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Tag: Far right

  • Jeffrey Epstein’s Quarter Zip and the Rise of a Fringe Fashion Obsession

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    I was swiping through Instagram Stories last week when I was served an eBay ad for a very familiar sweatshirt.

    Of all the accoutrements of the life and crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, a 2005 image showing him wearing a navy monogrammed quarter zip and a slight, characteristic smirk has acquired an endless digital footprint and a discomfiting resonance. With the Epstein story approaching the 10-year mark as a global preoccupation, this nth phase of the intrigue, largely prompted by fallout from the Department of Justice’s July proclamation that there were no further criminal charges in the works, has spawned a potent cottage industry. One can now purchase an Epstein quarter zip, as it’s invariably described, from an array of Etsy entrepreneurs, the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes’s web store ($69.99), or epsteinquarterzip.com ($49.00), which promotes its wares to its 129,000 Instagram followers with AI-generated images of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton sporting the titular apparel.

    “Iconic merch” is how leading right-leaning gaming streamer Asmongold recently described it. When Fuentes wore his riff on the sweatshirt, with “USA” replacing “JEE”—the American flag on the sleeve is true to the original—for a third week running, one of the X accounts that faithfully tracks his commentary said the choice represented “pure aura.” The quarter zip, in this conception of Epstein’s much-scrutinized persona, amounts to a signifier of ease and insouciance—the late financier wore rumpled sweatshirts around the global elite presumably because he could. In April 2019, a few months before his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, Epstein arrived at the artist Andres Serrano’s Greenwich Village home to have his portrait taken. “He acted the way he always acted,” Serrano told me in 2022. “Like a guy who didn’t have a care in the world.”

    If there is any stylistic throughline in the immense tranche of emails released in the latest round of Epstein documents, it is that Epstein was similarly unbothered in his personal communications. He wrote to executives and public officials with little concern for spelling or syntax, and capitalization seemed anathema to him. The Epstein files, long held up in the public imagination as a kind of Rosetta stone for the sins of the wealthy and connected, included documents showing how the FBI had found little evidence to conclude that Epstein was running a sex trafficking ring for other powerful men; they also fed the bottomless appetite for glimpses into Epstein’s eccentricities and the corruption of the ruling class. Even if few of the wildest conspiracies found material support, his cultural imprint grew only larger.

    The quarter zip took on a life of its own in September, when Restricted, a Miami luxury reseller that primarily stocks Chrome Hearts and accepts cryptocurrency as payment, claimed to be selling the genuine article. “Straight from Mar A Lago,” the shop wrote on Instagram. “This piece is very controversial and iconic.” A rumor spread that it was purchased by Ian Connor, the stylist affiliated with the artist formerly known as Kanye West and A$AP Rocky in the 2010s, and whose career was soon overshadowed by a series of sexual assault allegations that he has denied. (Connor had commented on the post with a moneybag emoji and indicated that he wanted to discuss the matter over direct message.) The shop’s owner told the Miami New Times that, after fielding more than 5,000 inquiries, he sold it to a different, unnamed client whom he described as famous. He was certain that the sweatshirt, which he purchased for $5,000 from another client and sold for $11,000, was authentic. (The client who sold him the sweater, he added, was from the Palm Beach area where Epstein had a home, and “also showed me, like, some mail he had, and medicine prescription bottles.”)

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    Dan Adler

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  • Nick Fuentes Is Not Just Another Alt-Right Boogeyman

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    Part of what separates Fuentes from his fellow-streamers is that he is capable of keeping his thoughts in a coherent, if odious, order. He once offered a trollish, occasionally captivating, and always grossly bigoted hour-long act; that has evolved into something more like a daily address, one that presents a code of behavior and a set of distinct ideas. As recently as a year ago, I’m not sure I could have told you what Fuentes thought about anything outside of his hatred of minorities, gays, and Jewish people. Today, he has developed a vile but discernible vision for the U.S.—something few of his predecessors in the role of far-right boogeyman have been able to do.

    Fuentes’s narrative about the U.S.’s current state of affairs begins in a familiarly reprehensible place. Jewish oligarchs, he claims, have bought America, and now control every politician, media outlet, and lever of power. These same oligarchs, in Fuentes’s account, have launched a campaign to smother all criticism of Israel. As proof, Fuentes will point to TikTok, and theorize that big money in politics pushed legislation against that platform, precipitating its sale to Larry Ellison, an ardent supporter of Israel, who will now, Fuentes believes, change the app’s algorithms to suppress pro-Palestinian content. This same group of oligarchs, Fuentes argues, are behind mass migration to the U.S.—this is one of the main tropes of the “great replacement” theory, a racist conspiracy that seemed to motivate many of the young men who attended the rally in Charlottesville, years ago—and have impinged on the sovereignty and livelihoods of white men by pushing for open borders. Fuentes has always had awful things to say about Black people and immigrants, but his recent turn has basically cast them as pawns in the oligarchs’ game.

    Crucially, Fuentes has become one of Donald Trump’s most ardent critics on the right. He repeatedly tells a story about a nation of young men in flyover country who believed that Trump would realize a new vision of America and who now have been betrayed. These young men, as Fuentes put it recently, are looking at China and the United Arab Emirates and asking why America couldn’t build “world wonders” and “peaceful” cities. Their interest in MAGA was both industrial and quasi-socialist: they believed that Trump would drain the swamp and bring new legislators to Washington, D.C., who would restore manufacturing jobs, and that America, a failing empire, would “draft” people like them, devastated by poverty and the opioid epidemic and general aimlessness, back to work. All that was a lie, Fuentes now says. Trump has been in or around the heart of political power for more than a decade, and, according to Fuentes, is a sellout who has been bought by the oligarchy. Only Fuentes is willing to put America first.

    In the opening column for Fault Lines, in 2024, I wrote about the ideology of the internet, which, put simply, is “kill the mods.” If you want to get traction online, you have to rail against the moderators—who are, you might insist, being paid off to suppress your dangerous speech. Tucker Carlson, in his latest iteration, on Elon Musk’s X, has fully grasped this. Broadcasting online, rather than on Fox News, is a signal of integrity: Here I am at my most uncensored. This version of Carlson comes with an inherent defiance and an implied challenge to the mainstream media industry that made him a star: I can do this without all of you. Fuentes similarly understands that he cannot be censored out of existence. He has been banned from nearly every platform—he currently streams on something called Rumble—but he knows that his fans, whom he calls Groypers, will dutifully clip his most impassioned moments and spread them to the mainstream.

    In the past, the hard right was constrained, in a way, by its fealty to Trump. What Fuentes has done is deem Trump a mod. It hardly needs to be said that Fuentes’s story about America relies on some of the oldest antisemitic tropes there are. But he has also crafted, in the past few months, a call to action, one that needs to be taken more seriously than anything promulgated by his predecessors in the alt-right, who were mostly meme-addicted losers trying to troll the media. Fuentes recently criticized a student in Mississippi who made national headlines by going up to Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, throwing some coins on the ground, and yelling, “Fuck the Jews.” The act was “rude,” Fuentes said, and not reflective of the behavior that he wants to promote; it would make his own antisemitic movement look bad. What he wants, essentially, is message control. He asked his followers to focus on their supposed winning arguments, such as the one about how Ellison’s purchase of TikTok will suppress free speech. Fuentes has also called for the Groypers to start preparing for the 2028 election so they can defeat J. D. Vance if and when he runs for President, because Fuentes considers him a tool of the oligarchy. Fuentes recently asked his followers, “Where do you see yourself in three years?” He added, “I want to see you guys in Iowa, I want to see you in New Hampshire, I want to see you in Nevada and South Carolina. I want to see you on Super Tuesday.” He told his online army that, even if they lose in 2028, they should get ready for 2032 and onward. “Look at Pat Buchanan,” he said. “He ran in 1992. He didn’t see his vision realized until 2016—twenty-four years later. Are you ready to go until 2040, until 2050?”

