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Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, owners of Uline shipping supply company located in Pleasant Prairie, WI, and major donors to Republican candidates including President Donald Trump, contributed more than $4 million to the Tea Party Patriots.

The group participated in the rally before the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. While the organizers have taken down their website, and many tweets, since the rally led to the mob takeover of the Capitol, Mother Jones and others have reported on the March to Save America, AKA the March for Trump, sponsors.

That contribution of $4.3 million, reported by Chicagos public radio station WBEZ, has led the Democratic Attorney General Association (DAGA) to call on attorneys general and its counterpart the Republican Attorney General Association (RAGA) and Republican attorneys general and candidates to refuse any future contributions from the Uihleins.

This declaration and other corrections to their association are necessary actions on the only path forward for those who claim to believe in the rule of law and protecting our democracy, said Sean Rankin, executive director of DAGA in a statement. Republican AGs or candidates who choose to accept Uihlein money moving forward will be turning their backs on our country and ignoring the deadly attack on Congress on January 6th.

According to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (WDC)s website, the Uihleins (and others related to Uline shipping) have given nearly $1.5 million to Wisconsin candidates including the annual maximum $32,500 in donations to former Attorney General Brad Schimel who frequently used the slogan law and order to describe his views in the race he lost in 2018 to Attorney General Josh Kaul.

RAGA also has direct ties to the Jan. 6 rallies. WDC reported this week that an arm of RAGA, called the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF) urged followers to attend a Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally making robocalls, according to reporting from Documented, a watchdog group.

WDC describes RAGA as a Washington, D.C.-based group, which raises and spends unlimited amounts from special interests to help elect state GOP attorneys general throughout the country. The group was active in the 2018 Wisconsin state elections, doling out more than $2.8 million on electioneering activities to attack Democratic candidate Josh Kaul.

Between January 2018 and late November 2020, RAGA took in around $279,000 from about two dozen Wisconsin contributors, including MillerCoors (now Molson Coors), Foley & Lardner, Wisconsin Realtors Association and Kwik Trip.

The Uihleins have also given amounts of $1,000 each election cycle to many Republican legislative candidates, WDC records show.

Rankin continued: We must demand accountability from our elected leaders and future leaders, and we must refuse to let funders of terror and spinners of dangerous conspiracy theories undermine our democracy.

THE MORNING NEWSLETTER

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Uihleins, owners of Wisconsin company, gave millions to group sponsoring the Jan. 6 March for Trump - Wisconsin Examiner

There is a touching story about how Queen Liliuokalani bid farewell to her people.

Every Hawaiian remembered the sad days a few years before when intruders stormed the capitol of their country and stole their kingdom. Worst of all, the intruders had put their beloved queen in jail, keeping her captive in her own palace.

The day finally came when the proud Hawaiian people had to watch their flag lowered and a flag of a foreign country raised in its place. The foreigners cheered while the crowd of Hawaiians stood in silent protest watching their noble kingdom pass away.

As their flag was slowly dropping down, they heard a beautiful voice singing above. They looked up to the balcony of the palace and there was their royal queen sweetly singing Aloha Oe. Farewell to you. Tears flowed as hundreds of Hawaiians said goodbye to their kingdom with peace in their hearts.

This is fairly close to what happened and the protest was based on truth with a heart of goodness and aloha.

Journeying back many years to early America, trouble was brewing in the colonies. England was oppressing the colonists by over-taxing them and pushing them around in the streets. Taxes were too high we all know that problem.

The tax they paid on tea was especially high. and they had no voice in how they were governed. It was making life hard for the people. They had to fight back.

A few daring patriots in Boston came up with a plan.

One night, they dressed up with painted faces and wore feathers, and with danger all around they snuck onto British ships in the harbor and tossed all the tea into the sea.

It was called the Boston Tea Party. They had fought back and gave themselves dignity.

Like the queen and her people singing their song, the Boston Tea Party was a protest of truth and justice with a heart of goodness.

There were many marches yet to come, the right of women to vote was a big issue.

