibly use them—for reasons that we cannot comprehend.

Carlson then demanded to know: “Who is this person, and why hasn’t he been charged? That’s a simple ask.” He suggested that someone in Congress should demand an investigation.

They needn’t bother. Reilly’s report at HuffPost reveals that in fact “RedFace45” has been identified already, and interviewed by the FBI, but apparently hasn’t been charged because there’s no evidence he participated in the day’s violence beyond yelling and encouraging people. In fact, he’s something of a well-known character in the St. Louis area, where he is known as “Rally Runner,” an ardent Cardinals fan who runs sprints around Busch Stadium during home games.

“Rally Runner” is somewhat of a local celebrity in St. Louis. A photo of him was featured in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in October 2013, when the Cardinals reached the World Series. The man, who did not provide a name, told the paper his running “strengthens the spirit for the Cardinals to get the energy to win.” (They lost to the Red Sox in six games that year.) He also told St. Louis magazine in 2016 that running around the stadium was “spiritual,” that his “memory is horrible” and that he’d like to publish his journal as a book.

As it happens, in addition to being a rabid Trump supporter, “Rally Runner’s” social-media posts have included posts and comments expressing his adoration for Carlson: “This is so true what he says.” “Tucker nails it again! So true!” “Look at my post from Tucker Carlson on my timeline recently, if Dems get Senate and President we are screwed. Everyone is screwed,” he wrote in November.

When Reilly confronted McBride with this evidence, he at first refused to acknowledge its veracity, then finally claimed that because it was his job was to defend his client, he didn’t “need to be right” about the facts.

“If I’m wrong, so be it, bro. I don’t care,” McBride said. “I don’t give a shit about being wrong.”

Finally, McBride told Reilly he had just been “theorizing things,” but was “not publishing conclusive findings”—though apparently he had no compunction about making definitive assertions on national television.

Republicans have had an array of would-be scapegoats to blame for the right-wing mob’s violence on Jan. 6, beginning with the early claim that the instigators were actually “Antifa” and BLM that was trotted out by GOP members of Congress. One of their early favorites was to identify a young Black videographer from Utah, John J. Sullivan, who had been with the mobs inside the Capitol, as a secret “agent provocateur” from both antifa and BLM.

There’s just one problem with this story: It has, once again, been thoroughly debunked. Sullivan, as The Washington Post reported in detail, is a man who initially attempted to organize BLM protests in Utah outside of the existing African American protest community. In short order, a person was shot during one of his events and then Proud Boys began showing up to support his protests. Among BLM activists, he was widely regarded as a duplicitous “double agent.” His last organized protest of the summer was a pro-gun rights rally featuring large numbers of far-right militiamen, including Oath Keepers.

Then there have been the sensational claims of right-wing propagandist Darren Beattie from Revolver News, who has been featured heavily in Carlson’s pseudo-documentary. Beattie’s badly flawed reportage—which, among other many factual errors, is based on conflating confidential informants with unindicted coconspirators, when in reality they are mutually exclusive under the law—has nonetheless continued to circulate with fresh iterations.

Beattie recently appeared on Glenn Beck’s talk show to claim that an Arizona Oath Keeper named Ray Epps was one of these “Deep State” informants for the FBI who had helped convince innocent “Patriots” to incriminate themselves (also the subject of a lengthy Revolver piece by Beattie). Beattie also suggests that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes—around whom federal prosecutors have been circling for months—is somehow part of this plot with the FBI.

But as Politifact explains, Beattie doesn’t even confirm that Epps is an FBI informant, but rather speculates broadly that he is. His actions on Jan. 6, videos show are wholly consistent with those of the outspoken Trump supporter he has been for years (notably as a spokesman for the Arizona Oath Keepers). And as with all of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who had informant relationships with the FBI, if Epps was also himself an informant, the information he was providing was intelligence on their “leftist” opponents, not on their own organization.

It also would not be a Tucker Carlson gaslighting episode without the requisite right-wing projection by which mainstream liberals defending democracy from the radical right, in classic “bloody shirt” style, are converted into nefarious bullies trying to destroy the country. This was the plea that McBride made to Carlson’s audience:

Our democracy and our way life is at stake, and unless you fulfill your oath to your constituents and to your country to stand up and do the right thing here, then our democracy will be lost, there is no doubt about it.

Sometimes they’re right, but not the way they think.

The wing of the QAnon conspiracy cult that believes John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and will return to the American political scene as Donald Trump's running mate showed up earlier this month in Dallas after being told that both JFK Jr. and his assassinated father would make an appearance there—and then remained through Monday, the 58th anniversary of the late president's murder. They had been told both men would appear.

At Dealey Plaza—the site of the 1963 national tragedy—a large crowd of them gathered on an overpass overlooking the spot with banners reading "Trump/JFK Jr 2024," along with ordinary Trump banners and American flags. One of the participants told a local journalist: "It's reversing the spell of what happened to JFK Senior."

The gathering—comprised mostly of followers of a leading QAnon promoter named Michael Protzman, who persuaded a substantial group of about 100 people to remain in Dallas even after his Nov. 2 event at which the deceased Kennedys failed to appear—also was the apotheosis of the cultish nature of the QAnon phenomenon. Over the weekend, Protzman—who uses the moniker "Negative48"—had advised his followers, Jim Jones-like, in a video chat to get comfortable with the idea of dying, because only then will they learn the truth.

"Ultimately... we have to experience that physical death... let go... come out on the other side," one of the chat participants said.

When asked by video journalist Rex Ravita what message she hoped the Dealey Plaza rally hoped to send, a participant replied:

It's reversing the spell of what happened to JFK Senior. They faked their deaths. And they said senior did not die and Jackie did not die. He said there was 900 celebrities that had to fake their death due to the Illuminati and their contract that they had. So they called it the Gone With The Wind program, and they're supposed to return as well and let everybody know what was going on with the Illuminati, the record business and the Epstein island the child trafficking and human trafficking that they were all involved in.

Protzman, whose main claim to fame arises from his ardent promotion of the JFK Jr.-is-still-alive theory combined with gobbledygook health claims, and his followers represent only a minority subcult within the larger QAnon alternative universe. [In reality, Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash in 1999. When asked in 2018 about the theory suggesting JFK Jr. was still alive and was about to join Trump in exposing the machinations of the globalist child-trafficking cult at the center of QAnon beliefs, the original "Q" poster confirmed that Kennedy in fact was dead; nonetheless, the theory has persisted within the QAnon cult.]

As Thomas Lecaque at The Bulwark observes, Protzman—like nearly all conspiracy theorists—embeds a deeply antisemitic core within his larger, mostly incoherent, narrative:

Protzman has some 97,000 followers on Telegram, and while the number of Q types gathered in Dallas has dropped from 350-500 in the first few days to perhaps 75-100 now, more than a week after the original promised deadline for JFK's reappearance, they are still there with him. Protzman seems to believe that JFK and Jackie Kennedy were the second physical incarnations of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and direct descendants in a genealogy so bizarre not even Dan Brown would touch it, with JFK Jr. as the Archangel Michael and Donald Trump as the Holy Spirit. And while all of this is outrageous and unhinged, he is apparently pushing anti-Semitic films and ideas—Europa: The Last Battle and Adolf Hitler: The Greatest Story Never Told—and leading his followers into ideologies ever more divorced from reality. QAnon is already based in part on medieval blood libel myths, used by Christians to justify massacres of Jewish communities. Protzman's group is spreading even more direct versions while waiting for the sign for their own crusade, bolstered by apocalyptic visions, the reemergence of dead celebrities to cheer them on, and inevitably the violence and massacres that must follow to create their Promised Land over the bodies of their enemies.

The Negative48 cult's disquieting power lies in Protzman's ability to persuade hundreds of people to come to Dallas, and for a substantial portion of them to take up communal living for a month in the hopes of witnessing "the Storm."

