Hundreds of former DOJ officials urge probe of Barr over move to clear out protesters

A man is detained by bicycle mounted police during a demonstration near the White House on June 1. Former Department of Justice officials are seeking an investigation of Attorney General William Barr's role in a move by police to clear protesters away from the White House later that day. Photo by Tasos Katopodis/UPI | License Photo

LOOKS LIKE THEY BUSTED YOUNG IAN ANDERSON OF JETHRO TULL
June 10 (UPI) -- Hundreds of former Justice Department employees on Wednesday called for a probe of Attorney General William Barr's involvement in a move by police to clear demonstrators from an area near the White House last week.

In a letter to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, 1,250 department alumni -- many of them former career prosecutors, supervisors and trial lawyers -- urged the internal agency watchdog to look into Barr's role in a June 1 incident in which federal law enforcement officers used horses and tear gas to push a largely peaceful group of protesters back from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.

Also Wednesday, the DOJ Association of Black Attorneys issued a statement condemning retaliation or police-use-of force against peaceful protesters and calling for a return to more federal oversight of local police reform.

In the Lafayette Square incident, protesters who had gathered outside the White House to denounce the police-involved death of George Floyd were charged by U.S. Park Police officers firing rubber bullets and chemical gas.

RELATED House Democrats unveil reform bill against police misconduct

The show of force came shortly after President Donald Trump threatened to mobilize thousands of active U.S. military members against demonstrators.

The purpose of the police action, the Justice Department alumni wrote, was to enable Trump "to walk across the street from the White House and stage a photo op at St. John's Church, a politically motivated event in which Attorney General Barr participated."

"While the full scope of the Attorney General's role is not yet clear, he has admitted that he was present in front of the White House before law enforcement personnel took action to disperse the crowd," they wrote.

RELATED ACLU sues Trump, Barr over 'criminal attack' on Lafayette Square protesters

Barr has denied giving the "tactical order" for the Park Police to charge the demonstrators, but White House and Justice Department officials confirmed Barr had personally ordered the execution of a plan devised earlier in the day to push the crowds back following incidences of vandalism the previous night.

Trump has faced criticism from Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, other prominent Democrats and military officials over the incident. Pentagon adviser James Miller resigned in protest over Defense Secretary Mike Esper's involvement in the police move.

The DOJ Association of Black Attorneys condemned using federal law enforcement agencies to employ unnecessary force against protesters and to strengthen federal oversight of local police reform.

RELATED Pelosi asks for full ID of all police, forces responding to D.C. protests

"George Floyd's death reminds us yet again that the ongoing inequitable treatment of Black Americans demands structural and systemic improvements within the American justice system," the group wrote.

"This country's history of racial violence and intimidation as well as pervasive implicit bias still permeates cities, towns, local police forces, prosecutors' offices, and the day-to-day interactions of all Americans. DOJABA will not be silent.

"For DOJABA members, it does not take harrowing images or painful videos to imagine the same fate," the statement said.

"Incidents like George Floyd's murder reinforce the constant fear that we-or our loved ones-will experience such horror while going to the store, sitting in one's home, or jogging."

The group's statement, which was supported by other DOJ employee organizations, urged that the DOJ return to a tradition of stepping in with local police reform agreements addressing the use of force and discriminatory policing, which have been de-emphasized in the Trump administration, first under Attorney General Jeff Sessions and later under William Barr.

"We strongly encourage the prosecution of law enforcement officers who blatantly disregard the Constitutional rights of Black Americans to the fullest extent possible under federal law," the group said.

Protesters demand justice in police killing of George Floyd

Protesters gather in Washington Square Park in New York City on June 9. Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo 

MASKED SOCIAL DISTANCING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE UNLIKE

THE ARMED WHITE PROTESTERS AGAINST COVID-19 RULES

South Korean company pleads guilty in U.S military base corruption scandal

CRIMINAL CAPITALISM

MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

South Korean engineering giant SK pleaded guilty to fraud in obtaining contracts for the massive construction project at Camp Humphreys, the U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek. Photo by Yonhap

SEOUL, June 10 (UPI) -- One of South Korea's largest engineering firms, SK Engineering and Construction, pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in obtaining a construction contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. Army, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

SK received a contract in 2008 at Camp Humphreys, the headquarters of United States Forces Korea, by funneling payments to an official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to plea documents.

SK agreed to pay a total $68.4 million in criminal and civil fines and restitution to the U.S. Army in a plea agreement entered in a Western District of Tennessee federal court. The company will also serve three years of probation, during which time SK will not pursue U.S. federal government contracts.

SK created a fake construction company to cover roughly $2.6 million in payments to the official and submitted false documents to the U.S. Army, the Department of Justice said. The company also admitted that its employees obstructed the criminal investigation by burning documents and attempting to persuade an individual not to cooperate with U.S. authorities.

RELATED U.S. accepts $200M proposal for furloughed USFK employees

"Today's guilty plea and substantial criminal penalty sends a clear message," said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. "[C]ompanies like SK -- which withheld and destroyed documents, attempted to persuade a witness not to cooperate and failed to discipline any responsible employees -- will pay a price."

The criminal fines of more than $60.5 million are the largest ever imposed in the Western District of Tennessee. SK also paid civil penalties amounting to $5.2 million and an additional $2.6 million in restitution to the United States Army.

Two SK employees, Lee Hyeong-won and Lee Dong-Guel, were indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy, fraud and obstruction in 2018, but the two remain fugitives of justice, the Justice Department added.

RELATED U.S. military begins furlough of South Korean employees

"American contracts are not for sale in the United States, nor abroad," said Paul Delacourt, assistant director at the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office, which helped investigate the case. He added the judgment would send a message "that the FBI and our partners will hold accountable those who threaten the integrity of our military operations and who abuse their position to profit personally at the expense of American taxpayers."

The roughly $11 billion expansion of Camp Humphreys into the main command for American troops deployed on the Korean Peninsula was plagued by construction delays and cost overruns.

Plans to consolidate troops at the base in Pyeongtaek, located some 40 miles south of Seoul, date back to 2004. The move was originally slated to take place in 2008, but United States Forces Korea did not relocate their headquarters there until 2018.

RELATED South Korea employees warn furlough would compromise U.S. bases

With some 42,000 soldiers and civilians, Camp Humphreys is the U.S. Army's largest overseas base and was the largest construction project in the U.S. Department of Defense's history. Under a defense cost-sharing agreement with the United States, South Korea paid for approximately 90 percent of the expansion project.

On This Day: U.S. Supreme Court strikes down anti-flag burning law

On June 11, 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an anti-flag-burning law passed by Congress the year before.

In 1776, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman were appointed by the Continental Congress to write a declaration of independence for the American colonies from England.

