The Radicalization We Refuse to See
We will be fighting for the soul of America long after Trump is gone. Stay vigilant.
A friend of mine relayed a conversation she had with someone the day after the verdict came in on Trump’s New York fraud case.
As my friend relayed it, her companion couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. “So, he had sex with a porn star and and paid her hush money. All politicians lie. People get paid hush money all the time. That’s what non-disclosure agreements are about.”
My friend calmly explained that this wasn’t a “hush money” case, this was an “election fraud” case. That Trump paid off Stormy Daniels, via Michael Cohen, because he thought if the public knew he had sex with her it might cost him votes in the 2016 election.
This was just days after the Access Hollywood video came out, in which Trump was heard telling Billy Bush that he grabbed women by the pussy, and “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
“Women will hate me,” Cohen testified Trump told him, when it became obvious Daniels was shopping her story around. “This is gonna cost me the election” if it gets out, Trump added.
It is illegal, my friend explained, to pay someone off to keep information from voters. That’s why he was convicted.
My friend’s companion responded, “I didn’t know that! Why didn’t anyone say that? They just keep calling it a hush money case.”
This is the problem with news media framing. We glom onto a catchy phrase that will sell and make people watch/listen/read. Even if that phrase is misleading, or minimizes the gravity of the situation.
I’m sure there are some journalists who think that saying it was an election fraud case would be biased - that it would be taking the side of the prosecutor. But isn’t it our job to report what people are charged with?
The point is, there are too many people out there like my friend’s companion, who are aware of the headlines swirling around them, but don’t stop to look more closely. If those headlines are misleading, then the people hearing them are misled.
On September 29, 2020, in a debate with candidate Joe Biden, Trump was asked to denounce right wing militia groups. After some hedging, he looked at the camera and said, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”
I knew immediately that this was a call to action. This was an alert. The Proud Boys knew that, too. Anyone who had even a passing understanding of right-wing militias knew that.
“Within minutes,” reported Sheera Frenkel and Annie Karni of the New York Times, “members of the [Proud Boys] were posting in private social media channels, calling the president’s comments ‘historic.’ In one channel dedicated to the Proud Boys on Telegram… group members called the president’s comment a tacit endorsement of their violent tactics.”
Then, on December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted his infamous call to action for January 6th, “Be there! Will be wild!” Militia groups immediately knew this is what they were standing by for.
One Twitter employee testified in one of the subsequent sedition trials that he saw a significant uptick in violent rhetoric after the December 19th tweet.
Yet, as January 6th unfolded just a few weeks later, there were too many people in my life - good, intelligent people - who were shocked that this was happening. I was like, “He told them to stand by. He told them to come on January 6th. What are you not understanding?”
Like my friend’s companion, the people who were shocked by January 6th were taking in the headlines, but weren’t looking deeply at the stories. Or they were politically active liberals, who could not bring themselves to imagine that an insurrection could happen in the U.S.
They could have, at any time, attended an Anti-Defamation League event on extremism. They could have checked in every once in a while on the list of extremist symbols on the ADL website. (Whatever issues you may have with the ADL, they do a great job of tracking domestic extremism.)
They also could have checked in with the prolific output of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes lists of hate groups that included people like Richard Spencer, the “dapper Nazi,” who fooled many journalists into thinking he was palatable, until his entire operation collapsed under the weight of lawsuits after the Charlottesville rally in 2017.
The people who were shocked by January 6th could have read Michelle Goldberg’s 2006 book, “Kingdom Coming,” which was one of the first books I read that alerted me to Christian Nationalism and the violence it threatened to wreak.
As did Kristen Du Mez’ 2020 book, “Jesus and John Wayne.”
When George W. Bush was president, sociologist Pete Simi actually went undercover with white supremacist groups in order to learn about them. The result, “American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement's Hidden Spaces of Hate,” is an incredibly eye-opening and terrifying book that I just assumed all of my liberal acquaintances had read. Or at least read about.
