Matt Braynard, the organizer of tomorrow's "Justice for J6" rally at the US Capitol, has said the event will highlight the supposedly unfair treatment "nonviolent offenders" and "political prisoners" facing charges related to the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol "who've been held in solitary confinement" and denied bail.

In a video promoting the event, he has described the prosecution of the Capitol rioters as a "grave violation of the civil rights of hundreds of fellow Americans."

To liberal America, Genevieve Peters became an object of national scorn when she livestreamed herself refusing to wear a mask in a Trader Joe's store in Rancho Palo Verdes, Calif. in May 2020, causing a clerk to call the police— an early example of defiance against COVID restrictions that has long since lost its novelty, but was then worthy of mention in the New York Times.

To many others, Peters was a hero with a growing social-media profile. The Trader Joe's incident helped cement her position as a prominent social media influencer who helped coalesce the burgeoning far-right subculture in southern California that drew together anti-lockdown resentment with fanatical MAGA loyalty, interwoven with enforcement muscle from Trump's violent followers, the Proud Boys.

On a sweltering summer night last year, Rita Grange, my then 91-year-old grandmother, sat dazed, tired, and anxious along with dozens of other older people on buses parked outside an assisted living center in Brooklyn. On a day when temperatures reached 98 degrees, ConEdison purposely cut power, leaving them without working lights, elevators, or air conditioning.

ConEdison dropped 33,000 Brooklyn and Queens customers from the grid that July 19th to prevent even worse outages.

Somehow, without even so much as an oral argument and barely any news coverage, Roe v. Wade was invalidated in Texas with a cursory unsigned majority opinion refusing to grant an injunction to halt a new Texas anti-abortion law from going into effect. Confused? Pissed off? What to do next? You're not alone. I'm feeling all of that and then some right now but I'm also going to do my best to explain what happened.

I wrote about it in July. Basically the law in question, SB8, makes abortion illegal once a heartbeat can be detected (about 6 weeks), which would outlaw 85 to 90 percent of abortions. While far from the first attempted six-week ban, this law is having unprecedented success, because it employs a new enforcement mechanism.

If you put all Americans in a bag, shake us up and pull one of us out, the odds are that you will pull out someone who identifies as white. That has held since the nation's founding. However, sometime in the middle of this century — in a mere two decades — it will no longer hold. At that time, America will be a majority-minority country.

The exact date, the tipping point, tends to change based upon the latest figures. In 2018, William H. Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote that the United States would become "minority white" in 2045, according to census projections at the time. "During that year," he wrote, "whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations."

A neo-Nazi terror cell enmeshed in the US Marine Corps made plans to attack the power grid last fall, hoping to set the stage to carry out assassinations in their quest to create a white ethno-state, according to a new indictment issued last month.

Arrests in the government's takedown of the terror cell, whose members called themselves "BSN," began in October 2020, starting with founders Liam Montgomery Collins and Paul James Kryscuk, and gradually expanding to include three others through June 2021. Collins and Kryscuk were initially charged with surreptitiously manufacturing and transporting firearms for profit, but in November 2020, a superseding indictment charged them with manufacturing and shipping firearms, including suppressors, "with the intention that they be used unlawfully in the furtherance of civil disorder." As has previously been reported, members fantasized about shooting Black Lives Matter protesters in Boise, Idaho in the summer of 2020.

In one of the most indelible scenes from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, rioters knocked out a window next to the Lower West Terrace tunnel to break into an office suite and destroy furniture. Rioters broke off table legs and repurposed them as clubs, ripped a door off its hinges and commandeered a table top as makeshift barricade.

As others outside battled a line of riot police at the mouth of the tunnel, the rioters in the adjacent office strategized how to push further into the building.

A sizeable number of students returning to school need to be "detoxed" from QAnon-inspired lies they soaked in -- often from their parents -- while away from class because of the pandemic, CNBC reports.

"Teachers across the country face a vexing and evolving challenge as the new school year begins and students return to the classroom following a roughly 18-month hiatus from normal in-person learning," the report says. "Since the last time full classrooms congregated, a whole industry of misinformation has exploded online, spreading conspiracy theories on everything from the alleged steal of the presidential election, which Joe Biden won, to the prevalence of microchips in Covid-19 vaccines."

America's spies still don't know where covid came from. In May, President Joe Biden called for a three-month sprint to discover the origins of Covid-19, but according to a recently-released report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the body that oversees the 18 agencies that comprise the US Intelligence Community (IC), little progress has been made toward that goal. This shouldn't surprise anyone. It was sheer hubris to expect the IC to crack one of the major scientific mysteries of our time over the summer.

It's fair to ask why the president gave this mission to the IC in the first place. We normally look to epidemiologists and virologists to explain the origins of viruses, not spies. And the unclassified summary of the report implies that the spooks are leaning heavily on the same body of scientific literature as everyone else.

Editorial note: This story has been updated to reflect that the information indicating Charles Bausman was at the US Capitol on Jan. 6 is solely based on his own account and has not been independently verified.

A pro-Russia propagandist promoted the lie that Donald Trump won the election in Pennsylvania and, by his own account, went to the US Capitol on Jan. 6, before abruptly disappearing and later resurfacing in Moscow, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch reports in a new investigation.

Recently, an exclusive Reuters report claimed the FBI has little evidence of a single overarching plot to overturn the election on January 6. The headline: "FBI finds scant evidence US Capitol attack was coordinated — sources." The story kicked off a self-serving game of telephone by right-wingers spinning an already threadbare dispatch into ever-more exculpatory narratives. Steve Bannon pronounced it a "massive win" while Republican Senate hopeful JD Vance tweeted, "Another narrative collapses." These strained readings of the report culminated in the bizarre Washington Examiner headline: "FBI confirms there was no insurrection."

In fact, the government has already uncovered far-reaching conspiracies to attack the Capitol and stop the certification of the election. It alleges that three major paramilitary groups — the Oath Keepers, The Proud Boys, and the Three Percenters — conspired within their own ranks to commit violence to keep Donald Trump in power. In addition to plotting within their own ranks, these groups reportedly coordinated with each other. The point that Reuters' anonymous sources were making was that there is as-yet little evidence these paramilitary operations were part of a single overarching plot orchestrated by a "civilian" leader, like Trump confidante and self-proclaimed dirty trickster Roger Stone. Maybe the paramilitaries acted on their own. This is a truly terrifying possibility given it would indicate the civilian wing of the Republican Party has finally lost control of the party's paramilitary wing.

With dozens of Proud Boys facing federal charges in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, energized members of the right-wing paramilitary group have plunged into the movement to oppose public health measures designed to control the resurgent pandemic.

Proud Boys have interjected themselves into controversies over masking and the coronavirus vaccination over the past month, showing up at school board meetings and joining protests at government buildings, hospitals and, in one case, a local pizzeria. A group with a violent track record of its own, the Proud Boys are helping to build a coalition in a volatile movement that has seen a threat to forcibly remove school board members who uphold a masking mandate in Pennsylvania, and an anti-vaccine activist in Los Angeles publicly shared city council members' home addresses while calling on supporters to "sharpen your knives, get your guns," and prepare for "civil war."

My oldest daughter was shot in the head in April while reading in her Kansas City apartment by someone who aimed through her first-floor window. Aviva lived for two more days, kept alive by machines until her brain swelled enough that she could be pronounced brain dead.

I watched as a doctor removed Aviva from the ventilator to see if she could breathe on her own, the final test, and then recorded the rising amount of carbon dioxide in her blood. My daughter was 24 and had her whole life ahead of her — or should have.