Despite media narratives blaming Black Lives Matter and antifascist activists for last summer’s protest violence, there were plenty of suspicions that far-right extremists seeking to intensify fear of the “violent left” were, in fact, responsible for a significant amount of it. These suspicions were fed by such incidents as the assassination of a federal officer in Oakland by two far-right “Boogaloo Bois” and the arrest of another “Boogaloo” enthusiast from Texas for attacking a police station in Minneapolis, David Neiwert reported at DailyKos (6/8).
Now we know, thanks to federal prosecutors investigating the Oakland incident, that it was not the act of a single “lone wolf” and his accomplice, but rather part of a larger plot by group of far-right extremists who called themselves the “Grizzly Scouts” and planned a series of deadly attacks on law-enforcement officers with the intent of making it appear to be the work of the “violent left.” Even more disturbing, according to the San Jose Mercury-News, most of these conspirators, following their arrests for destroying evidence in the case, have been released on bond by federal magistrates who have deemed them not a risk to the community.
The Grizzly Scouts, according to the grand jury indictment handed down in April, plotted a variety of lethal actions targeting law-enforcement officers in the months and weeks before fellow “Boogaloo Boi” Steven Carillo—an active-duty Air Force sergeant—shot and killed federal protection officer Dave Patrick Underwood on May 29, 2020, and then a week later, a Santa Cruz sheriff’s deputy seeking to arrest him. Carrillo was a key member of the group, which in addition to planning attacks on police, engaged in paramilitary training exercises at the home of a member near Turlock, Calif.
The four men named in the indictment—Jessie Alexander Rush, 29, of Turlock; Robert Jesus Blancas, 33, of Castro Valley; Simon Sage Ybarra, 23, of Los Gatos; and Kenny Matthew Miksch, 21, of San Lorenzo—and Carrillo used a WhatsApp chat group for the Grizzly Scouts labeled “209 Goon HQ” to plan their attacks and organize training sessions as part of the so-called “Boogaloo” movement, with which they identified.
The men created a so-called “Quick Reaction Force” intended to perpetrate acts of violence against perceived enemies, and sent a member to scout a protest in Sacramento. They also cooked up a document describing police officers as “enemy forces,” and described taking some law-enforcement officers prisoner: “POWs will be searched for intel and gear, interrogated, stripped naked, blindfolded, driven away and released into the wilderness blindfolded with hands bound.”
On May 26, three days before he shot Underwood, along with another federal officer who survived, at a Black Lives Matter protest in Oakland, Carrillo had messaged Ybarra that he wanted to conduct a “cartel style” attack on police, and the two men then met in person in Ybarra’s van to discuss the idea. Before leaving his home in Ben Lomond for Oakland on May 29, Carrillo had texted Ybarra that he was heading out to “snipe some you know what’s.”
Carrillo then met up with another “Boogaloo Boi” named Robert Justus Jr., 30, of Millbrae, who drove the van to the BLM protest with Carrillo in the passenger seat, armed with the rifle he then used to open fire at a guard booth at the Ron Dellums Federal Building manned by Underwood and his partner. Justus later turned himself in to authorities.
During the week following the shootings, the Grizzly Scouts discussed their hopes that then-President Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act as a response to the violence at the protests, which were inspired by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman.
ARIZONA ‘FRAUDIT’ RECOUNT GENERATES TOURISM. Three Pennsylvania lawmakers visited Arizona (6/2) to check out the state Senate GOP’s partisan audit of the 2020 election.
They’re the latest Republicans to make a pilgrimage to Phoenix, Ground Zero in the “stop the steal” movement’s push to find support for the far-fetched conspiracy theories suggesting the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, the Associated Press reported (6/2).
The “fraudit” tourists include US Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who cheered the audit at a rally just outside Phoenix in May. The next day, several prominent Trump supporters and conspiracy promoters were advertised as speakers at a Phoenix megachurch. Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys extremist group, recently posted a short video of himself at the Arizona Capitol.
Political pilgrimages are nothing new to Arizona, where Republican politicians have long enjoyed photo ops in front of the US-Mexico border wall. But now, the draw is the Arizona State Fairgrounds, site of a former basketball arena where a Trump supporter who has promoted election conspiracies is overseeing a hand recount of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County.
