1). “Peril, Pets, and Possibility: Republi-Fascists, Weimar Dems, and Post-Election Scenarios”, Sep 13, 2024, Paul Street, The Paul Street Report, at < https://paulstreet.substack.
2). “The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About: 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”, Aug 28, 2024, Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert, The American Prospect, at < https://prospect.org/politics/
3). “How MAGA Is Already Justifying The Use Of Military Force At Home If Trump Wins”, Aug 27, 2024, Josh Kovensky, Talking Points Memo, at < https://talkingpointsmemo.com/
4). “The Weekend Essay: Democracy Needs the Loser: The observance of defeat, especially in an election, is often all that keeps a state from tipping into violence”, August 24, 2024, Barbara F. Walter, The New Yorker, at < https://www.newyorker.com/
5). “JD Vance Working to 'Hijack' MAGA to Push Theocracy, Ex-Friend Warns”, Sep 14, 2024, Gabe Whisnant, Newsweek, at < https://www.newsweek.com/jd-
6). “My former friend JD Vance has aligned with something far worse than MAGA: Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity”, Sep 14, 2024, Sofia Nelson, MSNBC,
7). “Show #1216”, Sep 12, 2024, Len Osanic interviews James Corbett, and afterwards Jeff Carter: Topics: 9/11, Fletcher Prouty Documentary, Black Op Radio, Corbett interview from start of show to 59:28, from 59:28 to 1:28:15 Carter interview, at < https://www.blackopradio.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The first 6 of these items reflect directly on the upcoming presidential election and the relatively rare, and extremely dangerous political and socioeconomic conditions, that we see as we move towards November 5, 2024. Paul Street's essay at Item 1)., “Peril, Pets, and Possibility: ….” is, IMHO, particularly brilliant and pertinent on this topic. The U.S. has now moved into the cagtegory of “dangerous societies” in which political issues are resolved by terror campaigns, the imposition of hated social controls, and outright governmental coercion, particularly if Trump wins, but there will likely be unprecedented levels of violence regardless of who actually “wins”. Item 2). “The Election Story Nobody ….”, and Item 3)., “How MAGA Is Already Justifying ….” both look at the mobilizing of far-right Militias and other sorts of right-wing gangs and their potential for violent actions after the election, regardless of who “wins”. In Item 4)., “The Weekend Essay: ….”, the noted expert of violent movements of the right and the breakdown of democracy, Barbara F. Walter, compares the U.S. with Nigeria and Kenya, both places where major battles between political / ethnic / socioeconomic factions took place. The U.S. has many of the disturbing characteristics of a society where these kinds violent struggles can easily take place.
Both Item 5)., “JD Vance Working to 'Hijack' ….”, and Item 6)., “My former friend JD Vance ….”, discuss the fact that Vance is actually far more of a fascist and an ultra-reactionary than is Trump himself. Vance is now working hard to see that a particularly harsh and odious Theocratic regime will take power in the U.S. with a special plan to destroy all the liberal attitudes and institutions that have made living in this country often pleasant and usually at least bearable. Vance, a very sick individual, and he is ready to impose an agenda that the far-right elements of the Catholic Church want force the population to accept.
Finally Item 7)., “Show #1216”, presents a tremendous analysis of the events of 9-11 (that marked their 23rd anniversary on September 11th. James Corbett, who provides a wonderful website with wide ranging analysis and muck-raking examinations. He was particularly a skeptical of the events that took place now 23 years ago. He “saw the light”and began to seriously question what had happened after about 5-years in 2006 when he attended and listened to presentations by such leading lights as Peter Dale Scott and Graham MacQueen at that conference. And Corbett notes that the questionable and always dangerous program of covert ruling class interference in and disruption of the normal functioning of our society actually goes back, in a direct line, to the days of his youth in the 1960s. The John F. Kennedy assassination was the first big step, and after the forces of darkness got away with that one they were “off to the races”.
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The Maps Presented below show just how tight this election really is. One thing these maps do not do is to present the effects of the many methods used by the far-right Republicans to undermine the validity and authoritative nature of U.S. elections, that have generally been counted accurately and honestly. This is the cost of imposing an extremely unpopular agenda on a resistant majority of the population.
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Peril and Possibility: Post-Election Scenarios
Image by Phil Hearing.