From the very beginning, women could not vote. America was a country for 140 years and women still had no say in elections. Right after the Civil War, former male slaves got the vote, but not women. They had to wait another 50 years for equality.

Women marched in the streets, were beaten down and put in jail but they kept on until justice prevailed and they had the same rights as men.

All their protests were based on truth and justice with a heart of goodness.

The biggest wrong of all is racial prejudice. Blacks went through so many hardships until Rosa Parks sat down on a bus, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood up with a dream and marched until finally African Americans had equal rights. But the fight goes on.

They protested with truth and with heart and finally won.

Hawaiians, Native Americans, and many others have marched for their beliefs to gain a better life. And every single protest from the beginning of this country, and of all time has had a bit of truth and heart behind it.

That is until last week at the U.S. Capitol. It was not a protest with a cause, it had no cause.

Another riot with looters.

It was not based on truth and goodness. It was based on a lie and darkness.

Time for all of us to join together and step into the light.

Dennis Gregory writes a bi-weekly column for West Hawaii Today and welcomes your comments at makewavess@yahoo.com

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Making Waves: Protesting with a heart - West Hawaii Today

The U.S. Capitol has seen countless protests and a number of violent incidents over its two centuries. But what we observed last week, when a mob of President Trumps supporters stormed the Capitol intent on stopping the count of electoral votes, has been called unprecedented.

Robert Churchill is a professor of history at the University of Hartford and studies political violence.

The transcription below has been edited for clarity.

Lori Mack: What makes this incident so different?

Robert Churchill: I think its different in two ways. The first way is weve had a tradition in this country where a president who loses an election cedes power, not only peacefully, but gracefully. And this tradition goes back all the way to 1800.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson took over the presidency from the Federalist Party. It was the first transfer of power between parties in American history. It almost did descend into violence. And ever since then, we have had the principle that we would never allow that to happen. So thats the first thing thats different.

The second thing that I think was different is while we have had protests in the Capitol, and indeed in American history have had armed insurrections, theyve always been targeted at particular laws.

We have never had an armed insurrection that was targeted at seizing power and voiding the results of an election. That is completely unprecedented in American history. And even in 1860, the South didnt try to void the election. They simply withdrew from the country. But this is a very new thing in American history.

Its very new for people to take up arms and go beyond saying, We will not tolerate this particular law, to say, We will dictate what the laws and policy are going to be. We and others will be the sovereign people to the exclusion of everybody else in the body politic. Thats very new.

Its been talked about that an insurrection in Washington has been building long before this election cycle. So what about that?

Well, I think that there have been building blocks that have been building slowly. I dont want to assume that theres anybody behind the scenes putting these in place, but you have had the emergence of militia groups now going back 20 to 25 years.

Those militia groups have primarily been anti-government in their orientation. They have been targeting particular kinds of federal policies and attempting to sort of craft a deterrent against the kind of state-sponsored violence that we saw in Ruby Ridge and Waco in the 1990s. Whats new is that some portion of that movement seems to [have] grafted itself onto Donald Trump and now see themselves essentially as an armed partisan militia that has decided to do the presidents bidding. Thats a new development.

The second thing thats new is weve got communications technology today that we didnt have 25 years ago. And particularly in the age of social media, its extremely easy for misinformation to spread rapidly. And when you have the president and quite a few members of the congressional caucus of one political party bent on spreading that misinformation, it spreads like wildfire.

The idea that an entire political party would dedicate itself to the proposition for which there is no evidence whatsoever that their loss in the recent election was in fact, due to fraud. Thats a very new thing and its a very explosive allegation. Its not an allegation to be played with lightly and yet folks seem to have played with it lightly. And then there are some folks who even today are doubling down on that allegation.

As someone who has studied political violence, what was going through your mind as you watched these events unfold?

One was disbelief. But the second was that it seems to me that in confrontations with the militia movement over the last few years, the federal government has allowed itself to get beat several times.

When you say beat, what do you mean?