The latest visitors are Pennsylvania Sens. Doug Mastriano and Cris Dush, and Rep. Rob Kauffman. They met with Arizona legislators at the Capitol before touring the site and getting a briefing from the auditors, according to a terse statement from the audit team.
As Trump and his allies claimed without evidence last year that his Arizona loss was marred by fraud, the Arizona Senate GOP used its subpoena power to get access to all ballots, counting machines and hard drives full of election data in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and 60% of Arizona’s voters. They handed all of it over to a team led by Cyber Ninjas, a small consulting firm with no prior election experience for a hand recount and analysis of vote-counting machines and data.
The effort will not change President Joe Biden’s victory, and election experts have pointed to major flaws in the auditing process. But it’s become a model for Republicans in other states hoping to turn up evidence supporting conspiracy theories.
BIDEN, OBAMA CELEBRATE RECORD ACA ENROLLMENTS WHILE SUPREME COURT PONDERS THE LAW’S FATE. “Really good news, folks,” President Joe Biden tweeted. “Great news: 31 million people are now covered by the Affordable Care Act. And I know someone who’s going to really want to know that number is up as high as it is. I got to call this fella.” Of course, “this fella” is former President Barack Obama, the guy who passed the ACA, which is more popularly known as “Obamacare” (which, for the record, he says, “I take pride in”). And 31 million enrollments is a record high for the program, Joan McCarter noted at DailyKos (6/7).
“Joe Biden, we did this together. We always talked about how if we could get the principle of universal coverage established, we could then build on it,” Obama said. “The effort was worth it. The families that have been able to care for their loved ones, be cured, have access to care, that all makes it worthwhile,” Obama said.
Those enrollments came in partly as a result of the pandemic, and the special enrollment period Biden created as soon as he got into office. The Department of Health and Human Services reported June 5 that “there have been reductions in uninsurance rates in every state in the country since the law’s coverage expansions took effect.” A big chunk of those 31 million enrollments, along with the protections the law extended for everyone who has any form of health insurance, remain in some question, however, in the Supreme Court. The court heard a challenge to the law back in November, right after the election, and was expected to issue a decision in June.
If the court overturns the ACA, McCarter noted, it poses, again, a question for the 50-50 Senate and for the usual suspects: Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. “Right now, by refusing to reconsider the filibuster, the two are giving those six— or even five, if you don’t want to count Roberts—conservatives on the Supreme Court just a little be more leeway to do their worst. Because there sure aren’t 10 Republican senators who will be volunteering to be the ones not to achieve the primary Republican goal of the last decade: repealing Obamacare,” McCarter wrote.
“Even if it means 31 million people losing their coverage. Even if it means the loss of coverage for preexisting conditions for every American with health insurance. Even if it means tens or hundreds of thousands of people potentially losing everything because of a health crisis. Republicans have proven time and again that they have no problem reverting to that status quo. The question right now is how that 50-50 Senate—and specifically, the two Democrats holding out against filibuster reform—will respond.”
REPUBLICANS ‘FORGET’ THAT TRUMP FIRED EMBEDDED CDC OBSERVER IN CHINA MONTHS BEFORE OUTBREAK. Did the coronavirus pandemic start with a leak at the Chinese virus lab at Wuhan? It’s quite possible. Can’t trust the Chinese government to tell us the truth about anything, least of all the nature of their coronavirus research or any accidents involving it, Francis Townsend noted at DailyKos (6/6).
But you know who could have been in the best possible position to inform the US about it many months ahead of the pandemic? The China-embedded CDC epidemiologist who was fired by the Trump administration in July, 2019, that’s who. Dr. Linda Quick was on the ground in China working for the US monitoring the lab. And she was never replaced. Her position was eliminated as collateral damage during Trump’s trade war with China.
“Do you remember Rand Paul or Tom Cotton or any other Trump water carrier protesting Quick’s firing at the time — or at any other time? I sure as hell don’t,” Townsend noted. So Trump, knowing that China couldn’t be trusted on anything, apparently seemed to trust them just enough not to have anyone keep tabs on their virus research. And the GOP seemed to have no problems with this, either.
DEMS WON GEORGIA, BUT GERRYMANDERS KEPT LEGISLATURE REPUBLICAN. Joe Biden put Georgia in the Democratic column for the first time in nearly three decades, but Republican gerrymanders helped keep Team Red firmly in control of both legislative chambers, DailyKos noted (6/7).
