Demands to know: Did foreign Bitcoin transfers fund the failed insurrection?

WASHINGTON, D.C. Today, U.S. Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5) called on the Department of Justice and federal agencies to redouble investigation efforts into the reported single $520,000+ bitcoin transfer to multiple alt-right groups and extremist personalities leading into the deadly failed insurrectionist attacks on the U.S. Capitol.

Federal agencies are currently investigating a transfer of $522,000 worth of bitcoin to twenty-two different wallets belonging to several alt-right groups and extremists one month before the January 6, 2021 attack. The largest donation of approximately $250,000 went to a far-right extremist internet troll who was reported to be present at the initial January 6 Washington, D.C. rally and seen outside the U.S. Capitol as the riot began.

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In the wake of the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, Americans deserve to know if more than half a million dollars worth of bitcoin helped fund the failed insurrection. Are foreign entities paying far-right extremists to try to overthrow the U.S. government? Are there other cryptocurrency transfers to extremist groups we dont yet know about? asked Congressman Josh Gottheimer, a member of the House Financial Services Committee and Homeland Security Committee, today. We know this isnt an isolated incident. We know other terrorist actors and foreign groups use cryptocurrency to finance their attacks. Our federal agencies and the Department of Justice need to actively redouble their investigation and immediately brief Congress to help get to the bottom of this.

Gottheimer is the lead sponsor of the bipartisan Freezing Assets of Suspected Terrorists and Enemy Recruits (FASTER) Act, to give law enforcement the capability to freeze the assets of all domestic terrorists when a suspect is arrested by federal law enforcement. It also implements a one-of-a-kind National Homegrown Terrorism Incident Clearinghouse for all levels of law enforcement to collect and share information on incidents of homegrown, lone-wolf terrorism and violent extremism to help investigate and thwart future attacks.

Gottheimer is also the lead sponsor of bipartisan legislation the Online Terrorism Prevention Act to require regular disclosure of the presence of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations on social media websites, and to impose financial and criminal penalties for social media companies that fail to eliminate terrorist content from their platforms.

Original post:

Gottheimer: Feds Must Probe Bitcoin Transfers to Alt-Right Extremists Prior to Capitol Attacks - TAPinto.net

Here are three observations about culture and politics as viewed through the prism of the last days of the Trump administration and the first days of the Biden one.

Everyone is making media at all times, CNN reporter Elle Reeve reported of January 6 capital siege. Its crazy. Its like, Were you there if you didnt livestream it? And theyre all hoping for that viral moment that will give them more clout on social media.

The commitment to postingeven though this particular viral moment would ultimately provide authorities ways to track down the riotersshows the degree to which politics has been recoded, in the Trump Galaxy Brain, as some kind of media project. Politics is downstream from culture, Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous hard-right web outlet, once said.

Supporters of US President Donald Trump enter the Capitol as tear gas fills the corridor on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.)

You dont need an army of content-creating goons to have reactionary violence in the United States, of course. Reactionary mob violence, against the Indigenous and minorities, against the poor and the working class, has been an aspect of life in this country since before the creation of the Republic.

But whats become apparent to me is that the dynamics of the networked DIY media economy are particularly catalytic to reaction, in ways I havent heard talked about. Not just because it is an efficientvehicle for spreading unvetted misinformation, though this is true. Nor because it creates filter bubbles or incentivizes mob mentality, though this is also true.

After four years, everyone should know that the deepest reservoir upon which the Trump base drew was not the white working class, but the white petit bourgeoisie. Its a lot of small business owners.

The social media-ization of everything has added to that layer in a particular way. Social mobility may have declined in the United States, inequality has certainlysoared, debt has ballooned, and physical infrastructure is crumblingbut media has gotten easier and easier to access and consume. This expanding cornucopia of tech and entertainment has served as a compensatory narrative of progress and advancement for an empire in decline. The future seems more and more constrained, materially, but, on the flip side, you are freer and freer to build your own virtual worlds and get lost in them.

Supporters of US President Donald Trump enter the US Capitols Rotunda on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.)

The promise of viral fame has also provided a new-model rags-to-riches story to keep gas in the tank of Americas myth of itself as a middle-class nation of self-defined, self-made people, despite the pervasive sense of narrowing opportunity (even as Big Tech consolidated its monopolies). Whether you are an independent journalist looking to Substack, a sex worker on OnlyFans looking to survive the pandemic via a paying fanbase, or a QAnon wingnut decoding breadcrumbs and monetizing the resulting notoriety via T-shirts and Trump merch, the recent past has held out the individual internet hustle as the path to some form of stable autonomy.

In her great book,Labor in the Global Digital Economy, theorist Ursula Huws makes the point that online attention economies are built around begging and bragging, creating systematic psychic stresses. There is, she writes, a cumulative battering of the ego that cannot be good for anyones self-respect even for those who (by definition a minority) emerge from the process as winners most of the time.

After the Capitol assault, the New YorkTimes wrote of participants that a number of the feeds we reviewed suggested that those whod made a sharp pivot to sharing misinformation were similar in their desire to cultivate a public persona. The protesters the Times interviewed

shared an entrepreneurial streak. They expressed a desire for connection with others and sought to achieve it online. But their attempts at conventional influencing (via modeling, reality television, running a small business and sharing motivational content) brought only modest attention.

Until, that is, they found an audience in extreme conspiracies, and a plausible route to the micro-influencer fame that was otherwise out of reach. Jake Angeli, the QAnon Shaman who became the face of the Capitol attack, is similarly a failed actor and web spirituality entrepreneur. Scotty the Kid, who single-handedly built last years Save the Children rallies, is a failed model and rapper (specifically rapping about BitCoin.)

