Archive for category: TRUTHOUT

Tensions were higher than usual at Donaldson Correctional Facility in Alabama early on the morning of January 30. A couple of days prior, guards had attacked and choked an elderly incarcerated man, Cat Diamond, in the cafeteria under the reportedly false pretense that he had gotten in line for a second meal.

That morning, Robert Earl Council, an incarcerated organizer who is also known as Kinetik Justice, questioned Officer Griffin about the beating, witnesses said. Officer Griffin called for reinforcements and Sgt. “Shakedown” Brown, Sgt. Binder, and Officer Milton liberally maced the area.

They beat Ephan Moore, a Black man who had filed a lawsuit against Sgt. Binder previously, with a meat cleaver, splitting his skull open. Four to five guards stomped Moore while he was unconscious, and then again once he was handcuffed in a wheelchair at the prison’s infirmary.

Witnesses told the Free Alabama Movement, a group organizing against prison slavery and mass incarceration in Alabama, it would be “a miracle” if he survives. His injuries include an orbital and nose fracture, a broken jaw, and two broken hands. He has at least 10 staples in his head, Moore’s cousin told the podcast Abolition Today .

Then, witnesses say the officer unit descended on Kinetik Justice, a well-respected organizer and whistleblower, and beat him with their metal batons as he lay defenseless on the ground. After the attack, at least two other incarcerated people, Wilbert Smith and Detrol Shaw, were badly beaten while the prison was on lockdown.

The aftermath was akin to a scene from a horror film: a tooth, and large puddles and streaks of blood painted across the floor, showing where guards dragged bodies.

Kinetik Justice and Moore were airlifted to the trauma center at UAB Hospital in Birmingham. Worried loved ones staged a protest at the hospital with the demand that officials allow Kinetik Justice’s family in to see him — a demand which has been unmet.

Moore underwent surgery, while Smith and Shaw’s conditions are unknown. Moore and Kinetik Justice have been moved to the Kilby infirmary, where they reportedly are not receiving basic medical care or ice for their wounds.

In a press release, the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) said it called on the FBI to assist in an investigation, and claimed that both guards and incarcerated people sustained injuries.

Nikki Davenport, a prison abolitionist with the support coalition known as the Free Alabama Movement Queen Team and a close friend of Kinetik Justice, told Shadowproof that guards had beaten Kinetik before, but this was the worst incident.

“His eyes are glued shut, he has three broken ribs, and his head is busted open in three places,” Nikki said.

“Because he tends to expose the things [ADOC does] that are dehumanizing, they retaliate on him,” she explained. “Whenever they get a chance. And he doesn’t go about it the wrong way. That’s the thing. He follows their policy. They don’t follow their own policy.”

Kinetik Justice has spent a majority of the last five years in solitary confinement. As a former member of the Free Alabama Movement, he played a key role in organizing work strikes in 2016 and 2018. ADOC put him in solitary and beat him for his involvement.

“He’s just a genuinely good person that everybody cares about, like, you won’t really meet anybody across the state of Alabama in the prison system that has anything negative to say,” Nikki said. “He helps everybody that he came across, teaches them to read, teaches them to write, you know, helps them with their legal work, helps them with whatever they needed help with. That’s just him.”

In 2019, Kinetik helped expose and end a tortuous practice at Limestone Correctional Facility known as “bucket detail,” whereby guards shackled incarcerated people to buckets for days on end in cells without running water until they defecated in the bucket several times. He sued Alabama Department of Corrections employees in September, 2020 for alleged retaliation he faced after speaking out against gambling rings run by a captain and sergeant at Limestone.

He was transferred to Donaldson, a facility with a well-doumented culture of horrific violence, sexual assault, and deliberate indifference toward the needs of incarcerated people.

In October 2019, prison guards at that facility beat 35-year old Steven Davis to death. “They beat him so badly his head was misshapen. He looked like an alien, or a monster,” Davis’ mother said. ADOC never provided her with information about the murder beyond a notification that her son was in the hospital.

In June of last year, guards at Donaldson used ‘Cell Buster,” a potent chemical agent, on Darnell McMillian’s cell while he was on suicide watch. An employee said Darnell yelled that he couldn’t breathe. He died shortly after.

Tommy Lee Rutledge, a man who struggled with mental health issues and spent a majority of the last several decades in solitary confinement, was cooked to death in an overheated cell on December 7. Unable to turn down the heat, he died from hyperthermia when his core body temperature rose to 109 degrees.

The most recent round of beatings follows a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against ADOC on December 9. The DOJ wrote that Alabama “fails to provide adequate protection from prisoner-on-prisoner violence and prisoner-on-prisoner sexual abuse, fails to provide safe and sanitary conditions, and subjects prisoners to excessive force at the hands of prison staff,” in its prisons for men.

Professor Robert Chase, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook and author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners Rights in Postwar America, explained how history is repeating itself. From 1965 to 1995, federal courts found eight of the eleven states of the U.S. South — including in Alabama — as having unconstitutional conditions in prisons, he told Shadowproof.

Incarcerated people organized labor strikes, filed a flurry of civil rights lawsuits throughout this period, and, Chase said, “were susceptible to accelerating levels of targeted violence and brutality meant to silence their public outreach campaign for civil and human rights.”

In the 1970s, Alabama attempted to appease the federal government by constructing new prisons.

Alabama’s solution, again, is to spend an estimated $3 billion on two new mega-prisons, a move solidified on February 1, when Governor Kay Ivey signed two 30-year leasing contracts with private prison company CoreCivic.

CoreCivic will construct the prisons and serve as the landlord for the government. Such a “public-private partnership” (sometimes called a ‘P3’) allows Alabama to skirt incurring debt in the short-term, but will be substantially more costly for taxpayers in the end.

Advocacy groups quickly criticized Gov. Ivey’s plan. “The ACLU of Alabama condemns Governor Ivey’s reckless decision to put the state of Alabama into a multi-billion-dollar lease to build new prisons, despite overwhelming opposition from community members and state leaders of both parties,” the organization wrote in a statement.

“Prison construction is not and has never been the answer to the unconstitutional conditions in Alabama prisons, and the Department of Justice said as much when it issued the first report in April 2019.”

Organized resistance to the construction plan appears to be on the rise, too. Relatively new advocate groups, like Alabama Students Against Prisons, have created a virtual protest toolkit, and are promoting an in-person demonstration on February 13, and a fundraiser for Ephan Moore.

Nikki isn’t sure what Kinetik will say about the recent assault, but she thinks he will continue struggling. ADOC, she says, should probably expect yet another lawsuit.

Robert Mercer and Rebekah Mercer attend the 2017 TIME 100 Gala at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 25, 2017, in New York City.

Four years before Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., pumped his fist to a supportive mob that would soon overrun the Capitol Police and hunt lawmakers through the halls of Congress, the former Missouri attorney general needed a deep-pocketed patron. Naturally, he called on the man who helped bankroll former President Donald Trump’s rise: hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, whom he would soon describe as a friend while name-dropping him to court support from far-right figures like Steve Bannon, a longtime Mercer ally. It’s unclear what came of Hawley’s meeting with Mercer, but the Club for Growth, which has received millions from the Mercer family, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, which also got Mercer donations, quickly became Hawley’s biggest financial backers, by far. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah kicked in a near-maximum donation to his 2018 Senate campaign for good measure.

While Charles Koch and his late brother David have dominated Republican fundraising in recent decades, the Mercers’ recent strategic investments in far-right candidates bought them a disproportionate level of influence in the Republican Party before culminating in an effort to subvert the election that fueled the deadly Capitol siege.

“The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution,” Bannon told The New Yorker in 2017. “Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.” Steve Schmidt, a former Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, sees it differently. Rebekah Mercer, he said in an interview with Salon, is the “chief financier or one of the chief financiers of the fascist movement, and that’s what it is.”

Hours after the pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, killing five people and injuring dozens of police officers in a futile bid to stop the counting of electoral votes, Hawley joined with top Mercer beneficiaries in objecting to the results to back Trump’s “big lie” that the election was somehow stolen. There was Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose super PAC got $13.5 million from the Mercers during the 2016 presidential campaign — before the family dropped another $15.5 million to back Trump. There was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., defending the majority of the GOP House caucus voting to overturn legal election results after his Congressional Leadership Fund received $1.5 million from the Mercers. And there was Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who received $21,600 from the Mercers before speaking at the rally that preceded the riot and objecting to the results. Brooks was later named by “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander as having helped orchestrate the event, though his office said he has “no recollection communicating in any way with whoever Ali Alexander is.”

Alexander himself may have benefited from the Mercers’ millions while working for the Black Conservative Fund, a small and mysterious group that received $60,000 from Robert Mercer in 2016. Though the group did not raise any money in 2020, it promoted the White House rally to tens of thousands of followers, according to CNBC.

