Michigan conspirators planned to storm capitol, conduct livestream executions, lock legislators inside and burn building down
Eric London, WSWS, Nov 13 2020
According to a legal brief recently filed by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the fourteen militiamen who were arrested in October for plotting to kidnap and kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer also planned to storm the capitol, capture hostages, live stream a horrific series of executions, and target the entire elected state leadership and members of the state legislature. The revelations come as Michigan judges have quietly released three of the plotters, including Wolverine Watchmen cofounder Pete Musico. The attorney general’s office wrote:
Plan A consisted of recruiting 200 men and then storm the Capitol building in Lansing while Congress was in session. They were to take hostages, execute tyrants and have it televised. It would take about one week and that no one is coming out alive. The secondary plan was to storm the Capitol building in Lansing when Congress was in session. They would then lock the entrances/exits to the structure. They would then set the building on fire.
As of the time of this writing, no national media outlet has reported these details, and the Democratic Party has maintained total silence beyond the state attorney general herself. According to prosecutors, the conspirators also planned to research the residential addresses of a number of unnamed political figures and execute them at their homes. Officials also released additional details of the military trainings conducted by the plotters, who wrote a schedule for one training session held in Wisconsin on June 14 on the property of a leading member of the fascist Oath Keepers organization there. According to the schedule, the plotters planned to address “basic fundamentals for the new members,” “driver down situation,” “taking a (possible) hostile vehicle over,” “planned ambushes,” “L shape ambush” and “when is the right time to screen for a medic?” The Wolverine Watchmen internally described themselves as a Boogaloo group. According to a private Facebook page used by the group, their purpose was “to network and assemble and recruit like-minded individuals.” They used anti-lockdown demonstrations sponsored by Republican state legislators and promoted by Trump to discuss their plans and recruit new forces.
The Attorney General’s office made these arguments in order to oppose a bond request by Pete Musico, the cofounder of the Wolverine Militia. But after reviewing this evidence, Michael Klaeren granted bond at an estimated $10k, allowing Musico to walk out of jail. Klaeren had previously reduced Musico’s bond from $10m. On Wednesday, prosecutors also announced that 38-year-old Shawn Fix was released on bond in Antrim County, Michigan Tuesday. Weeks ago, Wisconsin resident Brian Higgins was released from bail by county judge Todd Hepler after posting $10k in cash, well below the $1m requested by the local district attorney’s office. These figures and the bail terms are lenient given the gravity of the crimes for which the conspirators stand accused. Musico was merely ordered to wear an ankle monitor, while Higgins was told he could not leave the state of Wisconsin. The plotters will be monitored by friendly police officers, including many who belong to extreme right-wing groups that have praised the plotters and defended their actions as lawful. MilitiaWatch founder Hampton Stall, who researches far-right groups and maintains a database of their activity, told the WSWS:
There’s often a lot of big talk among militia groups that can be dismissed as idle threats, but the specificity and extremely high level of violence included in the fantasies documented in the attorney general’s brief is a massive red flag, especially given how active this core of actors had been. The October arrests of 14 militiamen have not slowed recruitment among militia groups I track, and it seems that leading up to the election recruitment has only continued to rise, both among leaders advertising their groups and new recruits seeking to connect to armed movements.
Far-right networks continue to organize throughout the country in response to Trump’s baseless claims that Biden’s victory was only the product of electoral fraud. Media Matters reported Thursday that fascist Oath Keeper leader Steven Rhodes “says he has men stationed outside of DC ready to engage in violence on Trump’s order.” Rhodes told fascist online personality Alex Jones:
We’ll also be on the outside of DC, armed, prepared to go in, if the president calls us up.
Rhodes made these comments on a YouTube program dedicated to promoting this weekend’s planned pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” demonstrations aimed at overturning the result of the presidential election won by Joe Biden. Small demonstrations took place last weekend in various states and were far outnumbered by demonstrations celebrating Trump’s defeat. The presence of the Proud Boys at these demonstrations came after their leader Enrique Tarrio said in reference to Trump’s statement at the first presidential debate that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by”:
We’re rolling out. Standby order has been rescinded.
