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The factions of far-right militants in America can seem a jumble of militiamen and revolutionaries, neo-fascists and white supremacists. While they all share a love of guns and a loathing of liberalism, not all militant groups share the same tactics, aims, or trigger points. How do you differentiate an Oath Keeper militant from a Proud Boy brawler or a Boogaloo Boi from the Patriot Front? Weve got you covered.

Below, a survey of some of the most dangerous groups on the right, the objectives they pursue, what makes them unique and why they fight. The best way to distinguish between these groups, says Matt Kriner, a senior research scholar at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, is looking at their narratives of justified violence.

Founded: In 2016 by Gavin McInnes, who previously helped launch Vice Media. Proud Boys started as a street-fighter group that wanted to be real-life shitposters, says Kriner. They wanted to be those edgelords on the street.

Core beliefs: The Proud Boys declare themselves to be Western chauvinists, which is a fancy way of saying white supremacists or white nationalists, Kriner argues. Despite surface denials of bigotry, the Proud Boys have acted as a gateway to the alt-right. Kriner describes them as a vessel to deepen the red redpilling of disaffected men. They have a hipster aesthetic, testosterone-fetishizing mores (eschewing masturbation, for example), and initiation rituals that make light of violence e.g., enduring punches until initiates can name five sugar cereals.

The Proud Boys rage against the left, which they blame for undermining Western society. The Proud Boys take metaphorical culture wars and make them literal: They are street brawlers, often showing up to clash with anti-fascist counterprotesters particularly in cities in the Pacific Northwest. Differing from militia movements, says Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher at the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism, theyre more focused on opposing the left than the federal government.

Approach to violence: Unlike the Oath Keepers and other militias, the Proud Boys dont tie themselves in knots looking for moral or legalistic justifications of violence. Theyre fascists, says Kriner. Theyre not adhering to a constitutional structure. Theyre saying, Were here to fuck shit up.

Key moments: Top Proud Boys face federal charges for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. Earlier, a prominent Proud Boy, Jason Kessler, helped organize the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. (Kessler was belatedly kicked out of the Proud Boys.) In a 2020 debate, then-President Trump was asked by Joe Biden to disown the Proud Boys. Trump instead told the Proud Boys to Stand back and stand by, because somebodys gotta do something about antifa and the left.

Men belonging to the Oathkeepers wearing military tactical gear attend the Stop the Steal rally on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Founded: In 2009 by StewartRhodes, a former Army paratrooper and Yale Law-educated attorney, who lost his eye in a handgun accident. Through the Obama years, the groups membership grew into the tens of thousands.

Core beliefs: The Oath Keepers tout themselves as guardians of the constitutional order against what they perceive as encroaching federal tyranny. They recruit heavily among veterans and law-enforcement personnel, appealing to their vow to protect the country against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The organization is very conspiratorial in their outlook, says Kriner. Its multipart oath includes fever-dream promises to defend cities from being turned into interment camps. We will not obey any order to detain American citizens as unlawful enemy combatants, reads another, or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.

Approach to violence: On a surface level, the Oath Keepers orientation is defensive, even as many members spoil for a fight. Theyre going to try to look for moral high ground, Kriner says, and say We were pushed to a point that we no longer could avoid violence.

Prominent adherents: A leaked roster of 38,000 Oath Keepers revealed that many sheriffs, police officers, and even some elected officials signed up for the group.

Key moments: Oath Keepers showed up in force at the 2014 standoff at Bundy Ranch in southern Nevada, in defense of a notorious anti-government cattleman who refused to pay federal grazing fees. They also manned rooftops during the Ferguson uprising in Missouri in 2014, purporting to protect property owners from looters.

Jan. 6 connection: Many Oath Keepers have been charged for storming the Capitol in tactical gear to disrupt the count by the Electoral College. Rhodes and nearly a dozen other Oath Keepers have been charged with seditious conspiracy to block the peaceful transfer of power by force. These Oath Keepers allegedly stockpiled weapons across the river in Virginia on Jan. 6 eager for Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and call them into a bloody battle against the presidents enemies.

GA, a member of the Boogaloo Boys, stands with his assault rifle in front of the Arizona State Capitol building on January 17, 2021 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

Founded: The Boogaloo movement formed in far-right online platforms like 4chan over the past decade spreading through memes and shitposting before spilling into real-life protests and acts of violence, beginning around 2020.

Core beliefs: The Boogaloo name derives from a much-memed movie sequel Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo. The militants seek their own sequel, a new civil war, short-handed as the Boogaloo, which is seen as both imminent and necessary.

