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The way that many gay men talk about bodies and beauties may have ripened their minds for right-wing thinking

In recent decades, Spain has often been painted as the only European country without a far right. But even in the 1990s, violent street movements were building their forces — and now they’re entering the country’s political institutions, too.

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Journalist and author Miquel Ramos. (Photo: Cristina Candel)

In Spain’s last general election in 2019, the far right achieved its best ever result. With 3.7 million votes (15 percent) and fifty-two seats, Vox became the third-largest party in the Congreso de los Diputados. And it hasn’t stopped advancing. Earlier this year, it joined the government in Castilla y León, Spain’s largest region. If a decade ago Vox didn’t exist, today its leaders appear on prime-time comedy shows — and with general elections slated for 2023, they could soon even be in cabinet.

All this has been a surprise to a certain mainstream mantra. For decades, it had painted Spain as an oasis of democracy, even the only country in Europe without a far right, just because it didn’t show up on election day. But recognizing these forces’ power today is also about facing up to reality. The Spanish far right isn’t just back: it never really went away. Vox is not its only name. That’s something committed anti-fascists have known for over three decades.

As for many others from his generation, anti-fascism is a personal matter for journalist Miquel Ramos, born in Valencia in 1979. A month before Miquel turned fourteen, the eighteen-year-old activist Guillem Agulló was stabbed to death by far-right militants. Ramos knew Agulló through his presence in left-wing demonstrations and political spaces. Indeed, the 1990s were years in which teenagers saw rising fascist violence in the streets. In a year and a half, trans woman Sonia Rescalvo in Barcelona, migrant worker of Dominican origin Lucrecia Pérez in Madrid, and Agulló were all killed.

Ever since then, Ramos began to collect press clippings about the subject, building toward the work he has now published on thirty years of militant opposition to far-right, fascist, and neo-Nazi movements in Spain, entitled Antifascistas: Así se combatió a la extrema derecha española desde los años 90.

Ignacio Pato spoke to Ramos about far-right street movements in Spain, their relationship to the parliamentary right, and how they can be fought.

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Ignacio Pato

Compared to older generations, your generation’s relationship to anti-fascism seems to have a distinct, more personal characteristic.

Miquel Ramos

My generation didn’t live through the Transición of the late 1970s, a period marked by the continuity of Francoism in state structures such as the police, and by groups that still advocated for dictatorship.

The fairy tale claimed that fascism had died with Francisco Franco.

But in our teenage years in the 1990s, we did see the manifestations of a far right that had not been so present before. They acted in the streets with violence and impunity. The fairy tale claimed that fascism had died with Francisco Franco. Maybe part of the previous generation that had fought against it didn’t feel attracted by these new groups. But our generation, the one that started to have political concerns at the beginning of the 1990s, did.

It was impossible for many types of people to escape from that far-right violence. A lot of people experienced it, whether they were political militants or not: sometimes you had to be careful just because you hung around certain places.

Ignacio Pato

Can we see different phases in far-right strategies during the last thirty years?

Miquel Ramos

Yes. First, they had some more tribal features associated with skinheads and football hooligans — that was between the mid-1980s and the 2000s. After that, the far right tried to form regular political parties and soften their speech, playing to the gallery.

The third phase was the rise of neofascist social movements influenced by the French Nouvelle Droite, such as Italy’s CasaPound — groups that directly imitate the strategies and symbols of the radical left. The current stage is that we have, for the first time in Spain, a far-right party, Vox, in the institutions. Although the far right disguises itself as democratic, there are still violent groups on the streets.

Although the far right disguises itself as democratic, there are still violent groups on the streets.

The brighter side of the story is that anti-fascism is also organizing. And this movement joins with others such as squatting, anti-globalization, and those who fight for more social, livable neighborhoods. The anti-fascist militant isn’t usually just against fascism.

Ignacio Pato

In Antifascistas, you identify a turning point around November 20, 1988 — the anniversary of Franco’s death — when far-right groups tried to attack the stalls of leftist and anarchist movements in El Rastro, Madrid’s most popular open-air market.

Miquel Ramos

Until then, far-right action was more about reprisals and occasional clashes. However, the assault on El Rastro involved a fascist organization attacking a pretty symbolic space for left-wing people in Madrid. They were already on alert and realized they had to come together and face the problem.

Ignacio Pato

The 1990s were a kind of “years of lead” of continued violence. They began with the killing, on another November 20, of the left-wing Basque MP Josu Muguruza. Groups like Bases Autónomas used violence in the streets, and areas of some cities fell under the far right’s control. For many people, anti-fascism became something more than a political position, for it was also about protecting themselves and their own lives. Do you think today’s society is aware of the real dimensions of what happened then?