At one far-right rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania last weekend, armed Proud Boys gathered with signs that said, “Standing Back and Standing By For My President” and “Free Kyle,” a reference to Kyle Rittenhouse, the fascist who murdered two people protesting police violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin in August. The Harrisburg demonstration was held at the state capitol building and Republican state legislators were pictured visiting and supporting the armed fascist demonstrators. Pennsylvania and Michigan are two of four battleground states with a Republican legislature and Democrat governor, where Trump has focused on appeals to elect alternate slates of electors, overriding the popular vote. Biden won in Michigan by roughly 150k votes, and in Pennsylvania by over 50k votes. Even though the evidence points to a far broader assault on Democrat officials and state legislators, the Democrat Party has also remained completely silent on the assault, effectively silencing the state attorney general’s office and its warnings that the plotters should not be released from jail. The Democrats greatest fear is that informing the public of the plans to carry out mass executions of elected officials will provoke mass opposition to Trump’s attempt to override the election by means of violence and police repression.
Leading NYPD officer caught posting racist, fascistic messages online
Shuvu Batta, WSWS, Nov 12 2020
Deputy Inspector James F Kobel, a 28-year veteran of the NYPD, was revealed to have been a far-right “troll” on an online forum called Law Enforcement Rant, or the Rant. A report by the New York City Council published Nov 6 details that he had posted over 500 times in this forum, leaving a trail of racist remarks and personal information about his co-workers. Within the force, Kobel holds the rank of captain and was a commanding officer of the Equal Employment Opportunity Division, which is responsible for investigating employment and harassment claims. Going by the username of “Clouseau,” Kobel wrote hundreds of vile posts on the Rant, using slurs and profanity directed against African Americans, Jews, Muslims and others. A representative example is him saying that Eric Garner, an African American man who was placed in a lethal chokehold by police for selling cigarettes on the sidewalk, died because of his “poor dietary choices” and that Garner “should have made an effort to make himself a productive member of society … having everyone of his spawn living off of the Federal Government Teet.”
The investigators were able to cross-reference personal information that “Clouseau” had posted about himself on the forum, including the dates he joined the NYPD, proposed to his wife and his mother died, which matched the identity of Kobel. More evidence, including a picture of the digital avatar used by “Clouseau” on Kobel’s phone and an email on his personal computer from the Rant message board that acknowledged his screen name, substantiated the investigators’ conclusion. In his posts, Kobel attacked black Democrat politicians, hurling a variety of racist epithets against Obama, Rep Ilhan Omar and even Mayor Bill de Blasio’s biracial son. Kobel has also parroted the xenophobic rhetoric of the Trump administration, calling COVID-19 the “Wuhan flu.” His other posts contain mixtures of homophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Kobel’s views represent the general consensus opinion of posters in the Rant, a forum dedicated to active and retired police officers. Several of the current threads on the site promotes the conspiracy theory that Trump was the victim of election fraud and that Biden’s victory is illegitimate. Kobel’s views are also common within the NYPD. The Police Benevolent Association and the Sergeants Benevolent Association, which represent between them almost all of the police officers in NYC, both endorsed Trump’s reelection campaign. Trump has repeatedly encouraged police violence, saying in relation to this summer’s protests after the police murder of George Floyd:
When the looting starts, the shooting starts.
Data recently published by the NY CLU reveal that the head of the NYPD, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, alongside other top NYPD brass have been guilty of abuse of authority, with Shea being caught conducting an unlawful stop and frisk. The data reveal over 323,911 accusations of police misconduct, composed of beatings, chokes, shootings, racist language and more, with complaints spiking over the past four years. Commissioner Shea cynically responded to the report on Kobel, saying:
The allegations, if true, that it can be attributed and proved to a member of this department, I am saddened and I am disgusted by it.
Kobel has continued to deny his online identity, suggesting that he was framed. This unsubstantiated claim has been backed by the Captains Endowment Association, which represents Kobel. The investigation against Kobel was conducted by the City Council’s Oversight and Investigations Division, led by Democrat Councilman Ritchie Torres, who said:
The NYPD knew of the existence of Law Enforcement Rant and it did nothing to uncover the identities of those officers. It speaks to the complacency and casual bigotry of the old boys network at the NYPD. The most hateful person was put in charge of fighting hate in the police department. That’s a profound failure of due diligence on the part of NYPD leadership.