The Boogaloo Bois are decentralized and leaderless, and the ideology while centered on violent revolution is not fixed. Some Bois are avowed white supremacists seeking to build a white ethnostate. Others are more anarchic in their orientation, wanting to distribute power to a heavily armed populace.

The Boogaloo arose, in part, as a reaction to traditional militias aligning themselves with the Trump administration a place for purists who think the militia movement sold out, says Friedfeld. Boogaloo Bois win converts with irony and dark humor. But the goofy iconography a revolutionary flag with a big igloo and the movements de facto uniform, Hawaiian shirts, obscure their violent agenda. Unlike the Oath Keepers, who revere law enforcement, Boogaloo Bois are hostile to police: Boogaloo culture refers to a Big Luau (a rough homonym for Boogaloo) that unmistakably includes roasting pigs.

Approach to violence: Unabashedly offensive. They believe the threshold of violence has already been crossed, says Kriner. Violence underpins everything that they do, adds Friedfeld. The concept is literally based around a future civil war. Individual Boogaloo Bois have been linked to a raft of violent plots, including allegedly scheming to firebomb a power station, incite riots, possess machine guns, and toss Molotov cocktails at cops.

Key moments: A militant who pleaded guilty to federal charges in the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer imagined that the act would jump-start the Boogaloo. One self-styled Boojahideen was sentenced to 36 months in prison in March for conspiring to provide material support to the militant group Hamas.

Members of the right-wing group, the Patriot Front, as they prepare to march with anti-abortion activists during the 49th annual March for Life along Constitution Ave. on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022 in Washington, DC.

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Founded: By Thomas Rousseau,a former Boy Scout and Trump superfan, in 2017, after he attended the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Core beliefs: Patriot Front is a hate group that revives Italian fascist symbols and Nazi slogans like blood and soil, but it projects itself under a red-white-and-blue banner of extreme patriotism, says Friedfeld. Where the Proud Boys target men in their twenties and thirties, Patriot Front recruits disaffected teenagers. Its recruits dress like preppy storm troopers, in khakis, blue windbreakers, baseball caps, and white neck gaiters pulled up to their sunglasses. They show up in flash mobs and use graffiti, defacing public murals celebrating diversity or LGBTQ pride.

The group taps into the America First imagery of the modern right, but Kriner insists that just below the surface, its deeply fascistic, deeply anti-Semitic, very racist, and they dont hide it. (The groups website venerates racist and bigoted Americans like Robert E. Lee, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Andrew Jackson.) Yet the overly patriotic trappings give people a comfortable platform from which to then jump into the broader pool of extremity, Kriner says.

Approach to violence: Lots of bark, little bite. Patriot Fronts direct actions and propaganda are designed to intimidate, but the group is not known for overt violence. Here are a bunch of teenagers whove had pretty easy lives, Kriner says. The moment theyre confronted, they tend to run away.

Key moments: In June, a U-Haul full of Patriot Front members was arrested for conspiracy to riot at a LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur dAlene, Idaho. In July 2021, Patriot Front defaced a Portland, Oregon, mural honoring George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. It was far from an isolated incident. Of nearly 5,000 public hate markings cataloged by the ADL in 2021, Patriot Front was responsible for 82 percent. Theyre incredibly active in plastering towns with posters and graffiti that lean into the patriot side of the ideology but direct interested parties to their white-supremacy resources, Friedfeld says. If youre not repelled and they have your attention, thats where they can start to peel people off into their ranks.

Founded: Atomwaffen Division, also known as the Nationalist Socialist Order, announced its launch in 2015 on a then-prominent neo-Nazi website called Iron March. The group pledged to move beyond keyboard warriorism in pursuit of ultimate uncompromising victory. The name Atomwaffen is German for atomic weapons, and also a play on words; the Waffen were a feared division of Hitlers SS. Atomwaffen is small but has spread internationally.

Core beliefs: These are literal Nazis, declaring: National Socialism is the only solution to reclaim dominion over what belongs to us. Many white-supremacist groups attempt to sugarcoat their noxious beliefs to redpill new recruits, but Atomwaffen is for hardened haters. (Theyre also trolls, known for plastering campuses with stickers like Join Your Local Nazis.)

Members of Atomwaffen are students of American neo-Nazi James Mason, who was a follower of Charles Manson, who touted a white-on-Black race war (and whom Mason wanted to make the American Hitler). They believe that democratic society is irredeemable and a race war should be accelerated to destroy the Jewish oligarchies and the globalist bankers responsible for what they call the racial displacement...of the white race.

Approach to violence: Terroristic. Atomwaffen idolizes mass murderers like Manson, Dylann Roof, and Timothy McVeigh, and models itself after Al Qaeda. The group seeks to operate in small cells and has been tied to murders, bomb plots, and other conspiracies.