"I think what you're seeing here is really, undeniably a cult," said Mike Rothschild, author of The Storm Is Upon Us, told the Dallas Morning News. "The moment when the leaders of a cultic group start talking about the need for physical death to reach utopia is the moment to get the authorities involved," he tweeted.

Protzman clearly holds a powerful sway over his followers; days after the initial Nov. 2 rally, he ordered them to line up single-file in Dealey Plaza to await his instructions, and they dutifully did so. He continuously moved the goalposts regarding his predictions; after the Nov. 2 no-show, he promised believers that the big revelation instead would come on the Nov. 23 anniversary. So many of them stayed and waited, cutting off contact with their abandoned families.

"There is absolutely behavior control and thought control," Rothschild said. "He's telling people what to do. He's having people stand in straight lines to have conversations. He's telling people when to go outside, when to look up, when to look down. It is unquestionably the behavior of a cult leader."

The Negative48 cult is tearing families apart, as Vice's David Gilbert recently reported. Katy Garner, a nurse from Arkansas, told Gilbert that she had essentially lost her sister to Protzman's cult in the months since the November 2020 election.

"She left her children for this and doesn't even care. She is missing birthdays and holidays for this. She truly believes this is all real and we are the crazy ones for trying to get her to come home. But she won't," Garner said. "I don't believe she will ever come back from this. We are in mourning."

Garner said that, under Protzman's direction, her sister now is required to drink a hydrogen peroxide solution and take "bio pellets" to ward off COVID-19, and her phone calls are monitored. She also has handed over about $200,000 to the cult.

Other people with friends and family members in Dallas told Gilbert that they feared for their loved ones. "I'm very worried about her safety," one said. "We don't know if she's given him any money, but her husband is about to cancel her cards. She's blowing through money fast."

A woman whose fiancé traveled to from Missouri to Dallas for the Nov. 2 rally, went home, and then returned a week later, told a Telegram chat devoted to people whose friends and family are in the cult that she fears her fiancé may be lost to her for good.

"I keep asking him to come home, and he keeps saying something big is going to happen and he doesn't want to miss it," she wrote. "I have already thought that perhaps my fiancé might be penniless if he stays with this group. I just hope they wake up before losing everything."

One member of Protzman's group spoke about cashing in his retirement savings in order to fund his stay in Dallas on a Telegram chat.

Families across the country are wondering if and when their loved ones will leave Dealey Plaza and Dallas behind. "My wife has been there since October 31," wrote one Twitter user. "My brother as well," responded another.

Local Dallas residents are wondering the same things. The Negative48 cult's persistent presence in downtown Dallas is becoming a source of concern among local residents. "I live right by the AT&T Discovery District where [Protzman's followers] first gathered," Dallas resident Isaac Robert told Rolling Stone. "We saw a tweet and went to check it out for a good laugh, but I walked away concerned and shocked. I hate that they're still here and that Dallas has to be associated with that. If a cult leader can make a guarantee that doesn't come true and people still passionately follow him, he could tell them to do literally anything and they would. That kind of power in the hands is terrifying and dangerous for local residents."

As behavioral scientist Caroline Orr Bueno observed on Twitter, these kinds of shifts extreme rhetoric are often a signal of imminent violence—the kind that Matthew Coleman, another man radicalized by the QAnon cult, acted out earlier this year.

"These are basically the exact same spiritual/religious teachings that the guy in California was getting into just before he brutally murdered his two young children," Orr tweeted.

"My sister may be too far gone, but it's not too late to bring awareness to others," Garner told Vice. "Do not fall into this trap. Do not believe what these people say. They are all delusional and brainwashed. And if you notice a family member isolating themselves, speaking of nonsense, say something. Bring them back to reality. We didn't put two and two together. She hid this from us for a year. Don't let what happened to my family happen to yours. Pay attention and hold the ones you love tight."

The exultation on right-wing social media following Kyle Rittenhouse's acquittal has been sickeningly predictable: Mainstream conservatives loudly valorize Rittenhouse as a "hero," while more extremist voices, applying the same logic, demand that more Americans follow his footsteps—urging the likeminded to take to the street now to begin using guns to "be like Kyle." They have even appropriated his name for their future plans, voiced in numerous celebratory threads: Any leftist protester shot by a right-wing "patriot" henceforth will have been "Rittenhoused."

As we forecasted, the acquittal is now a beacon-like green light granting permission to violent right-wing extremists to openly wage the kind of "civil war" against "the left"—which ranges from liberal Democrats like Joe Biden to the "antifa" bogeyman they have concocted—that they have been fantasizing about for the past decade. In the words of Charlie Kirk's interlocutor, it's the signal that now they "get to use the guns."

The bloodlust has been palpable. Online trolls celebrated that "it's Open Season on pedo-commies" and boasted that the verdict means "there's nothing you can do about it." A neo-Nazi channel on Twitter urged readers to "let this win fuel your rage." A fan of pseudo-journalist Andy Ngo commented in a retweet: "Every one of these anarchist criminal thugs should be shot in the street like the worthless dogs they are."

Far-right maven Ann Coulter posted a meme showing a gantlet of comic-book superheroes bowing to Rittenhouse. On Facebook, Ben Shapiro framed any future violence as being left-wing: "The Left accepting the verdict in a peaceable manner remains the sizable elephant in the room."

The white-nationalist site VDare also extolled Rittenhouse's heroism:

This much is true: Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we've been waiting for throughout the turbulent summer of 2020, where a Black Lives Matter/Antifa/Bolshevik revolution has our country on the brink of total chaos.

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire blamed the media for there even having been a trial:

The verdict is right and just but Kyle Rittenhouse never should have been on trial at all. Now the media will go to work, like the demons they are, to ensure that Kenosha burns because they did not get their blood sacrifice.

Walsh then added:

I hope Rittenhouse bankrupts all of you dirtbags in media who smeared him as a white supremacist. I hope he ruins your life. I want you to suffer. It's what you deserve. It's justice.

Idaho legislator Tammy Nichols, a Republican, posted a meme featuring the Gadsden-flag "Don't Tread On Me" design, but with a graphic of Rittenhouse firing from a seated position as he did in Kenosha.

The Gun Owners of America (GOA)—a gun-rights extremist group headed by far-right militia figure Larry Pratt—joined in the celebration by announcing it was giving Rittenhouse a new gun.

Alert: GOA will be awarding Kyle Rittenhouse with an AR-15 for his defense of gun rights in America. Join us in saying THANK YOU to Kyle Rittenhouse for being a warrior for gun rights and self defense rights across the country!

Other "Patriot" Movement extremists saw the verdict as vindication for vigilantism and militia organizing. The "Washougal Moms," a militia-friendly group from eastern Washington state, opined:

Today the jury and legal system has reaffirmed our rights as citizens. The second amendment in all aspects, to form a well regulated militia, the right to bear arms in self defense, and against enemies both foreign and domestic!

Kurt Schlichter, the right-wing troll with over 380,000 followers, taunted MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who had expressed concern about the double racial standard that the verdict reflects, on Twitter.

Your pain delights me. Kyle Rittenhouse killed two leftist catspaws and bisected the bicep of another and there's nothing you can do about it.

A white-nationalist Twitter account called "Based Teutonic" celebrated the verdict by posting a fantasy that Rittenhouse would now embark on an action-hero-like mission—with the help of Judge Bruce Schroeder, who oversaw the trial in markedly biased fashion.

About to exit court room
Judge yells from behind:
Rittenhouse turns around
You forgot this
Tosses him his AR15
Credits roll, Eye of the Tiger plays

"Based Teutonic" wasn't alone in celebrating Schroeder's role in the verdict. On Telegram, a commenter in a Proud Boys channel observed:

Kyle's case shows how important is to have your guys in power on a local level. One vaguely conservative boomer judge made all of the difference in a monumental trial.