Tim Walz is telling people to “leave it all on the field” of the election.
Americans better not follow his advice. The 2024 election day will kick off a much bigger game full of peril but not without some opportunity on the path to the emancipation of humanity.
Poisoning Our Blood
Let’s start with some peril.
We will live now in a time where one of the two major and electorally viable US-capitalist political parties has gone fascist. And that means, among other things, that that party no longer accepts elections and jury verdicts that don’t go its way and is determined to eliminate its political opposition.
The “Republican” Party is united behind a frothing, demented, decrepit, twice-impeached fascist maniac who previously tried and remains determined to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law “democracy.”
Donald “Be Wild” Trump advocates the extra-judicial execution of suspected shoplifters.
He promises a draconian mass deportation campaign.
He promises to end inner-city crime “in one day” (a promise of live-ammunition, IDF-style military deployment in Black and Latino communities).
He says he wants to be “dictator for one day so that we can build the Wall and drill, drill, drill” – an at once arch-nativist and eco-cidal ambition in a time of escalating climate catastrophe.
He tells Christian fascists that they only have to vote one more time for him and then they’ll never have to vote again because he’ll have fixed the nation.
He says he’ll declare the Insurrection Act to crush protest on his next Inauguration Day.
He promises to end “Marxist domination of higher education” – something that does not remotely exist.
He channels Adolf Hitler (of whom he has long been a fan) by promising to “clear the Marxist vermin out of the country” and claiming that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
He has gathered around him an army of far-right policy wonks led by the Heritage Foundation with a giant detailed blueprint for the Christian white nationalist takeover and makeover of US government and society. (The head of the Heritage Foundation says that its neofascist Project 2025 is a “second American Revolution” that “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” – a not-so veiled threat of bloody repression.)
Red states have outlawed teaching about racism and have passed bills making it legal for MAGAts to run over liberal and left protesters with their cars and pickup trucks
Trumpist Republicans have recently conducted raids against Latino civil and voting rights activists in Texas and sent out police to intimidate citizens who signed a pro-abortion rights petition in Florida.
In Georgia and elsewhere the MAGA party has recruited local and county election authorities, securing pledges to refuse to certify votes that don’t go the Republi-fascists’ way.
Fascist paramilitaries are networking with local and county police to intimidate Democratic voters.
Trump has recently asked the nation’s local police forces, loaded with Trump fascists, to join in the voter intimidation project, reminding cops that their badges and guns inspire “fear…they fear you!”
The putschist Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors Cuz the Guys with the AR-15s Don’t Want to Hurt Me” Trump promises long prison sentences for those who have opposed, investigated, and prosecuted him.
Trump laughs about a sick Trumpist’s savage physical assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
This deranged, orange-hued malignant narcissist and pathological liar continues to deny that he lost the 2020 presidential election and has now added the related Hitlerian lies that the Democrats have “opened the borders” to bring in “illegals” from “prisons and insane asylums” who are being put up in luxury hotels while “eating dogs and cats” and being registered to vote for the Democrats while being given Social Security and Medicare.
Three days ago, the demented lunatic Trump got up in front of 52 million Americans on prime-time television to insanely call the centrist corporate Democrat Kamala Harris “a Marxist,” to wildly claim that Democrats want to “execute the baby” (with abortions after birth!), to absurdly deny that draconian tariffs on imports will increase prices for US consumers, to absurdly claim he had nothing to do with January 6 other than “give a speech,” to absurdly insist that he has nothing to with Project 2025, to preposterously claim that most Americans wanted to end women’s constitutional right to an abortion in 2022, and to continue his insane story line about the Democrats bringing in “illegals” as an electoral force to “destroy our nation.”
And Yet He Could Well Win
Despite all this head-shaking insanity and Kamala Harris masterfully beating the living crap out of him during last Tuesday night’s “presidential” debate, Donald “They’re Eating Dogs” Trump has a decent shot at winning back the presidency. Five Thirty-Eight quite realistically has Trump batting .450 coming to the election plate next November. Whatever you think of Five Thirty-Eight, Trump is very much in the horse race.
This is thanks to numerous factors, including these:
+ The right-tilted archaic, 18th Century slaveowners’ Electoral College, which effectively shrinks POTUS elections to a small handful of states and requires the Dem POTUS candidate to beat their Republican opponent by 4 to 5 percentage points in the national popular vote to win the White House.