The point is, there was a lot of information out there. People just weren’t accessing it.
Which brings me to Teddy Wilson.
No, not that Teddy Wilson, who was an iconic jazz pianist in the 1940s.
This Teddy Wilson is my new(ish) must-read on extremism. He publishes a Substack called “Radical Reports,” where he writes on white supremacist groups, shares copious amounts of links to stories on domestic radicalization, and shares other writers’ stories he finds interesting.
Full disclosure: One of those stories a while back was one of mine. It was a nice surprise.
But this week… Jesus fucking Christ Teddy!… this week, he published an exhaustive story detailing just some of the violent online speech on the night Trump was convicted.
And I am once again terrified.
His entire piece is way too long to reprint. Here is a link to it. I urge you to subscribe.
These are the parts that stood out to me.
First, there are the “mainstream” right wingers.
“We’re going to get back up, we’re going to regain our strength, and then we’re going to vanquish the evil forces that are destroying this republic,” [Jesse] Watters said during his program on Fox News. This narrative framing of the perceived political opponents of Donald Trump as evil is the continuation of the far right’s mainstreaming of “genocidal rhetoric.”
Former journalist and current conspiracy theorist Lara Loomer was asked by kindred podcast host Tim Pool if there “should…be list of Democrats who need to go to jail?”
Loomer responded “One hundred percent” and added, “not just jail, they should get the death penalty.”
Seconds later, Wilson reports, the video feed abruptly stopped. Later, it was removed from YouTube.
A number of “mainstream” right-wingers echoed the idea that there should be a list of Democrats to arrest, and called on Republican district attorneys and attorneys general to carry out those arrests. Some of these mainstream right-wingers include: Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA; right-wing podcasters Kambree Kawahine Koa and Auron MacIntyre; Attorney General wannabe Mike Davis; and “Sean Davis, the co-founder and CEO of right-wing publication The Federalist, who posted an ‘enemies of the people’ list on Twitter/X, and which apparently includes everyone from Chris Cillizza to Barbara McQuade to Anthony Fauci.”
Then there’s the less “dapper” right wing extremists. Wilson writes:
“On Patriots.win, the message board populated by the online MAGA community which began as the The Donald on Reddit, commenters indulged in violent fantasies including stockpiling guns and ammunition for a civil war, and calling for arrests and execution of perceived political enemies.”
This included Stew Peters, the far right antisemitic White Nationalist media personality, who posted on Telegram that, as Wilson relays, the “judicial system has been weaponized against the American people [and] we are left with no other option but to take matters into our own hands.”
Peters also posted an image of a noose under the words “extreme accountability” and captioned “It’s time,” according to Wilson.
Wilson quoted another commenter:
“All involved need to be designated as traitors to America and banished from the country. The head of the snakes need to be executed, and 1,000,000 men (armed) need to go to washington [sic] and hang everyone. That's the only solution.”
Even the Proud Boys rose up from the ashes. Wilson quotes one Columbus, Ohio member saying on Telegram that the group was previously “very careful to parse our words and remind people that political battles are best suited for the ballot box…Today? You can take it however the fuck you want. Your move.”
Wilson wasn’t the only person to comment on this. Tim Miller appeared on Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast and talked about the “moral depravity” of Republican leaders.
What I want my friend’s companion to know… what I want all of my politically left friends who can’t look reality in the eye to know… is that the issue isn’t whether Trump wins in November. He won’t win in November. The issue is that even when Trump goes away, the Pandora’s Box he opened - the furies he let out that were already there - will not go away. No matter how much we don’t want to see them.
Please, let that become part of your everyday knowledge. This fight is exhausting. But we have to keep paying attention.
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I meant it: "Jesus fucking Christ, Teddy!" I don't know how you enmesh yourself in this without getting depressed! But I'm glad you do.
Thank you for citing and quoting my work!