Other Proud Boys were more focused on their long-anticipated civil war. "There's still a chance for this country," wrote one. Another wrote: "The left wont stop until their bodies get stacked up like cord wood."

The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights monitored a number of far-right chat forums (particularly Telegram) following the verdict, and found an outpouring of extremist bile, much of it anticipating the ability to inflict lethal violence on "leftists," as well as Black "parasites" and, of course, Jewish people. A user called The Western Chauvinist commented: "The parasites are planning multiple 'protests' across the United States."

One user calling himself "Proud Boy To Fascist Pipeline" replied to one of these comments mocking Black leaders protesting the verdict as "parasites": "Your 17 year olds are already armed and terrorizing our neighborhoods, n----er."

Fittingly, Charlie Kirk fans—following the example of his Idaho audience member—were focused on the violence: "Arm up and tell them f**cking bring it!" one replied to predictions of leftist protests after the verdict. "Shoot these phukers," commented another.

Nick Fuentes' "Groypers" were also unbridled in their anticipation of gunning down their opponents. "The most American thing you can do is Killing Commies," opined one on the white-nationalist forum Gab.

Another Gab user exulted with a meme showing Joaquin Phoenix as The Joker, dancing: "When you find out it's officially Open Season on pedo-commies." Mocking "wannabe street thugs upset with the verdict," another Gab user replied, "you're gonna get Rittenhouse'd. Bitch."

"Getting Rittenhoused" became a popular way of threatening leftists. After Ngo posted a handful of tweets from leftists angry about the verdict, hundreds of his fans piled on, making threats of violence against them. "Someone will Rittenhouse them too," one responded. Another replied: "I came here to say that!"

Antisemitism also was a common theme. Right-wing troll Keith Woods, who has 23,500 followers on Twitter, declared after the verdict: "Huge L for the Jews." His followers piled on; one responded with a GIF meme of Gollum and the text, "Curse you goyim." Another replied, "hopefully they take an L in Charlottsville trial too. WHITE BOY WINTER!"

White nationalist Eric Striker was more explicitly antisemitic, as well as strategic, in his commentary:

Beating the Jews to the narrative as incidents unfold is more important than anything that happens in court.
Once you frame a story with the facts (and the facts have to be 100% accurate) and disseminate it with an effective propaganda network, Jews will struggle to challenge it once it's cemented.

Notorious white nationalist and antisemite Mike "Enoch" Peinovich put out a statement through his National Justice Party: "This victory for Kyle Rittenhouse over the cosmopolitan elite forces that plague the nation isn't only a victory for the young man himself, it's a victory for justice and for all White people who take a stand," Peinovich said.

On Telegram, a white nationalist commented: "The victory of Kyle Rittenhouse over the jewish forces that plague the nation isn't just a victory for the man himself, it's a victory for justice, and for the masses of disenfranchised White people which populate the globe.

The neo-Nazi group White Lives Matter had this advice for its white-supremacist followers:

Don't let this one victory lull you back to sleep. That's what they want. They know small "victories" can placate the angry masses more than anything else. Instead let this win fuel your rage. Never forget the simple fact that this clear-cut self-defense should never have gone to trial in the first place. Muslim, Hispanic, and African invaders have raped millions of our women, WHITE women. Their time of terrorizing our People with 0 consequences is coming to an end. The Rittenhouse verdict is a single tick in the scoreboard on our side. Our enemy doesn't have a scoreboard big enough for their victories. Fight harder, stronger, fiercer, and with the same remorse they have shown us. None. Get going, White man.

"This might be interpreted across the far right as a type of permission slip to do this kind of thing or to seek out altercations in this way, believing that there is a potential that they won't face serious consequences for it," Jared Holt of the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council told NPR. "I worry that that might end up being interpreted by some people as a proof of concept of this idea that you can actually go out and seek a 'self-defense situation,' and you'll be cheered as a hero for it."

Most of us are old enough to remember when Republicans eager to court the evangelical Christian vote would recoil in (not entirely genuine) horror at any hint of antisemitism in any political candidate, particularly on a GOP slate. But for the new post-insurrection Trumpian Republican Party, it seems not only to be no problem, it's practically an asset.

Case in point: Dave Reilly, an unrepentant antisemite who believes "Judaism is the religion of anti-Christ" is running for the local school board in Post Falls, Idaho, with the wholehearted endorsement of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee (KCRCC). When pressed about their candidate, the GOP chair doubled down, insisting that the press reports about his bigoted views—based on Reilly's own published tweets and articles—were "false," and that Reilly's story was "a remarkable one of salvation and is an inspiration to those struggling with life's challenges."

"I believe Dave is a good man who will make an excellent Trustee and will resist the Progressive/Marxist indoctrination of our children," retorted KCRCC chair Brent Regan on Facebook. "I encourage you to ignore the false accusations and continue your support of ALL of our recommended candidates."

When establishment Republicans have called Regan out for supporting Reilly, he has claimed they were making "accusations without complete information," and claimed that the information in the Daily Beast article by Kelly Weill that kicked off the controversy in early October did so "with quotes either fabricated or taken out of context."

As Weill and the blog Angry White Men documented, Reilly's history of posting antisemitic and white nationalist talking points on social media is extensive. His views first attracted attention in 2017, when he avidly promoted the deadly "Unite the Right" white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, while ostensibly covering the event for WHLM-AM radio in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, a station owned by his father.

"Good morning. The #AltRight slept tight and #Antifa is still sleeping. Probably hungover or dope-sick. See yall at Lee Park. #Unite the Right," one of his preevent tweets read. Reilly then resigned while putting out a statement denouncing "Nazism, the KKK, Racism, White Supremacism, and political violence," adding: "The accusations that I am a White Supremacist, Nazi, Racist or anything of this kind is pure slander."

Over the ensuing years, Reilly then embarked on a career of rubbing shoulders with racists, notably the white nationalist "Groyper" movement led by Nicholas Fuentes and embraced by pundit Michelle Malkin, who has endorsed Reilly's candidacy in Post Falls as well. Reilly attended one of their conferences. He also made multiple appearances on the white nationalist YouTube channel "Red Ice."

He tweeted that "Judaism is the religion of anti-Christ," that "all Jews are dangerous," and opined more Americans should believe antisemitic stereotypes.

On Twitter, Reilly's antisemitism was rampant. "Jews pretend to be white when it's expedient for them," he tweeted last January, which is why "white privilege is a thing." Later that month, he shared an article claiming 61% of Americans agreed with at least one antisemitic stereotype. "Good news! Let's get those numbers up!" he tweeted.

As Weill documented:

When Poland announced its withdrawal from a Holocaust event in January 2020, Reilly expressed his approval ("Poland FTW"), and when he was questioned again about his attendance at Unite The Right, he claimed that criticizing his presence alongside white supremacists was inherently Jewish behavior ("the idea that one can be contaminated by association is Jewish," he wrote).
Reilly also tweeted two pictures of billboards, which had been doctored to read "when Jews hold power they abuse it" and "all Jews are dangerous," and promoted conspiracy theories about "Jewish subversion." "Judaism is the religion of anti-Christ," he tweeted at one point in February 2020.

The targets of Reilly's bigotry include women and the LGBTQ community. He tweeted that women's suffrage was "a mistake" and that "women should not be allowed on social media." He also accused Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg of "dabbling in human trafficking" for adopting a child with his husband Chasten Buttigieg.

After leaving WHLM, Reilly worked as an editor for E. Michael Jones, the leader of an antisemitic "traditionalist Catholic" group based in Indiana and the publisher of Culture Wars magazine, which is noted for running such articles as "Judaizing: Then and Now," "John Huss and the Jews," "The Converso Problem: Then and Now," "The Judaism of Hitler," "Shylock Comes to Notre Dame." In 2019, a Reilly piece for the magazine titled "Generation Identity Crisis" claimed that "Jewish sociologists" had used "Marxist social engineering" to ignite a "mass movement of left wing agitation and sexual liberation … [leading to an] almost complete breakdown of social norms." He also wrote that "the Catholic Church has been infiltrated by homosexuals, Jews, and bad leadership."

