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Tag: extremism
Ultra-Right: The Bizarre And Extraordinary Extremism Of Doug Mastriano

Ultra-Right: The Bizarre And Extraordinary Extremism Of Doug Mastriano

Pennsylvania Republican nominee for governor Doug Mastriano posed for an Army War College faculty photo wearing a Confederate uniform in 2014, according to images published by Reuters. A few days later, Media Matters' Eric Hananoki posted video from 2020 of Mastriano complimenting a man wearing a Confederate battle flag as a cape in front of a statue of General Robert E. Lee.

The Confederate battle flag is a well-known symbol of modern right-wing extremism and remains a common sight in parts of the country, including as part of the design of some state flags.

But Confederate imagery is only the most obvious and familiar example of Mastriano's deep connection to a vast constellation of far-right groups and ideas: His campaign has employed militia members; he counts a number of self-proclaimed prophets as supporters and staff; he has pushed a legislative agenda based on Christian nationalist policies as a state senator; and he has repeatedly used sometimes violent far-right Christian symbolism in his public life.

Mastriano, who received former President Donald Trump's endorsement during the Republican primary, spent thousands of dollars from his campaign coffers to bus Pennsylvanians to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 and was present on the Capitol grounds during the insurrection that day by Trump supporters.

Several of Mastriano's supporters have been convicted of crimes related to their participation in the insurrection, including at least one who rode on a bus chartered by Mastriano. At first, the Republican denied being present on the Capitol grounds after violence broke out, but a radio interview unearthed by the website Pennsylvania Spotlight revealed that he had seen at least two attempts to break into the Capitol building. Footage uncovered by online activists showed Mastriano and his wife, Rebecca, breaching barricades abandoned by police outside of the building.

The House committee investigating the January 6 attack subpoenaed Mastriano in February to ask about his presence at the Capitol that day and his role helping the Trump campaign assemble a slate of fake Republican electors in Pennsylvania, a state that Biden won. After winning the Republican primary, the candidate agreed to a voluntary interview and provided documents to the committee but refused to answer questions during the interview and left after less than 15 minutes.

Mastriano is now suing the committee, alleging that it does not have the proper authority to make witnesses testify.

Dr. Heidi Beirich, the co-founder and leader of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told The American Independent Foundation, "There's no question that Confederate symbols are racist and directly tied to the Confederacy's defense of slavery and Black oppression."

"It may appear that the Confederate flag is a 'soft' representation of white supremacy, but its ubiquitousness in those circles shows white supremacists know exactly what it means. We shouldn't forget that the riots in Charlottesville in 2017 came about because racial extremists wanted to protect a Robert E. Lee statue," Beirich added.

Insurrectionists and militiamen

A member of Mastriano's security team, Scott Nagle, was listed in January as the Lancaster County regional leader for the Oath Keepers, the website LancasterOnline reported last month. The Oath Keepers are a far-right militia group that was extensively involved in the insurrection. Eleven members of the militia, including founder and leader Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, a U.S. Army veteran, were indicted on charges, including seditious conspiracy, by a federal grand jury at the beginning of the year.

According to prosecutors, several Oath Keepers established a makeshift base of operations in a Comfort Inn outside Washington ahead of Jan. 6, which they stocked with explosives and firearms in preparation for overturning President Joe Biden's victory.

Nagle has reportedly been photographed on several occasions with Mastriano.

Beirich noted that Oath Keepers members are also involved in election races this year: "Self-declared Oath Keepers members are running for office in some states. In a way, the line between the far right of the GOP and these extremist groups has become blurred, and their ideas are finding even more footing in the mainstream."

At the Fourth of July parade in Glenside, Pennsylvania, Mastriano supporters were reported to have marched with a Three Percenter flag, a symbol of a right-wing extremist anti-government ideology within the militia movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Theocracy by any other name

Mastriano is deeply tied to Christian nationalist extremists who say they want to govern America on the basis of religious principles. Many challenge the notion of a separation between church and state; Mastriano himself in April called it a "myth."

In March, Mastriano campaigned with Julie Green, a self-described "prophet" who says that Nancy Pelosi drinks the blood of children — a claim that Media Matters notes is aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump is fighting a Democrat-led "deep state" that runs an international satanic child-trafficking ring.

Mastriano is closely associated with regional leaders in the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of charismatic and Pentecostal preachers who believe that America ought to be governed according to their interpretation of Biblical law. NAR-affiliated leaders are reported to believe that God has bestowed the gift of prophecy on some in the movement and that demonic forces are at work in the world and must be fought by spiritual means.

Abby Abildness, who has worked in the Pennsylvania state Capitol as a lobbyist, is a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation. She has interviewed Mastriano for her podcast and, in one incident, walked the grounds of Gettysburg National Military Park on July 4, 2021, with Mastriano and his wife, praying that God defend the park from antifa amid online rumors that members of that movement planned to deface monuments and burn Americans flags — rumors that were later revealed to be the work of a social media prankster.