Aviator Charles Lindbergh appears in the open cockpit of airplane at Lambert Field, in St. Louis, Miss., ca. 1920s. On June 11, 1927, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge welcomed Lindbergh home after the pilot made history's first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, New York to Paris. File Photo by Library of Congress/UPI

In 1927, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge welcomed Charles Lindbergh home after the pilot made history's first non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, New York to Paris.

In 1963, for a brief moment, Gov. George Wallace blocked the enrollment of two African-American students to the University of Alabama. His acts of defiance would be short-lived as President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, instructing them to end Wallace's blockade of the school.

UPI File Photo

In 1967, protests and violence erupted in Tampa, Fla., after a police officer fatally shot 19-year-old Martin Chambers on suspicion of burglary. The race riots lasted three days, during which multiple businesses burned to the ground and a sheriff's deputy -- Sgt. Don Williams -- died of a heart attack.

In 1967, the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors ended with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire. The Israeli forces achieved a swift and decisive victory.

In 1994, after 49 years, the Russian military occupation of what had been East Germany ended with the departure of the Red Army from Berlin.

The Longtime Reality TV Show “Cops” Has Been Canceled 

As Protests Against Police Brutality Sweep The World

“Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don’t have any current or future plans for it to return," a spokesperson said.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/krystieyandoli/paramount-cancels-cops-amid-blm-protests

Democrats Are Calling For An Investigation Into The Trump Administration Denying DACA Recipients Federally Backed Housing Loans

“The facts are clear: HUD officials implemented a secret policy change to discriminate against DACA recipients," Sen. Bob Menendez said.

Nidhi Prakash BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on June 9, 2020, at 9:01 a.m. ET


Mandel Ngan / Getty Images
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson speaks in the Oval Office of the White House, June 25, 2019.

A group of Democrats in Congress are asking the federal housing agency’s inspector general to investigate why federal housing officials have told lenders to deny DACA recipients government-backed home loans, and why agency officials misled Congress and the public about the policy.

A letter making the request to the Department of Housing and Urban Development Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis was signed by 13 Senate and 32 House Democrats, headed up by Sen. Bob Menendez, Rep. Pete Aguilar, and Rep. Juan Vargas. It comes in response to a BuzzFeed News’ report last week, which revealed that Department of Housing and Urban Development officials did make a policy change to exclude DACA recipients from home loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration while denying that there had been a change to the public and to Congress.

“Specifically we are concerned that HUD imposed a new, nonpublic, and legally erroneous policy prohibiting the issuance of FHA-insured loans to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and knowingly misrepresented to Congress the implementation and enforcement of this new policy,” they wrote in the letter.

BuzzFeed News initially reported that DACA recipients and their mortgage lenders were being told they were no longer eligible for the program, which they had been able to access for years until the Trump administration moved to rescind DACA in 2017.

On several instances after BuzzFeed News published that story, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and other housing officials assured members of Congress in public hearings and in private meetings that there had been no policy change.

“The facts are clear: HUD officials implemented a secret policy change to discriminate against DACA recipients. HUD failed to disclose this change publicly and misrepresented that a change in policy had occurred in Congressional hearings, letter responses, and briefings to Congressional staff,” Menendez told BuzzFeed News in a statement on Monday.

”This is wrong and unacceptable. We are requesting that HUD’s Inspector General investigate potential violations of federal law and failure to disclose this policy change to Congress," Menendez said.

Carson told members of Congress last year that after reading the initial story from BuzzFeed News, he had “asked around” his department.

“No one was aware of any changes that had been made to the policy whatsoever. I’m sure we have plenty of DACA recipients who have FHA-backed loans,” he said during testimony before a House committee in April last year, well after the emails obtained by BuzzFeed News show that officials within the agency had decided to exclude DACA recipients.

“It’s unacceptable for the Trump Administration to secretly change the rules to stop DACA recipients from achieving the dream of home ownership. It’s equally unacceptable that the HUD Secretary would lie to Congress about the Trump Administration’s discriminatory housing practices," Aguilar told BuzzFeed News in a statement.

In December 2018, Sens. Menendez, Cory Booker, and Catherine Cortez Masto wrote to HUD officials asking why federal housing officials told lenders to deny DACA recipients government-backed home loans.

Responding to that letter, HUD’s Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Intergovernmental Relations Len Wolfson wrote, “[t]he Department wants to be very clear that it has not implemented any policy changes during the current Administration, either formal or informal, with respect to FHA eligibility requirements for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients. HUD has longstanding policy regarding eligibility for non-U.S. citizens without lawful residency. Those policies have not been altered.”

In another exchange of letters, Wolfson wrote in July last year that HUD “has not implemented any policy changes during the current Administration with respect to FHA eligibility requirements for DACA recipients.”

"HUD chose to exclude lawful homebuyers from accessing FHA-backed home loans,” said Vargas in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “DREAMers earned the right to buy a home as taxpaying participants in our country’s labor force.”

In their letter to the inspector general on Tuesday, Democrats pointed to Wolfson’s responses, Carson’s testimony, and the internal documents and emails that show that a specific decision was made to interpret a requirement for legal residency for the loans to exclude DACA recipients.

“The above timeline and documents demonstrate what we believe was a change of policy without sound and unambiguous legal reasoning, without an opportunity for public input under Section 553 of the APA, and without communication to FHA-approved lenders and Congress,” they wrote.

MORE ON DACA AND HOUSING
The Trump Administration Said It Didn’t Change Policy To Deny Housing Loans To DACA Recipients. Emails Show Otherwise.

Nidhi Prakash · June 4, 2020

Nidhi Prakash is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

Federal judge blocks pandemic-based deportation of Honduran teen


Immigration advocates are watching a case filed by the ACLU to see if emergency pandemic health restrictions can be used to deport asylum seekers. File photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo

June 10 (UPI) -- A federal judge Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from using pandemic-based health justifications to deport a Honduran teen.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan upheld a request from the American Civil Liberties Union in a suit filed Tuesday to issue an emergency temporary restraining order in the case of a minor identified by his initials, "J.B.B.C."

Sullivan is also the federal judge who will decide whether to dismiss the federal case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

The ACLU said in a complaint that the Trump administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are unlawfully using a new system to restrict asylum petitions in the name of public health.

RELATED Latino citizens are worrying more about deportation

The CDC published an order under Title 42 of the U.S. Code, which restricts entry into the country if there is "serious danger of the introduction of ... disease into the United States."

The complaint alleges that Trump's immigration policy is using Title 42 to block the rightful due-process of asylum seekers.

The 16-year-old boy, who has no symptoms of COVID-19, was apprehended June 4 by border officials, the suit said.

