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Best of Right Wing Watch - 5/12/23
Our Right Wing Watch team at People For the American Way works hard to document, expose, and disrupt right-wing extremism in America.
Here are our top five posts from the past week. We're also featuring another subscriber-exclusive piece this week! Scroll down for an update on the right-wing reaction to the convictions of January 6 insurrectionists!
Click on the images or headlines for the articles.
Family Research Council Launches New Church Network to ‘Impact the Culture’
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NEW: Subscriber Exclusive!
Jan. 6 Seditionists Are Being Held Accountable. We Love It. The Right Hates It.
May is a big month for the important legal efforts to hold leaders of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection accountable for their violent attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
The Justice Department announced on May 5 that it was seeking a 25-year term for Oath Keepers founder Stuart Rhodes, who was convicted earlier this year of seditious conspiracy. Rhodes is scheduled to be sentenced on May 25. Other convicted Oath Keepers face prison terms of ten years or more.
Just a day earlier, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the far-right fight club were found guilty of seditious conspiracy for their role in the attack on the Capitol. They are expected to be sentenced in August.
Right Wing Watch has been reporting on the Oath Keepers for more than a decade, and on the Proud Boys for almost their entire existence, and we repeatedly warned of their threats and violence.
Last year, Right Wing Watch documented the Oath Keepers’ role in Trump’s efforts to hang onto power after his loss. We were proud that the congressional committee investigating the insurrection played at a public hearing video that Right Wing Watch captured of Rhodes threatening bloody civil war if Trump didn’t use the military to stay in power.
Right Wing Watch has also extensively documented the threats to democracy from the increasingly aggressive and authoritarian Christian nationalist political movement, which promoted Trump’s post-election lies and stoked the rage that led to Jan. 6. Our work was cited a dozen times in a major report on the role Christian Nationalism played in the insurrection.
The Oath Keepers and Proud Boys convictions are essential to upholding the rule of law—and deterring future coup attempts against American democracy. Others—notably coup-leader-in-chief Donald Trump—have yet to be held accountable for their actions before and during the attack.
In fact, Trump and his allies are still trying to rewrite history. In his CNN “town hall” this week, Trump stuck to his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, called Jan. 6 a “beautiful day,” and said he was “inclined” to pardon “many” of those charged and convicted of committing crimes at the Capitol.
Taking their cue from Trump, far-right activists and right-wing media figures denounced the Proud Boys convictions as a “sham” and miscarriage of justice.
Don’t think for a minute that the Proud Boys are going away. As Josh Marcus noted at The Independent, “the Proud Boys remain a violent and influential force in American political life.” Many have shifted their attention to the local level, and are deploying their violent bullying tactics against people attending drag shows—which the far right has turned into a front line in their anti-LGBTQ cultural warfare, making the group what Marcus calls the “unofficial paramilitary backers of whatever the main Republican priority of the day is.”
Times are tough in the nonprofit world. Please support People For the American Way so that Right Wing Watch can continue to report on extremists and authoritarians—and so we can continue to provide what Rachel Maddow has called “a great public service” and a “fire alarm system for the whole country.”
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