+ A fascism-denying and fascism-normalizing mass corporate media that has granted Trump years of massive free exposure while downplaying the existential menace he poses to what’s left of US democracy and indeed to life itself.
+ A Weimar-like Democratic Party that refuses to properly call out Trump and Trumpism as fascist (since doing so would suggest the need for a popular mobilization the dismal Dems don’t want to encourage) and that is too conditioned by and too committed and captive to capitalist-imperialist imperatives to respond to the needs of the masses in a way that might make their elitist party seem like an attractive and authentic people’s alternative to the other ruling class party.
+ Oceans of right-wing dark campaign money, much from billionaires and other rich donors happy to see the US go fascist if it means more wealth for them through tax cuts and deregulation.
+ The toxic role of so-called social media in the spread of conspiratorial, racist, and fascist narratives among millions of angry and ignorant citizens
+ The overwork, alienation, apathy, cynicism, under-education, ignorance and sheer stupidity of millions upon millions of US citizens.
+ Harris’s identification with the problem of inflation during the Biden years.
Post-Election Violence
Contra “leave it all on the [election] field” (Walz), America is likely to experience significant post-election violence and quite possibly major civil conflagration after the election. The political scientist Barbara F. Walter, the world’s leading student of contested elections, has recently noted that the United States today is marked by the three main factors that predict election-related political violence across the planet over the years:
(i) winner-take-all presidential systems with strong presidencies as opposed to parliamentary systems where there is a significant measure of power-sharing between different parties and cooperation is required between parties. In the former system, “losing an election may leave significant portions of the electorate without representation, reduce incentives for inter-party collaboration, and allow the winning side to impose its agenda on the losers.”
(ii) “Government with parties that are organized by race, ethnicity, or religion make elections even more fraught… If your group is shrinking as a percentage of the population, then you can anticipate… the year you will be essentially shut out of the system.”
(iii) “Finally, elections are particularly dangerous in democracies whose institutions are weak or under attack. If citizens believe those in power can manipulate the outcome… then some will believe that violence and even war may be justified. Demagogues and would-be dictators, anticipating a potential loss, can groom their supporters to reject the results, using claims of fraud and calls for retribution.”
Sound familiar?! These three factors are all in place in the USA, where:
A. (unmentionably bourgeois-) “democratic norms are… degraded by… long-harmful features of our political system.” Here Walter mentions gerrymandering, voter suppression, the Electoral College, corporate money, and lifetime judicial appointments (she might also have included the absurdly powerful and malapportioned US Senate, the Senate filibuster, the corporate media monopoly, and states’ rights).
B. The two dominant parties (the “blue” Democrats and “red” Republicans) are increasingly split along racial, ethnic, religious and other cultural (and I would add regional) lines.
C. The Amerikaner Republi-fascist Party is fueled by and channels widespread white paranoia about coming Caucasian and “European cultural” minority status.
D. Trump and Fatherland/FOX News and other parts of the right-wing media have seeded the Republikan base with Hitlerian red-meat lies about a stolen election and immigrants being brought into the country (by the “radical left deep state”) to illegally vote for Democrats.
Political scientists have long failed to relate the well-known (inside academia and presumably in the US intelligence community) risk factors for political violence to the United States, but, Walter notes, “it’s now impossible to ignore that America has all the characteristics of a country at risk.”
Walter offers some chilling thoughts on what political violence will look like in the US if Trump loses: right-wing riots targeting the election result/count; far-right militias attacking “traitors within their own party, Republicans deemed too moderate” (because they “rejected MAGA”); assaults on minorities in red and purple states; ethnic and ideological cleansing of perceived “outside interlopers” in “red” turf.
Walter thinks violence is quite possible after a Trump win, too. Protest from “the left” would yield a “heavy-handed military response” from Trump, something that would in turn “radicalize” many Americans.