RELATED Poverty, poorer health make some in the Bronx more vulnerable to COVID-19

His father escaped Honduras due to fear of "severe persecution" and lives in the United States while his asylum petition is pending. J.B.B.C. has also experienced persecution and was trying to join his father, his lawyers argued.

"Plaintiff would face grave danger in Honduras and must be given the opportunity to remain in the United States to receive the statutory protections to which he is entitled," the suit said.

The teen is being held as an unaccompanied minor near El Paso, Texas, and was to be deported back to Honduras this week.

The ACLU argues that immigration authorities are expanding the power of Title 42 to circumvent Congress on immigration policies. In the past, Title 42 has authorized testing and quarantine powers, but has never been used to deport migrants.

Before March, an unaccompanied minor seeking asylum would have been placed into the custody of Health and Human Services. The boy would have then joined his father waiting for an asylum hearing.

The Trump administration also pushed through pandemic-related economic measures meant to block visas for undocumented child migrants for 60 days to preserve jobs for U.S. citizens.

RELATED Judge affirms White House plan to suspend visas for child migrants

The New York Times estimated in May that more than 900 children have been deported under the new policy, being sent back before they have a chance to coordinate with guardians or sponsors in the United States.

The suit is being watched by immigration advocates to see whether the new Title 42 rules to deport asylum seekers under emergency pandemic rules will stand going forward

A 16-Year-Old Boy Is Suing The Trump Administration, Claiming It's Using The Pandemic As An Excuse To Deport Him

The teen is the first to challenge an unprecedented policy put in place amid the coronavirus pandemic that has all but shut down asylum at the southern border.

Hamed Aleaziz BuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on June 10, 2020

John Moore / Getty Images
Unaccompanied immigrant minors wait to be transported to a US Border Patrol processing center in July 2019.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday challenging a controversial Trump administration policy that has turned back thousands of immigrants at the southern border, including children apprehended alone and asylum-seekers.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, DC, was filed on behalf of a 16-year-old Honduran boy who fled to the US to seek protection from persecution in his home country. The teen, who is seeking to stop his imminent deportation, is the first to challenge an unprecedented policy that has all but shut down asylum at the southern border.

The ACLU also filed a second lawsuit challenging the policy on behalf of a 13-year-old girl from El Salvador who has already been deported under the new measures after coming to the US in April. She had fled El Salvador because she was targeted by gangs that had previously threatened her mother, a former police officer, the complaint states.

“During her apprehension, she fell into the Rio Grande River because she was trying to get away from CBP patrol dogs. CBP sent her to the hospital,” the suit, which was also filed in federal court in Washington, DC, states.

The girl was later deported on April 27.

Meanwhile, the threat of persecution and torture to the girl "is imminent and real," her lawyers wrote.

"El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world and in particular gender-motivated killings of women and girls,” they added.

Administration officials have said they are following public health orders designed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the US, but advocates like the ACLU say they are using the health orders to violate federal laws that govern the processing of unaccompanied minors.

Department of Homeland Security officials have turned around thousands of immigrants, including children, at the southern border by using a March order issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that bars the entry of those who cross into the country without authorization.

Previously, unaccompanied children from Central America picked up by Border Patrol agents would be sent to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), where they would be housed in shelters across the country as they began officially applying for asylum and waited to be reunited with family members in the US.

But those referrals have dipped since the issuance of the CDC order and the agency received just 58 children for the entire month of April — lower than the average number of referrals in a single day in the period prior to the order. Instead, unaccompanied children at the border are turned back and deported by Department of Homeland Security officials under the CDC order.

“The Administration’s use of [the CDC order] is a transparent end-run around Congress’s considered decision to provide protection to children and others fleeing danger even where communicable disease is a concern—and to address that concern through the use of testing and quarantines, not deportation,” read the ACLU’s lawsuit.

The ORR referral process was created by the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by then-president George W. Bush in 2008. Under the law, US Customs and Border Protection officials are generally required to refer the children within 72 hours to the US refugee agency.

The 16-year-old Honduran boy facing expulsion has been in CBP custody since June 4, according to the lawsuit. He fled the Central American country, attorneys said, after witnessing a murder and gang members threatened him afterward. His father lives in the US.

Advocates said the use of the CDC order is “extreme in seeking to eliminate statutory protections for vulnerable non-citizens and children. And it is not only a ban on entry, but provides for summary expulsion for those who entered the country.”

They also note in the lawsuit that the US is already dealing with an outbreak of the disease.

“Despite Defendants’ claimed fear of ‘introducing’ infected individuals into the country, the United States is experiencing an outbreak of COVID-19 that is substantially more serious than most of its neighbors,” the lawsuit read. “This country has the highest COVID-19 death toll and one of the highest infection rates in the entire world. As of June 7, 2020, the United States had over 1.94 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, a rate of 5.91 people per thousand.”

The ACLU is requesting the order be declared unlawful as it applied to the 16-year-old child and to stop them from using it against him.

The deportation has temporarily been put on hold for 24 hours after advocates and the government came to an agreement.


MORE ON THIS
Trump Ordered All Immigrants Caught Entering The US Illegally To Be Turned Back To Ward Off Coronavirus Spread

Adolfo Flores · March 20, 2020

The Trump Administration Is Now Deporting Unaccompanied Immigrant Kids Due To The Coronavirus

Hamed Aleaziz · March 30, 2020

Hamed Aleaziz is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in San Francisco.

The US Women’s National Team Is Demanding US Soccer Apologize To Black Players For Banning Kneeling During The National Anthem

Emails obtained by BuzzFeed News show that in 2017, US Soccer suggested a player who violated the policy twice could be suspended for a year.

Molly Hensley-Clancy BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on June 8, 2020

Ronald Martinez / Getty Images
Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan stand on the field during the national anthem before a friendly match at Allianz Field on Sept. 3, 2019, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The US Women’s National Team is demanding their employer, US Soccer, end a policy requiring players to stand during the national anthem.

“The Federation should immediately repeal the ‘Anthem Policy,’ publish a statement acknowledging the policy was wrong when it was adopted, and issue an apology to our Black players and supporters,” the national team players said in a statement to BuzzFeed News.

Players called for US Soccer to “lay out its plans on how it will now support the message and movement that it tried to silence four years ago.”

US Soccer will hold a special board meeting Tuesday to discuss its anthem policy, which goes beyond even the National Football League’s rules in its attempts to limit players’ ability to protest. It requires players to “stand respectfully” during the anthem at national team games. When it passed in 2017, no board members voted against it.

The policy was created to target a single player: superstar Megan Rapinoe, who in 2016 became the first white major athlete to kneel during the anthem in solidarity with the NFL’s Colin Kaepernick.

Rapinoe, who is gay, said in 2016 that she was kneeling because she understood “what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties.”

