Pro-Trump “cowboy” is disqualified from politics – but the little-known law in question has pitfalls for democracy
Archive for category: #Fascism #Elections #Caesarism
The 2022 midterms and the 2024 general elections will profoundly impact the trajectory of our political system.
The Border Patrol has largely avoided the scrutiny that police have come under in recent years. That should change: the Border Patrol’s powers are increasingly authoritarian, with few legal checks, and expanding throughout the United States.
A US Border Patrol agent checks the passports of immigrants after they crossed the border with Mexico on May 18, 2022, in Yuma, Arizona. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Inspired by the violent culture of the Texas Rangers, the US Border Patrol was established in 1924 as a relatively small agency with little oversight and limited domain. Existing only along the US-Mexico border, the agency’s early goal was to enforce immigration restrictions.
Today, with more than 60,000 employees, seemingly endless jurisdiction, increasingly sophisticated use of surveillance technology, and a continued lack of oversight, the US Border Patrol has become one of the largest — and most threatening — enforcement agencies in the world.
On July 1, 2020, former acting secretary of Customs and Border Patrol Mark Morgan tweeted that the agency was working alongside local law enforcement across the nation to protect cities amid protests of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. “As a federal law enforcement agency, it’s our duty and responsibility to respond when our partners request support,” he asserted on Twitter.
Soon after, videos surfaced online of armed men with few official markings other than the word “POLICE” written across their clothing hauling away Black Lives Matter protesters from the streets of Portland, Oregon. As later evidence would show, these mysterious agents came from the Border Patrol. Far from the border and with authority beyond the confines of the Constitution, including the power to carry out unwarranted stops and interrogations, the Border Patrol’s presence in Portland represented a further advancement of the agency’s mission to become a national police force.
In his recent book Nobody Is Protected: How the Border Patrol Became the Most Dangerous Police Force in the United States, political geographer Reece Jones tells the story of how the US Border Patrol developed into the powerful, lawless agency it is today. While historians have previously provided excellent historiography of the Border Patrol, the narrative in Jones’s book urges an imperative question for immigrants’ rights activists and all Americans alike: For how long are we willing to allow the Border Patrol to exert and expand its extraconstitutional power?
In the following interview with Jones, he lays out the story of how a number of landmark but little-talked-about Supreme Court cases shaped the Border Patrol’s current powers, the role of race in the rise of the Border Patrol, the post–September 11 “border-industrial complex,” and why all Americans should pay attention to the dangerous possibilities of the Border Patrol’s expanding powers.
- Conner Martinez
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Race plays a major role in the development of the Border Patrol throughout your book. Could you explain how?
- Reece Jones
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The Border Patrol was established in 1924 to enforce the Immigration Act passed that year, often referred to as the National Origins Quota Act. That act was a law based on racial exclusion. The people who wrote it were drawing on eugenics and race science, and it was meant to prevent nonwhite people from entering the United States and to orient immigration toward Northern Europe. The Border Patrol was established two days after that law went into force, so the original purpose of the agency was as a racial police force whose job was to locate nonwhite people entering the country and remove them. This role has continued through the present.
In Nobody Is Protected, I talk about how some key Supreme Court cases defined the parameters of what the Border Patrol can do. In two of those cases, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce in 1975 and United States v. Martinez-Fuerte in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the Border Patrol can use race as one of the primary criteria to stop individuals while on patrol. So we can see that the Border Patrol was founded as a racial police force and is allowed to continue racial profiling today. This has always been a key part of its ethos.
- Conner Martinez
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You just mentioned two Supreme Court cases. Multiple such cases play a prominent role in your narrative of the Border Patrol’s extraconstitutional power. What are these cases, and how did they shape the Border Patrol’s authority today?
- Reece Jones
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One of the interesting things about the Border Patrol is that upon its establishment, it was given really expansive authority. Agents were allowed to stop people without a warrant inside the United States. Eventually in the 1940s, this power was set within a hundred miles of borders and coastlines, allowing agents to both stop and search people without a warrant in this area.
