On January 6, far-right extremists stormed the U.S. Capitol, smearing blood and feces on the walls, hellbent on exacting revenge on lawmakers to “Stop the Steal” of the presidential election they delusionally believed Donald Trump had won.
Trump “watched television happily—happily—as the chaos unfolded,” noted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, before voting to acquit the former President.
The marauders, despite their clownish getups of bearskin furs and horn helmets, were deadly serious as they rampaged. One officer was killed—two others died later by suicide—and more than 140 sustained injuries including cracked ribs, smashed spinal disks, concussions, and a lost eye.
Trump “watched television happily—happily—as the chaos unfolded,” noted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, before voting to acquit the former President at the conclusion of Trump’s impeachment trial on February 13.
Imagine Trump gloating, slumped in a chair, reveling in the violence, as if he were watching his favorite football team blitz the enemy quarterback, an aging schoolboy bully marveling at his adroit use of demagoguery to inspire a mob.
Armed protesters at the Michigan state capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on January 17, 2021.
The bloodbath could have been far greater, as the mob included a significant number of off-duty officers in its ranks with specialized training. Estimates put the number of people who participated in the insurrection anywhere from 3,000 to 20,000, according to the Los Angeles Times. More than thirty of the January 6 insurrectionists had military or law enforcement ties, and forty others have been connected to extremist groups. In all, more than 800 rioters breached the Capitol, and thousands more stormed the grounds. More than 300 people have since been charged.
“What we are dealing with here is not merely a mix of rightwing organizations, but a broader mass movement with violence at its core,” said Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats.
According to the George Washington University Program on Extremism, the terrorists came from forty states and the District of Columbia. They averaged about forty years old, and were overwhelmingly white and male. At least sixteen people linked to the Proud Boys, a neofascist gang with a history of violence against the political left, were present at the Capitol, as were members of the Three Percenters, another far-right extremist group.
They carried guns and zip ties. They wielded baseball bats, flagpoles, and pipes. Many dressed tactically in bulletproof vests and helmets. Among the most prominent far-right groups present were the Oath Keepers, an antigovernment militia made up of military veterans and law enforcement officers.
“Trump’s been trying to drain the swamp with a straw. We just brought a shop vac,” Oath Keeper and U.S. Army veteran Jessica Watkins, thirty-eight, posted on the walkie-talkie app Zello. She’s been charged with conspiracy to obstruct Congress and other crimes.
Images of the attack on Congress show six men wearing black hats and shirts emblazoned with the Oath Keepers’ insignia printed in yellow lettering. One video shows members of the far-right militia group taunting police officers guarding a Capitol entrance.
In addition to Watkins, Oath Keeper Donovan Crowl, fifty, a U.S. Marine veteran, and Thomas Caldwell, sixty-five, a U.S. Navy veteran, have been indicted on conspiracy and other charges. The plot included coordinating with the Three Percenters to plan “to transport weapons across the Potomac by boat,” according to prosecutors in court documents reported by NPR.
As the mob breached the Capitol, Caldwell received a message, referring to members of Congress, saying, “All members are in the tunnels under capital [sic] seal them in. Turn on gas.” After retiring from the armed forces, Caldwell served as an FBI section chief from 2009 to 2010 and has had “top-secret security clearance” since 1979.
In the wake of the insurrection, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin ordered all military commands to “stand down” during the next sixty days to reinforce existing rules barring extremism in the military as the Defense Department investigates service members.
Nearly thirty police officers from a dozen departments participated in the Capitol siege.
But it’s not just the military veterans. Nearly thirty police officers from a dozen departments participated in the Capitol siege. One of them was Houston police officer Tam Pham, an eighteen-year veteran, who stood inside the Capitol holding a Trump flag. Pham, after federal charges were filed against him, resigned from the Houston police force.
“There is no excuse for criminal activity, especially from a police officer,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told NPR. “I can’t tell you the anger I feel at the thought of a police officer and other police officers thinking they get to go storm the Capitol.”
Frank Straub, director of the Center for Mass Violence Response Studies at the National Police Foundation, an expert on counter-extremism, tells The Progressive, “For many, many years, members of the military and law enforcement have been active in these extremist sites.”
The solution to extremist violence, according to Straub, requires stronger domestic terrorism laws and preventive measures that tackle the country’s polarization and economic inequality. But the Capitol insurrectionists were business owners, real estate brokers, and active and veteran police and military personnel often in higher income brackets—not the poor. And do we really not have enough laws in place to prevent another coup attempt?
As David Dayen argued in The American Prospect, “We now have every possible tool necessary to fight sedition and conspiracy and attacks like the Capitol Riot . . . . Every time we add some new authority to the tool kit, it gets abused and often applied to groups far from its intended target.”
White nationalists and other far-right extremists have targeted a shifting cast of enemies since this country’s founding; rooting out their influence must begin with that foundational history—not new ways to police an already overly policed society.
The Oath Keepers’ leader Stewart Rhodes, a U.S. Army veteran, started the group in 2009 as part of a wave of reaction following the election of Barack Obama. But the links between far-right groups and law enforcement extend much further back in time.
Historian Kyle Burke’s book, Revolutionaries for the Right, traces the origins of the modern-day militia movement to the Reagan era, when far-right mercenaries launched wars of so-called national liberation on the world stage as part of an “anticommunist international” movement.
Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, speaks during a rally outside the White House in Washington, D.C., in 2017.
