Trump supporters and conspiracy theory - Part 2

[Rick Plant]

Buffalo gunman's racism appears linked to mainstreaming of white nationalism



Amid the outpouring of grief and heartache following Saturday's massacre in Buffalo that left 10 people dead and three wounded, critical observers say the racial animus which evidence shows motivated the killer must be seen in the larger context of a white nationalist mindset that has increasingly broken into the mainstream of the right-wing political movement and Republican Party in recent years.

Taken into custody at the scene of the mass shooting at the Tops Market was Payton Gendron, the white 18-year-old male who has charged with murdering the victims. Gendron live-streamed his attack online and also posted a detailed, 180-page document that has been described by those who have reviewed it — including journalists and law enforcement — as a white nationalist manifesto rife with anti-Black racism, antisemitism and conspiracy theories about "white replacement."

According to local outlet News 4 in Buffalo:

The document, which News 4 has reviewed, plotted the attack in grotesque detail. The writer plotted his actions down to the minute, included diagrams of his path through the store and said he specifically targeted the Tops Markets location on Jefferson Avenue because its zip code has the highest percentage of Black people close enough to where he lives.

"This was pure evil," said Erie County Sheriff John Garcia during a press conference on Saturday. The attack, he said, "was straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community."

A senior law enforcement official in Buffalo told NBC News that officials were working to verify the document's authenticity and confirm Gendron was behind it.

"We are aware of the manifesto allegedly written by the suspect and we're working to definitively confirm that he is the author," the official said.

NBC, which reviewed the document, reports:

The manifesto includes dozens of pages of antisemitic and racist memes, repeatedly citing the racist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory frequently pushed by white supremacists, which falsely alleges white people are being "replaced" in America as part of an elaborate Jewish conspiracy theory. Other memes use tropes and discredited data to denigrate the intelligence of non-white people.

In the manifesto, Gendron claims that he was radicalized on 4chan while he was "bored" at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.

The document also claims "critical race theory," a recent right-wing talking point that has come to generally encompass teaching about race in school, is part of a Jewish plot, and a reason to justify mass killings of Jews.

The manifesto also includes repeated references to another mass shooter motivated by racial hate, Brenton Tarrant, who in 2019 live-streamed his vicious Islamophobic assault on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he murdered 51 people and wounded dozens of others.

With these and other facts established about Gendron's apparent motivations and ideology, many of those horrified by Saturday's killings responded by saying the brutal and deadly attack in Buffalo cannot — and should not — be separated from the growing embrace of the far-right nationalism that has increasingly found a home inside more mainstream institutions in the U.S., including right-wing media outlets like Fox News and a Republican Party enthralled by the xenophobic and fascistic conspiracy theories of Donald Trump.

"We are horrified, heartbroken, and enraged at the news of the vicious attack on our neighbors and loved ones in Buffalo, New York," said People's Action, the progressive advocacy group, in a statement.

"This racist attack is a pure example of evil," the group added. "It's also the predictable result of the relentless onslaught of white nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy theories spewed from the far right, increasingly distributed by major corporate news outlets like Fox News and the extremist politicians their billionaire allies have cultivated."

"In Christchurch, New Zealand and El Paso, Texas and Poway, California and now again in Buffalo, New York, a gunman motivated by a white nationalist conspiracy theory about invading immigrants shot and killed people of color," said Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council for Muslim Advocates, in a statement referencing a series of mass shootings carried out by white supremacists in recent years.

"In Christchurch, El Paso, Poway, California, and now in Buffalo, a gunman. motivated by white nationalist conspiracy theory ... shot and killed people of color."

"Just like in Christchurch," Waheed continued, "the alleged Buffalo shooter both posted a manifesto about the 'great replacement' conspiracy theory and also livestreamed his massacre on social media. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims and to the people of Buffalo."

In a statement on Sunday, Kina Collins, a gun violence prevention advocate and Democratic congressional candidate running for Congress in Illinois' 7th district, made similar arguments.

Calling the shooting a "devastating and sickening display of the racism, white supremacy, hate, and gun violence that plague this country," Collins said, "Black people in Buffalo were targeted for no reason other than that they are Black."

"This was an act of terrorism and it should be treated as such," she added. "It is another reminder that white supremacy has and will always be America's greatest threat. White supremacy has infiltrated our military and police departments. It was also on display on January 6th last year as insurrectionists, fueled by white supremacy, attacked our Capitol and threatened the lives of sitting members of Congress."

Journalist Sam Sacks also made a connection between the Buffalo shooter and the "Big Lie" movement that drove the Jan. 6 insurrection last year.

