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Jun 4, 21

This Week in Fascism #111: Pro-Coup Qanon Convention Attracts GOP; Nevada GOP Wanted to use Proud Boys to Stop Vote; Texas Neo-Nazi Murder Plot

photo: @AlissaAzar

Welcome fellow antifascists!

We’re late to the party this week but have a great column for you! Lots of hard hitting news stories, from a GOP-stocked Qanon conference where speakers endorsed conspiracy theories and a military takeover of the US, emails that link far-Right GOP Rep. Paul Goser to an attempt to use the Proud Boys to stop the election vote count, a neo-Nazi mass murder plot in Texas, continued crossover of the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis into the GOP, and much more! Be sure to also check out a new call to action in Oregon and updated information on antifascist prisoners.

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With so much to cover, let’s get into it!

News

Qanon Conference Brings the Republican Officials to the Yard, Former General Mike Flynn; Embraces Calls for Military Dictatorship

The “For God and Country” conference held in Dallas over Memorial Weekend brought out the Qanon followers alongside “Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Texas GOP Chair Allen West and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn,” the latter who agreed with an audience member that a Myanmar style military coup should be launched to conserve power on the Right. Other far-Right and pro-Trump figures pushed conspiracy theories that Trump would soon be reinstated as president and downplayed the violence of the January 6th attempted coup in DC, while a “former aide to Roger Stone, a longtime friend and former advisor to Donald Trump, appeared to indicate at the conference…that Hillary Clinton should be hanged.” The recent Qanon conference showcases a growing continued embrace of a violent project of complete and total settler-State subjugation coming out of the Right, which seeks to re-cement racial and class apartheid while popularizing anti-Semetic and anti-Left conspiracy theories.

As the Washington Post recently wrote:

While GOP efforts are ultimately aimed at the 2024 election, they will first make their impact felt in 2022. Off-year elections are always tough for the party in power. This one will be tougher still because of Republican-driven voter suppression, reapportionment and gerrymandering. Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report writes that Republicans will have full authority to redraw 187 congressional districts, while Democrats will control just 75. He estimates that redistricting in just four states — Texas, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina — could be enough to deliver the House to Republican control.

This brings us to a nightmare scenario: a Republican-controlled Congress overturning the 2024 presidential election results to install Trump or a Trump mini-me in the White House. In January, 139 House Republicans and eight Senate Republicans voted not to certify electoral college results in at least one state. Since then, the most prominent GOP opponent of the “big lie,” Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), has been purged from the House leadership. Willingness to lie about election fraud has become a litmus test for Republicans, with the implicit threat of mob violence if they don’t go along. Republicans are so scared of Trump and his fanatical followers that most of them just voted against a bipartisan investigation of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Many congressional Republicans will refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic win in swing states. If Republicans control Congress, they could deny the Democrats an electoral college majority and throw the election to the House — where each state delegation, regardless of population, would cast one ballot. Given that Republicans already control a majority of state delegations, they could override the election outcome. If that happens, it would spell the end of American democracy.

Support for Qanon is growing in Republican and Independent circles. One study found about 40% of Independents defended the conspiracy, while about 20% of Republicans did.

Emails Claim Paul Gosar Wanted to Use Proud Boys to Stop Vote Count; Neo-Nazi and Proud Boy Crossover Into the GOP Continues

A consultant hired by the Republican Party in Nevada worked to mobilize the far-Right street gang the Proud Boys to come out for a rally “protesting the validity of balloting in the presidential election, according to an email obtained by the Nevada Current from a former Republican operative.” The purpose of the protests was to stop the counting of electoral votes, much as the Roger Stone organized “Brooks Brothers Riot” did in 2000, which resulted in the election being handed to George Bush. Guess riots really do work!

It appears that Rep. Paul Gosar, the Republican official who attended and spoke at the white nationalist ‘America First Political Action Conference,’ organized by Unite the Right marcher and Holocaust denier, Nick Fuentes, is implicated in the event. From the New Civil Rights Movement website:

Messages leaked to the Washington Post implicate Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in a plot to create a so-called “Brooks Brothers Riot” in his home state to block President Joe Biden’s victory. Woodrow Johnston, the vice president of political consultancy McShane LLC, told an undercover liberal activist posing as a Trump supporter that Gosar wanted to use the far-Right Proud Boys gang to disrupt the certification of the 2020 election in Arizona. “We might need to do the same here in Nevada,” Johnston added in his message. Gosar’s office claimed that the Trump-loving Arizona congressman was not in contact with Johnston and denied coordinating any election-related protests.

