American Insurrection: How Trump legitimised far-right extremists
Encouraged by Trump, white supremacists simply took off their swastikas and wrapped themselves in the flag. James Rampton on the rise of the right
On the night of 11 August 2017, thousands of hard-faced white men assembled for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ostensibly, they had gathered to protest against the proposed removal of the statue of Confederate general Robert E Lee. However, in reality, their cause was far more wide-ranging and sinister. This was a white supremacist rally.
The white-shirted extremists marched in one long column across the campus of the University of Virginia brandishing burning torches and wielding swastikas. As they gave Nazi salutes, they chanted: “You will not replace us”, “White lives matter”, “Hail Trump” and “Blood and soil” (a translation of Hitler’s notorious slogan about racial purity.) Raw hatred filled the air. It was a chilling moment redolent of history’s darkest days.
Just yards away, reporter AC Thompson looked on in utter horror. Speaking to The Independent from his home in the US, Thompson recalls just how scared he was that night. “It was absolutely terrifying.”
The reporter, who has been covering the far right in the US for decades and charts their recent rise in American Insurrection, an absorbing new documentary which goes out on PBS America at 8.35pm on Friday, continues: “During those days in Virginia, there was a feeling that at any time something horrible was going to happen, and that something horrible might be you getting killed.” Indeed, during the rally the far-right protesters did threaten to kill one of Thompson’s colleagues, a Lebanese-American.
The next day proved even more devastating. A white supremacist named James Alex Fields Jr deliberately drove his car at high speed into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters. He killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 other people. He was later convicted of first-degree murder and malicious wounding and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 419 years.
What happened next, however, shocked an already appalled world. Reviewing the carnage in Charlottesville, Donald Trump asserted that there were “very fine people on both sides”. He was suggesting there was a moral equivalence between the neo-Nazis and the liberal protesters. That green light from their commander-in-chief was all the encouragement that the white supremacists needed.
As Brien James, leader of the Indiana chapter of the far-right group the Proud Boys, put it: “We’ve got a guy who is a nationalist in the most powerful seat in the world. We’ve got a guy who is at least 90 per cent on our side, and he’s the president. There’s no reason at that point to be an extremist.”
Trump is, after all, a man who, according to a new book, once reportedly asserted that Adolf Hitler “did a lot of good things”.
Rick Rowley, the director of American Insurrection, concurs, emphasising that Trump gave these once-shunned groups new life. “Many elements inside the white supremacist movement found in him a path into the mainstream. They took off their swastikas, and they wrapped themselves in the flag.”
Speaking while Trump was still in the White House, the then Acting Assistant Attorney Genera, Mary McCord, said: “Under this presidency, far-right unlawful militias have felt much more licence to publicly engage. It’s given them a real opportunity. I trace a lot of things to Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally. When the president’s talked about very fine people on both sides, I mean, that was immediate. Right-wing groups just grabbed a hold of that language, and it helps them recruit, it helps them fundraise, it helps them expand.”
The far right certainly did not hang about. Infuriated by lockdown restrictions and apparently encouraged by Trump telling them they have to take their state back, extreme-right organisations last summer hatched a plot – which was fortunately foiled – to kidnap and try to execute the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer.
Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, believes this new, emboldened generation of militias differs from similar groups in the past. “I think the difference is that these folks felt supported by those in government, and perhaps at the highest levels of government.
“You had the president of the US calling her [Whitmer] out by name, calling her a dictator, saying that individuals should liberate Michigan. The president of the US, after these armed gunmen had more or less taken over our Capitol building, his words were that these are very fine people and the governor ought to sit down and negotiate with them. Can you imagine? That sounds like a hostage crisis more than anything.”
You had the president of the US calling her [Whitmer] out by name, calling her a dictator, saying that individuals should liberate Michigan
From there, it was only a very short step to the attempt by the far right on 6 January this year to mount an insurrection and overthrow a legitimately elected government by storming the Capitol building in Washington DC. Five people lost their lives on that day. There is a straight, clear line between Charlottesville and the Capitol.
In a speech that day memorable for all the wrong reasons, Trump perpetuated The Big Lie that he had somehow been cheated out of the election victory and vociferously exhorted his supporters outside the White House to march down to the Capitol: “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, you have to be strong… And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
This was all the goading required by what Thompson describes as, “a mob, urged on by the president, willing to embrace an insurrectionary violence that was once confined only to the most extreme elements of the far right”.
The attack on the Capitol was merely the culmination of years of Trump firing up his white supremacist base. The events of 6 January grabbed the headlines worldwide, but the malignant power of these groups had been growing for years. Since 2015, right-wing extremists in the US have been involved in 267 plots or attacks, leading to 91 deaths.
Thompson expands on the myriad ways in which Trump, during his four tumultuous years in office, helped legitimise the far right. “I had reported on right wing extremists back in the 1990s. And what I saw in 2015, 2016 was this resurgence of actors and ideas that I thought had gone away in the 1990s. I thought most of these sorts of groups and ideologies had been consigned to history. And then it turns out that, no, they haven’t been.
