Illustration by Alex Nabaum
This article appears as part of a special issue of The American Prospect magazine on state policy divergence and aggression. Subscribe here.
In December 2020, Rusty Bowers’s modest suburban home in the Phoenix suburbs became the site of virulent MAGA protests. Bowers, the Republican Speaker of Arizona’s House of Representatives, had come under intense pressure from Donald Trump and his lieutenants to call a special session of the Arizona legislature to investigate supposed fraud in the election that Trump had just lost. When Bowers refused Trump’s entreaties, his legislative colleagues went after him on Twitter.
Before long, his home address had been posted across right-wing social media networks. “Trump trains” of pickup trucks, waving MAGA flags and blaring their horns, descended on Bowers’s home, where his 42-year-old daughter, Kacey, was convalescing in the final stages of a battle with liver failure. An armed gunman confronted one of Bowers’s neighbors. A video billboard baselessly and scurrilously accusing him of being a pedophile was parked outside his home. Bowers went on to receive the nation’s second-highest civilian award for his defense of democracy, before losing his next primary race to a challenger who claimed the devil stole the 2020 election.
Red state–supported vigilantes are specifically aiming to intrude into blue states and impose MAGA values.
The vigilantes and their enablers in government weren’t done. In a May 2022 presentation from True the Vote, a front group for election deniers, state Sen. Kelly Townsend parroted a conspiracy theory that Democratic operatives were using Arizona’s early-voting drop boxes to deposit thousands of illegal ballots. “I have been so pleased to hear of all of you vigilantes out there that want to camp out at these drop boxes,” Townsend told her audience. “So do it. We put the word out today that if you’re going to come and be like a mule and stuff ballot boxes this time, you’re going to get caught.”
Arizona has used early voting for decades; its ballot drop boxes, located at courthouses and government centers, allow voters to exercise their constitutional rights in a secure and convenient fashion. But when early voting began, voters were shocked to find masked, heavily armed men patrolling the drop boxes. Although the vigilantes concealed their identities, reporting from ProPublica revealed that they included members of the AP3 militia, a group whose popularity surged as federal prosecutors went after other militias more centrally implicated in the January 6th insurrection.
The vigilantes’ presence cast a chill over Arizonans’ exercise of the franchise. An untold number of voters walked or drove away rather than subject themselves to being surveilled by vigilantes carrying long guns and recording equipment. After one voter tried to drop off her ballot, she was followed by a group of individuals, triggering a federal civil rights investigation.
The MAGA Movement’s Revival of State-Sponsored Vigilantism
The vigilante attacks on Arizona’s elections came as a shock. Yet public, private, and in many cases public and private voter suppression has been a regular feature of America’s elections for most of the nation’s history. Long into the 19th century, states restricted the franchise to white men whose good character was established by owning property where they voted. After the Civil War, when constitutional amendments guaranteed voting rights to Black men, states and private actors primarily in (but not limited to) the South devised an array of voter suppression schemes, both blunt and subtle, to ensure that the formal right to vote was little more than an empty promise for anyone but white Democrats.
As social media users pointed out when images of the Arizona drop box vigilantes went viral, the Ku Klux Klan used the same techniques, similarly animated by a purported need to protect the “integrity” of the vote, to manipulate elections during Reconstruction. The Klansmen’s efforts may have formally violated the law. But little in the way of punishment was forthcoming. State officials not only tolerated but often encouraged the violent enforcement of white supremacy.
State-supported vigilantism remained a central feature of American political life throughout the long decades of Jim Crow. Only after the civil rights movement gained momentum did the tide turn. But to the surprise and horror of practically everyone who understood state-supported vigilantism to be gone for good, the ignoble practice is now making a roaring comeback. Equally inspired and chastened by the chaos of January 6, 2021, MAGA strategists recalled that for private violence and intimidation to work well, it would have to be normalized, and even legalized.
MARICOPA COUNTY ELECTIONS DEPARTMENT
Armed vigilantes in Arizona patrolled drop boxes throughout the state during the 2022 elections.
To carry out this plan, MAGA lawmakers backed by a loose network of lawyers, dark-money groups, and right-wing advocacy shops like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America have repurposed Jim Crow–era strategies to advance the dual objectives of prosecuting today’s Christian nationalist culture wars and entrenching MAGA political power.