The federal government decided to have a showdown with Cliven Bundy and then back down. The federal government had a showdown at the Malheur National Wildlife reserve and then was unable to secure convictions. And then on Capitol Hill, obviously the federal government, the Capitol police, were overrun. When that happens in the face of an armed insurgency, it simply emboldens the insurgency to be more bold and more violent. The federal government, if it wants to go up against these guys, is going to have to win.

How do they do that?

Its a really, really good question. Its a very difficult question. And I would say that you have to ask the question a little bit differently: How do you do it in a way that you dont create martyrs, which is even more difficult.

Nevertheless, if you want to begin to bolster federal authority again, youre going to have to enforce the laws and youre going to have to punish those who take up arms against the laws.

We hear the phrase that history doesnt repeat itself but it often rhymes. Have you seen any of those rhymes so far, and more broadly, what can we learn from history about what may happen next?

I think that what we want to be careful of is that we want to find a way to isolate these insurgents from the larger political community.

There are going to be some people who are just hellbent on taking arms up against the government. Were going to have to deal with them. But you want to find ways to assuage the anger in the broader public, if that is at all possible. If you dont do that, then I think you get into a situation thats much more like 1860, where you have two factions of the public that are angry and getting more angry and getting more violent and alienating each other even further, and that just leads to chaos and bloodshed.

What can we learn? Well, to be sort of broad-minded about this, 40 years ago we had a pretty tight wall between the extremes of the political spectrum and the mainstream. We had a way of walling off this kind of misinformation and conspiracy theories. That wall began to break down due to communications technology.

That wall also broke down because the Tea Party was designed to break it down. The Tea Party was designed to bring the far right into the Republican tent. I think when you look at what tech companies are doing now with de-platforming, what youre seeing is an attempt to build that wall back up.

And so one of the things that we can learn is that when you invite the extremes into the mainstream public sphere, they have a tendency to alienate and radicalize more and more people. Suddenly you wake up and realize that a significant portion of one of the major political parties really no longer supports the democratic republic of the United States of America, which is a terrifying thing.

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Armed Insurrections In The U.S. Aren't New. This Is Why The Capitol Attack Was Different - Connecticut Public Radio

While watching our favorite TV shows and movies, we've all had a moment where we've wanted to eat whatever is on-screen...like the bugs in The Lion King, don't @ me!! And though I would not advise going out and digging up some slimy creatures for yourself, I WOULD suggest this series of cooking classes inspired by your favorite movies and TV shows.

Cozymeal, the online cooking class platform, has introduced a new pop culture series, rolling out some new lessons inspired by your favorite characters and their diets. And no matter what type of fan you are, there is definitely something for you on here. Harry Potter fans will love the Quidditch Cup After Party class, where you can make things like Slytherin Spinach Artichoke Dip, the Sex and the City-themed Sushi Night, which features rainbow rolls and Carrie Bradshaws favorite Cosmopolitan, and The Crown-themed Afternoon Tea Party. Our personal favorite is the Out of This World Mandalorian-themed Meal, where you'll make Grogu's faves like bone broth and Blue Milk Macaroons.

You can book each Zoom class for $39 per device. Each class is fully interactive and you can ask the chef as many questions as you need to throughout the cooking session (phew!). You can also easily order all the groceries you'll need for each class online, or head to the grocery store with a full list of ingredients. All that's left to do is clear a space in your fridge for all that delicious food!

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io

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These Pop Culture Cooking Classes Are Inspired By Food From 'Harry Potter' And 'The Mandalorian' - Delish

An Air Force veteran from Southern California and ardent conspiracy theorist bent on war against the government. An Army psychological operations officer at Ft. Bragg, N.C. A decorated, retired Air Force officer of 18 years from Texas who served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The deadly riot in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 attracted a variety of far-right extremists who shared a devotion to President Trump and his insistence on a false belief that the November election had been stolen from him through fraud.

Many rioters also had something else in common as they sought to upend the American government in an insurrection that bristled with Confederate flags, racist symbols and conspiracy theories: They were ex-members of the military and police or actively employed by the armed services and law enforcement.

"It's an incredibly disturbing trend," retired U.S. Army Col. Jeffrey D. McCausland, a professor of national security at Dickinson College and former dean at the U.S. Army War College, said in an interview. "These are people who are supposed to uphold the Constitution and the law, yet they were doing the exact opposite."

