He encourages listeners to click on a link on the group’s website to become a member. There is no other information about the group’s beliefs, locations, leadership or philosophy.

But Tactical Civics was listed for the first time in the annual as an anti-government, extremist organization operating in Colorado. Tactical Civics has a statewide presence with chapters in Colorado Springs, Fountain, Weld County and Longmont, according to the report, which documented groups active in 2024 across the United States.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a human rights organization that has tracked extremist groups in the United States for 25 years, found 33 extremist and hate groups operating in Colorado, according to its report. Of those, eight operate statewide and another 25 have local chapters.

The extremist groups in Colorado include anti-government organizations, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant groups, white nationalists and sovereign citizens. One organization, Northern Kingdom Prophets, is classified as a hate group.

The Southern Poverty Law Center counts each chapter of one of the organizations as a single group, so Tactical Civics accounts for five of the 33 listed.

Efforts to reach Kevin Ennett, a Tactical Civics leader who lives in Park County, were unsuccessful.

Twenty groups on the Colorado list are considered to be involved in anti-government or sovereign citizen movements. Six — mostly based in Colorado Springs — want to suppress the LGBTQ community, three are white supremacist groups and the rest either promote anti-immigrant ideology, run a militia or generate general conspiracy theories.

Last year, the report identified 30 hate and extremist groups in the state, up from 22 in 2019. While the total number of groups active in the state continues to increase, the names of the organizations and their ideologies continue to evolve. Some groups disappear from the public eye by moving to private, encrypted online sites where they are harder to track.

For example, the center reported in 2019 that there were three chapters of Identity Evropa, a white nationalist group, in Colorado. That year, the group made the rounds across the Front Range, passing out literature and placing its logo in public places. However, Identity Evropa disbanded in 2020, , a group founded to fight the defamation of Jewish people.

In another example, MSR Productions, a white supremacist music label, once operated out of Wheat Ridge, but it also no longer appears on the list.

Nationally, the Southern Poverty Law Center documented 1,371 hate and extremist groups in 2024.

Margaret Huang, the center’s president, said in a news release that these groups are creeping into American politics and increasingly attempting to take over local governments and school boards.

“After years of courting politicians and chasing power, hard-right groups are now fully infiltrating our politics and enacting their dangerous ideology into law,” Huang said. “Extremists at all levels of government are using cruelty, chaos and constant attacks on communities and our democracy to make us feel powerless. We cannot surrender to fear. It is up to all of us to organize against the forces of hate and tyranny. This report offers data that is essential to understanding the landscape of hate and helping communities fight for the multiracial, inclusive democracy we deserve.”

The groups listed as operating in Colorado in the report:

• Colorado Alliance for Immigration Reform: Anti-immigrant,  Longmont
• Family Policy Alliance: Anti-LGBTQ, Colorado Springs
• Family Research Institute: Anti-LGBTQ, Colorado Springs
• Focus on the Family: Anti-LGBTQ, Colorado Springs
• Gays Against Groomers, Colorado chapter: Anti-LGBTQ, Denver
• Generations: Anti-LGBTQ, Elizabeth
• The Pray in Jesus Name Project: Anti-LGBTQ, Colorado Springs
• Colorado Eagle Forum: Anti-government,  Brighton
• Constitution Party Colorado: Anti-government, statewide
• Faith Education Commerce (FEC United): Anti-government, Northern Colorado
• Freedom First Society: Anti-government, Colorado Springs
• Moms for Liberty: Anti-government, Boulder, El Paso, Larimer, Mesa and Weld counties
• Parents Involved in Education-Colorado: Anti-government, statewide
• Tactical Civics: Anti-government, statewide with local chapters in Colorado Springs, Fountain, Longmont and Weld County
• We Are Change: Anti-government,  Denver
• Scriptures for America Worldwide Ministries: Christian identity, Laporte
• American Freedom Network: Conspiracy propagandists, Johnstown
• Northern Kingdom Prophets: General hate,  Pueblo
• Colorado Mountain Boys: Militia, El Paso County
• Asatru Folk Assembly-Colorado: Neo-volkisch, statewide
• The American States Assembly-Colorado: Sovereign citizen, statewide
• Colorado State Assembly: Sovereign citizen, statewide
• People’s Operation Restoration: Sovereign citizen, statewide
• Team Law: Sovereign citizen, Grand Junction
• Patriot Front-Colorado: White nationalist, statewide

“He has not said whether he disagrees with her offensive posts or spoken out against antisemitism,” Caraveo, a Democrat, said during a brief online news conference. “Let’s be clear: Hate and antisemitism have no place in our society. We must stand up to all forms of intolerance, wherever and whenever we see it.”

On Tuesday, Evans, a state representative, directly condemned the comments from his former political director, Jessica Spindle, in an email to The Denver Post.

“Gabe fully rejects the offensive material contained in those social media posts,” campaign spokesman Alan Philp wrote. “That’s why he acted immediately upon learning of them.”

The posts by Spindle were laid out in a story last week by the . The online outlet showed screenshots of Spindle’s posts on social media sites, including Facebook, that were antisemitic, along with one in which she wrote “please shoot her” — in reference to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.