Scenarios
Let’s look at some of the post-election scenarios going forward…
If Trump prevails, he will likely do so with critical help from voter suppression/intimidation and vote-count manipulation and quite possibly through the intervention of the now fully MAGA-tized Supreme Court. Many Americans will protest, leading to right-wing attacks encouraged by Trump even before he takes power and tries to crush demonstrations with federal military force. Popular outrage and protest will be especially intense if he wins after losing the national popular vote and/or if he gets in through the corrupt, illegitimate, and fascist Supreme Court. Violent state and extra-state repression of “left” protest will feed escalation that will provide pretext for more repression that will be “justified” in the name of putting down “antifa terrorists.”
But even without protest, Trump promises legal and physical “retribution” against immigrants and urban minority communities and against anyone and everyone who previously opposed and current opposes him, starting with people in current or former positions of power.
A second Trump presidency will simply not be accepted by a vast swath of the US populace and many blue states and cities may find them engaged in various forms of nullification and rebellion.
(If Trump wins the coming contested election, David Neiwert recently told Rick Perlstein, far-right terrorists will come out to shoot protesters they’ll label as “radical terrorist antifa” and “they’ll get heavily involved in violent immigrant round-ups.”)
A civil war could evolve, raising the question of which side US military personnel align with. We already know which side rural and metropolitan police will join: Trump.
If the former mass incarcerator and ongoing imperial killer and genocide-backer Kamala “STFU About Gaza Unless You Want Trump” Harris wins, she’ll do so by a maddeningly small margin, Trump and his many revanchist minions will scream steal. Fascist thugs will go on a bloody rampage across the country (an attack on the US Capitol seems unlikely since the Dems currently hold the White House and will have the legislative branch ringed with military force, but vengeance will be inflicted on blue/Democratic areas and gatherings and individuals from coast to coast). Lone wolf incel fascists with assault weapons will be activated Early targets will include vote counting centers and Democratic towns and cities surrounded by angry Trumpist-fascists in “red states.” The new Harris administration and Democrats across the nation will be dealing with right wing violence well past her inauguration. Animated by extreme patriarchy combined with virulent white supremacism, many of the nation’s bitter Amerikaners will be driven over the edge by the presence of a Black/South Asian female in the White House (never mind that she will bend over backwards to accommodate the right wing and “unite” the country under the banners of national chauvinism and imperialism).
(If Harris wins, Neiwert says, paramilitaries will show up brandishing assault weapons “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.’” A Harris inauguration will be followed by “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.’” )
Again, a civil war could evolve, raising the question of which side US military personnel align with. We already know which side both rural and metropolitan police will join: Trump.
A Gridlocked President Harris
A President Harris can forget about getting much done that she can use to make a “progressive” case for her re-election to millions of voters whatever sick faux-populist the RepubliNazis run in 2028. The Dems are certain to lose their slim Senate majority this fall and the Supreme Court is already firmly in Christian Fascist hands.
Half the nation’s absurdly powerful state governments will stay in Republi-fascist hands. They will continue to impose various draconian and revanchist policies and nurture fascist politicos and movements.
If she wins and survives the post-election challenges and violence, Killer Kamala will stew and stink in the combined capitalist and archaic constitutional clusterfuck that is late bourgeois democracy, American Minority Rule style. She could come to see her domestic political profile dependent on her willingness to act on her repeated campaign promises to keep the US-imperial military machine (what she boastfully calls “the world’s most lethal fighting force”) set on kill. As a Black female, she will feel especially compelled to wield imperial power with mass-murderous force.
Radical Opportunity in Bourgeois Democracy’s Crisis: for Re-Polarization
What could possibly be hopeful about the coming madness? America is more polarized and divided between its two major parties and between regions, with the harsh divisions reaching up into its ruling class, than any time since 1860-61. The conflict, chaos, and insecurity likely to break out beneath the Democrats’ teary-eyed calls for “unity” and “getting things done” on a bipartisan basis can create an opening for seriously radical and even revolutionary forces fighting to re-polarize the country away from (a) “red versus blue” to (b) the people versus the ruling class and the class ruled system – capitalism-imperialism – that vomits up the revolting “choice” between ever-more right-wing and nativist ruling class War Democrats and vicious authoritarian ruling class Republi-fascists. There is liberating opportunity as well as eliminationist-authoritarian menace in the current perilous moment. It is possible that civil conflict and even civil war between hyper-polarized late bourgeois-democratic “blue” America and fascist “red” America this and next year(s) could provide an opening for actually radically Left forces to re-polarize America between humanity and class rule/capitalism-imperialism and bring forth a serious movement for what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters: “the radical reconstruction of society itself” and for what Marx and Engels rightly called the only alternative to “the common ruin of all”—“the revolutionary [socialist] re-constitution of society at large.”