Prominent adherents: Rolling Stone profiled 21-year-old founder Brandon Russell and fellow Atomwaffen member Devon Arthurs after Arthurs allegedly murdered the duos other two roommates. Russell was sentenced to five years on federal charges for possessing bomb-making equipment. Arthurs, in and out of mental hospitals, was only recently judged fit for trial.

Key moments: The Atomwaffen have a knack for getting arrested. In March 2020, shortly after the feds arrested five Atomwaffen on conspiracy charges, Mason declared that the group had disbanded. But it seems to have merely splintered, with many cells going underground.

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Your Handy Guide to the Absolute Worst People in American Politics - Rolling Stone

The last few years have been very weird for the academic humanities. Last month, for instance, a controversy erupted among Twitter-using Medieval historians surrounding a review of a recent work of popular history, The Bright Ages (HarperCollins), by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry. The review, which Eleanor Janega wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books, praised Gabriele and Perrys book as necessary a joyful work, even that does the hard work of introducing audiences to a world that we too often overlook for expressly political reasons. Precisely the kind of glowing words one hopes to receive from a fellow scholar.

The subsequent controversy, however, had little to do with Janegas assessment; rather, it centered on the fact that her review appeared in the first place. Mary Rambaran-Olm, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, took to Twitter to denounce LARB for torpedoing a review of the book she had written for the publication some weeks before one that chastised Gabriele and Perry for their white-centrism and Christocentrism and for rely[ing] on their whiteness for authority. Rambaram-Olm asserted that because the LARB editors are friendly with the books authors, they wanted to whitewash her negative assessment (pun, I suspect, intended). Denunciations, angry tweet threads, and Twitter account deletions followed while leagues of outsiders, like rubberneckers passing a flaming car crash, looked on and thought: What in the world is going on here?

This wasnt the first time a political controversy launched the otherwise sleepy world of medieval studies into the public eye. In 2017 the University of Chicago historian Rachel Fulton Brown incurred the ire of her colleagues in medieval studies by writing a blog post called 3 Cheers For White Men and promoting the alt-right media personality Milo Yiannopoulos and his extravagant contrarian junket through Americas universities, the Dangerous Faggot tour. The Brandeis medievalist Dorothy Kim penned a few lengthy blog posts about Fulton Browns problematic opinions, Fulton Brown responded on her own blog, and Kim followed with an article for Inside Higher Ed accusing her adversary of intimidation, harassment, manipulat[ing] the concept of free speech to operate as a dog whistle, and leaving her open to deadly violence akin to the murder of Heather Heyer at the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

Of course, a historian of the Middle Ages shouldnt look to a right-wing provocateur and media personality for a model of intellectual openness and argumentative rigor. And a university professor blogging her opinions, however caustically, does not constitute violence against a colleague. Such dust-ups are just examples of a more general sad truth about the academic humanities: that over the last decade, the same clownish, philistine attitude of partisan mob-formation and paranoid enemy-detection found everywhere else in American society has compromised the last institutional holdouts of humanistic inquiry.

When Kim sought examples of others who found themselves in a similar position to herself standing before a mob hurling approbation and accusation she turned not to the sweep of history she had devoted her life to studying, but to a far more recent precedent: Gamergate, an explosive and largely internet-based controversy about ethics in gaming journalism that raged in 2014 and left an indelible mark on the cultural politics of the internet. Because the alt-right broadcast my office location, she lamented, I had to lock down my digital presence and decide whether to do as Zoe Quinn did Quinn being a video-game designer at the center of the Gamergate controversy and file a police report. In other words, the roots of the supposed politicization of the academic humanities in our age are shallow, reaching only as far back as the mid-2010s era of hashtag activism and pre-Trump right-wing trolling. It is midday television drama, the stuff of talk shows and pundit media, playing out on campuses increasingly drained of money. Academic protest culture today has more in common with online flash mobs than with the rifle-toting and Maoism of the late 60s.

This politicization is also an epiphenomenon of the slow slide of academe into oblivion, in the face of which scholars desperately grasp for relevance. As academic humanities departments shed undergraduates and lose both prestige and funding, professors sensing their own obsolescence seek different venues for recognition and regard. The professors of academic Twitter have by and large subordinated their work as professional intellectuals and historians to the news cycle, yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media.

Perhaps the most prominent representative of this tendency today is one Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Jason Stanley. Trained in epistemology and the philosophy of language, Stanley turned to politics in 2015 with his book How Propaganda Works. He completed his metamorphosis into a political theorist in 2018 with the best-selling follow-up, How Fascism Works. His books were perfectly of the age: American liberals, horrified by the Trump revolt and desperate to find a definitive tie between Trumpism and the kind of movements that installed Hitler and Mussolini, devoured them. There are fascists on the prowl, and theyre all the people Jason Stanley doesnt like.