Miquel Ramos

I don’t think it is. Days like those scar you. It was a scenario in which you aren’t looking for anything — but it finds you. There were murders, seriously injured people, and others who were forced to beg for their life, to hit back or to preventively attack. It makes you see the far-right problem in a certain way. That threat has been trivialized, for instance, when the media talked about “urban tribes.” Of course, those were not fights for territory: the far right wanted to kill you because of who you were, how you thought, or who you loved. Or who they thought you were, because sometimes victims didn’t have any political link. Crossing glances was enough. My book tries to explain what existed, how people lived with that, and what they did about it. Their testimonies are based on their own experience.

Ignacio Pato

Mainstream media rhetoric, in those years, mainly portrayed the logic of “clashes between different tribes.” For the first time, Nazis made prime-time news. Did this presence sound anti-fascist alarm bells among ordinary citizens, or did it end up whitewashing them?

Miquel Ramos

Media featured a cartoonish far right — very often as a drunk skinhead, while the problem was obviously bigger. The problem was also that some people embraced that cartoon. A lot of Nazis were attracted to the skinhead movement through the movie American History X, the book Diario de un skin, or sensationalist TV reports on football. Some others, it’s true, arrived at anti-fascism through these images, but there was also an attempt within the movement to put a stop to that. For example, Brigadas Antifascistas (BAF) said, “You can’t hang out here, this is political.”

Ignacio Pato

One of the testimonies in the book, from BAF, say this collective was “a steamroller” at the beginning of the millennium. There was an anti-fascist offensive at that time. What were its key elements?

Miquel Ramos

Anti-fascist groups were not only focused on self-defense, but around that time, they got over a “victim” attitude. The mindset changed. For collectives like BAF, the idea was, “There’s no need for them to come for us; we are going for them first.” People who took that initiative saved a lot of other people, in my opinion. It can be criticized from a distance, and the discussion around violent tactics comes through from the whole book, because there has never been a consensus about it. But where an anti-fascist offensive has existed, where people have drawn the line, far-right violence has declined.

Ignacio Pato

Important for another generation of anti-fascists was the murder of Carlos Palomino, a sixteen-year-old stabbed to death at a protest against a neo-Nazi rally in 2007. There was a change in the way the movement communicated and the way it fought to portray the story in media. Some organizations began to show their faces. Somehow, the image of the anti-fascist as an angry young man under a black hood was overcome.

Miquel Ramos

Very often, under those hoods, there were individuals that people wouldn’t imagine. The profile of anti-fascists has always been diverse. The cliché that media created has been the one of a violent “black bloc”–style crew causing trouble. For years, that weighed heavily. Around the time of Carlos Palomino’s murder, there was not just the claim that they killed a minor who had a mother and friends. Some reports insisted on the anti-fascist caricature [of Palomino], and it was a double victimization. And anti-fascism was very clever about showing faces. That helped to dismantle the media’s “both sides” mantra, but not in a complete way, because it persists even now.

The profile of anti-fascists has always been diverse.

Ignacio Pato

What role have police played regarding the far-right problem?

Miquel Ramos

There was not an effective purge of the security forces after Franco’s death. Policemen who had tortured people continued their job until they retired. There was, especially in the 1980s, state terrorism that involved members of those forces. Some of them paid for that with prison time, but others got away with it or even were decorated, as in the well-known case of “Billy el Niño” [the most known torturer and police officer in Franco’s dictatorship, who died of COVID without ever going on trial]. We have always seen Nazis who are sons of police officers or who get arrested but don’t even go to police stations. And don’t forget that their information squads are still talking about “urban tribes” even today.

Ignacio Pato

Some political commentators have connected Vox’s rise to a response to the Catalan independence process and the October 2017 referendum.

Miquel Ramos

Spanish nationalism has always been one of the basic elements of the far right. That always existed — it didn’t need the referendum in order to whip itself into excitement. The question is why the far right was able to capitalize on the campaign against Catalonian self-determination.

Spanish nationalism has always been one of the basic elements of the far right.

The official narrative, the one that came from the authorities, well suited the far right. In demonstrations, there were democrats against the Catalan referendum who didn’t put up any barriers against the far right. Why were people from Communist and Socialist parties sharing banners with Vox? Maybe that narrative was a mistake from the start. Wasn’t there an alternative to police smashing heads on voting day? Why was the message “a por ellos” (“go for them”) institutionalized?

Ignacio Pato

Vox has tried — but so far not managed — to make more of an approach to working-class concerns. Is there a danger, in Spain, of a far right with a more social discourse than Vox itself has?

Miquel Ramos

I don’t really see it now, at a party-political level. I don’t see Vox making a serious approach to social problems concerning workers. Nevertheless, Vox has expanded the Overton window for social movements that imitate the Left and try to use a “class” discourse, as the French Nouvelle Droite did after May ’68 — movements whose narrative turned from attacking the homeless to feeding them.