This law was not put in front of the Supreme Court until the 1970s, when finally the contradiction between the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure were weighed against the Border Patrol’s authorization to stop and search anyone in the border zone. In the 1973 case Almeida-Sanchez v. United States, which was about whether the Border Patrol could carry out searches anywhere in the border zone, the Supreme Court came within just a few weeks of deciding that yes, it could search any vehicle, but a justice switched his vote at the last minute, and the court decided searches needed probable cause just as in the case of the police.
In 1975 and 1976, the Supreme Court had two more cases dealing with making stops in the Border Zone. Something additional to note about the Brignoni-Ponce decision in 1975 is that it established that the Border Patrol could stop virtually any vehicle if they had at least two facts justifying the making of that stop. Race was one. In the Martinez-Fuerte case in 1976, it was then established that race alone can be used at a border checkpoint to send someone to a secondary inspection.
- Conner Martinez
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What exactly is the border zone?
- Reece Jones
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The original idea of the Border Patrol was that it would only operate at the border line. But the agents started to encroach into the United States in order to make apprehensions. So, in the 1940s, Congress revised the Border Patrol’s authorization to say that it could operate at a reasonable distance from the border. However, it didn’t specify how far.
Later in 1947, the Department of Justice released a simply routine interpretation of the laws in the federal register, and without any input or public debate, they set the reasonable distance as one hundred miles from any borders and coastlines, which is an extremely vast area that includes around two-thirds of the US populations and many of the largest cities in the country. New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago are all within that one-hundred-mile zone. Even a number of entire states are within that zone.
And what makes the zone significant is, again, the lower standards of evidence that the Border Patrol has in terms of stopping vehicles without probable cause and without a warrant. It can even set up checkpoints on roads deep within the United States.
- Conner Martinez
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During the protests of the police killing of George Floyd in Portland, Oregon, a series of videos came out showing mysterious detentions of protesters by heavily armed agents with few official markings. As it turns out, these were Border Patrol agents. What was the Border Patrol doing so far from the border in Portland? And is this something we can expect more of in the future?
- Reece Jones
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Something I highlight specifically in my book is that the Border Patrol has all of this sophisticated military gear and almost 20,000 agents in the field, but it has relatively little work to do when it comes to immigration. This makes it available to be deployed for other purposes.
During the protests, Donald Trump’s administration decided to use a “war on terror”–era law that says that the secretary of homeland security could assign federal officers to protect federal buildings. But the regulation is actually quite broad, because it says they can do investigations on-site and off-site for any felony cognizable under the law. This allowed the agents to police social justice protests and also grab people off the street in the middle of the night in unmarked vans in things that have nothing to do with immigration work.
The major concern then is that these laws are still on the books. And the Border Patrol is eager to do this kind of work. One of the alarms I’m trying to raise in my book is that these laws need to be fixed before a future authoritarian president comes into power and uses them even more expansively.
- Conner Martinez
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Part of this shift in the Border Patrol’s work has been about rebranding. In the years after September 11, the war on terror led to a rebranding of the Border Patrol as an agency focused on terrorism. Has this rebranding worked, and does the Border Patrol actually prevent terrorism?
- Reece Jones
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The Border Patrol will often issue press releases where it says that it has arrested someone at the border who is on the terrorism watch list, but often the people it finds have nothing to do with terrorism. It also tends to release press releases when it arrests someone with the same name as someone on the terrorist watch list, even when in reality it’s not the person who is on the watch list. So the Border Patrol claims that it does make a number of terrorism-related arrests at the border, but no significant prosecutions have happened based on arrests by the Border Patrol.
What we do see in the post–September 11 era is that the Border Patrol is doing a kind of repositioning. Prior to September 11, the Border Patrol was primarily focused on immigration and drug enforcement. But after the attacks, the atmosphere of fear allowed the Border Patrol to reposition itself as primarily a front line against terrorism. This resulted in a lot of money flowing to the Border Patrol, giving it access to more agents it could hire and access to much more military gear it didn’t previously have. This also coincides with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the procurement of military gear that also ends up eventually in the hands of security services within the United States.
