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One year ago, a mob of mostly white men stormed the Capitol to try to keep their race-baiting idol in power. The attack was not the last gasp of white supremacy or Trumpism, as many might have wanted to believe.

It was a national coming out party for the political rights insurrectionist movement, whose roots were set decades ago and completely visible in Californias electoral politics and public battles in the 1990s.

These rioters were neither outliers nor rejects within the Republican Party. A University of Chicago report released this week found that the more than 700 insurrectionists criminally charged in the attack were not members of some extreme political fringe. Theyre from the mainstream; only 7% were unemployed. Half were business owners or white-collar workers, including doctors, lawyers, accountants. The great majority nearly 90% were not part of extremist groups like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.

Opinion Columnist

Jean Guerrero

Jean Guerrero is the author, most recently, of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda.

More importantly, the insurrection is a political movement, not ordinary criminal activity, though crimes can be involved, the Chicago researchers found. And the key driver of the movement is the white supremacist Great Replacement theory, which comes straight out of California politics from the 1990s.

What is new perhaps is how pervasive this ideology has become along with a broad embrace of violence. The Chicago report found that 21 million Americans believe President Biden is an illegitimate president and that use of force to restore Trump to office is justified. Let that sink in: 21 million people more than the combined population of the five most populous U.S. cities think Trump should forcibly regain power.

The report warns that this movement, with its approval of the use of violence, may well continue (or grow) with the coming election season and as Trump launches his own social media platform.

What force could make a vast swath of Americans want to hurt others and end our hallmark peaceful transitions of power? The answer is predictable: About 75% of pro-insurrection adults, according to the study, have the delusion that Democrats are importing Third World immigrants to replace them.

This racist and largely antisemitic conspiracy theory is not relegated to the dark cellars of 8chan and Telegram. Its openly promoted by leading conservatives, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And its a theory that has violence at its core, inspiring white terrorist massacres.

Thats not a new play for Republican leaders. They opened the Pandoras box of replacement paranoia in California in the 1990s with scaremongering about a decline in the states white population and an imagined Mexican reconquista. Trumps senior advisor Stephen Miller, for one, grew up in California during that time.

That nativist craze took many forms, including border vigilantism and unfounded voter fraud claims precursors to Trumps Big Lie. During the 1988 elections, uniformed guards were hired by local Republicans to patrol mostly Latino neighborhoods, where some held up signs saying Non-citizens cant vote. In 1990, ousted San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock peddled voter fraud hysteria on his talk show.

Harold Ezell, co-author of the notorious Proposition 187 which sought to deny social services for undocumented people launched a voter fraud task force and hotline within days of the 1994 election. The thing that made me start wondering about this, Ezell said then, was when I was looking at the opposition to 187. I was watching the vociferous anger against 187 and the hot pursuit . . . to register (people) to vote against 187. Brown people voting had to mean something was amiss.

Trumps Big Lie and its capacity to elicit violence is inseparable from those biases. Ahead of the 2016 election, Trump falsely claimed there was a big problem of illegal immigrants voting, another way of stoking replacement psychosis.

And it worked. The people charged in connection with the storming of the Capitol came largely from places experiencing relative declines in white populations (a phenomenon attributable to racially motivated white flight amid demographic change, not a sinister replacement). Immigration paranoia was top of mind for many of them, including Ashli Babbitt, a San Diego resident who was shot and killed by police as she broke into the Speakers Lobby in the House.

Babbitt, a QAnon adherent, made social media posts and videos echoing right-wing propaganda about immigration. In one video, she was upset because she lived near the border: This immigration thing, I guess Im taking it so personally is because I am here and you see the effects, you see the crime, you see the drugs you see the rapes, you see all of the gangs.

In reality, San Diego is one of the safest big cities in the country.

California has in recent decades seen an increase in Latino political participation. About a million new Latino voter registrations in the 1990s were facilitated by changes in immigration law. Who was the proponent of this sweeping effort to replace whites with an influx of Third World immigrants? Ronald Reagan, with his 1986 immigration reform plan.

The Republican Party, being captive to replacement theory derangement, seems to have given up on courting Latino voters. This has led to the only place it could go: efforts to reverse electoral defeats with denial and violence that pose the true apocalyptic threat to American democracy.

@jeanguerre

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Guerrero: How the insurrection's ideology came straight out of 1990s California politics - Los Angeles Times

By MICHAEL BARONE

I want to add a few notes to my Christmas weekend column on the Census Bureau's July 2021 state population estimates and what stories they tell about growth and decline in the first 15 months of the coronavirus pandemic.

