Everyone who knew Ken Balcomb—the great whale scientist who died this week at age 82 after a long struggle with cancer—has stories to tell about him, often many of them. My favorite is one that he liked to tell sometimes, but that other people I know witnessed on several different occasions.
If you had any thought that the insurrection that we all saw unfold on Jan. 6 might have just been a one-day affair—rather than the ongoing attack on American democracy that it in fact has become—you just needed to see Steve Bannon wrapping up this week’s eliminationism-themed “America Fest 2022” put on by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA outfit in Phoenix.
The antidemocratic far right has been building momentum for its campaign of intimidation against the LGBTQ community this year by organizing gangs of armed neofascist thugs to turn out at their events—ranging from Pride gatherings to drag-queen story hours—and has largely done so without resistance. That’s beginning to change—and it seems to be making a difference.
One of the unfortunate realities of the Republican assumption of control of the House in 2023 is that congressional committees’ power to investigate far-right terrorism and insurrection will functionally evaporate, because the GOP has zero interest in pursuing the matter.
The 40,000-plus North Carolinians who have been without power since Saturday because someone knocked out the power grid in Moore County have largely been restored to service now, thanks to workers at Duke Energy who scrambled to replace the equipment destroyed in what has all the earmarks of a domestic terrorist attack. The investigation into the attacks continues apace, with the FBI issuing search warrants both for individuals and for cell phone data.
The first time I came across the Oath Keepers back in the summer of 2009, it was all because of a then-29-year-old ex-Marine wearing a skull mask and ranting about the need for “Patriot” militiamen to “rise up” in “a violent revolution.” It was a telling introduction.
The Marine’s name was Charles Dyer. He was an Iraq War combat veteran, and his videos began turning up in late 2008 and early 2009 on YouTube.
We’ve known for some time now that the presence of far-right extremists within the ranks of our police forces is a serious problem, one that was amplified by the Jan. 6 insurrection, where a number of officers were participants. Despite that, there’s been little effort among either police authorities themselves or their civic and federal overseers to confront the issue and begin rooting white supremacists out of our policing system.
Everyone fighting to defend democracy in the just-finishing midterm elections breathed a sigh of relief this week when it became clear that the election denialists running to take over the election apparatuses in key battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan all lost in their races decisively, in a clean sweep.
MAGA fanatics are nothing if not predictable. Almost from the moment that Democrat Katie Hobbs was declared the winner of the Arizona governor’s race, the army of election denialists lined up behind loser Kari Lake—their last possible hope for taking control of the voting apparatus in a battleground state—donned their well-worn tinfoil hats, and howled an all-too-familiar cry: It was stolen! Voter fraud! Democrats are cheating.
Denialists gotta deny. It’s what they do. Even when a national election result dumps cold water all over the idea that voters are even close to buying far-right claims of “election theft,” shutting out every election denialist who sought office in every battleground state where they might wreak havoc—they deny that this has happened to them.
While other far-right paramilitary groups who played key roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection, such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, have remained highly active in its aftermath, the followers of the antigovernment Boogaloo civil-war movement have mostly kept a low profile. But it’s fairly clear, as two arrests made this week in separate states indicate, that its followers remain quietly active, lurking in the background.
When a jury earlier this year acquitted two of the 14 men charged in the bizarre plot by a group of far-right militiamen to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, there was immediate concern that we might be seeing a repeat of the disastrous failed prosecutions of other right-wing extremists. However, the subsequent convictions in August of the two ringleaders in the retrial of the same federal case alleviated some of those fears.
Joe Kent, the Donald Trump-endorsed Republican candidate in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District, clearly has a lot to hide. He’s done his best to cover up his multifarious connections to the right-wing extremists—including white nationalists, Proud Boys, and their cohorts—who provided him with his earliest and most vociferous support.
Alex Jones, who long ago demonstrated his estrangement from reality, has been putting on a brave front in the wake of this week’s jury verdict in Connecticut awarding the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre nearly $1 billion in damages for having smeared them relentlessly after the tragedy.
Alex Jones, who long ago demonstrated his estrangement from reality, has been putting on a brave front in the wake of this week’s jury verdict in Connecticut awarding the parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre nearly $1 billion in damages for having smeared them relentlessly after the tragedy.