    Right-wing agitators are typically cheap and quickly disposable. Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, and the Twitter personality, podcaster, and self-published author Bronze Age Pervert—these men have largely come and gone, and though their influence can be detected in D.C., their demagoguery failed to become much more than a cloying desire to freak out the libs. Fuentes is something different, I believe, in large part because he seems to understand that all norms in political commentary have been destroyed and the game is now to position yourself in opposition to anything that even sniffs of the establishment. This is directly connected to the medium that has aided his rise, and it should worry us even more than it already does. After all, how do you stop something like this without turning off the internet? ♦

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    Jay Caspian Kang

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  • Opinion | The New Right’s New Antisemites

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    Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation flounders in the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes fever swamps.

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    The Editorial Board

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  • Elon Musk Has Turned His Eye to the UK

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    Elon Musk loves responding to posts on X with heart emojis. He’s sent dozens this year alone, often in response to people praising his cars or directly to his mother’s posts.

    But this week, Musk sent a heart emoji to Tommy Robinson, the far-right Islamophobic activist from the United Kingdom. Though Musk largely ignored UK politics this year while working in the US government at his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), he appears to be back across the pond, spending his money and using his platform to elevate far-right extremists.

    “A HUGE THANK YOU to @elonmusk today. Legend,” Robinson wrote on Monday, following the first day of his two-day trial for a charge related to counter-terrorism law at Westminster Magistrate’s Court in London. Robinson claimed this week that Musk had funded his defense.

    Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was charged under the Terrorism Act after he refused to give police access to his cell phone in July 2024 while trying to leave the UK. Prosecutor Jo Morris told the judge this week the police believed “there may be information relevant to acts of terrorism” on the phone at the time. Robinson has pleaded not guilty and claimed the stop was unlawful. A decision in this case is due next month.

    In a video posted on X ahead of the trial this week, Robinson said Musk had agreed to fund his defense. Robinson did not say how much Musk was contributing to his defense fund, but Mark Stephens, a prominent British solicitor who has in the past served as legal counsel for Julian Assange, tells WIRED that if he were covering Robinson’s entire defense, Musk’s bill would come to “easily half a million pounds [$665,000], maybe more with appeals.”

    Robinson and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

    Musk posted incessantly about British politics at the beginning of the year, until his focus was consumed by DOGE. But, following his stormy departure from Washington, Musk’s focus on Europe is once again creating chaos. WIRED analyzed data provided by BrightData that shows a significant dropoff in the number of posts Musk made about the UK after January of this year. After he left DOGE in May, Musk’s posts about the UK increased dramatically again in August.

    Experts believe Musk’s current outpouring of support for the UK’s far right is part of a possible concerted effort to destabilize the region politically to prevent onerous regulations—such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or the UK’s Online Safety Act—being used to punish X.

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    David Gilbert

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  • Opinion | The Crisis in Paris Is That No One Recognizes the Real Crisis

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    France’s welfare state is in desperate need of reform, but Macron is obsessing over Marine Le Pen.

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    Joseph C. Sternberg

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  • At a Conspiracy Conference in Rural Ireland, Charlie Kirk Was the Star

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    At this point, the event was briefly disrupted by a small protest outside by two local activists who highlighted the fact that Attwood had been advocating a toxic bleach solution to his followers. Power and fellow far-right activist Philip Dwyer confronted the two protesters and questioned if they were trying to get Attwood killed, just like Kirk. Dwyer declined to answer WIRED’s questions about his comments but called this reporter a “communist left-wing radical.”

    Back inside, Attwood laughed off the protesters, with one later speaker calling them “clones.”

    Finally, after mystic Honey C Golden had informed everyone that “The Matrix was a reality show” and that she doesn’t “really believe in time,” it was time for Lewis Herms, a fringe candidate for California governor, to take the stage.

    Herms, who became popular through his Screw Big Gov platform online, is running as an independent conservative and is one of almost 70 people who have filed statements of interest in being governor of California. Calling himself an “anti-politician,” Herms slammed the GOP for not talking about “child trafficking,” “election fraud,” or the influence of “Big Pharma.”

    While Herms has decided not to employ a campaign manager—because it would not be authentic—he did claim that he is working with some other people.

    “I’m very proud to say a lot of RFK Jr.’s team is already working with us,” Herms said. “And they already label our team Super MAHA because we’re looking for different modalities that we can bring back to California and bring to a whole other level than he’s even doing it right now.”

    Herms and Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment.

    Herms received a standing ovation at the end of his nearly 45-minute speech despite the fact that most people were, at this point, very cold. But even though it was now dark outside, there was still time for one more speaker—Janine Morigeau, a Canadian tarot card reader.

    Just as the day had begun with the name of Kirk being invoked, so it ended. “Is Charlie Kirk really dead?” an audience member asked, with the rest of the crowd reacting excitedly. Morigeau proceeded to pull half a dozen different cards and very quickly concluded that the person seen on camera being shot was not actually Kirk at all.

    “Whatever they were doing there was likely a white hat op, because it’s to the benefit of humanity,” Morigeau said before adding mysteriously: “I don’t know if even the real Charlie Kirk was who we thought he was.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • Britain Is Manifesting Nigel Farage as Its Next Prime Minister

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    “It’s our identity,” Hartle-Ryton explained. “Our identity is being slowly eroded as a British culture, and while we want to be welcoming and all the rest of it, we’ve got our own culture, and that’s slowly going. So the flag is there to say, Hey, we’re still here. You know, don’t forget about us.”

    Farage was due to address the conference at around 4 P.M., but he decided to make his speech earlier, because of a crisis in the government. At around noon, the news broke that Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister and the deputy leader of the Labour Party, had resigned from Starmer’s Cabinet.

    One of the eerier aspects of Reform’s current momentum is how ably it is being assisted by those who are supposed to be preventing it. Rayner had been snared in a media scandal, because she didn’t pay enough in taxes when buying an apartment earlier this year. In her defense, it was a complicated transaction. Rayner, who has a disabled son, divorced her partner two years ago and left a share of her former house in a trust, which had tax implications for her next property purchase. According to Laurie Magnus, the government’s adviser on ministerial standards, her error was not having sought advice from a tax specialist. (Plus, Rayner was the Housing Minister, so it wasn’t a good look.) A more intuitive, or bold, Prime Minister than Starmer might have protected Rayner, or moved her to another post. She was the government’s only truly charismatic working-class politician.

    At the conference, Farage appeared onstage in a blaze of pyrotechnics and gladiatorial chords. For years, his default expression for the cameras was a catlike, impish grin. But in recent months he has slowed his gait and stiffened his back, in preparation for high office. “We are all ships rising on a turquoise tide,” he told the hall, “headed ever closer toward winning the next general election.”

    The Rayner affair—just another mainstream politician, dodging their taxes—wrote Farage’s attack lines for him. “It screams to entitlement,” he said. “It screams to a government that, despite all the promises that this would be a new, different kind of politics, is as bad, if not worse, than the one that went before.” Farage and his allies like to refer to Labour and the Conservatives as a single “uniparty,” whose time has passed.