The Mercers funded numerous key players who helped foment the Jan. 6 insurrection, though their full involvement remains unclear. Along with far-right candidates and groups, they have also funded the far-right social network Parler, which was used to coordinate the Capitol siege, and Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct London-based data firm that stole Facebook user data to help Trump’s 2016 campaign target potential voters.

“As I discovered first-hand, the Mercers are exceptionally skillful at obfuscating and masking their political enterprises,” David Carroll, a professor at The New School in Manhattan who sued Cambridge Analytica for his data in London, said in an email to Salon. “I marveled at how their ownership of Cambridge Analytica was effectively shielded from the U.K. courts where they were prosecuted.”

Now that the Mercers have survived the scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission and former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Carroll added, “I would assume the family has doubled-down on investing in its own privacy.”

Schmidt agreed that “it’s hard to keep track of the money” the Mercers have doled out to their pet causes.

“In this movement, the money is a fundamentally important part of it. It fuels the movement and that movement is an extremist movement,” he said. “Is there a better than even chance that the Mercer money is flowing, like so many tributaries, right into a larger seditious stream on this? Of course there is.”

Lax laws surrounding dark money donated to nonprofit entities mean it will likely be “several years before the public will have a complete sense of how much the Mercers spent,” wrote The Intercept’s Matthew Cunningham-Cook.

Publicly available data shows that the Mercers helped fund numerous players who pushed the “big lie.” The family donated $3.8 million to Citizens United, which is run by longtime Trump adviser David Bossie, who was tapped to lead the former president’s legal challenges. Though the Mercers have pulled back their financial support in recent election cycles amid growing scrutiny, they donated $300,000 during this past cycle to the Republican National Committee, which joined Trump’s legal battle.

The Mercers were also the top donors to Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward, a devoted Trump loyalist, The Intercept reported last week. Ward joined the lawsuit led by the Republican attorney general of Texas that sought to overturn the results of the election in multiple states and spoke at a December rally that featured Alexander to push Trump’s election conspiracy theories. On Twitter, Ward promoted her appearance at a “Stop the Steal” rally alongside former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to invoke martial law to rerun the election and posted the hashtag “#CrossTheRubicon,” a phrase that refers to Julius Caesar marching his army into Rome to declare himself a dictator. The Arizona GOP also promoted Alexander’s tweets, which included his declaration that he was “willing to give up my life for this fight.”

“Live for nothing, or die for something,” the party tweeted about a month before the Capitol riot.

More recently, Rebekah Mercer co-founded Parler, ostensibly a “libertarian” moderation-free social network that quickly became a megaphone for far-right figures like Alexander and fellow organizer Alex Jones, both of whom had been banned from mainstream social networks for spreading disinformation. Alexander, Jones and others used Parler to spread falsehoods about the election while others simply trafficked in white supremacist content, according to the Anti-Defamation League. “Holocaust denial, antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry are also easy to find,” the ADL said.

Parler was used by some of the Capitol rioters to plan and coordinate the attack. The site was briefly taken offline by Amazon before finding a new host, though its apps have been removed from the Apple and Google app stores. Rebekah Mercer said in a Parler post that she started the social network to combat the “increasing tyranny” of our “tech overlords,” slamming mainstream social networks over “data mining” — which is exactly what the Mercers’ former company, Cambridge Analytica, exploited to steal Facebook users’ personal data to help Trump in 2016. Although Mercer touted Parler’s protection of user data, hackers were able to easily gain access to unsecured user data, which showed that Parler users had penetrated deep inside the Capitol and shared videos and photos of their crimes.

Before Trump, the family for years bankrolled Breitbart News, formerly run by Steve Bannon, who affectionately termed it the platform of the alt-right. Along with Breitbart, which received a $10 million investment from the family, the Mercers also funded Bannon projects like Glittering Steel, a film production company, and the Government Accountability Institute, whose president authored the anti-Hillary bestseller “Clinton Cash” and later pushed discredited conspiracy theories about Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work overseas. Bannon’s appointment to Trump’s White House, after Rebekah Mercer pushed for him to take over Trump’s campaign, was celebrated by the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party. Though Bannon fell out with Trump after a few months in the White House, both he and Breitbart aggressively pushed Trump’s false narrative following the election.

A remarkably rapid dissolution of the Mercer-Bannon partnership, whose alliance provided fuel for the narrative that drove Trump’s victory.https://t.co/2hUs6RrOjD pic.twitter.com/uMeU4BFrLk

— Matea Gold (@mateagold) January 9, 2018

The Mercers also funded conservative groups that helped push Trump’s election lies and spread hate. An analysis by Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, which researches the spread of Islamophobia, extensively detailed the Mercers’ donations to groups that promote “racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism,” and that have since moved on to pushing election conspiracy theories.

In 2017, the Mercers donated $200,000 to the Gatestone Institute, where Rebekah Mercer sat on the board of governors. The group spent years pushing anti-Islam writings before echoing Trump’s baseless fraud claims following the election. That same year, the Mercers gave $1.725 million and another $500,000 the following year to the Bannon-founded Government Accountability Institute, whose research director Eric Eggers pushed unfounded fraud claims on Sean Hannity’s radio show. In 2018, they gave $8.1 million to DonorsTrust, which later donated $1.5 million to the white nationalist group VDARE, which subsequently promoted conspiracy theories about the election.

“Any examination of the growth of the far-right today in the U.S. must take into account the role of the Mercer family,” said Mobashra Tazamal, a senior research fellow at Bridge who authored the report, in an email to Salon. “Rebekah Mercer, in particular, has provided financial support to politicians who amplify white nationalist sentiments, and platforms like Breitbart and Parler that magnify far-right conspiracy theories.”

Tazamal added that the Capitol riot should not be understood as “an organic event” but rather as a “coordinated attack.”

“By strategically funneling millions into known hate groups, platforms amplifying racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, and politicians who pushed forth outright lies of a stolen election, Rebekah Mercer played a role in inciting the violence by providing material support,” she said. “The billionaire family has used their extraordinary wealth to bankroll the rise of violent white nationalism in this country.”

#Mercer donations to think tanks from .@washingtonpost pic.twitter.com/CgKil9WVo6

— JoAnne (@josieO) March 28, 2017

Rebekah Mercer defended herself in a 2018 Wall Street Journal op-ed, claiming that she “welcomes immigrants and refugees” and rejects “any discrimination based on race, gender, creed, ethnicity or sexual orientation,” despite repeatedly funding lawmakers and groups accused of trafficking hate. She said she supported Trump “because he promised to tackle entrenched corruption on both sides of the aisle,” even though he did far more to fill the swamp than drain it. She insisted that she had “no editorial authority” at Breitbart and argued that Bannon took the outlet in the “wrong direction,” though The New Yorker reported that the family had invested $10 million in the outlet on the condition that Bannon would be placed on the company’s board. The report also said that she is “highly engaged” with the site’s content and “often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention.”

“She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos,” a source told the outlet.

The Mercers were also the principal patrons for far-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos. After Yiannopoulos was fired by Breitbart for comments defending pedophilia, he received a wire transfer from Robert Mercer’s accountant, according to BuzzFeed News. “Rebekah Mercer loves Milo,” a source told the outlet. “They always stood behind him, and their support never wavered.”

Politico in 2016 dubbed Rebekah Mercer the “most powerful woman in GOP politics.” Newsmax founder Chris Ruddy, whose outlet also pushed the “big lie,” labeled Mercer the “first lady of the alt-right.” Though her father signed the large checks, Politico reported, it’s Rebekah Mercer who is “running the family operation” and whose “frustration” with the Koch brothers’ donor network — in which the Mercers previously participated — led her to start a “rival operation.”

Rebekah Mercer heads the Mercer family’s foundation, which donated $35 million to right-wing think tanks and policy groups between 2009 and 2014, according to the Washington Post. It marked a massive shift for the family, which donated just $37,800 in 2006, including a $4,200 check from Robert Mercer’s wife Diana to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. The election of Barack Obama changed everything, leading the family to pump at least $77 million in political donations into conservative candidates and causes between 2008 and 2016. Though their early forays into politics in New York and Oregon were utter failures, and Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign crumbled under the weight of relentless attacks from Trump and general bipartisan disdain, their investment in Trump quickly paid dividends.

Rebekah Mercer reportedly led a major reorganization of Trump’s 2016 campaign, connecting him with Bannon and former Cruz adviser Kellyanne Conway, who would replace Paul Manafort at the helm of the team. Mercer, who also served on the Trump transition’s executive committee, pushed for Trump to hire Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who was forced to resign less than a month into Trump’s presidency amid a criminal investigation and now spreads QAnon conspiracy theories online.