Salon's Frederick Clarkson reported in July that Mastriano had sponsored bills based on model legislation distributed originally through the so-called "Project Blitz," produced by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, with which Abildness is affiliated. The bills would have required that the Bible be taught in public schools and allowed adoption agencies to refuse to work with same-sex couples.

An appeal to heaven

Mastriano's gubernatorial campaign and public life are steeped in right-wing Christian nationalist symbolism, including the use of Jewish ritual items that have taken on meaning in Christian nationalist circles, such as the shofar, or ram's horn, blown as a trumpet by Jews on certain holidays and used now by some Christians to declare spiritual warfare. A man wearing a Jewish prayer shawl blew a shofar at the launch of Mastriano's campaign.

The New Yorkerreported in 2021 that Mastriano has hung a flag bearing the phrase "An appeal to heaven" on his office door in Harrisburg. The phrase, taken from 17th century English philosopher John Locke, refers to the right of people to revolt against their leaders when they become tyrants, and the so-called Pine Tree Flag bearing the phrase was first flown by Continental Army warships during the American Revolution.

More recently, the flag has reportedly been adopted by the pro-Trump Christian preacher Dutch Sheets as a symbol of "gathering a network of fellow believers serving Christ in public office to fellowship, encourage, and serve one another in our common mission." It was carried by participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Mastriano's campaign has paid Gab, a social media platform that is a haven for antisemites, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists, to promote his campaign. The website's founder, Andrew Torba, publicly espouses a multitude of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism.

Mastriano has been reportedly playing down his more extremist views and associates since winning the Republican primary. Reports note that he rarely talks about abortion on the campaign trail, despite having said during the primary campaign that passing a ban on the procedure is his "number one issue." In July, the Philadelphia Inquirerreported that he had deleted social media posts containing videos about conspiracy theories and his extreme views.

Despite his efforts, more than a dozen prominent Republicans have rejected Mastriano as too extreme and have endorsed his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

However, many state Republican figures have closed ranks around Mastriano.

Jared Holt, senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told The American Independent Foundation, "The entity that could course-correct [extremism] most efficiently would be the Republican Party."

Beyond that, Holt stressed the importance of participation in the democratic process and government. "If there are 20 conspiracy theorists showing up at a school board meeting to intimidate members, there's no reason why there shouldn't be at least 20 people there to offer a countermessage," he said.

Shapiro has led Mastriano in every poll of the race taken so far, although some, such as Emerson College's, conducted in late August, have the candidates within the margin of error. And while the campaigns haven't had to release fundraising numbers since June, those reports showed Shapiro with $20 million on hand to Mastriano's $954,000. The next round of campaign finance reports are due in late September.

Reprinted with permission from American Independent.

Carlson's Extremism Shows Murdochs Haven't Truly Dumped Trump

Carlson's Extremism Shows Murdochs Haven't Truly Dumped Trump

Last Friday evening, the New York Postand The Wall Street Journal each published editorials condemning Donald Trump’s refusal to stop the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, as chronicled by the latest hearing from the House select committee investigating the assault. Soon after, the chattering class came to a swift – but ultimately premature – conclusion: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, who control those publications, had turned on the former president.

Those observers should have waited another hour or so.

While they were contemplating the implications of the Murdoch empire rejecting Trump, the Murdochs’ protege, Tucker Carlson, was starting his Fox News program with a furious salvo against the January 6 committee that reflected much of what the network’s millions of viewers have been seeing since the hearings began last month.

Carlson did not condemn Trump on Friday. In fact, consistent with his network’s pattern of ignoring the committee’s findings, the Fox host did not mention Trump’s activities on January 6 at all. Instead, he devoted his opening monologue to the argument that the committee’s actions constitute “politicized justice” like that found in an “authoritarian regime,” in which “your opponents go to jail, your supporters can do whatever they want, and this reveals that the state exists not to serve the people who live in it, but to preserve itself and to crush all dissent.”


Carlson’s complaint is that the successful prosecutions of many close allies of the president – including former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, found guilty of contempt that day for refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoena, along with, among others, Trump’s former campaign chair, his former national security adviser, and his longtime political adviser – indicate not a pattern of rampant criminality around Trump, but rather that the United States is “moving toward the authoritarian system we now have, where justice is an illusion.”

The Fox host went on to characterize the hearings as a “show trial” taking place under the “woke system of justice that Liz Cheney has brought us” (in fact, it is not a trial at all).

Carlson also minimized the violence on January 6, laughing at the committee receiving testimony from an anonymous White House security official who was, in Carlson’s words, “claiming that Secret Service agents assigned to Mike Pence were using their radios to tell their families goodbye like they're on the deck of the Titanic because they assumed they would die in the Capitol because some guy in Viking horns on mushrooms was spinning around in circles and talking about peace.” He added, “They were so afraid.”

Of course, when one of the scores of law enforcement officials who were assaulted by the mob on January 6 testified publicly last year, Carlson made fun of him too.