The Election Story Nobody Wants to Talk About
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
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.
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How MAGA Is Already Justifying The Use Of Military Force At Home If Trump Wins
Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.
In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.
This dark vision of the future draws on deeply pessimistic theorizing, on lectures about Marxist anti-government ideology seemingly ripped from the Cold War, on memories of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and on claims that Democrats and the left will be unable to accept a Trump victory. It all comes against the backdrop of senior officials around Trump and Trump himself reportedly having been eager to invoke the Insurrection Act while he was in office, and mulling its actual use if he’s re-elected.
In this situation, a second Trump administration would invoke the law to deploy the military to enforce immigration laws as part of a broader mission at the southern border — a proposal Trump has often spoken about publicly. But it would also make that invocation to do something far more extreme and at odds with American history: use the military against protestors.
Wargames
For this story, TPM spoke with influential right-wingers and reviewed publications, public statements, and planning documents from Trump-affiliated think tanks. They presented a vision of a Trump victory in the 2024 election that, in their telling, would almost immediately be followed by street fighting and mass violent protests aimed at destabilizing the new administration.
It’s all feverish: Several people TPM interviewed predicted that “people will die;” others imagined foreign control of their opponents and Marxist infiltration. Through it all ran an unwillingness to distinguish between peaceful protest and the employment of violence.
“If you see a peaceful protest from the left, please call me, because it’ll be the first time I’ve ever seen that,” Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, told TPM.
Howell, who served in the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration, helped direct a wargame that the Heritage Foundation ran simulating the 2024 election. Apart from preemptively dismissing the prospect of a fair election, the report suggested that readers should “expect public violence from left-aligned entities in the event of disfavored outcomes,” while warning that “biased media outlets” would minimize and understate the severity of that violence.
Howell laid out a similar, extended scenario to TPM: an outgoing Biden administration and the press would ignore mass violence, he said.
“I think people are going to die and I think they’ll excuse it,” Howell told TPM. “And I think it’s awful and I think we should be preparing for it.”
That, Howell said, would then present the Trump administration with a clear objective once assuming office: “Bring law and order back to this country.”
Howell wouldn’t say directly whether that would lead to the president invoking the Insurrection Act, only that “all items on the menu should be looked at to protect the people of this country against the terrorist element.”
There are many, many other prominent voices fantasizing about this.
Jeff Clark, the former assistant attorney general who briefly tried to hijack the DOJ during Trump’s 2020-2021 attempt to stay in power despite losing re-election, has suggested that the U.S. is subject to “color revolutions” — mass social unrest, aimed at violently achieving regime change, orchestrated by its own intelligence agencies. Glenn Beck urged his readers in June to prepare for a “2024 color revolution.”
Others laid out post-election scenarios that were somewhat less lurid, but still envisioned rioting as a political tool that could be deployed against them. Gavin Wax, head of the New York Young Republicans, speculated to TPM that following a Democratic loss, it would be part of “overall psychological warfare, showing strength, taking to the streets.”
Conservative policy influencer Chris Rufo argued in a recent article that Americans should expect the left to stage violent riots before the 2024 elections, saying that the same tactic, supposedly, “paid an electoral dividend” in 2020.
In the minds of Trump’s supporters, this planning is justified — in line with Trump’s promise of “retribution.” In their telling, he’s already borne those same slings and arrows that he envisions for his opponents: years of attempts by the “deep state” to thwart his administration, followed by supposedly unjust political prosecutions. He is punching back. It sets the stage, for Trump and those around him, to claim they are simply engaged in a tit for tat: using the machinery of the state to suppress his political opponents.
And, in a stunning coincidence, those same opponents will happen to be violently rioting just as Trump takes office — at least in the fantasies of these hardcore supporters.
Peter Feaver, a scholar of civil-military relations at Duke University, told TPM that the powers of the executive had “evolved” over the years, and that their responsible use had it come to “depend on electing a principled President.”