In 2019, Spindle praised a mashup flag combining the United States flag, the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag and the Confederate flag. She also posted favorably about the QAnon movement, a sprawling conspiracy theory that claims Donald Trump is fighting a secret, satanic cult of world leaders and celebrities intent on world domination.

Spindle’s posts largely date back to 2019 through 2021, before the Times Recorder said that she first worked with Evans, helping him win election to the state House in 2022. But its story said Spindle posted an antisemitic image as recently as June.

Spindle’s account on Facebook and her account on the social platform X appears to .

Evans’ campaign said Spindle was fired last week “after a number of inappropriate comments she made on social media were brought to our attention.”

Philp didn’t respond to a question about how Spindle had been vetted for the campaign’s political director position or how Evans could have been unaware of her postings on social media. Spindle, who serves on the , based in Fort Lupton, did not return an email request for comment.

Illinois Democratic Congressman Brad Schneider, who is Jewish, joined Caraveo on Tuesday’s call. He called Evans “extreme” and accused him of “not standing with the Jewish people” against hate.

Evans’ campaign attempted to turn the tables on Caraveo, a freshman representative, by criticizing her no vote last November on a bill that would have provided $14.3 billion to Israel in its fight against Hamas. At the time of her vote, Caraveo said she opposed the bill because Republicans designed it to be funded by stripping money from the Internal Revenue Service. The entire Colorado Democratic congressional delegation voted against the bill.

The Evans campaign also said Caraveo wasn’t vocal enough in criticizing college protests against Israel this past spring, which at times veered into what some Colorado Jewish students perceived as displays of antisemitism.

The 8th Congressional District is considered one of the closest House races in the country in November’s election and stands as Colorado’s most evenly divided district by voter affiliation. The district covers northern Denver suburbs in Adams County and stretches north to Greeley and into a small slice of Larimer County.

That����ap a quote from a member of an organization called Love Has Won in a new HBO docu-series, entitled The group is, by most accounts, a cult that grabbed headlines in April 2021 after the mummified remains of its leader, Amy Carlson, known as Mother God, were found in a sleeping bag wrapped in Christmas lights near Crestone, Colorado.

But that was hardly the first time Love Has Won ended up in the news. Over the course of a decade-plus, the group gained exposure by spreading its message by live-streaming on platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. In 2020, Love Has Won fled Hawaii under police escort after Carlson’s claims to be the deity Pele sparked outrage among locals.

HBO’s docu-series chronicles the life and death of Carlson through interviews with current and former members, footage from the group’s extensive online archive and conversations with her family members, including the two children Carlson left behind when she moved to Colorado on a whim to – in her words – chase her life’s mission.

The three-part documentary is well worth a watch, but for those who don’t have three hours to dedicate to it, here’s a quick primer on the Love Has Won cult.

What are the beliefs of Love Has Won?

As the leader of Love Has Won, Carlson was believed by her followers to be the mother of all creation and a living god who energetically processed all the world’s traumas on behalf of Earthly people. Members of the cult referred to her as Mother God and believed she lived numerous past lives as Joan of Arc, Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe.

Many of the group’s beliefs relied on metaphysical elements, such as energetic vibrations, five dimensions of reality, a galactic council and starships. They believed Carlson did not die but rather “ascended,” meaning she left her physical body, to save humanity. In preparation for achieving their own ascensions, members of Love Has Won ate and slept very little. They often consumed drugs and alcohol.

The group was also known to repeat political conspiracy theories that aligned with QAnon, such as the baseless belief that cannibalistic liberal pedophiles run a global child sex trafficking ring.

What is the group’s connection to Colorado?

Love Has Won set up a “mission house” near Crestone, technically in the town of Moffat where they lived, and conducted live-streams and business for several years.

Additionally, the group rented a large cabin in Salida, where the most devoted followers lived and where new recruits were brought upon arriving in Colorado. The group moved between California, Oregon and Florida at various times.

How did the group make money?

Love Has Won raised donations while live-streaming online, offered services such as “etheric surgery” sessions for a fee, and sold house-made supplements, including colloidal silver. They made hundreds of thousands of dollars this way, according to the HBO series.

How did Amy Carlson die?

Carlson died from natural causes after years of alcohol abuse, opioid use, anorexia and chronic ingestion of colloidal silver, according to an autopsy report from the El Paso County Coroner’s Office.

Members of Love Has Won believed she suffered from cancer and was paralyzed from the waist down; however, she never visited a doctor or a hospital to confirm those diagnoses.

Seven members of the cult were arrested in connection with her death, but the charges were ultimately dropped.

Is Love Has Won still active?

After Carlson’s body was found, Love Has Won rebranded and reemerged under the moniker 5D Full Disclosure. Its members still publish videos, podcasts and other content.

How to watch the docu-series

The three-part docu-series, “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God,” is available in full on Max.

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Soon after the FBI searched Donald Trump’s home in Florida for classified documents, online researchers zeroed in on a worrying trend.

Posts on Twitter that mentioned “civil war” had soared nearly 3,000% in just a few hours as Trump’s supporters blasted the action as a provocation. Similar spikes followed, including on Facebook, Reddit, Telegram, Parler, Gab and Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform. Mentions of the phrase more than doubled on radio programs and podcasts, as measured by Critical Mention, a media-tracking firm.