    One of Farage’s gifts as a politician is knowing what he does not have to say. While other right-wing populists, in Europe and elsewhere, get caught up in talk of race, or religion, or replacement theory, Farage’s language is always careful, always clubbable. Unlike Trump, he doesn’t like to shock or make himself out to be exceptional. He is an everyman, who remembers when it was fine to have a few drinks with lunch. “It’s as if our leaders have forgotten who we were,” he said in Birmingham, vaguely, before praising Operation Raise the Colours as a patriotic protest against a rotten establishment. “Let’s make Britain great again. I’ve heard that phrase somewhere else before,” he quipped. “But I agree with it.”

    His deputies and outriders are not quite so deft. A few hours later, in the same hall, I watched Zia Yusuf, Reform’s head of DOGE (yes, DOGE), give a speech that was martial and mean. Yusuf, a former banker at Goldman Sachs, describes himself as a British Muslim patriot. He reiterated Reform’s plans for mass deportations, the sidelining of judges by the executive, and the use of military aircraft to clear the country of “illegal migrants.” In a century’s time, Yusuf promised, children would be taught the names of the Prime Ministers who had allowed Britain’s borders to be overrun. “They will learn of a political class that betrayed its own people,” Yusuf said. “They will learn of a Britain that was besieged.”

    On my way out, I bumped into Michael Gove, a former Conservative Cabinet minister who is now the editor of The Spectator, Britain’s most influential right-wing magazine. Gove was a leading Brexiteer and one of the more effective Tory politicians during the Party’s long spell in power. When we spoke on the phone a few days later, Gove acknowledged that the rise of Reform was all that anyone was talking about. “But there’s a ‘but,’ ” he said. Aside from Farage, Gove observed that the Party retained an amateur feel. “And the amateurism leads to a fear that the perimeter between the populist-and-radical-right movement and something more worrying is not properly policed,” he said. The day after Farage and Yusuf spoke, Reform delegates were addressed by Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist and vaccine skeptic, who shared a claim that COVID vaccines might be responsible for recent cancer cases in the British Royal Family.

    Gove is three years younger than Farage, and, like him, part of the generation of British conservatives who grew up enthralled by Margaret Thatcher, and who subsequently led the national revolt against the European Union. (“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts,” Gove said, memorably, during the Brexit campaign.) Every revolution devours its children.

    Farage has been waiting for this moment for a long time. I remember chatting to him while he smoked a cigarette after a Brexit Party rally in the West Midlands, in the spring of 2019. It was almost three years after Britain had voted to leave the E.U., but the country’s political class was unable to agree on the right terms for leaving the bloc. “This is not even about Brexit,” Farage said, referring to the anger and the energy of the supporters he had just addressed. “This is now a genuine movement that wants to radically change the entire system in the U.K.”

    For a few years, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was able to satisfy the cravings of the populist right. But those days are gone. It was the collapse of the Tories at last year’s election that has created the space for Farage’s march to power. Between 2019 and 2024, the Conservatives lost seven million voters, equivalent to more than twenty per cent of the vote. Labour’s numbers stood still. Starmer’s hundred-and-fifty-six-seat majority in the House of Commons is unsteady, because it rests on only thirty-four per cent of the popular vote. “This isn’t Tony Blair in 1997. There is no love for Starmer or his government,” Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said. Everyone has their own analogy to describe Labour’s illusory power. “I call it a Jenga tower,” Ford said. “It’s very tall, but it’s got extremely weak foundations.”

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    Sam Knight

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  • Right-Wing Activists Are Targeting People for Allegedly Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s Death

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    Far-right influencers and violent extremists are posting identifying details about people they view as celebrating or glorifying the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The campaign has been swift and widespread and has already led to at least one person losing their job and others receiving death threats.

    The people posting the identifying information include Chaya Raichik, who runs the hugely influential, hate-filled LibsofTikTok account on X, Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer, and former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio.

    A central hub of this activity is a website called Charlie’s Murderers, which was registered in the early evening on the day Kirk was shot and is revealing certain personal information, such as social media usernames and email addresses, of individuals the operators believe were celebrating the horrific murder.

    One of the first names listed on the sites was Rachel Gilmore, an independent journalist at Bubble Pop Media who wrote on X that she was “terrified to think of how far-right fans of Kirk, aching for more violence, could very well turn this into an even more radicalizing moment. Will they now believe their fears have been proven right and feel they have a right to ‘retaliate,’ regardless of who actually was behind the initial shooting?”

    As WIRED reported, this is exactly how much of the far right—along with Republican lawmakers including President Donald Trump—did respond to the news, even though no suspect had been arrested and no motive had been revealed.

    For Gilmore, the impact of her inclusion on the website was instant and terrifying.

    “This website has me genuinely afraid for my safety,” Gilmore tells WIRED. “I feel awful for anyone whose name is on it. It’s clear that the purpose of the website is to do exactly what the post that landed me on there warned Kirk’s supporters might do: retaliate.”

    Gilmore has received multiple death and rape threats since the site went live on Wednesday evening. (WIRED reviewed screenshots of emails and direct messages Gilmore has received to verify the threats.) She has not reported the threats to the police yet, she says.

    “I’ve gotten emails and DMs promising to find out where I live,” Gilmore says. “I have folks claiming my information is all over 4chan telling me in the same breath that they hope I get ‘raped and killed’ and telling me to ‘have fun walking the streets of’ my city, which they name.”

    At the time of publication, two dozen people were listed on the site, with many entries including full names, employment details, location, and social media accounts. The site’s operators, who are anonymous, claim to have received “thousands” of submissions. “All of them will be reviewed and uploaded shortly,” a note on the website reads. “This is a permanent archive and will soon contain a search feature.”

    “Most likely, we’d be happy to answer your questions,” the people controlling the website told WIRED in an email. Subsequent emails, though, went unanswered.

    The website asks people to submit a potential target’s full name, location, and employer information, as well as screenshots of incriminating social media posts, via email. An About section on the website, added on Thursday morning, says: “This is not a doxxing website. This website is a lawful data aggregator of publicly-available information. It has been created for the purposes of public education.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • ‘War Is Here’: The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence

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    “You could be next,” influencer and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “The Left are terrorists.”

    Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who popularized the demonization of critical race theory, suggested in a post on X that the “radical left” was responsible for the shooting, and urged the US government “to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

    Republican representative Derrick Van Orden from Wisconsin also blamed the shooting on “leftwing political violence” and warned on X that “Whoever does not condemn this is part of the problem. The gloves are off.”

    On the floor of the House, after Democrats and Republicans observed a “moment of prayer,” led by House speaker Mike Johnson, for Charlie Kirk and his family, representative Lauren Boebert called for a spoken prayer. Some Democrats said no, and referenced the school shooting in Colorado that also occurred Wednesday. Shouting broke out, and Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna yelled across the aisle, “Y’all caused this.” One Democrat, according to The New York Times, responded, “Pass some gun laws!”

    On X, Luna continued to blame the left: “EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS. You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting orgs that exploit minorities, protecting criminals, and stirring hate. YOU ARE THE HATE you claim to fight. Your words caused this. Your hate caused this.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also posted about Kirk’s death, calling on people to “rise up and end this.”

    Blake Masters, a twice-failed US congressional candidate once backed by Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel and endorsed by Trump, called for RICO investigations into non-governmental organizations as a result of the shooting.