Stanley claims that the goal of his book was not to describe fascist regimes, but rather to delimit the essential characteristics of fascist politics distilled into a checklist of 10 essential qualities which may or may not congeal into a regime down the line. This distinction allows him to avoid any mention whatever of Spains Franco, Austrias Dollfuss, Romanias Antonescu, or Portugals Salazar, while every single chapter contains at least one instance of the word Trump. But as Samuel Moyn observed in an essay for The New York Review of Books, If Stanley is right, most of modern political history is fascist, latently or openly. His definition is gravely overbroad. A vast majority of politics as such for decades if not centuries, whether left- or right-coded, in America or beyond contains most if not all of what Stanley believes to be characteristic of fascism.

However famous Stanleys books have made him, he is possibly better-known (at 127,000 followers and rising) for his Twitter account, where he delivers unusually earnest reflections on his academic career while sorting, according to his schema, the fascist from the non-fascist. Indeed, his definition of what counts as fascism is heavily influenced by Twitter-induced presentism: His political orientation, like so many other academics captured by the media complex, comes primarily from what falls into his sight on his timeline. Breaking news supplies the most urgent objects of attention and analysis. He spends his days sharing articles about and delivering sage-like edicts upon the various people and events of the day: critical race theory, the 1619 Project, Russia, QAnon, Trump, Elon Musk. (In a fit of rage, he recently blamed the essayist-turned-Substacker and cultural critic Wesley Yang for the past two years of right-wing agitation on nearly all of these matters a strange accusation for a self-described propaganda expert.) For academics like Stanley, shackled to the media machine, the past is not of interest either for its own sake or as a means of illuminating the complexity of the present. It is, rather, little more than a wellspring of justifications for liking and disliking things in the world today.

Education is, as the philosopher Henry Bugbee tells it, more fundamentally the task of placement within the fullness of historical time so that it may become the time of our lives than it is in adjustment simply in contemporaneous relationship to the things around us. That is, reading, thinking, and studying are not simply in the service of conforming to the current arrangement of the world, but of developing a long view of human nature that allows us to consider more seriously what might be good as such for human beings, both individually and in community, thereby deepening our sense of what we might mean, for instance, by words like justice. This should be especially true for those devoted to the study of human things: philosophy, literature, history, languages, and so on.

But too often, scholars eagerly go public only when their pedantry can either serve their favored politician or party or discredit their enemies. As Sam Fallon noted in these pages, to read the work of humanities scholars writing for a general audience is to be confronted by dull litanies of fact: a list of the years in which Romes walls were breached by invaders (take that, Trump), an exhaustive inventory of historians who have dunked on Dinesh DSouza, a bland recounting of witch-hunting in 17th-century New England.

When egregious perversions of the historical record proliferate among their own tribe for liberals, say, when the vice president and several sitting senators insisted that the Capitol riot was akin to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, or when a prominent journalist claims that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery; for conservatives, when Republican politicians or Claremont-affiliated professors breathlessly declare the impending destruction of Western civilization, or when Trump assembled a collection of partisan professors to produce the propagandistic patriotic education of the 1776 Commission public-facing scholars nod quietly in agreement and retreat into the dim light of the faculty office.

This kind of tribalism has less in common with politics properly understood involving electioneering, coalition-building, and on-the-ground action and organization in the world, motivated by a concern for justice than with far more recent social phenomena unique to the digital age. The writer and cultural critic Katherine Dee has argued persuasively that our ages political culture is more often than not a species of fandom, made in the image of postmillennial internet culture and forged in the furnaces of LiveJournal, Tumblr, and other early experiments in internet community-formation. What motivates someone to spend 10 hours a day on Twitter, Dee suggests, is similar to what motivated people to camp out in front of theaters to see the next installment of Star Wars, or dress up in costume for the release of the latest Harry Potter book. Whatever it is, it certainly isnt the fruit of serious reflection and study.

The ideological posturing, moral nitpicking, and clique formation that occur in places such as academic Twitter have more to do with crafting a scene than building a movement. And scholars, of all people, should be able to recognize these dynamics, call them into question, and make more reasonable decisions about how to engage with their colleagues, whether in agreement or debate.

So what are beleaguered and increasingly irrelevant humanities professors to do, subject as they are to a constant demand for novelty, and to ever more suffocating pressures of conformity from administrators, colleagues, and students alike? The kind of writing that has withstood the ravages of time has focused on those questions that lie at the bottom of human existence and experience: What is the good life? How should we understand human nature? What kind of political community do we want to inhabit, and how do we achieve it? These sorts of questions, of course, do not admit of final answers: No matter how close we feel weve gotten, our answers are colored by perplexity.