“Seeing themselves as guerrillas arrayed against a totalitarian state, rightwing paramilitary groups in the United States began preparing for an apocalyptic showdown with the federal government,” Burke tells The Progressive. “In their visions, the state had been taken over by communists, African Americans, Jews, and foreigners—or some combination of those groups, it wasn’t always clear—and was now bent on crushing individual freedom by levying unjust taxes, passing gun laws, allowing interracial marriage, and preaching multiculturalism.”
In the 1990s, Kyle explains, the rightwing militias enacted “guerrilla fantasies, with frightening results.” In 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil before 9/11. McVeigh had connections to paramilitary networks in Michigan and Arizona.
In 1997, while McVeigh’s trial was underway, the investigative reporter James Ridgeway wrote in The Village Voice about the spate of violence gripping the country, with a string of bombings, bank robberies, and shootouts initiated by what he termed “armies of the right.”
“What makes this a movement and not just a collection of disparate violent acts is the web of associations that tie together the participants,” Ridgeway wrote. And just as in the 1990s, the connection between far-right groups and the military remains one of their central features.
“Veterans and private military contractors continue to migrate into an array of far-right organizations, carrying with them military training, familiarity with weapons, and the desire to continue the war at home against a shifting set of domestic enemies,” Burke says.
Retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock Jr., fifty-three, of Texas, is pictured in the halls of Congress holding zip-tie handcuffs, outfitted in a military-style helmet and tactical vest.
“He means to kidnap, restrain . . . perhaps execute members of the U.S. government,” commented Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Weimer, before releasing Brock to home confinement. “His prior experience and training make him all the more dangerous.”
Speaking about groups like the Oath Keepers, Burke adds, “As in previous decades, they too contend that the U.S. government has been hijacked by a cabal of enemies. Thus, in their eyes, it is left to true patriots to set things right through armed insurrection.”
On January 1, Oath Keeper Caldwell replied to a Facebook comment, writing, “I swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. I did the former, I have done the latter peacefully, but they have morphed into pure evil even blatantly rigging an election and paying off the political caste. We must smite them now and drive them down.”
The frontier represents a site of the greatest violence this country has ever wrought, while at the same time standing for one of its most comforting myths.
The expansion West was a caldera of violent tendencies that still animates U.S. society—beginning with the near extermination of Indigenous peoples, the legal apartheid of Black people from 1877 to 1965 enforced by lynch mobs, and the white backlash, post-1965, following the civil rights movement and still continuing today.
And yet Trump deviates slightly from that historical trajectory, offering up, historian Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth, an “extremism turned inward, all-consuming, and self-devouring.” He continues, “Expansion, in any form, can no longer satisfy the interests, reconcile the contradictions, dilute the factions, or redirect the anger.”
In a liberal capitalist democracy like the United States, these dynamics have gained a greater salience during Trump’s presidency. His attacks on immigrants may very well be the most ignominious accomplishment of his term in the White House. The cruelty often came dressed up in the guise of more than 400 executive actions, which ratcheted up the Obama era deportation machine and led to concentration camps caging kids at the border.
Even if Trump didn’t quite understand how to use the blood-soaked pens that authored Jim Crow laws and justified the mass murder of chattel slavery and settler colonialism, his underlings did and carried out his wishes with deadly aplomb.
But for all of the rioters’ guns, bulletproof vests, bearskin furs, horn helmets, and Confederate flags, the story of fascism in the United States isn’t just about far-right ideologues committing acts of overt violence. It is also about the exercise of power through systems of domination and racialized terror as these systems are refracted through the lenses of settler colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.
The U.S.-Mexico border, like U.S. prisons, is also a site of invisibilized violence. “We never referred to asylum-seekers as prisoners,” Jenn Budd, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent turned whistleblower, tells The Progressive, noting that the agency has increasingly criminalized border crossings over the years. “They call them prisoners. They call them invaders.”
This new reality is what the journalist and author Brendan O’Connor describes as “border fascism” in his book, Blood Red Lines.
“That some members of the military and the police see no contradiction between their participation in the most repressive apparatuses of the state and their participation in an attempted fascist putsch is revealing,” O’Connor says.
In his first public appearance after the failed coup at the Capitol, Trump visited Texas, holding a rally in the Rio Grande Valley, and then traveling to Alamo. In his very own “Mission Accomplished” moment, surrounded by supporters waving American and Trump flags from their pickup trucks, he christened with a dedication a new portion of the “big, beautiful wall” that he had promised on the campaign trail in 2016.
“It was almost as if he were paying one last tribute to not only his ‘monument,’ but all that it represents psychologically and ideologically, the ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ ‘innocent’ versus ‘criminal,’ ‘safe’ versus ‘dangerous,’ ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal,’ this world of militarized divisions, racism, xenophobia, and punishing pain for those that don’t comply that so blatantly symbolized Trump’s four years in office,” Todd Miller, author of Border Patrol Nation, tells The Progressive.
“They said it couldn’t be done and we got it done,” Trump said, truth eluding him yet again. “We gave you 100 percent of what you wanted so now you have no excuses.”
Trump’s visit to the southern border was a fitting coda to the violence he inflamed against immigrants and the authoritarianism he institutionalized and accelerated in the U.S. Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies.
Trump may be gone from the White House, but Trumpism will carry on, its exuberant hatreds against an array of presumed enemies flaming hot. As a new report by the rightwing Survey Center on American Life highlighted, nearly three in ten Americans, including 39 percent of Republicans, are willing to resort to political violence against opponents, to defend the country.