Ignacio Pato

Former deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias is one of the interviewees in Antifascistas. This is probably the first time in recent Spanish history that a figure that high up in government can speak on this issue from first-person experience. Anti-fascism was quite an explicit slogan for Podemos in Madrid’s last regional election.

Miquel Ramos

Some people within Podemos come from social movements and have suffered neo-Nazi violence. They’ve got that sensitivity. Pablo Iglesias and equality minister Irene Montero have for a long time had far-right ultras coming to the door of their own home, even sending them bullets in the mail. That’s something that had never happened before.

Ignacio Pato

In the last two years, mental health became a mainstream topic in Spain. This is an issue that the far right never seems to care about, instead making fun of people’s emotional problems. Is mental health a space where anti-fascism, and democracy with it, can make an advance?

Miquel Ramos

The far right is more about bullying than doing politics. It’s based on harassing and knocking down vulnerable groups. Their deeply neoliberal economic program has serious costs for the quality of people’s lives. However much they use the cultural battle as a smokescreen, far-right politics don’t give more rights to the working classes. And this has a cost also at an emotional level. Defending our health — mental health, but also other kinds — is a banner we can raise. The far right doesn’t give a damn about the quality of life of the unprivileged. Anti-fascism is largely based on mutual support and caring for one another. Clearly, we have a moral advantage on this front.

Ignacio Pato

Feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ movements, housing campaigns, and trade unions allow for a kind of preventive anti-fascism. At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, we saw mutual aid groups in a lot of neighborhoods, while the far right didn’t do anything to help anyone. What do you think are their weak spots?

Miquel Ramos

Fascism takes advantage of the neoliberal undermining of class consciousness. They focus not on this social consciousness but on other identities. Their voter is not attracted to economics but by the flag, masculinity, and whiteness.

The far right is more about bullying than doing politics.

The sense of class belonging, which remains widespread still today, used to be a dam against fascism. We aren’t living through the best of times for this consciousness; it’s true. But grassroots struggles in neighborhoods, for housing rights, defending your neighbors, your and your friends’ jobs, maybe other workers’ jobs even though they’re hundreds of miles away from you — all that is absolutely a protective wall against the far right.

Ignacio Pato

What’s your diagnosis of the present situation?

Miquel Ramos

Anti-fascism still counts for a lot among democratic-minded people — it’s part of their DNA. Spain was one of the last European countries where the far right entered parliament, and I think that has increased awareness.

I’ve been asked, in other interviews, if anti-fascism has failed. I’d tell you it hasn’t. The question that needs answering is why people, many of them very young, who fought against the far right were left on their own — so, not what they did wrong, but where the rest of society was. My book wants to pay tribute to people that all too often struggled alone. Still today, there are journalists who don’t know the games the far right plays with media. Even worse, there’s a certain kind of Left that buys into far-right framings.

Anti-fascism has a huge amount of work to do, but a very valuable heritage. We must insist that fascism is not a political option nor a respectable opinion. It impacts many people’s lives. So everyone has to choose what side of history they want to be part of.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Media Matters’ Angelo Carusone about the Alex Jones trial for the August 12, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

 

Janine Jackson: A Texas jury levied $45 million in punitive and $4 million in compensatory damages against Alex Jones, on behalf of the parents of Jesse Lewis, a six-year-old, one of the 26 people whom Jones insisted to his followers—not once but over and over again—were not shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, because they never existed, their mourning families really paid scammers faking grief in a ploy to take away gun rights.

Responses to the verdict included both reporting calling it a “punishing salvo in a fledgling war on harmful misinformation” and headlines declaring “Alex Jones Isn’t Sorry and Won’t Change”—a reflection of the fact that the Alex Jones phenomenon involves more than the particular piece of work that is Jones, but also the array of people who platform and profit from his actions.

Angelo Carusone has been tracking right-wing media machinery for some time. He is president of Media Matters, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Angelo Carusone.

Angelo Carusone: Thank you.

JJ: Before this trial, as he tried to forestall it, Jones at one point called for one of the Sandy Hook family’s lawyers, called for the lawyer’s head “on a pike.” And then, after the verdict, he was back on his show, saying that it was all an attack on him by “globalists.” Alex Jones learning anything was probably never on the table, but did we? Did you learn anything new about Jones or his operations from this trial?

AC: I think we knew that he was making a lot of money. What we didn’t know until the trial—this is I think what’s really significant about it—is that he’s making not just a lot of money, but he’s doing some really shady things with it.

