Author: TheGuardian

Trump refuses to acknowledge Biden’s win, but experts say there is not a constitutional path forward for him to remain president. Joe Biden won the presidential election, a fact that Donald Trump and other Republicans refuse to acknowledge. There are worries the president and other Republicans will make every effort to stay in power. “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” said Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state. William Barr, the attorney general, has also authorized federal prosecutors to begin to investigate election irregularities, a move that prompted the head of the justice department’s election...

White supremacists and other rightwing extremists have been responsible for 67% of domestic terror attacks and plots so far this year, with at least half of that violence targeting protesters, according to a new analysis from a centrist thinktank. The report found only a single deadly “far-left” attack in 2020, the shooting of Aaron Danielson, a rightwing activist, by a self-described “anti-fascist” during a protest in Portland this August. Experts on extremism said this was the first killing linked to an anti-fascist in the United States in 25 years. Violent rightwing actors were responsible for 41 politically motivated attacks...

The good news is that Donald Trump has been voted out of the White House. The bad news is that Trump was not a unique, aberrant threat to American democracy; it was already broken so deeply and in so many ways that no single election can possibly repair the damage. Even with a Biden administration, the worsening structural inequities embedded in the nation for centuries – and cynically exploited by Republicans to govern with narrow minority support – will still be with us. They are embodied in institutions such as the electoral college, which elected Trump in 2016 despite...

In a year of escalating political violence in the United States, Facebook has served as a key organizing tool for violent extremists. An alleged plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was planned in part on Facebook, with one leader of the scheme broadcasting a video of his frustrations with Whitmer to a private Facebook group, and participants later sharing footage of their paramilitary exercises and bomb-making training, according to an FBI affidavit. A related Michigan militia group facing terrorism charges also used Facebook to recruit new members, according to the Michigan state police. Before Michigan, there was...

In 1860, on the brink of civil war, caped young men with lanterns sought to safeguard democracy. Now, in a nation divided once more, the group has returned to the light. On 21 September, a tweeted image of an eyeball, with the words “WIDE AWAKE,” accompanied an urgent appeal to demonstrators in Washington, eager to protest against Republican plans to nominate a supreme court replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The tweet was part of a rapidly growing interest in the Wide Awakes, a shadowy youth movement that rose up in 1860, as the nation teetered toward civil war, then...

The City of Milwaukee has one documented case of a lynching, involving George Marshall Clark in 1861. For the following 14 years until 1875, eight lynchings took place in Wisconsin. Historians have devoted in-depth analysis to the lynchings that took place in the Southern United States, and some that occurred in Western states and territories. But the mob violence directed at people of color that occurred in the Midwest has gone relatively unexamined. What were lynchings? Historians broadly agree that lynchings were a method of social and racial control meant to terrorize Black Americans into submission, and into an...