The squeezed small-business-owner class has been, classically, considered the popular base for fascism. Official ideology privileges and glamorizes the dream of economic independence, yet small proprietors are slammed by competition, atomized, and relatively powerless. Thenetworked web economy specifically holdsout a dream of glamorous independence and celebrity inflated way beyond its ability to deliver to large numbers of people, creating a substantial and volatile base of thwarted small-media entrepreneurs looking for salvation.

This idea of digital medias role inthe fix we are in may make it seem that the unprecedented, coordinated action by Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Stripe, and more to deplatform both Trump and his more extreme fans in the last weeks can only be a positive development.

In the wake of the bans, everyone is now waiting to see what effects they might have beyond serving as a kind of temporary emergency brake that has been pulled.

Supporters of US President Donald Trump enter the US Capitols Rotunda on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.)

But, actually, most experts already agree what will happen.

Bottom line is that de-platforming, especially at the scale that occurred last week, rapidly curbs momentum and ability to reach new audiences, Graham Brookie of the Digital Forensic Research Lab told the Washington Post. That said, it also has the tendency to harden the views of those already engaged in the spread of that type of false information.

And those who are already engaged, keep in mind, are literally tens of millions of people at this point. For those committed to sharing Stop the Steal memes, the coordinated action of Big Tech was further evidence of a diabolical scheme against them and against Americawhich is the very sense that created the conditions of reaction in the first place. Way back when Trump was first running in 2016, RAND found that how you answered the question do you feel voiceless? was the best predictor of his support among Republicansbetter than age, race, college attainment, income, or attitudes towards immigrants or Muslims.

So, peace in the information sphere is bought at the price of further extremism, probably on a large scale.

Make no mistake, the loss of internet platforms is a huge blow for the right-wing culture warriors and internet conspiracy addicts, disorganizing, demoralizing, and dispossessing them. But there were, after all, much more sinister groups in attendance at the Capitol, dedicated to forms of militia actionIRL war instead of just the meme war. Theyve been prepping for years for a showdown and are actively looking to recruit.

Its easy to imagine that, in turning off the online attention spigot, you have not only radicalized a sense of grievance on the level of belief but also redirected a lot of thwarted energy towards groups more dedicated to the non-virtual world as the center of the action.

Marchers parade past an Apple Store in San Francisco, protesting Apple Incs profits held in tax exempt overseas accounts in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images.)

On the other side of the radicalization funnel, Big Tech absolutely does have way too much control over peoples livesthat is hardly a sense that only ultra-reactionaries share. There is a huge, unfocused mass of anger at tech that goes beyond political affiliation. Just as vaccine skepticism that crosses class and demographic lines has been a conduit into broad right-wing growth during COVID, this general angst opens dangerous pathways of solidarity.

We risk allowing righteous resentment at techwhich is only going to grow as more and more as people see these platforms as the last avenue of social advancementto be tangled up and channeled into the racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic narrative of those who are the most evident target of the ban and the loudest voices against it.

As Doug Henwood pointed out recently on the Behind the News podcast, the giants of Platform Capitalism today seem to be playing the same role in the public discourse as the railroads did in the late 19th century. Rail let small farmers get their goods to market, but also put them at the mercy of giant monopolies, stoking resentment. Now, social media behemoths control access to an audience, to visibility, to careers, to community, and so on, stoking resentment.

Ryan Walker, I Saw the Farmer and the Consumer and they who come between (1902).

It was in the broad revolt against the 19th-century rail monopolies that a term was born so potent that it endures in our political lexicon: Populism. It started out as a left-wing movement of radical democracy and redistribution of wealth, but has been channeled into right-wing strong-man anti-elite politics.

It matters a lot who captures the resentment generated by the real injustices of corporate domination over communication. It is very bad if people preaching an apocalyptic gospel are the ones who speak for it.

The Social Dilemma, last years blockbuster middlebrow clickbait documentary on the horrors of social media, contains a scene that is meant as a parable for what social media is doing to the kids. We are shown how phone-addled suburban teens are impelled by the sinister forces behind their screens to participate in a violent street protest, ending up in cuffs.

Press image from The Social Dilemma. (Image courtesy Netflix.)

The documentary, however, specifically refuses to show what the protest is all about. The problem at hand, the implication is, is neither left- nor right-wing extremism, just extreme opinions, generically. As if that term could be defined non-ideologically.(To symbolize the docs all-sided criticism, the signs you see at the protest tout the Extreme Centerprobably not referring to Tariq Alis book of the same namecritiquing technocratic liberalisms role in paving the way for right-wing populism.)

Im sympathetic to the idea that the profit models and practices of social media capital are having socially corrosive effects. But, in general, I think that the Trump-era pundit obsession with trying to combat the growing right at the level of technology has too often ended up being about looking for a technical fix for deep-seated social problems that have developed over years of social erosionand this is dangerous.

An example of this perspective came in last years blockbuster Rabbit Hole podcast from the New York Times, which also set out to show how social media was a radicalization tool drawing people into conspiracies. The funny thing, however, was that its star example was Caleb Cain, described as a lonely young man, raised amid the decline of postindustrial Appalachia, failing to find a place for himself at college, then finding himself working aimlessly at a series of jobsDairy Queen, packing boxes at a furniture warehousewithout much of a sense of self-worth or future prospect.