After September 11, we can see that the agency has transformed into a much more aggressive, violent organization, even though in practice it’s interacting with the same kinds of people as before. And who is it finding at the border? It’s encountering people who are coming to the country to work and increasingly finding families who are trying to apply for asylum. So instead of trying to evade the Border Patrol, these people often turn themselves in after they cross the border.
What the United States should then be investing in is aid to people who are on the move — social workers and others who can handle asylum claims and families in need, instead of the militarized force we are currently spending on. This leaves us not equipped in any way for dealing with what is actually going on at the border.
- Conner Martinez
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Where is support for the militarization and growth of the Border Patrol coming from?
- Reece Jones
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There has become a border-industrial complex. What we saw with the military — corporations donating to members of Congress, setting up factories in congressmembers’ districts that provide jobs and foster a cycle of military spending — we’re seeing with border security. The whole security industry has become extremely lucrative for corporations.
Additionally, the border is one of the main issues for the Right. This fear of immigration is often depicted in the racialized terms of the white-supremacist “great replacement” theory. It has become a motivating force for right-wing voters, with politicians on the Right then becoming more supportive of higher spending on border security, even if the crisis at the border they’re depicting doesn’t exist.
- Conner Martinez
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Why do you think the Border Patrol’s activities away from the border often fly under the radar of the US public?
- Reece Jones
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For a long time, the Border Patrol simply wasn’t that big. With so few agents, its work within the interior of the United States wasn’t able to affect many people’s lives. But after the rapid growth in the agency, it can now operate in many of the places they didn’t in the past. So I think more people are actually running into the Border Patrol in their daily lives.
A recent report on checkpoints has shown that from 2016 to 2020, 250 million vehicles passed through an interior checkpoint. That’s 50 million a year, which is a huge number of people who are subjected to a violation of their rights to be stopped and have their vehicles briefly seized in order to ask them questions about immigration — even though they’re driving on an American road in between two American towns.
We’re seeing more people come into contact with the Border Patrol and becoming aware of it. But the question is also in many ways why I wrote this book: to raise attention to these exceptions the Border Patrol has to the Constitution and the impact the Border Patrol has on both immigrants and, increasingly, US citizens alike.
- Conner Martinez
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Is there any constitutional authority within the border zone?
- Reece Jones
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Of course, the Constitution exists within the boundaries of the United States. But what we have seen is that Congress has authorized exceptions to it and the Supreme Court has decided to defer to Congress on those exceptions, providing the Border Patrol special authority to circumvent the law and make stops without a warrant or probable cause and to stop vehicles at checkpoints and ask anyone about immigration.
These exceptions have an impact on US citizens and immigrants. They are directly related to the increases in deaths at the border, where border crossers have to go past the one-hundred-mile mark to get out of the border zone, and they result in many drug-related citations for American citizens at interior checkpoints. What they don’t serve is any deep immigration enforcement purpose.
Over 50 percent of the Border Patrol’s immigration apprehensions happen at the border. We need to reconsider this vast authority that has been given to the Border Patrol’s expansive zone at the border before the power expands even further. We’ve seen a dramatic expansion of its activities over the last fifty years, and it only makes sense to ask what it will look like in another fifty years. How far into the United States will it be operating? How will it be setting up its checkpoints? Because right now, it can do all of this in an area that includes two-thirds of the nation’s population. All of this needs to be reconsidered before it expands those powers.
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 15, 2022 ~ The nonpartisan watchdog group, Accountable.US, has released the results of an investigation into how committed to democracy the 100 largest corporations in America are. The corporations were graded on support for voting rights, the electoral process, and American democracy. The results were provided in an interactive resource called the American Democracy Scorecard. Researchers looked at 14 key criteria. Seven elements of the criteria involved making pro-democracy statements, being affiliated with pro-democracy organizations, and taking other pro-democracy actions. Seven other criteria involved corporate contributions to elected officials who are undermining democracy and voting rights. Three of the largest mega banks on Wall Street, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo, flunked the democracy test, each receiving a score of “F.” Goldman Sachs received a “D.” Bank of America and Citigroup received a “B” grade, but, clearly, that was based on very recent … Continue reading →
The myth of U.S. democracy is on the verge of shattering.