Democrats had failed to win a statewide race in Georgia since 2006, but the highly educated and diversifying Atlanta area’s rapid swing to the left during the Trump era helped power Biden to a 49.5%-49.3% victory. Two months later, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock proved this showing was no fluke by capturing both of the Peach State’s US Senate seats.
However, while the legislative boundaries the GOP crafted in 2011 and tinkered with in 2014 and 2015 failed to anticipate the party’s erosion in the suburbs, they were still more than enough to protect the party’s majorities. Democrats netted only one seat in each chamber, which left the GOP with a 34-22 advantage in the Senate and a 103-77 edge in the lower chamber.
Despite his statewide loss, Donald Trump carried 31 Senate seats to Biden’s 25, as well as 94 House districts compared to 86 for Biden. That divergence between the statewide outcomes and the legislative results is only one way, however, to illustrate the power of the GOP’s gerrymanders—and how tough it would have been for Democrats to have flipped either chamber under these maps.
DailyKos’s numbers crunchers found that the median Georgia Senate seat backed Trump 57-42, a full 15 points to the right of his statewide margin. That means that for Democrats to have secured a majority, the party’s Senate candidates would have somehow had to win districts that remained firmly Republican by double digits even during the best year for Georgia Democrats in recent memory.
The median point in the House wasn’t quite so unfavorable at 52-47 Trump, but that was still a 5-point advantage for the GOP and, in this age of heavily polarized voting, a massive obstacle for Democrats.
Democrats badly needed voters to split their tickets downballot, but Republicans actually benefited from crossover support. Three Republican senators and nine House members represent seats that voted for Biden, while not a single Democrat represents a Trump district.
TURNS OUT PEOPLE ARE LESS ANXIOUS ABOUT MONEY WHEN THEY HAVE MONEY. A new analysis of Census Bureau surveys argues that the two latest rounds of aid significantly improved Americans’ ability to buy food and pay household bills and reduced anxiety and depression, with the largest benefits going to the poorest households and those with children, the New York Times reported (6/2). The analysis offers the fullest look at hardship reduction under the stimulus aid.
Among households with children, reports of food shortages fell 42% from January through April. A broader gauge of financial instability fell 43%. Among all households, frequent anxiety and depression fell by more than 20%. While the economic rebound and other forms of aid no doubt also helped, the largest declines in measures of hardship coincided with the $600 checks that reached most people in January and the $1,400 checks mostly distributed in April.
This study, of course, makes those Republican governors who are rejecting the additional federal unemployment money (because they think it makes them look sufficiently soulless so as to attract the Republican base) appear to be even more cruel and stupid, Charles Pierce noted at Esquire.com. It’s also a reminder that this particular dynamic used to be the fundamental truth of the general American economy. It was the basis for the New Deal, and Social Security, and the regulation of the banking industry, and all the other stuff that got ground up in Greed-Is-Good supply-side fantasies over the past 40 years.
Pierce added that the data indicates that people who got the stimulus checks acted more responsibly than did the banks, who took the TARP money after the 2008 economic collapse and gave themselves bonuses.
While the ability of cash payments to reduce hardship might seem obvious, Luke Shaefer, a professor at the University of Michigan who co-authored the study, pointed out that critics of such aid often warn that the needy might waste it. He argued that the size, speed and variety of the hardship reductions vindicated the use of broad cash relief. While other forms of aid have been better targeted, some have taken many months to distribute and can be used only for dedicated purposes like food or housing.
“Cash aid offers families great flexibility to address their most pressing problems, and getting it out quickly is something the government knows how to do,” Mr. Shaefer said. Extrapolating from the survey data, he concluded that 5.2 million children had escaped food insufficiency since the start of the year, a figure he called dramatic.
STUDY SHOWS CONSERVATIVES HEAR, AND BELIEVE, FAR MORE FAKE NEWS THAN LIBERALS. A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences surveyed thousands of people to determine how likely Americans are to fall for fake news. Specifically: fake news as presented like it would be in a Facebook feed. The results appear to be both dismal and exactly what you’d expect. As reported by CNN, researchers determined that:
• 90% of study participants believed their ability to spot fake news is “above average.”
• Republicans are more overconfident than Democrats, likely based on “the lower levels of media trust they report” to begin with.
