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Militant Christian Nationalists Remain A Potent Force, Even After The Capitol Riot
by Tom Gjelten
NPR
January 19, 20219:59 AM ET

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

"JESUS SAVES" banners were among those carried during a rally on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington before rioters stormed the Capitol. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

With Joe Biden just days away from his inauguration as the nation's president, Pastor Darryl Knappen was still denying reality and even declaring himself willing to take up arms to keep Donald Trump in office.

"It was pastors who led the way in colonial times to encourage our country to shake off the totalitarian regime of the king of England," Knappen said in a Jan. 9 Facebook message to his Minnesota congregation. He was referring to the "Black Robed Regiment," a name given to those ministers who supported the Revolutionary War effort.

"I was tempted to wear my black robe today and cover up my AR-15 beneath it," Knappen said from his Cornerstone Church sanctuary in Alexandria, Minn., "but I thought that would be way too graphic for all of you and for Facebook to allow. But I would be part of that movement back then, and I may be part of that movement today."

Conservative evangelical Christians have been among Donald Trump's most fervent and loyal supporters. While few have gone as far as Knappen and endorsed armed struggle on his behalf, the rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been notably militant.

In a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Dec. 9, the right-wing Christian author and radio host Eric Metaxas said he did not care about the overwhelming odds against any effort to overturn the election of Joe Biden.

"What's right is right," Metaxas said. "That is so wrong. We need to do absolutely everything we can. What's going to happen is going to happen. But we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it's worth it."

Three days later, Metaxas was the emcee at the Jericho March in Washington, where he and others implored God to keep Trump in office.

"We are here because we know he is the God who does real miracles when his remnant cries out to him in humility and love," Metaxas said. "We are here to cry out to the God of heaven to ask him to have mercy on the greatest nation in the history of the world."

A rally organizer, Robert Weaver, told the assembled crowd that God had appeared to him in a vision after Biden's election victory and told him, "It's not over."

The notion that God would take direct interest in a U.S. election is an expression of the ideology of Christian nationalism, says Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University and co-author of Taking America Back For God.

"It's the idea that God has a plan for this nation, that God wants a particular outcome," Whitehead says. Such convictions, Whitehead says, gave extra potency to efforts in support of Trump's attempts to overturn his clear election defeat.

"Religion is such a strongly and closely held system of beliefs and values," Whitehead says. "So if God has said, 'This is the way I want this nation run, and this is the person that I want leading it,' why would you brook any opposition, no matter what?"

Taken to an extreme, Whitehead says, that viewpoint can even be seen as justifying violence.

"Among Americans who see a fusion between their religious identities and their national identity," he argues, "it tends to draw on a framework of conquering outsiders and taking violent hold of what is rightfully yours."

Speaking at last month's Jericho March prayer rally, the founder of the OathKeepers militia group, Stewart Rhodes, told the crowd he hoped Trump would use the Insurrection Act to "drop the hammer" on his opponents.

"He needs to know from you that you are with him," Rhodes said, "and that if he does not do it now, we're going to have to do it ourselves later, in a much more desperate, much more bloody war."

Among the flags at the rally was a big yellow banner that said "JESUS SAVES." The same banner was seen again in the crowd that assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, among other examples of Christian imagery.

One of the leaders of the invasion of the Senate chamber, Jacob Chansley, actually asked the rioters to pause in their rampage and join him for a moment of prayer to God.

"Thank you for allowing the United States to be reborn," Chansley said, standing on the dais occupied a few hours earlier by Vice President Pence.

"We love you and we thank you. In Christ's holy name, we pray," Chansley said, as recorded in a video by Luke Mogelson, a writer at The New Yorker. The rioters, many of whom had quietly removed their hats, erupted in a cry of "Amen!"

The post-election expressions of right wing Christian protest suggest that Christian militancy on occasion can lead to political extremism.

"Inherent in the idea of Christian nationalism is the idea that America is representative of God's truth, and for that reason it needs to be defended. It needs to be protected," says Kristin du Mez, a historian at Calvin University and author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith and Fractured A Nation.

"Because the dangers are so great and the stakes are so high, that often will require violence. It's violence for the sake of righteousness, violence to achieve order, violence to bring peace and security," du Mez says. "There's a willingness to do what needs to be done."

Since the Jan. 6 assault on the on the Capitol, pro-Trump Christian activists have generally kept a low profile. After an article on the Jericho March was published by The Atlantic, a spokesperson for the organizers wrote to say the March "denounces any and all acts of violence and destruction, including any that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021."

But not all Christian militants have been chastened. In his Jan. 9 Facebook message, Knappen issued a call to arms.

"There is a need in every one of our localities to have individuals, patriots, who are ready to arm up and be part of a citizen militia to protect our freedoms," he said, noting that he was in church, speaking in front of the cross.

For Andrew Whitehead, the protests led by Christian militants in the aftermath of Trump's election defeat show that Christian nationalism can be a dangerous phenomenon when it calls into question the idea of sharing power with an adversary, and one not likely to disappear any time soon.

"It really is a threat to a pluralistic, democratic society," Whitehead says. "It should be taken very seriously."

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How QAnon uses religion to lure unsuspecting Christians
by Daniel Burke
CNN Religion Editor
Updated 1:05 PM ET, Thu October 15, 2020

(CNN) Parker Neff was scrolling through conservative posts on Facebook when he saw an unfamiliar hashtag: #WWG1WGA.

Recently retired after serving as a Southern Baptist pastor for more than 20 years, his time was free and curiosity piqued.

"I started looking into it online," Neff said. "Doing some research."

And with that, the 66-year-old retiree, and soon his wife, Sharon, fell down one of the internet's most dangerous rabbit holes.

It didn't take long for Neff to find the hashtag's meaning. "Where We Go One We Go All" is one of several mottoes of QAnon, a collective of online conspiracists.

The pastor and his wife, who live in Arcola, Mississippi, began watching the vast collection of QAnon videos posted online by "researchers" who decipher the cryptic messages of "Q," an anonymous online persona who claims to have access to classified military and intelligence operations.

Since its inception in 2017 QAnon has quickly metastasized, infiltrating American politics, internet culture and now -- religion.

A woman holds up a QAnon sign at a President Trump campaign rally on September 22, 2020, in Moon Township, Pennsylvania.

According to QAnon, President Donald Trump is secretly working to stop a child sex cabal run by Hollywood and political elites who will one day be revealed during an apocalyptic event known as The Storm.

During the pandemic, QAnon-related content has exploded online, growing nearly 175% on Facebook and nearly 63% on Twitter, according to a British think tank.

Although QAnon's conspiracy theories are baseless -- they allege that a famous actor is a secret sex trafficker and a leading Democrat participated in Satanic rituals -- the dangers the movement poses are very real.

The FBI has called QAnon a domestic terror threat and an internal FBI memo warned that "fringe conspiracy theories very likely motivate some domestic extremists, wholly or in part, to commit criminal and sometimes violent activity."

Facebook finally pledged to ban QAnon content earlier this month. And YouTube announced Thursday that it is "removing more conspiracy theory content used to justify real-world violence," including QAnon videos.

Still, some Christian conservatives are falling for QAnon's unhinged conspiracies.

"Right now QAnon is still on the fringes of evangelicalism," said Ed Stetzer, an evangelical pastor and dean at Wheaton College in Illinois who wrote a recent column warning Christians about QAnon. "But we have a pretty big fringe.

"Pastors need to be more aware of the danger and they need tools to address it," he told CNN. "People are being misled by social media."

Pastors who preach QAnon-aligned ideas

Some Christian pastors are actually leading their followers to QAnon, or at least introducing them to its dubious conspiracy theories.

To cite a few examples:

• During services in July, Rock Urban Church in Grandville, Michigan, played a discredited video that supports QAnon conspiracy theories. "The country is being torn apart by the biggest political hoax and coordinated mass media disinformation campaign in living history — you may know it as COVID-19," the video says. The church did not answer requests for comment and has removed the video from its YouTube channel.

• Danny Silk, a leader at Bethel Church, a Pentecostal megachurch in Redding, California, has posted QAnon-related ideas and hashtags on his Instagram account. Silk did not respond to requests for comment.

Bethel Church in Redding, California. One of its leaders has shared QAnon ideas on social media.

• Pastor John MacArthur of California, an influential evangelical who is battling county officials over the right to continue indoor services at his Grace Community Church, espoused a theme popular in QAnon circles when he misinterpreted CDC data and informed his congregation that "there is no pandemic." MacArthur declined CNN's request for comment.

• There's even a movement, led by the Indiana-based Omega Kingdom Ministry, to merge QAnon and Christianity -- with texts from both the Bible and Q read at church services.

"If you are just learning about QAnon and The Great Awakening, this is the right spot for you," reads the ministry's website. Representatives from the ministry did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Paul Anleitner, an evangelical pastor in Minneapolis, said he's seen worrying examples of conservative Christians preaching from QAnon's bible: Pastors warning about the "Deep State," congregants trading conspiracy theories during Bible studies, and, most concerning to him, unsuspecting Christians lured to QAnon through respected church leaders.

"I see this circulating through conservative and Charismatic churches and it breaks my heart," said Anleitner, who spent time in Pentecostal churches, where he says QAnon's influence is distressingly pervasive.

"It's pulling families apart, pulling people away from the gospel and creating distrust among people searching for the truth."

Pastor John MacArthur speaking at his California church in August. CNN has blurred a portion of this image to protect a child's identity.