Michelle Lippert, a retired professor of philosophy at North Idaho College and current school board member, told KXLY-TV that Reilly's candidacy is worrisome. "I've read pieces he's written. I've seen his tweets. I've listened to podcasts that he's participated in and it's clear that he's very anti-Semitic he is misogynistic, homophobic, and he has an appreciation of white supremacy," Lippert said.

For his part, Reilly—who only moved to Post Falls in 2020—has mainly claimed martyrdom at the hands of the media and liberals. He told The Coeur d' Alene Press that he has "been subjected to incredible financial, social and personal hardships because he was a public supporter of Donald Trump."

"As a result of these attacks on me and my family by radical left-wing activists, I have been able to more closely imitate Jesus Christ, who was mocked, scourged, put on a show trial, spat upon and ultimately killed," Reilly said. "I'm extremely blessed to be able to participate in that suffering for Christ's sake."

His primary rebuttal to the accurate characterization of his worldview as antisemitic is the same as Regan's: holding up his endorsement by a local man of Jewish descent named Alan Golub, who they both describe as "the son of a Holocaust survivor." What they omit from their description is that Golub, a wealthy Bitcoin promoter, does not appear to be a practicing member of the traditional Jewish faith; rather, he is listed as the primary agent for Aman Ministries, a nonprofit group with a website devoted to a mishmash of Hebraic and Christian fundamentalism, in the manner of Jews for Jesus.

In the meantime, both Reilly and Regan have come under sharp criticism from the pro-Israel group StandWithUs Northwest, which attempted to open a dialogue with both men and was rebuffed. On Facebook, the group noted: "If you look at our statement, you will see that our 'allegations' are actually screen shots of tweets that Reilly himself posted.

Reilly continued lying about StandWithUs, alleging numerous untrue things about us, in an attempt to deflect from his own antisemitic writings."

This doubling-down approach by Trumpian Republicans on efforts to call out the GOP's embrace of far-right extremism was reflected Jan. 6, when Reilly was a speaker at a rally in Coeur d'Alene organized to protest Trump's defeat in the election. He told the crowd that the November elections were fraudulent.

"This election was rigged and it was stolen from us, the American people," he said. "There's more votes in Pennsylvania than registered voters."

Before the mob in Washington began its assault on the Capitol, the Idaho crowd heard Reilly denounce police officers and the FBI for lacking integrity; called Democrats pedophiles; and claimed the CIA has been smuggling drugs, children, and money. He also attacked then-Vice President Mike Pence.

"Mike Pence just released a letter saying he's not going to do what he's supposed to do," he told the audience, which booed loudly, with shouts of "traitor". The event's emcee then took the microphone and announced: "Supposedly they're taking the Capitol and taking out Pence."

The crowd cheered.

We knew at the time that Donald Trump sent an army of contracted goons from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in to the city of Portland, Oregon, in the summer of 2020 to arrest citizens protesting against police brutality—summarily sweeping people off the street on the pretext of a kind of preventative arrest based on groundless speculation that they were "antifa" conspiring to "burn down our cities," as Trump put it—that it was an outrage against the Constitution and the rule of law.

What we didn't know (and an internal DHS review that only surfaced this week reveals) was that it was also an extraordinary exercise in authoritarian incompetence. It demonstrates that senior DHS leadership pushed unfounded conspiracy theories about antifascists, encouraged the contractors they hired to violate protesters' constitutional rights, and made spurious connections, based on no real evidence, between protesters who engaged in criminal activity. It also revealed poor training and inadequate guidance, which contributed to the federal intelligence officers' lack of knowledge on legal restrictions for the collection of such information, and turned the entire operation into a massive mess.

"The report was a stunning analysis of the incompetence and mismanagement and abuse of power during the summer of 2020," Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who released a redacted version of the document Friday, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Originally released on Jan. 6—and its contents subsequently overlooked due to that day's events—the internal review focused on DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I/A). It found that senior DHS leaders attempted to politicize intelligence in order to support Trump's claims that a massive "antifa" conspiracy was behind the many anti-police protests around the nation, but particularly so in Portland. The same leaders pressured subordinates to illegally search phones, and when legal staff objected, sought to cut them out of the discussion.

A team of open source intelligence collectors, tasked with analyzing information obtained from public sources, also created dossiers on protesters and journalists—which they called "baseball cards"—despite having no clear connections to domestic terrorism or security threats.

"The report documents shocking, coordinated efforts by our government to abuse its power and to invade liberty in violation of the Constitution," said Oregon federal public defender Lisa Hay. "In Portland, we were concerned that the government unconstitutionally collected information, including through the illegal search of protestors' cellphones last summer. This report confirms that was their intent."

Over the course of the summer, between June 4 and Aug. 31, DHS sent at least 755 officers—from agencies that ranged from Federal Protective Service to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as well as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secret Service, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis personnel—to Portland, tasked with protecting the city's downtown federal courthouse. The building had come under regular attack during nightly social justice protests that arose initially from the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in late May.

The Floyd protests were an international phenomenon, spreading to over 2,000 cities and towns, occurring in all 50 states as well as in over 60 other countries. Demonstrators turned out en masse to support those seeking justice for Floyd and the wider Black Lives Matter movement, and standing up against police brutality. Most of these protests lasted one or two days; however, in Portland, where police brutality issues had taken on an extraordinary edge, the protests became a daily affair—one that eventually surpassed 100 consecutive days.

By early July, most of the protests had become quiet and nonviolent, with only sporadic violence and vandalism, with the notable exception of an arson attack on the federal courthouse downtown—which is about the time that DHS agents began showing up, wearing anonymous military gear, arresting protesters on the streets, and spiriting them away in unmarked vans.

Over the next few nights, they clashed with protesters in the area around the courthouse, using flashbangs and munitions to disperse the crowds. One protester was shot in the forehead by an "impact weapon" round that caused him brain damage. Another protester—a Navy veteran who was attempting to speak with the DHS officers—was brutally beaten with batons, breaking his hand.

That was when the scene exploded. On the night of July 24, thousands of Portlanders took to the streets to protest the arrests. The protest was entirely peaceful—drum circles, groups of teachers and nurses, a marching band, a "Wall of Moms" wearing yellow shirts—until the DHS officers began unleashing tear gas on the crowd. A brigade of "fathers" arrived with leaf blowers and blew the gas back at the officers.

The escalated protests continued nightly. DHS officials called the protests "criminal violence perpetrated by anarchists targeting city and federal properties." It brought in reinforcements on July 28, even though many of these officers lacked proper training, and both Mayor Ted Wheeler and Gov. Kate Brown—along with both of the state's senators—demanded the DHS police be withdrawn. Eventually, they negotiated a phased withdrawal, and the DHS arrests ceased.

It was shortly apparent that the right-wing attempt to make "antifa" and Black Lives Matter into bogeymen responsible for the protest violence was utterly bogus. An Associated Press review of the arrest documents from the summer's protests showed that most of the people taken into custody were not left-wing radicals and had no ties to larger movements. It had already been clear for months that "antifa" was not responsible for the violence—which in many instances appeared in fact to have been instigated by police pushing back on protesters. This didn't prevent Trump from declaring on Twitter that he intended to have antifa designated a terrorist organization, though in fact he lacked the statutory power to do so.

The internal review at DHS conducted afterward revealed that the push for concocting intelligence about antifa intended to fit this narrative came from the top. Though the names are redacted, it is safe to assume that Chad Wolf, the DHS unconfirmed "acting secretary," was particularly involved, since he made numerous public statements at the time that mirror the shape of the discussions with the agency.

At the time the protests broke out, Wolf appeared on Fox News with Tucker Carlson and announced that the Department of Justice had plans "targeting and investigating the head of these organizations, [and] the individuals that are paying for these individuals to move across the country."