“There’s this whole new wave of people who are embracing the same tropes that I had been looking at many years before. And they were picking up the old neo-Nazi and white supremacist movement and taking it in a new direction. And they were frankly energised by Trump. That was really the big catalyst there.”
Thompson, who in 2013 won the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for investigative journalism into the shooting of civilians by police after Hurricane Katrina, adds: “When I’ve interviewed the members of these groups, over and over and over again, Trump’s name comes up.
“They’ll all say his rise to power motivated them to be out on the streets and active. There was that pool of angry people, and it needed somebody like Trump to bring them to the surface. Perhaps without somebody who could stoke those resentments, and without a demagogue like that, they would have existed, but people wouldn’t have been mobilised and moved out into the streets and into action. “
Among the most unsettling discoveries Thompson has made during his years studying these groups is how many current and former members of the military belong to far-right organisations. In the course of its investigation into the Charlottesville riot, the reporter identified seven members of one neo-Nazi group who had military affiliations.
Then last summer, two ambush-style attacks were carried out against security personnel and law enforcement officers in California, leaving two dead and three others injured. One of the two men arrested for the crimes was US. Air Force Sergeant Steven Carrillo. He had ties to the Boogaloo Boys, an anti-government extremist movement whose members are trying to start a second civil war.
The mob was urged on by the president, willing to embrace an insurrectionary violence that was once confined only to the most extreme elements of the far right
It doesn’t end there. Thus far, 52 people with military associations have been arrested for taking part in the 6 January assault on the Capitol, including, if you can believe it, one Marine Corps major on active duty.
John Bennett, a former FBI agent, was stunned by the high level of military and police involvement in the riots. “I think 6 January really surprised everybody. Here are groups that profess to be for law and order in this country, and yet there are cops in the group that are beating on other cops. That is unheard of.”
The suggestion is that neo-Nazi groups are strategically inserting their supporters into the military. Thompson puts his finger on this troubling development. He believes it stems from a soldier’s “sense of themselves as heroic actors and the desire to be in a great narrative of heroism.
“If your world has been holding a military rifle, and being deployed in dramatic, dangerous situations, and you return to your country and you’re not happy with your situation, and you’re hearing all this angry rhetoric about the infringement of your rights and how the president is now being unlawfully pushed out of office, it’s not really that surprising that that you might turn towards picking up a gun and engaging in violent action to resolve what you see as a constitutional crisis.”
Thompson carries on: “These men have this sense that, ‘I had been waiting for another heroic mission, and here it is.’ The concern with the people who are in the military who joined up with the Boogaloo Boys or a militia group like the Three Percenters or the Oathkeepers or the Proud Boys is that they tend to be quite competent with weapons. They tend to be aware of basic military strategy and tactics, and they have the capability, more so than the typical civilian, to do great harm.”
What makes these extremists even more of a threat is the fact that they are powered by a warped idea of patriotism. According to Thompson, “one of the core things here is the sense that the foundational documents of the United States were these divinely rendered, perfect documents that were handed down to the founding fathers of the US. Now, they are under attack by nefarious outside forces that aim to undermine our constitution and the structure of governance and civic life. And so the only way to resist that is to pick up a gun and go get rid of the tyrants who are ruining this country.
“One of the iconic slogans that gets used in the far-right movement is the number 1776. That’s really everywhere. These guys are saying, ‘it’s time for a new revolution, it’s time to remember what happened in 1776.’ This is just like taking up arms against the British, except they’re taking up arms against the Democrats, against the socialists, against Black Lives Matter, against ‘antifa’ and possibly against immigrants and people of colour.”
They are taking up arms against the Democrats, against the socialists, against Black Lives Matter, against ‘antifa’ and possibly against immigrants and people of colour
One of the principal problems Thompson has encountered in his work is trying to reason with people to whom reason is a stranger. The extremists he has met automatically take him for a purveyor of “fake news”. “As journalists, we have this ongoing problem, which is that cutting through disinformation, conspiracy theory and bogus bullshit is really hard now.
“I feel like no matter how many times I do a documentary about things that are actually rooted in facts, there’s going to be a large chunk of the population that will not pay any attention to what I’ve reported. They will not believe it simply because that is their posture. They have accepted the line of information that they will receive, and anything that comes out from outside their bubble, they are not going to accept, and that is a worrisome thing.”
Thomson continues: “You want people to be critical when they see a documentary. What’s concerning, though, is that that critical eye has morphed into something else, a refusal to accept basic facts and basic reality and apply basic reasoning to things
“When we were out filming, a lot of times people were angry with us, just because we worked for public broadcasting. And we would say to them, ‘look, we were critical of President Obama, we have been critical of Donald Trump, and we will be critical of Joe Biden. That’s what we do. That’s our job as journalists.’ Then they would simply say, ‘but Joe Biden is not the president.’” It’s very difficult to argue with someone who believes that.