THE IMMIGRATION BUSTThe big news is about immigration. In the years from 2010 to 2019, the Census Bureau recorded an increase in "international migration" immigration, in layman's language of 873,000.For the 15 months from April 2020 to July 2021, the corresponding number is only 257,000 down 71% from the average of the years from 2010 to 2019. Presumably, that does not include most of the additional illegal immigrants who have crossed the border and fanned out across the country due to Biden administration policies. The cutoff date is July 1, just five months into the administration.The drop-off from the previous decade is enormous. It's even greater if you look back to the peak immigration surge that started in the 1980s and ended abruptly with the housing price collapse and sharp recession in 2007.And there's also a big difference in immigrant destinations. In earlier decades, half of all immigrants typically headed to three states: California, Texas and New York.In the plague year, they've headed elsewhere. The highest immigration increase as a percentage of the preexisting population in 2020-21 was in two dissimilar states: Massachusetts and Florida, followed by Washington, D.C.One can see in these numbers the increasing share of legal immigrants who are high-skilled people from East Asia and South Asia heading to university and medical school clusters in metro Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. But it is not so on the West Coast. Massachusetts' immigrant increase (13,700) was essentially identical to California's (13,900), even though Massachusetts has about 7 million people and California has about 39 million.The No. 1 and No. 2 destinations for 2020-21 immigrants were Florida (41,200) and Texas (28,500). Together, these states account for more than a quarter of the nation's immigration increase. Plague-year immigrants are evidently attracted by the same factors as plague-year domestic migrants: low taxes, vibrant private-sector economics and a relative lack of COVID-19 restrictions.The pattern has political implications. Latin American and Asian immigrants from the 1982-2007 surge turned out to vote heavily Democratic, and high-skill Asian immigrants since 2007 have done so as well.But Latino voters, especially but not only in South Texas and South Florida, have trended toward Republicans in the Trump era. Polling shows that Latinos in the Lower Rio Grande Valley resent rather than identify with the illegal immigrants surging across the border.And Florida may be seeing an influx of high-skill and anti-socialist refugees from new leftist governments in Argentina, Peru and Chile, as it already has from Venezuela and Cuba.Where immigrants aren't going is also significant. Only 5% of the 2020-21 immigrant inflow was to California, and only 2% was to Illinois. Los Angeles and Chicago have lost their allure. And immigrants added less than one-tenth of 1% to the populations of the fast-growing Carolinas and Georgia and the slower-growing Midwest.

THE BIRTH DEARTHThe number of births in the 12 months up through July 1, 2021, was 3,582,000 9% lower than the average in the years from 2010 to 2019.You have to go back to 1979 to find a year with fewer births, and you can go back to the 1790 census and you won't find a year with fewer births as a percentage of the population (1.1%).Birth rates are lowest in the six New England states and New England-founded Oregon on the West Coast. They are similarly low in Florida and West Virginia, with their elderly populations. In recent years, only a few states, such as Maine and West Virginia, have registered more births than deaths. In the April 2020-July 2021 period, 25 states did.What states have the highest birth rates? Not California or New York, whose pre-2007 immigrants were prolific in recent times. In the plague year, their birth rates were below the national average.The most prolific instead are heavily Mormon Utah, three sparsely populated states with mining and financial sectors (Alaska and the Dakotas) and Texas.

THE POLITICAL IMPACTPolitically, the 25 states carried by former President Donald Trump had 43% of the nation's population in the 2020 census, which ended on April 1. But they produced 44% of the nation's births and attracted 44% of its immigrants in the following 14 months, ending July 1, 2021. Even as Biden Democrats took over the government, the nation's demographics shifted marginally toward Republicans in the plague year.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

2021 CREATORS.COM

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Opinion: Plague-year immigrants headed to Trump country - Sumter Item

In what is sure to be only the first shot fired in the Republican primary for Texas governor, former Florida congressman Allen West has leveled accusations at Governor Greg Abbott that Abbott has put the Texas Army National Guard at severe risk on the southern border.

The allegation comes at a time of definite crises for the guard. Morale among the guard serving in Operation Lone Star is low enough that substance abuse, desertions, and suicideare starting to become a serious problem according to the army itself. This is likely related to the dismal nature of the operation itself. Lone Star is largely seen as a needless, racist initiative from Abbott as a ploy to show he is tough on border security. In reality, itsbecome a meat grinder of false arrests and harassmentthat is overwhelming the Texas criminal justice system.