Posts mentioning “civil war” jumped again a few weeks later, after President Joe Biden branded Trump and “MAGA Republicans” a threat to “the very foundations of our republic” in a speech on democracy in Philadelphia.

Now experts are bracing for renewed discussions of civil war, as the Nov. 8 midterm elections approach and political talk grows more urgent and heated.

More than a century and a half after the actual Civil War, the deadliest war in U.S. history, “civil war” references have become increasingly commonplace on the right. While in many cases the term is used only loosely — shorthand for the nation’s intensifying partisan divisions — observers note that the phrase, for some, is far more than a metaphor.

Polling, social media studies and a rise in threats suggest that a growing number of Americans are anticipating, or even welcoming, the possibility of sustained political violence, researchers studying extremism say. What was once the subject of serious discussion only on the political periphery has migrated closer to the mainstream.

But while that trend is clear, there is far less agreement among experts about what it means.

Some elements of the far right view it literally: a call for an organized battle for control of the government. Others envision something akin to a drawn-out insurgency, punctuated with eruptions of political violence, such as the attack on the FBI’s Cincinnati field office in August. A third group describes the country as entering a “cold” civil war, manifested by intractable polarization and mistrust, rather than a “hot” war with conflict.

The question is what does ‘civil war’ look like and what does it mean,” said Elizabeth Neumann, assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the Homeland Security Department under Trump. “I did not anticipate, nor did anyone else as far as I know, how rapidly the violence would escalate.”

Neumann now works for Moonshot, a private security company that tracks extremism online. Moonshot found a 51% increase in “civil war” references on the most active pages on 4Chan, the fringe online message board, in the week after Biden’s Sept. 1 speech.

But talk of political violence is not relegated to anonymous online forums.

At a Trump rally in Michigan on Saturday night, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said that “Democrats want Republicans dead,” adding that “Joe Biden has declared every freedom-loving American an enemy of the state.” At a recent fundraiser, Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, said that governors had the power to declare war and that “we’re probably going to see that.”

On Monday, federal prosecutors showed a jury in Washington an encrypted message that Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers armed extremist group, had sent his lieutenants two days after the 2020 presidential election: “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war.”

Experts say the steady patter of bellicose talk has helped normalize the expectation of political violence.

In late August, a poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov and The Economist found that 54% of respondents who identified as “strong Republicans” believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade. Only about a third of all respondents felt such an event was unlikely. A similar survey conducted by the same groups two years ago found nearly 3 in 5 people feeling that a “civil war-like fracture in the U.S.” was either somewhat or very unlikely.

“What you’re seeing is a narrative that was limited to the fringe going into the mainstream,” said Robert Pape, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.

The institute’s researchers tracked tweets mentioning civil war before and after Trump announced the search on Mar-a-Lago. In the five preceding days, they logged an average of roughly 500 tweets an hour. That jumped to 6,000 in the first hour after Trump published a post on Truth Social on the afternoon of Aug. 8, saying “these are dark times for our Nation.” The pace peaked at 15,000 tweets an hour later that evening. A week later, it was still six times higher than the baseline, and the phrase was once again trending on Twitter at month’s end.

Extremist groups have been agitating for some sort of government overthrow for years and, Pape said, the most radical views — often driven by white supremacy or religious fundamentalism — remain marginal, advanced by no more than 50,000 people nationwide.

But a far larger group, he said, are the people who have been influenced by Trump’s complaints about the “Washington swamp” and “deep state” forces working against him and his allies.

Those notions, stirred in a smoldering crucible with QAnon conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine views and election denialism, have fueled a growing hostility toward the federal government and rising talk about states’ rights.

“Did you know that a governor can declare war?” Flynn said at the fundraiser on Sept. 18, for Mark Finchem, a Republican running for secretary of state in Arizona. “And we’re going to probably, we are probably going to see that.”

Neither Flynn nor Finchem responded to a request for comment about the inaccurate remarks. The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war and, in fact, specifically bars states from engaging in war “unless actually invaded.”

However far-fetched, such ideas are often amplified by a proliferating set of social media channels such as the right-wing platform Gab and Trump’s Truth Social.

Social media platforms are rife with groups and boards dedicated to discussions of civil war. One, on Gab, describes itself as a place for “action reports,” “combat vids” and reports of killed in action in “the civil war that is also looking to be a 2nd American Revolution.”

In August, a single tweet stating “I think civil war has just been declared” managed to reach over 17 million profiles despite coming from an account with under 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli firm that monitors misinformation.

“Ideas go into echo chambers and it����ap the only voice that����ap heard; there are no voices of dissent,” said Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies how terrorist groups radicalize and recruit.

Braddock said he did not believe these posts indicated any planning for a war. But he worries about what academics call “stochastic terrorism” — seemingly random acts of violence that are, in fact, provoked by “coded language, dog whistles and other subtext” in statements by public figures.

Trump is adept at making such statements, said Braddock, citing Trump’s April 2020 tweet reading “Liberate Michigan!” Less than two weeks later, mobs of heavily armed protesters occupied the state Capitol in East Lansing. He also pointed to Trump’s speech before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when he encouraged thousands of supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol and, later in the same remarks told them, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

“The statements Trump makes are not overt calls to action, but when you have a huge and devoted following, the chances that one or more people are activated by that are high,” Braddock said.