So, for example, the estimates from their forensic analysis was that he had somewhere between $250 to $300 million in assets. Now, Jones would declare he’s bankrupt. But when you start to unpackage that a little bit, what you’ll find out is that there’s a company which owns a lot of debt to Alex Jones called PQPR; he’s the primary owner of it. And starting right when the buzzards started circling around Jones a couple years ago, he began moving tens of millions of dollars, sometimes payments of $50 million, $60 million, to this company that now owed Alex Jones a debt itself.

So it’s pretty interesting, I think, just the financial part of this is interesting. I think, if I were to sum it up, I would say the one thing we learned is the scale of the revenue that he’s made in this period of time, and then also, essentially, it confirmed that it really is much more of an infomercial at this point than it is a traditional-type programming.

JJ: And you’d think when journalists are looking at it, “follow the money” is kind of a prime directive, right? And here, that would be very interesting. And then even the business plan, if you will—stoke anxiety and then sell survival gear at 100% markup—that’s not really a new plan, as it were.

AC: No, it’s not. The part that is interesting is that he’s managed to convince and capture the attention of some very significant conservative donors. And that means that he has access to donations. In addition to people buying his products, he solicits donations multiple times a day. A lot of times a day.

But he’s gotten pretty hefty Bitcoin donations from anonymous sources, upwards in the realm of $8 million. He got a big $8 million donation in May, a single one, but he’s had other big ones of that scale over the last couple of years.

And one of the donations that always jumps out to me is in the lead up to January 6; this was in November, he was trying to secure a permit for a demonstration in DC. This is before it was even organized, and somebody gave him a half-a-million dollar donation, anonymously, so that he could file for one of the original permits that later ended up getting transferred over for that big January 6 event.

So that part I think is novel and unexplored, just how much people that are in this orbit are willing to give to him from a donations perspective. And once you get a few of those deep pockets, that gives you a lot of operational capacity.

JJ: And my general sense is that you think it’s a mistake to focus overwhelmingly on sifting out what’s special and specific about Alex Jones, at the expense of seeing why and how his playbook, if you will, has been normalized both in the Republican Party and through right-wing media. This is a story where the bigger picture really is the story.

AC: Yeah, I think that’s right, actually. If we were to have this conversation 10 years ago, I would say that Alex Jones is sort of an island unto himself. And occasionally Glenn Beck would steal some of his stuff and sort of launder it and sanitize it a little bit, and do it on his Fox News show back then. But he was really sort of on an island unto himself.

And one of the things that’s different between then and now is that the content that Alex Jones says on a fairly daily basis is essentially mirrored and reflected through establishment Republicans and the traditional right-wing media.

So the “deep state” notion, which is not controversial anymore—everyone says that on the Republican side — that somehow there’s some conspiracy inside government, even now more so with the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. That’s an Alex Jones conspiracy.

And just last night, Fox News was pushing this idea that there was this globalist meeting between Soros and Garland and Biden and all these foreign prime ministers who decided that this was going to be the playbook to take out Donald Trump and subjugate America. But that’s conspiracy stuff that he’s been pushing.

And then the last one is the right-wing media, both talk radio and Fox. They’ve also been pushing this idea that the evidence was planted inside the safe in Mar-a-Lago. They didn’t even know the evidence, didn’t even know what was planted, but they’re already conjuring up a conspiracy.

So that’s very much what Alex Jones has peddled in. And now it is nearly indistinguishable from the traditional right-wing and conservative talking points. And I think that’s the part that’s significant about all this, is that the big players now are doing Alex Jones. Everything is InfoWars. That’s basically what I would say.

JJ: I have to say, I thought that something would change in 2017, when Jones was in a custody fight with his ex-wife and she said, I don’t want my kids around this guy, you know, he’s calling for people to have their necks broken. He said he wants Jennifer Lopez to be raped. You know, I just don’t want my kids around him. 

And Alex Jones’ lawyer at the time said that Jones is a “performance artist,” that he’s “playing a character,” and to judge him by what he says on InfoWars, his lawyer said, would be like judging Jack Nicholson by his portrayal of the Joker in Batman.

Now, I’m not naive; I’ve been at this for a minute. But I have to say, I was still surprised that after that, media went right back—not just right-wing media, but centrist elite media—went right back to calling Alex Jones “controversial,” calling him “bombastic.”

Even now, it’s weird to read that Jones acknowledges today that Sandy Hook happened, as though we need to credit any particular relationship between what he says and reality.

I guess I hold some blame for not just right-wing media, but so-called mainstream media, for not, at that point, once his case was, “I don’t believe any of this, and you’d have to be stupid to believe anything that I say,” why didn’t the picture of him change? Why didn’t we start talking about him differently?

AC: And that’s the part that I find so frustrating. And I think that gets back to why I do what I do, and I’m glad you guys exist, too, is that there are some real problems with the way the news media has handled this, and they’re reflective of deeper issues.