“It’s important to have white people stand in support of people of color on this,” she said then.

No player actually faced penalties from US Soccer after the anthem policy, but emails obtained by BuzzFeed News show in 2017, US Soccer initially sought to punish any national team player who did not stand for the anthem with suspension.

“As to repercussions, what we have in mind is that for a first offense, the player be suspended for three (3) national team camps/games,” a US Soccer representative wrote to the player’s union of the men’s national team.

“For a second offense, the player would be suspended from participating in national team activities for twelve months.”

Both the unions for the men’s and women’s national teams said they believed the policy could never formally apply to national team players, because US Soccer had not gone through the proper process to approve the rule with the unions.

Nonetheless, the women's national team players said in their statement, the anthem policy “perpetuates the misconceptions and fear that clouded the true meaning and significance of Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe and other athletes taking a knee — that Black people in America have not been and continue to not be afforded the same liberties and freedoms as white people and that police brutality and systemic racism exist in this country.”

“This is everybody’s responsibility, including this union and its members; we could and should have done more in the past,” the players said. “We are committed to rising up against racist, hateful and unjust acts to effect change. Black lives matter.”

A representative for US Soccer declined to comment for this story.


Kevin C. Cox / Getty Image
Rapinoe kneels during the national anthem on Sept. 18, 2016, in Atlanta.

For Rapinoe, much of the damage had already been done by the time the policy was passed. After she said she would continue kneeling during the anthem, she was kept off of the US national team roster for more than six months.

Though she attended several team camps, Rapinoe didn’t put on the uniform of the national team — including to appear on the bench — until after US Soccer passed the policy requiring players to stand and she had agreed publicly to comply.

The team’s coach at the time, Jill Ellis, blamed Rapinoe’s absence from American rosters after she knelt on her performance: the midfielder had dealt with several injuries and struggled in the 2016 Olympics.

But details of the timeline of Rapinoe’s absence from the team undermine Ellis’s claim.

When Ellis left Rapinoe off the roster for the year’s biggest tournament in February 2017, for example, she said it was because Rapinoe needed “some time to work her way back in and get games with her club” in the National Women’s Soccer League.

But after US Soccer’s anthem policy was made public in early March, Ellis invited Rapinoe back into the team’s next training camp just two weeks later — long before she had played any games with her club team.

Rapinoe was invited to return to a national team camp on March 20, according to a source. She was put on the roster for the first time since she had knelt, and even played in both games, in early April against Russia. The first club games in the National Women’s Soccer League weren’t played until April 15.

And after she said she would stand for the anthem, Rapinoe made the next 26 national team rosters.

In a statement to BuzzFeed, the lawyer for the men’s national team union, Mark Levinstein, also called for the policy to be rescinded. He said it was an “ill-advised and insensitive political statement,” though he noted the union believed it had never applied to their players, "so we were not concerned about it."

“The Federation now absolutely needs to acknowledge they were wrong to issue it, to apologize for it, and rescind it,” Levinstein said.

Rapinoe has not given interviews in the wake of George Floyd being killed in police custody, saying she wants to focus on elevating the voices of black activists.

She has said previously that she believes she was kept off of the team because of her choice to kneel. But she has also pointed out that her career has been able to rebound — unlike Kaepernick’s, who has not played professional football again.

"While I'm enjoying all of this unprecedented and, frankly, a little bit uncomfortable attention and personal success, in large part due to my activism off the field, Colin Kaepernick is still effectively banned from the NFL for kneeling during the national anthem in protest of known and systematic police brutality against people of color, known and systematic racial injustice, known and systematic white supremacy,” Rapinoe said at an awards ceremony last year.

“I see no clearer example of that system being alive and well than me standing before you right now.”

Even if US Soccer’s board votes the anthem policy down Tuesday, it faces an uphill battle to being rescinded permanently. It must then go in front of the organization’s full membership, which is heavily white and male. The anthem policy passed without any objection in 2017.

During the 2019 World Cup, Rapinoe chose to stand stoically during the anthem, declining to put her hand on her heart or sing along as most of her teammates do.

“I’ll probably never put my hand over my heart,” she told Yahoo Sports. “I’ll probably never sing the national anthem again.”

MORE ON USWNT
US Women's Soccer Was Just Dealt A Huge Blow In Their Equal Pay Lawsuit

Stephanie K. Baer · May 1, 2020
US Women's Soccer Players Protested Unequal Pay At A Match By Turning Their Jerseys Inside Out

Molly Hensley-Clancy · March 11, 2020


Molly Hensley-Clancy is a politics reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in Washington, DC.

A Woman Who Makes Bags For Michael Kors Was Sent To One Of The Most Crowded Prisons In The World For A Facebook Post

A Cambodian woman who makes bags for brands like Michael Kors and Kate Spade was jailed for two months after expressing her fears about the coronavirus.

Nishita Jha BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From  New Delhi
Posted on June 10, 2020

Courtesy Soy Sros
Soy Sros

“I’m sorry if I seem distracted, I’m not fully myself yet,” Soy Sros said, pushing sweaty brown bangs off her forehead.

It had been less than a day since Soy was released from prison, where she was crammed into a tiny cell with 72 other women and children, without masks, hand sanitizers, proper food, or even any room to lie down. The prison was all she’d known for nearly two months. Now, she was sitting on a plastic chair in an empty office, staring at a laptop and hoping her story would reach Michael Kors, the 60-year-old billionaire and darling of the fashion world.

“I am not afraid,” she said, speaking clearly and directly, her chin raised to the camera. “I will go back to work. I’m looking forward to it.”

Soy, a Cambodian woman who makes bags for international fashion brands like Michael Kors and Kate Spade, worked at the Superl factory in the country’s Kampong Speu province. On April 4, Soy was sent to prison for a Facebook post in which she wrote about her concerns that workers from her factory would be laid off in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Graeme Sloan / Sipa USA via AP
A boarded-up Michael Kors store in Washington, DC.

Depending on who you are and which part of the world you live, venting on social media has either become a seamless part of your life or something that could endanger it and everything you love. The day after she complained about her employers on Facebook, the 30-year-old single mother received a summons to the supervisor’s office at Superl. The note said someone at the office wanted to meet her. When she got there, Soy said the supervisor presented her with a document that included a warning and an admission — by signing it with her thumbprint, Soy would admit she had made a mistake, and that, if she were to do so again, the factory would start a disciplinary process against her. BuzzFeed News has seen a copy of the letter Soy was asked to sign by her employers at Superl.

She refused to sign the document and returned to her workstation, resuming gluing and sewing bag handles. Since the pandemic began, orders at the factory had slowed down, but there was still, always, more work for someone like her. At the end of her shift, Soy was summoned to the office again. This time, she said, the police were waiting. She was taken to an interrogation room, where she was quizzed by the police for more than 48 hours.