In our forthcoming book Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy, we term the first of these strategies dissenter vigilantism. By reconfiguring what used to be a right to opt out, lone dissenters are given the de facto right to impose their policy views on their communities.
The second strategy, courthouse vigilantism, encourages MAGA foot soldiers to surveil members of their communities and bring legal proceedings to punish deviations from MAGA orthodoxy, even if those deviations take place outside their jurisdictions. Pioneered in Texas’s infamous anti-abortion bounty hunter law, it has become a key mechanism for policing the gender of high school athletes and pushing LGBTQ+ families out of public life.
The next strategy, street vigilantism, involves the use of violence and threats of violence to control who exercises rights and how. Through immunities from criminal prosecution, an exorbitant conception of “self-defense” that allows for the use of deadly force when heavily armed vigilantes feel “threatened,” kid-glove exercises of prosecutorial discretion, and Trumpian uses of the pardon power, MAGA politicians telegraph that violence against their political enemies is welcome and will not be punished.
Lastly, electoral vigilantism involves the use of dissenter, courthouse, and street vigilantism to take and hold political power. In locales like Shasta County, California, and Clallam County, Washington, it has propelled right-wing government takeovers, creating a vicious circle in which vigilante-backed officials further empower the foot soldiers who put them in office, all in the hope of creating a Jim Crow–style lock on political power. But this is not preordained; in Shasta County, frustration with the incompetence and maladministration of the militia-backed officials has enabled some of the community’s old-school conservatives to regain their footing. Control of county government is now closely divided between MAGA die-hards and their opponents.
Copycats, Spillovers, and Intrusions
The most immediate effects of the right’s revival of legal vigilantism have been in MAGA-dominated states such as Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. Recent reporting shows that vigilante-targeted teachers and students are being forced to conceal their identities; denial of access to reproductive care and gender-affirming care has led to arduous, expensive, and sometimes dangerous trips to secure services out of state; and lifelong Republicans have been hounded from office and public life more broadly for faithfully executing their duties. Local governments controlled by vigilantes have thrown out voting machines and wasted millions of dollars pursuing MAGA conspiracy theories, while liberal towns and cities, notably in Texas and Florida, have seen their authority to govern themselves handed over to vigilantes operating with a license from the state.
As political scientists have documented, however, state and local governments today play a particularly prominent role in national political battles, serving as laboratories for policies copied by other states and, perhaps soon, by the federal government. A glance at Project 2025 reveals how much inspiration the drafters of the de facto manifesto of a second Trump presidency have seemingly drawn from the likes of Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Glenn Youngkin.
But state-supported vigilantism isn’t simply about cementing right-wing control in MAGA jurisdictions and prototyping policy for the Heritage Foundation. Red state–supported vigilantes are specifically aiming to intrude into blue states and Washington, D.C., and impose MAGA values.
Like much of the vigilante playbook, the prototype for these incursions is the handiwork of Donald Trump. In 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump issued a Twitter call to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN,” where lawmakers were considering whether to challenge an emergency declaration issued by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer restricting public gatherings.
Trump’s tweet animated far-right extremists, some of whom understood the president to be calling for the “boogaloo,” an armed uprising that’s a fixture of anti-government conspiracy theorists. In a preview of the January 6th insurrection, caravans soon descended on Lansing to protest at the governor’s residence. Not long after, armed protesters flooded the state Capitol building. From high in their perch, they looked on as legislators attempted to conduct the state’s business. A viral photograph captured an agitator screaming in the face of masked State Police officers. One of that man’s confederates explained his presence as follows: “The message here that I had: Violence will happen and it will happen in two weeks when people literally don’t have any food … You’re gonna rub people the wrong way. There will be violence. People are dying from the side effects of all this legislative action.”
Blue states owe duties to fellow Americans denied basic rights by red-state authoritarianism.
