Since the deadly January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have pushed false and misleading accounts to downplay the event that left five dead and scores of others wounded. His supporters appear to have listened.
Three months after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to try to overturn his November election loss, about half of Republicans believe the siege was largely a non-violent protest or was the handiwork of left-wing activists “trying to make Trump look bad”, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll has found.
Six in 10 Republicans also believe the false claim put out by Trump that November’s presidential election “was stolen” from him due to widespread voter fraud, and the same proportion of Republicans think he should run again in 2024, the March 30-31 poll showed.
White supremacist propaganda reached alarming levels across the US in 2020, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.
There were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages spread through physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters in 2020, according to Wednesday’s report. That is nearly double the 2,724 instances reported in 2019.
Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and it is likely those cases reached into the millions, the organisation said in a statement.
The ADL said last year marked the highest level of white supremacist propaganda seen in at least a decade.
Its report comes as federal authorities investigate and prosecute those who stormed the US Capitol in January, some of whom are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and anti-government militias.
Khater and Tanios are not charged with killing Sicknick, the Reuters news agency reported.
The Washington Post reported they “are charged with nine counts including assaulting three officers with a deadly weapon”. Khater is from Pennsylvania and Tanios is from Morgantown, West Virginia, the paper said. They are expected to appear in a federal court on Monday.
The charging documents for Khater and Tanios are not currently available in the US online court system or the Justice Department’s database of Capitol riot investigations.
The Post, which has seen the charging documents, said an FBI agent claims Tanios said “Hold on, hold on, not yet, not yet … it’s still early”, after Khater asked for the spray, drawing from the video seen by the agent.
The incoming administration has already signaled its sensitivity to the urgency of the moment: within hours of taking office, Biden signed a slew of executive orders on the pandemic, immigration, and the climate that began the work of undoing some of what the Trump administration was able to accomplish without congressional involvement. But many of these orders only return federal policy to the pre-Trump status quo, which was already insufficient; those that go beyond that previous status quo do so in the most minimal or superficial of ways. If the Biden administration is serious about legislating towards a more just and equitable society, it must not only pursue reforms to the way that Congress itself works – abolishing the filibuster, for example – but it must prioritize structural reforms like the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would open the door to a transformation of the US labor movement.