From this life situation, this young man who started out as an Obama supporter discovers YouTube self-help content to fill his empty nights. This leads him to the mens-rights content that leads him to the so-called alt-light content that leads him to dipping into the deeper waters of white nationalist content.

But by the time the Times talked to him, Cain had been both successfully radicalized and then deradicalized on YouTube. At some point, he found his way to videos where his alt-right heroes debated more left-wing ideas, put out by BreadTube, a group of self-consciously ideological anarchists, democratic socialists, Marxists consciously out to engage with reactionary online entrepreneurs and counter them on their own turf.

There is actually a kind of vindication of the importance of effective intellectual engagement in hearing how Cain is won away from the abyss by watching his favorite alt-right YouTube stars get owned by online lefties rolling up their digital sleeves to engage with their arguments and offer alternate explanations for the alienation and demoralization of his actual lived condition.

Caleb Cain, aka Faraday Speaks, analyzing a Stop the Steal rally on YouTube.

Nevertheless, podcast host Kevin Roose strangely takes a totally other lesson away from this parable. Towards the end of his profile, he reveals that Cain himself has started a YouTube channel, Faraday Speaks, where he tries to use his experience to reach people like him who might be attracted to the nastier ideas he had found himself dabbling in. Seems great to me! But here is how Roose engages with Cain:

I guess what I am sort of wondering is that it seems like, you know, you went pretty far down this alt-right rabbit hole. You didnt get to the bottom maybe, but really close. And then you kind of found this path to this other part of YouTube that works kind of the same way, but with just a different ideology, and got sucked pretty far down into that by some of the same algorithms and the same forces that had pulled you into the alt-right. And I guess Im wondering if that makes you feel like the problem is still that you kind of are in the rabbit hole, but youre just in a different one. Youre still susceptible if the algorithm were to change in the future and lead you down some other path that was maybe more dangerous, that this could happen to you again.

You almost feel like Roose is about to say, Have you instead considered a subscription to the New York Times?

Figures including artist Joshua Citarella have been, for years, repeating the message that the best alternative to the right-wing online content funnel is creating self-consciously leftwing alternatives.And yet, faced with his own reporting showing actual case-study evidence that left-wing ideas helped pull Caleb Cain away from alt-right ideas, and Cains effort now to do the same for others, Rooses take on how to battle rising extremism is to tell him: stop doing that. (This Times Take, incidentally, very much fits Tariq Alis definition of an extreme center position.)

Rabbit Hole amounted to one long argument that YouTube, Facebook, et al. were derelict in their duties to stop societys far-right drift, and should be more forceful moderators. Well, now this demand has been fulfilled in the most dramatic possible way, albeit after it was almost too late.

My fear is that this focus on moderating away the problem is ultimately a substitute for having an ideology, for doing something about it or for even having to think about postindustrial Appalachia anymore or address the real social conditions that are drawing people like Cain towards reaction.

I cant say its not nice to have silence from Trumps Twitter. But its worrisome to me to think that now that the Great Muting has happened, everyoneor everyone whos comfortable enough to do sois just going to go back to not thinking about all that he represented, as if the level of chaos and social fragmentation that we have lived through were something you could just hit mute on. As if the movie doesnt still go on even though you cant hear whats going on.

Link:

3 Observations About Culture, Politics, and Social Media Radicalization in the Post-Trump Era - artnet News

On his first full day as an ex-President, Donald Trump didnt make any headlines, not even in his new local newspaper. On Thursday evening, the main headline on the home page of the Palm Beach Post declared that the number of coronavirus cases in Palm Beach County has topped a hundred thousand. In Washington, Joe Biden was revelling in his role as the antithesis of Trump, revoking some of his predecessors most controversial policies, appealing for unity, and unveiling a new plan to tackle the pandemic.

Having written critically about Trump on a regular basis over the past five years, Id be as pleased as anyone to relegate him to the history books and concentrate on the challenges facing the new Chief Executive. But, of course, the country has unfinished business with its forty-fifth President: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to transmit an article of impeachment against Trump to the Senate on Monday, triggering a trial. Earlier in the week, Mitch McConnell, now the Senate Minority Leader, indicated that he would delay the start of Trumps impeachment trial until February. Trump, for his part, insists that he, too, has unfinished business. I want you to know that the movement we started is only just beginning, he said, in his farewell address. On the final full day of Trumps Presidency, his aide Jason Miller posted a picture of the White House on Twitter with the caption Until 2025...

That was just bluster. Right now, another Trump Presidency seems unlikely. If he had accepted gracefully the result of the November election, in which he garnered the support of more than seventy-four million Americans and came within forty-three thousand votes in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin of eking out another victory in the Electoral College, he would still be in a formidable position politically, despite his catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic. But Trumps behavior since the election, particularly his incitement of the deadly January 6th riot on Capitol Hill, has done him a lot of political damage.

Getting himself impeached for the second time is only the start of Trumps troubles. His attempted self-coup prompted some Republican leaders in Washington to finally break with him, and it sent corporate America fleeing from anything connected with the Trump brand. As I noted last week, hes now such a pariah that many Trump businesses are facing vast challenges. Even if he were to try and branch out in a new direction, such as by starting a television network, its far from clear that he could find the necessary partners and raise the necessary funds. He also seems to have alienated some of his foot soldiers, including some of the alt-right thugs who took part in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. In their case, they were angered by how he backed away from them in the days after the violence. On Wednesday, the Times published a fascinating piece about how members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing groups were calling him extraordinarily weak and a total failure on social media.