They tend to privilege the right wing in a way that I think is ultimately destructive. And at the moment that he acknowledged that it was all an act, I think he should be treated accordingly.

And I was with you, because at the same time that that story happened, let’s not forget that Pizzagate was still fresh in the minds of so many of the Beltway media. Many of them used to frequent that pizza establishment in Washington, DC. Alex Jones was one of the big drivers of the Pizzagate conspiracy. It’s specifically the establishment that was targeted.

And so I thought, to your point, that when he made that argument and said that stuff, and it became so clear that that was his defense, that they would change their narrative, because it would be juxtaposed with the reality of the experience that just happened, but it didn’t.

And Tucker Carlson gets the same pass, right? I mean, Fox News won a lawsuit just two years ago, a little more than that, where their defense was no reasonable person would believe the things that Tucker Carlson says, and yet, the news media doesn’t talk about him any differently either.

And I think that this is part of the inertia that exists in the coverage. It’s not that I encourage them to debunk them all the time, but I do think that what they do is they have a very limited set of boxes that they can apply to individuals, and they very rarely change those.

You know, there are plenty of establishment individuals that get quoted, and they’re treated as “Christian” organizations or “conservative” when, in fact, they’re officially designated hate groups, right?

So it is a deep problem in the news media that they both don’t have the language, and when they do have the language, there’s still so much inertia and hesitancy, I think, in shifting their coverage. I think there’s a little bit of the right wing “working the refs” that ends up poisoning the coverage, too, that is a real problem.

JJ: I’m going to have to end it there, but we’re absolutely going to pick it up again.

We’ve been speaking with Angelo Carusone. He’s president of Media Matters. They’re online at MediaMatters.org. Angelo Carusone, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AC: Thank you.

The post ‘What Alex Jones Has Peddled Is Now Nearly Indistinguishable from Right-Wing Talking Points’ appeared first on FAIR.

Hours after the Department of Justice executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8, Donald Trump posted a stark black-and-white video on his Truth Social account, Trump’s own social media platform. “We are a nation in decline,” the video begins. Rumbles of thunder nearly overwhelm the former president’s litany of decline—“We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith”—before giving way to saccharine strings. The gathering clouds, the apocalyptic tone: It positions Trump as the hero returning to confront the coming storm.

For some it might look like an ordinary Trump ad, a glimpse into a Democrat-made doomsday. But the video is suffused with imagery sending a signal to a deeply devoted section of the president’s fan base: those still adhering to the complex creed of QAnon. They have not only remained followers of the multiple, nested QAnon conspiracy theories since Trump left the Oval Office, but they have managed to further propagate them. A movement we were told would collapse without him has gone mainstream in Republican politics and now boasts the support of more than 20 candidates running for federal or statewide office who will appear on the ballot this November.

As many as 18 QAnon-supporting candidates for Congress will compete in November’s general election, with two QAnon-supporting gubernatorial candidates and two QAnon-supporting candidates for secretary of state, based on analyses from Grid and Media Matters. Including people who lost their primaries, QAnon candidates made the ballot in 26 states in the 2022 elections, and they have raised more than $20 million.

Some of the names of QAnon-adjacent congressional candidates will be familiar, such as Republican incumbents Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, both considered long shots in 2020, whose first week in office included the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by some of their own supporters, and whom January 6 rally organizers allege met with as part of their efforts to keep Trump in office (an allegation Boebert has denied). They are joined by newcomers like Republican Representative Mayra Flores of Texas, who spread conspiracy theories that January 6 was “surely caused by infiltrators” and is currently serving in Congress after winning a special election this past spring. There’s also Ohio Republican congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, who was present at the Capitol on January 6 and boasted of helping get Trump supporters there, and who has a chance at prevailing in a toss-up race. Like Greene and Boebert, Flores and Majewski are on record affirming support for QAnon—“I believe in everything that’s been put out from Q,” Majewski said in 2021—and both have tried to mislead reporters when questioned about their support for QAnon, denying or disavowing their past statements even as they still advance some core QAnon missions, such as casting doubt on the results of the 2020 election.

The dangers in this core belief in a stolen election become even more evident at the state level, where QAnon-supporting candidates may be elected into positions with critical roles in the 2024 election, as part of a strategy led by QAnon influencers beginning in 2021. They have scored two supportive Republican candidates for governor, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Dan Cox in Maryland, and two for secretary of state, Republicans Jim Marchant in Nevada and Mark Finchem in Arizona. Mastriano and Cox both attended a QAnon conference in April 2022, “Patriots Arise,” at which the opening speaker claimed that “child satanic trafficking” existed and that he would “not stop until these people”—the alleged traffickers—“are dead and in boxes in the ground.” After Mastriano pitched himself to the crowd as the one who God would help win—and said that what he would do to the state of Pennsylvania would make Florida look like “amateur hour”—organizers presented him with a sword to “bless him.”

