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THE ELECTION STORY NOBODY WANTS TO TALK ABOUT  
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Rick Perlstein
August 28, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ A Q&A with David Neiwert, America’s foremost writer and thinker
on far-right extremism, on what might happen if Trump wins—or loses
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Members of the Proud Boys rally in front of the Ohio State Capitol
building in Columbus, Ohio, January 6, 2024., Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto
via AP

 

_David Neiwert was a 21-year-old newspaper editor in the Idaho
Panhandle in 1978 when the Aryan Nation hate group showed up in town.
He and his publisher arrived at a fateful decision._

_“We decided, ‘Oh, these guys just want publicity and we’re not
going to give it to them,’” he said. “Well, within about three
years that policy was completely discarded, because what followed was
an endless litany of criminality, culminating in ’84 with the
rampage of the Order, including bank robberies and assassination.”_

_It taught him a lesson that has informed his work for almost five
decades as America’s most important writer and thinker on far-right
violent extremism and its incursions into the conservative
“mainstream”: There is no acceptable choice but to shine a light
on forces like these._

_“You have to provide readers with the context into what they’re
doing and what their beliefs are, and make sure you’re not just
doing ‘he said, she said’ journalism, but actively exposing them
for the people to see,” said the writer of hundreds of articles on
the subject in newspapers, in blogs
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“Yes, certainly there are going to be people recruited because of
your journalism. But many, many people will be repelled. And more
importantly, officials and law enforcement will be prepared,
informationally, for dealing with these guys.”_

_Dave and I have been friends since blogging’s early days. One of
our encounters, in 2009, proved indelible to me, and had a huge
influence on the work I’m doing now. We were at the annual Netroots
Nation conference when news broke that a terrorist had assassinated
Dr. George Tiller while he was serving as an usher at church. The
Kansas abortion doctor had been wearing bulletproof vests out in
public since the first terrorist attempt on his life, in 1993. The
shooting followed months of threateningly escalating rhetoric on the
mainstream of the right since Barack Obama’s election. Neiwert had
been indefatigably documenting it all._

_Offhandedly, I mentioned to Dave that I expected his phone would soon
be ringing off the hook with interview requests, as reporters,
producers, and Google searches would quickly turn up Neiwert’s work
exposing how Fox News star Bill O’Reilly had, night after night,
been calling out this specific abortion doctor as “Tiller the Baby
Killer.”_

_Instead: crickets._

_“Journalism can be very cliquish,” my favorite Cassandra of the
Pacific Northwest stoically reflected. “If you’re not one of the
cool guys, you’re not one of the cool guys. I’ve never been one of
the cool guys.”_

_Mainstream American political journalists have always been shockingly
indifferent as well to the right-wing violence emerging in our midst.
In a wide-ranging Zoom call last week, Dave and I talked about that
institutional failure, and what that means for us now. A lightly
edited transcript follows._

RICK PERLSTEIN: WHAT ARE THE BASIC OUTLINES OF THIS STORY NO ONE WANTS
TO TALK ABOUT?

DAVID NEIWERT: We’re once again faced with a situation where a
substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts
of violence and bringing down the government. We saw this before, in
2020, in the run-up to that election and the aftermath. A lot of us
held back; obviously, these guys have a long history of blowing off a
lot of steam, talking, and wildly exaggerating their actual ability to
carry out a threat. But I think we saw on January 6th, that was
probably not the wisest view to take. We should have been paying more
attention to what these guys were saying amongst themselves online.
And what they’re saying amongst themselves right now is probably
disturbing. Because they’re talking about shooting their neighbors.

Expand

[Infernal Triangle 082824 2.jpg]

David Neiwert,  Slowking/Creative Commons

LET’S TALK ABOUT WHAT EXACTLY WE SAW BEFORE: WAS THE SYSTEM BLINKING
RED IN THE RUN-UP TO JANUARY 6TH?

Absolutely. I was trying to warn in my columns
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were really gearing up for violence.

THE RESPONSE OF A LOT OF PEOPLE TO WARNINGS LIKE THOSE IS THAT
YOU’RE CRYING WOLF.