Politically, the biggest blow to Trump is that he has permanently lost his premier social-media platformTwitterand it isnt clear whether his secondary platformFacebookwill eventually allow him back. On Thursday, Mark Zuckerbergs company said that it had referred to an outside oversight board the decision of whether to make the platforms suspension of Trump permanent. Given the significance of the decision to bar Trump, we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld, Nick Clegg, Facebooks director of communications and policy, wrote in a post.

Its hard to exaggerate the significance of Trump losing his online presence, which was central to his political rise and Presidency. In broad terms, Trump never had anything very new to say. His success was based on exploiting a number of phenomena that have long bedevilled American society: anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, class divisions, resentment of coastal lites, opposition to liberal value systems, a belief in conspiracy theories, and genuine economic grievances. Trumps adroit use of the Internet separated him from previous Republican rabble-rousers, such as Pat Buchanan and Sarah Palin. His Twitter account enabled him to disintermediate the media and speak directly to his supporters. Once he was in power, it also allowed him to dictate the daily news agenda, float conspiracy theories, punish people who crossed him, and keep himself constantly in the public eye. Without his vast social-media following, it will be far more difficult for him to make a comeback. A Trump without a Twitter account is a centurion without a sword.

Which isnt to say he should be written off, a mistake that politicians and commentators have often made before. Even though he has done himself great harm since November, the right-wing populist movement that he spearheaded, and the underlying forces that it fed on, are still very much present, and great swaths of the Republican Party are still in thrall to themas evidenced by the fact that, just hours after the January 6th assault on the Capitol, more than half of the House G.O.P. caucus voted to challenge the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. It has been widely reported that McConnell and other Republican leaders in the Senate are now flirting with the idea of using the upcoming impeachment trial to wrest control of the G.O.P. back from Trump. But, until that happens, reports of the Party breaking with him should be treated with extreme skepticism. Trump, as he sits in Palm Beach, may well be justified in asking of McConnell the question that Stalin reputedly asked of Pope Pius XII: How many legions has he?

Even without the Proud Boys, who could still come back around to Trumps side, the former President still has many legions, unfortunately. In the days immediately after January 6th, a series of opinion polls showed his job-approval rating plunging from the low forties, where it was for much of his Presidency, to the low thirties; one survey, from Pew Research, even put the rating in the high twenties. That dive reflected the widespread revulsion at Trumps seditious behavior, but, during his final week in office, his numbers rebounded somewhat. According to the FiveThirtyEight poll average, he left the White House with an approval rating of 38.6 per cent. The Real Clear Politics poll, which tallies the data differently, put the figure at 41.1 per cent. In both poll averages, Trumps ratings were slightly above the lows that they reached in late 2017.

Many readers may find that information hard to fathom, but it reflects the enormous gulf in attitudes to Trump that has been evident from the moment he rode down the escalator in Trump Tower in June, 2015. Hes never had the support of a majority of the country, or even come particularly close to gaining it. To the disgraceful end of his Presidency, though, he retained a large enough base of support to persuade other conservative opportunists that Trumpism (albeit without Trump) represents the future of the G.O.P. With their eyes on 2024, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley voted to reject some of the Electoral College results. Other Presidential hopefuls, such as Tom Cotton and Rand Paul, didnt go that far, but they have adopted much of Trumps divisive playbook. And the new Congress contains some true Trump fanatics. One of the first official acts of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a new member of Congress who has in the past expressed a belief in Qanon, was to file articles of impeachment against Biden. On this, the first weekend of the new Presidency, Trumpism is still alive and kicking.

Read the original here:

Trump May Be Gone, But Trumpism Isnt - The New Yorker

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal's radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson: Hey, hey, hey. It's Al, and I have some exciting news. Okay, so in July, we brought you American Rehab. That was our eight-episode series that uncovered tens of thousands of people desperately in need of help for their addictions, but instead of getting treatment, they were sent to work without pay, sometimes at big corporations. The New Yorker called it riveting, urgent, and mind-bending. Now we're making it available for your binging pleasure. You can find it by subscribing to Reveal Presents: American Rehab wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that's Reveal Presents: American Rehab. All right, get to binging.

Speaker 2: Why did an American family leave behind a comfortable life in Indiana and wind up at the heart of the ISIS caliphate in war-torn Syria? Join the worldwide search to unravel this family's complicated journey and explore what happens as they return to the U.S. Listen to I'm Not a Monster, a new podcast from Frontline, BBC Panorama, and BBC Sounds. Search for the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Speaker 2: Reveal is brought to you by Progressive, one of the country's leading providers of auto insurance. With Progressive's Name Your Price tool, you say what kind of coverage you're looking for and how much you want to pay, and Progressive will help you find options that fit within your budget. Use the Name Your Price tool and start an online quote today at progressive.com. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. The morning of January 6, before the storming of the halls of Congress, reporter David Neiwert tweeted a prediction, "Today is likely to be a historically violent day in the nation's capital."

David Neiwert: Yeah. No, that wound up being an understatement, didn't it?

Al Letson: David wasn't surprised that pro-Trump extremists did what they did. In fact, he linked to a video from the night before shot on the streets of D.C. in which a middle-aged white man in a Trump hat tells a young white nationalist livestreamer-

Speaker 4: In fact, tomorrow, I don't even like to say because I'll be arrested-

Speaker 5: Well, let's not say it.

Speaker 4: I'll say it.

Speaker 5: All right.

Speaker 4: We need to go into the Capitol.

Speaker 5: Let's go!