    “Left-wing violence is out of control, and it’s not random,” Masters posted on X. “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments it, or it will destroy us.”

    Masters was quoting a post from right-wing podcaster and conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich, who blamed the shooting on the left. “Congressional hearings now,” Cernovich posted on X. “Every billionaire funding far left wing extremism. Soros, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman. Massive RICO investigations now.”

    Chaya Raichik, who operates the anti-LGBTQ account Libs of TikTok, simply wrote: “THIS IS WAR.”

    On fringe platforms like Trump’s own Truth Social and The Donald, the rabidly pro-Trump message board that was responsible for some of the planning of the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, numerous users echoed Jones’ comments about war.

    “War is coming,” one user of The Donald wrote on a thread dedicated to Kirk’s shooting. “War is here,” another responded.

    Another user of The Donald wrote in the same thread: “Civil War is coming … this will give the left the blowback they’ve been begging white people for so they can play the victim and justify white genocide.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • Stacey Abrams Has Some Ideas on How to Stop Elon Musk and the Far Right in Georgia

    Stacey Abrams Has Some Ideas on How to Stop Elon Musk and the Far Right in Georgia

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    Leah Feiger: I absolutely hear that. Obviously though, this is a different environment, right? We have experienced a fracturing of media and social platforms that we have never seen before.

    Stacey Abrams: Absolutely.

    Leah Feiger: In many ways, to me, it feels like tech platforms have abdicated responsibility in this election cycle.

    Stacey Abrams: Yes, absolutely.

    Leah Feiger: Elon Musk doesn’t just own X. He’s actually been using it to spread election conspiracies, and letting other major influencers do the same. How does the Harris campaign deal with that, and what do you make of the role that Musk has played in this election?

    Stacey Abrams: So, the podcast I do called Assembly Required, we had Esosa Osa on to talk about disinformation. The reason this matters is that it’s not just Elon Musk. It’s that Meta and other platforms have weakened their filters. So, Elon Musk has been aggressively and intentionally a disinformation factory.

    Leah Feiger: Machine, truly incredible to watch.

    Stacey Abrams: He is becoming his own industry of life. So, he deserves his own specific place in ignominy.

    Leah Feiger: Fair.

    Stacey Abrams: Let’s put it that way. We should be angry. We should be concerned, but we should also be aware that while he is the loudest version of this terrible dark star, he’s not alone. So, to your point, our obligation is to hold all of these tech platforms accountable. You should not be permitted to weaken the protection that you owe the people. If you are going to hold yourself out as a purveyor of information, you are obligated to ensure that that information at least meet the basic smell test. Unfortunately, we have seen multiple tech platforms abdicate that responsibility. So, while I am more than happy to castigate and hold Elon Musk particularly accountable for taking terrible and making it worse, we also have the responsibility on the other side of this election to evaluate everyone who was willing to take this Wild West situation, and make it worse.

    Leah Feiger: I mean, absolutely. Yesterday, we came out with a big article about how militias are organizing on Facebook, and you know what? Facebook is actually auto generating pages for militias. It’s messy to say the least. Obviously with the Musk thing, he comes with the benefit of just an absolute ton of cash. That has been also wild to watch about his cash for registration sweepstakes. There’s just a lot happening there that I am constantly wondering, “Is the Harris campaign doing enough to counteract, and can they?”

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    Leah Feiger

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  • Meet the Far-Right Constitutional Sheriffs Ready to Assert Control if Trump Loses

    Meet the Far-Right Constitutional Sheriffs Ready to Assert Control if Trump Loses

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    Tim Marchman: This is rooted as you write in white supremacist beliefs. Can you unpack that a little bit?

    David Gilbert: It is, and you can trace it back from the late-1960, early-1970s to a movement called Posse Comitatus, which was founded some say by a guy called William Potter Gale. He was at the time a minister in this militant anti-Semitic white nationalist quasi-religion, kind of known as Christian Identity. He believed that the sheriffs were these protectors of the citizens and that they had the power to call up militias and that they should be enshrined in law as the ultimate power law enforcement anywhere in the country. We’ve seen across the years that these far-right or Constitutional Sheriffs, no matter what they’ve done in terms of the extreme actions they’ve taken, if they have a base of supporters in their locality or in their county who believe in what they’re doing, they will be voted back into office for decades at a time.

    Tim Marchman: The mandate of the public is pretty powerful, but some of these sheriffs are citing a higher source of authority. They say their power derives from God, which seems pretty unconstitutional given the separation of church and state in America. How do they respond to that?

    David Gilbert: Well, they respond by saying that the separation of church and state is not something that really exists. They say that, that again is a misreading of the Constitution, and the entire Constitutional Sheriff’s movement is deeply infused with Christian nationalist beliefs and ideology. Most of the Constitutional Sheriffs who I’ve spoken to over the last six months or so are eager for the US to return to being a nation rooted in Christianity, where Christianity is at the center of all aspects of life, be that law enforcement or education or government or culture. They believe that in that society because they believe they got their power from God, that they will be the most powerful law enforcement individuals across the country.

    Tim Marchman: Under this constitutional order as they understand it, is there a role for constitutional governors or constitutional mayors, or are these powers unique to sheriffs?

    David Gilbert: They seem to believe that these powers are unique to sheriffs. In all the time I’ve been covering this, I’ve never heard any of them speak about other figures, whether in government or law enforcement that would hold similar powers to a sheriff. Again, that comes back to the idea that this is somehow enshrined in the Constitution. As we said, it’s not, but in their belief system, in their ideology, they can trace the sheriff. It’s one of the oldest law enforcement offices in the world. It goes right back to the UK where the sheriff did the bidding of the local magistrates and collected taxes and stuff like that. It’s obviously been exported from England to the US and it has persisted since the beginning of the US nation. They believe that, that is key to giving them the power that no one else in the US has because at a local level, they’re there to protect their citizens, and the citizens are the ones who elect them, and therefore, that is their duty. Even if other positions like a governor is elected by the people, they don’t seem to believe that, that position should have the similar kind of constitutional protections.

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    Leah Feiger

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  • Far-Right Candidates Have A Target This Election — And It Could Reshape The Next Generation

    Far-Right Candidates Have A Target This Election — And It Could Reshape The Next Generation

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    Over the last few years, elections for public education officials have gone from overlooked and low-profile to heated and politicized affairs, a shift that’s due in large part to conservatives increasingly eyeing schools as places where they can wield significant influence and enact a specific agenda.

    Moms for Liberty, a far-right group that popped up in Florida during the COVID pandemic and has since campaigned nationwide for a variety of conservative causes, is a significant driver of this shift. The so-called “parental rights” organization has thrown its support behind school board candidates across the country who have gone on to ban books, pass policies that hurt LGBTQ+ kids, and limit what teachers can do and say in their classrooms.

    In 2022, more than half of the candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty won their races, with those in Florida seeing particular success. But the following year, the group’s high-profile attempts in Pennsylvania were largely a dud.

    This year, the group said it has identified 77 candidates for endorsements but has not publicly released the list.

    “We continue to strive to have all voters across the country engage in their local school board elections and get to know the candidates because we know that change happens at the local level,” Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich said in an emailed statement to HuffPost. “We have seen an incredible win rate the past two years that shows the power of our grassroots organization and we are excited to see that same kind of win rate this year.”

    But even as the group keeps a lower public profile than it has during previous elections, its impact is clear. Across the country, far-right extremists are looking to get on school boards and reshape public schooling.