A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump used the term “civil war” in 2019, when he declared in a tweet that “it will cause a Civil War-like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal” if he was removed from office. Last month, Trump said there would be “problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before” if he was indicted over his handling of the classified documents that were the target of the FBI search.

Other Republicans have used language suggesting the country is on the brink. Greene wrote in August that the Mar-a-Lago search reflected the “type of things that happen in countries during civil war,” in posts to her nearly 900,000 combined followers on Facebook and Telegram. Sen. Rick Scott of Florida likened the FBI to the Gestapo, the secret police in Nazi Germany, saying “this cannot be our country.”

Late last month, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told The Texas Tribune he believed immigration legislation was unlikely in part because of a “political civil war.” He has made similar comments before, including a November 2021 call for Texas to secede if Democrats “destroy the country.”

Nick Dyer, a spokesman for Greene, said that she was “vehemently opposed to political violence” and that her civil war comments were about Democrats, who “are acting like a regime launching a war on their opposition.”

McKinley Lewis, communications director for Scott, said he had “ZERO tolerance for violence of any kind” but added that he “continues to demand answers” related to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search.

Republicans have often argued that their language is political rhetoric and blamed Democrats for twisting it to stoke divisions. It����ap Democrats and the left, they said, who are courting violence by labeling Trump’s supporters adherents of what Biden has called “semi-fascism.”

In response to a query about Cruz’s comments, Maria Jeffrey Reynolds, a spokesperson for the senator, said Cruz placed blame on Biden, claiming that he has “driven a wedge down the middle of our country.”

After Biden delivered his speech on democracy, Brian Gibby, a freelance data entry specialist in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote in a Substack post that he believed “the Second Civil War began” with the president����ap remarks.

“I have never seen a more divisive, hate-filled speech from an American president,” Gibby wrote.

Asked by The New York Times to explain his views, Gibby said he believed Biden was “escalating a hot conflict in America.” He worries something will happen around the November elections that will be “akin to Jan. 6, but much more violent,” where armed protest groups from both sides of the political spectrum come to blows.

“Plan ahead, stock up, stay safe, get out of cities if you can,” he wrote.

This article originally appeared in .

The prosecution’s case about the alleged plot in 2019 is based on the account of Cynthia Abcug’s then 16-year-old daughter, who told her counselor that her mother was talking with followers of the baseless Qanon conspiracy theory about launching a raid on the home, defense lawyer Brian Hall said during opening statements in court in Castle Rock in suburban Denver.

Many Qanon supporters believe former President Donald Trump was fighting enemies in the so-called deep state to expose a group of satanic, cannibalistic child molesters they believe secretly runs the globe.

Hall stressed that the girl did not know details about what was supposed to happen and did not think her mother knew where her son’s foster home was.

But Chief Deputy District Gary Dawson told the jury that the daughter heard her mother talking about the raid on several occasions in September and August of 2019. Around that same time, Abcug bought a gun, and a man identified only as Ryan and described as an ex-member of the military and a sniper moved into their home to provide protection, Dawson said.

An older son who was no longer living at home will also testify that he remembers Abcug talking about launching a raid to get her young son back, Dawson said.

Abcug is charged with both conspiracy to commit second-degree kidnapping, a felony, and misdemeanor child abuse for allegedly committing medical child abuse by lying about his health problems to doctors, causing him to be subjected to unnecessary procedures, and telling staff at his school that he suffered seizures, had trouble walking and swallowing and was dying. The boy has not suffered any medical problems since being put in foster care in May 2019, Dawson said.

Hall said there was no evidence of medical child abuse. He said that a doctor who cared for the boy in Florida and a half-brother witnessed him having seizures and implied that at least some of his other health problems were side effects of medication prescribed to treat the seizures.

Abcug, a single mother, moved her family to Colorado in 2018 to seek treatment based on the recommendation of the Florida doctor, Hall said. A doctor in Colorado had developed a plan to wean Abcug’s son off the seizure medication about two weeks before he was removed from his mother’s custody, Hall said.

“Ms. Abcug was doing the best she could after years of not knowing what was wrong with her child,” Hall said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a heated, “unhinged” dispute, Donald Trump fought objections from his White House lawyers to a plan, eventually discarded, to seize states’ voting machines and then, in a last ditch effort to salvage his presidency, summoned supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol for what turned into the deadly riot, the House Jan. 6 committee revealed Tuesday.

In another disclosure, raising the question of witness tampering, the panel’s vice-chair said Trump himself had tried to contact a person who was talking to the committee about potential testimony. And still more new information revealed that Trump was so intent on making a showing at the Capitol that his aides secretly planned for a second rally stage there on the day of the attack.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chair, said it had notified the Justice Department that Trump had contacted the witness who has yet to appear in public.

“We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” said Cheney, a Wyoming Republican.

A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley declined to comment when asked if the department was investigating the call.

The hearing Tuesday was the seventh for the Jan. 6 committee, which is portraying the defeated Trump as “detached from reality,” clinging to false claims of voter fraud and working feverishly to reverse his election defeat. It all led to his “be there, will be wild” tweet summoning supporters to Washington.