Sure. I’m used to that. And that’s the thing: It does come from
this contingent that has a track record of just laying out a deluge of
bullshit. But it’s getting frantic and ugly enough that we’re
getting to the point where I don’t think it’s just hot talk. I
suspect that there’s guys involved in militias, particularly with
Kamala Harris taking the lead in the polls, running paramilitary
training operations. Some of these guys are actually well-trained
veterans, some of them with combat experience.

I KNOW, IN PART FROM YOUR WORK, THAT THESE THINGS TEND TO COME IN
WAVES. DO YOU TEND TO SEE THEM COMING?

To some extent, mostly because I keep a finger on the pulse of what
these guys are saying online amongst themselves. But it’s incredibly
hard to predict; we’re talking about unstable people, acting out.
Except in the case of January 6th, when it wasn’t just that; it was
that the unstable people were being ginned up.

SO LET’S TALK SCENARIOS. WHAT IF TRUMP WINS?

There are two components. One is the immigrant front, the whole
Minutemen ethos is going to come into play here, where these guys
armed with AR-15s will claim we’re just supplementing the
government; we’re just rounding people up and serving them up to the
Border Patrol. Which is what they did in Arizona for quite a few
years. But this will spread to the national scale.

The second component, it’s pretty obvious that Trump and his minions
basically hope that they can work the electoral count to a point where
they can force the outcome of the election to either go through the
Republican Congress or the Republican Supreme Court. But either way,
it will be a de facto installment of a dictator. Then there will be
massive protests—I think quite deservedly so. And the Three
Percenters, militias, the Proud Boys, who have all been gearing up for
this, are going to come out to play, not just defending the Trump
administration but attacking the protesters. And doing so with
reckless abandon. They’ll just call them “antifa”—[they] have
a ready-made excuse.

If we’re talking about the kind of rhetoric we’re seeing in
right-wing Telegram spaces, they’re basically talking about how it
will be “decided by the bullet box, not the ballot box.”

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE DEMOCRATS WIN?

Even a Joe Biden–sized victory, I think, could lead to instability.
There will be contested states, like we saw in Arizona as well as
Georgia. These actors will show up at ballot-counting centers, as well
as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the
votes. We certainly saw in the spring of 2020, these armed bodies of
men entering state legislatures. I think that this is their hope: that
they can create a lot of chaos in places like Arizona and Georgia so
that they can’t actually carry out their votes, can’t actually
certify the votes. Then they will say, “Well, we’ll now throw it
to the state legislatures.”

DO YOU SEE ANY COORDINATION ON THAT BETWEEN OFFICEHOLDERS AND
PARAMILITARY ACTORS?

I don’t know that there is any communication. A lot of it is just
that they’re all swimming in the same soup.

AND IF HARRIS IS INAUGURATED? ARE WE IN THE CLEAR?

No. I think that we’ll have at least a year or two of dedicated
domestic terrorism against various government entities, as well as
liberal figures, including stepped-up attacks against drag queens.
They’ll lean quite heavily into the Christian nationalist
authoritarian agenda, against anyone supporting the, um, “demonic
liberal agenda” …

DO YOU THINK APPROPRIATE LAW ENFORCEMENT PREPARATIONS ARE BEING MADE?

No. Nobody even talks about it, Rick. That’s why this is a problem.
Nobody is even recognizing that this is building.

To counter this effectively, obviously you want to have the DOJ tuned
in and ready, and I’m not sure that they are. Certainly, the FBI has
shown itself to be extremely problematic under Christopher Wray in
terms of the ongoing presence of dedicated Trumpists within the FBI.
That’s the wild card. Law enforcement is our main guardrail for
these kinds of things, and we have Trumpist cops working on the local
level, we have them working on the state level, and we have them
working on the federal level.

I think they actually played a large role in our failure to prosecute
these January 6th insurrectionists adequately. Just think about how
the Secret Service deleted all their freaking texts. And likewise, the
FBI was not particularly forthcoming about their own internal
communication regarding Proud Boys and Oath Keepers prior to January
6th, but we know that they were looking entirely in the wrong
direction. They were planning on antifa showing up in Washington and
creating these riots! And that was part of Trump’s plan, too: That
was going to enable him to unleash the Insurrection Act. And then they
didn’t show up. So they were just left to fight with the cops,
right. But they will continue to throw that bogeyman out there.

