The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-08-28-election-story-nobody-talks-about-neiwert-qa/
Members of the Proud Boys rally in front of the Ohio State Capitol building in Columbus, Ohio, January 6, 2024.
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.
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 that they 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?......................................
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I worry about this, I worry about literally getting shot by neighbors. I suspect they would shoot the people across the dirt road first--they are Mexican and therefore it's visibly unlikely they are trumpers (we are wave-friendly with them). We have a rabid trumper near us, in fact we share a well with him. He shoots his guns off nearly every day (at what???), the last time we saw him in person he said the cost of electrical power was Biden's fault. The guy who came to stain our deck asked outright if we were Democrats (answer was "Let's not talk politics"
. This very threat is the reason I will not socialize anywhere in town, and therefore, since we are relatively new here, have no local friends. The last thing I would feel safe doing is going anywhere near the Democrat HQ here in town. We aren't just keeping our heads down, we are hiding from our neighbors.
One super-scary trumper moved away, thankfully. The ones a bit down the road who had the gigantic trump banner on their driveway fence in 2020 do not have even a sign out now. It's mostly this gun nut that we worry about most.