For all that, Thompson has not given up hope that his films can make a difference. After his documentary about the riots at Charlottesville, “eight white supremacists from the Rise Above Movement were arrested by federal authorities. Michael Miselis got pushed out of his job at Northrop Grumman, a big security contractor, and an active duty marine, who is a member of a Nazi terrorist group, got court martialled, jailed and forced out of the marines. Also, members of Congress investigated the nexus between the white power movement and the military.
“I’ve done stories that have helped get people who are wrongly convicted out of prison, and I’ve also done work that led to 138 border patrol agents getting investigated by the government, and a bunch of them lost their jobs. So I’m not just fixated on punitive things. But I am hoping that, whatever happens when we do this work, there is some sort of impact, some sort of transformative change.”
Thompson, who is married with an 11-year-old child, has been advised by the police to vacate his home “repeatedly” following credible far-right death threats against him. He is understandably worried about the effect on those closest to him. “The concern for my own safety is one thing, but the concern for my family is different. I’m mature enough to make bad decisions about my career, but they don’t really have a choice in that.
“My wife is a former private investigator, so she understands this world pretty well. Other people in my family are former law enforcement and former military. So in a lot of ways they understand the sort of world I inhabit, but I think generally they would like me to do something else!”
All the same, Thompson finds it tough to imagine doing anything else. “The problem for myself and my colleagues, is that generally we don’t run away from danger – we run towards it. Generally, we are gravitating towards dangerous situations and dangerous characters. The stakes that are involved make for compelling television and important stories.
“The harm that is being done is obvious. And so the need to do the journalism to document that harm, and hopefully correct it, is obvious. It’s hard for me to get excited about stories that don’t involve a life or death situation. The truth of my work is that is decent people almost always suffer grisly and awful fates.
“When there are people who can be held accountable for that damage, that’s what we try to do with our films. That may sound like an earnest, 16-year-old worldview – that there is evil in the world and there is harm being done. But it should be documented, it should be exposed, and we hope it can be stopped. That’s still what propels me.”
More than anything else, what alarms Thompson now is that even though Trump is gone, Trumpism hasn’t. “It absolutely persists. The ideas that began circulating again and really took hold during the Trump period have not disappeared. That ideology, those beliefs and the sense from a lot of people in the Maga world that they are being oppressed by an illegitimate government that is run by a cabal of nefarious globalists, that’s not going away.
“If you look at the polling, there are still tens of millions of people who believe that our last presidential election was illegitimate. So that’s a huge number of people who are already radicalised at a certain level, who believe the foundational premise of this country has been disrupted. And so the potential for one of those people to take dramatic, violent action – that would seem completely correct and righteous to them – is really high. That is the ongoing concern here.”
He carries on: “In right-wing extremist circles, there was a belief that illegitimate deep-state actors and traitors and socialists were trying to push Trump out of office. They were saying, ‘this will end in civil war’. But it didn’t just end in civil war – it ended in an insurrection.”
Thompson goes on to sound a deeply disturbing warning. “We’re facing the possibility of a mass-casualty attack by someone who says, ‘look, I believe in America, I’m a loyal patriotic American. But this country has gone deeply wrong. And we have a stooge for the Chinese Communist Party who’s running this country and who stole the election. Our guy has been forced out and we are on a complete war footing.’
“When you have a country that’s so fractured, and so filled with people who are so angry at the current regime, I think an atrocity is entirely possible, particularly since the language that circulates through these communities is about violence. It’s about overthrow, it’s about hanging the traitors, it’s about getting out the guillotine. When the rhetoric is all incredibly inflammatory, I think it’s worth taking seriously. And, you know, in the US, it’s just not that hard to get a weapon or to make a bomb and kill a lot of people. These are easy things to do.”
Mike Dunn, the leader of the Boogaloo Boys in Virginia, undoubtedly sounds prepared to give his life to the cause. In the wake of 6 January, he says: “We realised that we’re a lot closer to a revolution. Our recruiting and interest went completely through the roof as well. They’re beginning to understand that the only answer is revolution.
It’s about overthrow, it’s about hanging the traitors, it’s about getting out the guillotine. When the rhetoric is all incredibly inflammatory, I think it’s worth taking seriously
“I think we’re definitely looking at armed insurrection. Many of us in this movement, myself and a lot of other young people like me, have come to grips with the fact that death is a reality. It’s coming. We just want ours to count.”
Bennett chimes in with a warning not to underestimate these extremists. “These groups want to be instigators, the frontline of the civil war that is going to happen in this country. The skinheads and all of that neo-Nazi side of things – that is something people really don’t want to be associated with. But the scary thing is a lot of people in these groups we’re seeing now are your neighbours, they are your truck drivers and your doctors, and they believe in this.”
Reflecting on the malign effect of the re-vivified far right in the US, we will leave the final word to Susan Bro, the bereaved mother of Heather Heyer. “I always wondered, was she afraid? Did she see him coming? Dear God, I would love to have my daughter back.”
What would Bro regard as justice for her murdered daughter, then? “I don’t know. Nothing’s going to bring Heather back. Those of us who miss her, miss her forever.”
‘American Insurrection’ is on PBS America at 8.35 PM on Friday
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