The racist dimension is a theme that has been presented most powerfully by Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) in his remarks at the opening and the closing of the committee’s public hearings. “I’m from a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the Klu Klux Klan, and lynching,” Rep. Thompson said in the first hearing. “I’m reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6th, 2021.”
Racism helped propel post-election efforts to disenfranchise voters in major urban areas in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere; helped galvanize the concerted disinformation campaign against Black election poll workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss; and helped drive militia groups, Neonazis and similarly minded domestic terrorist groups to help plan and participate in the Capitol attack.
Giuliani, for example, “seized on a clip of Freeman passing Moss a ginger mint, claiming that the two women, both Black, were smuggling USB drives ‘as if they’re vials of heroin or cocaine.’ … Not only were Giuliani’s claims about Freeman and Moss reckless, racist, and false, they had real-world consequences that turned both women’s lives upside down. And further heightening the personal impact of these baseless attacks, President Trump supported, and even repeated, them, as described later,” the report states (p. 280).
“Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, mother and daughter, were besieged by incessant, terrifying harassment and threats that often evoked racial violence and lynching, instigated and incited by the President of the United States,” the report states later (p. 305) – after providing a detailed list of state and local officials across several battleground states subject to a wave of racist, sexist,and antisemitic threats galvanized by Trump and Giuliani’s public demonization of them.
The Report also contains discussion of the role of white nationalist extremists, such as “online provocateur” Nick Fuentes and his Groypers, a loose network made up of figures that hold racist and antisemitic views. It provides an in-depth look at the crucial role of the Proud Boys, “Western chauvinists” known to promote “an exclusionary, hyper-masculine interpretation of Western culture,” in organizing and executing the breach of the Capitol. The report notes that Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boys leader involved in the the attack at the Capitol, invoked the “Day of the Rope” when discussing his intent to reject the outcome of the 2020 election, “referring to a day of mass lynching of ‘race traitors’ in the white supremacist novel The Turner Diaries.”
“White supremacists and Confederate-sympathizers were among the first rioters to enter the U.S. Capitol,” the report explains.
At the same time as making these racist throughlines more widely understood, the Report helpfully identifies rightwing anti-government extremism– with a focus on the Oathkeepers and the Three Percenters– as a related movement that explains the conditions that gave rise to the January 6th attack It notes these closely related movements produced what might be thought of as a presage for the assault on the Capitol, as “[f]ar-right extremists protested at or inside State capitols, or at other government buildings, in at least 68 instances” between January 1, 2020 and January 20, 2021.
https://www.justsecurity.org/84551/i...ry-6th-report/
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by sturg33