Trump himself appeared on Fox with Laura Ingraham and claimed that "people that are in the dark shadows" are "controlling the streets" of Democratic cities. When Ingraham warned him that he sounded like he was promoting a conspiracy theory, he doubled down with a pitch-perfect rendition of the "evil antifa thug" caricature central to the narrative attacking the movement.

"We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms, with gear and this and that," he claimed.

The DHS internal review found that Wolf and his immediate underlings at I/A pushed staffers to describe the protests as "Violent Antifa Anarchist Inspired" (VAAI) actions—an entirely new category that had no evidentiary support or background.

"You could see where this VAAI definition was coming from a mile away," a career analyst is quoted saying in the report. "He got tired of [Redacted Name] telling him they did not have the reporting and he was convinced it was ANTIFA so he was going to fix the problem by changing what the collectors were reporting."

An email was sent to DHS senior leaders "instructing them that henceforth, the violent opportunists in Portland were to be reported as VAAI, unless the intel 'show[ed]...something different."

The report says that the DHS leadership "did make other attempts to controvert the collection-analysis processm," pointing particularly to the push for VAAI designations. One memo from the same leader posited that "we have overwhelmingly intelligence regarding the ideologies driving individuals toward violence," but the analysts responded with factual reality: "In fact, overwhelming intelligence regarding the motivations or affiliations of the violent protesters did not exist," the report says. "Indeed, the review team could not identify any intelligence that existed to support [Redacted Name]'s assertion."

Wolf and his team even concocted an analytical framework for the protests—claiming that there are four distinct phases in which they develop—that appeared to have been pulled from their nether regions, and then required analysts to work overtime to come up with evidence to support it and put it into a report which then went utterly ignored:

A second example of the manner in which [Redacted Name] turned analysis upside down was his dictate regarding the "Four Phases of Protest." Apparently, [Redacted Name] came to the conclusion sometime after George Floyd's death and the subsequent protests that four phases of protest exist, and he wanted to say, at least temporarily, whether a protest was in a particular phase, and the indicators of that phase. As with the VAAI term, [Redacted Name] devised this idea about phases of protest on his own. From the analysts' perspective, the problem was that they were typically asked to investigate a question, not given a conclusion and told to write a paper to support it. In this case, [Redacted Name] gave the analysts four phases and told them to find support for his proposition. Aggravating the task, they were given 48 hours over a weekend so the paper could be sent to state and local partners. … At any rate, the paper was sent to state and local officials, where it was greeted like "a tree that fell in the forest that no one heard."

The review also noted that Federal Protective Services officers requested assistance from DHS's Homeland Identities Targeting and Exploitation Center to search protesters' cellphones. The latter team found the searches were illegal, and resisted pressure from senior Homeland Security leaders to assist in the searches.

And then there were the "baseball cards." These dossiers were compiled by freshly hired collections analysts who targeted people arrested during the protest and suspected of having "antifa" or BLM connections. The internal review found that out of the 48 reports provided, 13 of them involved people accused of non-violent offenses, such as trespassing or failing to comply with an order, with no clear tie to any national security threat or mission. One "baseball card" report focused on a person who was arrested and accused of flying a drone and identified on social media as a journalist.

Republicans took the bogus narrative and functionally made it an official one widely believed across the country—namely, that "antifa and BLM burned down cities across the nation"—and have even used it to justify the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. At congressional hearings, they have even tried to claim that examples of lethal violence, such as the slaying of an FPS officer in Oakland, by far-right extremists was the product of "antifa" radicals.

The narrative also was primarily responsible for the failures by both DHS and other federal law-enforcement agencies, notably the FBI, to adequately take the very real and building threat of white-nationalist terrorism seriously. The result, in fact, unleashed a plague of far-right violence that reached a high-tide mark on Jan. 6, but which has still not receded.

"This was a textbook example of what happens when you send people in with a political agenda, inadequate training, and no real effort to correct the kind of problems that showed up early," Wyden told OPB. "This was about politics. We know that Donald Trump tried to say again and again, 'Portland is really the problem.' And he would never really focus on the fact that his people, were basically okaying, for example, the use of tear gas near a school in our community."

While you might get the impression that the Proud Boys largely vanished from the public radar in the weeks following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection in which they played a central role, the reality is that the proto-fascist street-thug organization has been popping up all over recently—but operating on a purely local level, consistently hijacking causes and events organized by local activists and communities.

This appears to be their latest strategy, as imprisoned Proud Boy Ethan Nordean had suggested in his pre-arrest Telegram chats: Namely, to scale down their operations and spread their recruitment by focusing on local issues. Over the past several weeks, as Tess Owen observes at VICE, they appear to be enacting it in places like Nashua, New Hampshire; Miami and Tampa, Florida; and Salem, Oregon.

The strategy mostly appears to entail identifying local grievances that can provide opportunities for Proud Boys to involve themselves. In Miami, for instance, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio turned up uninvited with several cohorts, offering "support" for a protest by the Cuban-American community backing dissidents in Cuba.

"Since Jan. 6, members of the group have steered clear of large-scale rallies, and instead attempted to build grassroots support in their communities by latching onto hyper-local culture war dramas and ginning up tensions," Owen writes.

In Nashua, as Owen reports, Proud Boys turned up at school board meetings, masked and wearing their uniform shirts, to protest "critical race theory" in local schools. Their presence riled local residents.

"Proud Boys come to our board meetings for what? For what? What is the purpose of them being here? Are they here for our children? I think not," said board member Gloria Timmons, who doubles as president of the Nashua chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Nordean's pre-arrest chats with his fellow Proud Boys about how to proceed after Jan. 6 promised this kind of strategy. "I'm gunna press on with some smart level headed non emotional guys and create a game plan for how to approach this year, we aren't gunna stop getting involved in the community, especially with the momentum we have," Nordean wrote.

He later added: "Yeah, this is just to organize and prepare for when we do decide to get active again. At the very least there's lots of good excuses to just get out and do meet n greets with the public, raise money, community service, security for events etc ... but we can work on an effective process so we look more organized and have properly vetted members who are representing the club."

This is consistent with Proud Boys' proclaimed self-image as just normal American guys, their belief right up to Jan. 6 that the police were on their side, and their ongoing denials of being racist or extremist. The localized issues are often the same right-wing grievances being ginned up nightly on Fox News, as with critical race theory in New Hampshire schools. The common thread among the issues being hijacked by Proud Boys is that they are congenial to (if not fueled by) conspiracism, and primarily revolve around concocted enemies.

The first post-insurrection Proud Boys event of note was an early-May rally at a city park in Salem, Oregon, at which journalists were threatened and ejected and guns were on broad display. It was also notable for the remarkable absence of any kind of police presence. However, another Proud Boys event held in Oregon City on June 15 was shut down by police when they declared it a riot.