In the region where cotton was king and prisons have succeeded the throne, this myth’s falseness is particularly evident in the U.S. South, the epicenter of the nation’s plantation and chattel slavery economy where the majority of Black/African-descended people still exist today. This region is also the land where Jim Crow law/segregation law once ruled and whose specter determines how resources are still allocated today. It’s also the region in which workers are least unionized and often hyper-exploited, with community members disproportionately subject to state violence such as incarceration or deportation.
Given these deathly conditions, the seats of power in our region are filled by those who benefit from these systems and uphold them, oppressing Southerners both historically and presently. In response, Southern freedom fighters have been fighting to build a grassroots democracy that is directly informed by the needs of our region, beginning at the local level. In so many ways, the efforts of Southern freedom fighters are an extension of freedom fighters in the Global South who share experiences of exploitation in the workplace, state violence and increased rates of incarceration, and have led organizing fights that inform strategies in the U.S. South. Formations like the Southern Movement Assembly are uniting U.S. Southern grassroots organizations with comrades across the Global South, particularly Central and South America, to develop a people’s democracy across colonial borders.
The Highlander Research and Education Center, where I work, is a Southern movement school, building democratic participation in the U.S. South and Appalachia through grassroots organizing, leadership development, and movement building. Highlander, which was established 90 years ago, has helped fuel the Southern fight for liberation against white supremacist capitalism.
Highlander supported the integration of labor unions in the 1930s and 40s, was a meeting place for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s and held trainings for civil rights activists during the sit-ins of the 1960s, and Highlander’s Education Director Septima Clark initiated the Citizenship Schools that expanded access to voting rights for Black people.
Although Highlander may be best known as the place where Rosa Parks trained before the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and where Martin Luther King, Jr. attended workshops that contributed to being red-baited as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, we know that many of the same issues these freedom fighters battled continue to face our communities today.
My work as Highlander’s electoral justice researcher and educator seeks to build capacity for today’s Southern freedom fighters and their communities to govern themselves as we move toward building a truly democratic world beyond capitalism and white supremacy.
This work goes beyond maximizing participation in the U.S. electoral system. This work seeks to build Southern communities’ capacity to collectively define their problems, learn and understand current power structures as they exist, and develop collective solutions based on the experiences and abilities of each community member.
There is strategic value in engaging elections, but strategies for grassroots democracy must extend far beyond Election Day. While we understand that participating in this U.S. electoral system is presently inevitable, we also understand it is equally, if not more, vital to build parallel systems that are truly democratic and accountable to every community member.
Southern freedom fighters have been fighting to build a grassroots democracy that is directly informed by the needs of our region, beginning at the local level.
This work is reflected when we see People’s Movement Assemblies being utilized to build political power in cities such as Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Lexington, Kentucky; and so many more Southern cities.
People’s Movement Assemblies are grassroots, democratic gatherings inspired by the World Social Forum in 2003, where collective decision-making spaces facilitated action plans that sparked international protests, leading to the Global Day of Action that year with millions of people worldwide taking to the streets to speak out against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. These assemblies are used by communities to collectively assess their problems, determine their strategies, assess who has the power to materially change their conditions, and create grassroots solutions to bring their vision for a life-affirming world into reality. The Southern Movement Assembly, a regional formation that has been seeking to build grassroots democratic power across the South for 10 years with Southern freedom fighters and their communities, is inviting Southern community organizations to utilize People’s Movement Assemblies in their work throughout Summer 2022 to build collective power, community governance and action plans for organizing throughout the Global South.