In a commencement speech to this years graduating class at St. Johns College, Mark Sinnett, a retired tutor, took the opportunity to remind his former students of the inescapability and the promise of perplexity. Perhaps if we were somewhat less frightened of our own perplexity, Sinnett wagered, we could show a little better respect for other peoples perplexity. Maybe we could have a humane discussion of something of importance in this society. All earnest thinking, whether alone or in community, begins in such perplexity. Scholars more than anybody should be ready to be perplexed, and to appreciate the perplexity of others. But far too often, the opposite is true.

Too few of todays academics have time for earnest questions and various attempts at answering them. The scholar is now proudly an expert, dealing in certitudes and performances of epistemic mastery. This is especially true among the extremely online academic set, where leaning on ones status or credentials for epistemic authority prefacing an opinion with as a scholar of or as an expert in, perhaps putting Dr. or Ph.D. in ones Twitter display name is de rigueur. This trend became especially noticeable, and dreadful, over the course of the coronavirus pandemic, with professors in various and sundry nonmedical fields succumbing to expertise creep, tweeting forcefully worded pronouncements on the virus as if reporting results from their own laboratories.

Which isnt to say that academics shouldnt extend their curiosity into areas outside their specialization. Quite the contrary: Epistemic trespassing is the duty of anyone who seeks to learn anything new, and even scholars of ancient history have to live in, and thus must seek to understand, the present. As Heraclitus said long ago, lovers of wisdom must be inquirers into very many things. But this inquiry should be conducted searchingly, with an openness to being bewildered, being surprised, and being wrong and with a respect for others whose earnest questioning produces different conclusions.

And of course, though it certainly wont resolve everything, they should probably log off.

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The Hysterical Style in American Academe - The Chronicle of Higher Education

In 2020, Michael Breslin and Patrick Foleythe creative directors of Fake Friends, a theater company based in Brooklyndigitally premiered Circle Jerk, a brilliant, piercing critique of Internet-era white gayness starring (and somewhat autofictionally about) themselves. It briefly became an online sensation, thanks in part to producer Jeremy O. Harriss ardent campaigning, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2021; now, theyve brought it back and into the IRL, live (and live-streamed nightly) from the Connelly Theater in New York. At least temporarily, this will close the loop before they move onto new projects.

Following rehearsal on a recent Sunday afternoon, the two are headed to the East Williamsburg nightclub 3 Dollar Bill for another exercise in communal self-indulgence: local celebrity DJ Ty Sunderlands weekly Ty Tea day party, where a certain kind of revelrous gay congregates throughout the summer.

One post-work drink turns into four double tequila sodas, and the pair are admiring the skin-forward, early summer couture, ranging from a young redhead in a tank top reading SLAY & YAAAS & TWINK, to more intricate, high-heeled getups. I love these theatrical little babies wearing full-out looks, but its sad to me that it probably only happens for, like, four hours on a Sunday, Breslin remarks. Its like repression in daily life at the capitalism office, and then they put on their theater costumes for their day out.

A few hours in, with Kylie Minogue blasting and shirts off, the self-congratulatory, debauched dealings around them create a perfect petri dish for the ideas of gay sociology Circle Jerk explores. With its two writer-stars playing six different characters competing for social survival, the piece creates a rigorous dialectic between inner and outer appearances. At a breakneck pace, the three-act play follows innocent Brooklynite Patricks visit to Gaymen Islanda mix of the Fire Island Pines and every other gay party meccawhere his sexy Internet boyfriend, secretly an alt-right troll, is mounting a massive disinformation campaign with a tech-savvy meme lord. When Patricks best friend Michael arrives to de-dickmatize him, white gays do as white gays will, and every conceivable sexual boundary is crossed.

Theres a dual vision at work when you're in gay-coded spaces of, Are you fuckable and are you actually interesting? and, for most gays, fuckable is way more interesting than being interesting, Foley says, dancing along to Britney Spears. But not for me, because Im an intellectual.

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The Creators and Stars of Circle Jerk Just Want to Put On a Show - Vogue

As the hearings probing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol got underway, we asked for your take with four prompts.

Your responses seemed to fall into the two camps. The most common opinion was confirmation, albeit with more detail than expected, that Donald Trump was involved in the planning and execution of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The second opinion shared was that the committee is running a witch hunt (to quote one response). A few people noted nuanced possible outcomes and addressed legal concerns. We thank everyone for their replies, we read them all.

Below are a sampling of responses, edited for length and clarity.