David Neiwert: It certainly wasn't a surprise for any of the people who've been reporting on and researching the radical right here in the United States in the past year, because they've been pretty upfront about it. They were saying they were going to do this.

Al Letson: David has been following the radical right for decades. A few years back, he and the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations teamed up with Reveal to start tracking what looked to him like an uptick in far right terrorism. We put together a database of every single domestic terror event starting in 2008.

Al Letson: In 2017, that data showed that right-wing extremists had become the biggest threat, while law enforcement under President Obama was focused on those acting in the name of Islam. Last summer, we ran the numbers for terrorism under President Trump, and we found that far right terror had grown and become more lethal, responsible for almost the same number of deaths during Trump's first three years as during all eight years under Obama. The men, it's almost always men, who are responsible for many of those deaths were driven by the same ideology.

David Neiwert: There's a very specific stripe of white nationalism that we're seeing run through, especially, these more recent mass killings.

Al Letson: Today, we're bringing back a show we first aired last June. We're going to connect the dots to show how extremist ideas and extremist violence spread online, and we'll ask why law enforcement is still struggling to catch up. Reveal reporters Stan Alcorn and Priska Neely dug into this for months. Priska starts us off with the story of a man who witnessed the deadliest domestic terror attack of 2019.

Priska Neely: Guillermo Glenn is well-known in El Paso's Mexican-American community. He's 79 now, and he's been a community organizer and labor rights activist for most of his life.

Guillermo Glenn: We conducted a lot of protests. We blocked a bridge. We went to jail.

Priska Neely: On August 3, 2019, he was just going about his weekend routine.

Guillermo Glenn: It was a Saturday morning around 10:00. I had gone to Walmart to buy some pet food. I was way in the back, and I heard this great big noise.

Priska Neely: A warning, Guillermo is going to share graphic details about what happened that day.

Guillermo Glenn: A large number of families, women and men were running towards me from the front of the building, and then I noticed at least one of the women was dripping blood. I said, "Well, there's something really wrong." I ran into the woman who was... Both her legs had received some type, either shrapnel or bullet wounds, and she was bleeding. So I stopped there to help her, and I grabbed a first-aid kit and tried to at least tend to her wounds in her legs. One of the firemen or paramedic came and told, "You have to get her out. We're getting everybody out of the store." So we put her in one of those grocery baskets.

Priska Neely: When he wheeled the woman to the front, he saw what had happened.

Guillermo Glenn: Right at the front door, there was a lot of blood. I knew then that there'd been a shooter. It was a very traumatic scene. I saw the body of a man with half his head shot off. There was a lady laying on the pavement across from where we're loading the people. I didn't know exactly who he'd taken out. I didn't have that information that he was actually shooting Mexicans.

Priska Neely: The suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, drove roughly 10 hours from outside Dallas to the El Paso Walmart right near the Mexican border. Police say he opened fire, 23 people were killed and many were wounded, and then he drove off.

Speaker 8: Minutes later, Patrick Crusius stopped his car at an intersection near the Walmart. He came out with his hands raised in the air and stated out loud to the Texas Rangers, "I'm the shooter."

Priska Neely: He's facing 90 federal charges, including 45 hate crimes.

Priska Neely: After Guillermo witnessed what happened that day, he got in his car and went to the restaurant where his friends always gather on Saturdays.

Guillermo Glenn: Several of my friends came up and hugged me and said, "Oh, you're okay. We're so glad. We've been looking for you. We thought you might be there." Then they showed me the manifesto.

Priska Neely: The manifesto. Minutes before the attack, the shooter had posted a document filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric to the online message board 8chan. Some of Guillermo's friends showed him a copy.

Guillermo Glenn: I sat down. I had some food, had some of my regular Saturday menudo. Then I finally realized what had happened, right after I read the manifesto.

Priska Neely: The Crusius manifesto reads kind of like a corporate website. It has an About Me section and parts where he outlines his warped vision for America. He matter-of-factly explains how his attack will preserve a world where white people have the political and economic power. He says peaceful means will no longer achieve his goal.

Priska Neely: Reporter David Neiwert says this alleged shooter is the quintessential Trump-era terrorist, a man largely radicalized online, entrenched in white nationalist ideology, and fueled by the belief that white men like himself are being replaced by Latino immigrants. Crusius wrote that the media would blame President Trump for inspiring him, but he claimed that his ideas predated the Trump campaign. Here's David.

David Neiwert: Patrick Crusius, especially, was so filled with loathing for Latino people that he didn't see them as human.

Priska Neely: When David reads the manifesto, he can immediately see the fingerprints of other white nationalists.

David Neiwert: Here's how Crusius opens his manifesto. "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."

Priska Neely: That opening line is a direct signal back to a previous act of terrorism, the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, just months before. David says this is part of a trend. One terrorist inspires another, and the cycle continues. Guillermo says he didn't understand all of the references at first, but it was clear to him that the manifesto had ties to a larger movement.

Guillermo Glenn: I think he was trying to show that somebody had to take action, and that really angered me at that point. Why would somebody come and shoot innocent people like that?

Priska Neely: David say Crusius started doing online research because of the anger he felt over how the country was changing demographically.

David Neiwert: But in the process of doing this research, he came across multiple white genocide theories, including The Great Replacement.

Priska Neely: The Great Replacement, or replacement theory, unites many acts of hate that we see across the country, around the world.

David Neiwert: That's this idea that comes out of white nationalism that white Europeans face a global genocide at the hands of brown people and that they're being slowly rubbed out of existence.

