“In the text, Carlson describes watching a video of several Trump supporters beating up an (alleged) antifa member on the streets of Washington, DC. His reaction is nuanced: He confesses to feeling a certain vicious bloodlust while watching the video — “I really wanted them to hurt the kid” — but realizes that this is a horrific impulse that ought to concern him. “I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed,” Carlson writes.
But the most important line is one where he describes the attack in racial terms: “Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”
His obvious implication is that nonwhite men gang up on defenseless opponents all the time, whereas whites only commit violence honorably.”
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“is it any worse than mainstreaming the “great replacement” conspiracy theory developed by white supremacists? Is it more offensive than saying immigrants make America “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided”? Is it more racist than downplaying the killings of unarmed Black men by the police, or accusing Tennessee state Rep. Justin Pearson (who is Black) of putting on a fake “sharecropper” accent?
Tucker has done all of these things on the air”
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“A core part of Tucker Carlson’s message is that he, and his viewers, are colorblind: that they are standing up for the ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. against liberals who want to polarize America along racial lines for their own nefarious purposes. “You can’t attack people, whole groups of people on the basis of their race and ethnicity. Not in the media, especially,” he said in a representative February broadcast.”
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“Seeing whites as at once the master race and victims is common in racist thought. Nazi propaganda described Jews as both inferior to Aryans and their conspiratorial oppressors; modern-day white supremacists routinely warn about the prospect of “white genocide,” a specter that Carlson also invoked on his show.
But Carlson’s maneuver was to sever the theory of white victimhood from its explicit white supremacist roots. Fox viewers should stand up for white interests not because whites are the superior race, in this narrative, but because they’re being victimized by the dastardly Democrats and race-mongers who are standing in the way of racial harmony.”
“Gang violence has killed more than 530 Haitians this year and 187 in the past two weeks alone, as the security and political situation in the Caribbean nation continues to devolve. Decades of corrupt leadership and weakened democratic institutions — supported by the United States — have brought a state of terror and lawlessness to Haiti without an achievable political solution or even an end to the violence in sight.
The violence, concentrated in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and the surrounding areas, is caused by political and economic factors including the decimation of the country’s largest economic driver, agriculture, and subsequent urban migration, small arms proliferation, and a political class willing to weaponize Haiti’s struggles to cling to power. The person nominally in charge of the country, acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, lacks a true mandate to power and has proven incapable of managing the chaos, instead proposing to deploy the country’s young and fragile military to maintain order.”
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“Violence by groups and gangs connected to the state is not new in Haiti, but a number of factors have contributed to the gangs’ power at the present moment. Political leaders as far back as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Haiti’s populist elected leader-turned-dictator from 1957 through 1971, have formed and utilized armed groups external to national security forces for protection or to enforce their own agendas and self-interest, according to an October report from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.
The present gangs are primarily affiliated with two groups, G-Pep and G9, which fight for control of Port-au-Prince. An estimated 60 percent of the capital is under the control of these groups, which terrorize civilians not only with threats of murder, but also abduction for ransom, extortion, and sexual violence, often at random.”
“While crime has risen since the pandemic in most US cities, it’s not spiking in downtowns.”
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“Violent crime has long been concentrated in low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods that have also been marked by segregation, discrimination, and disinvestment. But crimes in those areas, Love said, tend to get less media attention than those that occur downtown.”
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“And therein lies the problem. People don’t want to go downtown because they’re worried. But the best way to make people feel safe again downtown … is to have more people there. The best way to square that circle, Grabar suggests, is that downtowns should try and attract residents instead. That means converting offices to residences and building new housing.”
“since its independence in 1956, Sudan has undergone the highest number of attempted coups of any African nation, the New York times reported Saturday. That kind of entrenched instability tends to breed further coups”
““Very little about Jan. 6 was organized or violent. Surveillance video from inside the Capitol shows mostly peaceful chaos,” Carlson said, falsely, playing clips of Capitol police security footage that he argued depicted a calm scene. In reality, the insurrection was a violent breach that led to five deaths and the assaults of about 140 police officers. Carlson’s points echo arguments made by Trump voters and members of the Republican base, who’ve increasingly incorrectly suggested that the riot was more of a legitimate protest than a deadly incursion.
Since Carlson’s segment aired, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger issued an internal memo denouncing it and noting that the Fox News host “cherry-picked” footage that portrayed the attack in a “misleading” way.”