    The blueprint for a right-wing, Moms for Liberty-style candidate has been made, and conservatives are following it. These candidates typically rail against “critical race theory,” a college-level academic framework for understanding structural racism that has been co-opted by conservatives to mean talking about race at all and making white people feel uncomfortable. They falsely claim books about gender or sexual identity are inherently pornographic. They may smear teachers as groomers, and make sure transgender children are targeted and ostracized at school.

    Parental rights and fighting to keep trans kids from playing sports are now Republican talking points at all levels of government.

    “The work of Moms for Liberty hasn’t been as visible. But the rhetoric they use and their candidates are very much visible,” Tamika Walker Kelly, the president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, told HuffPost.

    In blue, red, and purple states alike, this election is shaping up to have dozens of hotly contested school board races that feature right-wing candidates going up against their more liberal counterparts and hoping to shape the next generation of public school students.

    North Carolina

    There is perhaps no state where more is on the line for public education than North Carolina. Some of the largest school districts in the state could end up with an ultraconservative majority, and the Republican candidate for the top statewide educational role attended the Jan. 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol and has no experience in education.

    The Wake County school board, the state’s largest school system, is at the epicenter of the fight for North Carolina’s schools. Five of the board’s nine seats are up for grabs.

    This isn’t the first time right-wingers have tried to influence Wake County schools. In 2009, after a Tea Party takeover of the school board led to the erosion of long-term integration policies, the Democrats took action and have managed to keep the school board liberal for the last decade and a half.

    But now, Republicans in Wake County are trying to make inroads in the schools again. Conservative activists have tried banning books in the county and recently ginned up a moral panic about sexually explicit content in schools after a high school student claimed a book she read in class was inappropriate. (The book in question was “Tomorrow Is Too Far” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which depicts a relationship between cousins and has the line “he tried to fit what you both called his banana into what you both called your tomato.”)

    To Democrats, the GOP vision is clear. “Their goal is to make public schools go away,” Kevyn Creech, the chair of the Wake County Democrats, told HuffPost. “They want to get rid of the Department of Education, make everything religious, and privatize it all.”

    Democratic leaders are particularly worried because a Republican win for state superintendent, coupled with GOP victories at the county level, could create the perfect storm.

    The state superintendent for public instruction oversees more than 2,500 schools in North Carolina and an $11 billion budget. The race is between Democrat Mo Green, the former superintendent of Guilford County schools, and Republican Michele Morrow, who homeschooled her own children.

    After defeating the Republican incumbent in March, Morrow made headlines when CNN discovered that she had attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection with her children. (There is no evidence that she entered the Capitol building or committed any crimes.) She has also called for the execution of prominent Democrats and made a video saying former President Donald Trump should use the U.S. military to stay in power after he lost the election in 2020.

    Morrow ran for school board in Wake County in 2022 and lost by 20 points. As a candidate for superintendent, she has lobbed homophobic and transphobic attacks at Green and vowed to rid the state’s schools of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and censor what teachers can say in the classroom.

    Educators believe that a Morrow win will set the state’s schools on a dark path.

    “Morrow and her extremist agenda will push our public schools further behind,” Walker Kelly said. “We will continue to see the further underfunding and disrespect of our public school system.”

    The state superintendent would work closely with the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly — meaning Morrow could wield influence over the schools and usher in her extremist agenda, which centers white conservative Christian ideology.

    “As a department of the state, there’s still enough power to do damage to public schools,” Walker Kelly said.

    South Carolina

    In South Carolina, the school board race in Berkeley County, a Charleston suburb, is shaping up to feature right-wing candidates looking to further entrench a Moms for Liberty-style agenda against a slate of candidates who have branded themselves as the “education over politics” group. Five of the board’s nine seats are up for grabs.

    Moms for Liberty has already made its mark in the county. In 2022, six of the new board members were endorsed by the group. One of their first actions was to fire the superintendent and ban critical race theory.

    Last year, Angelina Davenport, a parent in the school district and a Moms for Liberty member, challenged 93 books in the Berkeley County school district, leading to a costly and time-intensive review of each book. Now she’s running for school board on a parental rights platform.

    At a school board meeting, she said the books she challenged were “unconstitutional and ungodly.”

    “Why is it acceptable to make choices for my child, choices I’m not included in, choices I do not agree with?” she said. Board members told Davenport was free to opt her child out of any material she found objectionable.

    Maryland

    Further north in Maryland, there’s yet another school board race with at least one extreme candidate.

    In Anne Arundel County, home to the state’s capital of Annapolis, all seven seats on the board are open. One candidate, Chuck Yocum, is running on parental rights and barring transgender students from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. His campaign website features a long screed about how public schools used to be good but have been ruined by teachers unions and the creation of the Department of Education.

    “Unions, once held in high regard as fighting for fairness are fighting to take parents rights and put biological males in female locker rooms and sports,” he wrote. “Something that until about five minutes ago would have gotten a young man arrested. Now, it’s encouraged.”

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    Yocum used to be a high school teacher and was fired from his job in 1993 after being charged with child sexual abuse. He was acquitted at trial the following year and worked in administrative positions until he retired this year.

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  • Hungary birth rate falls to record monthly low despite €30,000 offer to 3 child families

    Hungary birth rate falls to record monthly low despite €30,000 offer to 3 child families

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    Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s right-wing prime minister, has several populist policies, one of which has been to grow Hungary’s native population.

    But early successes appear to be running out of steam in Hungary, as its birth rate is still falling despite huge incentives being offered to new parents.

    Populations across Western Europe are struggling with falling birth rates, which threaten long-term economic growth and could create a healthcare crisis as fewer young people are forced to care for and subsidize an increasingly older population. 

    However, financial barriers, such as rising accommodation prices, are a major obstacle to childbearing, which has been compounded by the cost of living crisis. Changing workplace dynamics, with more women enjoying meaningful careers, also push back the average age for couples to have their first child. 

    Immigration is regarded as the most realistic way of maintaining an optimal average population age, but that has become highly politically contentious since the global financial crash. 

    Hungary’s fight to increase childbirth

    Hungary is particularly sensitive to immigration, which Orbán has repeatedly argued would harm the country’s cultural fabric. From 2025, immigrants from non-EU countries will have to pass a Hungarian history and culture test to become residents of the country. 

    Instead, it is championing the classic populist policy of increased childbirth among natives.

    “We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children,” Orbán said in his State of the Nation address in 2019 as he rolled out childbirth incentives.

    To do so, Hungary is offering weighty financial incentives to up appearances in its hospital’s midwifery units. 

    In 2019, Hungary offered parents a €30,000 interest-free loan to spend on anything they wanted. The loan would be forgiven if they had three children. 

    Mothers of four children or more are exempt from paying income taxes under Orbán’s policy, which could be extended to those with fewer children.

    Hungary’s birth rate rose through the 2010s, rising from a record low of 1.25 in 2011 to 1.61 in 2021. But in recent years, growth has halted. In June, Hungary registered a record-low number of 6,000 births. 

    Wolfgang Lutz, founding director of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna, told the Financial Times that the policies had merely pushed forward births among women who had intended to have children at some stage in their lives anyway. 

    Those on lower incomes complained to the publication that the subsidies weren’t adequate to incentivize having more children, which became increasingly expensive to manage more children. The removal of income tax does little for self-employed workers, for example.

    Permeating the debate has been an encouragement for the growth of “traditional,” heterosexual family units. 

