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Two police officers from Rocky Mount, Virginia have been fired after they photographed themselves at the infamous pro-Trump riots in the United States Capitol building.
The Roanoke Times reports that former Rocky Mount Police Department Sgt. Thomas "T.J." Robertson and former Officer Jacob Fracker were terminated this week after they posted selfies of themselves inside the Capitol on January 6th.
<p>Rocky Mount Town Manager James Ervin said that their actions led to outrage among many residents, though he defended the town's meticulous approach to holding the officers accountable.</p><p>"We hear those who have communicated their anger and frustration about the actions of these individuals or our response to those actions," Ervin said. "We have treated the process of review seriously from the beginning and thank those who contributed and in coordinating a response in a quick, objective and lawful manner."</p><p>The two officers earlier this month were charged with a misdemeanor of knowingly entering a restricted building without authority to do so to engage in conduct that disrupts government business; and a petty offense of engaging in disruptive conduct in the Capitol in order to interfere with a session of Congress.</p>
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European Commission president: We're worried that democracy was 'permanently damaged' under Trump
January 26, 2021
During a speech at the Davos Agenda summit on Tuesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that she's worried about the effect of Donald Trump's presidency on the state of democracy, Forbes reports.
Von der Leyen said that global leaders "are worrying about whether democracy itself might have been permanently damaged in the last four years" thanks to Trump.
<p>She went on to say that the global community "must nurture our democracy every day and defend our institutions against the corrosive power of hate speech, of disinformation, fake news, and incitement to violence."<br/></p><p>"And in a world where polarizing opinions are the loudest, it is a short step from crude conspiracy theories to the death of a police officer, and unfortunately the storming of the [U.S. Capitol] showed us how just true that is," she said.</p><p>Watch her full speech below:</p><p><br/></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/unl2SBxH9oo" width="560"></iframe></div>
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‘Pre-fascist’ GOP ‘has become American democracy’s most dangerous enemy’: Conservative
January 26, 2021
Donald Trump has turned the Republican Party into the greatest threat to American democracy, according to one conservative legal expert.
Attorney Richard North Patterson, a former member of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued in a new column for The Bulwark that a "post-truth" GOP has become "pre-fascist," and explains how Trump's "big lie" on election fraud conditions his followers to accept any action undertaken to keep him in power.
<p>"Granted that the big Republican lie did not equal Hitler's poisonous assertion that perfidious Jews stabbed Germany in the back," Patterson wrote. "But the GOP's lie to its base was, nonetheless, breathtakingly ambitious: that an unfathomable conspiracy involving thousands of state and local officials and judges, many Republicans, had stolen the presidency from Donald Trump — from <em>them</em>."<br/></p><p>Patterson explained how decades of GOP politics -- "traditional elites" like Mitch McConnell rebranding campaign bribery as "free speech" while placating their base with white identity politics -- have congealed into disdain toward democratic institutions and a lust for unbridled power. </p><p>"Its implications are grave indeed; if most Republicans disbelieve in democracy, they will support its subversion by electoral chicanery — if not worse," he wrote. "The attack on Congress created a beachhead for anti-democratic violence: Polling shows that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/09/most-americans-reject-attack-capitol-but-millions-empathize-with-mob/" target="_blank">a full one-third of Trump supporters</a> feel that the mob represented their grievances. More broadly, <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gkWnvAwzyNvpNO81Ocsgzf5VH4TesevCQ_lp0asloaE/edit?ts=6000c535#gid=0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">half of the party's electorate</a> believes that GOP lawmakers did not go far enough in attempting to overturn the election."</p><p>That poses a grave threat to the future of American democracy, Patterson warned.</p><p>"It is far too little to say that the GOP has lost its way," he wrote. "Quite deliberately, it has become American democracy's most dangerous enemy."</p>
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