Salon - "This is Trump’s America now!": MAGA diehards jumpstart a new year of political violence

There are already calls for vigilantes to round up "brown folks" to imprison in camps
By Amanda Marcotte

Senior Writer
Published December 30, 2024 6:00AM (EST)



Donald Trump isn't in office yet but his fans are already getting excited about hurting and stealing from people of color. Last week, Mother Jones reported on a letter circulating through Lincoln County, Oregon, calling on locals not to wait for Trump officials to start the promised mass deportations, but to take action for themselves. "Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate of brown folks," the letter instructed. "Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate."

The goal, the letter explains, is to gather information to help Trump's incoming appointments for Homeland Security in their quest to deport millions of non-white people, which will necessitate rounding them up in concentration camps. The letter ends with a promise of material rewards for people who participate. "When the brown folks are rounded up, their properties will be confiscated," the letter promises. "So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable."



This promise has strong echoes from history. When Jews were kidnapped for the Holocaust during WWII, it was common for their Christian neighbors to ransack their homes, stealing everything and enriching themselves. "They raided Jewish people’s homes, businesses, and offices in search of valuables," reads the Holocaust Museum's online exhibit, which includes pictures of people going through piles of stolen goods and selling off looted valuables. It's unclear if the letter writer knows this history and finds it inspiring, or if they are unconsciously recreating the Nazi past. Either way, the main takeaway is whoever is behind this letter doesn't want to sit back and let the Trump administration do their own dirty work. They believe the MAGA masses can be harnessed to help, in a vigilante fashion.

This brownshirt impulse has always been a part of Trumpism, as we saw with the rise of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other paramilitary gangs during the first Trump administration. It was one of the earliest and strongest indicators that MAGA is a fascist movement, and they later proved instrumental in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021. Since that failed, the organized paramilitary arm of MAGA has died down, though far-right violence against minorities has continued to rise. The lengthy sentences that Proud Boys and Oath Keepers received — especially compared to the much lighter sentences for the unorganized insurrectionists — appear to have had a chilling effect on those who would want to keep paramilitary fascist violence going.

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