Within a few weeks of the Jan. 6 insurrection, it became crystal clear that the Republican Party, by openly embracing both Donald Trump’s Big Lie that fueled the violent attack on democracy and the mob of far-right “Patriots” who undertook it, had ceased to be a viable partner in American democracy.
The 40 or so insurrectionists being held in the Washington, D.C., jail while awaiting trial—having proven their susceptibility to conspiracy theories and disinformation by engaging in criminal behavior at the Jan. 6 Capitol siege—not only have become convinced of their own martyrdom, which they’ve been using to raise funds for their cause. They’re also convinced that they’d have better conditions being held at Guantanamo Bay than in D.C.
The American right’s entire agenda now is driven by a singular narrative: Liberals are evil. Not merely bad, but beyond-the-pale foul and unholy, demonically possessed and intent on destroying the nation.
Donald Trump’s MAGA followers were in full meltdown mode this week after the news broke Tuesday that the FBI had seized the cell phone of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the leading figures and financiers of the Trumpist election-denialism movement. Within hours, a number of leading Trump defenders—including Fox News’ Tucker Carlson—were denouncing what they all claimed was a sure sign of the Biden administration’s persecution of conservatives.
One of the reasons the Southern Resident killer whale population in the Pacific Northwest is endangered is that its primary dietary staple—Chinook salmon—happens to be prized food for humans, too. And humans are bad at sharing: While Northwest salmon harvests are carefully regulated, divvied up between commercial, tribal, and sport fishermen, the federal authorities in charge of those decisions leave no place at the table for the orcas whose survival depends on the salmon.
One of the constants of the world of right-wing extremists is that their leaders all find ways to turn their authoritarian activism into a moneymaking operation that wrings funds out of their gullible followers. Even if these leaders buy their own bullshit—and most of them do—they also are assiduous in creating revenue streams generated from the eager suckers who lap it up.
For most of his misbegotten tenure in the Oval Office, Donald Trump danced a three-step tango with right-wing extremists: Apparently embracing them, then stepping back with official (and unconvincing) disavowal, then swinging them back into his arms.
The arrests this week of five Florida militiamen who called themselves the “B Squad” for their violent actions on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol serve as a helpful reminder that the Justice Department is still in the process of bringing the insurrectionists who attacked American democracy that day—now over 860 and counting—to justice.
When a Michigan jury last April acquitted two of the key players in the plot by a group of far-right militiamen to kidnap and execute Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, it appeared that federal prosecutors once again had bungled a clear case of far-right criminal behavior in the mode of previous failures like the Malheur standoff and Hutaree militia cases.
America’s right-wing extremists have been hankering for a civil war for a long time now, and in particular have been eager to start using their guns in defense of Donald Trump ever since he came onto the political scene. They tried to start a civil war on Trump’s behalf after he lost on Jan. 6, 2021.
FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington—So far, the summer of 2022 has been the most encouraging season in at least six years in terms of restoring the health of the Southern Resident killer whales’ native summer habitat in the Salish Sea. The last time the SRKWs visited as frequently as they have this year was 2016, a season that was shadowed by death and decline.
In 2022, they’ve been frequent though not entirely regular visitors to the Salish Sea and the San Juan Islands.
From their very beginnings in the 1990s, “Patriot” militia groups have tried to portray themselves as civic-minded defenders of their communities who show up at natural disasters as well as for “communist” threats to their well-being. Over the years, they’ve posed as flood rescue workers, volunteer border watchers, and anti-pedophilic “groomer” watchdogs—but in reality, they always have been nothing but unaccountable thugs with gun.
When prosecutors in Portland, Oregon, in 2019 filed riot charges against Joey Gibson, the leader of the Proud Boys-adjacent street-brawling group Patriot Prayer, it provided a glimmer of hope that the city’s law enforcement officials would finally start taking the organized violence against their citizens seriously.
It didn’t work out that way.
House Republicans added yet another brick in their growing wall of far-right extremism this week: They voted unanimously against a measure requiring federal military and law enforcement officials to analyze and report on the breadth and depth of the presence of right-wing extremists, particularly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, within the ranks of the nation’s military and law enforcement.
Friday Harbor, Washington: The trend that San Juan Island whale watchers observed in late May—when the entirety of the endangered Southern Resident J pod spent eight days cruising the Salish Sea, with repeated visits to the island’s west side—picked up again in the third week of June.