Priska Neely: Only a few terrorists in recent years have referenced replacement theory by name, but it's widely popular among right-wing extremists. It's linked to ideas that are many decades old, but one attack in Europe showed how those ideas can be weaponized.

David Neiwert: Anders Breivik's terrorism attack in Oslo and Utya Island, Norway, in 2011.

Priska Neely: Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting. Before the attack, he sent out a 1,500-page manifesto about how he planned to lead white supremacists on a crusade against the "Islamification of Europe." Around the same time, a French writer named Renaud Camus refined and popularized the ideology in a book. The title translates to The Great Replacement.

David Neiwert: The Great Replacement essentially is this idea that brown people, particularly refugees and immigrants from Arab countries in Europe, are being deliberately brought into the country in order to replace white people as the chief demographic.

Priska Neely: The conspiracy theory claims all this is orchestrated by a cabal of nefarious globalists. That's code for Jews.

Speaker 9: You will not replace us!

Speaker 10: You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us!

Priska Neely: In August 2017, white supremacists in the U.S. took up this concept as a rallying cry at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Speaker 10: Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!

Priska Neely: The next day, a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. This incident had an immediate impact on the public perception of terrorism, making it clear that white nationalists violence is a serious threat.

Speaker 11: Today, the nightmare has hit home here in the city of Pittsburgh.

Priska Neely: At a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, Robert Bowers is accused of killing 11 people.

David Neiwert: He went to a Jewish synagogue because he was angry about the Latin American caravans. The caravans had been in all the news in the weeks prior to that synagogue attack. He blamed Jews and went to a Jewish synagogue to take revenge for Latino immigration.

Priska Neely: These are the ideologies that are zigzagging across the globe. In March 2019, the gunman who livestreamed his mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Facebook also wrote a manifesto. The title, The Great Replacement. The New Zealand manifesto inspired the El Paso shooter to target the people he felt were replacing him. Recent manifestos and books put a new spin on violent, hateful acts, but David traces these sentiments back much further.

David Neiwert: What's remarkable in a lot of ways when I read these manifestos is so many of them are expressing ideas that I read in the 1920s coming from eugenicists. Look, I would even take it back to the 1890s, when we first started seeing the wave of lynchings in the South as a form of social control. This was very clearly a form of terrorism.

Priska Neely: After the El Paso shooting, activist Guillermo Glenn says white supremacist ideology was barely part of the conversation. There were brief efforts to unite the community against hate, a few events held under the banner El Paso Strong.

Guillermo Glenn: The politicians, the businessmen, the mayor, everybody was pushing this idea that we had to survive, but they weren't really talking about who caused it or why.

Priska Neely: Before we talked for this story, Guillermo says he didn't identify as part of this larger group of survivors that includes Jewish and Muslim communities.

Guillermo Glenn: You say, well, it's the Jewish people that they attacked, it's the Muslim people that they attacked, and here on the border it's the Mexican and Central Americans. But nobody talks about, what does the Great Replacement mean? Nobody put all these incidences together and say, "Hey, this is something that we should be aware of nationally."

Priska Neely: And he says that's part of the failure, part of the reason these attacks keep happening.

Al Letson: That story from Reveal's Priska Neely.

Al Letson: As we've been saying, these extremist groups are using online communities to spread their messages and find new recruits. When we come back, we'll hear how it works.

Josh Bates: It's a conditioning process, it's a grooming process, and I let myself fall into that.

Al Letson: The evolution of the white supremacist internet, next on Reveal.

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Al Letson: If you like what we do and you want to help, well, it's pretty simple. Just write us a review on Apple Podcasts. It's easy and only takes a few seconds. Just open the Apple Podcasts app on your phone, search for Reveal, then scroll down to where you see Write a Review. There, tell them how much you love the host. Your review makes it easier for listeners to find us, and well, it really does make a difference. And if you do it, you will get a personal thank you from me right now. Thank, not him, no, you. Yes, you. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. All right.

Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. We're continuing with our show we first broadcast last summer about domestic terrorism during the Trump administration.

Al Letson: The FBI and academic researchers say there's no such thing as a terrorist profile. You can't tell who's going to become a terrorist with a personality test or a demographic checklist. But the young white men who attacked the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway and the Walmart in El Paso, they had a lot in common. Not only were they motivated by the same conspiracy theory about white people being replaced, they developed those ideas in some of the same spaces online. Two of them even posted their manifestos to the same website, 8chan.

Al Letson: Now, you can't blame today's white supremacist terrorism on the internet, but you also can't understand it without talking about the way the white supremacist movement uses the internet and how it's changed over the last decade. Reveal's Stan Alcorn is going to tell that story through the eyes of a man who lived it. Here's Stan.

Stan Alcorn: Josh Bates's decade as a white supremacist started in his mid-20s, with a YouTube video about the presidential candidate he says he supported at the time, Barack Obama.

Josh Bates: I was scrolling through the comments section, "He's a Muslim," "He wasn't born here," things of that nature, and somebody said, "You guys sound like those Stormfront (beep)." I was like, "What in the world is Stormfront?"

Stan Alcorn: Stormfront is a message board that a former KKK leader set up in the '90s. Josh says he went there at first because he was curious, then to argue. But then the middle-aged message-board neo-Nazis started winning him over.

Stan Alcorn: How could they be convincing in these arguments? Can you help me understand that?

Josh Bates: Well, I wish I could answer that question, because I still ask myself that a lot. How could I end up falling for something like that? But I guess it's probably similar to how we look at people who fall into cults. It's a conditioning process, it's a grooming process, and I let myself fall into that.