Feaver served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He added that the judiciary has long given the executive branch the power to use the Insurrection Act to override state law enforcement, in part out of deference to national security decision-making. Federal troops have been deployed domestically in dozens of situations; to quell the 1992 Los Angeles riots, to ensure desegregation efforts, to break up railroad strikes.
“It’s not as if we’ve never had somebody who has tested the line, but we haven’t had somebody who has gone rogue to completely and permanently subvert the Constitution,” Feaver said.
Higher stakes
For many right-wingers, the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests serve as a benchmark, often invoked when forecasting the kind of developments that they see as inevitable over the coming months, and requiring a tough response following a potential Trump victory. On the right, those protests are regarded as the high-water mark of recent left-wing violence.
As MAGA influencers tell it, the media and local, Democratic-controlled city governments ignored wanton lawlessness and violence, leaving shop owners and police squads to fend for themselves among violent mobs. The sense of grievance that’s emerged ignores the reality that many of the 2020 marches against police brutality were peaceful and managed to avoid burning down any police stations or looting stores. But the memory of that moment of activist mobilization remains powerful, among this set, and continues to inspire fear.
Howell and others said that in their view, the November election would lead to a far greater level of chaos across the country than what was seen in summer 2020.
“Much more is at stake,” Douglas Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho pastor who has become influential in conservative circles, told TPM. “With the killing of George Floyd, it was simply an opportunity to vent, but no actual power was at stake. And with the presidential election, it would be actual power.”
Setting aside the crimped definition of “power” here, Wilson envisions left-wing self-preservation as further inflaming the imagined post-election violence.
“If Trump wins, a lot of high powered, highly placed people are going to go to jail,” Wilson added. “They don’t want to go to jail.”
Wilson has become increasingly influential among self-described Christian Nationalists, who see Trump as a vehicle to punch through an agenda that would try to reshape American society, bringing it closer to their hardline interpretation of Christianity. Wilson appeared last September at an event held on Capitol Hill called “Theology of American Statecraft.” He spoke immediately after a talk given by Russ Vought, a former Trump Office of Management and Budget director who has taken a leading role in developing policies for a second administration, including through Project 2025.
Vought illustrates another feature of the summer 2020 protests that looms large over how some right-wingers cast the upcoming election: They were, they contend, misunderstood by the public, and a missed opportunity for the administration.
During the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump mulled invoking the Insurrection Act multiple times. According to a memoir from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump mused about having the military shoot protestors in the legs while discussing whether to invoke the Act.
“A lot of criticism that President Trump got from the right, particularly during the primary, was because he didn’t want to invoke that,” Wax, the New York Young Republicans chief, remarked.
In an undercover recording released last week, Vought was caught on camera discussing Project 2025. At one point in the recording, Vought remarked that “George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration.”
“We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm,” he said.
Many of those that TPM spoke with echoed Vought’s language in how they characterized protest. Howell, the Heritage official, said that the aim of protests after a potential Trump victory and inauguration would be “to destabilize the United States of America and the last beacon of hope and a free country in the West.”
A review of the paper that Vought referenced, authored by former DHS acting secretary Ken Cuccinelli and another staffer, shows that it answers an undisputed question: Does the Posse Comitatus Act, which blocks executive branch officials from deploying troops domestically, allow the president to use the military to defend the border?
That part of the paper answers a question that’s long been settled: The Pentagon regularly deploys troops in support of protecting the U.S.-Mexico border, though not in a law enforcement capacity. But as the New York Times first reported, the document makes extensive legal arguments for using troops to arrest people as part of a domestic deployment.
Lingering questions
Joseph Nunn has studied the Insurrection Act and related issues around domestic military deployments, and has warned as a potential second Trump term approaches that the law has virtually no safeguards: the president can invoke it at will, with no review.
“This is actually the longest the United States has ever gone without an invocation of the Insurrection Act since the first version of the law was enacted in 1792,” Nunn, a fellow at the Brennan Center, told TPM. (The last time the Act was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when state and local law enforcement briefly lost control of sections of the city.) He noted that the Act is intended for situations in which civilian law enforcement cannot cope; thanks to heavy investment in state and federal law enforcement, Nunn said, those kinds of emergencies have become exceedingly rare.
Using the military against peaceful demonstrators would cut against a foundational element of American public life: the right to freely and peacefully make your views about the government known, absent government retribution.