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Back in 2020, when QAnon candidates first came to national prominence, someone like Greene seemed like a long shot, let alone a figure who would move to the forefront of the Republican Party. Not long after she won her election that November, messages from the person or persons who make up the Q of QAnon ceased, and social media platforms began a mass deletion of QAnon accounts and groups. Some predicted that with Trump out of office, the storm was over.

QAnon as an identifier or brand may have faded from prominence, yet as research from the Public Religion Research Institute found, support for QAnon remained mostly stable throughout 2021, and over 2022 has increased. Instead of asking those surveyed if they believed in QAnon, PRRI asked questions about statements they identified as core QAnon beliefs. Eighteen percent of Americans surveyed said they agreed that “the government, media, and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation”; 27 percent agreed that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders”; and 19 percent agreed that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

QAnon was not muted by the loss of Trump; instead, it was further fueled by failure. In the days after January 6, after the apparent plot to install Trump as president had collapsed, I spoke with Jo Rae Perkins, an Oregon Republican and QAnon supporter who had lost her U.S. Senate race in November 2020. She was one of 30 Congressional candidates in that year who endorsed or promoted QAnon beliefs. Perkins had been at the Capitol, though she appeared only outside. She claimed to me that she “didn’t see any violence.” She had conspiratorial questions about the death of Ashli Babbitt, a QAnon supporter whom Capitol police shot and killed. She rejected the idea that QAnon believers played a prominent role in the attack on the Capitol. “I’m telling you,” she said, “those were antifa.”

None of this thinking would be a fatal setback for Perkins’s political career; she again won a Republican Senate primary in Oregon, and in November 2022 she will challenge Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. She continues to promote Covid-19 conspiracy theories of a “plandemic,” along with QAnon shows that are now on Rumble after they were booted from YouTube.

There are ample signs that we are in the midst a return to overt QAnon appeals. Since Mar-a-Lago was searched on August 8, Trump has increased his promotion of QAnon accounts on Truth Social. (The platform has become something of a QAnon outpost; Truth Social board member Kash Patel said in June that they were trying to “incorporate” QAnon as part of their effort to “capture audiences.”) The weekend following the search, in a single 24-hour period, he shared 11 claims from at least six different accounts, according to Alex Kaplan at Media Matters, including an account with a flaming Q as its banner image and another with the acronym for the QAnon slogan, “Where we go one, we go all,” as its display name. A few days before that, his Truth Social account also shared a video featuring a song titled “Wwg1wga,” which QAnon supporters interpreted as confirmation that Trump was still very much with them.

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QAnon candidates have also prominently failed in 2022, of course. Those seeking to celebrate the loss of QAnon could find that in the unsuccessful congressional bid of Ron Watkins, who is often charged with being Q himself. As the Watkins campaign was clearly fading in late July, The New York Times pronounced, in a nearly optimistic analysis, that candidates who espoused QAnon beliefs in secret child sex-trafficking cabals had little chance at victory. The Times also noted that candidates who pushed the claim that children are being “groomed” (by learning from adults that LGBTQ people, including themselves, exist) were more likely to succeed with voters. They identified Watkins’s fellow Arizona Republican, the gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, as not being part of QAnon explicitly while “deftly navigating conspiracy theories for political gain.”

What Lake has done is graft QAnon symbolism onto what is too often dismissed as a “culture war” agenda. “Our young people have been tortured,” Lake said on Saturday at an event hosted by Turning Point USA. “They’ve been tortured by their political leaders and they realize that politics matter. They realized that the people who masked their faces, shut their schools down, took all of those firsts away.… They took that away from our young people.” She continued, “Let’s face it, we all woke up during Covid. That was the biggest wake-up call you could ever imagine.” Lake’s words were shared on a popular QAnon forum, via a Telegram post. “This is the power of the Great Awakening,” said the Telegram user, who has more than 200,000 subscribers and runs a Substack newsletter with posts about the “return of Q.” In Lake’s words, these followers detected a QAnon signal, whether intended or not. When she recently appeared on the QAnon-influencer-co-hosted MatrixxxGrooove Show to urge viewers to vote for her, it only reinforced the message, with co-host “intheMatrixxx” noting that Lake’s presence showed him and “the anons out in this community” what influence they have.

It’s true that Lake is not offering unequivocal support to QAnon, even as she accuses Democrats of supporting “grooming” and not “child satanic trafficking.” But make no mistake: When Lake repeatedly scapegoats LGBTQ people with groomer rhetoric, that is not somehow a less extreme position. And when Lake deems civil rights protections for LGBTQ students a “perverted sexual agenda” by Democrats, it is no less a dangerous departure from reality than when QAnon supporters do so.

