Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Trump’s "Be Wild" Insurrection Planned in Plain Sight. More Threats of Violence Imminent.
January 14, 2021
Trump January 6 rally participants were primed for a 1 PM march to and occupation of the US Capitol by flyers posted on Facebook and elsewhere on the Internet, email, text messages and other digital communication platforms.
By Bill Berkowitz
Planning for the invasion of the US Capitol took place in plain sight and it had been brewing on-line since early December. . “For weeks, the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump railed on social media that the election had been stolen,” ProPublica’s Logan Jaffe, Lydia DePillis, Isaac Arnsdorf and J. David McSwane recently reported. “They openly discussed the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result.”
ABC News reported that “President Donald Trump's political apparatus worked behind the scenes with pro-Trump groups to plan and promote events in Washington, DC, that ultimately led to Wednesday's attack on Congress.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hannah Gais and Freddy Cruz recently reported that “Parler, a conservative alternative to Twitter that has become a haven for far-right extremism of all stripes, proved to be a haven for recruitment and promotion for the Jan. 6 pro-Trump riot at the US Capitol building.”
Parler was founded in 2018 as a conservative alternative to Twitter, but according to the SPLC, its funding structure remained a bit of a mystery until Rebekah Mercer – “a prominent conservative donor whose father, Robert Mercer, founded the now-defunct data analysis company Cambridge Analytica – was revealed to be one of the site’s founders and main backers in late 2020. Dan Bongino, a right-wing media personality, also acquired a major ownership stake in the company in summer 2020. The Mercers have also been revealed to be financial backers of Breitbart News.”
Despite Parler being a well-known meeting place for right-wing groups and domestic terrorists, it wasn’t until this past weekend that “Google announced they were pulling Parler from Google Play, citing its lack of "robust moderation," and “Apple announced it had determined Parler had not taken adequate steps to clamp down on illegal and violent activity on its platform, and as a result would be removed from the App Store indefinitely.”
Furthermore, Parler is currently inaccessible online after Amazon dropped them from their cloud hosting services, just as advertisers blacklisted the site and google and apple knocked them out of their app stores. Parler CEO John Matze says that due to wide-ranging service provider and advertising boycotts, Parler may go out of business.
An Uprepared Response by Law Enforcement
“We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th,” leaders of the Stop the Steal movement wrote on Dec. 23. Getting “wild” was clearly going to be the theme of the day; a theme taken from Trump’s urging his supporters to show up in Washington because it, he tweeted, “Will be wild.”
“Ali Alexander, a founder of the [Stop the Steal] movement, encouraged people to bring tents and sleeping bags and avoid wearing masks for the event,” ProPublica noted. “’If DC escalates… so do we,’ Alexander wrote on Parler last week — one of scores of social media posts welcoming violence that were reviewed by ProPublica in the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s attack on the capitol.”
Variious Trump-affiliated organizations had also posted on the Internet and sent text messages urging January 6 Trump supporters to march at 1 PM on the Capitol and occupy it, which coincides when Trump fired the starting gun by exhorting the Trump rioters to march to the nation’s legislative body.
But for some, as yet to be explained reasons, “law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation’s entire legislative branch — nearly all of the 535 members of Congress gathered in a joint session, along with Vice President Mike Pence — were ill-prepared.”
Upcoming investigations will determine to what extent, federal and local law enforcement agencies underestimated and miscalculated the threat – and to what extent the White House and Trump appointees leading federal agencies knowingly disregarded evidence and/or actually withheld support to threatened lawmakers and staff in the Capitol building. In addition, there is growing evidence of some GOP Congressional Reps and Trump staffers directly assisting the Capitol invasion.
White Supremacist Insurrectionists
There will undoubtedly be more pro-Trump rallies and demonstrations in the future. And while some pro-Trumpers might peel away from the movement, unwilling to engage in violence, and recoiling from its white supremacist/neo-Nazi underpinnings, there is a core of dedicated insurrectionists ready and willing to create more confrontation and violence.
The leaders of the assault on the Capitol building are much more than merely Trump supporters that believe the election was stolen from them. Social and political activist Randy Gould takes the longer view: While “much of the liberal and even some of the more radical left media dismiss the people that successfully stormed the Capitol building as a bunch of boobs -- and many of the brown-shirts’ and foot soldiers obviously are – the cadre that organized and attacked the Capitol (and who have been active and successfully organizing for quite some time now) are not simply a bunch of ignorant racists, they are white supremacists who count themselves as revolutionaries.
“They absolutely believe in their cause, and they have a coherent (though ugly, evil, and false) ideology,” Gould stated in an email exchange. “They have an intelligent leadership, strategic and tactical plans, and they have arms and know how to use them.”
As evidenced by some of those carrying incendiary devices and weapons, Gould said that they “are willing to fight, kill, and die for what they believe. They absolutely (and sometimes correctly) feel abandoned by the State, and fear for their ‘white supremacist’ culture and nation.”
If you dismiss these people outright, you do it “at your peril.”
Despite their ties to law enforcement agencies and the revelations that many of them have military experience, Gould questioned whether “they have the strength to actually overthrow the current State?” He believes that “As long as the military stays loyal to the State, I don’t think so.”
According to Gould, “these revolutionaries have a significant amount of popular sympathy, if not outright support. They have the power and ability, especially with the collusion of certain State actors, to create a great deal of mayhem and push even further their Nazi like agenda.”
“It’s an absolutely new ballgame,” Devin Burghart, executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which has tracked far-right activity for decades, told the Kansas City Star. “What was on display Wednesday in many respects is the beginning of a new movement, not the end of an old one.”
“Right now, we are at a critical juncture,” Burghart said. “Left unchecked, this newly forming movement could become something far worse than any we’ve ever seen. And what we saw in our nation’s capital could look tame compared to what we could experience in the near future.”
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