It’s unclear why the Mercers fund so many far-right causes, though sources close to the family told Politico in 2016 that they “harbor a deep and abiding enmity toward the political establishment.” Robert Mercer has been described as a “reclusive” former IBM computer scientist who made his fortune as co-CEO of the algorithmic trading company Renaissance Technologies. Sources close to him told The New Yorker that he is a conspiracy theorist who believes the Clintons had opponents murdered and were involved in a drug-running ring with the CIA. He has also described the Civil Rights Act as a mistake, arguing that Black people were better off financially before the passage of the landmark law, according to the same New Yorker report. Racism in the U.S. is “exaggerated,” Mercer reportedly said, attributing most of it to “Black racists.” He has likewise argued that climate change is not a problem and would actually be beneficial for the Earth, sources told the magazine.

“Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make,” David Magerman, a former colleague of Mercer who later sued him for unlawful termination, told the New Yorker. “A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.”

Magerman warned in an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer that Mercer was “effectively buying shares in the candidate.”

“Robert Mercer now owns a sizable share of the United States Presidency,” he wrote.

While painting herself as a philanthropist who supports small government and personal responsibility, Rebekah Mercer, who reportedly home-schools her four children in a $28 million Trump-branded apartment in New York that she shares with her husband, a Morgan Stanley banker, described the state of the country in apocalyptic terms in a 2019 book first flagged by The Intercept.

“[W]hat is the state of [the American] experiment today?” Mercer asked. “‘Now we are engaged in a great civil war,’ said Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863. One hundred and fifty-five years later, it is barely hyperbolic to echo the Great Emancipator.” She added, “We are not yet in armed conflict, but we are facing an ever more belligerent, frantic, and absurd group of radicals in a struggle for the soul of our country.”

The report added that the Mercers own Centre Firearms, a company that claims to have the “country’s largest private cache of machine guns,” and has a Queens warehouse filled with guns and “an Mk 19 belt-fed grenade launcher, capable of hurling 60 explosives per minute.”

The Mercers’ extremist sympathies set them apart from other big Republican donors like the Kochs, whom Schmidt described as transactional limited-government ideologues who “got none of what they were seeking” from their Republican funding.

The Kochs “wanted conservative governance,” said Schmidt, who was senior strategist for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “They didn’t get that. They got big government, they got big-spending, out-of-control government, led by the Republican Party. That’s the complete opposite of what they invested in.”

But the Mercers “invested in a different cause,” he added.

“That cause is not a democratic cause. It’s not a limited-government cause. It seems that the Mercers invested in chaos and they got exactly what they wanted. It seems like they invested in someone who didn’t believe in American democracy, and they got someone who tried to burn it down.”

Tenants display a banner reading "HERE TO STAY" during a protest

It started last June with squatting. Quietly and without fanfare, Philadelphia activists affiliated with OccupyPHL and the Black Renter’s Cooperative broke into long-vacant public housing buildings and supported houseless families moving in. Then came the massive, barricaded protest encampment on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, a tree-lined oasis in the middle of the Pennsylvania city surrounded by some of Philadelphia’s most expensive housing.

“They totally could have used the cops to disperse the encampment,” activist Wiley Cunningham of Philadelphia Housing Action remarked. “But politically, it would have looked bad for them.”

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, who is white, was wary of the optics of clearing a mostly-Black encampment in the midst of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. When activists blocked construction of an expensive high-rise complex with their second protest encampment next to the Housing Authority headquarters, city officials decided it was in their best interest to negotiate.

With COVID eviction moratoriums rapidly reaching their end, around 40 million people in the U.S. will soon face eviction and houselessness. On January 18, more than 160 organizations sent a letter to Joe Biden and Rochelle Walensky, the incoming director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), calling on them to take stronger and immediate executive action to protect tens of millions of people from eviction and displacement.

On his first day, Biden issued an executive order to extend the moratorium for evictions until at least March 31. Forbes notes, “The executive order also calls on federal housing agencies to extend the foreclosure and eviction moratorium for federally backed mortgages at least through March, and allow forbearance applications to continue for federally-backed mortgages.”

The Biden administration also intends to allocate a total of $30 billion for rent and utility bill relief as part of his American Rescue Plan. The plan, which also includes $5 billion in assistance for those at risk of homelessness, must be approved by Congress.

However, some activists are skeptical. The Right to the City Alliance called Biden’s executive order “deeply concerning for renters and housing advocates nationwide” in a statement, noting that “it is confusing and distressing that President Joe Biden would choose to extend this same moratorium for only a couple months without first strengthening it, removing loopholes, creating enforcement mechanisms, and ensuring that it lasts for the duration of the pandemic with a buffer period after.” While $35 billion in rental and utility relief is a step in the right direction, these funds are woefully insufficient to end the crisis.

Across the nation, activists are already deploying a variety of tactics to keep tenants in their homes and to find homes for those without. Sometimes, as in Washington, D.C., this looks like tenant organizations and legal education. Other times, eviction defense involves facing off against the police.

Always, the goal is the same: get people into homes and keep them there.

Eviction America

The U.S.’s out-of-control COVID epidemic continues to wreak economic havoc alongside skyrocketing death tolls. In September, the CDC issued a moratorium on evictions to slow spread of the disease. Many states followed suit, but most of these protections will soon expire. Currently, this federal moratorium expires on March 31, leaving many tenants and homeowners wondering whether they will have a place to lay their head through the rest of 2021.

While the eviction ban was extended, as things stand, tenants will owe the entirety of their back-payments the moment the moratorium expires. Those who could not afford to pay their rent or mortgage during this crisis are unlikely to be able to afford months’ worth of payments on April 1, or any other time. Studies indicate that people of color and single mothers will be disproportionately impacted by this pending crisis.

This crisis of incoming evictions is being met by a growing collection of organizers who are taking to eviction defense as a community-based solution to what could become a catastrophe unseen since the 2010 foreclosure crisis. In Western New York, in the Rust Belt city of Rochester, a coalition effort is bringing together a number of organizations to work on multiple levels to stop evictions. The Rochester Housing Justice Alliance (RHJA) is a collection of a number of activist groups, tenant unions and nonprofits that are organizing eviction defense for people whose legal challenges have failed or whose landlords are ignoring the laws. During COVID, they have taken up the challenge of in-person actions, starting by staging protests at homes where they knew evictions were being issued and working up to a round-the-clock eviction watch where they use a sophisticated phone tree system to call out activists for support.

“The biggest problem is, as it has ever been, the disorganization of working people — tenants in this instance. Because the landlords have us atomized, relatively few choose to fight back, or even consider the option,” says Crescenzo Scipione, who works with Metro Justice, a member of RHJA. “The more tenants unionize, the more neighborhoods band together against evictions, the fewer people in our communities will die from combinations of poverty, displacement and COVID-19. Join a tenant union or anti-eviction organization. If there ain’t one, build one.”

Activists in Washington, D.C., are concentrating more on tenant organization than immediate direct action, according to organizer Greg Afinogenov. Afinogenov is part of Stomp Out Slumlords, an organization that concentrates on building tenants’ associations in apartment buildings. Not only do these associations bring renters together to defend their rights, they coordinate for actions with a larger, city-wide focus.

Tenants’ unions are one reason that, unlike other cities with supposed eviction protections, D.C. has not had a single eviction since the moratorium went into place.

Washington, D.C., enacted an eviction moratorium at the beginning of the COVID crisis, now extended through June. Tenants’ unions are one reason that, unlike other cities with supposed eviction protections, D.C. has not had a single eviction since the moratorium went into place. “I think the existence of this sort of movement is one of the main reasons eviction moratoriums survived,” Afinogenov tells Truthout. “Because it’s been challenged repeatedly by various political voices on the city council who are very much not friendly to it.”

Because their efforts to prevent evictions have been so successful, D.C. activists have turned their attention to rent debt cancellation. A Halloween direct action at Mayor Muriel Bowser’s house contributed to Bowser’s subsequent decision to forgive $10 million of rent debt. “This is not a huge amount in actual terms of need,” Afinogenov says. “But it does show that this kind of direct action actually works.”

Building a Network

Stomp Out Landlords is a part of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN), which is an organization that began coordinating different tenant unions in 2018, free from large NGO funding and accountabilities. In 2020, ATUN formalized the network to support unions confronting evictions during the pandemic. The Tenant and Neighborhood Councils (TANC) is a member of that network and based in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the epicenters of climbing urban rental costs and eviction rates. TANC works on multiple fronts to confront evictions, from running activist campaigns to an eviction defense team that attempts to hold back evictions. “We will work to unite their neighbors to defend them and to fight the landlord, the sheriffs and the city. We will blockade their home and prevent these groups from entering,” says Nick Jackson, an organizer with TANC. The council has created a Cancel Rent Agreement which is asking the East Bay Rental Housing Association, a landlord organization, to have members forgive rental debt as an alternative to the current “debt repayment forms” the association is using that TANC says are misleading and predatory. While many eviction moratoriums may have halted evictions during the pandemic, as debt piles up for many out-of-work tenants, the evictions are only delayed.