The problem is that affects law enforcement, because we have a lot of
law enforcement who fall for this stuff! Who watch Fox News,
and _believe _that antifa is this deep, dark threat to America.

IS THE MEDIA READY?

No. None of them are considering it as a factor. I think it’s
amazing that someone like Amanda Moore
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who did this incredible undercover work exposing these neo-Nazis’
connections to the Republican Party, she can’t even get an editor to
pick up her work. All these editors and all these producers are all
like, “That’s not interesting anymore, we don’t care about that
stuff.” They are basically dismissing the problem: “We don’t
need to keep talking about that sort of thing.” [_An honorable
exception, as so often
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is Talking Points Memo
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It always baffled me, even back in the ’90s, when I was reporting on
this stuff, that the political journalists that I knew, that I worked
with, didn’t seem to recognize that this work that I was doing had
overlap with the work they were doing. You’re dealing with domestic
terrorism; we’re dealing with politics. But politics is also about
how people behave around each other. This stuff creates disruption in
communities, it creates a feeling of distrust in the ability of
government to keep each other safe. That’s one of the reasons
domestic terrorists do it in the first place: They’re trying to
undermine the public’s faith in the ability of the government to
keep them safe.

DO YOU STILL HEAR THAT OLD ARGUMENT THAT COVERING IT ENCOURAGES IT?

All the time. All the time.

WHENEVER I DO A PIECE ABOUT THIS KIND OF THING, I GET EMAILS FROM
PEOPLE IN VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES, OR JUST FROM LIBERAL PEOPLE IN RURAL
AREAS, TERRIFIED FOR THEIR OWN SAFETY AT THE HANDS OF THEIR NEIGHBORS.

Being from a rural area myself, the really great unreported story that
the corporate media won’t touch is: Why don’t we talk about these
people in these small towns who are Democrats in red cities and red
states, and what life is like for them. Because I can tell you, I
mean, my family and friends who live in such conditions: They feel
threatened, they feel intimidated, they feel like they have to keep
their heads down. They don’t put bumper stickers on their cars, they
don’t announce their politics in social situations, or they do it
very discreetly, and only on a one-to-one basis.

Mainstream media talk to the folks in the diners. What about the
people who frequent the Indian restaurant in a small rural town?
“The Trump voters that nobody understands!” Well, what about the
Democratic voters who have to live in these cultures where they’re
being aggressively threatened all the time?

WHAT ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, THE HARRIS-WALZ PEOPLE, BOTH THEIR
POLITICAL OPERATIONS AND THEIR POLICY PLANNING?

We don’t have anybody in the forefront, because the mainstream
Democratic Party really doesn’t want to run on this issue. Talking
about how we need to prepare to counter these right-wing ideologues
who are threatening violence really runs counter to the whole
“joy” narrative.

I don’t know how we talk about it, but it’s a reality we have to
deal with. We need to have an adult conversation about what is likely
after the election. Because these guys have worked themselves into
such a powerful frenzy, I don’t see them being able to just walk
away from it if they lose. And they certainly won’t walk away from
it if they win.

They’re almost certainly going to engage in violence, and I think
there’s going to be a lot of people hurt. And they’re going to
have multiple opportunities for this violence, and multiple venues and
multiple excuses for this violence. So we need to look at what those
opportunities are, and prepare the officials who are involved in
getting the votes counted. Democrats should have a comprehensive
ground game prepared. Certainly, the first priority has to be really
heavy security around ballots, particularly in the swing states.

IF DEMOCRATS, THE MEDIA, AND LAW ENFORCEMENT DO NOT GET ON THE CASE,
WHAT SHOULD ORDINARY PROGRESSIVES DO? GIVEN THE DANGER, _SHOULD _WE
PROTEST?

Yeah, I don’t see not protesting as an option if they shove Trump
down our throats.

YOU CAN ALMOST IMAGINE HAVING TO TAKE INSPIRATION FROM THE FREEDOM
RIDES, FROM MISSISSIPPI SUMMER, FROM SELMA AND THE EDMUND PETTUS
BRIDGE.

All I can tell you is that people _should _be getting ready; they
should be talking to local and statewide law enforcement. Can we get
this conversation going at least? People _need_ to be talking about
this.

_Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2024. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.:
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