• The proliferation of pro-Trump militia groups across the country eerily echoes the rise of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi.

On March 23, 2023, former president Donald Trump launched his third presidential bid in front of a raucous, rollicking crowd in Waco, Texas. Waco, a city of about 145,000 people in east Texas, situated halfway between Dallas and Austin, was the scene 30 years earlier of a bloody showdown between federal and state law enforcement officers and the heavily armed Branch Davidian cult, a siege that left scores of Branch Davidians dead in a suicidal conflagration. Since those events, which began on February 28 and ended on April 19, 1993, Waco has become iconic in the memory of far-right, violence-prone militia groups, and it inspired a militia-affiliated extremist, Timothy McVeigh, to explode a truck bomb in Oklahoma City exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people and injured 680.

By selecting Waco as his campaign kickoff event, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to violence-prone extremists nationwide. The Houston Chronicle, in an editorial about Trump’s rally, wrote that the choice of Waco went far beyond a “dog whistle” and compared it to “the blaring of air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10,” adding that Trump was “stoking the fires of Waco.”

In his speech, Trump fed his audience the red meat that many of them were looking for. He opened the rally by playing a song, “Justice for All” by the “J6 Choir,” recorded by men imprisoned for the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, accompanied by footage of the mob attack. Claiming that the United States has been taken over by “Marxists and communists,” Trump said ominously, “2024 is the final battle. That’s going to be the big one.”

And he added: “I am your warrior. … I am your retribution.”

Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he suggested that “the Second Amendment people” — i.e., his gun-owning backers — might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court choices. In 2019, he said, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” And in 2020 Trump famously told the Proud Boys militia to “stand back and stand by.” Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.

Such rhetoric has led many people to warn that Trump, an authoritarian favored by white supremacists, is a fascist, or proto-fascist, and that stopping him in this year’s election is essential to prevent the erosion of democracy, end runs around the US Constitution, and the beginning of a slide toward fascism in America. But one thing that Trump doesn’t have, so far at least, is something that both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler could count on in their parallel ascents to power in the early 1920s: a reliable force of street thugs and paramilitary units that he and his allies can deploy against Trump’s “enemies,” from the Democrats (“Marxists and communists”) to immigrants, racial minorities, LGBTQ organizations, and that “enemy of the people,” the media.

Certainly, Trump has summoned US militias and other extremists to his cause. In 2020, for instance, at the height of nationwide protests against lockdowns, mask requirements, and school closures at the start of the coronavirus crisis, Trump issued a series of viral tweets urging his followers to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia, where armed adherents were mobilizing in street demonstrations. For instance, on April 17, 2020, Trump tweeted — characteristically, in all caps — “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Soon afterwards, gun-toting Trump supporters invaded the state capitol in Lansing. Most egregiously, he called on supporters to gather in Washington on January 5-6, 2021 — “Be there, will be wild” — for a rally that ended in the occupation of the Capitol and led to Trump’s impeachment.

Yet so far Trump’s interaction with militia groups and what the US Department of Justice calls “domestic violent extremists” has been mostly at arms-length, and the national militia movement is leaderless and inchoate. But America is heading into an election as a bitterly divided nation in which a substantial portion of the populace believes that violence may be necessary. According to a survey by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security & Threats, as many as 14 percent of Americans say that violence is justified to “achieve political goals that I support,” and 4.4 percent — that’s more than 11 million US adults — agree that “the use of force is justified to return Donald Trump to the presidency.”

“We are in such an extremely polarized country, where more and more issues are seen as zero-sum, that we are in a tinderbox state where anything can set people off,” says Mark Pitcavage, who’s spent decades studying far-right extremists for the Anti-Defamation League, and who says that Trump’s entry in politics has politicized the militia movement. “It’s like we’re standing outside a building filled with explosives and hoping nobody’s smoking inside.”

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An American SA?

It’s hard not to draw a parallel between the SA’s role in protecting Hitler’s beer hall events and the emergence of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Three Percenters — all paramilitary-like groups — as unofficial bodyguards and security for Trump. According to Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The Oath Keepers provided security to Trump campaign rallies and events in Texas, Minnesota, Washington, DC, and elsewhere at regular intervals between 2016 and 2020.”

During and after Trump’s presidency, gun-toting protesters occupied several state capitols, organized militias at the US-Mexican border to combat what Trump called an “invasion,” mobilized militia-like formations to engage in street fights with antifa and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd, and created self-defined protection units to defend business owners who opposed pandemic-imposed lockdowns and closures.

Ann Coulter, who called the Proud Boys “brawny, tattooed brutes,” invited a 20-man squad of Proud Boys to protect her at a speech at UC Berkeley in 2020. And Roger Stone, the inveterate right-wing mischief maker and Trump ally who’s maintained close ties to the Proud Boys, used the Oath Keepers, another far-right militia, as a personal security detail on January 6, 2021. The Proud Boys “lined up behind Donald Trump and were willing to commit violence on his behalf,” said a federal prosecutor involved in charging those involved in the January 6 attack. “The defendants saw themselves as Trump’s army.”

[…]

But the pool of potentially violent Trump supporters is still enormous. (Those half-million Oath Keeper followers are still around.) In 2021, The New York Times, citing law enforcement analysts, reported that anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 people belong to militias in as many as 300 groups, and that, worryingly, one-fourth of those are veterans or active-duty military personnel. The Proud Boys, virtually decapitated after January 6, reverted to local chapters. Julie Farnam, the CEO of Pandorus Intelligence LLC, is a veteran of the Homeland Security Department and before and during the January 6 insurrection she was the acting director of intelligence for the US Capitol Police, where her warnings about the coming storm went unheeded. In an interview with The Nation, Farnam said that there are at least 154 local, decentralized chapters of the Proud Boys in 48 states with a robust communications system via Telegram. “They are still hyper-aware of what Donald Trump is saying and doing,” says Farnam, who’s closely monitoring their activity.

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“It would be foolish to underestimate the power of Trump’s comments to call rogue militias to action,” wrote Mary McCord, in essay for Lawfare five years ago. “The militia movement has shown that it will take action based on the president’s statements.”

[…]

In an interview with The Nation, McCord says that she has documented a kind of “call-and-response, dog-whistle” pattern that allowed Trump to summon armed support groups to his cause, and that his insistence that the 2020 election was rigged has created a dangerous climate for 2024. “If he doesn’t win, he’s been planting the seeds of a false narrative that people with AR-15s are listening to,” she says. “A lot of what happens is up to Trump and what words he uses, and to what extent does he call people to engage in violence.”

[…]

Whether Trump could and whether he intends to rally armed right-wing extremists on his behalf — especially were he to lose the election in November — is something that is unknowable. But the very fact that it’s conceivable does indeed invoke the specter of It Can’t Happen Here.

Source: Bob Dreyfuss, thenation.com/article/society/donald-trump-squadristi-nazis/