“There were several policemen in the interrogation room, and they asked me if I wanted attention, or to be famous, whether I was trying to incite somebody,” Soy said. “They called me names, offended my dignity as a woman.” Soon after that, Soy was thrown into the Kampong Speu prison.

Cambodia’s overcrowded prisons, some of which hold over 400 times more detainees than they were built for, have been described in a report by Amnesty International as a “ticking time bomb” for coronavirus cases.
Superl’s initial charges against Soy had claimed that she had posted fake news and defamed the factory. But the court that was looking into her case also charged her with two criminal offenses, relating to provocation and discrimination. If Soy were found guilty, she faced up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 6 million riels (approximately $1,500). Superl Factory did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

When Soy spoke to BuzzFeed News, she had been temporarily released from the prison while her case was being argued in court. A week after she spoke, Superl agreed to withdraw the complaint against Soy, but the criminal charges invoked by the court against her could still stick. Despite requests by BuzzFeed News and labor rights organizations, Superl has not indicated whether Soy can return to work, when that might be, or whether it will pay her for the days of work she missed, or compensate her, as Soy wants, for “harm to her reputation.”

On the video call, before the factory dropped charges against her, Soy appeared gaunt and disturbed as she described her mental and physical state in prison. Over the course of two months, she said she had developed a persistent low-grade fever and frequently needed an IV drip and medicines. She also said she had barely eaten or slept in weeks because she was so anxious about her health, whether her children and mother would survive if something were to happen to her, and what the factory would do to the rest of the workers at Superl.

In April, the same month Soy was arrested, the CEO of Capri Holdings, the global fashion luxury group that owns the Michael Kors brand, as well as brands like Versace and Jimmy Choo, signed the UN Global Compact. This is a nonbinding pact to encourage businesses worldwide to adopt sustainable and socially responsible policies toward honoring human rights and labor.



Amnesty International@amnesty
We've received shocking footage from Cambodia, revealing the inhumane conditions inside one of its prisons. Such extreme overcrowding is a ticking time bomb for a #COVID19 outbreak. Cambodian authorities must immediately address this overcrowding crisis.09:09 AM - 10 Apr 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite

On its website, Capri Holdings mentions that nearly all Michael Kors products in the fiscal year 2019 were produced in Asia. The company’s webpage also includes its code of ethics, which it expects supply chain partners, like Superl, to follow. It includes things like respecting the “legal rights of employees to freely participate in worker organizations of their choice without harassment” (i.e., unionize), and zero tolerance policy for any partners who “employ any form of physical or mental coercion or punishment against workers.”

In prison, Soy’s days were a blur of sweat, bodies, hunger, and pain. The crowded cell meant the women could not all lie down at once, and when they slept, each woman’s head touched the feet of another person. The food was largely inedible and unhygienic.

While Cambodia has thus far reported zero deaths due to the coronavirus, Soy was concerned because several women in the cell were running persistent low-grade fevers like hers. She made friends; some of the women shared their medicines with her (each person was only allowed to take one pill a day) or fanned her when she was trying to sleep.

On April 14, when Cambodia celebrated the Khmer New Year, rumors circulated that several prisoners across the country would receive presidential pardons. Soy did not make much of this news until she learned that some men in Kampong Speu province, where she was held, had attempted to escape jail by feigning medical ailments when they learned they would not be pardoned. Through the “prison grapevine,” Soy said, she heard that the attempt was unsuccessful and that the men had been punished — while she would not say just what she saw and heard that day, Soy told union leaders she was “terrified.”

Unless they are unionized, workers like Soy, who are at one end of the supply chain, rarely know which brands they are making products for. This absence of transparency in the brands’ supply chains, according to labor rights activist Andrew Tillett-Saks, is one of the ways brands escape accountability for how factories treat their workers. “Brands hide behind these corporate structure nuances,” Tillett-Saks told BuzzFeed News over the phone from Myanmar, which along with Cambodia, Bangladesh, and India produces much of the world’s ready-made garments. “It’s important for the public to be reminded who is at either end of the supply chain and the vast gulf of inequality between them.”

Soy and her union, the Collective Union of Movement of Workers, knew the brands they were making bags for. Michael Kors has been a buyer from Superl’s factory in Cambodia since 2017, as shown on an international trade database. The factory also manufactures for Kate Spade (the brand now owned by Tapestry) as well as a few others. The leather tote bags and nylon backpacks made at the Superl factory where Soy works are shipped through Vung Tau, Vietnam and/or Kaohsiung in Taiwan; they arrive in the United States through the ports of Long Beach or Los Angeles in California or via Savannah, Georgia; Tacoma, Washington; and Newark, New Jersey.

This is why, soon after Soy’s arrest, CUMW members began writing to Capri Holdings and Michael Kors, as well as Kate Spade to call for her release. When they received no response, they looped in international labor watchdogs like Clean Clothes Campaign and IndustriAll Global Union for help.

“Brands have all the power to help us,” Pav Sina, a member of CUMW, said on a video call from the union’s office in Kampong Speu. “The factories will listen to them, but they have to listen to us first.”

On May 11 and again on May 28, the urgent appeals coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign wrote to Krista McDonough, the chief sustainability officer at Capri Holdings, as well as Taryn Bird, the social impact director at Kate Spade. The watchdog reiterated CUMW’s demands to release Soy from prison. The letter, reviewed by BuzzFeed News, said:

“Following her arrest, Mrs Soy Sros’ family lost their income as she is the sole breadwinner. She is a widow and a mother of two underaged children. They are now taken care of by their grandmother. As per today, Mrs Soy Sros remains in jail. According to CUMW who visited Mrs. Soy Sros on May 8, 2020 her health is rapidly deteriorating and she now receives medical treatment.”

The CCC reminded the brands about the code of ethics listed on their websites, adding, “We assume [you have a] sincere interest in resolving this case as soon as possible. We urge you to take immediate action and will await your response.”
Neither Capri Holdings nor Kate Spade responded to the CCC nor the IndustriAll Global Union. They also did not respond to questions when contacted by BuzzFeed News for this article.

Soy’s arrest is part of a pattern that has plagued fashion brands since the pandemic began. As brands close outlets across North America and Europe, putting unsold stock from these stores on discount sales online, they are also canceling orders from their suppliers and reneging on payments. In the shadow of a looming economic crisis, supply chain partners for major brands across Asia have been accused of union-busting (getting rid of unionized workers who know their rights, or “troublemakers”) to eventually replace them with a younger, more desperate, or more subservient workforce. Garment industry experts say a huge reason manufacturers are able to get away with this: race.