Most of the Proud Boys' reappearances have occurred over the past month:

• July 3, Buhl, Idaho: A Proud Boys float, featuring uniformed marchers walking alongside, was among the 100 or so entries for the town's annual Sagebrush Days parade. The polo shirt-wearing Proud Boys carried both an American flag and a black flag emblazoned with the organization's logo.
• July 10, Grand Rapids, Michigan: A local Proud Boys chapter announced that it planned to hold a rally in a local park to "honor the lives lost to antifa & BLM racist mob violence," but nobody from the organization showed up at the anointed time and place.
• July 10, Tallahassee, Florida: A group of about 100 protesters that included a large number of Proud Boys rallied on the lawn of the Historic Capitol Museum to demand the government release the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. They flashed signs at passersby and chanted, "Let them go." It was hosted by Luis Miguel, a Republican senatorial candidate from St. Augustine, who described the arrested indictees as part of a patriotic brotherhood: "They're not insurrectionists; they're not traitors; they're not terrorists. They are heroes," he said.
• July 11, Miami, Florida: As demonstrators assembled en masse around Miami to support nationwide anti-government protests in Cuba, Tarrio arrived with a pack of Proud Boys to offer their backing. One of the Proud Boys asked Miami Police Chief Art Acevedo why he hangs out with "Marxists" and "Communists." Acevedo also had a hostile exchange with Tarrio.
• July 14, Salem, Oregon: A group of about 20 Proud Boys, armed with holstered handguns, paintball guns, bats, and body armor gathered to protest outside a Planned Parenthood clinic to protest abortion laws, and were met by a crowd of at least 40 counter-protesters. The opposing sides ended up brawling, and Salem police arrested two people.
• July 14, Helena, Montana: An ostensible "fundraising event for veterans" sponsored by a local Proud Boys group was canceled after being publicized locally. A "Proud Boys Poker Run" was supposedly intended to dedicate funds to a wounded veterans fund, but the person who originated the event punted when he was exposed: "the poker run for the 24th is hereby officially cancelled due to snow-flakes," he wrote on the event's website. "unfortunately a few uninformed sheep started causing problems at the hub sorry for any inconvenience and hope yall have a great summer."
• July 17, Los Angeles, California: A crew of black-clad Proud Boys descended upon the scene outside Wi Spa, which had attracted a crowd of protesters and counter-protesters in a dispute over the business' policies regarding transgender members. As Left Coast Right Watch's on-scene reporting showed, a handful of fights turned into an outright street brawl. Police clashed mostly with left-wing protesters, using batons and riot munitions, and the scene was declared a riot and cleared.
• July 19, Red Bluff, California: A number of Proud Boys showed up to rally outside a court hearing for a local tavern owner facing assault charges, reportedly flashing white-supremacist hand gestures. The tavern, the Palomino Room, has become "kind of a Mecca for right wing extremism, given the owner's outspoken views regarding those awful, oppressive mask mandates," reported the local news outlet. "From there it has been surmised that the Proud Boys might have vandalized the Wild Oak store by firing a paint ball at it and attaching a State of Jefferson Proud Boy sticker in front of a 'Black Lives Matter' sign."
• July 20, Scotland, South Dakota: Local Proud Boy David Finnell applied on behalf of the group to sponsor a street dance from noon until midnight in mid-September, and the local city council approved the request, which would have closed a section of the city street, as required for alcohol consumption and food vendors. However, after the announcement produced a torrent of disapproval, Finnell pulled out, saying the Proud Boys were dropping sponsorship of the event "out of concerns for safety."
• July 26, Tampa, Florida: An anti-COVID-19-restriction rally, billing itself as a "Worldwide Freedom Rally," attracted a large contingent of Proud Boys supporting the cause. Some of them carried yellow "Don't Tread On Me" Gadsden banners, as well as signs declaring that "Trump won," and demanding the government "free political prisoners"—that is, the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
• July 30, Boise, Idaho: Some anonymous Proud Boys hung two large banners bearing their logo from two heavily trafficked freeway overpasses in the city. Police removed the banners, and said it was unclear who hung them.

One of the more insidious aspects of the Proud Boys' strategy is how it manipulates small-town environments to insinuate themselves within them, and once there, how it divides and creates turmoil within those communities where little existed previously. As a local account in Mainer News demonstrated, the Proud Boys' gradual takeover of a small old tavern in Portland, Maine, alienated and angered local residents, who blamed the tavern owner for permitting it.

The owner, as the report explains, wasn't necessarily sympathetic to the Proud Boys, but really had little idea about their background. "'Oh, they're not that bad,'" the man reportedly told his longtime bouncer, who quit over the situation.

"They're bad as the fuckin' Klan, Bobby!" the bouncer replied. He then pointed at a group of Proud Boys across the street, and added: "Yeah, I'm talking about you motherfuckers."

One of the consequences of the GOP's sidelong embrace of its extremist elements—from the insurrection denialists and Big Lie gaslighters to the QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—is that far-right extremists are now perfectly comfortable identifying as Republicans. In some cases, they're demanding the overthrow of the party's establishment—which can't seem to decide whether to fight back or just succumb willingly to the incoming far-right tide.

Establishment Republicans in Western states are particularly under siege from extremist elements among their voting base. In Idaho, for instance, armed-standoff-guru-turned-pandemic-denialist Ammon Bundy filed paperwork to run for governor, in a race already featuring another leading state "Patriot" movement figure. In Nevada, an insurgent far-right group organized on social media and led by Proud Boys members are attempting an open hostile takeover of the Clark County GOP, the state's largest county-level Republican organization.

Bundy's filing is rich in irony. For starters, he is currently banned from the Idaho Statehouse in Boise after his two ejections and arrests for defying masking requirements, for which he is currently standing trial. For another, as KTVB notes, Bundy himself is not even registered to vote in Idaho, and has apparently never done so in the five years or so that he has lived in Emmett.

He also named himself the treasurer of his campaign, which means that he will have to refile the paperwork, according to the Idaho Secretary of State's office, which tweeted out an explanation: "Because a treasurer must be a registered Idaho voter, Ammon Bundy will either need to register and refile or name a new treasurer by refiling. IDSOS staff have notified him as such."

The Republican field to replace incumbent Governor Brad Little (who has not announced whether he will seek re-election) is already large, and Bundy's competition in the primary already features another leading "Patriot" movement figure, Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin, who announced her candidacy last week. While Bundy was probably the earliest far-right figure in Idaho to take up the cause of opposing COVID-19-related public-health restrictions, McGeachin—who has supported Bundy and his fellow standoff-loving "Patriots" steadfastly from her office in Boise—has also been on the pandemic-denialist bandwagon.

McGeachin appeared alongside Bundy at one anti-restriction rally in Boise. More notoriously, she appeared in a video in which she brandished a handgun and a Bible while sitting in the driver's seat of a pickup, railing against coronavirus restrictions.

The political insurgency inside Clark County's GOP was reported Friday by Rory Appleton at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who explained that a group of far-right activists with deep ties to the Proud Boys are positioning themselves to take over the county Republican leadership. Some of its members, meanwhile, are alleged to have threatened a number of prominent Republicans.

The group, Appleton reported, organized online—primarily using the encrypted chat app Telegram—while reveling in anti-Semitic and white-nationalist memes and rhetoric. "Two Republican women in public office told the Review-Journal they've been threatened by leaders of the fringe movement, as did the current board of the Clark County party, which is hiring security for a crucial meeting Tuesday," the story reads.

Calling itself the "Republican Chamber of Commerce" (despite lacking ties to any known GOP organization), the far-right group first made its presence felt last month when it organized a late surge in votes favoring the censure of Barbara Cegavske, the state's Republican Secretary of State, for refusing to play along with attempts to overturn the 2020 election results based on Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud.

Since then, it has been preparing to provide a similar wave of votes to sweep three of their three leading figures—Rudy Clai, Matt Anthony and Paul Laramie—into the leadership of the Clark County GOP. The group has no record of doing business anywhere in the state of Nevada, and has no connection to any of the known chamber or Republican groups already established in Nevada.

Yet its website appears to be a nominally mainstream GOP group. Its primary emblem resembles the Republican National Committee's logo but inverted, with a red elephant on a white background encircled in red with the letters "RCC" and "Republican Chamber of Commerce" within.

Anthony has achieved a level of media notoriety as one of Las Vegas' most prominent Proud Boys, though he insists the local chapter is nonviolent and nonracist. After the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he defended the people arrested and warned against a law-enforcement crackdown on "Patriots": "They're basically going all in on tyranny, guys. … They're watching. It's to be expected. They're the enemy. They're going to shut down our ability to communicate."

As it happens, Anthony is also a fugitive: He is the subject of an arrest warrant from the state of Michigan after he broke probation by moving to Nevada and then refusing to return after Nevada declined to oversee his probation, all stemming from his 2012 arrest on a drug charge.