Earlier this year a young Christian friend of his recirculated QAnon ideas posted online by a national Christian leader, Anleitner said. (He declined to name the pastor on the record).

"I reached out to my friend and told him the stuff he posted came directly from QAnon," said Anleitner. "He had no idea."

And that, Christian leaders say, is a big part of the problem.

Some followers see QAnon messages as sacred texts

QAnon is complex, said Brian Friedberg, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has studied the movement.

It churns out an almost endless stream of content, from memes to anti-Semitic tropes to Christian Scripture. From its anonymous message board, the dubious ideas circulate through social media, sometimes finding their way into the Twitter feed of Trump and his allies, who have repeatedly boosted QAnon accounts.

Q himself (or herself, or themselves for that matter -- no one quite knows who Q is) has posted nearly 5,000 messages since 2017.

In QAnon, some observers see a mass delusion, others see a political cult, and still others claim to see the sprouts of a new faith.

According to the religious view of QAnon, Q is a postmodern prophet, "Q drops" (aka his messages) are sacred texts and Trump is a messianic figure who will conjure "The Storm," an apocalyptic revelation exposing evildoers.

A QAnon flag is flown during a rally in support of President Trump on October 11, 2020 in Ronkonkoma, New York.

If QAnon is a new religion, it bears the birthmarks of our truth-deprived time: Born on an obscure internet image board, it spreads through social media, preaches a perverted form of populism and is amplified by a president who has demonstrated little regard for facts.

But in Mississippi, the Neffs said they see QAnon as a source of "behind the scenes" information -- not as a religion.

"It's kind of like checking Fox News or CNN," -- that is, a place to find the latest news, said Park Neff, who has a master's in divinity and a doctorate from New Orleans Baptist Seminary. "It just seemed to be good, solid conservative thought."

Like her husband, Sharon Neff said she saw no contradictions between QAnon and Christianity. Instead, she saw important connections, as did many of her friends and fellow church members.

"What resonated with me is the idea of moving toward a global government," she said, "and that actually goes along with the Christian belief about the End Times."

QAnon's 'red pill'

In some ways, QAnon echoes the concerns of politically engaged, ultra-conservative evangelicals.

It interprets world events through the lens of Scripture or Q posts. It's obsessed with a grand, apocalyptic reckoning that will separate good from evil, deeply distrusts the media and finds an unlikely champion -- and hero -- in President Trump.

Neff also said she likes that Q quotes Christian scripture extensively and claims to be exposing child trafficking, a problem that she said she and other Southern Baptist women have been fighting for years.

That's no accident, say experts who have studied QAnon. The group intentionally uses emotionally fraught topics, like suffering children, to draw Christians to their movement.

"That's a recruiting tactic," said Travis View, a host of "QAnon Anonymous," a podcast that seeks to explain the movement. "It's their red pill." (Travis View is a pseudonym he uses for safety. )

A man wears a QAnon sweatshirt during a pro-Trump rally on October 3, 2020 in the borough of Staten Island in New York City. The event was held to encourage supporters to pray for Trump's health after he contracted Covid-19.

View compared it to a religion that proselytizes by offering potential converts seemingly mundane services before laying the hard sell on them.

"The 'Save the Children' messaging is very effective, because everyone wants to protect children."

It's also tailor-made for evangelicals, View said.

Lately, he added, QAnon has been holding "Save the Children" rallies, while carefully concealing its involvement.

The tactic has been effective, said Anleitner.

"People who start with 'saving the children' don't stay there -- and that's the problem," he said. "It's like Alice in Wonderland. They follow the rabbit and enter a totally different framework for reality."

Ready for the Great Awakening

Friedberg said he sees elements of his experience as a young evangelical in the QAnon movement: Its seamless blend of Christianity and nationalism, its promise of spiritual knowledge and the primacy of scripture, and, finally, the desire to evangelize to friends and family.

But Friedberg said he doesn't see QAnon itself as a religion.

"This is an information operation that has gotten out of the direct control of whoever started it," he said. It's an operation, he added, that likely would not exist in a less polarized, confusing and frightening time.

Under somewhat similar strains, a group of 1840s Baptists called the Millerites predicted the Second Coming of Jesus.

When Jesus didn't arrive, the Millerites were greatly disappointed, but they adjusted their apocalyptic timetables and soldiered on, eventually becoming the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

A QAnon supporter at Mount Rushmore National Monument on July 1, 2020 in Keystone, South Dakota.

Travis View said he sees echoes of the Millerites in QAnon. Numerous QAnon "prophecies" have proven false. Hillary Clinton was not arrested in 2017, Republicans didn't rout Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections and Trump has not imprisoned his political enemies at Guantanamo Bay.

These days, Q shies away from giving specific dates, View noted, suggesting a shift in tactics. Even so, believers attempt to explain away any contradictions between QAnon and reality, just as the Millerites did centuries ago.

Park Neff, the Baptist pastor, said the failed prophecies are all part of QAnon's master plan.

"Some of it seems like deliberate misinformation to throw off the other side," Neff said, "as should be apparent to anyone who watches the news. Sometimes he (Q) does it to rattle their cages, sometimes to keep them guessing. It seems to work."

Meanwhile, Neff, like many interested in QAnon, looks forward to the Great Awakening. The pastor said it won't be like the other Great Awakenings, the religious revivals that torched through early America.

This one, he said, will concern the state, not the church.

It will start when the prevailing evil in our government is finally revealed, he said, and end with Trump validated and all the bad people jailed on an island far, far away.

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How QAnon Conspiracy Is Spreading In Christian Communities Across The U.S.
NPR: All Things Considered
August 21, 2020 3:47 PM ET

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with journalist Katelyn Beaty about the spread of the QAnon conspiracy theory in Christian communities in the United States.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

The false conspiracy theory known as QAnon is moving from fringe Internet chatrooms into mainstream politics. A Republican congressional candidate in Georgia is a supporter. The Texas Republican Party has used a QAnon slogan in campaign messaging. President Trump himself has retweeted QAnon followers at least 200 times and described them as, quote, "people that love our country." To be clear, this is a group the FBI has labeled a potential domestic terrorist threat. Its followers believe that President Trump is saving the world from a cult of cannibalistic pedophiles.

Reporter Katelyn Beaty writes for the Religion News Service about how this belief is taking hold in white evangelical churches. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

KATELYN BEATY: Thanks so much for having me.

SHAPIRO: Your piece is called "QAnon: The Alternative Religion That's Coming To Your Church." Do the people you interviewed really see it as a belief system comparable to organized religion?

BEATY: They do. They are picking up on the overt spiritual language that Q, whoever that is, is using in his messages on the Internet, and they see that as connecting directly to the Bible, to the God of Christianity and to God's hand at work in the world. So they see the QAnon messages as revealing truth in the world and that they are supposed to take up a spiritual battle to reveal truth.

SHAPIRO: And your reporting suggests that there's something about this moment that makes it spread that much faster.

BEATY: Yeah. So a lot of pastors I spoke with noted the fact that, you know, their churches are having to continue to do virtual church. They're not meeting in person as much due to the coronavirus and restrictions on worship. And in that time, the pastors I spoke with sense that there is this isolation and loneliness that their members are experiencing. You know, the pastors only get one hour a week with people in their church. The people in their church are probably spending hours on Facebook, on other social media forums, taking in this information. And the pastors I spoke with just felt like they couldn't do enough to counter the false messages that some of their church members were receiving through the Internet.

SHAPIRO: One pastor who you spoke with in rural Missouri named Mark Fugitt told you he's trying to get at this in his sermons, and one way he's doing it is talking about the theme of dehumanization.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARK FUGITT: When our enemy becomes - when they're not human, when they're Satan, you know, working for the devil, then we get into - you know, it's the whole - you know, I can't hate a - you know, another person. But, boy, if I can make them less than human, that's the crusade that's Jewish persecution throughout history, that's racial issues. And I think we're starting to see some of that. And, I mean, I've heard it. I've heard people literally say, you know, hey, this certain political figure, you know, I don't think they're human.

SHAPIRO: Besides speaking at the pulpit, what other strategies are these pastors trying?

BEATY: So the pastors I spoke with talked a lot about drawing on tried-and-true Christian principles - for example, the biblical teaching that Christians are not to bear false witness against their neighbors. They're supposed to be people who speak truth and not falsehood. They're people who are supposed to create peace instead of division. They're people who are supposed to speak words of love instead of hate. And so rather than directly take on the truth or falsity of specific QAnon claims, the pastors that I spoke with felt that it was better to really draw people in their church to principles that could then be applied in their daily lives, including in how they conduct themselves online.

SHAPIRO: Many pastors you spoke to are clearly very concerned about this. Let's hear from Jeb Barr, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Elm Mott, Texas.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JEB BARR: As a Christian, as a church, we're going to be spreading the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ because that's the most important message in the world. So if the people spreading that message are also spreading easily debunked, crazy lies, why would the message be believed, right? Why would we listen to my friend Joe, who says he's a Christian and who's telling me about Jesus, if he also thinks that Communists are taking over America and operating a pedophile ring out of some pizza restaurant?

SHAPIRO: I guess one question is, if these pastors are the voices of authority within the church community, why aren't they able to talk their parishioners out of this false belief?