    Hungary’s policies are focused on incentives for new mothers, while in 2021 the country introduced laws that banned LGBT content from being shown in schools, something the U.S. and EU labeled as “discriminatory.” 

    Populist swing

    Increasing childbirth has long been a critical policy anchor of right-leaning populist governments, allowing them to solidify their stance as self-proclaimed protectors of traditional family values while offering them an anti-immigration platform. 

    While Orbán’s birthing policy looks to be on the ropes, the playbook does have one high profile proponent: U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

    Vance suggested in 2021 that Americans with children should get more votes than their childless peers. While on the campaign trail at the same time, Vance also hailed Orbán’s push for more births.

    “Viktor Orbán, who is, of course, the bugaboo of nearly every liberal in the mainstream American media, has implemented a couple of policies that I think are really interesting.

    “They offer loans to new married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples eventually stay together and have children. Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation here in our country?”

    Vance recently walked back his comments on giving more votes to parents, describing them as a “thought experiment” amid heavy backlash.

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    Ryan Hogg

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  • How QAnon Destroys American Families

    How QAnon Destroys American Families

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    Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.

    David Gilbert: The calls to arms, you know? They’re being very explicit about what is going to happen should Trump lose in November. And I think more attention needs to be paid to it, because it’s constant, it’s every day, and it could spell major trouble. And maybe not in one single coordinated effort like we saw on January 6th, but in lots of different locations around the country on maybe a smaller scale, but no less frightening.

    Leah Feiger: David and Jess, thanks so much for coming on. Jesselyn Cook is a journalist and author of The Quiet Damage: Qanon and the Destruction of the American Family, which is out now. We’ll be right back with Conspiracy of the Week. Welcome back to Conspiracy of the Week, where you guys bring me your favorite conspiracies that you’ve come across recently, and I pick my favorite. The wilder, the better. Jess, as our guest, please go first.

    Jesselyn Cook: So you know about flat earthers, but have you heard of hollow earthers?

    Leah Feiger: Wait. Already, what? No.

    Jesselyn Cook: Yeah. Tragically in my book, there is a seven-year-old, a second-grader who gets really deeply into Qanon, and his journey, a lot of it was through TikTok. And so I learned a lot about a lot of conspiracy theories on TikTok through his story.

    Leah Feiger: Mm-hmm.

    Jesselyn Cook: The Hollow Earth Theory, this idea of an inner earth civilization, it’s been around for a long time, kind of through various ancient myths and legends, but it has made a resurgence on TikTok. A lot of young people you will see, if you look this up on TikTok, are talking-

    Leah Feiger: I’m going to in like, truly, 10 minutes. Yeah.

    Jesselyn Cook: So the idea is that deep below the Earth’s surface, there is a secret society, a very advanced society that lives down there somehow surviving without sunlight, without oxygen, without all the things we need to live. Some versions of the conspiracy theory are that they are aliens, and others are just there’s this society that’s going to emerge one day and kill us all. So not quite a fun conspiracy theory, but …

    Leah Feiger: Oh, they never are. Sometimes. That’s a weird one. That’s like a real Hunger Games meets Stuart Little/Ratatouille vibes in a more globalist centric way. What do people think that the hollow earthers are doing? Are they controlling us or are they just existing?

    Jesselyn Cook: They’re just existing. Some people who are not happy on regular Earth have gone down there apparently…

    Leah Feiger: Sure.

    Jesselyn Cook: …To just make a new life for themselves. And it’s funny, but then what’s less funny is when you click on the comments on these videos and you’re expecting people to be like, “This is dumb,” but there are a lot of kids in there saying, “NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer,” and just digging their heels in and citing Bible verses that supposedly prove the existence of this deeper earth. Study after study is showing that even though we assume digital natives, young people are able to parse real from fake online, that is not the case. Most of the time, these studies are showing that it’s really a grim outlook. And so it’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down. Check it out if you want on TikTok. But it’s pretty wild.

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    Leah Feiger

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  • He Was an FBI Informant—and Inspired a Generation of Violent Extremists

    He Was an FBI Informant—and Inspired a Generation of Violent Extremists

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    Listing the Atomwaffen Division and the Order of Nine Angles as a lasting influence, Butcher also disclosed the nature of MKU’s “alliance” with 764, which was forged by the users “Xor” and “Kush” (both of whom are still unidentified). While deriding 764 for not committing enough in-person violence, Butcher said the two groups “might still stay associates because they keep cleansing their own way by making the weak suicide.”

    According to victims of 764 members, “Tobbz,” a troubled young German convicted of killing an elderly woman and stabbing a man in 2022, was in the original 764 Discord server along with Almeida and Bradley Cadenhead, 764’s teenage founder who is serving decades in a Texas prison for CSAM offenses. Tobbz also had a Tempel ov Blood trident tattoo and had joined MKU, according to reporting from Der Spiegel and Recorder.

    The second issue of Drums of Tophet, which its authors describe as “designed for the dark warriors of a doom now imminent on the near horizon,” continues in the same vein with features Q309, an occult sadomasochistic, self-described “art project” that borders on CSAM and prominently features Order of Nine Angles themes and a lengthy interview with a founder of the Satanic Front, a southern occultist organization.

    In communications with a former Tempel ov Blood member viewed by WIRED, Sutter openly discussed viewing CSAM with other members of his nexion, and seemed obsessed with conspiracy theories like Project Monarch that involved child abuse. The former ToB member also noted Sutter’s fascination with the case of Belgian serial killer, rapist, and pedophile Marc Dutroux. Shortly before taking the Agony’s Point Press X account offline in March of this year, the account posted a photo of an occult altar featuring a blood-smeared photo of Dutroux next to human and animal skeletal remains, as well as a severed doll’s head inked with lightning bolts and a swastika, on top of a flag featuring a Nazi death’s head and the Nazi slogan “Meine ehre ist meine treue” (my honor is my allegiance).

    On several occasions in the past year, the Agony’s Point Press account on X posted videos and photos highlighting 764 and its offshoots, particularly MKU and the group’s growing interest in the Order of Nine Angles. The account also routinely posted about 764 and com, occasionally adopting a faux journalistic tone to launder posts from the CSAM distribution and extortion network. Around Christmas 2023, @agonyspoint posted a graphic of MKU’s hockey goalie mask insignia with a ToB trident emblazoned in its forehead.

    All this took place as the FBI’s investigation into 764 expanded and new arrests, including those of alleged member Kyle Spitze and Richard Densmore, who pleaded guilty in mid-July, were made in the early months of 2024. Moreover, there is an active FBI investigation on MKU that stems directly from its ties to 764, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the matter.

    Earlier this year, the Agony’s Point account turned back toward older Martinet Press material, with several threads promoting Bluebird and Iron Gates, two books that Sutter introduced to the Atomwaffen Division as required reading that celebrate child abuse and rape.

    “A Deal With the Devil”

    The FBI has never addressed Sutter’s role in fueling violent far-right ideology. But the blowback from Sutter’s actions over the past decade is a feature, not a bug, of American law enforcement’s use of confidential informants, says Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who has studied the topic extensively for more than 15 years. “The informant market is run on this tacit, uncomfortable understanding that the cure sometimes might be worse than the disease,” Natapoff tells WIRED. By utilizing people with criminal or extremist histories to infiltrate hard-to-penetrate milieus like gangs, organized crime, or terrorist groups, she explains, the US government rewards such people for continuing to swim in the same waters.