The panel delved into a critical three weeks of secret planning in the run-up to the Capitol attack and heard remorseful testimony from an Ohio father who believed Trump’s election lies and answered the defeated president’s tweet to come to Washington. The panel also heard form a former spokesman for the extremist Oath Keepers who warned of the far-right group’s ability for violence.

“I think we need to quit mincing words about just talk. … What it was going to be was an armed revolution,” said Jason Van Tatenhove. “I mean, people died that day.”

Tuesday’s session focused in part on December 2020, a time when many Republicans were moving on from the November election Trump lost to Joe Biden. Testimony brought out details of a late night Dec. 18 meeting at the White House with Trump’s private lawyers suggesting he order the U.S. military to seize state voting machines in an unprecedented effort to pursue his false claims of voter fraud .

The panel featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel at the time, recalling the explosive meeting when Trump’s outside legal team brought a draft executive order to seize the states’ voting machines — a “terrible idea,” Cipollone said.

“That’s not how we do things in the United States,” he testified.

Another former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, called the meeting “unhinged” in separate video testimony.

Cipollone and other White House officials scrambled to intervene as Trump met late into the night with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired national security aide Michael Flynn and the former head of the online retail company Overstock. It erupted in shouting and screaming, another aide testified.

“Where is the evidence?” Cipollone demanded of the claims of voter fraud.

“What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts,” testified another official, Eric Herschmann.

But Trump was intrigued and essentially told his White House lawyers that at least Powell and outside allies were trying to do something.

As night turned to morning, Trump tweeted his call for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, when Congress would be tallying the Electoral College results. “Be there. Will be wild,” Trump wrote.

Instantly, the extremists reacted.

The panel showed graphic and violent text messages and played videos of right-wing figures, including Alex Jones, and others vowing that Jan. 6 would be the day they would fight for the president.

Messages beaming across the far-right forums laid out plans for the big day that they said Trump was asking for in Washington. It would be a “red wedding,” said one, a reference to a mass killing in “Game of Thrones.” “Bring handcuffs.”

Several members of the U.S. Capitol Police who fought the mob that day sat stone-faced in the front row of the committee room.

Members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups are now facing rare sedition charges over the siege. Nine people died the day of the attack and in its aftermath.

“This tweet served as a call to action — and in some cases a call to arms,” said one panel member, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla.

The committee revealed new details about what happened next, as planning was underway for Trump’s big rally on the Ellipse outside the White House, and aides scrambled to secretly set up a second stage outside the Capitol complex across the street from the Supreme Court.

In a Jan. 4 text message from rally organizer Kylie Kremer to Trump ally Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, Kremer explains: “This stays only between us, we are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the Ellipse. POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol.”

Kremer warns that if the information gets out, others will try to sabotage the plans and the organizer “will be in trouble” with the National Park Service and other federal agencies.

”But POTUS is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly,’” Kremer wrote.

On the morning of Jan. 5, Trump ally Ali Alexander sent a similar text to a conservative journalist saying: “Ellipse then US capitol. Trump is supposed to order us to capitol at the end of his speech but we will see.”

And the panel showed a draft tweet from Trump, which was obtained from the National Archives and never sent, calling on supporters to arrive early for the rally and expect crowds.

“March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!” the draft Trump tweet said.

Committee member Murphy said, “This was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather was a deliberate strategy.”

Tuesday’s was the only hearing this week, as new details emerge. An expected prime-time hearing has been rescheduled for July 21.

Cheney said the Trump team is shifting its strategy in dealings with the committee, and is now trying to shield the former president from blame, suggesting he received bad advice from “crazy” advisers or was otherwise “incapable” of understanding some of the details of the situation.

Trump is “not an impressionable child,” Cheney said. “Just like everyone else in our country he is responsible for his own actions.”

The panel also heard from a sorrowful Stephen Ayres, the Ohio father who said he got caught up in social media after the election, but has since lost his job and his house after joining the mob at the Capitol. He pleaded guilty last month to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building.

When Trump summoned supporters to Washington, “I felt like I needed to be down here,” he testified.

Ayers hugged and apologized to the police officers after the hearing.

“The problem of politicians whipping up mob violence to destroy fair elections is the oldest domestic enemy of constitutional democracy,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md..

___ Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Nomaan Merchant and Michael Balsamo in Washington and Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland, contributed to this report.

___

For full coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings, go to https://www.apnews.com/capitol-siege.

The charges against members of the angry pro-Trump mob range from low-level misdemeanors for those who only entered the Capitol to felony seditious conspiracy charges against far-right extremists.

It����ap the largest prosecution in the history of the Justice Department, whose leader, Attorney General Merrick Garland, has vowed to hold accountable “all January 6th perpetrators, at any level.”

As the U.S. House committee investigating the attack prepares to hold a series of public hearings to detail its findings, here’s a look at where the criminal cases stand:

WHO HAS BEEN CHARGED?

Authorities have arrested people in practically all 50 states in connection with the riot. They include former police officers and U.S. military veterans, a five-time Olympic swimming medalist and the son of a New York City judge.

Hundreds of people who went inside but didn’t take part in any destruction or violence are facing only misdemeanor crimes like picketing in the Capitol and disorderly conduct that call for up to six months behind bars.