Following Trump’s lead, MAGA organizers have mustered posses to “protect” communities from Black Lives Matter protests. The most notorious such gathering took place in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where Kyle Rittenhouse (who traveled from Illinois upon learning about the rally on social media) shot and killed two BLM protesters and injured a third. MAGA leaders have organized pro-Trump caravans in California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, and Texas, where in 2020 they attempted to run a Biden campaign bus off I-35 between Austin and San Antonio. They’ve summoned mobs to combat supposed ballot-stuffing and dispute unfavorable election returns, as in Arizona. The national news media inevitably covers these incursions, and right-wing commentators applaud them. As one caravan headed to Lansing during the pandemic, Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted it was “time to get your freedom back.”
In today’s America, there is no such thing as purely local vigilantism. The toxic combination of social media, national news, and cross-state activist networks—all of whom take their cues from Mar-a-Lago—makes every local attack a part of a national political battle.
As if targeting women, LGBTQ+ people, and racial minorities doesn’t do enough work to silence their voices, bully them out of civic spaces, and maybe even compel them to relocate to safer (often bluer) states, right-wing partisans are intimidating voters and election officials, and destabilizing democracy in the process. In the wake of violent threats, doxing incidents, and harassment campaigns led by both townspeople and elected officials, scores of nonpartisan election administrators and supervisors have stepped down from their posts.
In a May 2024 survey by the Brennan Center at NYU School of Law, 38 percent of local election officials reported experiencing threats, harassment, or abuse. Fifty-four percent of officials said they were concerned for the safety of their colleagues and staff, and 28 percent reported being concerned about their family or loved ones being threatened or harassed. After pro-Trump mobs descended on polling sites and tabulation centers in 2020 and 2022, Arizona has taken extraordinary measures to secure them in the upcoming presidential election. In Maricopa County, uncounted ballots are kept in “cages” made of chain-link fencing, CCTV cameras record ballot-counting rooms and the exterior of the tabulation center, and a SWAT team is stationed at the main building where officials tabulate votes.
The harms from being forced to operate in this fortress-like environment are not limited to nonpartisan election officials. For decades, the sites of American democracy have been open to public view and often participation, allowing voters, volunteers, and party officials to observe where votes were counted and how they were tabulated. Now, MAGA strategists have begun to realize that those sites present soft targets for vigilante attacks. County and state officials’ understandable inclination to harden them has, lamentably, altered what once was an open, inviting process into one that, out of necessity, is more closed and policed. That, ironically, will further validate the vigilantes’ conspiratorial beliefs, as the tabulation of votes becomes a function conducted by “deep state” bureaucrats insulated from public oversight.
Interrupting Vigilantes’ Interstate Pipeline
Already, some numbers of Americans are seeking to leave vigilante-enabling jurisdictions, principally to obtain access to medical services. But the same MAGA lawyers and activists who deployed vigilantes to stamp out access to legal abortions in Texas (and surveil high schools to prevent transgender children from competing in women’s sports) are now targeting interstate travel.
Under the guise of regulating “abortion trafficking,” Texas cities have enacted local ordinances that unleash vigilantes against individuals who use public highways to secure out-of-state abortions. Taking a page from Texas, Idaho has endeavored to make it a crime to help a minor cross state lines to seek an abortion or obtain abortion medication.
Still, blue states are not powerless to stop vigilantism affecting those seeking refuge. They also have the power to combat red-state vigilantism and the violence, cruelty, and democracy-distorting effects those practices have had on the nation as a whole.
A first step is to provide greater protections for those seeking sanctuary. Individuals forced to flee states because they have been targeted on the basis of their identity, because their kids are going to schools where teachers can’t teach Black history or let students use bathrooms that match their gender identities, or because they have a bona fide need for medical care that has been outlawed in the jurisdictions they are fleeing should receive relocation assistance and housing support. The principal argument for providing such supports is moral: Blue states owe duties to fellow Americans denied basic rights by the hollowing out of federal protections and red-state authoritarianism. But like most refugees, red-state refugees are likely to be an economic boon to the places they flee to over the long term. By making themselves inhospitable to those who do not conform to the edicts of white Christian nationalism, red states are depriving themselves of a valuable source of human capital.
AP Photo
The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 granted federal protection against Ku Klux Klan attacks. They could be resurrected to prevent modern vigilantism.
