Morning Briefing: Capitol Rioters Plead Guilty and Face Sentencing
Participants in the Capitol Riot continue to plead guilty and face sentencing.
Morning Briefing: Kellye SoRelle, an attorney for Oath Keepers charged for participating in the Capitol Riot, will reportedly “plead guilty after being charged with conspiring with the right-wing group’s founder to obstruct Congress’s certification of the results of the 2020 election.”
Isaac Yoder, who wore colonial garb, wielded a metal sword, and a flagpole during the Capitol Riot, has reportedly “resoundingly failed to convince a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that his sentence of one year imprisonment should be reduced.”
Jay Johnston, an actor who portrayed Jimmy Pesto on Bob’s Burgers, has “pleaded guilty to charges related to his role in the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021,” and “faces a maximum of five years in prison and pleaded guilty to a felony count of civil disorder.”
Louis Colon, a former Proud Boy and ex-police officer from Kansas City, was sentenced to “two years of probation followed by 24 months of supervised release,” and was “the last of four local Proud Boys to be sentenced in the case.”
Must Reads
Annika Brockschmidt writes that “for a long time, unitary executive theory was dismissed as crackpottery, a fringe idea with no realistic chance to find its way into practice. In 1988, Antonin Scalia, by then a Supreme Court justice and to this day one of the patron saints of the conservative legal movement, had endorsed it in a lone dissent in Morrison v. Olson. Back then, it seemed hard to imagine that a power grab masquerading as a ‘legal theory’ would ever truly get close to the spheres of respectability. But the signs were there. In 2019, former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr praised the very same unitary executive theory in front of members of the Federalist Society. Journalists like Vox’s Ian Millhiser have warned that the current right-wing majority of the Supreme Court has signaled sympathy for the ‘theory’ multiple times over the last couple of years. And indeed, last Monday, the Supreme Court handed down an opinion that law professor Melissa Murray describes as ‘the lovechild of the unitary executive theory and this idea that the president is a king. I mean, it’s the unitary executive monarch principle, in real time being developed for us.’” [Religion Dispatches]
Sarah Posner writes that “this is far from the first time [Mark] Robinson has used the violent language of warfare to pit MAGA Republicans like himself against others. In 2021, he said in a speech that he was born ‘to be one of God’s freedom fighters’ in order to ‘literally make war on the devil.’ He warned he wanted to make ‘the literal foundations of hell tremble, and I want this nation to join with me in doing it.’ That same year, Robinson said in another speech that Christians and conservatives must ‘get as bold and unafraid and warlike in spreading the truth in this nation as these people have been in spreading the lies that are currently destroying it.’ But in those instances, Robinson stopped short of endorsing murder. Explicitly advocating for supposed ‘enemies’ of Christian America to be killed — on a church pulpit, no less — is a clear and dangerous escalation of Christian nationalist support for ‘spiritual warfare’ against ‘demonic’ enemies. Many promoters of ‘spiritual warfare’ have long insisted, citing Ephesians 6:12, that they are not talking about actual war with ‘flesh and blood,’ but rather a battle against ‘principalities and powers’ that takes place solely in the realm of spirituality and prayer.” [MSNBC]
Sian Norris writes that “the Red Pill is not the only online subculture to bring together violent misogyny, conspiracy theories, and far-right beliefs that dreamed of pure male entitlement and an end to women’s rights. Perhaps the most extreme example is the incel group – another forum that started on Reddit and now flourishes on other platforms such as incel.net and incel.is. Incel stands for involuntary celibates: a group of men and boys who feel sexually rejected by women and who are very angry about it. The subcultures’ violent fantasies have spilled out into real-life terror, with extremists driving vans into cafes, shooting men and women in California, murdering Asian sex workers in massage parlours, and stabbing people to death in Plymouth, UK. When I went undercover on incel forums, doing a keyword search for ‘abortion’, the results were revealing. Through my research I discovered that many incels believe in the far-right Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which, they claim, is fuelled by women’s reproductive rights, leading to extreme anti-abortion content. The baseless theory believes white people are being ‘replaced’ by migrant people, with that replacement aided by feminists repressing the white birth rate with abortion and contraception.” [openDemocracy]
What to expect from Radical Reports: Morning Briefing provides a daily round-up of reporting on the Radical Right; Extremist Links offers a weekly round-up of extremists activities including the white supremacist and militia movements; Narratives of the Right delivers weekly analysis of the current narratives in far right online spaces and promoted by right-wing media; and Research Desk provides monthly highlights research and analysis from academia on the Radical Right.
All this is true.
Insufficient punishment for deadly seditionists!