Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille for BuzzFlash: Trump’s DC Insurrection Is Tip of Right-Wing’s Terrorist Authoritarian Anti-Democracy Project
December 8, 2021
The first infamous “UNITE THE RIGHT” rally occurred in Chalottesville, and Trump refused to condemn the neo-Nazi white supremacy “protest” (Anthony Crider)
The president’s Stop the Steal rally, which turned into a right-wing terrorist insurrection, could easily be branded UNITE THE RIGHT II. This assault on the US Capitol and democracy is not so much a culmination of Trumpism, as it is an expression of the next phase of homegrown right-wing anti-democratic terrorism. And the whole world is watching.
Three plus years earlier, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and other white-supremacist groups marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans including “Jews will not replace us.” The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville resulted in the murder of Heather Heyer and the injury of 19 other anti-fascist protesters. Following the rally, Trump "condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides," and he also referred to "very fine people on both sides." Trump’s “very fine people” remark was seen as a tacit nod and wink to the white supremacist marchers.
On December 20th, Trump set the stage for the violence by tweeting: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild.” Trump was promising a dead-enders Wilding.
At the ellipse, just south of the White House, Trump had his army of supplicants where he wanted them; glued to his every word and primed to take action. The crowd of neo-Fascist, evangelical Christian, white-supremacist, male-supremacist, QAnon’s conspiracy addled overwhelmingly white men and women, hung on his every word.
“They rigged it!” he shouted from the stage. “We will not take it anymore. To use a term you people really came up with, We will stop the steal!” Trump repeated the lies he had been spouting since he lost the election, calling it a fraud. “Just remember,” he told them. “You’re smarter. You’ve got more going than anybody, and they try to demean anything having to do with us, and you’re the real people.”
He then urged his mob to march to the US Capitol building: “Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back… After this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down to the US Capitol. And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them… Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength. And you have to be strong.”
While his hyped up army took off toward the Capitol building -- wearing MAGA gear, and waving Trump and Confederate flags, and mostly maskless -- Trump retreated back to the White House to presumably watch the events unfold on television.
Timothy Denevi, author of Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson’s Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, reported that he was surprised at how many people at the rally “were QAnon supporters.”
At the Capitol, Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and more than 125 of his Republican House colleagues, prepared to lead a lie-soaked attack from the floors of the Senate and the House.
Meanwhile, as domestic terrorists stormed the US Capitol, swarms of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Trump Dead-Enders, and other white supremacist/neo-Nazi groups were marching on government buildings in Topeka, Kansas, Olympia, Washington, Sacramento, California, Salt Lake City, Utah, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Trump “is a magnet to” his supporters,” Liesl Schillinger, a New York–based critic, translator, and educator, wrote recently. “A magnet compels bodies who are susceptible to its pull. The megaphone of social media has given Trump the capability of widening the reach of his magnetic force—both while he was president, and evidently still now, after he has been voted out of office. The question we all face today is whether that magnet’s power can be stopped, in an age when the megaphone prolongs and amplifies its effects.”
Schillinger wrote: “It’s obvious why dictators would be attracted to illiberal actions from the White House; but why would ordinary citizens succumb to a strongman’s signal? What’s in it for them? And why would an ordinary American want to storm the Capitol, in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election in the world’s oldest continuous democracy?”
In 1831, a Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville, who had spent nine months traveling across America, wrote Democracy in America. He stated: “The power of thought is often actually increased by the small number of those expressing it.” And he warned, “The word of a strong-minded man which alone reaches to the passions of a mute assembly has more power than the confused cries of a thousand orators; and so long as there is just one public place where one speaks freely, it is as if one had spoken publicly in each village.”
Trump has nearly 90 million Twitter followers. On Wednesday, Twitter put a temporary lock on Trump’s tweets. Facebook has announced a ban on Trump’s accounts at least until after the Biden inauguration. But it is also clear that the most radical of Trump supporters have already migrated to other social media platforms such as Parler and Gab, and encrypted platforms. How many of the 70 million people who voted for Trump will continue to follow him is anybody’s guess, but 21st century social media offer unparalleled channels for the spread of hate and lies.
The anger, grievance, and white-supremacy evidenced in Wednesday’s mob assault on the Capital and government sites across the country were and are expressions of long simmering right-wing threats to democracy. This growth of the ultra-right should not come as a surprise and must be understood in the context of these movements over the past 50 years.
In May 2020, the Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a brief titled, “The Escalating Terrorism Problem in the United States.”. The findings were that: “First, far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks and individuals inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between January 1 and May 8, 2020. Second, terrorism in the United States will likely increase over the next year in response to several factors. One of the most concerning is the 2020 U.S. presidential election, before and after which extremists may resort to violence, depending on the outcome of the election.”
CSIS analyzed 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the US between 1994 and 2020 finding that: “Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57 percent—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25 percent committed by left-wing terrorists, 15 percent by religious terrorists, 3 percent by ethnonationalists, and 0.7 percent by terrorists with other motives.
A failed coup is a warning, a possible predictor of what lies ahead. And, while Donald Trump has acted as a human wrecking ball attacking norms and institutions of government and stoking terrorist mobs, he may not be necessary to the ultra-right’s continued assault on democracy.
President-Elect Biden has been a steadying voice and has repeatedly called out systemic racism and the need to insure equal justice in this county. But too often when speaking about Trumpism and its fruits, Biden says “this is not America…” The problem is that this is America – at least a movement of a significant part of America. People like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are the smarter, smoother, and more sophisticated versions of possible future coup leaders. They, and their QAnon followers, contingents of Proud Boys, Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Patriot Prayer -- and more yet to be formed militia groups -- are the ones that need to be reckoned with.
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