Stan Alcorn: The experts I talked to say that first step is more about the person than what they're stepping into. Josh had just left the Marines, where he used to have a team and a mission. Now all he had was a computer.

Shannon Martine...: It's pretty concurrent with a whole lot of people, where they felt really deeply disempowered in their lives.

Stan Alcorn: Shannon Martinez is a former white supremacist who's helped people, including Josh, leave the movement.

Shannon Martine...: When you encounter information that's presented that this is the real truth, the true truth people don't want you to have because, if you did, it would be too empowering for you and too disempowering for them, that's an incredibly powerful, toxic drug.

Stan Alcorn: That drug, widely available on the internet, is, at its heart, a conspiracy theory. It says your problems aren't your fault; it's immigrants, Black people, Jews.

Josh Bates: They talk about, oh, Hollywood and the media and all these Jews that are in these positions of power. When you google that kind of stuff and you see it and you consume it, eventually after a few months you kind of get desensitized to it. Everybody's agreeing with everyone for the most part. You get along. There's that online community. Stormfront was my first one.

Stan Alcorn: He didn't know their names, but they were his team now. He'd spend the next 10 years as what he calls a keyboard warrior for the white supremacist movement. He'd be there for every step in its evolution, from joining the KKK and the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement to more diffuse groups and websites that called themselves alt-right and identitarian.

Stan Alcorn: Some of these groups would go to some lengths to appear respectable and say, "We're not racists. We're not Nazis. We're not the KKK." Then some of those groups were Nazis; they were the KKK. You were in all of them. Does that tell you that the differences between these groups are more about the image and the tactics than the core ideas or who they attract?

Josh Bates: Absolutely. We've been using the terms white nationalism 1.0 and white nationalism 2.0 for a few years now. 1.0 is your early groups, Ku Klux Klan. They're very explicit, National Socialist Movement, walking around with swastikas on their uniforms and their flags. Your 2.0 guys, they're your Identity Evropas, where they're dressing in khakis and collared shirts and dock shoes, and they've got these nice cropped haircuts. They call that good optics. But anybody who was in the early 1.0 movements like myself, I could see right through it. They just put lipstick on a pig. That's all they did.

Stan Alcorn: But people who followed the white supremacist movement for decades, like Type Investigations reporter David Neiwert, they say that this alt-right makeover of the old racist right, it was transformative.

David Neiwert: That radical right was very backward-looking, very stiff and formal. They didn't have any... Humor was not part of their repertoire. In fact, their primary recruitment demographic really was men between the ages of 40 and 60. With the advent of the alt-right, what we saw was this very tech-savvy, very agile movement that, instead of running away from the culturally savvy aspects of the internet, rather embraced them wholly.

Stan Alcorn: Instead of writing racist newsletters that people had to sign up for, they were making memes and jokes in places like Reddit and 4chan. These forums that celebrated being politically incorrect, they were the perfect place for those ideas to take root, hybridize with other fringe ideas, and grow into something that could be shared on more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

David Neiwert: It was very brilliant because it meant that suddenly their recruitment demographic was much larger and had a lot more political activist energy. They were younger people.

Stan Alcorn: Josh Bates says that energy got a huge boost in 2016 with the rise of a new presidential candidate.

Donald Trump: They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. Some, I assume, are good people.

Josh Bates: Because Trump was spouting off a lot of the same talking points as general white nationalists, he breathed new life into that movement. The thought leaders of the movement just took full advantage, thinking that they could take it even further, and they did.

Stan Alcorn: They started to take their ideas into the real world.

Megan Squire: They were being emboldened by Trump and really acting out.

Stan Alcorn: After Trump's election in 2017, computer scientist Megan Squire set up software to track extremists on Facebook. She'd started out studying the misogynist Gamergate movement, but that had led her to all of these different anti-Muslim and neo-Confederate and white supremacist groups.

Megan Squire: At the time, Facebook was a central player, if not the central player, and it was the place where these guys all wanted to be. I was looking for ideological crossover, group membership crossover, just trying to, I guess, map the ecosystem of hate on Facebook.

Stan Alcorn: She watched this ecosystem plan what one neo-Nazi website would call the Summer of Hate, anti-Muslim marches, misogynist Proud Boy rallies, and what was shaping up to be this real-world meetup of all these different mostly online hate groups, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is where she came across Josh Bates.

Megan Squire: There was a person who was talking about they didn't have enough money to go to Charlottesville, and someone else suggested, "Hey, we have this crowdfunding site. Why don't you set up a fundraiser?"

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The Evolution of All-American Terrorism - Reveal

A report by President Trumps 1776 Commission, established to promote patriotic education, was written without the input of any professional historians of the United States, and does not include a bibliography or list of citations.

But that doesnt mean the 45-page report, which drew harsh criticism from scholars when it was released on Monday, doesnt have sources. Far from a free-floating product of the Trump era, it draws on longstanding conservative talking points and a growing shelf of ideologically inflected scholarship and popular history books that aim to counter what it maintains is anti-American left-wing historical revisionism.

The report seems to draw heavily from a rhetorical trick now quite popular on the right of reassigning slavery, racism, and fascism to the left, Nicole Hemmer, a historian and the author of Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, said in an email. But the underlying argument, that multiculturalism and liberation movements are fundamentally dangerous and un-American, has been a hallmark of conservative politics since at least the 1990s.

Here are some of the main claims of the report, and the ideas they draw on.