BEATY: The pastors that I spoke with talked about a crisis of authority that they feel acutely as spiritual leaders. They perceive that we're in this time when traditional forms of credibility, of verifying truth, of looking at authoritative figures as holding truth - we're in a time when there's a lot of mistrust of traditional sources of authority and truth. And they feel that themselves as church leaders. So they're concerned that if they try to take on QAnon directly and speak truth instead of falsehood, that they just - they won't be trusted. They won't be believed.

And, also, if they try to point their church members to credible news sources, to mainstream media, that none of that will come through because, of course, according to the QAnon conspiracy theory, the mainstream media is part of the cover-up. So I think a lot of the pastors felt that their hands are tied in this time, and they're concerned that members of their church are not only accepting falsehood and kind of believing in these falsehoods but also spreading falsehood to other people in the church. And that's especially problematic when QAnon is being espoused by other pastors in a denomination or by leaders in a particular church.

SHAPIRO: Do you think we would find a growing belief in QAnon in any community that includes a lot of Trump supporters, or is there something specific to the white evangelical church that makes it susceptible to these messages?

BEATY: That's a great question. I think about a poll conducted by the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical institution in the Chicago suburbs. This was a poll conducted in 2018 that found that over half of evangelicals, as defined by belief, are strongly convinced that the mainstream media produced fake news. And Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Billy Graham Center, noted that that distrust in mainstream media and that willingness to write off mainstream media information as fake news opens the door for a lot of evangelicals to turn to alternative and fringe news sources, including those that traffic in conspiracy theories. So I certainly think there's a connection there.

But, also, again, it's that QAnon uses this explicitly spiritual language that sounds Christian. You know, there's a clear battle between good and evil. There's the promise of this great awakening. More people are going to wake up to these prophecies, if you will, that's coming from Q. And so it's easy for many white evangelicals to read their Bibles and connect the dots between what they read there and what they're hearing from QAnon sources.

SHAPIRO: Katelyn Beaty is a journalist who wrote about QAnon and the evangelical church for the Religion News Service. Thank you for your time today.

BEATY: Thanks so much for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Copyright © 2020 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at http://www.npr.org for further information.

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QAnon: The alternative religion that’s coming to your church: Teaching susceptible Christians media literacy won’t counteract their sudden, widespread adherence to conspiracy theories because these Christians thrive on a narrative of media cover-up.
by Katelyn Beaty
August 17, 2020

In this Aug. 2, 2018, file photo, David Reinert holds a Q sign while waiting in line with others to enter a campaign rally with President Donald Trump in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory forged in a dark corner of the internet has come into the mainstream political arena. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

(RNS) — It’s a rough time to be a pastor. An election year, national racial unrest and a global pandemic each challenged the usual methods of ministry. Taken together, many church leaders are facing the traditional post-vacation ingathering season with a serious case of burnout.

But there’s another challenge that pastors I spoke with say is on the rise in their flocks. It is taking on the power of a new religion that’s dividing churches and hurting Christian witness.

Mark Fugitt, senior pastor of Round Grove Baptist Church in Miller, Missouri, recently sat down to count the conspiracy theories that people in his church are sharing on Facebook. The list was long. It included claims that 5G radio waves are used for mind control; that George Floyd’s murder is a hoax; that Bill Gates is related to the devil; that masks can kill you; that the germ theory isn’t real; and that there might be something to Pizzagate after all.

“You don’t just see it once,” said Fugitt. “If there’s ever anything posted, you’ll see it five to 10 times. It’s escalating for sure.”

Conspiracy theories — grand narratives that seek to prove that powerful actors are secretly controlling events and institutions for evil purposes — are nothing new in the U.S. But since 2017, a sort of ur-conspiracy theory, QAnon, has coalesced in online forums and created millions of believers. “To look at QAnon is to see not just a conspiracy theory but the birth of a new religion,” wrote Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic in June.

Named after “Q,” who posts anonymously on the online bulletin board 4chan, QAnon alleges that President Donald Trump and military officials are working to expose a “deep state” pedophile ring with links to Hollywood, the media and the Democratic Party. Since its first mention some three years ago, the theory has drawn adherents looking for a clear way to explain recent disorienting global events.

Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe. With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero,” and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support.

One scholar found a 71% increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651% increase on Facebook since March.

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a nondenominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared “Plandemic,” a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a moneymaking scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realized many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise” — a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”

A demonstrator holds a QAnon sign as he walks at a protest April 19, 2020, in Olympia, Washington, opposing the state’s stay-at-home order to slow the coronavirus outbreak. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has blasted President Donald Trump’s calls to “liberate” parts of the country from stay-at-home and other orders designed to combat the spread of the coronavirus. Inslee said Trump is fomenting a potentially deadly insubordination among his followers before the pandemic is contained. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.

There’s no hard data on how many Christians espouse QAnon. But Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, noted that distrust of mainstream news sources “can feed a penchant for conspiracy theories.”

A 2018 poll from BGC found that 46% of self-identified evangelicals and 52% of those whose beliefs tagged them as evangelical “strongly agreed that the mainstream media produced fake news.” It also found that regular church attendance (at least once a month) correlated to believing that mainstream media promulgates fake news (77% compared with 68% of those who attend less regularly).

Jared Stacy said the spread of conspiracy theories in his church is particularly affecting young members. The college and young adult pastor of Spotswood Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Stacy said some older members are sharing Facebook content that links the coronavirus to Jeffrey Epstein and secret pedophile rings. He says his and other pastors’ job is to teach that conspiracy theories are not where Christians should find a basis for reality.

“My fear … is that Jesus would not be co-opted by conspiracy theories in a way that leads the next generation to throw Jesus out with the bathwater,” Stacy said, “that we’re not able to separate the narrative of taking back our country from Jesus’ kingdom narrative.”

Others are concerned the theories will become grounds for more mistrust. “Young people are exiting the church because they see their parents and mentors and pastors and Sunday school teachers spreading things that even at a young age they can see through,” said Jeb Barr, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Elm Mott outside Waco, Texas. He said conspiracy theories are “extremely widespread and getting worse” among his online church networks.

“Why would we listen to my friend Joe … who’s telling me about Jesus who also thinks that Communists are taking over America and operating a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant? … Why would we be believed?”

But Barr and other pastors I spoke with are reticent to police church members’ social media conduct. Instead, they try to teach broader principles. “Christians are meant to be agents of hope, to be peacemakers; the Bible says we’re not to be quarrelsome,” said Barr. “We’re not to be the ones spreading fear and division and anger.”

Barr also teaches critical thinking skills and encourages his members to read “boring news.” He will recommend news sources that are credible.

But teaching media literacy isn’t enough, precisely because QAnon thrives on a narrative of media cover-up.

Fugitt said it’s not effective to tell conspiracy spreaders that what they are sharing online is false. “Nobody joins a cult. I don’t think anybody shares a conspiracy theory either because they believe it’s truth.” Rather, he tries to address the dehumanizing language of QAnon theories that equate certain people with evil. History is replete with examples of where such language can lead.

“I can’t hate another person, but boy if I can make them less than human, that’s the Crusades, that’s Jewish persecution throughout history, that’s racial issues hand over fist there.”

In a fraught political moment, the pastors I spoke with worried that taking on QAnon, by addressing politics directly, would divide the church.

But QAnon is more than a political ideology. It’s a spiritual worldview that co-opts many Christian-sounding ideas to promote verifiably false claims about actual human beings.

QAnon has features akin to syncretism — the practice of blending traditional Christian beliefs with other spiritual systems, such as Santeria. Q explicitly uses Bible verses to urge adherents to stand firm against evil elites. One charismatic church based in Indiana hosts two-hour Sunday services showing how Bible prophecies confirm Q’s messages. Its leaders tell the congregation to stop watching mainstream media (even conservative media) in favor of QAnon YouTube channels and the Qmap website.

And it’s having life-and-death effects: It’s hampering the work of anti-sex trafficking organizations. The FBI has linked it to violence and threats of violence. And its adherents are downplaying the threat of COVID and thus putting others’ lives at risk.

The earliest Christians contended with syncretism in the form of Gnosticism, which blended elements of Greek philosophy and Zoroastrianism with Christianity, emphasizing the good-evil spirit-flesh divide as well as secret divine knowledge (Greek: gnosis is “knowledge”). Early church fathers such as Irenaeus and Tertullian battled Gnostic ideas, rejecting them as heresy.

At a time when church leaders are having to host digital church and try to meet members’ needs virtually, the idea of adding “fight heresy” to their to-do list might sound exhausting. But a core calling of church leaders is to speak the truth in love. It’s not loving to allow impressionable people to be taken in by falsehood. Nor is it loving to allow them to spread falsehood and slander to others.

“Conspiracy theories thrive on a sort of cynicism that says, ‘We see a different reality that no one else sees,’” said Stacy. “Paul says to take every thought captive — addressing conspiracy theories is part of that work.”

(Katelyn Beaty is a former managing editor of Christianity Today and the author of “A Woman’s Place.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent those of Religion News Service.)

by **admin** » Sat Jan 23, 2021 10:15 am

‘A Total Failure’: The Proud Boys Now Mock Trump: Members of the far-right group, who were among Donald Trump’s staunchest fans, are calling him “weak” as more of them were charged for storming the U.S. Capitol.
by Sheera Frenkel and Alan Feuer
New York Times
Jan. 20, 2021

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Members of the Proud Boys, who have engaged in political violence, at a rally in Portland, Ore., in September. Credit...Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for The New York Times

After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump.

In a Nov. 8 post in a private channel of the messaging app Telegram, the group urged its followers to attend protests against an election that it said had been fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump. “Hail Emperor Trump,” the Proud Boys wrote.

