David Neiwert

The spread of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement—which claims that local county sheriffs are the supreme law of the land, capable of overruling federal and state laws, as well as prohibiting federal and state agencies from enforcing them—throughout rural American sheriff’s offices has often seemed like a quaint but localized problem: Sure, having set themselves up as laws unto themselves, they seem to always run their jurisdictions like private fiefdoms, but

The “sovereign citizen” movement—comprising scam artists and their gullible followers who claim that, by filling reams of documents full of pseudo-legal babble, ordinary citizens can declare themselves free of government rule at any level, thus becoming the law unto themselves—seems to have figured out how, after a couple of decades of mostly lurking on the fringes of the extreme right, to expand its reach and revive (if not entirely rebrand) itself: Go full QAnon.

FRIDAY HARBOR—For about eight days at the end of May, it felt like old times again on the western side of Washington state’s San Juan Island, when all 25 members of the Southern Resident J pod visited and foraged regularly up and down the island, only periodically disappearing north into Canadian waters. For orca watchers, it was eight days of a bounteous feast.

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho—Over the past couple of decades, Pride events in northern Idaho have come and gone with little controversy as communities have come to embrace them.

The brutal act of domestic terrorism that unfolded Saturday in Buffalo, New York, at a Tops grocery store, at the hands of a hate-filled white nationalist who drove 200 miles from his home in Conklin because he had specifically targeted a predominantly Black community, was not an “isolated incident” committed by a “lone wolf.” Rather the opposite.

The ongoing far-right strategy of targeting local politics—school boards and city councils and public health boards—to gain traction for their politics of bigotry and menace is clearly a daunting concern.

We’ve usually thought of Trumpism as being an essentially mainstream-conservative movement with expanding extremist elements. But its post-Jan. 6 metastasis, bringing these elements together, suggests it has become its own kind of extremism: wildly conspiracist, militantly if not fanatically religious, and fundamentally violent.

The Groyper War—the internecine battle among far-right groups vying for the college-age audience, pitting Charlie Kirk’s slick Turning Point USA operation with Nick Fuentes’ America First and its white nationalist Groyper Army—seems to be over. With barely a whimper, the Groypers are the victors.

The COVID-19 con artists never miss a trick. Check out their latest scam: For just a small fee—well, or maybe not so small, depending on whether you want a hat and shirt or participate in the show proceedings in Nashville—you too can be seated on “America’s Grand Jury,” which plans to hold a mock trial for Dr. Anthony Fauci, accused in “the deaths of millions of people all over the globe.

It’s only taken five years of ongoing assaults and preplanned violence by right-wing thugs—accompanied by an obscene double standard in enforcement by police officers and prosecutors—for authorities in Portland, Oregon, to finally start taking the problem seriously. But two separate cases this week in Portland courts indicate that progress is finally happening.

There are two distinct populations of killer whales in the Salish Sea. The most famous are the so-called Southern Resident killer whales, an endangered clan currently down to 73 members. But there’s an entirely different orca ecotype—who have not had any kind of genetic interaction, according to scientists, for at least 300,000 years and perhaps longer, with the SRKWs—who are known as “transient” orcas, scientifically known as “Bigg’s” whales.

There are two distinct populations of killer whales in the Salish Sea. The most famous are the so-called Southern Resident killer whales, an endangered clan currently down to 73 members. But there’s an entirely different orca ecotype—who have not had any kind of genetic interaction, according to scientists, for at least 300,000 years and perhaps longer, with the SRKWs—who are known as “transient” orcas, scientifically known as “Bigg’s” whales.

Friday Harbor, Washington: It surprises people to learn that there’s a population of red foxes on remote San Juan Island, up in the northwestern-most corner of the Lower 48 states. They’re not a native species, but they’ve been here long enough that they’ve carved a niche into the ecosystem and are now a celebrated component of the island’s phenomenal wildlife.

First of two parts:

Her Lummi name is Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut (pronounced SKA-li CHUKH-teNOT). It references the cove on Whidbey Island where she was captured as a calf in August 1970. She has other names, including Tokitae, taken from Chinook jargon, bestowed by Jesse White, the veterinarian who took charge of her that day when she was ripped away from her L Pod family.

Here’s a suggestion for assignment editors at the large national media outlets who have provided us with an endless stream of stories about Trump voters in rural diners over the past half-decade: Try instead reporting on what it’s become like for non-Trump voters in these rural red areas where the politics of menace and thuggery have taken over—sort of an inverted version of the cliché; the rural Biden voter who can barely show his face at the local café.