The next order of business is protection against vigilantes for those within blue-state borders. The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, offers an object lesson in what not to do. Reflecting on how right-wing militias were able to dominate the storied college town, then-Gov. Terry McAuliffe commented: “You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army … [They] had better equipment than our state police had.” To be sure, open-carry laws complicate efforts to counter Charlottesville-type gatherings. But even if states are precluded from disarming protesters by open-carry rules, many have little-used laws that ban private militias and empower state police to break up mobs. In moments when violence is likely to spike, blue-state attorneys general should set up specialized units to monitor and respond to organized threats to the civil rights of state residents.
Blue states also need to do more to protect the privacy of the short-term visitors who’ve come in search of health care and related medical services. Laws in Connecticut and Massachusetts prevent local courts from providing information or assistance to vigilantes using courts to go after individuals who cross state lines to secure reproductive or gender-affirming care. The coverage of such laws varies from state to state, however, and many jurisdictions have yet to adopt them. They should be enacted anywhere where MAGA lawmakers don’t control the state legislature.
Reconstruction Revisited?
Of course, blue-state pushback is simply one line of defense. Only the federal government has the authority to override state law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause and the resources and manpower to ensure that the targets of today’s vigilantism are protected. But, in part because of the MAGA stalwarts in Congress and on the federal bench, the U.S. government has been unable to lead the charge, even with a Democrat in the White House.
It is noteworthy that some of our most venerable civil rights statutes were enacted to address forms of state-backed vigilantism that closely parallel the legalized thuggery states are encouraging today. The Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 granted federal protection to Black Southerners and their allies whom the Klan targeted in campaigns of racist terror. Section 6 of the 1870 act made it unlawful for two or more persons to conspire to “intimidate any citizen with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise and enjoyment of any right or privilege granted or secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Recognizing that state courts would nullify their federal protections, the acts expanded the federal courts’ jurisdiction to provide a fair forum in which to vindicate federally protected rights. Enforcement proceedings could be initiated not only by the Department of Justice (which Congress created in 1870 in part to better protect Reconstruction) but also by individuals whom vigilantes attacked.
To its shame, the Supreme Court has constricted the acts’ scope to a shadow of what the Reconstruction Congress originally intended. Moreover, the Court’s erasure of long-standing rights to bodily autonomy (and the vulnerability of a federally protected right to marry to future Supreme Court meddling) leaves gaps in the acts’ coverage. With no federally guaranteed rights to protect, the acts’ tools are a dead letter. Fixing those gaps should be a priority for Vice President Harris’s 100-day legislative agenda if she pulls off a win in November.
But even in their current, hobbled form, the enforcement acts can be powerful tools against vigilante violence. Following the Unite the Right rally, the Enforcement Acts served as the backbone for a civil case in which a jury levied millions of dollars of damages against the rally’s organizers. Although the jury ultimately found the defendants liable under state law, the case highlights the power of litigation brought under the acts, including in cases brought by government litigators. The defendants acknowledged during trial that a verdict would bankrupt them, significantly weakening their ability to coordinate future Charlottesvilles.
This month, a case using Section 2 of the third Enforcement Act heads to trial in Texas federal court, against the organizers of the Trump train that attempted to force a Biden campaign bus off the highway in Texas. Rejecting the defendants’ bid to avoid trial, Judge Robert Pitman wrote: “Although the methods of political intimidation may change over time and require adapting the [Enforcement] Act to new contexts, the conduct alleged here requires no such adaption; the Defendants’ alleged conduct is similar to a type of political violence that the Klan engaged in at the time of the Act’s enactment.” Judge Pitman cited a chilling 1877 case, United States v. Butler, in which conspirators captured two Black men traveling on a public road and forced them “to get down on their knees, and … swear that they would vote the Democratic ticket.”
Bringing more such cases would require the DOJ to recognize the vigilante threat emanating from red America for what it is, not to mention substantial investments of investigators and lawyers. Given the department’s plodding response to the January 6th insurrection, and Trump judges’ success in derailing Trump prosecutions, one might question whether the department has the gumption for this. But the Democratic Party is under new leadership. If Vice President Harris prevails in November, she has the opportunity to appoint new enforcement officials who can respond to MAGA vigilantism with the urgency it demands.