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““It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here in the Capitol thinks,” McConnell said at a weekly news conference”
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““I think it’s a very dangerous thing to do to suggest that attacking the Capitol of the United States is in any way acceptable and is anything other than a serious crime against democracy and against our country,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who was shown during congressional January 6 hearings as having narrowly avoided an encounter with an angry mob. “To somehow put [Jan. 6] in the same category as a permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” added Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND).”
“Russell has previously been described by federal officials as a founder of a Neo-Nazi group known as the Atomwaffen. In 2018, he was sentenced to five years in prison on explosives charges. Russell was released in August 2021, federal Bureau of Prisons records show.
According to a criminal complaint charging the pair with conspiracy to destroy an energy facility, Clendaniel told an FBI confidential informant about plans to attack five substations in an effort to cause widespread blackouts. That “would completely destroy this whole city,” Clendaniel allegedly said.
Extremists, cybercriminals and vandals have intensified attacks on the power grid in recent years, with such incidents reaching a decade-long peak last year.
However, Sobocinski said the FBI isn’t aware of any links between the pair and other plans to attack electrical infrastructure.”
“It’s now clear the speaker was the target of Friday’s attack. The assailant broke into the home looking for her, reportedly shouting, “Where is Nancy?” — echoing what insurrectionists called out when they breached the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and saying that he would wait “until Nancy got home” as he confronted Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s husband suffered a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands that required surgery after the assailant bludgeoned him with a hammer. The attacker faces federal assault and attempted kidnapping charges. (A spokesperson for the speaker said in a statement that Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.)
Republicans have dismissed any connection between their rhetoric and the attack. Instead, they’ve blamed Democratic policies on crime and suggested that growing political violence may be the result of general anxiety around election legitimacy. Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO who was cheered by Republicans when he bought Twitter last week, has advanced a right-wing anti-LGBTQ conspiracy theory around the circumstances of the attack. Though he deleted his post, it remained on Twitter long enough to be amplified and repeated by many on the right.
Even before Pelosi became speaker, Republicans in the party and those adjacent to it have demonized her regularly, featuring her in attack ads and lambasting her on Fox News. At least one of her colleagues in the House, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), has directly indicated support for violence against her. And members of right-wing militia groups such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters have sought her assassination.
Police haven’t gone into further detail about the attacker’s motivations, but his Facebook posts on conspiracy theories around Covid-19 vaccines, the 2020 election, and the January 6 attack provide a window into his radicalization. Other blog posts under his name contained screeds against minorities, politicians, women, and global elites, and content related to QAnon — the false pro-Trump conspiracy theory that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, including prominent Democrats like Pelosi, are running the world.
None of those posts reference Pelosi specifically, but all of them intersect with the ways she has been a familiar target of the right — and not just on the political fringes.”
“In conversations with voters at an early-voting location in Virginia Beach, the economy weighed far more heavily than the attack on the Capitol. While jets from a nearby Naval Air Station roared overhead, those coming and going from casting their ballots didn’t view January 6 as a factor. Mike Malbon told Vox that he had voted for Kiggans. Although he had never voted for Luria, he described himself as a swing voter who had voted for Trump, Obama, and George W. Bush. Malbon said his vote was based on the fact that he was “just not really happy with what the Democrats were doing.” When asked if he’d thought about January 6 while voting, Malbon said, “I’ve thought about it for sure. I probably would never vote for Trump again, I would have otherwise.”
Melinda Salmons, who said she was voting for Kiggans because she thought Luria was in Nancy Pelosi’s pocket, echoed this. When asked about Trump, she told Vox, “Donald Trump doesn’t affect me one way or another. The man is not running. I’m like a lot of people, I like what my pocketbook says. I do not like what he says.””
“The perpetrator’s shouts of “Where’s Nancy?” during the home invasion early Friday morning echoed the chants of pro-Trump rioters who searched the Capitol’s halls for the speaker in a bid to stop the certification of Biden’s 2020 victory.
“This is despicable. There’s no place in America. There’s too much violence — political violence — too much hatred, too much vitriol,” Biden said. “And what makes us think one party can talk about stolen elections, Covid being a hoax, [that it’s] all a bunch of lies, and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced? What makes us think that it’s not going to alter the political climate? Enough is enough is enough.””