“Apparel supply chains are based on an international division of labor that requires the labor of the global south to not only be cheap, but to be docile so as not to interrupt the legal looting of labor and resources that the global north depends on to maintain its lifestyle,” Thulsi Narayanasamy, senior labor researcher at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s clearly a racial division of labor because as we see more brands move to producing clothes in places like the USA and UK, it’s migrant workers or people of color that are working in the factories.”

Under Narayanasamy, the BHRRC has devised a COVID-19 tracker that monitors brands and their supply chain accountability during the pandemic. They publish the names of the factories that each company uses as well as each brand’s performance for a number of different indicators — including who is offering heavy discounts on their products and the impact this has on garment workers’ salaries around the world.

In June, Narayanasamy also reached out to Superl, warning the factory that local and international unions were calling on it to immediately withdraw the charges filed against Soy. Superl never wrote back.

“If 60 million garment workers worldwide don’t earn enough to feed themselves, while the brands they produce clothes for create billions in profit on the back of their labor, we need to consider whether profit in the apparel industry is effectively wages stolen from exploited women of color,” said Narayanasamy.

In 2015, Kors was chosen as a Global Ambassador Against Hunger for the UN World Food Programme. Soon after, the “Watch Hunger Stop” initiative took Kate Hudson to meet schoolchildren in Cambodia. In the video, a dressed-down Hudson serves food to brown kids, grows food in lush green fields, laughs with brown women, and looks joyful.

“I was so excited because I love Michael Kors so much,” she says. And after a few lines about the World Food Programme, Hudson says, “This whole experience has been so beautiful, so great [that] it makes me want to do more.”



View this video on YouTube Michael Kors/YouTube
Kate Hudson Visits Cambodia | Watch Hunger Stop


While philanthropic efforts like these are important, they can also be a way for big brands to get away with “optical allyship,” ensuring that their messages remain on-brand without a deeper reflection into what the actions of an ally could be — in this case, changing the ways they conduct business.

Last month, as the US erupted in protests against police violence and anti-Black racism, fashion brands have shared similar messages of solidarity with Black protesters.

Michael Kors@MichaelKors
05:47 PM - 31 May 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite


But according to Narayanasamy, who wrote in 2018 about H&M’s ad campaign featuring a Black boy in a hoodie reading “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” (while his white counterpart sported one with the title “Survival Expert”), the fashion industry’s racism goes beyond whether campaigns include enough models of color, or how many Black and brown designers and executives a brand employs. Corporate diversity at the top does little to ensure that workers in Asia who perform the less visible and glamorous work of fashion — cutting, making, trimming, and, in Soy’s case, gluing and sewing bags — are treated ethically.

For the past month, Tillett-Saks’ work in Myanmar has focussed on another Western fashion brand, Vera Bradley. It sources its bags from a factory in the country, where six workers have been imprisoned after protesting over their working conditions. On June 4, Tillett-Saks tweeted at the brand in response to a message of solidarity with the Black community from the company’s CEO, Rob Wallstrom.


Andrew Tillett-Saks@AndrewTSaks
.@verabradley is literally refusing to drop charges against the black and brown workers who make its bags in jail for demanding Covid-19 safety measures, then tweet this nonsense. Peak BS corporate ‘anti-racism’. Should we boycott until they put their $ where their mouth is? https://t.co/doIDn4butY08:21 PM - 03 Jun 2020
Reply Retweet Favorite

.@verabradley is literally refusing to drop charges against the black and brown workers who make its bags in jail for demanding Covid-19 safety measures, then tweet this nonsense. Peak BS corporate ‘anti-racism’. Should we boycott until they put their $ where their mouth is?” Tillett-Saks wrote.

Tillett-Saks was referring to workers from a factory known as Blue Diamond, who said they’d been making bags for Vera Bradley. But when BuzzFeed News contacted Vera Bradley, a representative for the brand said it had never sourced bags from there.

“Blue Diamond is not part of Vera Bradley’s supply chain and never has been. The health and safety of our employees and those in the factories we use are of the utmost importance to Vera Bradley. We currently contract with three factories in Myanmar and they have been through a government health department audit to insure they had adequate controls in place for COVID-19 protection of its workers.”

But the address for the Blue Diamond factory is the same as another factory registered as Rong Son (Myanmar), which, according to import data, has been manufacturing bags for Vera Bradley as recently as 26 April. BuzzFeed News obtained photographs of the wallets workers said they made inside Rong Son (Myanmar)/Blue Diamond, which bear a label for the brand and whose barcode and product description match items sold by Vera Bradley. BuzzFeed News also obtained a copy of a Blue Diamond employee’s contract and their social security card — which names their employer as Rong Son (Myanmar).

Striking workers confirmed to BuzzFeed News that both factories were in the same compound, and that workers from Rong Son were moved to Blue Diamond at the beginning of this year. Zin Mar Khaing, a worker from Blue Diamond told BuzzFeed News: “Vera Bradley may try to just cut their orders from our factory when our dispute becomes public, but they need to stay and take responsibility for the situation they’ve helped create. We make their bags and their profits with our hands, they can’t just walk away as though it’s not their problem. We demand they stay and help correct this injustice.”

When presented with these details, the representative for Vera Bradley first asked for photographic evidence, then said that a team would look into the matter and respond once they had an update. “We want to ensure [these products] are genuine Vera Bradley products and not counterfeit,” said the spokesperson.

Tillet-Saks said public statements about racism and sexism from brands were “a shimmering facade that covers up the industry’s rotten foundation. This facade hides that the industry is built on treating Black and brown women workers as subhuman, with working and living conditions no brand owner would consider humane for themselves or even for workers in their home countries.”

At a moment when police violence against Black Americans is the most urgent issue in the US, Soy’s imprisonment is a reminder that racism does not end at the country’s border. It leaches into war, reproductive healthcare in impoverished nations, and work — including the way fashion supply chain workers are treated in countries thousands of miles away.

Nishita Jha is a global women's rights reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in India.

.

How The Antifa Fantasy Spread In Small Towns Across The U.S.

Rumors of roving bands of Antifa have followed small protests all over the United States. Why are people so ready to believe them?

Anne Helen Petersen BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on June 9, 2020

BuzzFeed News; Getty Images

The rumor that shadowy leftists planned to start trouble in Great Falls, Montana, first appeared on the Facebook group of the Montana Liberty Coalition late last Wednesday afternoon.

“Heads up,” a man named Wayne Ebersole, who owns a local cover crop business, wrote. “Rumor has it that Antifa has scheduled a protest in Great Falls Friday evening at 5 p.m. in front of the Civic Center.” He asked the group if anyone had any more information, or if anyone was available to “protect businesses.”

“It has been confirmed through the police department,” one commenter replied. “They have a permit for tomorrow night and are in town now.”