• People who are overconfident in their ability to decide which stories are hoaxes also have “greater willingness to like or share false content.” Especially when that content is political.
Yet another study, this one from The Ohio State University and reported by Neuroscience News (6/3), shows that conservatives are less able to distinguish political truths from falsehoods than liberals, mainly because of a glut of right-leaning misinformation.
Researchers found that liberals and conservatives in the US both tended to believe claims that promoted their political views, but that this more often led conservatives to accept falsehoods while rejecting truths.
“Both liberals and conservatives tend to make errors that are influenced by what is good for their side,” said Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and professor of communication at Ohio State University. “But the deck is stacked against conservatives because there is so much more misinformation that supports conservative positions. As a result, conservatives are more often led astray.”
While confirmation bias is a problem in all humans, including liberals, conservatives as a whole appear to be less discerning when it comes to sussing out true statements from the shovelfuls of offal served by Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, et al., on the daily, Aldous Pennyfarthing noted at DailyKos (6/4).
The study, originally published in the journal Science Advances, surveyed 1,204 Americans between January and June 2019.
Over the course of the study, researchers collected viral political news stories, half of which were true and half false. They then asked participants to evaluate statements based on those stories. The study found that both liberals and conservatives were susceptible to confirmation bias, being more likely to believe stories that reflected well on their side.
For instance, one statement that study participants evaluated was, “While serving as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia, selling 20% of the US uranium supply to that country in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.”
That’s false, and only 2% of Democrats believed it. But fully 41% of Republicans did, even though it’s been debunked numerous times and those fact checks are widely available online. But right-wing media blasted that conspiracy theory out on the regular, and since it involved Hillary Clinton, of course they believed it.
The study authors concede that Republicans may be more likely to be fooled by nonsense because there’s simply more conservative nonsense out there (“46% of falsehoods were rated as advantageous to conservatives, compared to 23% of false claims benefiting liberals”), they also found that “even when the information environment was taken into account, conservatives were slightly more likely to hold misperceptions than were liberals.”
TEXAS AG SAYS TRUMP WOULD’VE ‘LOST’ TEXAS IF HE HADN’T BLOCKED MAIL-IN BALLOT APPLICATIONS. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said former President Donald Trump would have lost in Texas in the 2020 election if Paxton’s office had not successfully blocked counties from mailing out applications for mail-in ballots to all registered voters, Newsweek reported (6/5).
Harris County, home to the city of Houston, wanted to mail out applications for mail-in ballots to approximately 2.4 million registered voters due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Texas Supreme Court blocked the county from doing so after Paxton’s office sued.
“If we’d lost Harris County—Trump won by 620,000 votes in Texas. Harris County mail-in ballots that they wanted to send out were 2.5 million, those were all illegal and we were able to stop every one of them,” Paxton told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon during the latter’s War Room podcast (6/4).
Trump carried Texas by more than 600,000 votes, finishing with 52.1% of the state’s more than 11.3 million votes, Biden won 46.5%. Polling ahead of the election had suggested that Biden had a shot at flipping the red state, which last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1976.
GOP lawmakers in Texas want to make it more difficult to vote in the state, citing baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
While absentee voting is allowed in Texas for anyone over the age of 65 without an excuse, the state requires younger voters to have a valid reason for requesting an absentee ballot. While Democrats believed the COVID-19 pandemic should be an acceptable excuse for any registered voter to cast their ballots by mail, Paxton and other Texas Republicans disagreed.
GOP lawmakers in Texas want to make it more difficult to vote in the state. Their efforts have been largely animated by Trump’s baseless claims that Biden won the 2020 election through widespread voter fraud. These false allegations have already been thoroughly litigated and wholly debunked, while the former president and his allies have failed to provide evidence to substantiate them.
Democratic lawmakers in the Texas state House blocked what they viewed as a voter suppression bill from moving forward at the end of May. The Democrats walked out of the late evening legislative session on May 30, denying Republican lawmakers quorum to pass the legislation. Although that successfully prevented the bill from moving forward, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, has vowed to call a special session in a further effort to pass changes to the state’s election laws.
