Two days after an attack on Paris's Champs-Élysées that left one police officer dead, questions remain about the shooter, his ties to terrorism, and whether he had accomplices. The Islamic State (IS) group claimed responsibility about two hours after the attack, which took place on Paris’s Champs-Élysées avenue. A statement published by the terrorist group’s progaganda…
The MAGA movement has spent the past four years getting a “civics lesson,” and it’s now maneuvered into a position where it can put what it’s learned into practice, according to its mastermind.
Steve Bannon told writer Isaac Arnsdorf that the right-wing movement has spent its formative years learning the “rules” of government and stacking the low-level building blocks of government with its loyalists.
And now it's ready to really start making its move.
The result, Bannon said, will be an extreme political movement that will last 100 years.
“Now they understand how important the rules are,” Bannon told Arnsdorf in his new book, “Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy," which was profiled in the New York Times Wednesday.
“We’re having a civics lesson here. We’re exploding, and the reason we’re exploding? We’re really getting into the granular, and people can’t get enough of it.”
Since 2020, Arnsdorf wrote, the MAGA movement has been building itself up at a local level, instilling itself into low-level but locally powerful spots and preparing to break into the national mainstream.
Despite disappointment in the midterm elections, Bannon sees the movement as a long-term project which, when it breaks through, will be dominant.
“In the book, [Bannon] keeps insisting to Arnsdorf that most of the country is MAGA, even if some of those MAGA supporters don’t know it yet,” the New York Times reported.
“Bannon believed the MAGA movement, if it could break out of being suppressed and marginalized by the establishment, represented a dominant coalition that could rule for a hundred years."
The long-term plan, the writer stated, involved work that is a lot more behind the scenes than the Capitol riot or the bombastic speeches of Donald Trump.
ALSO READ: Bill Barr: The GOP's master 'fixer' for decades exposed
And, Arnsdorf warned, it’s been happening. MAGA has shown “infinite patience,” slowly packing the humble yet foundational building blocks of the party structure — “precinct positions that were often vacant because no one was paying attention” — with loyalists, the Times wrote.
Arnsdorf warned there has now been “an influx of new precinct committee members [that] would ensure that the 2024 election would reflect the will of the real people — the MAGA faithful.”
Three years ago, Derrick Evans was taking part in the January 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol, joining hundreds of other Donald Trump supporters who refused to accept his defeat in the presidential election.
Now he is campaigning to serve in the very legislative body he targeted that day.
And he's not alone: across the United States, around a dozen people involved in the siege of the Capitol -- an attack that shook confidence in the stability of American democracy -- have sought or are seeking to hold local or national office this year.
Evans is running in his state's Republican primary for a seat in the US Congress. Campaigning in a rural state known for its coal mines, conservatism and natural beauty, he now frames his January 6 experience as a positive -- a reason fellow West Virginians should vote for him.
In an interview with AFP, Evans, now a real estate investor, described himself as a "political prisoner."
The hundreds who invaded the Capitol, galvanized by Trump's insistence that the election had been "stolen" from him, had hoped to block Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the new president.
Evans, then a newly installed member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, live-streamed himself entering the building. Seen wearing a black motorcycle helmet, he yelled "Freedom!" and -- lest there be any doubt about his identity -- proclaimed "Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!"
His actions that day earned him a three-month prison sentence on a felony civil disorder charge. Evans had pleaded guilty but insisted he was in the Capitol only as an independent member of the media.
"The Deep State came to my home and ripped me away from my wife and my four children," said Evans, referring to conspiracy theories about the existence of a shadowy, anti-Trump administrative body that secretly exerts power over American society.
- Hunted or hunters? -
The home page of his campaign website leaves no doubt about his past, proudly proclaiming: "J6 Prisoner running for US Congress."
Evans vows that "when I take my seat in Congress, we will turn the tables and the hunters will become the hunted" -- language that seemingly echoes Trump's threat of "retribution" against political enemies if reelected.
Evans is not the only January 6 veteran using the assault on the Capitol as an argument for election.
Jason Riddle, running for Congress in the Republican primary in the northeastern state of New Hampshire, describes himself as "a recently released January 6th political prisoner with a message of hope."
Others, like Kimberly Dragoo, have already lost their elections. Dragoo was running for a seat on a local board of education in Missouri, though she didn't receive her sentence -- two weeks in prison -- until last week.
Trump has embraced the January 6 crowd, promising amnesty if he returns to power.
Critics say he is trying to reshape the day's bloody events in the public eye, casting the Capitol's invaders as victims of the same "political persecution" that he claims targets him.
- 'Embrace it' -
When Evans is asked why he chose to capitalize on his January 6 experience, he replies: "I didn't. The fake news media did this."
"And I had two options. I could either run from it or embrace it. I chose to embrace it."
Did he have any regrets about that day?
"My regret is believing that we had natural God-given rights of free speech, and that we still had a Constitution in this country," he said.
Evans says the West Virginia voters he has met could care less about his clash with the law.
"When they find out that I'm the elected guy who got arrested for January 6, they shake my hand and they thank me and tell me they're gonna vote for me," he said.
In West Virginia's May 14 Republican primary, Evans will face another Trump supporter, Congresswoman Carol Miller.
Evans has been endorsed by several conservative figures, including Miller's colleague Representative Bob Good and former Trump advisors Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
He says he has a hard time believing Trump could possibly be beaten in his November race against President Joe Biden.
If Biden is returned to office, he said, "I'm going to teach my family how to live like Amish people," who shun much of modern civilization, "and get ready for the collapse of this country."
Jurors have already heard two days of damning testimony against Donald Trump in his hush money trial, and a former prosecutor told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" she believes what had been considered his strongest defense could be knocked down.
Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker told the jury that he personally tracked down negative stories about Trump during the 2016 election campaign and paid off damaging sources to prevent them from speaking to other outlets. Politico's deputy managing editor for politics Sam Stein floated what he believed to be the greatest weakness in the case against the ex-president.
"I actually think the defense is fairly easy here, right, which is this man David Pecker ran the National Enquirer, which literally made up stories and peddled lies," Stein said. "Why should we believe that he's telling the truth now? Same with Michael Cohen — he's admitted in prior iterations that he lied, why should we believe anything he says now? That, to me, seems a powerful defense — they're admitted liars, in disinformation, you shouldn't believe what they have to say, what should the prosecution do with that?"
But Barbara McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said it should be fairly easy for prosecutors to counter that defense and bolster the credibility of their key witnesses.
"Oftentimes a prosecutor needs to use as a witness somebody who was a criminal associate of the defendant," McQuade said. "The common statement is to say, 'I didn't choose the witnesses, the defendant did by associating with them very closely,'" she said. "The key is, of course, to find corroborating evidence so the jury don't have to take their word for it.
ALSO READ: A criminologist explains why Trump’s Manhattan trial is the biggest threat to his freedom
"We'll hear from people like Hope Hicks and other people who worked for the Trump Organization. We'll see documents in the forms of checks and ledgers, we'll hear that recording between Michael Cohen and Donald Trump about setting up essential consultants and some of the other payments."
"You can see it coming for David Pecker, for sure," McQuade added. "It's coming for Michael Cohen and, if she testifies, it will be coming for Stormy Daniels, as well. Very often the corroboration is enough to rehabilitate those witnesses."
Watch the video below or at this link.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
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