West announced in a news conference that guardsmen had been in contact with him over working conditions. Among other things, he cited late or missing pay, lack of supplies, and exposure to COVID-19 threats the guard is experiencing.

This falls squarely on the shoulders of the person that ordered the commencement of Operation Lone Star and thats you, Gov. Abbott, West said.

Abbotts office responded by punting the problem into the hands of the Biden Administration.

Since Governor Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March, National Guard soldiers and DPS troopers have apprehended over 85,000 migrants, arrested over 9,600 who committed a border-related crime, including smugglers and human traffickers, seized over 208 million lethal doses of fentanyl, and erected strategic barriers to stem the flow of illegal immigration, said a spokesman in a recent statement. Texas is beyond grateful for the brave men and women of the National Guard and DPS who are diligently and selflessly securing the border in the federal governments absence. We continue working with service leaders to ensure all who are deployed in Texas and overseas have the support they need to keep forging ahead and serve our great state and our nation.

The conservative infighting brings up some interesting contradictions. West says that Abbott is responsible for the rise in COVID among the guard. Its true that Abbott is planning on suing the Biden Administration over the presidents vaccine mandate for armed service members, which does endanger troops when it comes to the virus.

However, West is a noted conspiracy theorist and known for peddling various flavors of hogwash. He firmly stands against any sort of vaccine mandate, just as the governor he is criticizing does. Hes continuously doubled down on anti0vaccination rhetoric, even after contracting the disease himself.

Instead of jabbing Americans, and not illegal immigrants, with a dangerous shot which injects them with these spike proteins . . . guess what? I now have natural immunity and double the antibodies, and thats science, Westtweeted.

So, while Wests concern for the guards safety is well-founded, its weird that he is blasting Abbott for COVID-spreading policies he himself endorses.

Read this article:
West Accuses Abbott of Failing National Guard - Reform Austin

The attack on the nation's Capitol one year ago today was not an insurrection, local Republicans say.

"Donald Trump was not trying to overthrow the government," Michael Adam explained Wednesday, stressing that he was commenting independently of his position as Jefferson County Election Commission chairman. "Donald Trump was trying to get a vote to not accept the election results from [Georgia], Wisconsin and Arizona."

Oxford Languages defines "insurrection" as "a violent uprising against an authority or government." David Singer, the Jefferson County Republican Committee chairman, said those who stormed the Capitol were uprising against the election process but not the government.

"People like buzzwords," Singer said. "Some people call it a riot. Other people call it an insurrection."

Adam pointed out that Trump was "nowhere near the Capitol" when about 800 members of a mob, according to early media reports on the incident, stormed the building in hopes Congress would not certify the results of the presidential election, which incumbent Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

The attack occurred after Trump spoke at a rally near the White House, 2.3 miles west of the Capitol. Trump was impeached on suspicion of inciting an insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate on Feb. 13.

Five people died as a result of the attack, according to multiple reports: Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, 42; Ashli Babbitt, 35; Benjamin Phillips, 50; Kevin Greeson, 55; and Rosanne Boyland, 34. About 140 Capitol Police officers were injured.

Adam said there was "no reason" for the Capitol to come under siege.

"I think it was terrible," he said. "I think it was wrong. It was no reason to attack it. I think it was wrong. I think it was another party other than the Republicans that started it. I think good American citizens got conned into going into the building.

"Then again, I think it made the whole situation where they could not dispute the votes, so I think it was bad for everybody."

In refuting claims of an insurrection, Adam cited media reports that an extremist group and Guardsmen allowed the attackers to go inside the Capitol. A report on the damage to the Capitol two days later indicated broken glass, broken doors and graffiti, according to The New York Times.

He also questioned why Babbitt was shot to death, adding she was not armed.

"Even that guy who wore a funny-looking hat didn't do anything wrong," Adam said, referring to Jacob Chansley, who sported a horned viking helmet, carried a 6-foot spear and was shirtless with a tattoo on his chest. "He was told by the cops to 'come here' [through a door]."

Chansley was sentenced to 41 months in prison for criminal conduct, according to the U.S. attorney's office in D.C.

Adam also took issue with votes that he believes should not have been counted based on media reports that he heard or read.

Biden won by narrow margins in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin, giving him enough votes in the Electoral College to defeat Trump, 306-232.

While Singer denounced the attack, he pointed out that his committee focuses on state and local issues rather than national issues, adding that he took the election numbers at face value.

