Daily Archives: December 31, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The birth of a "boogeyman"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The "BLM-Antifa" phenomenon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perceptions Remain Unchanged Over Past Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methodology

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

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

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

The margin of error within this poll is 3.1%.

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

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

Berry Craig| Opinion Contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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