“One day I hope to see the tenant movement strong enough to expropriate empty housing and put those on the street into safe living environments. We’ve seen examples of this around the country, and it is inevitable as long as the commodification of housing continues to … condemn people to die in the streets,” says Jackson.

Portland Tenants United (PTU) (also a member of ATUN) formed in 2015 to confront the dramatic rise in evictions as Portland, Oregon, gentrified many of its working-class and BIPOC neighborhoods. Over the past five years, the PTU has undertaken dozens of eviction protests, mass actions against displacement, and been responsible for pushing moderate tenant legislation and getting renter-friendly candidates elected. Now, the group is moving in the direction of eviction defense as it coordinates a type of “rapid response” system that has been implemented by other network members.

“I think for the people who participate in [direct action eviction defense], it’s very empowering because you’re working together, often with people you don’t know. Something that’s very physical and literal,” says Lauren Everett, who works with the PTU. “So, it doesn’t have that abstract feeling of like, we’re sending letters or like we’re trying to get this thing passed. It’s like we are literally preventing this landlord from doing something illegal and walking locked out of their home.”

The PTU began this eviction defense work staging a multiday eviction watch in support of a couple who were being evicted by a landlord they lived with, where members of the community came together and stayed several days in front of the house to ensure that the landlord did not try to remove the family and change the locks.

The LA Tenants Union, also part of ATUN, faces a unique challenge: coordinating efforts across a large and traffic-clogged city with a wide variety of tenant issues. Initially, the group concentrated mostly on organizing tenants into autonomous local organizations capable of catering to their tenants’ specific needs. With COVID, however, everything changed. As evictions increased, union membership grew from 300 to 3,000.

Los Angeles activists spent much of last summer fighting illegal evictions. Although the law prevents anyone except a sheriff with a writ of possession from carrying out an eviction, many landlords began to change locks and evict without due process. Legally, tenants are allowed to break the lock and move back in when this happens, but many of them do not know this and are too afraid of violence from their landlord or the police to exercise their rights. “Even though it’s an entirely civil matter, [the police] will side with the landlord,” explained Colin Stevens, an activist with the LA Tenants Union. In response, the union mobilized to get people on scene and resist the police until the issue went far enough up the chain of command that someone realized the illegality of the eviction and called off the cops. After a summer of resistance, the police have begun to realize they cannot actually assist with illegal evictions with impunity.

Looking Forward

Philadelphia’s combination of tactics — from squatting to protest encampments — paid big dividends. By the end of October, the city agreed to establish a land trust with over 60 housing units in exchange for disbanding the encampments. The city also committed to amnesty for squatters, a commissioned study on the effects of public land transfers in poor and historically Black neighborhoods, and a cessation of evictions without a court order.

“A lot of it was just timing,” Cunningham says. Philadelphia’s white mayor was wary of sending the police to violently disband a majority-Black encampment during the summer of Black Lives Matter, which helped the encampments last long enough to bring the city to the negotiating table.

Activists also controlled the narrative. When the mainstream media tried demonizing the movement with tales of overdoses and violence within the encampments, activists like Cunningham were able to contextualize it. “Yeah, that happens every day,” he would respond. “That’s what we’re talking about. It wouldn’t happen if they had housing.”

Eventually, the neighborhood association for the luxury dwellings surrounding Benjamin Franklin Parkway came around with an op-ed that, along with calls for the dismantling of the encampment, demanded permanent housing for its inhabitants.

ATUN looks poised to be a foundation of coordinating local work nationally, taking those experiences and pulling out lessons that can apply to other cities.

“We exist to support tenant unions in growing, and more and more people becoming members of tenant unions, and more people organizing their buildings,” says Afinogenov, and that longer-term coordination can shift the balance of power. As they help to support the building of tenant unions on a ground-up model, the power of tactics like rent strikes begin to escalate and can confront the looming rental crisis. With a lot of uncertainty in 2021, this wide scale coordination of direct action and willingness to organize tenants at the site of their housing can be a solution to halting another housing collapse.

The Black Panthers' Fred Hampton speaks at a rally in Chicago's Grant Park in September 1969.

In March 1976, we sat in a cavernous Chicago courtroom while FBI agent Roy Martin Mitchell testified in the federal civil rights case that we and our partners at the People’s Law Office had brought on behalf of the families of slain Illinois Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the seven survivors of the murderous pre-dawn Chicago police raid on their West Side apartment.

Thanks to the liberation of FBI documents from the Media, Pennsylvania FBI offices, the revelations of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and our own hotly contested pretrial battles to uncover the truth about the raid, we had been able to document the local FBI’s central role in setting up the raid as part of the Bureau’s secret and highly illegal COINTELPRO Program. This program had previously targeted Black liberation leaders including Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad and the organizations that they led. As the Senate Select Committee would later find in its April 1976 report, the FBI had more recently turned its attention to “destroy[ing] the Black Panther Party.”

Roy Martin Mitchell was an integral member of the Chicago FBI office’s Racial Matters Squad and the control agent for a prized “asset”: informant-provocateur William O’Neal, who was the captain of security of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP). As such, O’Neal had ready access to the local BPP chairman, the dynamic Fred Hampton, who had garnered particular attention from Mitchell, his Racial Matters Squad and the COINTELPRO program.

At the time Mitchell testified, we had documentation of the FBI’s secret role in setting up the raid, including a detailed floor plan of the Hampton apartment — designating the bed on which Hampton would later be slain — that Mitchell and O’Neal had drawn up, and which Mitchell had supplied to the Chicago police raiders and their state’s attorney supervisors, including Cook County State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan, who utilized this invaluable information to execute the murderous pre-dawn raid on December 4, 1969.

We also had obtained two other damning FBI documents: a December 3, 1969, document that claimed the impending raid as a COINTELPRO project, and a post-raid document that set forth the outlines of the conspiracy to cover up the FBI’s involvement in the raid.

Concluding from the Senate report and the liberated media documents that the raid and its coverup had to have been approved and ratified at the highest levels of the Bureau, we had sought, months earlier, to join as defendants in our suit FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Director of Domestic Intelligence William C. Sullivan, and George Moore, who, as boss of the Extremist Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, had the Black Panther Party directly in his administrative sights. We had also journeyed to Washington to question Sullivan under oath in a pre-trial deposition, but his Department of Justice lawyers thwarted our efforts to probe the Bureau’s knowledge of the raid and COINTELPRO, and our overtly hostile federal trial judge, J. Sam Perry, acted similarly by denying our request for relevant documents and to bring Hoover and his crew on board as defendants.

So it was in March 1976 when Mitchell set about to meticulously slander Hampton and the BPP through the reports of his informant O’Neal. An instinctively cautious witness, Mitchell nonetheless made a crucial mistake, and in the process, revealed that the FBI and its government lawyers had suppressed 200 volumes of FBI files that pertained to Hampton, Clark, O’Neal, the seven survivors of the raid, and the FBI’s cover-up investigation — files that the judge had previously unwittingly ordered produced.

The Court held in no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.

The government rushed Mitchell off the stand with the judge’s blessing, and, over the next two months, its lawyers produced (several files at a time), the 200 volumes of documents. The files contained a great deal of information relevant to our claims of FBI conspiracy, but the FBI and its government lawyers, perhaps hoping to stave off the inevitable, saved the smoking gun for last: a pair of documents to and from the Bureau in Washington and the Chicago office that were buried in O’Neal’s personnel file and which requested and obtained for O’Neal a $300 bonus for furnishing “a detailed floor plan of the apartment” that “subsequently proved to be of tremendous value” and “was not available from any other source.”

Incredibly, Judge Perry shrugged off the damning government misconduct, refused to grant a mistrial and forced us to continue with the trial as we attempted to read and digest the deluge of documents that we were receiving on a daily basis.

The trial lurched forward for another 15 months, making it the longest civil trial in federal court history. Both of us spent time in the federal lockup for protesting the outrageous rulings of the judge and the blatant misconduct of the defense. After the jury heard 18 months of damning evidence, the judge absolved not only Mitchell, O’Neal and their Chicago bosses, but also State’s Attorney Hanrahan and the 14 raiding cops who fired more than 90 bullets from a machine gun, a rifle, shotguns and handguns at the sleeping Panthers by entering a directed verdict in their favor.