But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday.

As Mr. Trump departed the White House on Wednesday, the Proud Boys, once among his staunchest supporters, have also started leaving his side. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Mr. Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” according to messages reviewed by The New York Times. They have also urged supporters to stop attending rallies and protests held for Mr. Trump or the Republican Party.

The comments are a startling turn for the Proud Boys, which for years had backed Mr. Trump and promoted political violence. Led by Enrique Tarrio, many of its thousands of members were such die-hard fans of Mr. Trump that they offered to serve as his private militia and celebrated after he told them in a presidential debate last year to “stand back and stand by.” On Jan. 6, some Proud Boys members stormed the U.S. Capitol.

But since then, discontent with Mr. Trump, who later condemned the violence, has boiled over. On social media, Proud Boys participants have complained about his willingness to leave office and said his disavowal of the Capitol rampage was an act of betrayal. And Mr. Trump, cut off on Facebook and Twitter, has been unable to talk directly to them to soothe their concerns or issue new rallying cries.

The Proud Boys’ anger toward Mr. Trump has heightened after he did nothing to help those in the group who face legal action for the Capitol violence. On Wednesday, a Proud Boy leader, Joseph Biggs, 37, was arrested in Florida and charged with unlawful entry and corruptly obstructing an official proceeding in the riot. At least four other members of the group also face charges stemming from the attack.

“When Trump told them that if he left office, America would fall into an abyss, they believed him,” Arieh Kovler, a political consultant and independent researcher in Israel who studies the far right, said of the Proud Boys. “Now that he has left office, they believe he has both surrendered and failed to do his patriotic duty.”

The shift raises questions about the strength of the support for Mr. Trump and suggests that pockets of his fan base are fracturing. Many of Mr. Trump’s fans still falsely believe he was deprived of office, but other far-right groups such as the Oath Keepers, America First and the Three Percenters have also started criticizing him in private Telegram channels, according to a review of messages.

Last week, Nicholas Fuentes, the leader of America First, wrote in his Telegram channel that Mr. Trump’s response to the Capitol rampage was “very weak and flaccid” and added, “Not the same guy that ran in 2015.”

On Wednesday, the Proud Boys Telegram group welcomed President Biden to office. “At least the incoming administration is honest about their intentions,” the group wrote.

Mr. Kovler said the activity showed that groups that had coalesced around Mr. Trump were now trying to figure out their future direction. By losing his ability to post on Twitter and Facebook, Mr. Trump had also become less useful to the far-right groups, who counted on him to raise their profile on a national stage, Mr. Kovler said.

Mr. Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.

Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, led a contingent of the group in Washington last month. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

The Proud Boys were founded in 2016 as a club for men by Gavin McInnes, who also was a founder of the online publication Vice. Describing themselves as “Western chauvinists,” the group attracted people who appeared eager to engage in violence and who frequently espoused anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic views. The group had supported Mr. Trump since he assumed office.

The change toward Mr. Trump happened slowly. After November’s election, the group’s private Telegram channels, Gab pages and posts on the alternative social networking site Parler were filled with calls to keep the faith with the president. Many Proud Boys, echoing Mr. Trump’s falsehoods, said the election had been rigged, according to a review of messages.

The Proud Boys urged their members to attend “Stop the Steal” rallies. One Nov. 23 message on a Proud Boys Telegram page read, “No Trump, no peace.” The message linked to information about a rally in front of the governor’s home in Georgia.

As Mr. Trump’s legal team battled the election result with lawsuits, the Proud Boys closely followed the court cases and appeals in different states, posting frequent links in their Telegram channels to news reports.

But when Mr. Trump’s legal efforts failed, the Proud Boys called for him on social media to use his presidential powers to stay in office. Some urged him to declare martial law or take control by force. In the last two weeks of December, they pushed Mr. Trump in their protests and on social media to “Cross the Rubicon.”

“They wanted to arm themselves and start a second civil war and take down the government on Trump’s behalf,” said Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies the far right and a Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University. “But ultimately, he couldn’t be the authoritarian they wanted him to be.”

Then came the week of the Capitol storming. On Jan. 4, Mr. Tarrio was arrested by the Metropolitan Police on suspicion of burning a Black Lives Matter banner torn from a Black church in Washington. He was thrown out of the city by a judge the next day.

But nearly 100 other Proud Boys, who had been encouraged by leaders like Mr. Biggs, remained in Washington. According to court papers, Mr. Biggs told members to eschew their typical black-and-yellow polo shirts and instead go “incognito” and move about the city in “smaller teams.”

On the day of the riot, Mr. Biggs was captured in a video marching with a large group of Proud Boys toward the Capitol, chanting slogans like, “Whose streets? Our streets.”

Though prosecutors said Mr. Biggs was not among the first to break into the Capitol, they said he admitted to entering the building for a brief time. They also said he appeared to wear a walkie-talkie-style device on his chest, suggesting he was communicating with others during the incursion.

In an interview with The Times hours after the attack, Mr. Biggs said he and other Proud Boys arrived at the Capitol complex around 1 p.m. when the crowd in front of them surged and the mood grew violent. “It literally happened in seconds,” he said.

Prosecutors have also charged Dominic Pezzola, a Proud Boy from Rochester and a former Marine; Nicholas Ochs, founder of the Proud Boys’ Hawaii chapter; and Nicholas DeCarlo, who runs a news outfit called Murder the Media, which is associated with the group.

After the violence, the Proud Boys expected Mr. Trump — who had earlier told his supporters to “fight much harder” against “bad people” — to champion the mob, according to their social media messages. Instead, Mr. Trump began distancing himself from his remarks and released a video on Jan. 8 denouncing the violence.

The disappointment was immediately palpable. One Proud Boys Telegram channel posted: “It really is important for us all to see how much Trump betrayed his supporters this week. We are nationalists 1st and always. Trump was just a man and as it turns out an extraordinarily weak one at the end.”

Some Proud Boys became furious that Mr. Trump, who was impeached for inciting the insurrection, did not appear interested in issuing presidential pardons for their members who were arrested. In a Telegram post on Friday, they accused Mr. Trump of “instigating” the events at the Capitol, adding that he then “washed his hands of it.”

“They thought they had his support and that, ultimately, Trump would come through for them, including with a pardon if they should need it,” said Jared Holt, a visiting research fellow at the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab. “Now they realize they went too far in the riots.”

Some Proud Boys now say in online posts that the group should “go dark” and retreat from political life by cutting its affiliation to any political party. They are encouraging one another to focus their energies on secessionist movements and local protests.

“To all demoralized Trump supporters: There is hope,” read one message in a Proud Boys Telegram channel on Wednesday. “There is an alternative. Abandon the GOP and the Dems.”

by **admin** » Sun Jan 24, 2021 8:25 am

Trump and Justice Dept. Lawyer Said to Have Plotted to Oust Acting Attorney General: Trying to find another avenue to push his baseless election claims, Donald Trump considered installing a loyalist.
by Katie Benner
New York Times
Jan. 22, 2021

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Jeffrey Clark, who led the Justice Department’s civil division, had been working with President Donald Trump to devise ways to cast doubt on the election results.Credit...Susan Walsh/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department’s top leaders listened in stunned silence this month: One of their peers, they were told, had devised a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.

The unassuming lawyer who worked on the plan, Jeffrey Clark, had been devising ways to cast doubt on the election results and to bolster Mr. Trump’s continuing legal battles and the pressure on Georgia politicians. Because Mr. Rosen had refused the president’s entreaties to carry out those plans, Mr. Trump was about to decide whether to fire Mr. Rosen and replace him with Mr. Clark.

The department officials, convened on a conference call, then asked each other: What will you do if Mr. Rosen is dismissed?

The answer was unanimous. They would resign.

Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.

The previously unknown chapter was the culmination of the president’s long-running effort to batter the Justice Department into advancing his personal agenda. He also pressed Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels, including one who would look into Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election equipment that Mr. Trump’s allies had falsely said was working with Venezuela to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

This account of the department’s final days under Mr. Trump’s leadership is based on interviews with four former Trump administration officials who asked not to be named because of fear of retaliation.

Mr. Clark said that this account contained inaccuracies but did not specify, adding that he could not discuss any conversations with Mr. Trump or Justice Department lawyers because of “the strictures of legal privilege.” “Senior Justice Department lawyers, not uncommonly, provide legal advice to the White House as part of our duties,” he said. “All my official communications were consistent with law.”

Mr. Clark categorically denied that he devised any plan to oust Mr. Rosen, or to formulate recommendations for action based on factual inaccuracies gleaned from the internet. “My practice is to rely on sworn testimony to assess disputed factual claims,” Mr. Clark said. “There was a candid discussion of options and pros and cons with the president. It is unfortunate that those who were part of a privileged legal conversation would comment in public about such internal deliberations, while also distorting any discussions.”

Mr. Clark also noted that he was the lead signatory on a Justice Department request last month asking a federal judge to reject a lawsuit that sought to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election.

Mr. Trump declined to comment. An adviser said that Mr. Trump has consistently argued that the justice system should investigate “rampant election fraud that has plagued our system for years.”

The adviser added that “any assertion to the contrary is false and being driven by those who wish to keep the system broken.” Mr. Clark agreed and said that “legal privileges” prevented him from divulging specifics regarding the conversation.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Rosen.