Since the Capitol attack, which left five people dead, including a Capitol police officer and an Air Force veteran turned QAnon extremist, law enforcement authorities, journalists and amateur internet sleuths have scoured images, videos and arrest reports to identify those who were in the pro-Trump crowd.

The participants included members of the Oath Keepers, which recruits from ex-police and veterans, and Three Percenters, who wear patches and carry flags with the Roman numeral III. Photos show that another anti-government group, the Boogaloo Bois, was also in D.C.

The military and law enforcement ties among some rioters rattled U.S. officials ahead of more possible violence.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff this week issued a memo to the military condemning the attack as "a direct assault on the U.S. Congress, the Capitol building and our Constitutional process."

The Joint Chiefs, which is made up of the eight top branch generals, told service members that their jobs were to "support and defend the Constitution. Any act to disrupt the Constitutional process is not only against our traditions, values and oath; it is against the law."

The letter was addressed to the joint force, which covers the 1.3 million active-duty service members. It also includes 811,000 National Guard members and reservists.

Thousands of people took part in the violent insurrection at the Capitol as Congress certified electoral college votes confirming a November election victory for President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office next week. Federal officials have pressed dozens of charges and said they will file more bfore planned armed rallies in Washington and state capitols during the weekend.

One flier shared in right-wing message threads on social media after the Capitol attack instructs Trump supporters to "come armed" in front of legislative houses on Sunday, saying, "When democracy is destroyed, refuse to be silenced."

Those calls for action have grown after the U.S. House of Representatives voted 232-197 on Wednesday to impeach Trump for the second time.

People associated with the right-wing groups "are like dogs backed into a corner and have no option but to fight," said Joe Biggs, an Army veteran and Florida-based organizer for the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group that counts white supremacists among its members and encourages violence.

Biggs was in Washington on Jan. 6, but he said he did not enter the Capitol and planned to avoid weekend rallies. But the military and police training shared by many on the far-right present a dangerous dilemma for law enforcement seeking to quell riots and protests, especially since many followers invoke the Revolutionary War and see themselves as patriots.

"We take three months to plan an event," Biggs said on a podcast last month. "It's like, you're literally planning to go into a combat zone. It's not just like, 'Hey man, we're going to D.C., we're going to Portland.' It's like: 'All right, we're going to Portland. I need satellite imagery. I need to talk to people on the ground. I need them to scout out these alleyways when we have an escape route, we have four or five ways in and out, in case police close things off or whatever.' "

Those in the Washington mob included 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran from San Diego whom police shot dead as she was among armed rioters forcing their way through the Capitol.

Another retired member of the Air Force, Larry Rendall Brock Jr., was arrested Sunday in Texas and charged with unlawfully entering a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct in federal court in Washington, D.C., after photographs showed him on the Senate floor in a military-style helmet, black-and-green camouflage vest and tactical vest while holding zip-tie handcuffs.

Video now removed from social media also showed 45-year-old Adam Newbold, who the Navy confirmed as a retired Navy SEAL, saying how proud he was of what happened in the nation's capital. He posted the video from a car as he returned to Lisbon, Ohio.

Police officers from Los Angeles, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington state, and the police chief of Troy, N.H., were in Washington on Jan. 6, as was a firefighter from Sanford, Fla. On Wednesday, federal officials arrested and charged two Rocky Mount, Va., officers with unlawfully entering a restricted building, violent entry and disorderly conduct.

In the attack's aftermath, researchers and federal investigators have raised questions about how and why so many of those sworn to uphold the Constitution have become involved with dangerous extremist groups.

Kurt Braddock, a professor at American University who has written extensively on extremist groups said that, in recent years, greater numbers of ex-military and law enforcement are becoming involved with extremist groups, which he said provide "a sense of identity and direction."

"Their past experiences were almost entirely based on being part of a collective unit designed to protect something. The propaganda of the far-right makes this same promise that you can find brotherhood and belonging in a group with a purpose," Braddock said.