Despite its relevance and our repeated discovery requests, the FBI and its lawyers never produced Mitchell’s personnel file as part of the 200 volumes, nor were we permitted to recall Mitchell to the witness stand in order to question him about the O’Neal bonus document and whether he had also been rewarded for his central role in setting up the raid and subsequently keeping the FBI’s role under wraps.

Thankfully, the litigation did not end with Judge Perry’s baseless and vindictive ruling. We appealed to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which rendered a landmark 70-page opinion on April 23, 1979. The Court of Appeals granted us a new trial, ordered a hearing on the government’s misconduct and absolved us of our contempt citations. The Court held in no uncertain terms that we had amassed a powerful record of two successive police, prosecutorial and FBI conspiracies.

The first conspiracy, which was grounded in the COINTELPRO program and featured Mitchell and O’Neal’s central roles, encompassed the planning of the raid and the raid itself, and was designed, as the Court found, “to subvert and eliminate the Black Panther Party and its members, thereby suppressing … a vital, radical black political organization.” The second conspiracy, which included the post-raid coverup and legal harassment of the plaintiffs, was, as the Court further stated, “intended to frustrate any redress the Plaintiffs might seek and, more importantly, to conceal the true character of the pre-raid and raid activities of the defendants involved in the first conspiracy.”

The newly released file provides the first direct documentation that Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover ratified, celebrated and rewarded O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid.

We successfully withstood the defendants’ attempt to have the U.S. Supreme Court overturn the Court of Appeals’ decision, and the case was returned to another federal judge for retrial. We pressed for additional FBI documents to join Hoover and Sullivan (both of whom were deceased), as well as Moore and several other high-ranking FBI and Department of Justice officials as defendants, and pursued the misconduct hearing. In order to avoid judicial condemnation of their suppression of the FBI files and, as it later turns out, discovery of additional documentation of the FBI’s role in the raid, the government joined with Cook County and the City of Chicago to settle our case for what was, at that time, the largest police violence settlement in federal court history.

At that point, in 1983, after 13 years of litigation, it seemed as if the historical record was complete and the true narrative of the raid established: Chicago police officers, under the command of the Cook County state’s attorney, and at the behest of the FBI and its COINTELPRO program, targeted BPP leader Fred Hampton, and assassinated him while he lay asleep as part of a murderous pre-dawn raid during which the police fired more than 90 shots that also killed Panther Mark Clark and left several other survivors badly wounded.

And so stood that record, until December 4, 2020, 51 years after the raid, when historian and writer Aaron Leonard received from the FBI a redacted copy of Mitchell’s personnel file in response to his 2015 Freedom of Information Act request.

Involvement of Hoover and FBI Officials

The newly released file, containing several hundred pages of FBI memos and reports, provides substantial evidence that would have contributed significantly to our examination of Mitchell and his Chicago supervisors. It also provides the first direct documentation that Sullivan, Moore and even Hoover were aware of Mitchell and O’Neal’s Black Panther activities; that they ratified, celebrated and rewarded O’Neal and Mitchell’s integral roles in the Hampton raid; and that they were involved in the early stages of the cover-up of the FBI’s involvement. Here is some of the key information contained in the documents:

On June 27, 1969, in apparent recognition of O’Neal’s role in a June 1969 FBI raid of the Chicago BPP offices, Hoover commended Mitchell’s “very capable manner in which [he] performed in a matter of intense interest to the Bureau in the racial field … and for his “effective, skillful guidance of a confidential source who furnished valuable information.”
On November 24, 1969, only days after O’Neal and Mitchell drew up the Hampton floor plan and initiated Mitchell’s plan to convince the Chicago Police Department to execute the raid, Chicago Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Marlin Johnson, who was a defendant in our suit, sent a memo to Hoover’s desk cataloging O’Neal’s important BPP-related activities, and recommending O’Neal for an incentive bonus. O’Neal’s activities are deleted from the document.
On December 2, 1969, while the actual planning for the raid was in its final stages, Bureau Extremist Division Chief George Moore sent a memo to Bureau Director of Domestic Intelligence William Sullivan recommending that Mitchell receive an incentive award for “outstanding performance in the development of a highly productive informant in the Black Panther Party.”
On December 4, 1969, only hours after the pre-dawn raid, the Bureau’s administrative division concurred with Sullivan, Moore and Johnson that the “performance of SA Mitchell in developing and guiding informant merits incentive award” in the amount of $200.
On December 5, 1969, SAC Marlin Johnson “advised informant” (O’Neal) about an unknown topic; the remainder of this paragraph was redacted from the document, but it seems likely that it was to inform O’Neal that Johnson would be recommending him for a $300 bonus. Neither Johnson nor O’Neal ever admitted in sworn testimony that they met or had any discussion with each other on December 5 or any other time.
On December 10, 1969, a memo sent from the personal desk of J. Edgar Hoover to SA Mitchell reads: “I am certainly pleased to commend you and to advise you that I have approved an incentive award in the amount of $200 for your outstanding services in a matter of considerable interest to the FBI in the racial field.… Through your aggressiveness and skill in handling a valuable source he is able to furnish information of great importance to the bureau in this vital area of our operations. I want you to know of my appreciation of your exemplary efforts.”
On December 24, 1969, Mitchell sent an evaluation of O’Neal to Hoover stating, “He has been instrumental in the Chicago Office’s success in handling the Bureau’s interests regarding an extremist party in the nationalist field.”
On November 6, 1970, Hoover provided Mitchell with another $200 incentive award for his handling of O’Neal, stating: “The manner in which you have developed and handled a source of information of great importance to the Bureau in the racial field is certainly commendable.… A great deal of the information which has been furnished by this individual has been of material assistance to the FBI in fulfilling its responsibilities.”
On December 11, 1970, the Chicago FBI office sent a teletype to the FBI director marked “urgent,” which was initialed in Washington by George Moore, and discussed a redacted FBI agent’s (most likely Mitchell’s) potential testimony before a special state grand jury that was investigating the raid. At this point, O’Neal, Mitchell and the FBI’s role in the raid was still highly secret, and the teletype instructed that “any information dealing with [redacted]” — most likely the FBI’s role — “not to be touched upon” and “if any questions were asked in this area, [the redacted witness] is to immediately leave.”

While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified.

As lawyers who were deeply involved in the Hampton litigation for 13 years, we view these documents as vehicles that would have opened up new avenues of questioning, led us to additional documents to pursue, deepened our proof of the assassination and cover-up conspiracies, and provided compelling proof that the highest level of Bureau officials, including Hoover, were partners in the conspiracies. As historians who have extensively written and lectured on the assassination, we welcome this unexpected trove of documents as further proof that the search for past truths continues into the future. We hope to assist Aaron Leonard — who has previously chronicled FBI surveillance and harassment of other 20th-century leftists — in his efforts to compel the FBI to reveal the redactions in the Mitchell files, and the pursuit of the secrets that still remain ensconced in the bowels of the FBI files will continue.

This search for historical truths about the government’s repressive tactics and programs continues to be of crucial importance to this day. While the official COINTELPRO program was terminated soon after it was discovered, government attacks on today’s radical movements have continued and intensified. The use of private security forces such as TigerSwan at Standing Rock; the utilization of more sophisticated spying and military technology (including drones, sound canons and concussion grenades) in Ferguson, Missouri; the targeting of the Movement for Black Lives as “terrorists” under the heading “Black Identity Extremists”; and the nationwide violent and coordinated law enforcement attacks on peaceful Black-led demonstrations in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the most recent government-inspired white supremacist Capitol breach all demonstrate not only that the government’s repression mechanisms are alive and well, but also that law enforcement continues to be closely aligned with the emboldened forces of the violent and racist far right. The cold-blooded assassination of Fred Hampton provides an ongoing and detailed lesson about the illegal and violent lengths to which the government will resort to in its efforts to destroy social movements and young leaders of color when they pose a threat to its white supremacist power and control.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable work of Aaron Leonard, whose dogged pursuit of the Roy Martin Mitchell file uncovered the newly produced FBI documents detailed above.

Police clash with Trump loyalists who breached security and entered the Capitol building in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021.

Even as the Biden administration takes the reins of power, the fact remains that authoritarianism and a fascist strain of political thinking have taken firm root on U.S. soil among a large proportion of its citizens. This utterly disturbing development will, according to Noam Chomsky in this exclusive interview for Truthout, be hard to contain. A recent poll shows that the overwhelming majority of Republicans continues to give a thumbs up to Donald Trump, even after the storming of the Capitol. In the wake of the attempted coup, and on the cusp of a new administration, what do the current political currents mean for the future?

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, you had been warning all along of a potential coup in the event that Trump would lose the 2020 election. In this context, are you surprised at all by what took place on Capitol Hill on the Electoral College vote count?

