Trump's imminent pardons will green-light another wave of far-right violence
Granting clemency to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists won't just 'own the libs.' It will send a message that anti-democratic violence will have the president's blessing. With video
This year’s 4th anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol felt so ominous not merely because the man who organized and provoked it in an attempted coup is resuming power, but also because he is consecrating the mob with pardons.
Trump told Time that one of his first official acts will be to pardon most of the rioters accused or convicted of storming the Capitol to block the certification of Biden’s victory. “It’s going to start in the first hour. Maybe the first nine minutes.”
He’s wavered a little since, saying he’d “look if there’s some that really were out of control” and told NBC News he may make exceptions “if somebody was radical, crazy.” Still, it’s clear that those exceptions will be few in number: “Those people have suffered long and hard. And there may be some exceptions to it. I have to look.”
But while the media will portray these pardons and the subsequent outrage they will provoke as merely Trump “owning the libs,” their real meaning will be much deeper, much darker, and far more worrisome. It will give the green light to the groups behind the assault.
Of course, the street brawlers like the Proud Boys and the militiamen like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters who attacked the heart of democracy that day are the tip of Trump’s insurrectionist spear. And they were built up gradually, both before and during his tenure.
My first encounter with the organized white-nationalist right in street protests occurred in Seattle on the night of Trump’s inauguration: Jan. 20, 2017. The presence of Milo Yiannopoulos on the University of Washington campus drew a massive protest that turned violent. I was there to cover it for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
A man standing next to me (the one wearing the leather jacket) was shot and badly wounded by an alt-right Milo fan who thought she was defending her husband. The victim survived, but only after months in the hospital.
I was a witness at the trial of the couple. It ended in a hung jury, led by a couple of MAGA jurors who refused to let the shooter (who essentially admitted she pulled the trigger) face conviction or jail time. The rest of the jury voted to convict her. She and her husband walked free.
A little over three months after the Seattle riot, I found myself in the middle of the Proud Boys’ first event: April 15, 2017, in Berkeley. It was in fact probably the most violent of the 20-plus far-right events I covered from January 2017 to June 2022. It was full to the gills with neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and militia radicals—terms I do not use loosely.
The next big confrontation came in Portland, Oregon, on June 6, 2017. It occurred only a week after an unstable alt-right figure who had marched with the rally organizers had stabbed two men to death on a commuter train. City officials and other counter-organizers urged them to wait a week. They refused. As it happened, there was relatively little violence that day. Similarly, a far-right rally later in August was relatively calm—with, naturally, the usual brawls.
A couple of weeks later, there were a few physical confrontations when Joey Gibson, organizer of the Portland rally, and his “Patriot Prayer” crew traveled to the Evergreen State campus in Olympia to protest the “cancel culture” there. Again there were ugly brawls, but police managed to keep the two sides mostly separated.
Most of the Northwest events were organized by Patriot Prayer, but Proud Boys were the dominant presence for all their events, including those held also in Seattle and the Bay Area. Gibson defended them. Their role was always clear and simple: Amp up the violence.
By the summer of 2018, the lid was coming off and the violence became extreme.
Over time, these street events kept organizing under a changing menu of right-wing causes, after first launching under the “free speech” rubric. One was protest against “shariah law.” Another was about “men’s rights.” One protested “sanctuary cities” and immigration.
Eventually, they devolved into straight-up forays by gangs of right-wing thugs from rural areas, the exurbs and suburbs who actually cared very little about the supposed cause du jour being protested. They were there to beat the crap out of “leftists” and “antifa.”
That, as I have explained previously, was the larger strategic idea behind the Proud Boys and their militia cohorts: Organize busloads of men eager for violence to invade liberal urban centers and create scenes of horrifying violence, then blame it all on “antifa.”
The entire purpose of this far-right street theater was to create a “violent left” bogeyman for media consumption—mainly through the presence of violence-seeking far-right activists. In the process, the lines between mainstream Republicans and the right-wing extremists was blurred, if not erased altogether. Militiamen and Proud Boys commingled with mainstream Republicans and Christian Nationalists, forming Trump’s Jan. 6 army.
This pattern continued after Jan. 6, as well. The Proud Boys and militiamen shifted their strategy to focus on organizing for local events. They actually gained fresh recruits, extending their networks to include anti-vaxxers and Christian evangelicals.
This became clear on June 11, 2022, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, when a large phalanx of masked neofascists from Patriot Front tried to invade the annual Pride in the Park event at the city’s waterfront. They were arrested and no violence occurred.
Patriot Front was not alone that day. During the hours before their late-afternoon arrival, militia and Christian-nationalist “Patriots” prowled around and through the scene with guns. After the arrests, the connections to local far-right evangelicals became clear.
The scene in Idaho has been ominous because it manifests how deeply the extremist right has managed to insinuate itself into mainstream society there—which is the realization of the dream of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations that moved there and set up shop decades ago. These same forces—particularly the viciously racist brand of Christianity that they practice—have been seen emerging in this coalition on a national scale, especially as young white neofascists form alliances with Christian nationalists.
The people being pardoned by Trump represent these factions’ street-fighting forces. And with these pardons, they’re being green-lighted to bring their politics of menace and hate back to our political landscape. They’re eager to get to work.
As Joyce Vance of the Brennan Center warns:
Trump summoned these individuals to the Capitol to support him and now he will pardon them to complete that transaction. Trump will use the pardon power to make it clear that violence and violation of the law can be forgiven in service to himself.
Pardoning the rioters is a grotesque misuse of the pardon power because, cloaked in the appearance of lawful authority, it would put the presidential seal on crimes that go to the heart of an attack on our democracy, an effort to undo the will of the voters and seat a man who lost an election as the country’s leader. By advertising his willingness to pardon the people who supported him rather than the Constitution, Trump is sending a message to the people he is counting on to support him this go-round: If they protect him, he will take care of them. It’s a message fit for a would-be authoritarian.
Note: This coming week, I will publish dossiers on the top four insurrectionists Trump is likely to pardon: Stewart Rhodes, Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean, and Enrique Tarrio. Consider it a preview of coming events.
Yes I do believe that is a great & dangerous possibility. And that is part of the 47-Git's political machine's plan - choas & anarchy done in the the nane of Trump.
Red hats are the new brown shirts. Along with the (anti) constitutional sheriff's and related groups, red hats will start patrolling and beating those suspected of whatever the hate tells them to hate. It's all too predictable.