Waheed in his statement said, "This hateful, white nationalist rhetoric is not just being spread by lone gunmen."

Such rhetoric, he said, "can also be found on cable news and in the rhetoric of politicians today. On his cable news show, Tucker Carlson said that 'the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.' In campaign ads, Donald Trump described Latino immigrants as an 'invasion.' In a speech, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called the election of Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib 'an Islamic invasion of our government.'"

With Republicans and major media personalities "normalizing white nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Latino, antisemitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories," and gunmen like the one in Buffalo carrying out such attacks, Waheed said it is now "clear that white nationalism is the greatest threat to our nation's security and we must hold everyone who spreads this hate accountable before anyone else is harmed."

https://www.wivb.com/news/buffalo-supermarket-mass-shooting-tops/buffalo-mass-shooters-alleged-manifesto-leaves-no-doubt-attack-was-white-supremacist-terrorism/

[Rick Plant]

Grand jury probe may reveal Trump stole top-secret documents for 'personal profit' post-presidency: legal expert

A federal grand jury is investigating Donald Trump's handling of classified materials found in boxes at Mar-A-Lago, and a legal expert said the matter should be getting much more attention.

The development shows the Department of Justice believes a crime may have been committed, and MSNBC's Frank Figliuzzi said publicly available reporting already shows the 15 boxes of top-secret materials are believed to have been kept in the White House residence before they were boxed up and sent to Trump's private residence.

"Fifteen boxes of classified documents sitting in the residential wing of the White House doesn’t sound like a mistake to me," wrote Figliuzzi, a former FBI special agent. "That sounds deliberate and less like an error that could be attributed to staff. Virtually every day during my 25 years with the FBI, I handled classified information. It was my experience that staffers, whose job is to know and comply with the rules and regulations for handling such data, don’t deliberately break those rules unless someone at a high level makes them break those rules. That’s why I don’t believe this grand jury is targeting low-level staffers."

Investigators will also want to know what materials were in those boxes, and why the former president may have taken them home with him.

"As Justice Department investigators examine the documents, they’ll be able to see whether the contents held some value to Trump or those around him and possibly determine whether Trump could benefit from whatever’s in those documents," Figliuzzi wrote. "We mustn’t forget that during Trump’s term, his family members parlayed their relationship with him into personal profit and that while he was president, Trump’s own businesses reportedly raked in $2.4 billion."

The case might actually be bigger than it already looks, he said.

"The first step to solving the Mar-a-Lago mystery is to get those documents into the hands of federal prosecutors and agents," Figliuzzi wrote. "The convening of a grand jury suggests that may have already happened. Now, we wait for the mystery to be solved."

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/investigation-trump-s-handling-classified-documents-huge-n1295419

[Rick Plant]

These people are sick. The radical right continue to push these racist conspiracy theories, then when one of their white supremacist radicals acts on their lies with violence in a mass shooting, they attempt to deny it by claiming it was all "staged". This is the same thing they do with their "Critical Race Theory" conspiracy theory, the radical right is banning books in school trying to cause a race war. This is the same lie Alex Jones promoted when children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary. Yes, these people are sick and evil. 

Arizona Republican with ties to white nationalists accuses federal agents of staging Buffalo massacre



An Arizona Republican state legislator with ties to white nationalists suggested the Buffalo massacre was staged.

State Sen. Wendy Rogers, an election conspiracist who spoke at a white nationalist event, posted a message on the social media platform Telegram that speculated government agents had carried out the murder of 10 people at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood, reported HuffPost.

“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Rogers posted, although she didn't make clear why federal agents would stage the mass shooting.

The 18-year-old suspect in the shootings left a lengthy manifesto referring to the "great replacement" conspiracy theory that has motivated previous gunmen, and Rogers has espoused similar views about immigration and race.

“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted last year. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists and our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations and other strategies to accomplish this.”

Fox News broadcaster Tucker Carlson and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) have also promoted "great replacement" ideology.

Rogers, a first-term legislator, was censured in March for her violent rhetoric, and she spoke in February at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida, where she praised white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has also claims the Buffalo killings were a false flag.

“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted last year. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists and our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations and other strategies to accomplish this.”

Fox News broadcaster Tucker Carlson and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) have also promoted "great replacement" ideology.

Rogers, a first-term legislator, was censured in March for her violent rhetoric, and she spoke in February at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida, where she praised white supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has also claims the Buffalo killings were a false flag.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wendy-rogers-buffalo-shooting_n_6281bfd6e4b0c7c107750fb1

[Rick Plant]

Emails show that John Eastman thought allegations of fraud were unnecessary for stealing an election



Pennsylvania state legislator Russ Diamond had a problem. Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by 80,000 votes, thereby securing its 20 electors. According to a newly released trove of emails, Diamond and fellow Republican state legislators wanted instead to send electors dedicated to Donald Trump. They just needed the right excuse.