    “Baked into that arrangement is the well-understood, avoidable phenomenon that these individuals are going to commit criminal acts,” Natapoff says. “The FBI has authorized criminal and unauthorized criminal activity by confidential human sources, and the mere fact that those guidelines have those definitions is a recognition about the nature of informants.”

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    Ali Winston, Jake Hanrahan

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  • Far-Right Extremists Call for Violence and War After Trump Shooting

    Far-Right Extremists Call for Violence and War After Trump Shooting

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    Far-right communities online lit up on Saturday night with calls for violence, retribution, and civil war in the wake of the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump.

    “I guess they really do want war,” a member of the pro-Trump message board known as The Donald wrote on Saturday evening in a post that has since been deleted.

    Many other members of the message board, which played a significant role in coordinating activities leading up to the Capitol riot on January 6, agreed in responses to the post.

    “Let’s give it to them,” one person wrote. Another added: “I’m ready. This is my last damn straw.” One other user wrote: “CIVIL.FUCKING.WAR. I’m ready to be done with this fucking shit from Democrats.”

    The details of these posts were shared with WIRED by researchers from Advance Democracy, a nonprofit organization that conducts public interest research.

    Mainstream online platforms like X and Facebook have also been flooded with conspiracies and disinformation in the wake of the shooting, but in far-right communities, much of the talk focused on what happens next.

    “They’ve been trying to take this guy out since he’s been in office,” a member of Uncle Sam’s Proud Boys Upstate NY Telegram channel wrote in response to a picture from the shooting of Trump with a raised fist and blood on his face. “Too bad for them they missed probably their only shot at this failed attempt because they are about to really see what happens when you poke the bear for too long ie true American patriots. Fuck the DNC, Fuck the RINOs, fuck the FEDs and fuck the MSM. They should all be hung in the streets.”

    In a Telegram channel for the Infamous Legend Valley Proud Boys, an Ohio branch of the far-right militia, one member wrote: “Laugh and smirk now you Leftist cunts, But never fucking forget you will always reap what you sow.”

    On The Donald, users were also calling for all Democrats to be rounded up.

    “War now,” the user wrote. “They don’t want to live and let live. We need to finish what should have been done after the civil war: eradicate and eliminate all democrats and anyone who even thinks of being a democrat.”

    Calls for violence and civil war from far-right communities is nothing new. In the wake of the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Trump supporters immediately called for an armed uprising. Earlier this year, similar calls were made when Trump was found guilty on 34 felony charges. While these calls for violence do not always result in real-world action, there are numerous examples where online rhetoric has led to offline violence, most notably the Capitol riot.

    “Unlike the messaging in the aftermath of the attacks at the Cincinnati FBI field office and on Paul Pelosi, there is a concerted effort to present this as the consequence of left-wing rhetoric around Trump and fascism,” Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, tells WIRED. “A singular clear message is being spread from the top down and the bottom up, from members of Congress to right-wing influencers to neo-Nazi Telegram channels: We need to fight back.”

    Researchers at Advance Democracy say it is difficult to assess the scale of the online attacks, as the situation is still developing and could escalate.

    On Sunday, one of the main topics of conversation on The Donald was what would have happened if Trump had been killed, with most claiming that the response would have been much deadlier and much swifter.

    “I told my neighbor that if Trump had been killed I would have pulled my kit out, quit my job, and started working on my wish list,” one user wrote.

    These calls for violence are not limited to online spaces. Minutes after Trump was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, the former president’s supporters quickly turned on the media covering the rally.

    “Fake news! This is your fault!” they yelled, according to Axios reporter Sophia Cai, who was there. “You’re next! Your time is coming,” another shouted. A number of the attendees tried to break into the media area, but were stopped by security guards.

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    David Gilbert

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  • The Far Right Is Already Demonizing Kamala Harris

    The Far Right Is Already Demonizing Kamala Harris

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    Far-right communities online are already demonizing Vice President Kamala Harris after speculation that she may replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee in the US election.

    But rather than focusing on her policies, experience, or ability to do the job, the vicious attacks have focused instead on her sex life, her race, and rethreading old conspiracies about her eligibility to be president.

    These attacks have been spurred on by former President Donald Trump. “He just quit, you know—he’s quitting the race,” Trump said of Biden, in a video first reported by the Daily Beast last week and subsequently posted by Trump to his Truth Social account. “That means we have Kamala,” Trump adds. “She’s so bad. She’s so pathetic. She’s so fucking bad.”

    On July 4, Trump posted about Harris on Truth Social. “She did poorly in the Democrat Nominating process, starting out at Number Two, and ending up defeated and dropping out, even before getting to Iowa, but that doesn’t mean she’s not a ‘highly talented’ politician!” he wrote. “Just ask her Mentor, the Great Willie Brown of San Francisco.”

    Trump’s comments referenced Harris’ relationship with Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, in the mid-1990s. Though right-wing critics have accused her of having an affair with Brown because he was married at the time, a Reuters fact check from 2020 outlines how Brown had been separated from his wife for a decade before he began dating Harris.

    The White House pushed back against Trump’s attacks. “I think it’s gross, I think it’s disturbing,” Karine Jean-Pierre, White House press secretary, told reporters on Friday. “She should be respected in the role that she has as vice president. She should be respected like any other vice president before her who was in that room. It is appalling that, I’m going to be careful here, that a former president is saying that about a current vice president. And we should call that out—it is not OK.”

    But after Trump’s comments, the former president’s supporters and far-right figures quickly began to attack Harris.

    Harris has served in elected office for decades as a district attorney, state attorney general, senator, and vice president. Still, the vast majority of the attacks were both racist and sexist, and made some reference to her performing sexual acts and insinuating that they had to do with her success.

    “Kamala is just as brain dead as Biden,” far-right troll Laura Loomer wrote on X on Wednesday. “She pretends to be black, she has a documented history of giving blowjobs to Willie Brown to climb the ladder, and she’s obsessed with killing babies.”

    “Willi Brown’s F–k toy makes good,” one member of the extremist message board The Donald wrote in response to a post about her possibly replacing Biden as the Democratic nominee.

    Far-right posters also suggested that her race has played a major role in her success.

    “This is why DEI is particularly dangerous: idiots like her are lifted up above far smarter people so she starts to believe she’s the smartest one in the room,” a member of The Donald wrote last week.

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  • Far-Right Militias Are Back

    Far-Right Militias Are Back

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    Leah Feiger: To be fair, a militia of 2,500 across the United States that’s carefully organized on Telegram and promotes the use of armed weapons as a response to anything from natural disasters to fake claims of election fraud is still really concerning. I’m concerned.

    David Gilbert: Absolutely, and I think that gets lost. When you write articles like these, a lot of people kind of say, “Oh, you shouldn’t be platforming these people. They’re making this up. They’re bluffing.”

    Leah Feiger: Definitely.

    David Gilbert: But there are people in these Telegram groups who want to join armed militias, and it’s part of a bigger resurgence in far-right paramilitary activity and discussions that me and other experts are seeing online in recent weeks and months, and that’s really disturbing.

    Leah Feiger: We’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to talk about how all of these kinds of militias are starting to go mainstream again and what this means for 2024.Welcome back to WIRED Politics Lab. David, you were talking about how militias are having a resurgence right now. What exactly do you mean by that?

    David Gilbert: What I mean is that Lang is, and his network of militias that they’ve launched is just one part of a broader movement that both I, other journalists and researchers who are monitoring the space have seen in recent weeks, and it’s all linked to the 2024 election, that people need to be ready to respond if something happens and, of course, what that if is is if Donald Trump loses.