Kobel’s position within the police force was not a “profound failure of the NYPD,” but bound up with the role of police and their fostering of fascistic tendencies on a global basis. In a 2019 report, the Plain View Project documented 5k bigoted social media posts by 3.5k accounts identified as belonging to current and former law enforcement officials just in the US, representing a tip of the iceberg. The Brennan Center for Justice released a report in late August detailing the interconnection between the police and far-right forces. It notes that the police response to the nationwide protests against police brutality this summer included numerous officers flaunting their affiliation with far-right groups. A veteran sheriff’s deputy was photographed wearing patches with logos of the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers militias, with similar images of officers appearing in cities throughout the country. Furthermore, our own investigation has revealed connections between police forces and far-right coup plotters who had attempted to kidnap and murder Gretchen Whitmer, the Democrat governor of Michigan. All sections of the US ruling class, both Democrat and Republican, have emboldened the most backward layers of the police. The Obama administration was responsible for unprecedented police militarization, equipping local police forces with billions of dollars worth of military equipment. During this summer’s protests, Democrat mayors and governors called in the National Guard and oversaw brutal police crackdowns involving mass arrests and military-grade vehicles and equipment. In New York, after dozens of protesters were brutalized by the police, de Blasio said that the police gave “fair treatment across the board.”
European governments seize upon terrorist attacks in France and Vienna to build a police state
Johannes Stern, WSWS, Nov 13 2020
European governments are responding to the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Nice, Dresden and Vienna by adopting the political agenda of the far right. Under the pretext of the “war on terror,” EU leaders and European leaders on Tuesday agreed on a massive expansion of “Fortress Europe,” the de facto abolition of the right of asylum, and the creation of what amounts to a Europe-wide police state. Macron declared at a joint press conference with Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission and former German Defence Minister:
The work at government level is aimed at bringing our various services and authorities into line and better coordinating our efforts to fight terrorism, radicalisation with many targeted measures. The task now is to implement these measures consistently, for example the inter-operability of databases, the linking of our databases and the cooperation of our security services also at the external borders. Another topic we discussed was the determination with which we want to combat terrorist propaganda and hate speech on the internet. We are working to ensure that in the coming weeks a regulation on the removal and deletion of terrorist content within one hour is adopted. We must also work on a reform of the Schengen rules. This means that we must strengthen and better defend the external borders of the European Union and that we must better control and implement the functioning of the Schengen rules. I hope that we will soon be able to establish a real Security Council.
Merkel also pleaded for a strengthening of Europe’s external borders and stepped-up censorship, stating:
The German Presidency of the Council still wants to finalise the regulation on preventing the distribution of terrorist content on the internet. We have recently given our security authorities in Germany new opportunities relating to messenger services, such as Telegram, and surveillance.
Von der Leyen took the same line, announcing:
Our 2018 proposal to prevent terrorist content online will now be finalised in the Council and Parliament trialogue. We must focus on the speed of deleting such terrorist content. It is crucial to be fast. We will be giving greater responsibility to the major Internet platforms in the fight against illegal and harmful online content. Our Digital Services Act will be presented in a few weeks’ time.
It is clear what this means. Under the guise of the fight against “terrorist content,” the censorship of left-wing content and websites in particular will be expanded. On Oct 28, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted at a hearing before the US Senate that Google’s search engine censors the WSWS. The new directive will oblige internet giants such as YouTube and Facebook, which work closely with the secret services and governments and already censor left-wing and progressive content on a massive scale, to delete “harmful” articles, videos or other postings even faster. In order to justify the construction of a European police state, the ruling class is seizing upon the horrific terrorist attacks of recent weeks and fueling fears of a continuing terrorist threat. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz warned:
We have a constant danger among us. We have thousands of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’ who either survived the fighting in Syria, in Iraq, for the IS and returned or who did not get through at all because they were stopped somewhere when they left. We need more robust approach to the threats throughout Europe. In order to protect the freedoms of all, we have to restrict the freedom of these people.