The longest section of the report nearly half of the main body describes the countrys founding principles, which it argues are under siege by progressives, whose overly negative view of our history promotes at the very least disdain and at worst outright hatred for this country.

Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent, it says. But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.

David W. Blight, a historian of the Civil War at Yale University who is highly critical of the report, said that the report falsely portrays slavery not as a core part of American history and society, but as a global institution that had all but been imposed on Americans.

Scholars have noted that the report has curiously little to say about the Civil War itself, suggesting that slaverys end was less the result of a bloody conflict and more a kind of inevitable flowering of antislavery seeds planted in the Declaration of Independences assertion that all men are created equal.

Dr. Blight also criticized the way the report appropriates Black leaders like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which he said recalled longstanding myths of Black Confederates.

The Confederate Lost Cause was very clever in how they also manipulated claims of Black loyalty to the South, he said.

And the report, while admiringly quoting Lincoln, he said, also had echoes of books like the libertarian economist Thomas DiLorenzos The Real Lincoln (2002) and the tax attorney and author Charles Adamss When In the Course of Human Events (2000), which argue that Lincolns true reason for waging the Civil War was to expand the government leviathan.

These were books that hated Lincoln and any mainstream liberal consensus interpretation of American history, Dr. Blight said. They hated the New Deal, admired the Confederacy and much more.

The report argues that while fascism and communism may have been bitter enemies in their wars to achieve global domination, they were in fact ideological cousins that threatened the principles of natural rights and free peoples enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

That equation of fascism and Communism has been a staple of conservative writing for decades, going back at least to Friedrich Hayeks 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom, said Geoffrey Kabaservice, a historian of conservatism and director of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank in Washington.

But the report, he added, is perhaps less notable for what it says about Americas relationship to communism and fascism than what it omits.

Note that this historically innocent reader of this report would have no idea that the U.S.S.R. foughton the same side as the U.S. in World War II, Dr. Kabaservice said. And theres also no reference to the America First movement, which was the origin of McCarthyism and the conservative movement.

The reports discussion of the global fascist threat also invokes a particular, homegrown American villain: the so-called administrative state.

In its section on early 20th-century Progressivism, it describes the rise of the regulatory bureaucracy, a kind of unaccountable shadow government that the report characterizes as a betrayal of the founding principles.

In order to keep up with the complexity of society, the report writes, early 20th century Progressives like Woodrow Wilson here compared to the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini envisioned a regulatory regime run by unelected experts, under which, as Wilson wrote, the functions of government are in a very real sense independent of legislation, and even constitutions.

This idea has long been promoted by writers connected with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank that became increasingly influential during the Trump administration. (The editor of its journal, Charles Kesler, is a member of the commission.) And it has been popularized by figures like Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2008 book Liberal Fascism.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2017, Stephen K. Bannon, at the time Mr. Trumps chief political strategist, injected the phrase further into mainstream political discourse when he assured the audience that the deconstruction of the administrative state was at hand.

The way the progressive left runs, is if they cant get it passed, theyre just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency, he said. Thats all going to be deconstructed.

One passage that drew particular consternation among historians was the claim that John C. Calhoun, the ardent pro-slavery politician and intellectual architect of Southern secession, was a leading forerunner of left-wing identity politics.

Like modern-day proponents of identity politics, the report says, Calhoun believed that achieving unity through rational deliberation and political compromise was impossible; majority groups would only use the political process to oppress minority groups.

Traditionally, some on the ideological right have been more inclined to embrace Calhouns political theories, if not necessary his racial views. Russell Kirk, Dr. Kabaservice noted, wrote admiringly of him in his influential 1953 book The Conservative Mind. And more recently, some contemporary anti-government conservatives, while not necessarily expressing admiration for the man, have echoed his theory of nullification as part of their efforts to delegitimize government policies.

But however seemingly bizarre, casting the forces of so-called political correctness as intellectual descendants of Calhoun is not original to the report. In a 2013 article on the conservative libertarian website Law&Liberty, Greg Weiner, the assistant provost of Assumption University, declared that protesters calling for Yale University to remove Calhouns name from a residential college were Calhounian to their core.

And more broadly, Dr. Hemmer said, there has been an increase in right-wing commentators categorizing white supremacy as just another form of identity politics and whites as a beleaguered group as deserving of consideration and protection as any other.

While Calhoun is generally not considered a man of the left, even among the most trollish of commentators, reassigning white-power politics to the left is something weve seen more of since the rise of the alt-right, she said.

In a five-page appendix called Faith and Americas Principles, the report turns to the contentious question of religion and the founding.

History underscores the overwhelming importance of religious faith in American life, it begins. But some today see religious practice and political liberty to be in conflict and hold that religion is divisive and should be kept out of the public square. The founders of America held a very different view.

Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University, said the report echoed longstanding arguments on the religious right, summed up most influentially in books like The Jefferson Lies (2012). That book, by the evangelical pastor and author David Barton, depicts Thomas Jefferson as a conventional Christian who wanted to create a Christian nation.

The book was pulled from circulation by its original publisher after the accuracy of its historical evidence was widely challenged. But Dr. Laats, who has written about conservative efforts to influence textbooks, said that similarly Christianity-centered versions of American history can be found in textbooks published by Bob Jones University Press and Abeka Books, a Christian educational publisher.

In the big scheme of things, they are not used very widely, he said. But among conservative home-schoolers and at private schools, they are widely used.

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The Ideas Behind Trumps 1776 Commission Report - The New York Times