    Leah Feiger: So what does Lang say will happen in the event that Donald Trump loses?

    David Gilbert: Well, Lang talks about civil unrest, and that if Trump loses, that people will automatically be outraged. Do you believe that the outcome was accurate that Joe Biden did win the election?

    Jake Lang: No, I think it’s pretty much a statistical outlier or an impossibility.

    David Gilbert: When I spoke to him, he reeled off a list of the most widely known election conspiracies from 2020.

    Jake Lang: Rigged, stolen, manipulated, scam, whatever you want to call it. It was not the will of the people.

    David Gilbert: When he looks forward to 2024, he is predicting that if Trump loses, there will be a major catastrophe and there will be a lot of people angry, and that’s where his militias is going to be ready to step in.

    Leah Feiger: Is this real? I mean, people say a lot of things online. What kind of connections are you and other researchers drawing between this moment in 2020?

    David Gilbert: The network of people who are organizing this is much greater and much stronger because they have had four years to create these nationwide networks of connections and groups, whether it’s online or in-person. We saw ahead of 2020 that there were some researchers and some journalists who were raising flags, not a lot, but they were raising flags and saying, “This is worrying.” The intelligence services were also noticing that this was happening, but no one took any action. I think that this time around, we’re about five months out from the election, I think that the signals are much stronger. In recent weeks, I have definitely noticed a serious uptick in people who are discussing things like militias, things like sheriffs’ posses, that people need to be ready for 2024, this idea that something is going to happen on November 5th if the result doesn’t go the way people think it will go. So I think that that’s the parallels that you see between 2020 is that people ignored what was there in front of them. In 2020, you could kind of see why that happened because something like January 6th had never happened before. So what is happening this time is much bigger, but people at the moment, at least, don’t seem to be paying attention.

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    Leah Feiger

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  • Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters

    Far-Right Sheriffs Want a Citizen Army to Stop ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Voters

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    Boone Cutler, who has written a number of books with Flynn about “fifth-generational warfare”—military actions like social engineering, misinformation, and cyber attacks—described immigrants as “weaponized diaspora communities” who are being brought into the country to commit “terrorism.” Cutler announced, without providing any details, that he would be providing “irregular warfare training” to CSPOA officers ahead of the election.

    John Ferguson, who owns an aerospace company that he claims tracks activity along the border, boosted the dangerous and untrue myth that immigrants are crossing the border with military training and could pose a serious threat to the US. “The problem is that a lot of these people, there’s times where over 90 percent of the people that are being apprehended are all fighting-aged males, Chinese, Central and South Americans,” he said. “I have been south of the border doing missions in Mexico, and I have flown my unmanned aircraft over the training camps where they’re training.”

    The claim that “military-aged men” are being systematically brought across the border into the US is a conspiracy that has been around for some time and is increasingly gaining traction in mainstream GOP circles.

    And though they appear to have reached a new pitch, these claims about immigrants voting have been around for years. Trump has been promoting bogus claims about “illegal” immigrants voting since 2016, when he said the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton was due, in part, to many immigrants voting fraudulently.Trump repeated the claim in 2020 to explain the reason he lost to Biden in key swing states like Arizona—a claim he referred to in his speech ahead of the January 6 riot.

    Trump hasn’t stopped: “Biden’s conduct on our border is by any definition a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America,” Trump said last month during a speech in North Carolina. “Biden and his accomplices want to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters, and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations.”

    There is no evidence to back up any of these claims, however, and research from the Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations has shown that the number of noncitizens voting in US elections is statistically insignificant. In one study from the Brennan Center on the 2016 election, researchers found that non-citizens were suspected (not even confirmed) to have voted in just 0.0001 percent of the 23.5 million votes cast.

    Still, these assertions have continued to gain traction as tensions at the US-Mexico border escalate. Republicans have also continued espousing the belief that the US population is being systematically replaced by minorities, a conspiracy known as the great replacement. Despite the theory being widely debunked, the conspiracy has taken hold in MAGA and increasingly mainstream right-wing circles, with speaker of the House Mike Johnson recently announcing a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting in elections—even though that is not an issue.

    Earlier this month, the far-right X account known as EndWokeness posted misleading statistics about a supposed dramatic rise in the numbers of migrant voters registering in the US to vote without IDs to its 2 million followers. The stats were quickly debunked by election officials, but the post, which is still on the site without a Community Note, has been viewed over 65 million times. Elon Musk, X’s CEO, shared the post with the comment: “Extremely concerning.”

    At the CSPOA conference, Wayne Allen Root, a right-wing radio host who promoted the false conspiracy about former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate, repeated Trump’s claims about immigrant voters.

    “The [2020] election was stolen in the six battleground states that would have given Trump a landslide win, instead of a landslide electoral loss,” Root said, without providing any evidence to back it up. “Those six states were decided by the votes of illegal aliens who came in through our open borders. That’s who’s voting. That’s our elections.”

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    David Gilbert

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  • Elon Musk’s X Is Suspending Accounts That Reveal a Neo-Nazi Cartoonist’s Alleged Identity

    Elon Musk’s X Is Suspending Accounts That Reveal a Neo-Nazi Cartoonist’s Alleged Identity

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    Hours later, the account associated with the Anonymous Comrades Collective that posted the thread was deleted, and the account was suspended. On Friday, dozens of users, including a number of researchers and journalists, began discussing the incident and posting some of the details of the research, including Graebener’s name.

    X locked down many of these accounts and ordered them to delete the offending tweet to get full access to their accounts back. Among those targeted were Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, who covers right-wing extremism; Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at Southern Poverty Law Center; and Steven Monacelli, an investigative journalist for the Texas Observer. (WIRED has also published Monacelli’s work.)

    X also imposed a ban on sharing the link to the Anonymous Comrades Collective blog detailing its research. WIRED verified this on Monday morning by attempting to post the link, only to be met with a pop-up message that read: ‘We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by X or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

    Even with the crackdown from X, people kept sharing details of the Stonetoss investigation.

    “We all just started posting his name; it was like a Streisand effect,” Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, tells WIRED. “They’re just trying to censor his name, and then everyone started getting their accounts locked.”

    Caraballo, who shared screenshots of the messages she received from X with WIRED, managed to circumvent the initial ban by appealing it and claiming, ironically, that she was the victim of mass reporting from antifa who were attempting to silence her right-wing viewpoint.

    While that appeal was successful, Caraballo was quickly locked out of her account again when she changed her username to “Hans Kristian Graebener is stonetoss.” That resulted in a 12-hour suspension, and when her account was reinstated she was soon punished for earlier posts that shared screenshots of information about Graebener. Caraballo’s account has now been suspended for seven days.

    An X representative says that the company, following a review of the actions taken against the accounts of Anonymous Comrades Collective, Holt, Gais, Monacelli, and Caraballo, stood by its decision.

    “The posts that were removed were all actioned correctly,” says Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, adding that the posts violated the company’s “posting private information policy” for “outing the identity of an anonymous user.”

    While X does have a policy around sharing private information, a review of the company’s terms of service shows no mention of a policy related to outing the identity of an anonymous user, and Benarroch did not respond to a request for clarification.

    “According to X’s terms of service, posting someone’s name does not constitute doxing, but many accounts, including my own, have been made to delete posts that merely mention the name of the racist and antisemitic cartoonist Stonetoss,” Monacelli tells WIRED. “I’ve never seen enforcement like this before.”

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    David Gilbert

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