January 6th would be an appropriate day to listen to Steven Snider's 5-24-21 interview with James Scaminaci III regarding the role of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys in the January 6th insurrection. To hear the entire one-hour-plus interview on THE FARM PODCAST, click HERE.
What follows is Steven Snider's description of the show:
Here I'm joined by former civilian military intelligence officer James Scaminaci III to breakdown the events of January 6th. Up to this point I had been reluctant to label Jan 6th a full-blown coup attempt. But Scaminaci makes a compelling case that this is very much what happened, with the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys orchestrating the assault. Over the course of this interview we cover the background of the Oath Keepers; the command & control structure used by both groups that day; their battle plan; and most importantly, explain what the objective was. From there, we get into whether the security was adequate, the strange series of events involving General Charles Flynn (the brother of Michael) on the 6th, and a general account of the military's behavior that day.
And here are some related links....
1) From Jose Pagliery and Roger Sollenberger's 1-5-22 DAILY BEAST article entitled "Will the Oath Keepers Founder Spill on the Jan. 6 Organizers?":
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, has the power to burn some top right-wing personalities who pissed him off. It’s unclear if he’ll actually do it.
Members of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group which featured prominently during last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, feel betrayed by the headliners of the protests that day—names like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Ali Alexander. According to the Oath Keeper’s lawyer, those organizers of the Jan. 6, 2021, rally asked the militia to stand guard for them on that fateful day.
If that’s really the case, it could introduce even more culpability for those GOP figures.
But Rhodes hasn’t decided yet whether he’ll answer questions at his upcoming testimony before the Jan. 6 committee, according to a person familiar with this thinking.
Rhodes was slated to appear before the House panel in a closed-door hearing this week, according to an attorney with direct knowledge of the arrangement, but the testimony was postponed for unclear reasons. If and when Rhodes does appear, though, he could shine a light on a number of key questions for investigators. Rhodes has information about the planning, coordination, and intent of organizers, as well as any possible preparations for violence and connections to government officials.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
2) From Paul Brandus' 1-5-22 MARKETWATCH article entitled "Civil War in the United States Is Far More Likely Than You Think. In Fact, It May Have Already Begun":
What’s eye-opening here is that when you look at the 200-plus civil wars since 1946 and their root causes, it sounds eerily like America right now.
“People have a false impression that it is the most down-trodden, the poorest, the most discriminated against who tend to start civil wars,” [Professor Barbara] Walter says. “In reality, that’s not true. The people who tend to start civil wars are what experts call ‘sons of the soil.’ These are citizens who had either been dominant politically and culturally but were now in decline, or who had once had power and had lost it. This group believes that the country belongs to them, that they have the right to be in power, and when they lose it, they find it incredibly disconcerting.”
Walter adds: “They’re very resentful of groups that are ascendant, and they’re the ones who tend to mobilize and fight to try and re-establish control.”
As I’m listening to Walter, the images that immediately come to mind are of the torch-bearing white men marching through Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, shouting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Remember them? The angry white men waving Confederate flags and a few Nazi swastikas? This is a bullseye example of the political and cultural decline of once-dominant groups that have sparked conflicts elsewhere.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
3) From Freddy Cruz's 12-2-21 Southern Poverty Law Center article entitled "White Nationalists, Jan. 6 Protesters and QAnon: What You Need To Know About Border Vigilantes Along the Border":
As some vigilantes in Arizona continue preying on migrants, Hatewatch has learned the identities of some these far-right extremists.
In July, the Southern Poverty Law Center sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security alerting them to the militia presence at the border. Through a review of social media content, Hatewatch has learned culprits have included at least two QAnon adherents, four Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol rioters, a snake oil salesman and an antisemitic militia group that is attempting to recruit on the forum of the notorious white nationalist site Stormfront.
As reported by Hatewatch in July, the antigovernment militia group Veterans on Patrol (VOP), led by Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer, continues to operate alongside vigilante organizations in Pima County, Arizona. The vigilante network Meyer dubbed the “border coalition” has attempted to intercept and detain migrants in the desert. A closer look at United People of America (UPA), one of the initial organizations affiliated with VOP, has revealed UPA’s attempts to recruit border volunteers from Stormfront, one of the earliest and most prominent white nationalist sites [...].
The man at the helm of the border coalition is Michael “Lewis Arthur” Meyer, a former QAnon devotee who has tried to distance himself from the movement while continually espousing QAnon conspiracy theories. Meyer, who is not a veteran, leads VOP, a vigilante group that is known for mischaracterizing migrants using racist tropes while claiming that humans, weapons and drugs are being trafficked into the U.S. via the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation, a Native American reservation in Southern Arizona.