There are 19.5 million veterans in the country, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The federal government has not done a comprehensive study of how many have joined extremist causes, though experts said the vast majority do not.

The history of extremism, law enforcement and the military goes deep in the U.S. Former Confederate officers founded the Ku Klux Klan in the 19th century. In the 1970s, the Klan operated openly at Camp Pendleton. In 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh and accomplice Terry Nichols bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Analysts say extremist elements have ebbed and flowed in policing and the armed services as more Americans have embraced or moved away from violent ideologies, in part influenced by economic downtowns and political changes, such as racist resistance to the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first Black president in the U.S.

Many in law enforcement have seen a rise in caustic rhetoric by current and former colleagues.

Caesar Alvarez, a former sheriff's deputy in rural New Mexico, said that in the past four years he's seen increased vitriol being spewed among current and former law enforcement on social media.

"Statewide, like in most places, law enforcement is pro-Trump, pro right-wing," Alvarez said. "There are moments in reading some of this stuff, you stop and think: 'Are these guys committed to upholding the law or Trump?'"

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security apologized to veterans groups after releasing a controversial report that said extreme right-wing groups could be recruiting from disgruntled veterans who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Civil rights groups have since criticized screening measures in the military that do not outright ban white supremacists. ("Mere membership in a white supremacist group is not prohibited," deputy director of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations Robert Grabosky said at February hearing of the Subcommittee on Military Personnel of the House Armed Services Committee.)

Some militias recruit specifically among veterans and ex-police. The Oath Keepers is one of them. Its name comes from the oaths its members took as law enforcement and military. The group's founder, former Army paratrooper Steward Rhodes, joined the pro-Trump rally last week but has said he did not enter the Capitol or confront police.

Rhodes did not respond to calls from The Times for this article. In an interview last week with The Times, he called the presidential election a "sham" and said there were "pissed-off patriots that are not going to accept their form of government being stolen."

The Oath Keepers, which also encouraged its members to patrol polling sites in November, has been tied to several "stop the steal" pro-Trump rallies since then. Ahead of one of those demonstrations last month in D.C., Rhodes boasted about those with law enforcement backgrounds in his group.

"The leftist terrorists know our police go armed and they don't know which among the Oath Keepers they are looking at are police," he wrote on the Oath Keepers website, which has since gone offline. "We always mix in our police with our military members."

Before the Capitol attack, another attempt on a legislative building took place in the spring in Michigan when armed anti-lockdown groups converged in the Michigan capital to protest coronavirus-related businesses restrictions.

While several men and women entered the state house in Lansing, including members of the Michigan Home Guard militia, there were no deaths or major violence. Months later, state and federal law enforcement charged 13 men in a plot to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for the lockdown measures. Several were members of group called the Wolverine Watchmen.

After Twitter, Facebook and other major social media companies banned and suspended right-wing accounts this week for inciting violence, including Trump's, many militias have migrated to alternative networks such as Gab, Zello, CloutHub and MeWe. Another, Parler, has effectively shut down after Apple, Google and Amazon banned it.

Jim Murphy, a 73-year-old Green Bay, Wis.,-based county commissioner and Army veteran, is among those who has begun to migrate his accounts. He runs a chapter of the Black Robe Regiment, an armed Christian offshoot of the Tea Party that's named after clergy who joined the American revolution. Its 300 members, mostly in Wisconsin, used to talk on a Facebook group before the platform banned groups spreading false information about the presidential election.

Now, Murphy, who served in the Korean War, uses MeWe, a Culver City-based social media network. On a MeWe group called "Fight Smart Wisconsin," Murphy this week posted about going beyond "spiritual warfare" in a battle against liberals.

Murphy, who said he did not attend the riot in D.C., declined to comment when reached for an interview. In posts on his MeWe group, he described his views as an extension of his Army oath:

"'We the people' have a responsibility to be the masters of our courts and Congress and not their servants as we've been lately. They are there to serve us and maintain our liberties and if they fail to do so, they need to be removed."

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Why veterans of the military and law enforcement joined the Capitol insurrection - The Union Leader