More than 250 people have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement who were trying to protect the Capitol, including more than 85 accused of using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. Others have been accused of assaulting members of the media — one an Associated Press photographer — or destroying media equipment.

The most serious cases have been brought against members of two far-right extremist groups, the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.

The leaders of both groups have been arrested and remain locked up while they await trial later this year for seditious conspiracy, which alleges a plot to forcibly oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power. The rarely used Civil War-era charge calls for up to 20 years in prison.

WHO HAS BEEN CONVICTED?

More than 300 people have pleaded guilty to a slew of crimes, including conspiracy and assault. Among them are three Oath Keepers who have admitted to seditious conspiracy, are cooperating with investigators and could testify against their fellow extremists at trial.

There have been seven trials so far in the District of Columbia’s federal court. The first five juries convicted the riot defendants of all charges.

The convicted include Thomas Webster, a 20-year New York Police Department veteran who attacked an officer during the riot. Webster claimed he was defending himself when he tackled the officer and grabbed his gas mask.

Jurors also rejected the defense of an Ohio man who claimed he was only “following presidential orders” from former President Donald Trump when he stormed the Capitol. Dustin Byron Thompson was convicted of obstructing Congress from certifying the electoral vote and other charges.

A judge decided two other cases without a jury, acquitting one of the defendants and partially acquitting the other.

U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by Trump, convicted Otero County, New Mexico, Commissioner Couy Griffin of illegally entering restricted Capitol grounds, but acquitted him of engaging in disorderly conduct.

In the other misdemeanor case, McFadden found Matthew Martin of New Mexico not guilty of charges that he illegally entered the Capitol and engaged in disorderly conduct, saying it was reasonable for Martin to believe that outnumbered police officers allowed him and others to enter through the Rotunda doors.

WHAT ABOUT THE PUNISHMENTS?

Nearly 200 people have been sentenced so far. The punishments have ranged from probation to more than five years behind bars. About 100 people who were charged with lower level crimes have avoided going to prison, although some of those received time in home detention.

The longest sentence — more than five years — was given to Robert Palmer of Largo, Florida, who threw a wooden plank and sprayed a fire extinguisher at officers before hurling the fire extinguisher at them.

Others who received lengthy sentences include Jacob Chansley, the spear-carrying rioter whose horned fur hat, bare chest and face paint made him one of the more recognizable figures in the attack. Chansley, who called himself “QAnon Shaman,” got about 31/2 years behind bars after admitting to entering the Senate chamber and writing a note to Vice President Mike Pence that said: “It����ap only a matter of time, justice is coming.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

The two most high-profile trials — involving the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — are expected to take place this summer and fall.

Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, who was once the Proud Boys’ top boss, and four others linked to the group were charged on Monday with seditious conspiracy after previously facing other conspiracy counts. They are scheduled to stand trial beginning Aug. 9.

Tarrio, who has since stepped down from his post as the group’s chairman, was arrested in a separate case two days before the riot and was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6. But he is accused of helping put into motion the violent attack.

The trial for the Oath Keepers leader, Stewart Rhodes, and four other members and associates the group is scheduled to start Sept. 26. Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers plotted for weeks to try to overturn the election results and prepared for a siege by purchasing weapons and setting up battle plans.

Authorities are still searching for many suspects, including the person who planted two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the melee.

Mastriano opened his remarks by evoking Scripture: “God uses the foolish to confound the wise.” He claimed Pennsylvanians’ freedom would be “snatched away” if his Democratic opponent wins in November, and cast the election in starkly religious terms with another biblical reference: “Let����ap choose this day to serve the Lord.”

Mastriano, a state senator and retired Army colonel, has not only made faith central to his personal story but has woven conservative Christian beliefs and symbols into the campaign — becoming the most prominent example this election cycle of what some observers call a surge of Christian nationalism among Republican candidates.

Mastriano — who has ignored repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press, including through his campaign last week — has rejected the “Christian nationalist” label in the past. In fact, few if any prominent candidates use the label. Some say it����ap a pejorative and insist everyone has a right to draw on their faith and values to try to influence public policy.

But scholars generally define Christian nationalism as going beyond policy debates and championing a fusion of American and Christian values, symbols and identity.

Christian nationalism, they say, is often accompanied by a belief that God has destined America, like the biblical Israel, for a special role in history, and that it will receive divine blessing or judgment depending on its obedience.

That often overlaps with the conservative Christian political agenda, including opposition to abortion, same-sex marriage and transgender rights. Researchers say Christian nationalism is often also associated with mistrust of immigrants and Muslims. Many Christian nationalists see former President Donald Trump as a champion despite his crude sexual boasts and lack of public piety.

Candidates seen as Christian nationalists have had mixed success in this year’s Republican primaries, which typically pitted staunch conservatives against opponents even further to the right.

There were losses by some high-profile candidates, such as U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn and an Idaho gubernatorial hopeful, Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin. The former spoke of a “spiritual battle” on Capitol Hill and a need for “strong, God-fearing patriots.” The latter was photographed holding a gun and a Bible and said, “God calls us to pick up the sword and fight, and Christ will reign in the state of Idaho.”