When Mr. Trump said on Dec. 14 that Attorney General William P. Barr was leaving the department, some officials thought that he might allow Mr. Rosen a short reprieve before pressing him about voter fraud. After all, Mr. Barr would be around for another week.

Instead, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Rosen to the Oval Office the next day. He wanted the Justice Department to file legal briefs supporting his allies’ lawsuits seeking to overturn his election loss. And he urged Mr. Rosen to appoint special counsels to investigate not only unfounded accusations of widespread voter fraud, but also Dominion, the voting machines firm.

(Dominion has sued the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who inserted those accusations into four federal lawsuits about voter irregularities that were all dismissed.)

Mr. Rosen refused. He maintained that he would make decisions based on the facts and the law, and he reiterated what Mr. Barr had privately told Mr. Trump: The department had investigated voting irregularities and found no evidence of widespread fraud.

But Mr. Trump continued to press Mr. Rosen after the meeting — in phone calls and in person. He repeatedly said that he did not understand why the Justice Department had not found evidence that supported conspiracy theories about the election that some of his personal lawyers had espoused. He declared that the department was not fighting hard enough for him.

As Mr. Rosen and the deputy attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, pushed back, they were unaware that Mr. Clark had been introduced to Mr. Trump by a Pennsylvania politician and had told the president that he agreed that fraud had affected the election results.

Election workers performing a recount in Atlanta in November. Mr. Trump focused on Georgia’s election outcome after he lost the state. Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Mr. Trump quickly embraced Mr. Clark, who had been appointed the acting head of the civil division in September and was also the head of the department’s environmental and natural resources division.

As December wore on, Mr. Clark mentioned to Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue that he spent a lot of time reading on the internet — a comment that alarmed them because they inferred that he believed the unfounded conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump had won the election. Mr. Clark also told them that he wanted the department to hold a news conference announcing that it was investigating serious accusations of election fraud. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue rejected the proposal.

As Mr. Trump focused increasingly on Georgia, a state he lost narrowly to Mr. Biden, he complained to Justice Department leaders that the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, Byung J. Pak, was not trying to find evidence for false election claims pushed by Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and others. Mr. Donoghue warned Mr. Pak that the president was now fixated on his office, and that it might not be tenable for him to continue to lead it, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

That conversation and Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him votes compelled Mr. Pak to abruptly resign this month.

Mr. Clark was also focused on Georgia. He drafted a letter that he wanted Mr. Rosen to send to Georgia state legislators that wrongly said that the Justice Department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in their state, and that they should move to void Mr. Biden’s win there.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue again rejected Mr. Clark’s proposal.

On New Year’s Eve, the trio met to discuss Mr. Clark’s refusal to hew to the department’s conclusion that the election results were valid. Mr. Donoghue flatly told Mr. Clark that what he was doing was wrong. The next day, Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen — who had mentored him while they worked together at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis — that he was going to discuss his strategy with the president early the next week, just before Congress was set to certify Mr. Biden’s electoral victory.

Unbeknown to the acting attorney general, Mr. Clark’s timeline moved up. He met with Mr. Trump over the weekend, then informed Mr. Rosen midday on Sunday that the president intended to replace him with Mr. Clark, who could then try to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results. He said that Mr. Rosen could stay on as his deputy attorney general, leaving Mr. Rosen speechless.

Unwilling to step down without a fight, Mr. Rosen said that he needed to hear straight from Mr. Trump and worked with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, to convene a meeting for early that evening.

Mr. Clark asked Mr. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen, the acting attorney general. Credit...Ting Shen for The New York Times

Even as Mr. Clark’s pronouncement was sinking in, stunning news broke out of Georgia: State officials had recorded an hourlong call, published by The Washington Post, during which Mr. Trump pressured them to manufacture enough votes to declare him the victor. As the fallout from the recording ricocheted through Washington, the president’s desperate bid to change the outcome in Georgia came into sharp focus.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue pressed ahead, informing Steven Engel, the head of the Justice Department’s office of legal counsel, about Mr. Clark’s latest maneuver. Mr. Donoghue convened a late-afternoon call with the department’s remaining senior leaders, laying out Mr. Clark’s efforts to replace Mr. Rosen.

Mr. Rosen planned to soon head to the White House to discuss his fate, Mr. Donoghue told the group. Should Mr. Rosen be fired, they all agreed to resign en masse. For some, the plan brought to mind the so-called Saturday Night Massacre of the Nixon era, where Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and his deputy resigned rather than carry out the president’s order to fire the special prosecutor investigating him.

The Clark plan, the officials concluded, would seriously harm the department, the government and the rule of law. For hours, they anxiously messaged and called one another as they awaited Mr. Rosen’s fate.

Around 6 p.m., Mr. Rosen, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Clark met at the White House with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cipollone, his deputy Patrick Philbin and other lawyers. Mr. Trump had Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark present their arguments to him.

Mr. Cipollone advised the president not to fire Mr. Rosen and he reiterated, as he had for days, that he did not recommend sending the letter to Georgia lawmakers. Mr. Engel advised Mr. Trump that he and the department’s remaining top officials would resign if he fired Mr. Rosen, leaving Mr. Clark alone at the department.

Mr. Trump seemed somewhat swayed by the idea that firing Mr. Rosen would trigger not only chaos at the Justice Department, but also congressional investigations and possibly recriminations from other Republicans and distract attention from his efforts to overturn the election results.

After nearly three hours, Mr. Trump ultimately decided that Mr. Clark’s plan would fail, and he allowed Mr. Rosen to stay.

Mr. Rosen and his deputies concluded they had weathered the turmoil. Once Congress certified Mr. Biden’s victory, there would be little for them to do until they left along with Mr. Trump in two weeks.

They began to exhale days later as the Electoral College certification at the Capitol got underway. And then they received word: The building had been breached.

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York.

Katie Benner covers the Justice Department. She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @ktbenner

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:06 am

Texas man charged in Capitol riots threatened to kill AOC: Garret Miller of Dallas County, Texas, posted often on social media about his involvement in the deadly riots during which insurrectionists and rioters stormed the Capitol, according to charging documents.
by Ben Leonard
Politico
01/23/2021 03:46 PM EST

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive and one of the most high-profile lawmakers in Congress, has said that death threats are “a normal part of [her] existence." | Alex Wong/Getty Images

A Texas man charged with illegally storming the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6. threatened to kill Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a Capitol Police officer, according to federal prosecutors.

Garret Miller, of Dallas County, Texas, posted often on social media about his involvement in the deadly riots during which insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, including sending a tweet saying “Assassinate AOC,” according to charging documents.

Miller was charged with several federal crimes and arrested Wednesday in Texas, Department of Justice filings show. He appeared in federal court in Dallas on Friday for an initial hearing and has a bail hearing Monday.

Miller allegedly posted a selfie of himself in the Capitol, to which a Facebook user said "bro you got in?! Nice!," according to charging documents.

“just wanted to incriminate myself a little lol,” Miller replied.

“Well you did!” Ocasio-Cortez clapped back at Miller on Twitter.

“On one hand you have to laugh, and on the other know that the reason they were this brazen is because they thought they were going to succeed,” she said in a subsequent tweet.

Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive and one of the most high-profile lawmakers in Congress, has said that death threats are “a normal part of [her] existence.” Ahead of the House’s vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump, the New York congresswoman said that GOP lawmakers fearing voting to impeach Trump after the riots are privileged to not face threats more often.

“I get it, but some of us just spent the last 2 years taking stances that have led to repeated attempts on our lives - for demanding guaranteed healthcare, immigrant justice, etc.,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a tweet. “Sorry if this lacks empathy, but it’s a privilege if this is their first time. They can do one vote.”

Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection and faces a Senate trial slated for the week of Feb. 8. At a rally before the riots, Trump spoke to supporters.

“You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” Trump said at the time.

Trump has defended his comments as "totally appropriate." Just 27 percent of respondents in a recent POLITICO/Morning Consult poll said Trump acted “appropriately” and that the Senate should not remove him from office.

Miller’s arrest comes as federal officials fear hundreds of cases of rioters being charged could clog the court system, leaving them weighing potentially not charging some Capitol rioters to ease the burden, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

The FBI got a tip from law enforcement about Miller posting a video from inside the Capitol on Twitter. On Jan. 2, he said on Facebook that he was going to drive cross-country "for this trump sh-t," according to charging documents.

“civil war could start . . . not sure what to do in DC,” he said in a Facebook post Jan. 2.

He posted a photo of himself on Facebook wearing a Make America Great Again hat on Jan. 11 from inside the Capitol, according to the filings. In a tweet Jan. 6, Miller said "next time we bring the guns."

On social media, Miller also discussed a woman who was shot by Capitol police on Jan. 6, saying Jan. 10 that “We going to get a hold of” the officer and “hug his neck with a nice rope,” according to the filings.

“On Jan. 6, he also tweeted that "we acted with honor and we where [sic] not armed. We where [sic] gentle with the police” in a reply to Ocasio-Cortez.

He also said on Instagram that he had a rope in his bag on the day of the Capitol riots.

“We stormed the capital [sic] as peacefully as we could without weapons ... The congress building,” Miller wrote on his Instagram, according to the documents.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:21 am

GOP Rep. Andy Harris Tries To Bring Gun Into House Chamber: Republicans keep complaining about the new metal detectors outside the House chamber. Now we know why.
by Matt Fuller
Huffington Post
01/21/2021 07:26 pm ET Updated 4 days ago

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Rep. Andy Harris, MD @RepAndyHarrisMD

WASHINGTON ― New security measures outside the U.S. House chamber prevented a Republican lawmaker from bringing a gun onto the House floor Thursday.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), who has repeatedly flouted the magnetometers that were installed near the House chamber after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, set off the metal detectors while trying to enter. When an officer with a metal detector wand scanned him, a firearm was detected on Harris’s side, concealed by his suit coat. Police refused to let Harris in, and the officer signaled a security agent that Harris had a gun on him by motioning toward his own firearm.