Check last week’s column for more information on the cross over between the Nevada GOP and the Proud Boys. Antifash Reno points out that many far-Right groups in Nevada have also set their sights on intervening and opposing social justice and sexual education classes in local schools. Check out their recent thread, below.

Meanwhile, outside of Sacramento, according to Raw Story:

Chelsea Knight, one of seven admins for the Placer County For Trump Facebook group and one of the group’s most ardent promoters, is also linked to a channel on the social-media platform Telegram that aggressively pushes Nazi propaganda. The “Mr. and Mrs. Knight” channel on Telegram uses a profile photo of Chelsea Knight and her husband, Victor, that is modified so that both have laser eyes while substituting a backdrop with a full moon and barren mountain-scape. The “Info” field for the channel includes the text “14 things and 88 more,” utilizing two numbers that are significant in the Nazi belief system. “14” references the “Fourteen Words,” a distillation of white supremacist ideology that was coined by the late David Lane while he was serving a prison system for his role in the murder of Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg. “88” is a numerical code for “Heil Hitler,” substituting “88” for “HH” as the eighth letter of the alphabet. “Victorious Knight” and “Mrs. Knight” are the admins of the “Mr. and Mrs. Knight” channel. Beyond the similarities between “Victorious” and “Victor,” the username for “Mrs. Knight” is @Chelsea_Jo_Knight, matching the name of the Placer County For Trump organizer.

Virtually all of the media shared through the Telegram channel promote Nazi ideology in one way or another, including a video that appears to show a Ukrainian antifascist receiving a brutal beating from an ultranationalist outside a grocery store.

Another video lauding American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell includes a speech expressing virulent antisemitism that recycles tropes blaming Jews for social disorder and economic hardship — false claims that set the stage for the Holocaust.

Lastly in Oregon in the Portland area, connections between the local GOP and the Proud Boys continues to cause tension within the local GOP, which has splintered into two factions.

Ammon Bundy is Mobilizing far-Right Forces in Southern Oregon

According to the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights:

A conflict is brewing in the Klamath River Basin in southern Oregon. Ammon Bundy, one of the far-right figures involved in the 2016 armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and his group, People’s Rights, have inserted themselves into the fight over scarce water resources in the region that could lead to more armed conflict.

Severe drought has gripped the Klamath River Basin. A recurring problem in the irrigated high desert, the current round of limits on water for the Klamath Irrigation Project came April 14 when the Bureau of Reclamation (BoR) released its Klamath Project 2021 Temporary Operations Plan, announcing it would make an “initial minimum” allocation to the Klamath Irrigation Project of 33,000 acre-feet and provide some $15 million in immediate aid to the Klamath Project and $3 million in technical assistance to tribal ecosystem projects. The allocation is at an historic low.[1]

The decision comes as tribes in the Lower Klamath Basin, including the Yurok and Karuk, are facing massive fish die-offs and emergency conditions in their fisheries; and the Klamath Tribes have expressed concern that BoR managed water levels in Klamath Lake be maintained to support its treaty-reserved fisheries. Three fish species in the Klamath Basin critical to Indian Nations are listed under the Endangered Species Act, the C’waam [Lost River suckers], Koptu [shortnose suckers], and the Southern Oregon/Northern California Coast Coho.[2]

As a result, water for irrigation has been curtailed. Unhappy with that decision, a group of local irrigators, some of who were involved in a similar conflict back in 2001, are trying to reopen the flow of the irrigation canal. They’ve aligned with Bundy’s People’s Rights network, and are now holding organizing meetings on the property next to the headgates to the canal. Grant Knoll, a Klamath Irrigation District board member and one of the irrigators who purchased the property to stage the big tent People’s Rights protests recently declared, “We’re going to turn on the water and have a standoff.”[3]

Read the full report here.