They weren’t. Police later said they had been “working to quell the rumor.” But that didn’t stop it from sweeping across various right-wing groups. Within 24 hours, a screenshot of Ebersole’s post had been posted to the Facebook Group for the Montana Militia, whose members have recently dedicated themselves to tracking the perceived threat of antifa all over the state, including coordinating armed responses to “protect” their towns. (Ebersole did not respond to a request for comment.)

And by Friday at 5 p.m., as about 500 protesters gathered to protest systemic racism and police brutality, a handful of armed men had massed at the edge of the demonstration.“We heard that a little group called Antifa wanted to show up and not in our town,” one man, who declined to be named, told the Great Falls Tribune. “All it takes is a word and a whisper.”

As protests against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter continue to proliferate across the small towns and rural communities, so, too, have rumors of white vans of masked antifa driving from town to town, reportedly intent on destruction. In Hood River, Oregon, antifa were, according to screenshot of a fake Instagram story, calling on followers to “root loot do anything in your power.” In Spring Hill, Tennessee, there was a “busload” staying at the Holiday Inn, prepping to loot Walgreens at noon. In Wenatchee, Washington, bands of men dressed in black were surveilling potential targets. In Payette, Idaho, a plane full of protesters was circling overhead. In Honolulu, antifa had been flown in from the mainland. In Billings, Montana, some claimed agitators had been spotted by the National Guard. In Nebraska, they were creating Craigslist ads offering to pay people $25 a day to “cause as much chaos and destruction as possible.” In Sisters, Oregon, they were planning to show up at the local Bi-Mart.


To be clear: All of these rumors were false. They were all, as the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office put it, “fourth-hand information.” To combat them, police departments in dozens of towns are holding press conferences, posting announcements on social media, and telling anyone who calls the station that there has been no indication of a planned presence from antifa or any other outside agitators, whether “from Chicago” (code, in many parts of the Midwest, for black people) or “from Seattle” (code for liberals).

Yet these rumors continue to spread. That spread is facilitated by Facebook — where they thrive in groups whose previous focus was protesting pandemic-related shutdowns and circulating conspiracy theories about COVID-19 — and fanned by President Donald Trump, who recently declared his intention to label antifa a terrorist group. This morning, the president raised the antifa menace yet again, tweeting that the protester violently shoved by police in Buffalo, New York, “could be an ANTIFA.” (He was not.)

But the persistence of these rumors suggests a deeper fear of outside incursion, and the necessity of an ever-alert, armed response. As encapsulated in a Reddit thread out of Hood River, Oregon: “I’ll say this much: The people out here are armed to the teeth. If you want to bring mayhem to this area, the end result will likely have you begging for police protection.”


Stephanie Keith / Getty Images
An antifa member passes a fountain during an alt-right rally on Aug. 17, 2019, in Portland, Oregon.

Antifa has become the right’s face of violent leftist protest in the United States, sloppily aligned with, as the president put it on June 1, “professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters.” In a tweet, Trump claimed the national guard had “shut down” the “ANTIFA led anarchists, among others.” (The DC field office of the FBI reported no antifa involvement in protests, according to the Nation.)

It’s difficult to talk about antifa with any sort of precision. It’s “leftist” insomuch as it’s against, well, fascism, authoritarianism, and white supremacists. There are some local groups, but there’s no national leadership structure. Many antifa dedicate themselves to finding white supremacists in their communities and outing them. Most people within those groups are for violent protest only as a last resort, but a handful are for more forceful displays and destruction. Here in Montana, I encountered a very small handful in January 2017, when they showed up in Whitefish to counter a planned march by the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.

The most important thing to understand about antifa is that there are very, very few of them: According to the Washington Post, when the group tried to gather nationally, they topped out at a few hundred.

Nevertheless, Trump has been building up the menace of antifa for years. He first began evoking antifa following the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, when he famously claimed that there were “very good people, on both sides.” “Since then Trump has returned to the term often in speeches,” Ben Zimmer writes in the Atlantic, always “with an air of alien menace.”

Lifted by Trump’s rhetoric, that “alien menace” has accumulated around antifa in the public imagination, making it all the easier to believe posts in which fake antifa accounts promise to act in the exact ways Trump has described. On Sunday, May 31, a newly made Twitter account — since linked to the white nationalist group Identity Evorpa — posted: “Tonight’s the night, Comrades,” with a brown raised-fist emoji and “Tonight we say 'F--- The City' and we move into the residential areas... the white hoods.... and we take what's ours …”

The antifa threat has also been co-opted by QAnon, the nation’s most powerful and influential conspiracy theory and movement. At Concordia University, Marc-André Argentino researches the way extremist groups use social media as a tool to recruit, spread propaganda, and incite acts of violence. Last week, he began tracking the uptick in mentions of antifa within QAnon social media forums, which began to rise when “Q” (the anonymous poster who guides the site) began mentioning it on May 30. At least for the moment, QAnon is celebrating the protests (and antifa’s presence) for their potential to spark the apocalyptic “storm” central to the QAnon theology. “Antifa is a nebulous enemy, one that serves as a rallying cry for keyboard warriors and on-the-ground militiamen,” Argentino told me.

Argentino has been noticing something else, too: a growing cross-pollination between QAnon, which is often referred to simply as a conspiracy group, and more far-right extremist groups, from the so-called Boogaloo Bois and Proud Boys to more straightforward militias.

This intermingling was on display at the Reopen Michigan protests, where American flags waved alongside Confederate ones. And you can see it now all over the West, where the groups that advocated for reopening — often attracting a motley mix of constitutionalists, “patriots,” anti-vaxxers, Second Amendment advocates, anti-government advocates, and just straight up pissed off business people — have shifted their focus to “protection.” In the Tri-Cities area of Central Washington, the shift is so explicit that the Facebook group “Reopen Tri-Cities” has shifted, wholescale, to a second group called “Protect the Tri.”

Aurora Simpson Photography
Armed men gather on Main Street in the historic downtown of Klamath Falls, Oregon, on May 31.

In Montana, most of the rumors of antifa presence in the state can be traced back to state Sen. Jennifer Fielder, who warned her followers on June 1 of “multiple reports from credible witnesses” that five white panel vans of antifa were on their way to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and would then proceed to Missoula, Montana. Fielder, who lives in Northwest Montana, is known across the state for ultra-right, “liberty-minded” views on everything from public lands (they should be sold) to contact tracing (a form of governmental overreach).

But Fielder didn’t start the antifa rumor. She just brought it to Montana. On Sunday, June 1, over in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the rumors were so compelling that hundreds of armed people showed up to line the Main Street during a planned protest. The next night, in downtown Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a man with an AR-12, an AR-15, two 9 mm handguns, and a .38 special told reporter Bill Buley that he was there, along with hundreds of others, because he’d heard “there were some people who shouldn’t be here.”