Noam Chomsky: Surprised, yes. I’d expected a strong reaction from Trump’s voting base, raised to a fever pitch by his latest antics. But hadn’t expected the attempted coup to reach this level of violence, and I suspect most of the participants didn’t either. Many seemed to have been caught up in the excitement of the moment when the leaders of the crowd surged into the hated Capitol to drive out the demons who were not just “stealing the election” but “stealing” their country from them: their white Christian country.

That it was an attempted coup is not in question. It was openly and proudly proclaimed as just that. It was an attempt to overturn an elected government. That’s a coup. True, what was attempted was not the kind of coup regularly backed by Washington in its dependencies, a military takeover with ample bloodshed, torture, “disappearance.” But, nevertheless, it was an attempted coup. True, the perpetrators regarded themselves as defending the legitimate government, but that’s the norm, even for the most vicious and murderous coups, like the U.S.-backed coup in Chile on the first 9/11 – which was actually much worse in virtually every dimension than the second one, the one that we remember and commemorate. The first one is best forgotten on the principle of “wrong agents”: Us, not some radical Islamic fundamentalists.

The emotions of those attempting the [Capitol] coup were apparent. Belief that the election was stolen was plainly held with real fervor. And it is understandable among people who live in passionately pro-Trump areas where he is revered as their savior, and for some, even chosen by God, as he once declared. Many may scarcely have seen a Biden sign, or heard anything from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh to suggest some possible flaw in their beliefs.

In some respects, these beliefs are not as bizarre as they may look at first. A shift of tens of thousands of votes in a few counties might have swung the election the other way in a deeply undemocratic system such as ours, where 7 million votes can be swept aside along with an unknown number of others eliminated by purging, gerrymandering, and the many other devices that have been devised to steal the election from the “wrong people,” effectively authorized by the Supreme Court in its shameful 2013 decision nullifying the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v Holder).

As we’ve discussed before, the malevolent figure in charge deserves credit for his talent in tapping the poisonous streams that run not far below the surface of American society, with sources that are deep in U.S. history and culture.

I have to say that I was also surprised by the quick reaction of those who own the country and have a large share of responsibility for the malaise that broke forth on January 6. In no small part, it is a consequence of the neoliberal assault since Reagan, amplified by his successors, that has devastated the rural areas that are the homes of many who stormed the Capitol. Those who hold the levers of the private power that dominates the society and political system never liked Trump’s behavior, which harmed the image they project as humanists dedicated to the common good. But they were willing to tolerate the vulgar performance as long as Trump and his accomplices delivered the goods, lining their pockets by robbing the public.

And that they did. The “transfer of wealth” from the lower 90 percent to the ultra-rich since Reagan opened the doors for highway robbery reaches almost $50 trillion, according to a recent Rand corporation study. No one can place numbers on the vastly greater cost of environmental destruction that was a high priority of the Trump-McConnell years of service to the very rich and corporate sector.

But January 6 was apparently too much, and the marching orders were delivered swiftly by the Big Guns.

One has to have some sympathy for the legislators caught between powerful contending forces. On the one hand, they see the angry hordes whipped to a frenzy by Trump’s performances, and still in his pocket, poised to wreak vengeance on those who betray their leader. And on the other hand, looking down on them from above, are the captains of finance and industry who fund their elections and dangle before them many other privileges to keep them in line. (How many members of Congress leave office to become truck drivers or secretaries?)

The dilemma is particularly harsh for senators, who are more reliant on the large donors. And their defection from the ranks of obsequious Trump loyalists has been somewhat greater.

Apparently, D.C. Council members had been briefed by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia that Donald Trump might invoke the Insurrection Act to seize control of the city police, but did not expect an attack on the Capitol itself. In your own view, what explains the enormous security failures that led to the Capitol siege, and do the events of January 6, 2021, qualify as a putsch?

An attempted putsch, though the connotations of the term putsch may be too strong. The events reminded many, including historians of fascism, of Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, which actually did not so easily penetrate the centers of power as the attempted coup of January 6.

The reasons for the security failures are being debated. I have no special insight.Black members of the Capitol police, who showed great courage along with many of their white colleagues, have charged for years that the force has been infiltrated with white supremacists. There may have been some collusion, and possibly serious corruption higher up the chain of command.

If Trump incited an insurrection against elected officials of the U.S. government, is it enough that he has been impeached again? Shouldn’t he be facing sedition charges since inciting an insurrection against the government is a criminal act under Title 18 of the U.S. Code?

I presume the Joint Chiefs of Staff chose their words carefully in their message on the “violent riot” on January 6, “a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building, and our Constitutional process,” an act of “violence, sedition and insurrection.” They surely considered the fact that incitement to sedition and insurrection carries a heavy prison sentence. I presume that they also weighed the evidence that such incitement took place from the Oval Office.

Many questions arise about how to pursue such barely concealed charges, but we should be careful to avoid the Watergate trap. The Nixon impeachment procedures were initiated by [Massachusetts] Rep. Robert Drinan, S.J., charging him with the bombing of Cambodia, a truly monstrous crime, of Nuremberg Trial caliber. That charge was struck down by Congress. The prime charge against Nixon was that he organized thugs to invade one of two seats of political power in the country, the Democratic Party headquarters. This attack on the foundations of the Republic was overcome in a “stunning vindication of our constitutional system” (famed liberal historian Henry Steele Commager).

In short, the powerful can rise to their own defense. The victims of truly monstrous crimes can look elsewhere for recourse. Maybe history, with luck.

Incitement of an attempted coup is no laughing matter, but it scarcely weighs in the balance against a dedicated effort to destroy the environment that sustains life on earth or demolition of the arms control regime that mitigates the threat of nuclear war.

Do you believe that Trump is finished as a political figure? Or, to put the question slightly differently, was the Washington putsch of January 6, 2021, the beginning of the end of the rise of Trumpism?

Far from it. Whether Trump will survive the error of judgment that turned major power centers against him is unclear. He may well do so. The voting base of the Party seems to remain loyal, maybe with even greater fervor after this attack on their hero by the “deep state.” Local officials too. He was cheered on his visit to the Republican National Committee the day after the Capitol riot. He has other resources.

Whatever the fate of the individual, Trumpism will not be so easily contained. Its roots are deep. The anger and resentment raised to a frenzy by this talented con man is not limited to the U.S. The $50 trillion robbery is only the icing on the cake of the neoliberal disaster, which itself is built on foundations of deep injustice and repression. We are not out of the woods, by far.

Trump supporters occupy the West Front of the Capitol and the inauguration stands on January 6, 2021.

Nearly seven-in-ten Republicans falsely believe that “antifa” was part of the attacks on the U.S. Capitol last week, and that President Donald Trump, who instigated a crowd of his own supporters to breach the landmark building, bore little to no responsibility for what happened, according to a new poll out this week.

An Economist/YouGov poll released this week shows that only 37 percent of Americans overall believe antifa was involved in the event. Among Republican-leaning respondents, however, 69 percent wrongly say antifa took part, with only 9 percent correctly stating that the non-existent organization played a hand in it.

Among those who voted for Trump, endorsement of the errant theory is even more apparent, with 74 percent of the president’s supporters saying antifa was involved and only 5 percent saying they weren’t.

Rather than a formalized group, antifa is an informal ideological stance against fascism. Indeed, the term itself means “anti-fascist.” There is no national antifa organization, and many local groups across the country that have antifascist politics are not affiliated with one another.

Republicans and Trump supporters differ in opinion from the country overall on whether Trump, who called on his loyalists to go to the Capitol before the breach took place, is responsible in any way for the attacks. While 54 percent of Americans say Trump bears “a lot” or “some” responsibility for the storming of the Capitol building, only 20 percent of Trump supporters agree. Trump supporters are twice as likely as Americans overall to say that he bears “a little” or no responsibility whatsoever, with 72 percent of the president’s supporters saying as much.

Respondents in the poll were also asked to express their feelings about the Capitol breach last week. Sixty-two percent said they were “disappointed” in what they saw, while 51 percent said they were “angry” and 50 percent said they were “ashamed.”

Among Trump supporters, around the same amount (59 percent) said they, too, were “disappointed.” But only 33 percent said they were “angry” about what had transpired, and just 36 percent described themselves as “ashamed” over what the crowd of Trump loyalists had done.

The poll demonstrates that many Republicans and Trump supporters are still willing to believe falsehoods about the events of last week, particularly when it comes to who should be blamed. They are not the only ones — several conservative members of Congress, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), have also peddled the same unsubstantiated idea that antifa was responsible for the attacks on the Capitol.

“Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters,” Gaetz claimed on the floor of the House hours after the breach occurred. “They were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”

It’s possible that the Florida lawmaker may have gotten the idea due to faulty reporting from The Washington Times, which had wrongly reported that a facial recognition company identified antifa members. When that company challenged the reporting, saying it had not done such a scan, The Times deleted the story from its website.

The company in question, XRVision, did eventually perform an analysis, according to reporting from The Wrap. It did not find any individuals associated with antifa among those in the crowd, but did link two participants of the Capitol breach to known Nazi groups.Hundreds of individuals have since been identified as having taken part in the Capitol breach, including at least 28 cops and many well-known Trump supporters.

A police officer arrests a man in front of the U.S. Courthouse during a protest demanding justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and in solidarity with Portland's protests, in Downtown Los Angeles, California, on July 25, 2020.

Police in the United States are more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than they are against right-wing protesters, according to new data analyzed by The Guardian, corroborating observations repeatedly made by the left.

The data is based on over 13,000 protests since April of last year and was gathered by researchers for the U.S. Crisis Monitor project. “Force” in the data includes use of tactics like tear gas and rubber bullets.

The Guardian’s analysis showed that police used force at 4.7 percent of left-wing protests versus 1.4 percent of right-wing protests — 511 left-wing protests and 33 right-wing. When looking at protests that didn’t involve looting or vandalism, the disparity grew: Police were about 3.5 times more likely to use force at left-wing protests than right-wing protests, 1.8 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.

The report also found that police were more than doubly likely to intervene or break up a left-wing protest than a right-wing one, using tactics like arrests. A similar analysis of the same data by FiveThirtyEight found the same thing.

These analyses can potentially explain why the violent Donald Trump-inspired mob was able to overcome Capitol Police on January 6, as former president Barack Obama tweeted last week.

For those who are wondering why so much attention has been focused on the response of the Capitol Police to the Trump-inspired riots, here’s a data-driven article that provides some useful frame of reference. https://t.co/MAdlWGRd23

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 8, 2021

“No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday, they wouldn’t have been treated very, very differently” than the Trump loyalists at the Capitol, Joe Biden said in a speech on January 7.

Following the attack, right-wing outlets have been reporting misinformation about the disparity between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests from last year and last week’s attempted coup.

This week, Fox News ran a graphic saying that 30 died in BLM protests versus five due to the Capitol breach — the death statistics from the BLM protests are in reality much lower and, as one Twitter user pointed out, the deaths due to the attempted coup were much more per period of time. Additionally, many of the estimated 12 deaths that occurred during the months of BLM protests were not at the protests, but adjacent or possibly unrelated. Almost none were caused by protesters — and two people were murdered by a right-wing extremist.

The graphic is part of a larger push by the right to downplay the violent attempted coup on January 6, despite the demonization of BLM protests; Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said that impeaching Trump for his role in the coup is just “cancel culture”; many Republicans have been calling for “unity” to distract from the issue at hand; RedState published an article claiming that the coup simply didn’t happen.

The report on the disparity between the police responses to left- versus right-wing protests further underlines the disparity with the political responses to recent events — as The New Republic notes, “Republicans Want Impunity, Not Unity.” And while, as some have argued, the Trump militants were successful in intimidating members of Congress, many in the BLM movement are still fighting for justice.

On Thursday, the New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit against the New York City police department for excessive police force against BLM protesters last summer.

“[The Attorney General’s office] found that the NYPD arrested or detained hundreds of protesters, legal observers, medics and others without legal justification,” she said in a press conference. “In total, we found over 155 incidents of officers using excessive and unreasonable force against protesters.” James’s office’s findings line up with the data on the policing disparities from Thursday.

Congresswoman-elect U.S. Rep. Cori Bush speaks outside of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on November 19, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

A resolution for the House Ethics Committee to investigate and potentially expel the 139 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election last week now has 54 co-sponsors. Introduced by Democratic Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, the resolution calls for the Committee to determine whether the GOP members violated the Constitution in last week’s vote.

The resolution calls out Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) and Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) as leaders of “a politically motivated and last-ditch effort to overthrow the election.” It also calls on the House of Representatives to condemn the disenfranchisement of Black, Brown and Indigenous voters.

Bush introduced the legislation on Monday with 47 co-sponsors at the time. Seven more representatives have joined in since then. Co-sponsors include members of the progressive “squad” — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), Jamaal Bowman (D-New York), Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts), and others. Over 500,000 people have signed a petition in support of the bill. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) has not publicly supported the bill but has indicated her gratefulness toward Democrats pursuing the expulsion.

The freshman Congresswoman has had the bill on her mind since new members were sworn in on the 3rd, she told The Intercept. On the 8th, Bush tweeted: “Expel the Republican members of Congress who incited the white supremacist attempted coup.”

But the timing of the bill has undoubtedly helped it gain support — shortly after the violent breach of the Capitol on January 6, 147 members of Congress still voted to overturn the results of the election, despite the evidence that the movement to do so was fueling violence against Congress itself.

In the house of Congress, there are also a handful of senators calling for Cruz and Hawley to resign because of their roles in the January 6 coup attempt.

Republicans have also come under fire recently for their refusals to walk through metal detectors that were installed after last week’s violent white supremacist mob breached the Capitol. The security measure has caused shouting matches to erupt between Republicans and Capitol Police, CNN reports. Reporters have witnessed many Republicans sidestepping the detectors or pushing through into the House chambers even after setting off the detectors.

“To my colleagues who won’t go through the metal detectors: Have you ever had a job before?,” Bush tweeted. “If you won’t abide by the rules of this job, go find another one.”

To my colleagues who won’t go through the metal detectors:

Have you ever had a job before? If you work at McDonald’s and you don’t wear the uniform, you don’t work that day.

If you won’t abide by the rules of this job, go find another one https://t.co/rPO2xek1iB

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 13, 2021

Pelosi has announced that, starting next week, representatives will face a fine for attempting to bypass the metal detectors: $5,000 for the first time, and $10,000 for a second offense, to be deducted from the lawmakers’ salaries.

The presence of the metal detectors “contributed to a sense of roiling fury in Congress,” CNN wrote, that preceded the impeachment proceedings that took place on Wednesday, during which Trump was impeached for the second time.

Removing Trump has been popular among the public, as FiveThirtyEight reports that 52.7 percent support removing him from office.

Trump loyalists storm the U.S. Capitol building following a rally on January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C.

The astroturfed #StoptheSteal group that drew thousands of Trumpists to the Washington, D.C. rally on Wednesday that turned into a violent insurrection at the Capitol has strong ties with the influential Christian Right Council for National Policy.

The rally, like many other #StoptheSteal events held since the election of Joe Biden, gathered right-wing extremists who believe the lies spread by Trump and complicit politicians that the election was fraudulent in order to demand that Congress ignore its obligation to certify the Electoral College votes and overturn the election.

At least five members and leaders of the Council for National Policy (CNP) worked to turn out MAGA extremists and were scheduled to speak at the rally after Trump exhorted the crowd to march on the Capitol.

CNP is a secretive, influential “charity” composed of right-wing donors and Christian Right movement leaders and activists with deep ties to the Trump administration.

CNP convened a meeting on Nov. 12-14, 2020 to strategize on how to challenge the election results. In a panel titled “Election Results and Legal Battles: What Now?,” CNP members heard from voter fraud misinformation specialists J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, Cleta Mitchell, former partner at Foley & Lardner, and Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

Mitchell, a CNP Board of Governors member, lost her job at Foley & Lardner after the Washington Post published a recording of a Jan. 2 phone call in which she joined Trump in pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes to declare Trump the winner in Georgia.

CNP “Action Steps” distributed from that panel and provided to CMD by investigative reporter Brent Allpress asked members to call on state and federal lawmakers to challenge the election results and appoint alternate slates of Trump electors to the Electoral College.

In November, CMD exposed that former CNP member and right-wing influencer Ali Alexander (aka Ali Akbar), was the driving force behind #StoptheSteal. Alexander organized turnout and spoke at the rally in D.C. alongside many of the same individuals who helped lead the earlier protests.

Alexander told reporters in advance of the Jan. 6 rally that he had more than 100 buses and 30,000 cars brining protesters from across the country.

After the assault on Congress, Alexander made a statement that has since been removed by Twitter, in which he pointed to the rally on the Mall and said, “I don’t disvow this. I do not denounce this,” and attempted to distance himself from the violence at the Capitol, but then called stopthesteal.us the “home of the rebellion.” In another tweet, Alexander wrote, “Antifa Agitation!” to deflect blame for the riot.

Turning Point USA’s founder and president Charlie Kirk, a CNP member who continues to spread misinformation of voter fraud and was listed as an organizer of the November #StoptheSteal rally in November, was also deeply involved in organizing the D.C. protest-turned-riot. Kirk, who also chairs Students for Trump, touted on Twitter that he was sending “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.”