In the midst of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections for gubernatorial and legislative seats, Highlander has developed the People Practicing Power workshop intervention. During this workshop series, organizers and their community members are learning methods for self-protection during Election Day from racialized, fascist terrorism; the process for developing a policy demand into a law; and creating or joining efforts to build democratic institutions rooted in solidarity economy principles.
“Solidarity economy” is an umbrella term for institutions and practices that are grounded in mutualism, cooperation, democracy, pluralism and building a world beyond racial capitalism.
Examples of this include worker-owned cooperatives, time banks, participatory budgeting and community land trusts that place decision-making power and ownership directly in the hands of workers and communities that have been historically stripped of agency under white supremacist capitalism.
The U.S. South is often seen by those outside the region as a right-wing stronghold and a recipient of charity. Our practice of rooting our work in the creation of solidarity economies acknowledges Southerners’ long history of not only surviving under white supremacist capitalism, but leading the charge to develop people-centered democracies and economies within the U.S.
We invite anyone who is interested to plug into the workshops Highlander offers around solidarity economies, join us at our annual Homecoming event September 30-October 2, 2022, where we will celebrate 90 years of Southern movement building, and follow Highlander online for updates on upcoming workshops and learning spaces where Southern freedom fighters will build strong relationships and learn with each other to build a true democracy rooted in community governance throughout the U.S. South.
The U.S. empire is crumbling due to the destruction created by capitalism. As this empire takes its last breaths, it doubles down on its centuries-old fascist violence domestically and abroad. From the ashes of this empire’s burning, people are using tools of community governance and solidarity economies to build a world beyond colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism. There is a new world coming, we’re building it together, and the time is here to usher it in.
2019 New York City Labor Day Parade.
By David Sole
On August 25 President Joe Biden publicly warned that Trump supporters “have made their choice to go backwards, full of anger, violence, hate and division.” He characterized the Trump movement saying “it’s like semi-fascism.”
His speeches in Maryland that day echoed what many progressives had been saying often throughout the Trump presidency and especially during and after the 2020 election. An article in Fighting-Words.net after the January 6 Capitol insurrection likened it to Hitler’s 1923 “beer-hall putsch.”
Biden’s remarks were welcomed by many. What needs to be said, however, is that neither Biden, nor the Democratic Party leadership and not the “liberal” wing of the ruling class, can or will stop the growing threat of fascism.
Breaking up the mass base of fascism is of critical importance. That requires a bold and dramatic economic program that addresses the working class and middle class fears of financial ruin. The Democrats have offered, so far, only anemic relief for the very real problems of unemployment, lack of health care, housing, student debt and inflation.
The Democrats have also failed to mobilize the progressive base. There has been no motion on confronting voter suppression, defending reproductive freedom or challenging union busting.
Expecting vigorous action on these issues ignores the fact that the Wall Street bankers and bosses, known as the ruling class, do not want to channel any of their massive profits back to the workers who created the wealth for them. And the ruling class doesn’t want anything that might stir up a mass movement which could raise expectations of the masses and get out of hand. The capitalist class has firm control of both big political parties. The Democratic and Republican Parties, despite many differences, both serve the capitalist system.
Fascism aims to divert the attention of the masses away from their real enemies in the ruling capitalist class. Instead, the frustration and anger of the working and middle classes are directed against people of a different race, ethnicity, sex or sexual orientation. Base prejudices are exploited. Trump openly appealed to racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, anti-disabled persons, anti-Arab, anti-immigrant sentiment and more.
Another weakness in confronting fascism is the fiction that the military and police forces will not let those extremists go too far. Faith in the armed forces, local and state police and the F.B.I. to stop fascism is a dangerous illusion.
German “democracy” fell with Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. For the years between the end of World War I (1918) and the Nazi regime the police forces and the military establishment had vigorously suppressed working class struggles. But those same armed forces either openly welcomed or quietly accepted the Fuhrer and his stormtroopers. The German capitalist class, after all, figured that fascist capitalism was better for them than a working class socialist revolution.