Ever since Steve Bannon boasted to journalist Sarah Posner—just before being hired as Donald Trump’s campaign manager—that his publication at the time, Breitbart News, was “the platform for the alt-right,” it’s been self-evident what direction his right-wing populist politics were heading: straight towards white nationalism and neofascism.

David Pepper, the former Ohio Democratic Party chairman, has had a front-row seat to one of the major fronts in the American right’s insurgent war on democracy: Namely, the nation’s statehouses, where the gradual Republican takeover in the past decade has resulted in a barrage of antidemocratic laws, not to mention the empowerment of incipient far-right extremist ideology.

When I first met Bill Morlin, he was already a legend among news reporters in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll admit I was a bit starstruck: This was the man—on paper, a simple crime reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review, but much more than that—who had relentlessly covered the Aryan Nations and The Order. He was the first to report on the Ruby Ridge standoff, before it was even a standoff. His journalism was not just first-rate, it was courageous and groundbreaking.

Alex Jones has always tried to frame his far-right conspiracist Infowars site as a nonracist operation that eschews overt antisemitism and bigotry, even though his conspiracy theories are common grist for the mills of explicit white nationalists like “Groyper” leader Nicholas Fuentes. The fact that both Jones and Fuentes frequently appear at the same pro-Donald Trump, COVID-denialist events seems a mere coincidence.

Except that it’s not.

A hacker’s release last week of data from the Oath Keepers organization—which played a key role in the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection—revealed the breadth and depth of the penetration into the ranks of law-enforcement authorities by such far-right extremists. It also revealed the importance of weeding them out from the ranks of police officers—and the urgency of acting quickly.

Not only was there a surge in interest in joining the group after the Jan.

It’s one of the lingering mysteries from 2020’s anti-police brutality protests: Who tossed a couple of pipe bombs at Portland, Oregon, protesters one night in a city park? Was an ex-Navy SEAL who provides the police with training materials involved? And was there any likelihood that the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) would seriously investigate the matter?

However, the FBI has now joined the investigation at PPB’s request, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington—The summer of 2021 continued a trend of decreasing presence by Southern Resident orcas in the Salish Sea, one that began in 2016 and has seemingly deepened every year since.

FRIDAY HARBOR, Washington—K21 Cappuccino was a gregarious, curious, and kindly orca. He liked to engage in play behaviors—breaching, spyhopping, slapping his pectoral fins. And he was generally quite fearless about approaching human boaters who were in his waters. He seemed to always be curious about the crazy monkeys.

I happen to live in a place—San Juan Island in the far Pacific Northwest—that gets tons of tourists, especially on big holiday weekends like the Fourth of July. And one of the places that is most visited on the island by those tourists is in the photo above: Lime Kiln Point Lighthouse, on the island’s western side.

It’s one of my of my favorite places on the planet.

Tucker Carlson has become a relentless promoter of his twisted-bowtie version of the white nationalist “replacement theory” of immigration—namely, that Democrats are deliberately opening the national gates to a floodtide of brown immigrants whose primary purpose is to displace and dispossess Republican white voters.

There is a population of foxes on San Juan Island in northwestern Washington state, where I live. They are non-natives who were brought here in the 1930s by island dwellers who were trying to come up with a solution for dealing with the island’s other main invasive species, rabbits (who seem to have arrived sometime in the 1850s with early British settlers).

One of the consequences of the GOP’s sidelong embrace of its extremist elements—from the insurrection denialists and Big Lie gaslighters to the QAnon cultists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert—is that far-right extremists are now perfectly comfortable identifying as Republicans.

The attorneys for the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and other insurrectionists facing federal charges for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol have their work cut out for them, especially considering how their clients handed federal prosecutors all the evidence they needed, both on the day of the siege and on social media before and afterward. So it’s not a surprise that different lawyers for different clients are turning to wildly different strategies.

It’s becoming increasingly self-evident that Republicans no longer support democracy because they know they can’t enact their right-wing agenda through normal democratic means—that is, by persuading a majority of their fellow citizens to join and vote with them.

Donald Trump’s Space Force idea always seemed like a grade-school concept fueled by prepubescent boys’ fantasies featuring Buzz Lightyear and coloring book ideas about both space travel and the military. No doubt that’s why it’s been the source of so much unintentional hilarity since Trump signed off on creating it, including its painfully obvious Star Trek-derived logo.