Some of Idaho’s Republican primaries for the Legislature were won by candidates touting Christian values or sharing priorities with Christian nationalists, such as sports bans for transgender athletes. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who uses biblical phrasing to “be a watchman on the wall” against those seeking to “destroy our faith,” easily won her primary.

Watchers of Christian nationalism consider Mastriaono’s win — in a rout, with 44% in a crowded field despite opposition from the state party establishment — by far the highest-profile victory for the movement.

Mastriano has called the separation of church and state a “myth.”

After his victory, the comments section of his campaign Facebook page had the feel of a revival tent:

“Praise Jesus!” “God is smiling on us and sending His blessings.” “Thank you Father God!!”

Mastriano “is a unique case where he really does in his speeches highlight this apocalyptic idea” where his supporters and causes are on God’s side, said Andrew Whitehead, sociology professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and co-author of “Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States.”

“It literally is good and evil,” he continued. “There’s no room for compromise, so that is the threat to democracy.”

In the book, Whitehead and co-author Samuel Perry measured rates of Christian nationalism by drawing on a 2017 Baylor University survey. It gauged opinions on such things as America’s role in God’s plan and whether the U.S. should be declared a Christian nation, advance biblical values and allow school prayer and religious displays in public places.

Their research found about one in five Americans align with many of those views. That����ap down from nearly one in four a decade earlier, just as Americans have become less religious overall. But Whitehead said Christian nationalists, who are more numerous among Republicans, can be expected to maintain their fervor.

Christian nationalism is emerging alongside and in some cases overlapping with other right-wing movements, such as the conspiratorial QAnon, white supremacy, and denialism over COVID-19 and the 2020 election. Christian prayers and symbols featured prominently in and around the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection there.

Mastriano, who sought to overturn Pennsylvania’s vote for Joe Biden in 2020, attended the rally preceding the attack and chartered buses to bring others. Though he says he left when things turned violent, video showed he passed through “breached barricades and police lines,” according to a Senate Judiciary Committee report.

Robert Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, said those Jan. 6 displays were not surprising.

According to a recent survey by the institute, white evangelical Christians were among the strongest supporters of the assertion that God intended America as a “promised land” for European Christians. Those who backed that idea were far more likely to agree that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence … to save our country.”

“To my mind, white Christian nationalism is really the threat,” Jones said.

Conservative Christian themes are also playing a role in local elections, including in blue states, although many proponents say they view it not as nationalism but as supporting their religious freedom and values.

Pastor Tim Thompson of 412 Church in Murrieta, California, who hosts a YouTube channel with more 9,600 subscribers and envisions a conservative future for the state, recently started a political action committee aiming to “take back our school boards” and give parents authority over curriculum.

“We don’t want teachers or any other adults talking to our kids about sex,” Thompson said. “We don’t want teachers categorizing our kids into oppressed or oppressor. These are not political issues. They are moral and biblical issues.”

Judeo-Christian values are the foundation of America, he argued.

“People are afraid to speak up for these values because they are afraid that the left is going to slap a label like ‘racist’ or ‘Christian nationalist’ on them,” Thompson said. “I don’t care about those labels, because my wife, children, church and community know who I am.”

Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in Chino Hills, California, has also sought to influence local elections. While he does not let candidates campaign at the church, he frequently offers endorsements as a way of signaling to his flock those who are “pro-family, pro-life and pro-freedom.”

But “the hair on my neck goes up” when he hears the term “Christian nationalism,” he said. And he was embarrassed to see Christian imagery during the Jan. 6 riot: “That was a sad day, to see those sacred symbols and words pimped like that.”

Yet while he believes the founders created a secular nation, Hibbs said every Christian should have an equal say.

Elizabeth Neumann, chief strategy officer for Moonshot, a tech company that aims to counter online violent extremism, disinformation and other harms, said Christian nationalism began picking up steam around 2015 amid a rising narrative of purported persecution of Christians.

Neumann, who served in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations and grew up in an evangelical Christian household, called the movement “heretical and idolatry” and an “apocalyptic vision (that) very often leads to violence.” Many pastors are pushing back against it, she added.

“I see Christian nationalism as the gasping, dying breath of the older generation in America that is afraid that Christians are going to be replaced,” she said.

Bharath reported from Los Angeles.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Among other things, would require electronic key cards, with their uses logged, to access voting systems and 24-hour video surveillance of the site. It also bars people from overseeing elections if they’ve been convicted of election-related offenses, sedition or insurrection.

The officials also can’t “knowingly or recklessly” promote misinformation or disinformation, a distinction bill sponsor Senate President Stephen Fenberg said would be up to the courts to sort.

“I don’t think we were thinking about insider threats before Mesa,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said at a news conference Monday to debut the bill, referring to allegations against Peters. “We have lots of safeguards, but the idea that someone elected to uphold elections would try to destroy from within was shocking to the election community in Colorado.”

Griswold, like Fenberg, is a Democrat.

Colorado has “gold standard” elections as is, she argued, citing high turnout and security, but that the bill is necessary to combat emerging efforts to undermine confidence in the system.

The bill would require election officials to get training in testing voting systems, risk-limiting audits of the systems and election security, including how to combat misinformation and disinformation.

The proposal also includes $500,000 in grant dollars to help local election officials improve their security systems.