From 1970 to 1973 the elected socialist president of Chile, Salvatore Allende, carried out many radical working class programs and encouraged mass mobilizations of Chile’s workers and poor. But Allende ignored the dangers of right-wing organizations backed by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.). Allende assured the masses that the Chilean military had always been and would continue to be apolitical and would not interfere in the developing struggle for socialism.
The “peaceful road” came to an end on September 11, 1973 when the Chilean military carried out a bloody coup organized by the C.I.A. President Allende heroically fought back and was killed, gun in hand. But the mass political movement had not been prepared or organized to fight back. Captive of the illusion that the military would “defend democracy”, tens of thousands of communists, socialists and other progressives were rounded up, tortured and murdered.
There are many other historical examples that should alert the people of the United States that they ought not depend on the police and the military to protect our rights and our lives.
On December 18, 2021 the Washington Post ran an opinion piece signed by three retired U.S. generals urging “the military must prepare now for a 2024 insurrection.” These generals noted that in May, 2021,124 other retired military officers signed a letter “attacking the legitimacy” of the 2020 election.
More alarmingly, the generals warned of “the potential for a military breakdown mirroring societal or political breakdown…and the potential for lethal chaos inside our military” which “could lead to civil war.”
On September 7, The Guardian published an article by the Associated Press titled “Oath Keepers membership rolls feature police, military and elected officials.” It reveals that a review of 38,000 leaked names of Oath Keepers membership showed that 370 people are in law enforcement “including as police chiefs and sheriffs.” More than another 100 are currently in the U.S. armed forces and 80 more were “running for or served in public office as of early August.”
The Oath Keepers are an ultra-rightwing militia that played a role in the January 6, 2021 pro-Trump Capitol insurrection. Wikipedia lists their membership at 5,000 of which “two-thirds …are former military or law enforcement, and one tenth are active duty military or law enforcement.”
The Congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection has revealed some interesting information. However it has not explained how the mob was able to run wild for hours outside and inside the Capitol Building with no intervention by the various armed bodies pledged to defend the Constitution.
Why did the police on the scene, being assaulted and beaten, fail to use their weapons, except for one notable exception? Across the country on a regular basis police draw their weapons and gun down people of color for no reason.
Where were the reinforcements from the D.C. police department? Where was the National Guard? Where were military units that are on call by the Pentagon? Where were the FBI agents?
It has been documented that acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller had issued a detailed letter two days before January 6 limiting what the D.C. National Guard could do if they were called out. He ordered that the Guard “is not authorized the following:”
- To be issued weapons, ammunition, bayonets, batons, or ballistic protection equipment such as helmets and body armor.
- To interact physically with protestors, except when necessary in self-defense or defense of others, consistent with the DCNG Rules for the Use of Force.
- To employ any riot control agents.
- To share equipment with law enforcement agencies.
- To use Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets or to conduct ISR or Incident, Awareness, and Assessment activities.
- To employ helicopters or any other air assets.
- To conduct searches, seizures, arrests, or other similar direct law enforcement activity.
- To seek support from any non-DCNG National Guard units.
Of course there are many other right-wing organizations and many individuals who are simply “semi-fascist” in their sympathies. This information confirms that it would be folly to place confidence in the established military and police to stop fascism.
Who then can stop fascism if it threatens another insurrection? The only reliable force is the power of the working class and oppressed peoples. Independent, militant, organized anti-fascist forces, unarmed or armed, send a message to the ruling class elements that are the backbone of the fascist movement. This message is that the people will not meekly stand by in the face of fascism and that a confrontation of major proportions will ensue. That threat alone might be enough to limit the support the capitalist right-wing gives to its storm troopers, since a sharp conflict might disrupt business and the flow of profits.
It is most significant that just prior to the November 2020 election, when Trump already was threatening not to accept a possible defeat, several local central labor councils across the United States passed resolutions threatening a general strike. The general strike is a powerful weapon where all workers refuse to go to work in response to a political crisis. It has rarely been used in U.S. history. This is one type of action that working class organizations can popularize well before any such crisis arises.
