Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via AP
Members of the Proud Boys rally in front of the Ohio State Capitol building in Columbus, Ohio, January 6, 2024.
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 and Substack, on Daily Kos, and in books. “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.
Slowking/Creative Commons
David Neiwert
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?
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, 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, is Talking Points Memo.]
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.
It’s Project 2025 Summer here at The Infernal Triangle! I’m studying the whole thing for a series of columns. If you want to share your expertise on one of the federal departments the Heritage Foundation wants to weaponize or gut, contact me at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.