In some cases, the people with guns showing up at these rallies are “supportive” of the groups protesting — at least in so far as they’re supportive of the right to freely assemble. They don’t actually believe the protesters, in many cases local high school students, would turn to violence. Instead, they believe antifa is plotting to infiltrate the otherwise peaceful protests and turn them violent — or, as was suspected in Lewiston, Idaho, use the protest as a decoy in order to ransack the business district.

Which is why, as over a thousand people gathered to march along the Snake River in Lewiston, dozens of others, many heavily armed, lined the streets downtown. One wore a Hawaiian shirt (the “uniform” of the Boogaloo Bois) and held a sign with the name of a III% militia member who had been shot by the police. Another wore a vest covered in Nazi paraphernalia. Others were decked out in flak jackets, in camo, and Clinton Conspiracy shirts. Similar scenes have played out this week in Bozeman, Kalispell, Billings, Sandpoint, and Coeur d’Alene.

Travis McAdam, who’s tracked anti-government and hate groups for 15 years with the Montana Human Rights Network, calls it the “Antifa Fantasy.” A version of this fantasy has long existed, in some form, in militia circles: “An outside, shadowy entity is going to come in,” McAdam recounted, “and whether it’s to disarm the community or attack it, these folks are going to mobilize and fight it off. Antifa is just the bogeyman that they’ve stuck in this narrative.”

Put differently: Militia members get to plan, anticipate, and enact the idea at the foundation of their existence. And they get to do it in a way that positions them as “the good guys,” fighting a cowardly bogeyman easily vanquished by show of force alone. As a popular meme circulating in North Idaho put it, “Remember that time when Antifa said they were coming to Coeur d’Alene / And everyone grabbed their guns and they didn’t come? That was awesome!” It doesn’t matter if antifa was never coming in the first place. They didn’t come, and that’s evidence of victory.

And that victory can then be leveraged into further action — and a means to extend the fantasy. On the Montana Militia page, a man named Tom Allen, whose home is listed on Facebook as Wibaux, Montana, posted that he’d spent the night in Dickenson, North Dakota, “protecting” the veterans monument during a planned protest. A group of bikers showed up to guard the nearby mall, protecting “all of Antifa’s usual targets.” There was no incident. (Allen did not respond to request for comment.)

Afterward, Allen wrote, a man who had helped coordinate the defense followed a group of perceived antifa to an Applebee’s, where he said he overheard them talking about “the waitress and how they wanted to rape her,” “killing cops” and “other violence,” and their future plans: “They’re saying there’s going to be a ‘firestorm’ in Billings this weekend.” The post was shared more than 1,800 times.

Like Argentino, the online researcher, McAdam sees this current “protect” movement as an extension and consolidation of anti-government movements that have been percolating for years. Back in 2008, when tea party rallies began sprouting up all over the United States, many of them were attended and organized by people authentically upset about economic policies. But those protests, like the reopen protests, also drew in anti-government agitators and militia members, who then began to influence and, in some cases, take over the leadership in the tea party groups.

“That dynamic is very similar to what’s happening now,” McAdam said. “A core group of people coming from the anti-government movement are always looking for a crisis, where you have a divisive issue in the community that they can tap into and exploit. The COVID pandemic was one thing, and now we’ve got another avenue.” And people who might not ever consider themselves “militia” or even anti-government, who might have joined a reopen group in frustration, are now exposed, and perhaps more receptive, to rumors of roaming antifa in need of rebuke.

Aurora Simpson Photography
Armed men and women show up in Klamath Falls, Oregon, after rumors of an outside antifa presence at a Black Lives Matter protest.

“You can really see that in the Facebook groups,” dozens of which McAdam monitors. “I would see people posting early on a Tuesday morning, saying, ‘I don’t know if this Antifa rumor is real,’ and then later in the day, they’d be like, ‘Well, I dunno if I believe this, but I’m going to go drive around Missoula and look for these Antifa vans.’”

When someone in your Facebook feed posts a warning to be on the lookout for antifa in your small town, it might seem like low-stakes nonsense. But beneath such a seemingly silly rumor lurks a larger ideological iceberg: the idea that radical leftists are out to defile and destroy, and the only recourse against them is an armed, unrestricted militia. QAnon theory builds on this, suggesting that all of it — the protests, the police reaction, the presence of antifa — has been preordained as part of a coming mass destruction

And QAnon isn’t just a niche conspiracy theory. Tweets from its proponents are regularly retweeted by the president. At least 50 current or former candidates for Congress, plus the Republican nominee for the US Senate in Oregon, are public QAnon supporters. And that doesn’t even include candidates running on the state or local level.

As Adrienne LaFrance argued in the Atlantic, QAnon has become a religion, with clearly defined sides of good and evil, hungry for converts. The antifa fantasy functions similarly. Whether you’re in Lewiston, Idaho, or Klamath Falls, Oregon, it’s so, so easy to believe.

And as QAnon continues to cross-pollinate ideas with violent, extremist groups, “keyboard warriors” may bring their conspiracies into the real world. As Argentino put it, “If you’re in QAnon, and you see your messianic leader, Trump, at risk of losing the election, and the mass arrests that Q has promised is not coming, at some point people are going to question: If the Q team and Q can’t do this themselves, maybe they need the digital patriots to become offline patriots.”


Logan Cyrus / Getty Images
A member of the far-right militia Boogaloo Bois walks next to protesters demonstrating outside Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Metro Division 2 just outside of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, on May 29.

On June 2, Trump sent out a blast to his email list. The subject line: ANTIFA. “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” the email said. “They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting — it’s absolute madness.”

That night, in Forks, Washington, a multiracial family from across the state in Spokane pulled up to a local outdoors store. They were in a decommissioned school bus and picking up supplies on their way to go camping. In the parking lot, a group of people from seven to eight cars surrounded them and accused them of being antifa. According to a statement from the sheriff’s office, the family then drove off to their camping site, trailed by a handful of cars. In two of the cars, people were holding semi-automatic weapons. As the family was setting up camp, they heard the sound of chainsaws and gunshots in the distance. When they attempted to leave, they found that trees had been felled onto the road, trapping them on site.

“For lots of folks, it’s much easier to accept the idea that the only people who could be protesting the local police would be from outside the area,” McAdam explained. “It couldn’t possibly be that people of color in our community could have bad experiences with local law enforcement.” Or, for that matter, with locals in general.

“The ‘outsiders’ part of this narrative is just so important,” McAdam said. “It allows people to say, and to believe: ‘We don’t have problems in our community.’”

Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Missoula, Montana.