Here is what I think we the people need to know as the evidence is presented and re-presented during these hearings and seemingly the case is there to charge and ultimately convict the former president as well as others who were involved in official positions as well as those hired and otherwise participating.

As it is said, time to get down to brass tacks and see what case can be nailed.

~Arthur W. Rashap

The bottom line, the hearings are not going to change the minds of the far right or far left. However, there does seem to be some movement in the less extreme elements of the political parties as well as in independents. Many of these groups are watching the hearings with great interest and open minds. It is in these groups that the hearings may have the most profound political ramifications.

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~J. Stephen Sadler

I would like to see a randomly selected cross-section of citizens (such as those who participate in projects sponsored by the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford) pose their questions, and then get responses from the J6 committee, and spend some time deliberating about the way forward. I realize this is not practical in the short term, but I would like to see more engagement, rather than just evidence presented, in whatever form that might be practicable as soon as possible.~Robert Barrett

I have been thinking about the Jan. 6 hearings at two levels. First, at the most obvious, prosecutorial level, the hearings offer overwhelming evidence that President Trump (together with his cast of supporting actors) committed crimes that, by any reasonable standard, qualify as both impeachable and criminal. When viewed at this level, it is deeply troubling that the hearings are so widely being seen as nothing more than a partisan exercise intended to undermine Republican electoral prospects and Trump's chances of reclaiming the presidency.~Guy Burgess

My take is the Democrats are really scared that the people are seeing them for what they are. So, folks like yourself are trying your damnedest to make something out of nothing. You sat on your thumbs as cities across this nation burned, in some cases encouraged it. Now youre trying to blow up as much as possible a bunch of Americans who are fed up with our government acting like a bunch of spoiled children, in a bid to garner more control over the populace through fear, fear of their fellow Americans. ~Mike Dunn Be the change you want to see in the world - Gandhi

Witch hunt.

~Jeff Freeman

I have always followed the news and was very interested in this election. I was aware of how much Trump lied from the beginning of his rise, so I did not believe him about election fraud or any of his claims. All the lawsuits that he brought were ridiculous and I was not surprised that the judges found them so. I am glad to hear the testimony from Republicans that confirm what I suspected were more of his lies. Interesting to hear that former Attorney Geneal William Barr wondered if he was actually delusional. ~Judy Jones

I have not been surprised by the evidence so far, and my initial perspective was that the assault on the Capitol was totally influenced by former President Trump. What I would like to see exposed was how he systematically made people believe he was the greatest president ever (he said that often). Present all the times he claimed election fraud when Barack Obama won, when Sen. Ted Cruz beat him in one of the primaries and when he did not win the popular vote against Hillary Clinton. The constant bashing of mainstream media as fake news, saying he knew more than medical experts, scientists, generals, bankers you name it. By demonizing anyone who opposed him and saying they were low IQ people and that he was the only one who could solve every problem the country faced. Say these things loud enough and long enough it becomes the truth to his followers. ~Jack Laser

1. Unfortunately, none of the evidence has surprised me but seeing and hearing it presented in a dispassionate manner with clear emphasis on verifiable fact has added gravity to the very real threat we faced and still face. 2. Seeing and hearing the testimony of courageous individuals in Trump's inner circle has changed my perspective so that I see an even sharper focus on Trump as the sole ring leader implementing a contingency plan that he put into action as early as April 8, 2020. 3. Were I a juror I would simply be taking notes and searching for evidence that would prove Trump innocent of wrongdoing. 4. I want to know what legislation can be drafted to prevent a recurrence of this attempt to steal my vote. I want to know what actions Congress can take to compel members to testify when invited to do so since they can always avail themselves of the Fifth Amendment. I want to know what I can do to heal the deep wounds that Trump has added to those that extremists of all types have already inflicted upon our nation. ~Joe Bachofen Sr.

The only "surprises" I saw from the recent release of testimony and evidence were that many in Trump's inner circle were telling him that he lost and that the election was not affected by corruption. For me, the testimony and evidence simply confirm what I thought, that Trump was and continues to be a charlatan. The Republican Party allowed itself to be sucked into his mess and now is unable to disconnect itself from his fakery. ~Donna Becker

Probably the only thing that surprised me and still does was how did people get into the building in the first place (no tear gas or non-lethal force). Im just shocked people got within window-busting distance and nothing much happened. But Im going to guess some of the police officers were partial to what was going on? I felt it was wrong then and still do. I dont think he should run again (and I liked his policies and was leaning red at the time). Im a centrist by heart, and it's sad to see people that were otherwise the same have to pick sides when things clearly started to get exceedingly polarized. Center people exist for a reason.~Chad Quilter