Carlson also denounced other media outlets, calling it “absolutely shameful, absolutely shameful that the other channels played this crap without pushing back in even the mildest way,” and praised Fox for refusing to air the hearings live in prime time.

He concluded that the committee “worked in tandem with the Justice Department to punish the enemies of the Democratic Party,” representing “the single greatest threat to the rule of law in the history of the United States.”

Carlson then brought on Bannon, who called for an investigation into “FBI asset involvement” on January 6 and praised the Fox host’s past reporting on the attack (Carlson has suggested the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trumpists was a false flag masterminded by the federal government). Bannon also described the Biden administration as “illegitimate,” an allusion to the underlying lie that motivated the insurrectionists – that the election had been rigged against Trump.

Carlson isn’t an outlier at Fox. His colleagues at the right-wing propaganda network have tried to bury the committee’s revelations while instead feeding conspiracy theories about the attack to their viewers.

If the Murdochs didn’t want all this to happen, it wouldn’t happen. Rupert gave Carlson a job and a show, Lachlan reportedly speaks to him regularly, and together they made him the face of their network, which has defended him against any and all criticism for years.

“I’m 100 percent [Rupert Murdoch’s] bitch,” Carlson once said. “Whatever Mr. Murdoch says, I do."

The Murdochs may want some credit from the establishment for having their relatively high-brow outlets, the Journal and the Post, criticize Trump. But they also want to speak to the party’s Trumpist, pro-insurrection base. And so they are cheering on Tucker Carlson’s blood-soaked white nationalism, his deadly anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and his reprehensible 1/6 trutherism.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Justice Department Launches New Program To Identify U.S. Extremists

Justice Department Launches New Program To Identify U.S. Extremists

By Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced a new effort Monday to disrupt foreign terrorist cells from recruiting Americans, including a program to identify radicals who hold U.S. passports and are associated with the militant group Islamic State.

The aim is to identify and stop Americans before they join the ranks of terrorist groups overseas or return from abroad with plans to strike in this country, Holder said in a video message on the Justice Department’s website.

“We have established processes for detecting American extremists who attempt to join terror groups abroad,” he said.

He added that Justice Department officials will step up their efforts working with local law enforcement agencies and community networks, building upon about 1,700 meetings already held in the last two years. He also announced a White House conference next month to deal with “Countering Violent Extremism.”

Holder’s “pilot program” comes two months after his remarks during a law enforcement conference in Norway, where the attorney general said about 7,000 foreign fighters, including dozens of Americans, have streamed into Syria to take up arms there. The growing concern for the United States and other countries is that many of these fighters will return home with valid passports and an eagerness to spread their radicalism.

“In the face of a threat so grave, we cannot afford to be passive,” he said in Oslo.

In the Justice Department video Monday, Holder echoed that concern, invoking last week’s 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the growing menace of Islamic State, which had seized large swaths of Iraq and Syria, and beheaded three Westerners.

AFP Photo/Al Seib

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Syrian Islamists’ Call For A Free State Likely Directed At West

Syrian Islamists’ Call For A Free State Likely Directed At West

By Mitchell Prothero, McClatchy Foreign Staff

BEIRUT — The largest coalition of Islamist rebels in Syria issued a manifesto over the weekend that calls for the increasingly fractious rebels to unite around the notion of liberating the country from the government of President Bashar Assad and installing a free state that will protect the rights of religious minorities, not an Islamist state.

The position spelled out in the statement, titled the “Revolutionary Manifesto of the Islamic Front,” marked a reversal of a policy articulated last year that called for creating an Islamist state after the defeat of Assad. Analysts and observers agreed that the statement seemed directed at the international community, particularly the United States, which has been reluctant to support widespread military aid for the rebels over concerns about radicalism.

The statement, which was released as an audio posting on jihadi websites, was said to have the support of the Islamic Front’s leadership, including Hassan Abboud, the leader of a conservative militant group, Ahrar al-Sham, whose founders included members of al-Qaida and which previously had espoused developing an Islamic emirate as a predecessor to the return of a caliphate to rule all Muslim lands. Ahrar al-Sham is thought to be the largest group in the Islamic Front.

The statement was immediately attacked by the most radical groups in the anti-Assad movement, al-Qaida’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, an al-Qaida-inspired group that’s broken with al-Qaida over tactics in Syria. Analysts said the denunciation of the statement by Nusra and ISIS lent it credibility as a sincere policy position.

The manifesto “seems sincere considering the rabid response against it by (Nusra) and its supporters/sympathetic ideologues,” said Aaron Zelin, who studies radical Islamist groups as a fellow at the Institute for Near East Policy in Washington.

Whether it will influence the Obama administration’s reluctance to authorize aid for the Islamic Front remains to be seen. Zelin acknowledged that Ahrar al-Sham’s acquiescence to the new position was “weird,” considering the group’s al-Qaida connections.

AFP Photo/Ahmad Aboud