Jamie Raskin’s 5-year battle against white nationalism comes to head at Tuesday’s J6 hearing: NYT
On Monday, The New York Times reported that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) will take the lead in Tuesday's hearings of the House Select Committee on January 6 — and that he will bring to bear five years of experience investigating white nationalist and far-right extremist groups in the committee's assessment of Trump's ties to same.
"Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America," wrote Luke Broadwater. "He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups."
"Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump," the report continued.
Raskin, who is Jewish and has personal motivations to investigate these groups due to many of them expressing anti-Semitic ideology, laid out what he plans to show to the Times.
“There were Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, the QAnon network, Boogaloo Boys, militia men and other assorted extremist and religious cults that assembled under the banner of ‘Stop The Steal,’ ” said Raskin. “This was quite a coming-out party for a lot of extremist, antigovernment groups and white nationalist groups that had never worked together before.”
"As he has studied the rise of right-wing extremism, Mr. Raskin has noticed a pattern in the countries that are able to stamp out creeping authoritarianism: Liberals must unite with the center-right," said the report.
"Much of the Jan. 6 committee’s work has been geared toward creating such a consensus, by highlighting the testimony of Republicans who stood up to Mr. Trump and the effort to overturn the 2020 election," it added. "'When you look at it historically, liberal and progressive parties generally don’t defeat authoritarian and fascist assaults on democracy by themselves,' Mr. Raskin said. 'Where democracy survives, it’s because the center-right and the center-left come together to defend it.'"
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