"I believe we have fair and free elections in Arkansas," Singer said. "Can I give a valid opinion on Michigan and Arizona based on press reports? No. I didn't dispute anything. There were people raising questions. Nobody is advocating any sort of violence. Violent riots are unacceptable under any circumstances."

Adam said he doesn't know for sure whether the votes in key states were legitimate, but he gave an idea of alleged voter fraud in his own county from the 2020 general election as an example of what may or may not have happened in swing states.

"We had people who voted the same day they registered, and that's illegal," Adam said. "You have to wait 30 days after you register. Some people who voted in Arkansas voted with a Texas ID. Some people who voted in Arkansas voted with a Tennessee ID."

Those voters could have been referred to prosecutors on suspicion of voter fraud, but commissioners declined, Adam said. He declined to say why for the record.

Instead, they were given provisional ballots, and about 10 of about 200 suspect ballots were actually good, Adam said.

Asked whether Trump should have been reelected, Adam said there's no way that could happen once the Electoral College certified Biden's victory.

"If you read the Constitution, you know that can't happen," he said. "There's no way Donald Trump can be president," he said. "Maybe he should be president, and maybe he shouldn't be president, but there's no legal way."

Trump would do a better job as president, however, Adam assumes, adding that Trump would have handled the military exit from Afghanistan better than Biden, controlled inflation and continued to build a wall on the southern border to control illegal immigration.

But whatever came under attack on Jan. 6, 2021 -- be it a building, elected officials inside it, the Constitution or democracy itself -- Singer did not lose confidence that America or its foundations were protected.

"I can honestly tell you I did not think, 'Oh, my God. Democracy is under attack,'" he said. "To me, it looked like a riot run amok. I watched it unfold as any other riot that went amok in the last 1 years. The people were wrong. They were disorderly."

U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., whose district covers Jefferson County, condemned the events of last Jan. 6.

"The attack on the U.S. Capitol one year ago today was wholly un-American and a national disgrace that resulted in the tragic loss of life," Westerman said in an email to The Commercial. "In the face of that adversity, our democratic process prevailed. Those events did not stop the peaceful transition of power or the continued exercise of democracy. One year later, our nation has proven, once again, that liberty is stronger than fear and violence. I am confident in our country's resolve to never allow such reprehensible events to occur again."

Commercial Editor Byron Tate contributed to this story.

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Year later, parties disagree on Jan. 6: Wasn't insurrection, GOP says - Arkansas Online

Forget drugs or fraud. The most common type of case federal prosecutors bring is against illegal immigrants who try to reenter the country after having been ousted and almost all of those charged are Hispanic.

Now federal courts are grappling with whether that imbalance means the law itself is racist.

One court in Nevada has already ruled that it does. Judge Miranda Du, a President Obama appointee, said the section of law that makes it a felony for someone previously ousted to sneak back into the U.S. has racist antecedents dating to the 1920s.

Though the law has been updated since then, Congress has never confronted the racist, nativist roots of the law, the judge ruled. She said that, coupled with the overwhelmingly Hispanic targets for prosecution, makes the law unconstitutional.

She tossed the governments case against Gustavo Carrillo-Lopez.

The Biden administration has appealed and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is hearing the case, which has reverberated across the legal world and is shaping up as a significant test of the critical race theorys approach to criminal law.

If we are trying to uproot systemic racism, that means we have to consciously understand what motivated a laws original enactment, and then make the conscious decision whether we want to change it or whether we want to continue it, Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Immigration Law and Policy Center at UCLA School of Law and one of the leading scholars on the history of the illegal-reentry law, told The Washington Times in an interview earlier this year.

The illegal reentry law, section 1326 of Title VIII of the U.S. Code, governs reentry of removed aliens.

Those guilty of the basic offense can be sentenced to two years in prison. If they had a drug record or a basic felony on their criminal record they could earn 10 years, and if they had an aggravated felony record they could get up to 20 years.

Usually, sentences are much shorter, but the law has serious teeth and a lot of targets.

Disparate impact

According to a report last month by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 30,636 prosecutions in fiscal year 2018 under Section 1326. Thats more than 36% of all federal prosecutions. Drug trafficking, the second most common, only accounted for half that many.

The BJS study doesnt give an exact racial breakdown for Section 1326 prosecutions, but it does say 98% of all illegal immigrants prosecuted in 2018 were Hispanic, so its a good bet almost all Section 1326 cases were Hispanic.