HuffPost witnessed the interaction and later confirmed with a Capitol official that Harris was carrying a gun.

HuffPost watched Harris try to get another member to take the gun from him so he could go vote. The member, Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), told Harris he didn’t have “a license” and refused to hold the weapon for him.

HuffPost also heard Harris complain to some fellow members that he had asked his staff to remind him about the screenings and they hadn’t.

Harris then left on the elevators and 10 minutes later returned to the House chamber. He placed his cellphone and keys on a desk to the side, did not set off the magnetometer and was allowed to enter the House floor to vote on a waiver to allow retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to serve as President Joe Biden’s defense secretary.

Congress has been in a heightened state of security since the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol as both chambers of Congress were meeting to count states’ Electoral College votes. Even though President Joe Biden has been inaugurated, there are still two large fences around the perimeter of the Capitol, and National Guard troops remain on the grounds.

During a security briefing with Democratic members early last week, some lawmakers suggested that members should have to go through a metal detector to get on the House floor. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has said she’ll carry a gun around D.C., which does not allow the open carrying of a firearm, and Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) told his local paper that he was armed when insurrectionists stormed the Capitol.

When House lawmakers came back Jan. 12 for their first votes after the attack, they found magnetometers outside entrances to the House chamber. Most members followed police orders and went through the metal detectors, but some Republicans sidestepped the machines or refused to be checked with wands after they set it off ― Harris among them.

In response, Capitol Police put desks and velvet ropes on the sides of the magnetometers to block members from walking around the machines, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she will fine members who bypass screenings $5,000 for their first offense and $10,000 for their second.

Those fines are not yet in effect, as the House hasn’t adopted those rules, and a few members continue to not comply with the screenings. On Thursday, HuffPost saw Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Rick Allen (R-Ga.) and Boebert all refuse to be wanded down after setting off the magnetometer.

But when Harris went through the metal detector Thursday and set it off, the police officer stepped in his way and directed Harris to spread his arms so he could use the handheld wand. Harris complied, and the officer found the gun on his side.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Capitol Police would only tell HuffPost that “USCP is investigating this matter,” and when we asked for clarification on whether the USCP was aware that Harris had attempted to bring a gun onto the House floor, the spokesperson said the agency couldn’t comment on “an ongoing investigation.”

Members are allowed to carry a gun in the office buildings, in the Capitol and on Capitol grounds, but they are expressly forbidden from carrying firearms onto the floor. And guns in the Capitol are not supposed to be loaded. Members can carry bullets separately.

Individual officers who witnessed the situation also wouldn’t comment. However, HuffPost heard officers talking about Harris having a weapon on him later Thursday afternoon.

Harris’s office did not return multiple requests for comment, nor did Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office.

HuffPost did ask Pelosi for comment Thursday afternoon as she walked by the House chamber, but she told reporters she wouldn’t be taking questions.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:33 am

US judge blocks release of Tennessee man [Eric Munchel] in Capitol riot
by Associated Press
January 24, 2021

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A federal judge on Sunday blocked the release of a Tennessee man who authorities say carried flexible plastic handcuffs during the riot at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month.

U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell for the District of Columbia set aside an order by a judge in Tennessee concerning the release of Eric Munchel of Nashville. Howell stayed the lower court’s order pending a review.

After testimony at a detention hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Jeffrey Frensley for the Middle District of Tennessee determined Friday that Munchel wasn’t a flight risk and didn’t pose harm to the public.

Federal prosecutors have argued that Munchel’s offenses are serious enough to detain him pending trial to ensure the community’s safety.

According to court records, an FBI search of Munchel’s home turned up the tactical gear he wore in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, five pairs of plastic handcuffs, multiple weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a drum-style magazine.

Munchel is charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct on the Capitol grounds, conspiracy and civil disorder. He faces up to 20 years if convicted.

Munchel has been in federal custody since his arrest on Jan. 10 when he turned himself over to authorities.

In a memorandum in support of detention, prosecutors said Munchel traveled to Washington with his mother, Lisa Eisenhart, who has also been charged in the Capitol riot. The two participated in Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in which the former president repeated his baseless claims of election fraud and exhorted the crowd to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.”

Court documents allege Munchel went into the Senate chamber just minutes after the chamber had been evacuated.

Munchel “perceived himself to be a revolutionary, in the mold of those who overthrew the British government in the American Revolution,” according to court filings. He was “dressed for combat” with “combat boots, military fatigues, a tactical vest, gloves, and a gaiter that covered all of his face except for his eyes,” documents state. He also wore a stun gun on his hip and mounted a cellphone to his chest to record events.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:39 am

Morgan Lewis Drops Trump as Client as N.Y. Tax Probe Continues
by Bloomberg Law
Jan. 20, 2021, 5:00 PM

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius is dropping former President Donald Trump and his businesses as clients in the midst of an ongoing probe over alleged tax fraud.

“We have had a limited representation of the Trump Organization and Donald Trump in tax-related matters,” a firm spokeswoman told Bloomberg Law Wednesday. “For those matters not already concluded, we are transitioning as appropriate to other counsel.”

Morgan Lewis tax lawyers Sheri Dillon and William Nelson have been among Trump’s key legal advisers on the former president’s refusal to release his tax returns, and on investigations regarding filings for various Trump businesses. Dillon reportedly was asked to testify in an ongoing probe by New York Attorney General Letitia James into allegations the Trump Organization falsely inflated its assets to get loans and obtain tax benefits.

The firm’s decision to walk away from Trump and his companies, first reported by The American Lawyer, follows a similar decision by global law firm Seyfarth Shaw in the wake of the Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol. Several businesses, including Deutsche Bank and property management firm Cushman & Wakefield, have also recently said they will stop working with Trump and his companies, citing the former president’s role in stoking the violent protests.

Morgan Lewis didn’t say why it decided to walk away from Trump or how quickly it will transition out of the Trump work. The Trump Organization didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The firm brings in nearly $2.3 billion in revenue per year and employs some 2,200 lawyers around the world, according to Am Law data. Its roster of attorneys includes a number of former officials from the Obama and Trump administrations.

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 3:53 am

US Capitol riot: police have long history of aiding neo-Nazis and extremists: Experts were not surprised that officers were part of the mob, given the ties between some police and white supremacist groups in recent years
by Sam Levin in Los Angeles @SamTLevin
The Guardian
Sat 16 Jan 2021 06.00 EST

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Police officers in riot gear line up near the Capitol building in Washington DC. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

For years, domestic terrorism researchers have warned that there are police departments in every region of America counting white supremacist extremists and neo-Nazi sympathizers among their ranks.

To these experts, and the activists who have been targeted by law enforcement officers in past years, it came as no surprise that police officers were part of the mob that stormed the US Capitol on 6 January. In fact, the acceptance of far-right beliefs among law enforcement, they say, helped lay the groundwork for the extraordinary attacks in the American capital.

“I’ve been trying to ring the alarm since before Donald Trump was elected,” said Cedric O’Bannon, a journalist and activist who was stabbed at a 2016 neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento and was later targeted by the investigating officer. “It’s nothing new. We’ve seen it getting worse and worse. The law enforcement collusion with white nationalists is clear,” he said.

Cedric O’Bannon, a journalist and activist, was stabbed at a neo-Nazi rally in 2016. Photograph: Robert Gumpert/The Guardian

Last Wednesday, Trump encouraged his supporters and far-right groups to march to the Capitol where Congress was sitting. Soon, rioters and militants wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and white supremacist symbols toppled the flimsy barricades on the grounds, pushed past police and stormed the building.

In the days since the attack, which left five people dead and caused lawmakers to hide in fear for their lives, investigations have revealed that a wide range of US law enforcement personnel were represented in the crowd. News reports and other inquiries have identified roughly 30 sworn members of police agencies from more than 12 different states who were present at the Capitol, according to criminal justice news site, the Appeal.

So far, several on-duty Capitol police officers have been suspended for allegedly supporting rioters, and two off-duty Virginia officers were arrested after boasting on social media about breaching the Capitol. A Houston officer caught inside the building has since resigned, and the police departments of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia and other cities are investigating whether their employees attended.

“These are people who we give guns to, who get specialized training, who have access to sensitive information,” said Vida B Johnson, Georgetown University law professor and expert on policing, “and they took part in a plan to undo the votes for the democratically elected president.”

When police protect neo-Nazis

Extremism experts and survivors of far-right violence have for years cried foul about the close ties between some police and white supremacist groups. These links have escalated under the Trump era, they’ve warned, with numerous examples of police openly protecting far-right organizers, including armed and violent ones.

In June 2016 in Sacramento at least ten people were stabbed and injured at a rally of the Traditionalist Workers Party (TWP), a group that extremism experts have classified as neo-Nazis.

Sacramento mounted police keep watch over a protest in Sacramento in June 2016. Photograph: Jerry H. Yamashita/AP

The subsequent investigation, led by the California Highway Patrol (CHP), focused on the anti-fascist counter-protesters injured in the stabbings, with records showing that police worked with white supremacists to identify leftist activists and pursue criminal charges against the stabbing victims.