I was surprised by how many people in his inner circle told Trump it was "bullshit" and he still pushed forward.I heard confirmation that there was a planned insurrection.If I were sitting on a jury, depending on who was on trial (Trump?) and what are the charges, I would be asking, Who is guilty of what?I would want to know, what are we changing to make sure this never happens again? Especially the fact that law enforcement was not prepared to put this attempt to overthrow our government down!~Pablo Mendoza

The only thing that did surprise me is that his daughter Ivanka testified that she disagrees with Trump. Nothing I heard changes my view that Trump did this for his own purpose since this lunatic wanted to take over the country to remain president and in power forever or until he dies. If I was sitting in a jury, I would ask how come this person has not had a full on psychiatric evaluation. He is deranged and out of touch with reality. Reminds me of Jim Jones, who convinced 900 people to drink poison and die with him. Only this lunatic has created a revolutionary environment in this country with his lies and risk destroying 250 years of democracy. ~Heather Halperin

My internal jurist craves the answer to one question: Who thought that riling up an already sensitive group of overly demonstrative voters whose candidate just lost an election by the same landslide Electoral College margin he won by four years prior was a good idea? These voters represent a part of the populace made to feel marginalized (and for some, they were brushed aside by both Democrats and Republicans for years, not just as deplorables but as unworthy of time and consideration given their lack of donatable funds). Once a self-serving champion gave them agency to speak their minds through rallies, social media interactions and alt-right groups, the latent -isms found throughout the messaging of the Trump administration became magnified, as did the raw emotions of this group of Americans. My end-state thinking would be along the lines of trying to determine if using these loyalists as a means to an end interrupting the electoral process to keep then-President Trump in office was honestly considered to be a legitimate tactic. If so, this could not have been the work of one individual. But, if deemed illegitimate by the vast majority of staff members, why were the fires stoked from several directions?~Zach Boguslawski

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Your Take: The January 6th hearings - The Fulcrum

Around the third or fourth time I logged into Twitter to find #AmberHeardIsAPsychopath at the top of the trending list, I realized that there was no longer any pretending that the Depp-Heard defamation trial was not a terrible, foreboding reflection of our cultures worst impulses.

The media has covered the degree to which this trial has served as a referendum on the Me Too movement and a siren call to domestic abusers.

The narrative of the trial has been shaped in part by what appears to be, according to multiple researchers, an army of bots spreading rhetoric favorable to Depp. One researcher found more bots favorable to Heard, but said most of those bots were from third-party apps trying to capitalize on the trial; meanwhile, they found the highest pro-Depp bot post was shared nearly 20,000 times. The work of those bots has been further amplified by mens rights activists the part of the far-right-leaning extremist manosphere that seems to have decided discrediting Amber Heard is the key to destroying every woman who accuses men of abuse or domestic violence.

Conservative media outlets have also promoted a one-sided narrative of the case; Vice recently reported that Ben Shapiros popular conservative news platform the Daily Wire has spent nearly $50,000 promoting ads about the trial on Instagram and Facebook most of it trashing Amber Heard. The presence of these bad actors has, if anything, only exacerbated the vitriol Heard has received within the mainstream.

Trial memes almost universally weighted against Heard have taken over every corner of the internet, from TikTok to Twitch to Etsy. Even Saturday Night Live has lampooned what have been portrayed as the many excesses and absurdities of the trial testimony, and social media users have similarly found the trial ripe for parody. On TikTok, for example, totally unrelated accounts seem to have given themselves over to full-time Depp-Heard trial mockery, to the point where the actual substance of the testimony seems completely irrelevant beside the need to mine the proceedings for entertainment. Sure, Amber Heard cried while on the stand, but did you see how ridiculous she looked while doing it?

To put it mildly, this surreal explosion of internet culture vilification of Heard feels dispiriting and troubling. What made so many millions of people feel so justified in treating such a personal, toxic relationship like popcorn fodder? At what point before the bot armies and mens rights activists poisoned the well of discourse around this trial could a reasonable assessment of the evidence and the facts have been made? Did that point ever exist?

Most of the reporting on these memes has placed the blame for their sensationalist tone squarely on the evolution of fandom content creation. But recall that the white supremacist alt-right movement has a long history of memeifying everything they want to normalize and legitimize, and keep in the forefront of your mind that the alt-right latched onto this case as its bulwark long before fandom and the internet at large did. By now, after years of political disinformation campaigns, were used to social medias natural ability to contort reality. Rarely, however, has it bent this far, this rapidly, for this many people, in service of something this vile.