Another initiative taken before the 2020 election was a call issued by several organizations to members of the armed forces. It appealed to them to refuse illegal orders that Trump might issue prior to, or following his defeat.
These initiatives point in the direction that needs to be taken by the broadest layers of the population as we face the growing threat of a fascist movement.
We speak with The New Yorker’s award-winning war correspondent Luke Mogelson about his new book, “The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible.” The book gives an eyewitness account of right-wing extremism and growing civic unrest in the U.S. since 2020, starting with anti-lockdown protests in Michigan and culminating in the January 6 insurrection. Mogelson, who filmed the attack on the U.S. Capitol, says many of the right-wing rioters viewed the insurrection “not as a political act but as something taking place in a more timeless, kind of cosmic spiritual framework.”
Since former President Donald Trump left office, the widespread conspiracy theories of satanist pedophilia have slightly waned but now it appears those baseless claims are making their way back to the forefront.
In a new analysis published by NBC News, senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny explained the latest Satanic obsession brewing among members of the QAnon community.
“While the current obsession with Satan was boosted in part by the QAnon community, partisan media and conservative politicians have been instrumental in spreading newfound fears over the so-called ritualistic abuse of children that the devil supposedly inspires, sometimes weaving the allegations together with other culture war issues such as LGBTQ rights,” Zadrozny wrote. “Those fears are powering fresh accusations of ritual abuse online, which are amplified on social media and by partisan media, and can mobilize mobs to seek vigilante justice.”
Zadrozny went on to discuss the difference between witch hunts of the past and the current political climate as conspiracy theorists have begun circulating baseless claims about the existence of satanic rituals, graphic sexual abuse and underground pedophilia rings.
“Witch hunts have traditionally been associated with courts — even the kangaroo kind — but today, the accused can be branded satanist pedophiles at the speed of the internet,” she wrote. “Online accusers can bypass police, therapists and the traditional media and out their alleged accusers straight to audiences of millions.”
The latest claims have been perpetuated by individuals like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Zadrozny recalled a number of recent incidents where Satanic conspiracy theories had taken centerstage.
Pointing to one incident back in June, Zadrozny noted that the Republican lawmaker “credited the devil with whispering to women who choose to have abortions and controlling churches who aid undocumented immigrants.”
READ MORE: ‘Trust the plan’: QAnon conspiracy theorists believe Mar-a-Lago search will benefit Trump
Back in June, Greene tweeted a clip of a man dressed as the devil “stating that the mythical creature would be the next witness called by the House Jan. 6 committee.” The lawmaker wrote, “They all know him, they all love him, and some even worship him.”
She also pointed to another recent tragedy that was also overtaken by conspiracies. “Conspiracy theories similarly engulfed the tragedy in Houston at the Astroworld music festival in November, in which 10 people were crushed to death as the rapper Travis Scott performed on stage,” Zadrozny recalled. “Social media sleuths gathered livestreams of the performance and pieced them together to come to an otherworldly conclusion: that the concert was actually a satanic ritual. The videos weren’t widely shared by devoted conspiracy theorists or religious zealots, but by mainstream Gen Z and millennial users.”
Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon, also weighed in to explain how conspiracy theories transformed over the last three decades.
“The ʼ80s and ʼ90s were terrifying and they ruined people’s lives, but they were constrained in certain ways by network technologies,” said Phillips, who co-authored the book, “You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and Our Polluted Media Landscape.”
Phillips also expressed concern about the power of the internet and how it aids conspiracy theorists’ ability to push their dangerous agendas.
“The internet has basically jumped over the need for other intervention,” Phillips said. “You can have an accusation that goes viral, be seen by millions of people by the end of that day. That was never possible before. You can almost foresee what is coming next. It’s what we’ve seen before, but all of the bulwarks are gone.”
READ MORE: QAnon ‘nut jobs’ are ‘intercepting’ migrant children at the border to indoctrinate them: report
Trump keeps threatening violence — and media keeps giving jobs to his stooges. What’s wrong with this picture?