A new analysis is breaking down how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) contributed to the
slow and strategic erosion of United States democracy.

In an op-ed published by The Guardian, Gary Gerstle began with a brief overview of Republicans’ brazen actions which he described as a “deadly serious attempt to upend American democracy.” But while they only attempted a coup to overturn the last presidential election, Gerstle explains how McConnell managed to carry out his attack on democracy.

“Another brazen GOP action, however, has succeeded — this one engineered by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, whose chess-like skills of political strategizing put to shame Trump’s powerful but limited game of bluster and bullying,” Gerstle explained.

READ MORE: Mitch McConnell floats federal abortion ban if right-wing Supreme Court overturns Roe

He went on to recall what occurred ahead of the 2016 presidential election:

“The act to which I refer is McConnell’s theft of Barack Obama’s 2016 appointment to the supreme court, a radical deed that has dimmed somewhat in public consciousness even as it proved crucial to fashioning a rightwing supreme court willing to overturn Roe v Wade and to destabilize American politics and American democracy in the process.”

He later added: “The tale of McConnell’s steal begins in February 2016, when Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the lion of the judicial right, suddenly and unexpectedly died. Obama had just begun the last year of his presidency, and McConnell was entering his second year as Senate majority leader. McConnell immediately declared that he would hold no hearings on a new supreme court justice, regardless of whom Obama nominated. McConnell’s ostensible justification: it was inappropriate, he declared, for a president on his way out of office to exercise so profound an influence on America’s political future. Let the next president, to be elected in November 2016, decide who the nominee should be. That way forward would, McConnell argued, be a way of letting “the people”, through their choice of president, shape the supreme court’s future.”

According to Gerstle, McConnell’s actions are far more subtle and strategic as he took a route that differs from former President Donald Trump’s public antics. “McConnell is widely considered to be a cynic about politics, more interested in maintaining and holding power than in advancing a particular agenda,” Gerstle wrote.

READ MORE: How Mitch McConnell made the Senate a ‘hyperpartisan battle zone’: former Clinton official

“This is true up to a point,” he acknowledged, adding, “But it is equally true that McConnell has believed, for decades, that the federal government had grown too large and too strong, that power had to be returned to private enterprise on the one hand and the individual states on the other, and that the legislative process in Washington could not be trusted to accomplish those aims.”

He wrote, “Hence the critical role of the federal courts: the federal judiciary, if sufficiently populated by conservative jurists, could constrain and dismantle the power of the federal government in ways in which Congress never would.”

READ MORE: How Mitch McConnell’s blatant hypocrisy tarnished Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination for this Ohio voter

“They’re just going to let me die?” Madison Anderson asked. Her doctor had decided it was too legally risky to perform an abortion. Anderson told The New York Times she’d been informed the fetus would not live after birth — and carrying it could kill her.

Many in the United States now face multiple, life-wrenching crises due to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. The first is how to access safe abortion. The next is a possible national abortion ban if Republicans take the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms. Justice Clarence Thomas even wrote that the court’s rulings on things like contraception and gay marriage may be overturned.

Why has the GOP carried out a draconian assault on the right to abortion, a right that a majority of people in the U.S. support? At least part of the reason is that the Republican drive for power has found Christian nationalism a useful tool. Funded by a 1 percent of megadonors and corporations, the religious right, like Frankenstein’s monster, has grown to a grotesque size. The reality is that some of the richest people and corporations in the world bankroll Christian nationalists who, in turn, attack the already limited freedoms of poor people, people of color, women and LGBTQ people in the name of God. Yet the wealthy and the politicians they pay often break the very biblical codes they make into law. Now the danger has intensified. A Republican White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court can overturn democracy and replace it with a Christian nationalist state, fueled by ultra-wealthy donors who see attacks on fundamental rights as handy tools in securing their power.

Personal Jesus

A cruel irony is in the U.S., wealthy individuals and rich corporations bankroll Christian nationalists, even when they don’t believe in religious extremism themselves. They reap the benefits of supporting Republicans in the forms of lower taxes, unregulated capitalism or promoting libertarian ideas. Depriving millions of their bodily autonomy is a small price to pay.

“I’m basically a libertarian,” David Koch told Barbara Walters in a 2014 interview. “And I’m a conservative on economic matters and I’m a social liberal.” He died that year but his and his brother Charles’s political legacy is that since the 1970s, they have donated $100 million to conservatives. The main vehicle the Koch brothers use to bankroll pet causes is the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, an organization that in 2014 gave $885,000 to CitizenLink, which itself was founded by Focus on the Family, an extremist Christian organization that opposes abortion and gay marriage. CitizenLink used part of the money for direct mail support for Republicans like Tom Cotton, who wants to restrict immigration and called for the military to patrol the streets during the George Floyd protests.