Pueblo County Clerk Bo Ortiz, who also serves as the president of the Colorado County Clerks Association, called the bill the most important elections-related policy push since voters approved mail-in voting in 2013.

“Recognizing that low-information election officials make for easier targets for grifters and bad actors, we fully support for them to receive their state election certification before they run a major election,” Ortiz, a Democrat, said.

The association largely supports the initiative, Executive Director Matt Crane said. About 50 county clerks, across party lines, were on a call Monday to discuss the measure and all of them supported it, he said. There are 64 county clerks in the state.

Josh Bly, a spokesperson for the Colorado Senate GOP, said senators in his caucus are watching the bill, but didn’t comment on its merits.

“We sincerely hope the opportunity for bipartisan collaboration presents itself when the bill is considered,” he said in a statement.

It is up for debate at a Senate committee Tuesday, along with another Democratic proposal to ban the open carry of firearms at polling places. The committee is its first step through the legislative process.

County clerks throughout Colorado have been targeted by conspiracy theorists concerned about the election, and Griswold’s office keeps a running list of threats she’s received.

Her office, along with law enforcement, investigated Peters over allegations that the clerk and her deputy allowed an unauthorized man access to copy voting equipment servers. Passwords from the equipment were later posted in online QAnon circles.

Griswold has sued Peters and later Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder over allegations of making unauthorized copies of election servers. An investigation into the actions of a third county clerk, Merlin Klotz of Douglas County, cleared him.

Killings by domestic extremists increased from 23 in 2020 to at least 29 last year, with right-wing extremists killing 26 of those people in 2021, the Anti-Defamation League said in a report first provided to The Associated Press.

The ADL’s report says white supremacists, antigovernment sovereign citizens and other adherents of long-standing movements were responsible for most of the 19 deadly attacks it counted in 2021. The New York City-based organization’s list also included killings linked to newer right-wing movements that spread online during the coronavirus pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s presidency.

The ADL concluded that roughly half of the 2021 killings didn’t have a clear ideological motive, fitting a pattern that stretches back at least a decade.

The group’s tally included a shooting rampage in Denver by Lyndon James McLeod, who killed five people in December before a police officer fatally shot him. McLeod was involved in the “manosphere,” a toxic masculinity subculture, and harbored revenge fantasies against most of his victims, the ADL report notes.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists killed five people last year in two incidents, both involving “troubled perpetrators,” the ADL report says.

In August, California surfing school owner Matthew Taylor Coleman was charged with killing his two young children with a spear gun in Mexico. Coleman told an FBI agent that he was “enlightened” by conspiracy theories, including QAnon, and believed his wife had passed “serpent DNA” on to his children, according to a court affidavit.

A Maryland man, Jeffrey Allen Burnham, was charged with killing his brother, his sister-in-law and a family friend in September. Charging documents said Burnham confronted his brother, a pharmacist, because he believed he was poisoning people with COVID-19 vaccines.

“Prior to the coronavirus, the anti-vaccine movement in the United States did not have a particular ideological leaning and contained both left-leaning and right-leaning activists,” the ADL report says. “However, the politicization of the coronavirus and other factors have created many new anti-vaccine conspiracy adherents and given the anti-vaccine movement a distinctly right-wing tone it did not previously have.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory has been linked to other acts of real-world violence, including last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol. In June, a federal intelligence report warned that QAnon adherents could target Democrats and other political opponents for more violence.

A core idea QAnon promotes is that Trump was secretly fighting a Satan-worshipping, child sex trafficking cabal of “deep state” enemies, prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites. QAnon hasn’t faded away with Trump leaving office.

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL’s Center on Extremism and author of Tuesday’s report, said the QAnon movement is still evolving and increasingly overlapping with other extremist movements, including vaccine opponents.

“Could it sort of dissipate into those or could it find some sort of new focus or new life? Or could it just hang around if Donald Trump is elected again in 2024 and take a new form then?” Pitcavage said during an interview. “It����ap difficult to predict the future of those movements, so it����ap difficult to predict whether they will continue to have this sort of similar effect on people.”

A dearth of mass killings in 2021 meant that last year’s tally was far lower than the totals in any year between 2015 and 2019, when killings by domestic extremists ranged from 45 to 78.

In other respects, the ADL data for 2021 mirrors long-term trends.

Right-wing extremists have killed at least 333 people in the U.S. over the past decade, accounting for three-quarters of all extremist-related killings, the report says.

The ADL distinguishes between killings that it considers to be driven by ideology and those that it found to be non-ideological or lacking a clear motive. Its report says the numbers for each category have been close to even over the past 10 years. The ADL concluded that 14 of the 29 extremist killings in 2021 were apparently motivated at least in part by ideology.

The ADL attributed 13 killings last year to white supremacists, three to anti-government extremists, two to Black nationalists and one to an Islamist extremist.

The group didn’t count the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, as an extremist killing. Sicknick collapsed and died hours after he was attacked by rioters who stormed the Capitol and interfered with Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory. In April, the Washington, D.C., medical examiner’s office ruled that Sicknick suffered a stroke and died from natural causes.

“Although it is clear that the Capitol attack could have contributed to, or even precipitated, the strokes that felled Sicknick, it cannot be definitely proven that he was murdered by a Capitol stormer,” the ADL report says.