MIAMI — Republican politics may be about to get a lot more churchy than they already are. On Monday, the second day of the National Conservatism conference here, conference organizer Yoram Hazony, chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation, called on conservatives, repeatedly, to “repent.” This chastisement was focused in large part on what Hazony — also the author of “The Virtue of Nationalism” and the recent “Conservatism: A Rediscovery” — considers excessive squeamishness on the political right to discuss what he sees as the Christian roots of the United States.
This might come as a surprise to many Americans who have watched the increasingly overt and forceful alliance between the Republican far right and Christian nationalism. But Hazony envisions something on a broader societal level: the restoration of Christianity as the “public culture” of America, meaning that Christian values and observances are assumed to reflect the will of the majority, and while non-Christians should not face active discrimination they also should not expect to see their values reflected in the public square. Hazony himself is Jewish, but has argued for the past several years that only such a restoration of public Christianity — through things like a return to Bible instruction in public schools — can stave off the threat of “woke neo-Marxism.” Toward that end, he argued, Republicans need to be even more explicit than they already are.
“When politicians come and stand on this stage,” he asked, “do they mention the Bible? No, never.” He continued, seeming to directly reference a quote from the speech that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had delivered on the opening night of the conference: “Do they mention God? Yes, yes they do. They’ll always say the same thing: ‘Well, our rights come from God, not government.’ OK, fair enough. Can you tell me, when did God give you those rights?” There was an answer to that question, he continued: “We got these rights from God in the Bible.”
An hour later, when Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley took to the stage, he eagerly obliged, delivering a speech that might as well have been a sermon.
In 2021, when Hawley last spoke at NatCon, he drew nationwide headlines for his declaration that “the Left” sought to “unmake manhood” and create “a world beyond men,” and widespread mockery for his contention that feminist critiques of masculinity had led to a generation of young men addicted to video games and pornography.
This year, Hawley said, he was focused on the left’s “efforts to unmake history.” But after the standard conservative reference to 1776 and the contention that “the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God,” Hawley went a step further, saying that notion “comes from the Bible” and that, in fact, America’s founding had only been possible because of the Bible.
“We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible,” Hawley said, in a clear response to Hazony’s challenge that was echoed by other speakers throughout the day. “This was a revolution that began with the founding of the nation of Israel at Sinai and continued with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in the days of ancient Rome.”
“Without the Bible, there is no modernity. Without the Bible, there is no America,” Hawley claimed. “And now our biblical inheritance is again at the center of our politics. It is the question of the age.” The “woke left’s” campaign to “remake” the country, he continued — from the “1619 Project” to trans rights — was actually targeting “the inheritance of the Bible.”
“What they particularly dislike about America is our dependence on biblical teaching and tradition,” Hawley said. “What they particularly dislike about our culture is the Bible. And now they want to break that influence for good.”
If the tone of that speech seems unusual for a U.S. senator, it fit in at NatCon, which included other talks with titles like “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Christian Nationalism,” “How Christian Conservatives Beat the UN and How You Can, Too,” “A Christian Case for an ‘America First’ Government,” and four separate panels considering the respective roles of both the Protestant and Catholic versions of faith within the movement. On Tuesday morning, Daily Wire media host Michael Knowles delivered a plenary address making the case that “the traditional definition of the United States” is inarguably “Christian nationalism.”
Hawley went on to speak at length about scripture, invoking biblical stories of Abraham and Jesus, and told a story about early Christians in the Roman empire who drove an axe into the head of a statue of a “pagan” god, supposedly leading to “thousands of rats…surging out of the rotten insides.” That, he continued, was akin to NatCon’s political enemies today.
“The woke left, they seem powerful, and maybe they are,” Hawley concluded. “Opposing them might cost us much, but the truth is worth any cost.” Invoking the biblical through-line that, “though the God of the universe could have accomplished his purposes entirely on his own, he chose instead to call us to do his work with him,” Hawley exhorted the audience to “count the cost and take our stand, and we will turn the tide.”