The group's Telegram channel—owned by Anthony, and administered by Clai—is titled "Keep Nevada Open," apparently an offshoot of a Facebook group with the same name that boasted 17,000 members and organized anti-masking and other pandemic-related protests. Appleton describes a review of the channel's contents by the Clark County GOP executive board, led by chief of staff Richard MacLean:

MacLean showed his fellow board members several pictures and videos posted within the group, though not specifically by Anthony and Clai.

One photo blamed the 9/11 terrorist bombings on Jews. Another video featured a long clip of an Adolf Hitler speech and Nazi soldier marches. Some featured cartoon characters with negative Jewish stereotypes, and one photo featured messages written on dollar bills.

A post even poked fun at Republicans, claiming they seemed to be shocked at certain current events while white nationalists were thrilled by them.

The board promptly ejected the three men from the party. However, on Thursday, 10 people including Anthony and Clai filed a lawsuit against both the county and state party central committees, accusing them of illegally boxing them out of Clark County GOP meetings. They claim Clai and Anthony are heading up an alternative leadership slate, and are running against a mainstream ticket headed up by state Sen. Carrie Buck.

Despite the pushback by local Republican officials, the extremist elements remain emboldened in no small part because national-level Republicans have shown their eagerness to ignore the radicalism and even embrace it. Certainly, the local far-right leaders are confident that the party's base supports them, and not the establishment players.

"We have the numbers, and they don't, so they have to play dirty," Anthony said in an interview Thursday. "It's that simple."

McGeachin's campaign signs feature the hashtag #IAmIdaho. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are at a pivotal moment in history, not just for Idaho but for our nation," McGeachin said.

Bundy told NBC News on Monday that, despite the filings, he hasn't formally announced his candidacy, but is preparing to build a campaign organization.

"The people of Idaho are very freedom-minded," Bundy said. "I had never desired (to run for office), but I knew as early as 2017 that I would run for governor of Idaho."

When the Proud Boys and their far-right cohorts led the violent Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, they did so largely operating under their longstanding belief that the police were on their side. This weekend, breaking their weeks of quiet amid a stream of post-Jan. 6 arrests, they held an armed "Second Amendment" rally in Salem, Oregon—without a whiff of police presence.

That meant that the Proud Boys, acting as gun-bearing "security" for the "One Nation, One God" rally on Saturday at Salem's Riverfront Park—an event that had no permit from the city—were able to close off access to anyone deemed undesirable, threatening both journalists and citizens with impunity. The only sign of law enforcement was a police helicopter hovering overhead.

Proud Boys threaten journalists, close public park for far-right May Day event in Salem, ORwww.youtube.com

Journalist Tim Gruver of The CenterSquare Oregon was threatened by Proud Boys and refused entrance to cover the event. "Riverfront is a public park," Gruver noted on Twitter. "Families are gathered right next door."

A videographer who uses the nom de plume "Behind Enemy Lines" was also escorted out of the event by Proud Boys. "OK, gotta get you outta here," a masked Proud Boy can be seen telling him on video he published. "Roll it up." As he leaves, they make it clear that they believe he "doxxed" (revealed the identity of) a Proud Boy at a previous event.

Promoted online as a "May Day 2A Rally," the event drew 100-200 attendees, according to reporters. They were observed carrying semi-automatic pistols or rifles. And despite the lack of any authority to do so, they "closed" the public park to media and forced out anyone they believed didn't belong, including at least one elderly man who was just walking through the park.

Oregon Proud Boys have deep connections to the Jan. 6 insurrection, including two brothers who were arrested for their roles in the Capitol siege. Moreover, their participation in the invasion of the Oregon State Capitol in Salem on Dec. 21 was in many ways a powerful precursor of the Jan. 6 event, especially in terms of the far right's antidemocratic strategies.

The leading scheduled speaker for the event was Rep. Mike Nearman, the Dalles-based state House member who was seen on video opening a door to allow insurrectionists into the building on Dec. 21. Nearman has been charged with two misdemeanors—official misconduct in the first degree and criminal trespass in the second degree—for that act.

However, Nearman was a no-show. Instead, the best-known speaker Saturday was Jo Rae Perkins, the QAnon-loving Republican nominee for Oregon's U.S. Senate seat in 2020. Perkins called COVID-19 vaccines a "bioweapon," repeated false "stolen election" claims, and claimed the state is "going after your children."

"Let's take back Oregon, let's take back this country," she said.

A number of Salem residents remarked on the threatening and bullying behavior and the absence of a police presence on social media. "The Proud Boys are basically illegally taking over Riverfront park for the day and are forcefully ejecting people they don't like," tweeted one citizen. "They have weapons. Salem PD are doing nothing and have blocked me, a Salem resident, on this platform. This is not ok."

One elderly man posted a description of the scene on Facebook:

Just took a stroll through our Riverfront Park which Republicans and other fascists had commandeered for their meeting. A large number of men, mostly with sidearms, in Proud Boys uniforms, mainly military belts and camouflage, and also American flags and Trump paraphernalia.
The most noticeable aspect, which was my main reason for checking this out, was that there was absolutely no Salem Police present. Not only in the Park itself but also on the periphery, along Front Street. Not a one.
As I ambled through the venue I was accosted by a woman who demanded to know why I had a mask on. Then she demanded that I not take photos, and then insisted that I tell her my name. Turns out she was one of the "organizers".
After that I sat in the amphitheater area and listened to speakers, mostly Republicans. The atmosphere of hatred and blind, ignorant fury was unbelievable.
I was going to stay until Representative Nearman gave his speech but before we got to that part of the program four heavily armed and uniformed Proud boys sat down next to me and said they were going to escort me out of there, saying the "organizers" didn't want me there.
I naturally complied and as we were walking out I asked the one who seemed to be their spokesman what would happen if I didn't agree to leave as told, would they forcibly evict me. He said we could do it either way it was up to me.
Most of us, quite understandably, don't want to stay up at night worrying about these characters but at least believe that they have a serious agenda that involves violence and attacks on our governmental institutions. And the police will not be on our side.

Another Salem resident posted about his experience on Reddit:

I was walking past the fisherman statue towards the carousel with one of the kids I support when we saw a group of them walking by, so we cut through the grass towards the front of the carousel. I snapped a picture to post to snapchat and they started following me, yelling "give me that phone fucker." They started getting closer so we started hurrying to the gates. I had to stop when I got separated from the kid I support. They started shoving me telling me that I needed to go. One grabbed a hold of me so I tried to stabilize myself and one of them held me while a couple others started swinging at me. It felt like four or five were there but it was more likely only two or three of them involved in the scuffle. They smacked me in the head a couple times and got my ribs and back before throwing me on the ground. They wouldn't let me go back to the kid I support while she was still in the park so I had to walk along the train tracks and she had to follow me on the opposite side of the fence. She was being followed by somebody wearing a ballistic vest and holding a pistol at their side. We ended up back together at the parking lot by the gilbert house and they stopped following her.

The same man commented later that police did come to his home for a statement:

Police came by the house I'm working at and asked me questions. Dude spent the entire time basically trying to ask whether or not I was agitating them. Officer said "It's not normal for them to do that unprovoked, but you're not the first person they've thrown out today."

The Western States Center, a Portland-based social justice organization, issued a letter denouncing the event. It was cosigned by a coalition of religious and community groups, as well as the state's Democratic congressional delegation and Gov. Kate Brown as well as other elected officials. "We condemn the bigotry and racism that were always in our community, and that anti-democratic groups and some elected officials have emboldened," it read.

"The far-right actors behind the May 1 rally do not speak for Salem and they do not speak for Oregon," the letter went on. "Hate and intimidation has no place in our community, and those who explicitly or subtly encourage violence should be held accountable."