If that sounds outrageous, that’s because it is.

At first, it seemed allegations of electoral fraud might do the trick. Trump and his lawyers blanketed the airwaves with outlandish claims about fraud at the polls. But when the Trump legal team made their case to the Pennsylvania legislature, their efforts struck Diamond as unconvincing and frankly incompetent. If there was no fraud, how could they justify overriding the will of the voters?

Luckily for Diamond, an obscure conservative law professor had recently said in testimony that state legislatures didn’t need evidence of fraud to disregard the will of the people. It was enough, Professor John Eastman said, that the legislature objected to the rules under which the election was conducted. After watching Eastman’s testimony, Diamond decided Eastman was just the man to help him write a resolution purporting to nullify the will of his state’s voters.

“Honestly, the Trump legal team was not exactly stellar at PA's hearing, failed to provide the affidavits of their witnesses, and made a glaring error by purporting that more ballots had been returned than mailed out,” Diamond admitted in an email to Eastman. “It is for this reason that I latched onto your comments that actual fraud is irrelevant when the election itself is unlawful.”

Diamond sent Eastman a draft resolution predicated on Eastman’s crackpot theory that the US Constitution gives state legislatures the unchecked power to disenfranchise their own voters after the fact if legislators don’t like the results of an election.

Eastman praised Diamond’s efforts but urged his protegé to go still further and actually name Trump electors in the resolution, as opposed to simply announcing their intent to do so.

“One big question, though. Do you want to only go half way, and require another resolution to actually choose a slate of electors? Or should you do it all in one resolution?,” Eastman wrote. “I don't know the dynamic of your Legislature, so can't answer that. But my intuition is that it would be better to do what you need to do in one fell swoop.”

The Pennsylvania Secretary of State and the courts had made some tweaks to facilitate voting during the pandemic. Republicans challenged these changes in court and lost. But Eastman promised that these changes could give the Pennsylvania legislature the excuse it needed to throw out the election, even without any evidence of fraud.

Eastman argued that it would be more politically palatable if the legislature could claim that the new rules cost Trump the election and they as legislators were simply righting that wrong by nullifying the election and replacing Biden’s electors with Trump’s.

Knowing that the mail-in vote favored Biden, Eastman suggested that the legislature pass a resolution arbitrarily declaring a certain percentage of perfectly legal mail-in ballots to be illegal based on a convoluted formula Eastman made up.

That way, Eastman said, the legislature could claim Trump won. “That would help provide some cover,” he asserted. (In fact, Trump would still have lost under Eastman’s metric, but that’s beside the point.)

Ultimately, Pennsylvania state legislators did not pass a resolution openly nullifying the results of their state’s election and naming alternative electors. Instead, at the urging of Trump’s legal team, Pennsylvania Republicans secretly named a slate of pseudo-electors, as did Republicans in six other states that Biden won.

The threat of an Eastman gambit has not passed.

If anything, it has gotten worse.

That is why Congress must reform the Electoral Count Act to specify that if there are two slates of electors claiming to represent a state, Congress must only count electors courts have affirmed as legitimate.

https://www.cato.org/blog/state-legislatures-cant-overturn-presidential-election-results

[Rick Plant]

Ron Filipkowski @Ron Filipkowski

The Republican controlled AZ Senate has voted to open an investigation into Wendy Rogers comments about the Buffalo shootings. I posted her comments where she said the murders were a false flag FBI operation.



https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1526317431505178624


Wendy is also a retired military officer. Her post right after the shootings





Arizona Senate Investigating Wendy Rogers Over Claims About Buffalo Shooting



Just hours after a shooter killed 10 people Saturday in a racist attack at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers took to social media to write: "Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo," implying the attack was a false-flag operation.

She posted the remark Saturday on Gab and Telegram, two social media sites popular on the political right. The posts gained hundreds of likes from Rogers' supporters.

They also sparked national outrage. In the wake of the attacks by an 18-year-old white supremacist, who posted hundreds of pages of his writings, some on the far-right spread conspiracies that the attack was a false flag operation. Rogers appeared to be fueling those claims.

By Monday, national outlets — including Rolling Stone and Business Insider — had taken notice of Rogers' comments: "Racist Republican Lawmaker Claims White Supremacist Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag,"

On Monday afternoon, the Arizona Senate voted to open an ethics investigation into her comment. The motion passed in the GOP-controlled chamber. Other than Rogers herself, only two senators cast dissenting votes: East Valley Republicans Warren Petersen, of Gilbert, and Kelly Townsend, of Mesa. Twenty-four senators voted in favor of opening an investigation.