Neo-Nazi Caught Planning Mass Shooting in Texas

From Left Coast Right Watch:

As of May 26th, there were at least 232 mass shootings in the United States this year. On May 27th, Coleman Thomas Blevins, age 28, told an online message board he’d go to a Walmart and commit yet another. Kerr County Sherriff’s Office in Texas arrested him last Friday “on a warrant for a Terroristic Threat to Create Public Fear of Serious Bodily Injury.” Blevins was immersed in a network of people who think up plots like this all the time. They’re called ‘accelerationists’—those who want to commit acts of mass violence and irregular warfare with the goal of bringing down society so they can carve their own out of its ashes.

Blevins, like many mass shooters, foiled or otherwise, was ideologically motivated. Sheriffs seized “firearms, ammunition, electronic evidence, concentrated THC, and radical ideology paraphernalia, including books, flags, and handwritten documents” from his house. Among the evidence was a modified Reichskreig flag with a Nazi sonnenrad symbol in the middle, a Confederate battle flag, the flag of Saudi Arabia, and a flag of the Falangists–Spain’s fascists. Sherriffs also found the Quran, eco-fascist Mike Mahoney’s novel Harassment Architecture, Italian fascist ideologue Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, and neoNazi-insurgency-manual-disguised-as-race-war-fantasy-novel The Turner Diaries.

Torch Network Dives Deep on Pro-Police group ‘Wind Therapy Freedom Riders,’ Connected to Bikers and Proud Boys

The antifascist Torch Network did a deep dive into the pro-police organization ‘Wind Therapy Freedom Riders,’ based out of Texas and linked to various biker crews and Proud Boy chapters.

From the report:

 

In Central Texas a group calling itself Wind Therapy Freedom Riders – WTFR’s, for short – emerged as a leading pro-cop reactionary movement. Led by scammer Luis “Hollywood” Rodriguez, the group dubiously claims a nationwide membership of 800 but is primarily notable for their close ties to police.

They opposed demonstrations demanding justice for Mike Ramos, an Austinite murdered by APD, and received grateful handshakes and bottled water from the cops. They drew unwanted attention and bad publicity to the cops by being photographed alongside APD officers and Proud Boys like Christopher Ritchie.

WTF also organized their own “Back The Blue” demonstration in support of Lakeway, TX police officers under the banner of “Silent No More” on August 15th, 2020.

WTFers gained further notoriety when they engaged in a dispute with former city councilman Jimmy Flannigan. Austin’s Mayor Adler characterized the incident as Rodriguez being “physically detained in a threatening manner”. While we should not adopt a credulous attitude to capitalist politicians when they claim victimhood, the incident is worthy of consideration: it reveals a mechanism for the Police Department to apply pressure to city government without acting directly and compromising their position.

Fascist and reactionary gangs acting as extra-legal assets for the State to do its dirty work with less oversight and scrutiny is a theme we will explore further.

Read the full report here.

 

Antifascist Action

  • Antifascists in Portland held a rally in memory of those killed and injured in 2017 on a Portland train by white nationalist, Jeremy Christian.

  • In Beaverton, Oregon, antifascists left graffiti messages, stickers, and flyers at the scene of a far-Right “flag wave” attended by Proud Boys and other neo-fascist groups.

 

Doxxes

White Nationalist Joshua Grant Wells in Hutchinson, Kansas

Neo-Nazi Accelerationist Nicholas Hazen Welker in Sunnyvale, CA

Call to Action

Antifascists in Oregon are calling for people to push back against Proud Boys and other violent far-Right groups who are organizing another “flag wave” on Friday, June 18th at 2pm in Oregon City, located right outside of Portland, Oregon. Rose City Antifa has created a thread of background info you can check out here.

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Support Our Prisoners

  • Support those arrested during the ongoing rebellion! Check the In Contempt column on It’s Going Down for a list of prisoners.
  • Support Gage Halupowski! Currently serving a six year sentence. There is currently an outbreak at his prison, so please step up and support! More info here.
  • Support Dan Baker! Currently facing federal charges for posts online in response to armed far-Right rally at the capitol building in Florida. More info here.
  • Support Eric King! Anarchist and antifascist prisoner who has been targeted by the State and neo-Nazi inmates for being ‘ANTIFA.’ More info here. Donate here.
  • Support J.W. and TC! Antifascists arrested in San Diego following rally against far-Right and white supremacists. Donate here and here.
  • Support Scottie! Facing charges steaming from altercation with far-Right Trump supporters in LA. More info here.

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A weekly roundup of the latest and greatest happenings in the anti-fascist world. Each column features a roundup of news, actions, doxxes and current calls to action.

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