Again and again over the course of this trial, basic human empathy seems to have completely flown out the window. More than that, nuance feels impossible, and there doesnt seem to be room for even the reality of the situation. The contours of the abuse were well-established before the 2018 opinion column Depp is suing over was published. The basic facts of the case have gotten their day in court once already, having been heard in a British court in 2020, with the judge finding in Heards favor. But the basic, well-established facts do not seem to matter.

They do not seem to matter to people who would normally care about facts, truth, and nuance. They do not seem to matter to the tabloid media gleefully reporting on every aspect of this case. They do not seem to matter to the TikTok creators who seize every chance to parody a tearful Heard, turning her objectively harrowing trial testimony into a farce of over-the-top fake weeping.

The facts do not seem to matter to any of the people who have gleefully latched on to the image of Heard as a manipulative villain, as if she split her own lip, punched her own face, and pulled out clumps of her own hair.

What were witnessing here are the dramatically compounded effects of internet researcher Alice Marwicks theory of morally motivated networked harassment, which holds that a group of social media users can justify any amount of abuse directed at a target if they feel their cause is morally right. At scale, this looks like, and effectively is, millions of people around the world lining up to eagerly subject one woman to untold amounts of abuse, public humiliation, and violent rhetoric. (Incidentally, this is exactly what Depp wanted to happen to her so even if he loses the case, he still wins.)

To be clear, this isnt an easy story of good and evil. Its impossible to completely absolve Amber Heard, who has her own alleged history of violence, or frame Depp as a monster incapable of kindness, charity, and the positive energy that amassed him millions of fans to begin with. Yet you dont need to do either of those things to acknowledge that this is a case about the deeply unfunny topic of intimate partner abuse and that the major points of this trial have already been decided in one court of law. The judge at the first trial in 2020 found Heard had proven 12 of 14 allegations of abuse. So far none of the trial testimony has substantially contradicted anything in Heards original claim of being a domestic violence survivor.

Culture critic Ella Dawson has a Twitter thread compiling reporting on the myriad ways in which this trial is not only destroying years of progress made against domestic abuse in the US, but also laying the groundwork for a culture in which bots and bad actors harass, vilify, and eviscerate all other prominent women who publicly name their abusers like Gamergate, but times tens of millions of participants, and gleefully endorsed by people all across American culture.

That, above all above the TikTok cat memers mocking Heard and Saturday Night Live dismissing the whole trial as for fun is whats absolutely jawdropping here. This trial, which amounts to a simple yes/no question over whether Heard had the right to call herself a victim of domestic abuse in a single sentence from that 2018 opinion piece, has somehow united far-right misogynists with middle-of-the-road liberals and geeky progressive fandom acolytes of Depp.

People who have spent the last decade hashtagging #believewomen, fighting online harassment campaigns, and, especially, resisting white male supremacy have, over the course of this trial, crawled into bed with the vilest kinds of internet refuse at least 11 percent of whom dont actually exist, according to one bot researcher possibly all because they really like Captain Jack Sparrow.

The sheer volume of this cultural takeover by Depp acolytes has created a seismic value shift to a degree that may be unalterable. Trial watchers seem to be welcoming misinformation about the trial while doing everything they can to reject or undermine actual documented facts of the case.

Some of the arguments made against Amber Heard sound like QAnon-level conspiracy rabbit holes. (Amber Heards trial outfits, for example, have somehow become part of a sinister narrative in which Heard is a manipulative abuser attempting to rattle and intimidate Depp by mimicking his own trial suits.) This trial has accomplished what our enraged, paranoid ideological fringe could not: a complete dismantling of the ideological breakdown that has divided us politically, and the general public acceptance of a narrative created and controlled by bad actors and far-right extremists.

The Depp-Heard trial has refined the Gamergate playbook in a way that will haunt us for years to come. It has proven to extremists that if you rally around the right beloved public figure or institution, blanket them in a protective sphere of outrage and misinformation, and weaponize fandom culture already so prone to ideological radicalization and irrational groupthink you can successfully push whatever media narrative you want into the mainstream.

Theres no coming back from this. The actual trial verdict is all but irrelevant now. Its not just that Amber Heard will forever be an imperfect accuser whose own volatile history was used to help destroy a revelatory movement in Me Too. Its that there will be other Amber Heards, and many of them will be marginalized, with far fewer resources to withstand this onslaught of hate.

Its not a coincidence that this spectacle is playing out against a backdrop of perpetually escalating racist violence and the rapid erosion of decades of human rights for women, queer, and trans people. The Depp-Heard trial has just trained millions of people to discard their own empathy, their own rational judgment, in exchange for the gleeful mockery, rejection, and belittlement of a woman making herself vulnerable in public. If you dont think that training will be weaponized against vulnerable targets, you havent been paying attention.

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The Depp-Heard trial has played right into the hands of far-right extremists. - Vox.com