Rogers did not speak during the vote. And so far, she has not taken down the posts, nor apologized.

"This Senator was up before the ethics committee a year ago. In March, our state senate voted to censure her because of hateful, anti-Semitic comments," said Arizona State Senator Victoria Steele, a Tucson Democrat who is speaking in support of the investigation. "Spewing hate and furthering racist comments is not what we should be here for."

Several Democratic members of the Senate said they believed that more serious action — like expulsion — was necessary. Senate President Karen Fann waved away that option, saying the body "believed in due process" and that such action was "premature."

A subsequent motion to expel Rogers for her comments failed, largely along party lines. Multiple Republicans who voted in favor of the investigation dissented on the expulsion. It needed a two-thirds majority to pass, which would mean 20 votes. Only 11 voted in favor, with 15 opposed.

It's hardly Rogers' first controversy — or association with extremist views. She represents a large, rural district that sprawls across Coconino, Yavapai, and Gila counties, and since getting elected to the legislature in 2020, has been embroiled in one controversy after another.

Rogers was censured by her Senate colleagues after she called for the hangings of her political opponents at an extremist conference in Florida, then went on social media rants that, critics charged, were blatantly anti-Semitic. She also has appeared on extremist TV shows.

As critics have noted, Rogers has also stoked the "great replacement" conspiracy that, according to the shooter's own writings, inspired the attack on shoppers in a mostly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.

The ideology, centered around the idea that white people are being replaced by immigration, has a long history in white supremacist groups, and has prompted other episodes of violence and mass shootings, including the Christchurch attack in New Zealand in 2019.

Rhetoric that alludes or nods to these beliefs is not unusual in far-right circles. But Rogers, in particular, has drawn attention in the press for her invocation of similar beliefs. In July 2021, she tweeted a Breitbart article about immigration and added: "We are being replaced and invaded."

When Rogers faced scrutiny for that tweet, she announced that she stood by the statement. "We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country," she wrote. She later added that she wanted to "make Western civilization great again."

As several lawmakers noted this weekend, Rogers is just one example of extremism in the Arizona legislature.

Though Rogers didn't reply to Phoenix New Times' questions, she posted this statement on Twitter on Monday, apparently responding to the backlash:

"Of course, I condemn the violence in Buffalo. Who doesn’t?" she wrote. "I also condemn the #FakeNews and the government promoting violence and then blaming it on regular patriotic Americans as if regular Americans share those despicable views. Everything is not what it seems!"

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/remark-by-wendy-rogers-on-buffalo-shooting-sparks-outrage-investigation-13640591

[Rick Plant]

Donald Trump Jr. posted this on his social media. He thinks his father is a "king" and thinks of himself as "Prince".

[Rick Plant]

People are now saying the Republican Party is the party of white supremacists and mass shooters.

Buffalo killer's worldview has become 'increasingly central to the identity of the Republican Party': NYT editorial



The twisted view of the world that spurred the 18-year-old gunman to seek out and murder Black people in a Buffalo supermarket increasingly is at the core of the Republican party's identity, argued a scathing New York Times editorial on Tuesday.

The New York Times editorial board is calling out GOP politicians, especially those in leadership positions, for amplifying the false white supremacist conspiracy theory that there is an orchestrated effort is underway to displace white Americans.

The newspaper points out that a recently published poll revealed that almost half of all Republicans believe there is a concerted effort by a group of powerful people in this country who are trying to permanently alter the culture and voting strength of native-born Americans by bringing in large groups of immigrants.

Just like Payton Gendron, those who committed mass killings in recent years in El Paso, TX, Charleston, SC, Pittsburgh and elsewhere all shared the same racist worldview, the newspaper notes.

"American life is punctuated by mass shootings that are routinely described as idiosyncratic," the editors write. "But these attacks are not random acts; they are part of the long American history of political violence perpetrated by white supremacists against Black people and other minority groups. Politicians who have employed some of the vocabulary of replacement theory generally do not make explicit calls for violence. The office of one of those politicians, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, said in a statement that the Buffalo attack was an 'act of evil' and that she 'has never advocated for any racist position.'"

But as the Times points out, in September, Stefanik’s re-election campaign "paid for a Facebook ad that combined imagery of immigrants with the accusation that 'Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION.' Ms. Stefanik’s ad continued, 'Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.'”

The Times editorial underscores what Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who was kicked out of a GOP leadership role after denouncing former President Donald Trump and the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection, tweeted on Monday: "The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/opinion/buffalo-shooting-replacement-theory.html