Amid hysterical claims that wolves are driving ranchers out of business, Idaho's Republican state Senate this week approved legislation that would enable hired contractors to exterminate up to 90% of the state's wild wolf population. The bill, if signed (as expected) by GOP Gov. Brad Little would end tag limits on wolves and allow year-round trapping on private land.

It may have had the appearance of being a simple anti-environmental move by conservative Republicans taking advantage of a late-tenure maneuver by Donald Trump that green-lighted the state to kill more wolves. But it was also part of a long Idaho tradition of conspiracist fearmongering in which killing wolves is seen as a way of fighting back against the federal government and liberal environmentalists.

"These wolves, there's too many in the state of Idaho," declared Sen. Mark Harris before Wednesday's vote. "They're destroying ranchers; they're destroying wildlife."

Harris—whose southeastern Idaho district in Soda Springs is nowhere near any Idaho wolf habitat, which is primarily relegated to the central and northern parts of the state—repeated a tale of a "gentleman rancher" victimizes by a pack of wolves. He complained that Idaho's wolf management plan calls for only 150 wolves, and now over 1,500 wolves are believed to reside there.

The bill passed by a 26-7 vote. Little has not said whether or not he will sign it, but he did sign similar anti-wolf legislation in 2017.

The door to the legislation was opened by Trump's decision in late October 2020, just before the election, to hand wolf management decisions over to the states and local tribes. At the time, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director claimed the wolf populations were fully recovered, though there was no scientific data to support that claim. The wolves officially lost their federal protection 60 days later.

This is nothing particularly new for Idaho. In 2014, then-Gov. Butch Otter signed legislation approving $400,000 in funding to kill as many as 500 of the state's estimated population of 650 wolves, leaving as few as 10 breeding pairs. Otter had made loathing of wolves a centerpiece of his political image.

Much of the antipathy is predicated on old fashioned fear about wolves, particularly given their predilection for preying on livestock and family pets in areas where humans inhabit their range, not to mention the potential threat they represent to human life. But there is also a powerful political element, particularly in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, that is fueled by far-right anti-government paranoia and conspiracy theories.

For years, wolf recovery efforts have been depicted in the rural West as the imposition of the "New World Order" on residents of the rural areas where the creatures roam. A number of far-right outlets, including the John Birch Society's magazine and the conspiracist website World Net Daily, have run pieces describing how wolf recovery is a key component of a plot by radical environmentalists on behalf of the United Nations to destroy private property rights in America. In the Mountain West, holding such views is not uncommon.

When militias were first organizing in Idaho and Montana in the early to mid-1990s, much of the anti-government sentiment that drove recruitment revolved around resentment for the just-instituted wolf recovery efforts.

"It was seen as direct government intervention into their way of life and telling them what they had to put up with and what they couldn't shoot," recalls Amaroq Weiss, wolf recovery director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental organization that has filed numerous lawsuits over the years to prevent the wolf hunts in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. "So this goes way back. The wolf has always been a surrogate for hatred for the federal government in the areas where the reintroductions took place."

The John Birch Society's house organ, The New American, published an article in 2001 more or less outlining this same conspiracy: "Simply put, the 'wolf recovery' program is a form of environmental terrorism. Thus while the U.S. government is working through the UN to fight a war against terrorism abroad, it is collaborating with UN-linked environmental radicals to wage an eco-terrorist campaign against rural property owners here at home."

The embodiment of the extreme nature of these sentiments came in the winter of 2013 when a group of men wearing Klan-like hoods posed with the corpse of a freshly killed wolf and an American flag and then posted it on Facebook. The page that published the picture belonged to a couple of Wyoming outfitters, who later explained that they were harkening back to Western vigilantism: "Trying to make a statement! ... Frontier Justice! Wyoming hunters are fed up!"

The reality of livestock depredation by wolves makes a very different picture. Wildlife Services, the agency that oversees the killing of wolves, has been reporting that wolf predation in Idaho has been reaching record levels. However, those numbers have also been questioned by a number of environmentalist critics.

The problem with Wildlife Services' numbers is that they were recently changed to be much broader, so that they now include killings even where there is no evidence of predation, injury, or struggle, since the Services claim—without scientific evidence—that cattle can die from overexertion hours or even days after encounters with wolves.

Moreover, wolf predation represents only a tiny portion of cattle losses each year. While proponents of the Idaho bill note that 753 cattle, 952 sheep, and 54 other animals were killed by wolves between 2015 and 2020, the state is home to some 2.5 million cattle; those losses represent less than 1% of that population.

Predation overall represents only 4% of all livestock deaths on an annual basis—and the largest portion of that predation (over 40%) is by coyotes. Wolves, at 4%, represent the second-smallest class of cattle predator (with bears coming in last).

The Humane Society of the United States called the Idaho bill "a blatant attempt to usurp state biologists tasked with managing Idaho's wolves.

"This bill doesn't just cross an ethical line; it sprints right past it. It is an embarrassment to the state of Idaho, and there is absolutely no scientific or ethical justification for this deeply misguided and dangerous legislation. In a race to slaughter one of America's most treasured animals, this bill allows fear and hate to win. Idaho's wolves deserve better; the environment deserves better. This bill must be vetoed by Governor Little if it comes to his desk."

A self-described "lifetime member" of the Oath Keepers has become the first defendant in the Jan. 6 insurrection cases to enter a guilty plea as part of a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, following a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., Friday morning.

The plea bargain for Jon Schaffer, 53, a heavy-metal guitarist from Indiana who was photographed assaulting officers with bear spray and entering the U.S. Capitol, was approved by Judge Ahmit Mehta. Schaffer engaged in a long conversation with Mehta acknowledging that the deal requires him to "cooperate fully with the United States," which included providing evidence of known crimes and sitting for interviews with investigators.

Schaffer's guilty plea to two charges—obstructing an official proceeding and illegally entering the Capitol grounds—makes him the first participant in the insurrection to agree to provide evidence against his fellow rioters. Schaffer, who originally faced six felony charges, will enter the government's witness protection program as part of the deal.

According to an earlier filing, which was mistakenly made public, Schaffer in March began engaging in "debrief interviews." As The Washington Post notes, the plea bargain marks a critical step forward in the prosecution of the cases, as other defendants face similar choices in terms of providing evidence for prosecutors, particularly when it comes to the activities of the two key paramilitary organizations involved in the insurrection, the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.

"Whenever you have a large group of people arrested," criminal defense attorney Martin Tankleff told CNN, it's common for prosecutors to pressure defendants to flip on each other. "They're going to start talking. They're going to start sharing information."

Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, who was present in Washington on Jan. 6 but did not enter the Capitol, is one of the key figures being drawn into the net prosecutors are creating with conspiracy charges involving other members of his group. Though federal indictments handed down against his Oath Keepers and Proud Boys cohorts have not named him personally, he is referenced in several of them as "Person 1," a central player in what prosecutors are describing as a conspiracy to "stop, delay, or hinder Congress's certification of the Electoral College vote."

"I may go to jail soon," Rhodes recently told a right-wing rally in Texas. "Not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes. There are some Oath Keepers right now along with Proud Boys and other patriots who are in D.C. who are sitting in jail denied bail despite the supposed right to a jury trial before you're found guilty and presumption of innocence, were denied bail because the powers that be don't like their political views."

Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola's attorney wrote in court filings that he believed a so-called "cooperating witness" was sharing information about the Proud Boys. An earlier filing by prosecutors had revealed that this witness heard Proud Boys members claim that "anyone they got their hands on they would have killed," including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and that they would have also killed then-Vice President Mike Pence "if given the chance." The men—who all had firearms or access to them—also talked about returning to Washington for Inauguration Day, and that "they plan to kill every single 'm-fer' they can." That witness, prosecutors noted, has not been charged with a crime.

Most of the defendants, as a New York Times piece recently explored, are facing substantial evidence of their crimes culled from videos and photos both in mainstream media and on social media. Indeed, a large portion of that evidence was provided by the insurrectionists themselves.