What Kurz concealed was that European governments are in many ways responsible for the terrible terrorist attacks of recent weeks. The thousands of “foreign terrorist fighters” did not fall from the sky, but were used by the imperialist powers and their reactionary regional allies, above all Saudi Arabia, as shock troops in the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria. Almost all the assassins of the major terrorist attacks in recent years were known to the security authorities: Anis Amri, who drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market on Dec 19 2016, the Kouachi brothers who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo in early 2015, and also Kujtim Fejzulai, the assassin in Vienna. Kurz’s assertion that European governments are concerned with “protecting freedom” is a blatant lie. In fact, the policies of the ruling class do not protect freedom and life, but bring oppression and death. Due to the lethal “herd immunity” strategy, over 300,000 people have died in Europe alone since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In previous years, tens of millions of people had already been killed, injured or made refugees in the EU-backed neocolonial wars in Central Asia and the Middle East. Tens of thousands have drowned in the Mediterranean. Within Europe, the ruling class is cultivating and using extreme right-wing and fascist forces to intimidate and suppress the growing opposition of the working class and youth. The latest police-state measures are part of this strategy. The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the advanced economic, social and political crisis of the capitalist system. The ruling class feels it is sitting on a social and political powder keg. In recent days and weeks, teachers and students in Greece, Poland and France have protested against the unsafe reopening of schools. These protests are only an anticipation of massive working-class struggles that will be directed against the entire capitalist system, including in the US. There, the Democrats not only play down the coup plans by Trump, who seeks to overturn the election results and establish a fascistic dictatorship. They themselves appeal to the military and the state apparatus out of fear of a revolutionary development of the working class.
The same fear is also driving the nominally left-wing bourgeois parties on this side of the Atlantic. In Germany, the Greens and the Left Party, which articulate the interests of affluent sections of the middle classes, stand at the forefront of a sharp shift of the entire political establishment to the right. Last weekend, excerpts from a so-called “eleven-point action plan” drawn up by Green Party leader Robert Habeck and others became known. Both in terms of its form and content, the paper could have also been drawn up by the right-wing extremist AfD. According to the paper, so-called Islamist “Gefährder” (potential offenders) must be “consistently and closely monitored.” For that, more police and secret service agents are needed. The Greens attack the grand coalition and its notoriously right-wing Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU) from the right. They demand that arrest warrants against “Islamist perpetrators” be executed more consistently and that deportations be organized more quickly. According to a report in the FAZ, the Greens demand:
We need a European Criminal Police Office with its own investigative teams, a uniform definition of the term ‘Gefährder,’ and more cross-border cooperation between national security authorities.
This is a blueprint for the creation of a pan-European police state where nobody is safe. If one takes the recent tightening of the Berlin police law by the SPD-Left-Green Senate majority, any person who might be willing and seems able to commit a terrorist crime can be classified as a “Gefährder.” This means that anyone can be classified as a “Gefährder” on the basis of a mere presumption and thus prosecuted by the security authorities. The Left Party leadership is also calling for a strong state, combining this with anti-Islamic agitation. In a commentary for the right-wing Springer newspaper Die Welt, Dietmar Bartsch, the leader of the Left Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag, called for an end to “ambiguity and inaction” and a “clear reaction of a well-fortified democracy.” By this Bartsch obviously understands the oppression of Muslims, and the criminalisation of any opposition to racism and the police state. Among other things, he pleads for a headscarf ban “in day-care centers and primary schools.” he wrote angrily in Die Welt:
It was shocking that demonstrations took place in this country, after the attacks in France, against the French President.
Bartsch could hardly make it clearer where he and the Left Party stand on the class struggle. Protests against the hated “President of the Rich” Macron—who praised Nazi collaborationist Philippe Pétain as a hero and has ordered the suppression of the “yellow vest” protests, are just as taboo for the former Stalinist state party of East Germany as protests against police violence. In early June, the Red-Red-Green senate in Berlin organized police violence against peaceful demonstrators protesting against the police murder of George Floyd in the USA. At the time Bartsch repeatedly praised the police forces, which are permeated by right-wing extremist networks, and declared:
The police do not deserve less, but rather more social recognition and personnel, especially on the streets.
Niqnaq 