The lead CHP investigator, Donovan Ayres, repeatedly stated in police records that he viewed the neo-Nazis as victims and the anti-fascists as suspects. In court, he repeatedly called TWP the “permitted party”, since it had a permit for a rally, and in a phone call with a TWP leader, he said, “We’re looking at you as a victim.”

Records show that Ayres formally recommended Cedric O’Bannon, a Black journalist who was filming the events and was stabbed during the demonstration, face criminal charges for conspiracy, rioting, assault and unlawful assembly noting he was “among the protesters”. The officer did not recommend anyone face charges for the stabbing. O’Bannon ultimately was not charged.

Reflecting on the case now, O’Bannon said there should be accountability for the way the officer treated him. “I always think about, has he treated other people in the same way? Is he still doing it now?” Without consequences, officers who sympathize with neo-Nazis are emboldened, he said.

“People of color know this and we’ve been knowing this,” said Mike Williams, a 60-year-old indigenous activist in Sacramento. He was one of three counter-protesters who faced a criminal trial after Ayres pursued cases against them, alleging they violated the “free speech” rights of neo-Nazis.

The reports that Capitol officers may have enabled or supported the insurrectionists make clear that there are police across the country who are aligned with far-right views, he argued: “They feel like they are going to lose control. This is about keeping systemic racism in place.”

CHP declined to comment on the case, and said Ayres no longer works in the Sacramento region. Ayres did not respond to a request for comment.

In Berkeley, California, in 2017, police worked with a violent and armed pro-Trump demonstrator to prosecute leftist activists over an altercation during a protest. Activists saw the criminal trial as just one of many examples of US law enforcement aggressively targeting leftwing demonstrators and favoring members of the far-right after violent clashes.

Pepper spray is used during competing protests in Berkeley, California, in April 2017. Photograph: Anda Chu/AP

Police often tolerate pro-Trump violence, said Jeff Armstrong, one of the activists who faced charges but was ultimately acquitted: “We knew we didn’t do anything wrong ... but they were trying to put us in prison,” he said.

And in 2019, Rob Mathis, a Black resident of Muskegon, Michigan, exposed a white police officer who had a framed KKK application and Confederate flags in his home. Mathis, 54, discovered the items while touring the home with a real estate agent. The officer was eventually fired, but ultimately won his pension and retiree health insurance.

Mathis said when police initially brought him in to ask about his viral Facebook post showing the KKK form, it felt as if the department was “interrogating” him or treating him like a suspect. Officials told him he should’ve filed an internal complaint and not gone public, he recalled. “They got rid of him because of optics, because of social media.” The officer claimed he was not a KKK member and said he collected memorabilia.

It was happenstance that Mathis uncovered this officer, and he said he worries that police across the country don’t get caught and continue abusing people of color in their communities: “This system is made for white people and by white people. It is about protecting those people and their jobs.”

Muskegon and Berkeley officials did not respond to an inquiry.

‘White nationalists hide in plain sight’

The number of white supremacist extremists within US police forces is unknown, but even relying solely on cases that have been publicized shows the problem is widespread.

Johnson, the Georgetown expert, testified in Congress last year about white supremacist infiltration of police. She found that since 2009, more than 100 police departments in 49 states have faced scandals involving officers making overtly racist statements. In Florida, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana and elsewhere, active police officers have been outed as members of organized hate groups, including the KKK, she found.

And this is likely the “tip of the iceberg”, she said, adding that polls showing that 10% of Americans believe it’s acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views, and that 12% supported the Capitol attack. Those rates are likely higher for police officers, she said, given that officers are disproportionately white and male.

Bandages and protest signs are left on the lawn of the California State Capitol after protests in 2016. Photograph: Max Whittaker/Reuters

Among the reasons behind the prevalence of white supremacy in police forces is that, according to the repeated warnings of the FBI since 2006, there are members of organized white supremacist groups who have worked to “infiltrate” police agencies. The FBI has said white supremacists are the greatest domestic terror threat, and that the groups often have “active links” to police.

Because of the way policing works in America, it also attracts people with explicitly racist views – giving them a professional license to patrol Black neighborhoods and allowing them to join a system that stops, searches, arrests and prosecutes people of color at disproportionately high rates, experts say.

“It’s very easy for people with white nationalist commitments to hide in policing, to find a place in policing,” said Nikki Jones, professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. American police departments, Jones said, have in many ways stayed true to their roots of protecting white people: “The way policing is structured, presented and performed allows white nationalists to hide in plain sight.”

Despite the clear evidence of explicit racism within policing, the US has not prioritized investigating white supremacists in law enforcement. This is particularly true under Trump, whose administration has focused its efforts to combat domestic terrorism on targeting Black activists and other leftist groups.

In addition to the federal government’s failures to proactively investigate and weed out white supremacist officers, local laws often make it very difficult to terminate officers, who are backed by powerful unions. Terminated officers are frequently rehired in other departments.

Michelle Monterrosa, a 25-year-old California resident whose brother was killed by police last year, said she was worried about the officers who traveled to the Capitol and who will likely face no consequences.

“These officers participated in this insurrection and participated in this hate,” said Monterrosa, who was recently arrested when she engaged in a peaceful protest. “It’s very scary to know they returned home and put their badge on.”

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 4:32 am

The Trump insurrection was America’s Beer Hall Putsch: Op-Ed
by Benjamin Carter Hett
Los Angeles Times
JAN. 16, 20213:30 AM

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Very soon after the nation watched in horror as a mob ransacked the U.S. Capitol, journalists and politicians began speaking of a coup.

The fallout from these events has been dramatic and will continue. But we need to understand a crucial point. The guy in the Viking hat and his friends could break windows. A member of the mob could kill a police officer. Rioters could plot to assault members of Congress. All of this is terrifying. But these people and their criminal actions are not the most dangerous threat to our democracy. The real threat comes from people in business suits or police uniforms who are inside the system — and that threat remains.

A historical example illustrates the point.

In November 1923, Adolf Hitler led a violent coup against the democratic system of Germany’s Weimar Republic. The coup started in an unlikely spot — a beer hall in Munich, the Bürgerbräukeller, very far from the capital city of Berlin and its parliament. But at this beer hall, the political, military, and police leaders of the state of Bavaria were meeting. Hitler wanted to enlist them in a “March on Berlin” to overturn the democratic government. He went to the beer hall to give a speech.

For five years, Hitler and others on the German right had been telling their followers a lie: that Germany had not really lost World War I. Instead, Germany had been “stabbed in the back,” betrayed by civilian politicians (democrats and socialists, controlled, Hitler said, by Jews). Bavaria became the center of a large network of right-wing militia groups who believed the lie and were ready to act on it.

Hitler knew the Bavarian leaders were reluctant to join his march on Berlin. His speech at the Bürgerbräukeller was designed to get the crowd to pressure them into joining the coup. At first it seemed to succeed. But the Bavarian leaders turned on Hitler as soon as he left them alone. Police and military units then speedily crushed the coup. Hitler and some of his followers were jailed.

Hitler learned his lesson: A sophisticated modern state could not be overturned by a violent coup led by outsiders, against the police and the army. He realized he would have to work within the system.

Over the following decade, this is exactly what he did. The Nazis ran in elections until they were the largest party in Germany’s parliament, gridlocking legislative business. Even more insidiously, the Nazis worked to infiltrate crucial institutions like the police and the army. In 1931, Berlin police responded incredibly sluggishly to a massive Nazi riot in the center of the city. It turned out senior police officials silently sympathized with the Nazis and had colluded in hobbling the police response.

Hitler grew steadily more attractive to business and military leaders who saw him and his movement as their only salvation from the growing Communist Party. Early in 1933 they opened the doors of power to him.

After the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, 139 Republican members of the House and eight members of the Senate, led by Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, came out of hiding to vote to object to the electoral college vote count. While a police officer lay dying, they supported Trump’s lie of a stolen election and embraced the insurrectionists’ cause.

Imagine the events of the past weeks and months if someone like Hawley had been the secretary of state in Georgia, or someone like retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn held a significant military command. Imagine what would have happened if the Republicans held majorities in both houses of Congress and could have overturned the electoral college results. Imagine if the courts had been more generously stocked with judges willing to entertain the Trump campaign’s ludicrous arguments.

Above all, imagine if the president had been a bit more competent, a bit more strategic, a bit more daring. Hitler, after all, was at least willing to be present at the violence his words inspired. He was also more persuasive in his dealings with important officials.

It is much more common for democracies to be undermined by seemingly legal actions taken from within than by violence from without. Hitler himself ultimately consolidated his power through legal instruments — for instance, the notorious Reichstag Fire Decree, which abolished the civil rights the democratic Weimar Constitution had granted.

In recent times, we have seen this happen in Hungary, Turkey and Russia. We need to think about legal safeguards for our institutions more than we need to think about barricades. We need to know that our police and military commanders will be loyal and do their jobs. And there must be real consequences for officials who try to profit from spreading sedition. There need to be motions of censure at the very least against Hawley and Cruz.

The majority of one of our two political parties is firmly committed to anti-democratic and insurrectionist politics. Normally the opposition party gains in midterm elections. It takes little imagination to see where this would put us in a close election in 2024. Democrats will have to work hard, using the Georgia model of mobilization to minimize midterm losses.

This month, Americans have seen what it means to have insurrectionists working inside our government. We will need to respond aggressively if our Beer Hall Putsch is not to be followed by more of the kinds of violence and terror we have seen in the past.

Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the author of “The Death of Democracy” and “The Nazi Menace.”

by **admin** » Tue Jan 26, 2021 4:46 am

‘He has an obligation to them’: Attorney for ‘QAnon shaman’ asks Trump to pardon rioters
by Quint Forgey
Politico
01/15/2021 08:52 AM EST

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

Jacob Chansley, a 33-year-old man from Phoenix, was one of the most recognizable perpetrators of the Capitol siege.

The lawyer for the “QAnon shaman” who was part of the deadly siege of the Capitol last week publicly petitioned President Donald Trump on Thursday to pardon his client.

In an interview on CNN, attorney Albert Watkins said his client, Jacob Chansley, “felt like he was answering the call of our president” when he stormed the nation’s seat of government last Wednesday during a riot that resulted in the deaths of at least five people.

Chansley, a 33-year-old man from Phoenix also known as Jake Angeli, was one of the most recognizable perpetrators of the Capitol siege. He carried a spear, wore a furry horned headdress and painted his face in shades of red, white and blue.

On Tuesday, Chansley became one of the first three people indicted by federal prosecutors in connection with the violence at the Capitol. He was charged with a felony violation of the Federal Anti-Riot Act, as well as obstruction of Congress and other offenses.

In a filing on Thursday, prosecutors said Chansley was as “an active participant in” and “the most prominent symbol of” what they described as a “violent insurrection.” Prosecutors also said Chansley had expressed his intention of returning to Washington, D.C., for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week.

The language in the filing suggests more severe charges, such as sedition or insurrection, could be coming for those involved in the siege.

Watkins, Chansley’s attorney, said on Thursday that his client, “like a lot of other disenfranchised people in our country, felt very, very, very solidly in sync” with the president — suggesting Chansley was incited to storm the Capitol in Trump’s name.

“He felt like his voice was, for the first time, being heard,” Watkins said. “And what ended up happening, over the course of the lead-up to the election, over the course of the period from the election to Jan. 6 — it was a driving force by a man he hung his hat on, he hitched his wagon to. He loved Trump. Every word, he listens to him.”

Prior to the Capitol siege, the president, his family members and his political allies riled up his supporters at a rally on the White House Ellipse. When it was his turn to speak, Trump urged those in attendance to march on the Capitol amid Congress’ certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory.

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said. He also said that “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

On Thursday, Trump became the only president in American history to be impeached twice — this time, in a bipartisan vote on a single count of “incitement of insurrection.”

“We all have to understand that the words that were spoken by the president meant something, not just to my client. They meant something to a lot of people,” Watkins said in his interview.

“They listened to those words. And those words meant something to them. And they had a right to rely on the words of their president that was strewed forth worldwide,” he said. “And they did. And now they’re turning around [and] they’re getting arrested, as well many should be.”

Nevertheless, Trump “needs to stand up and own these people,” Watkins argued. “He has an obligation to them. He has an obligation to our nation. It’s not going to happen.”

Pressed by host Chris Cuomo on what exactly he would like Trump to do, Watkins replied: “Oh, give a pardon.”

As Chansley’s attorney, “my role is not to judge somebody. My role is to be an advocate,” Watkins said. “If there’s one iota of a chance that the guy who’s the president of our country — who invited everybody down Pennsylvania [Avenue] — will give my client a pardon, you know what? I’m going to do it.”

Watkins acknowledged, however, that his plea was unlikely to succeed. “Am I holding my breath thinking that Donald Trump is going to be sitting around going, ‘You know what? … What’s the name of that guy with the horns? Yeah … let’s give him a pardon.’”

But “with Trump, you never know,” Watkins said. “He may say, ‘I want the guy with the horns.’ Next thing you know, maybe he’s represented by the shaman instead of Rudy Giuliani.”

Watkins went on to compare the president’s supporters who stormed the Capitol to the Jonestown cult members who committed mass suicide at their settlement in Guyana in 1978: “You know the only thing different here? There’s no Kool-Aid.”

*************************

Capitol rioter known as "QAnon Shaman" will be jailed until trial
by Erin Donaghue
CBS News
JANUARY 16, 2021 / 7:19 AM

A Capitol rioter known as the "QAnon Shaman" has been ordered detained until trial, after federal prosecutors in Arizona initially said his words and actions during the January 6 siege show that the intent of the rioters was to "capture and assassinate" lawmakers. Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin later said there is no "direct evidence" of kill and capture teams, and a prosecutor later struck that line from the memorandum urging a judge to keep him detained, according to The Associated Press.

Jacob Chansley, 33, of Arizona was indicted January 11 by a federal grand jury on two felony charges of interfering with law enforcement during the commission of civil disorder and obstructing a Congressional proceeding, threatening Congressional officials and disorderly conduct. Chansley, who is also known as Jake Angeli, was also indicted on four misdemeanor counts.

Prosecutors say Chansley, a well-known fixture at Arizona pro-Trump rallies, is a "self-proclaimed leader" in the QAnon conspiracy theory movement. Images of a shirtless Chansley storming the Capitol wearing horns, a fur coyote tail headdress and face paint, carrying a bullhorn and a spear, quickly went viral on social media. He is being held in a federal detention facility in Arizona.

A Trump supporter, later identified as Jake Angeli of Arizona, screams "Freedom" inside the Senate Chamber after the U.S. Capitol was breached by a mob during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.
GETTY IMAGES

In a detention memorandum filed Thursday, U.S. prosecutors in Arizona argue Chansley would pose an "ongoing danger to the community" and a flight risk were he to be released. While inside the Capitol, prosecutors argue, Chansley approached U.S. Capitol police officer Keith Robishaw and screamed that "this was their house, that they were there to get Senators, and that they were there to take the Capitol, to get Congressional leaders," the memorandum reads. "Chansley also used his bullhorn to communicate that they were there to take out several United States congressmen," the filing says.

The memorandum also says "while officer Robishaw was attempting to quell the crowd, Chansley was using his bullhorn to incite it."

Prosecutors originally argued in the memo that "Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States Government," The Associated Press reported. But at a Friday hearing for Chansley in Phoenix, another prosecutor struck that line.

The prosecutor said the statement may be fair at trial, but added that prosecutors did not want to mislead the court, according to the AP.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin told reporters Friday that while there is no direct evidence of "kill or capture" teams, there are "bread crumbs" that suggest some level of coordination among some groups inside and outside the Capitol. Sherwin, whose office is leading the massive federal investigation into the riot, said understanding the rioter's motives and level of advance planning could take weeks or months.

In their filing, Arizona prosecutors say Chansley then entered the Senate chamber with a group of about 25 rioters, posed for pictures at the dais where Vice President Mike Pence had been minutes before, and left a note that read, "It's only a matter of time. Justice is coming."

The following day, prosecutors say Chansley called the FBI Washington field office, admitted his involvement and described Pence as a "child-trafficking traitor," but said he did not intend the note to be a threat. When asked about the meaning of the note, he launched into a "lengthy diatribe" describing current and past lawmakers including Pence, former president Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President-elect Joe Biden as "infiltrators involved in various types of wrongdoing."

"Although he stated his note was not a threat, the government strongly disagrees," the prosecution's court filing reads.

Chansley was arrested January 9, when unaware of a sealed warrant out for his arrest, prosecutors say he drove to an FBI office in Phoenix intending to "continue his interview." He brought with him the headdress, spear, horns, face paint and bullhorn in the trunk of his car, according to the memo.

Prosecutors describe Chansley as a "follower-turned-leader" in the QAnon ideology who has espoused dangerous conspiracy theories and described "hanging" lawmakers he called "traitors" in social media posts.

"He has repeatedly demonstrated dramatic, erratic behavior, an inability to conform to societal norms, and an unwillingness to appreciate the consequences of his actions," the filing read. "He abides by his own belief system, acts accordingly regardless of the criminal consequences, and brings others along with him."

They say Chansley also vowed to return to Washington, D.C. for President-elect Biden's inauguration.

"At this juncture in our Nation's history, it is hard to imagine a greater risk to our democracy and community than the armed revolution of which Chansley has made himself the symbol," prosecutors wrote.

Chansley's lawyer Albert Watkins, however, painted a starkly different picture in a statement Thursday. Watkins said Chansley was unarmed, non-violent, and surrendered peacefully to the FBI. The lawyer said Chansley and others who entered the Capitol did so at the instruction of President Donald Trump, and called on Mr. Trump to pardon Chansley and other "like-minded, peaceful individuals who accepted the president's invitation with honorable intention."

"Mr. Chansley is an American; he served honorably in the U.S. military," Watkins' statement said. "He has zero criminal history. He is a lover of nature, routinely practices meditation, is an active practicer of yoga and eats only organic food. He took seriously the countless messages of President Trump. He believed in President Trump. Like tens of millions of other Americans, Chansley felt -- for the first time in his life -- as though his voice was being heard."

So far, more than 200 people are the subject of investigations and more than 100 are facing local or federal charges in the Jan. 6 riot that left five people dead. Hundreds more charges are expected as federal investigators comb tips, video and social media to identify and arrest suspects across the country.

Those already charged face a variety of counts ranging from curfew violations, unlawful entry and disorderly conduct to theft, assault and weapons violations. A team of senior federal prosecutors are investigating more serious charges including sedition and conspiracy related to the "most heinous" acts at the Capitol, Sherwin said Tuesday.

Catherine Herridge contributed reporting.

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