This belief that a Tribal Nation engages in the trafficking of migrants is a long-standing claim of some on the far right. Militias piggyback on anti-Indigenous messaging that insinuates that tribal governments are failing and that they even cooperate with domestic and international criminals. Figures such as Elaine Willman have made a career out of promoting the idea that tribal governments should be erased in the name of national security. Willman, who has written books on the topic of dismantling sovereign tribal nations, helped popularize conspiracy theories that frame immigration and tribal nations as two of the greatest existential threats to the U.S. In Arizona, Meyer and his ilk are peddling similar conspiracies as they conduct their daily operations around the Tohono O'odham Nation Reservation.
Today, VOP’s mission, which originated in Three Points, Arizona, has slowly spread to other areas such as Sasabe, Arizona. Since launching the “border coalition,” Meyer has continued to peddle the notion that the migrant crisis is being “orchestrated” by the Biden administration, as well as other QAnon conspiracies. These include the idea that the “deep state” is responsible for the crisis, that migrants are looking to harvest the organs of children and that the situation at the border constitutes an “invasion” [...].
Meyer isn’t the only vigilante at the Southern border who continues to perpetuate QAnon conspiracies. Rebecca Ferland, leader of the group AZ Desert Guardians, has similarly espoused QAnon talking points while engaging in border activities earlier in the year. Ferland, who also goes by the name “Becky,” was one of the initial border leaders to join Meyer’s “border coalition.” Over the last few months, she has continued to peddle the false claim that U.S. sponsors for migrant children are also registered sex offenders [...].
Alongside white nationalist and QAnon adherents, the border has also attracted several Jan. 6 rioters. This includes Christie Hutcherson, founder of the pro-Trump group Women Fighting for America (WFFA); Tim Foley, leader of the anti-immigrant militant group AZ Border Recon; a UFO conspiracy theorist named Paul Flores and Shawna Martin, a far-right MAGA activist and VOP volunteer.
Hutcherson, a far-right religious zealot, first broke into the spotlight earlier this year when she spoke in front of a large pro-Trump crowd on the eve of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Hutcherson, a proponent of “The Big Lie,” frequently conflates her religious and political beliefs regurgitating the notion that God chose Trump to run the country for four more years. According to Right Wing Watch, Hutcherson also claimed to be a member of the Family Research Council, a SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group. On the WFFA website, the group states its mission is to “assist women from all walks of life to push back on the daily attacks on the nuclear family and defend American values.”
To read the entire article, click HERE.
(If you'd like to access the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Map, which tracked 838 hate groups across the U.S. in 2020 alone, click HERE.)
4) From William Saletan's 12-15-21 SLATE article entitled "The Chilling Lesson of Mark Meadows’ Text Messages":
The
more we learn about what Donald Trump and his aides heard and did on
Jan. 6, the more clearly we understand his corrupt intent. The latest
revelations come from newly disclosed text messages
sent to Mark Meadows, Trump’s then-chief of staff, that afternoon. The
messages show that Trump’s family, his media allies, and people inside
the U.S. Capitol begged him to call off the attack but were ignored for
most of the day. And they confirm that Meadows, who has refused to
testify in the Jan. 6 investigation and now faces possible indictment
for contempt of Congress, was at the center of what unfolded that day.
But
the messages also clarify a standoff that took place in the middle of
the afternoon. Shortly after 2:30, Trump sent out a tweet urging his
followers to “stay peaceful.” That tweet has been cited as proof that he tried to end the crisis.
But the texts, combined with other evidence, show that trusted figures
in Trump’s orbit were asking him to do more. They wanted him to tell the
rioters to leave the Capitol and go home. On the surface, this looks
like a small difference. But Trump refused to do it. Why?
The simplest answer is that, as his prior behavior demonstrated, he saw the mob as leverage in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
5) From Barton Gellman's 12-6-21 ATLANTIC article entitled "Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun":
Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
“The democratic emergency is already here,” Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine, told me in late October. Hasen prides himself on a judicious temperament. Only a year ago he was cautioning me against hyperbole. Now he speaks matter-of-factly about the death of our body politic. “We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024,” he said, “but urgent action is not happening.”
For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.
By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.
Any Republican might benefit from these machinations, but let’s not pretend there’s any suspense. Unless biology intercedes, Donald Trump will seek and win the Republican nomination for president in 2024. The party is in his thrall. No opponent can break it and few will try. Neither will a setback outside politics—indictment, say, or a disastrous turn in business—prevent Trump from running. If anything, it will redouble his will to power.
As we near the anniversary of January 6, investigators are still unearthing the roots of the insurrection that sacked the Capitol and sent members of Congress fleeing for their lives. What we know already, and could not have known then, is that the chaos wrought on that day was integral to a coherent plan. In retrospect, the insurrection takes on the aspect of rehearsal.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
6) Jordan Klepper vs. Iowans Who Think Trump Won | The Daily Show (10-18-21):