The right-wing Veterans in Defense of Liberty (VIDOL), led by CNP member Scott Magill, also sent troops to the insurrectionist #StoptheSteal event Wednesday. A January 3 email to “fellow Warriors and Friends,” stated that in response to Trump’s “clarion call,” VIDOL would attend the January 6 protest, and “our battle cry shall be, ‘We will not concede!’”

In a 2017 CNP member report leaked to CMD by Allpress, Magill claimed to have a “cavalry of Veteran motorcycle riders” for “deployment to anti-American protests, flag burning ceremonies, snowflakes rallies, etc., etc.,” and argued that “we are in an undeclared civil war.”

Tea Party Patriots co-founder and CNP executive committee member Jenny Beth Martin promoted the rally and was listedas a speaker. Last November, Tea Party Patriots Action announced that it was “working with FreedomWorks, Turning Points, Heritage, and countless social media influencers” to promote and hold “Protect the Vote” rallies in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, CMD reported.

Ed Martin, president of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles and a CNP member, has been involved in the organizing of #StoptheSteal from the get-go and was listed as a speaker, as was John Schlafly, son of right-wing activist and former member of CNP Phyllis Schlafly.

Anti-abortion activist Jason Jones, a CNP member, was also scheduled to speak, as were many of Alexander’s organizing partners in #StoptheSteal including Arizona Representative Paul Gosar, who led the House challenge to his state’s electors.

Trump embraced and promoted the #StoptheSteal rally, tweeting on Dec. 19, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Then, on Jan. 2, Trump tweeted, “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2021

Alexander told supporters on Parler to prepare to occupy and, “encouraged people to bring tents and sleeping bags and avoid wearing masks for the event. ‘If D.C. escalates… so do we,’” PBS reported.

After the MAGA supporters breached the Capitol during the certification proceedings, forcing the evacuation of the Vice President, Representatives, Senators, staff, and reporters, Trump was slow to comment. When he did release a videoasking rioters to “go home in peace,” he still claimed the election was “stolen from us,” expressing love for his supporters, and calling them “very special.”

Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were eventually suspended, but not before the damage was done. Trump is now back on Twitter, but banned from Facebook.

Trump and Pence have spoken at CNP meetings over the last year where they both thanked the group for its efforts. Pence thanked CNP’s president Bill Walton and CNP for “consistently amplifying the agenda of President Trump and our Administration” in a March 2020 letter leaked by Allpress.

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris delivers remarks after U.S. President-elect Joe Biden announced nominees of his cabinet that will round out his economic team, including secretaries of commerce and labor, at The Queen theater on January 8, 2021, in Wilmington, Delaware.

This article was produced by Sludge, an independent, ad-free investigative news site covering money in politics. Click here to support Sludge.

In March 2016, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink began hiring a “shadow government” of Democratic operatives and economic policy wonks. The reasoning was transparent: this coterie of revolvers would safeguard BlackRock’s interests in Washington whether or not Larry Fink was ultimately named Treasury Secretary, a role to which he long aspired and for which Barack Obama had already considered him.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, managing just under $8 trillion of assets as of September 2020, much of which is invested passively in the world’s largest companies in everything from oil to green energy to cybersecurity to infrastructure development.

Though Clinton ultimately lost the election, Fink continued hiring Democratic operatives and remained personally involved in party politics. Now, as Joe Biden prepares to enter the White House, members of the BlackRock “shadow government” are queued up for major policy roles. They include Brian Deese, who will be the next National Economic Council director, and Wally Adeyemo, who will be a top aide to Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen. Yet the BlackRock figure set to join the administration with the deepest ties to both the firm and the neoliberal economic policies it benefits from won’t be serving in the White House at all, but rather as the top economic aide to Biden’s potential successor.

The American Prospect reported on Wednesday that Mike Pyle, global chief investment strategist at BlackRock and one of the original members of Fink’s “shadow government,” will become Vice President Harris’ chief economist.

Pyle cut his teeth in the early Obama administration as an aide to Peter Orszag, Obama’s first budget chief and the single most vocal austerity advocate in the midst of the Great Recession. (Fink, for his part, was and remains a deficit scold.) Orszag left the Obama administration in 2010 and took a job at Citigroup, prompting a New York magazine profile literally titled “Revolver.”

Before leaving the White House for Wall Street, however, Orszag worked closely with Pyle to design “the fiscal and budgetary aspects of health reform,” according to a Pyle bio. What exactly Pyle contributed to the Affordable Care Act is unclear, but Orszag’s overall contributions to Obama’s signature health law are among its most baffling elements.

Orszag shaped the ACA’s heavy focus on cutting costs within the existing healthcare system via so-called “managed care.” This refers to a range of techniques for lowering costs for existing private health insurance holders, such as cost-sharing or preventive treatment, rather than expanding access to cover more patients. This follows Orszag’s overall obsession with budget deficits, according to contemporaneous reporting in the New Yorker. And yet, one year before Obama took office, Orszag had personally overseen a study debunking the very theory of managed-care cost savings he inserted into the ACA. According to one health policy expert, that massive report “said the managed care fads would at best save the federal government microscopic sums of money.” If, as seems likely, Pyle aided Orszag in framing the ACA around managed-care and cost saving, then he helped build large swaths of American healthcare infrastructure around a theory Orszag should have known wouldn’t work.

Biden’s own signature healthcare proposal — appending a public health insurance option to the Affordable Care Act — takes a different approach, namely making more coverage available overall, not just making existing options more efficient coverage. For his part, Pyle has unsurprisingly been tight-lipped about any flaws in the original ACA’s design over the years. A public option for health insurance would be a costly new government program — exactly what Pyle’s close associates Fink and Orszag both detest.

This isn’t the only area where Pyle’s government career has run counter to Biden’s public policy pronouncements. After working for Orszag, Pyle migrated to the Treasury Department under Lael Brainard, where he “helped to manage the full range of Treasury’s international economic efforts.” For Brainard, those “international economic efforts” turned out to be enough of a political liability to help tank her all-but-assured rise to Treasury Secretary.

At Treasury, Brainard “resisted all efforts” to label China a currency manipulator despite economists’ findings that doing so would increase U.S. GDP and employment, and could even help Chinese workers. When Congress eventually passed legislation in 2015 to toughen currency manipulation rules, some progressives in Congress joked that the bill should be called the Lael Brainard Memorial Act.

Brainard also helped shape the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) during her time at Treasury, with one Treasury official telling HuffPost: “Structurally, a lot of this fell under her. The fact that she had influence and a serious imprint is pretty cut and dry.” A wide swath of progressive stakeholders from the environmental movement to labor leaders to political opponents of Big Pharma ultimately helped prevent Congress from ever certifying the TPP. Former Secretary of State Clinton was forced to disavow the deal she helped create, and President Trump campaigned on his opposition to the deal, criticizing its “handouts for insiders.”

Biden has already signaled a reversal from much of Brainard’s — and thus, Pyle’s — global economic policy legacy. Biden specifically chastised China’s past currency manipulation to the United Steelworkers union and plans to appoint the most progressive United States trade representatives of any modern Democrat in Katherine Tai. Public Citizen’s Lori Wallach, one of the most knowledgeable left-leaning trade watchers, praised Tai’s “encyclopedic knowledge of trade” and “top-notch political skills.”

Both of these policy shifts also run counter to Larry Fink’s perspectives. In 2017, Fink described China as “a currency manipulator, but the opposite. They have spent almost $1 trillion keeping the currency where it is, and by all measures, when you look relative to other currencies, China’s currency is actually pretty high.” Fink spent much of 2017 and 2018 hand-wringing about Trump’s trade wars with China, and as a truly global asset manager with multiple trillions invested worldwide, BlackRock has an obvious stake in the global trade regime.

By becoming Harris’ top economic adviser, Pyle is gaining stock with Biden’s most likely successor as leader of the Democratic Party, despite coming out of an economic legacy Biden seems to be moving away from. The public record has little information about Pyle’s own personal economic philosophies, but his experience working alongside Orszag and Brainard on some of their least successful initiatives raises questions — most especially, has Pyle learned from those failures and acknowledged them as such?

The fact that Pyle left government for BlackRock, and has remained there ever since, does not inspire confidence that the answer to this question is “yes.” Pyle will likely have to pledge to recuse himself from BlackRock-related policy matters, as other firm alums like Deese and Adeyemo have. But this only highlights the ridiculousness of hiring BlackRockers in the first place. To make such a pledge meaningful, these policymakers would need to recuse themselves from practically every avenue of economic policymaking. BlackRock, after all, is “one of the top owners of every industry,” in Deese’s own words.

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