QANON BELIEVERS SEEK LOCAL POSITIONS OF POWER. QAnon support, no longer relegated to the fringes of the internet, is increasingly going mainstream, Kerry Eleveld noted at DailyKos (6/4). Alongside a recent survey finding that roughly 15% of Americans believe in several of QAnon’s central wackadoodle tenets, 19 congressional candidates who have expressed support for QAnon-based conspiracy theories have already announced their candidacies in the 2022 cycle, according to the media watchdog group Media Matters.
“We’re at the beginning of this, not the end,” Media Matters president and CEO Angelo Carusone told CNN. “There’s a flash point right now. They’re on the ascent.”
Carusone says QAnon followers were emboldened by the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan.6, despite the fact that none of the movement’s many predictions—such as Donald Trump remaining or being reinstated as president—have actually come to fruition.
To Carusone, the threat doesn’t come from the movement’s delusional theories—it comes from the permission structure it gives to its adherents to attack outsiders. “The ideas are actually a rationalization for harming basically everybody that QAnon brands as an enemy,” he said.
But QAnon adherents gaining access to power isn’t theoretical by any means. Not only does the House GOP caucus already have several QAnon members; at the local level, Q believers in positions of power are roiling American cities and towns.
Take Grand Blanc, Mich., where the recent election of local school board member Amy Facchinello has become a locus of controversy. After former high school senior Lucas Hartwell unearthed a series of social media posts dating back to 2017 suggesting Facchinello’s support for the conspiracy theory, some members of the community began calling for her resignation.
A recent school board meeting on May 24 devolved into a contentious debate that forced a 10-minute break in order to defuse tensions, according to CNN. Prior to the meeting, a group of students, retired teachers, and parents had gathered outside to protest Facchinello’s post on the board, where she has just begun serving a six-year term. The demonstration was rife with signs featuring giant strike-throughs of the letter “Q.” One sign said, “Amy Q Resign.”
Hartwell and others say believing in QAnon is simply disqualifying for anyone dealing with education.
“I think it’s the false narrative to try to cancel Trump’s supporters,” says Facchinello, who was part of the Trump campaign in Grand Blanc.
When CNN asked her about a tweet on her account using the common QAnon slogan “WWG1WGA”—which stands for “Where we go one, we go all”—Facchinello framed the abbreviation as “an inclusive message.”
UNEMPLOYMENT AID CUTOFFS SHOW WHO HAS EAR OF REPUBLICAN GOVERNORS — AND IT’S NOT REGULAR PEOPLE. Republican governors don’t need a personal reason to cut off $300 a week in added unemployment aid for four million people. Making life harder for people struggling to get by is the Republican way. But some of the Republican governors who’ve announced they’re opting their states out of the federal unemployment supplement do have that personal reason, in the form of business interests, Laura Clawson noted at DailyKos (6/7).
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice is a major business owner in his state, and an executive at the Greenbrier, a historic resort he owns. Justice attributed an uptick in job applications to the planned cutoff of benefits, as well as to rising vaccination rates. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s family includes investors in a resort which he ran until he became governor. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is on the board of a family agricultural company. All of these businesses are advertising jobs.
Did any of them specifically consider what their businesses or family businesses wanted when making this decision affecting so many people in their states? They all deny it, and it’s probably true that it wasn’t anywhere close to the biggest factor in the decisions. But, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s Noah Bookbinder told the Washington Post, “It doesn’t really matter if there were communications with the business about the decision. These people know what their business interests are.”
And more broadly, they see themselves as aligned with business—that’s who they know, who they identify with, who they take calls from. It’s the Republican way in ways that go to the core of who these politicians are.
But just as multiple studies have shown that added unemployment benefits aren’t keeping significant numbers of people from looking for work, the evidence that the Republican governors’ moves are having a significant impact on job applications is scant.
“I don’t think that the federal benefits are an end-all, be-all problem or solution,” the president of the New Hampshire Lodging and Restaurant Association told the *Washington Post*. “The real challenge is we’re still at the tail end of the pandemic.” He said Sununu’s announcement about cutting off federal benefits had not made a “dramatic difference” in job applications.
The May jobs report showed unemployment dropping and more than half a million new jobs—but also that the economy is still 7.6 million jobs short of where it was in February 2020. And according to JPMorgan, it “looks like politics, not economics, is driving decisions regarding the early ends” to states accepting federal unemployment supplements. The states “announcing early ends all have Republican governors, and while some of these states have tight labor markets and strong earnings growth, many of them do not.”
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2021
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