The study was published after Judge Dus ruling, but she pointed to the overwhelmingly Hispanic demographics of those arrested jumping the border as evidence that Mexican and Latinx individuals are disproportionately affected by the illegal reentry law.

She said that, coupled with the fact that illegal reentry was first criminalized by Congress in 1929, by lawmakers who were influenced by the Jim Crow era of racial segregation and were looking to tamp down on Mexican migration.

Section 1326 itself was written in 1952 again with arguably discriminatory intent, Judge Du concluded and its penalties were stiffened in 1988, 1990, 1994 and 1996.

The judge said those Congresses never explicitly came to terms with the racist antecedents.

Kris Kobach, former secretary of state in Kansas and a prominent legal figure among groups who want stricter immigration, was stunned by the ruling.

The judges conclusions are ridiculous, he said. The law is neutral on its face, and it is justified by a multitude of legitimate reasons having nothing to do with race. It is nonsense to declare that the statute must be cleansed in some way because an unknown number of legislators who supported a predecessor statute a century ago might have been racially biased, he said.

The Justice Department, in its appeal briefs, said Judge Dus math equating the high number of Latinos to racial discrimination ignored the obvious alternative explanation that those numbers are attributable to geography and the high percentage of such individuals among the population of noncitizens unlawfully in the United States.

Or, as Christopher J. Hajec at the Immigration Reform Law Institute put it to The Times earlier this year, when you border Mexico, and just south of that is Central America, youre going to see a lot more illegal immigrants from those places trying to sneak back in.

When youre doing disparate impact you have to compare things with the right things. In the universe of illegal aliens a very large proportion are from Latin America, and thats due to geography and economics, Mr. Hajec said. It follows that a large proportion of illegal entrants whove already been deported are going to be from Latin America, are going to be Hispanic.

IRLI said the point of the law is to deter deported migrants from trying to come back, no matter where theyre from.

The case has forged odd alliances, with IRLI finding itself on the same side as the Biden administration.

Indeed, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this year told employees at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that he thought there should be more prosecutions under Section 1326.

I see cases now where we apprehend and remove individuals that I think need to be prosecuted criminally, he told employees during a virtual town hall this spring. He said he would work with the Justice Department to try to bring more cases.

But Mr. Arulanantham says there must be some reckoning of the laws history, and pointed to his own experience serving for two years as an assistant federal public defender in El Paso.

He figures he handled maybe 150 illegal reentry cases, yet he didnt know the laws origins at the time.

Thats how systemic racism works, its nobodys fault, but we live in a system and unless youre very consciously able to examine it, you just go along with it, he said.

Criminal vs. civil

Carrillo-Lopez, the man at the heart of the Nevada case, was already deported twice, with the most recent expulsion coming in 2012. He snuck back in at an unknown time, and was living secretly in the U.S. Nevada lists a dozen different aliases hes used until he was caught on state drug-trafficking charges in 2019.

He also has a prior felony conviction for drugs and a misdemeanor domestic-violence conviction.

Even if he beats the federal illegal reentry charges, hes not going to be out on the streets soon. Hes serving a life sentence on the drug trafficking charge, with no possibility of parole until 2029.

So far, this appears to be the only case where a judge has tossed the charges over questions about Section 1326. But if Judge Dus ruling stands, he wouldnt be the last.

That would leave a couple options.

Congress could go back and repass the illegal reentry law, or something like it, this time grappling with the history and concluding that whatever the motives of the past, theres a good reason today to have a criminal bar on deported people sneaking back into the country.

But its not clear that Congress would pass such a law again at this time, which opponents say is part of the whole point of performing a systemic racism analysis on the legal code.

Forcing Congress to reenact this statute would be a significant legislative undertaking, particularly when it played a huge role in family separation, Mr. Arulanantham said.

The other option is to live without a criminal penalty, and rely on the civil code and its penalty another deportation.

Even those who are convicted under Section 1326 and serve time about six months, according to the new Justice Department report will usually be deported at the end of it anyway, which raises questions about whether the criminal law is needed as a deterrent.

But there are other implications to a world where laws like Section 1326 are ruled unconstitutional because of racist intentions by Congress at the time.

One target could be gun control laws, such as the Gun Control Act of 1968, which imposed a ban on sale of firearms to felons and created the first federal bar on explosives.

Scholars have argued that law was part of a push to keep firearms out of the hands of the countrys Black residents.

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Critical race theory takes aim at immigration law - Washington Times