Since 2010, the Koch brothers’ nonprofit network has poured $24 million into Catholic and right-wing Christian groups like Concerned Women for America (which got $11 million) and the Susan B. Anthony List (which received $1.5 million). Both groups specifically target abortion rights. At a 1999 meeting with conservative leaders, Charles Koch said the money was intended to “rally the troops” for his economic goals.

The Kochs are just one family in a network of Republican megadonors that include the Mercer family, the Uihleins and recently deceased Sheldon Adelson. Alongside them are multinational corporations like Amazon and CVS, Charles Schwab and AT&T. They in turn fund politicians or groups that aim to gut reproductive rights. The largest anti-abortion groups like National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List coordinate or work with dozens of smaller groups like The Alabama Policy Institute or The Family Policy Alliance to attack reproductive rights.

Some megadonors are driven by religion, like Texas fracking magnates Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who shelled out $11 million to far right politicians over the past decade. In Pennsylvania, the Martin family, owners of Martin’s Pastry Shop, are proud Christian nationalists who funded the campaign of far right Republican Doug Mastriano, to the tune of $100,000.

More often, megadonors fund reactionary social forces to secure other goals. Take, for example, Sheldon Adelson, who donated over $426 million to the Republican Party and super PACS from 2016. Yet he claimed to be pro-choice, for socialized health care and a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants, but held a hardline support for Israel. “Look I’m basically a social liberal,” Adelson told the Wall Street Journal. “I know no one would believe that.”

Aside from megadonors, large corporations give to both political parties in order to lobby them later. As reported by Truthout’s Sharon Zhang, many companies that publicly support reproductive and LGBTQ rights underhandedly fund the most reactionary politics. Zhang writes, “Amazon, AT&T, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Comcast, CVS, General Motors, Google, T-Mobile, Walgreens, Walmart, Wells Fargo and Verizon have spent at least $15.2 million to support anti-abortion politicians.”

The sum of this double-dealing is simple. The 1% are more than willing to throw people’s rights under the bus in order to protect their profits. They fed Christian nationalism until it became an uncontrollable monster on the verge of ripping apart nearly every progressive legal victory of the 21st century.

Faith No More

“I know what it’s like to see children growing up in poverty,” Miriah Mark said to CNN. “I know what it’s like to be a young Black girl not having a father, or the mom not being able to be home because they have to work.” At 15 weeks pregnant, Mark decided to have an abortion because her partner walked out. Plus, the sky-rocketing cost of child care and housing was too much.

When asked about the overturning of Roe v. Wade, she said, “it makes you feel like you’re going back to a time where women didn’t have rights or women couldn’t vote.”

She is exactly right. The Republican Party is trying to turn back time. It is a party that wins on a rigged political playing field. The Senate structurally tilts Republican since each state, regardless of population, gets two senators. They often gerrymander districts, practically guaranteeing GOP victories. Most importantly, they stacked the Supreme Court by stealing a vacancy from President Obama, and under Trump, put in Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. By locking in minoritarian rule, the GOP can pay back the players in their base, the religious right being first in line.

Until recently, the religious right was clearly losing the culture war and corresponding legal rights. Feminism and gay liberation, abortion and contraception freed people to explore their authentic selves. The legal victories of Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges — which legalized, respectively, abortion, same-sex privacy and gay marriage — cemented the sexual revolution. Americans were leaving establishment religion behind in large numbers.

Unable to halt the decline of religious attendance, the religious right has ongoingly used courts to force secular America to bow down. The Republican Party solidified a judicial pipeline from the Federalist Society, a conservative organization that incubates lawyers and judges with a budget of nearly $20 million. Take a wild guess where that money comes from? On Democracy Now!, journalist Eric Lipton said, “Google and Microsoft are donors to the Federalist Society, and as well as major energy companies like Chevron or Devon [Energy] … you have also a lot of very conservative family foundations that — you know, like the Mercer foundation or the Koch brothers’ foundation, that see their giving, if you look at their donor patterns, as a way to try to influence American society.”

To understand the impacts of all this strategic spending by the wealthy and powerful, remember what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said about the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Poor women of color are going to pay the price for rich people’s incredibly selfish funding of Christian nationalism. “People will die,” she tweeted.

The latest GOP lie isn’t just a distraction — it’s feeding the violent fantasies of the insurrectionist right

“This is how our democracy could crumble, quickly and quietly,” warned one observer.

Former Republican strategist says her party can’t be salvaged — and if Trump isn’t punished, America is “done for”