“To the extent that any candidate or person in the orbit of a candidate is suggesting a preemptive plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, that’s inappropriate,” Nunn said. “The purpose of this law is to respond to sudden emergencies. If you are planning it months in advance, that’s by definition anticipating an abuse of the law.”
Neither of the two missions that the Trump team is envisioning — immigration enforcement or putting down protests — falls remotely within the ambit of why people join the military, Nunn added. “People who join the military don’t do so because they look to be deployed against their fellow Americans,” he said. Domestic law enforcement, among other things, is not seen within the military as its job. “It’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be focused outward, on defense.”
A military commander might not want the mission, but it’s would be unusual verging on unprecedented for senior officers to refuse to carry out an order.
Throughout his first term, Trump was observed time and again making his wishes known without explicitly directing his subordinates to carry out a given action. When he mused in summer 2020 about shooting protestors, he did not order subordinates to do so: per Esper’s account, Trump simply wondered why the option wasn’t on the table.
It leaves the country with a riddle that only Trump, if elected in November, can solve: will he go further this time? And will those around him do the same?
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Election 2024 Material
“The Weekend Essay:
Democracy Needs the Loser: The observance of defeat, especially in an election, is often all that keeps a state from tipping into violence”,
August 24, 2024, Barbara F. Walter, The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/democracy-needs-the-loser
The election was all anyone could talk about. The country would soon choose a new President, and conversations in homes, marketplaces, and houses of worship were dominated by a single topic: Who would win? Lurking behind these discussions was a more ominous question: Would there be violence? During the previous election, four years earlier, mobs had burned buildings, snatched ballot boxes, and targeted government leaders for assassination. When the outcome was announced, supporters of the vanquished candidate had erupted. The election, they claimed, had been stolen. Roughly two hundred people died in a matter of days.
Nigerians knew that the 2011 Presidential election might be similar. Muhammadu Buhari, the retired general who had lost in 2007, was facing off against the sitting President, Goodluck Jonathan. Buhari was running as a populist, an avowed outsider, despite the fact that he had been the country’s military head of state in the eighties, before the modern Presidency was established. He promised to bring order and security to Nigerians, and his main base of support came from the country’s rural and working-class voters, who loved him. When Buhari ran and lost in 2003 and 2007, he claimed the elections had been rigged. He challenged the results in court, but both times his case was dismissed.
In many ways, the tension surrounding the election was unsurprising. Nigeria has a federal system comprising dozens of states, and the country is deeply divided. Buhari’s main supporters came from the poor, rural north, and many of them felt left behind by the wealthier, more educated south, where Jonathan was from, and where most of the country’s oil and gas reserves were situated. Compounding this economic divide was a religious one. Jonathan’s region was largely Christian, with increasing support for evangelicalism, while Buhari’s was embracing more extreme forms of Islam. In the early two-thousands, a wave of states in Buhari’s stronghold began to expand the use of Sharia law, and in 2009 the jihadist group Boko Haram sparked an insurgency against the federal government. The two halves of the country distrusted each other. Jonathan’s supporters feared that Buhari and his allies would pursue a conservative religious agenda if in power, while Buhari’s base feared being permanently excluded from government.
If Buhari lost in 2011, he suggested, he would not appeal to the courts again: “Anybody who stands in the way of the people will be crushed by the people.” His supporters echoed his threats, saying that “all hell would be let loose” if Buhari was not declared the winner. Election Day—a Saturday—was peaceful. But violence broke out on Sunday, as preliminary results suggested that Jonathan would win. One of the first attacks took place at a college in the northern city of Zaria. According to Human Rights Watch, a crowd of young people armed with sticks, clubs, and machetes stormed the campus, demanding that students reveal their religious and ethnic identities, along with their political affiliations. Then the mob beat a group of students to death.
The worst violence was in Kaduna, a state in the middle of the country that had a fairly balanced mix of Muslims and Christians. Armed mobs of Buhari supporters roamed the streets, attacking police stations and the homes of Jonathan supporters. Violence then moved farther south, as Christians began to seek revenge against Muslims. The attacks and rioting lasted for roughly three days, and some witnesses reported that it subsided only when the government deployed soldiers to intercede. In the end, an estimated eight hundred people—mainly in Kaduna—were killed, and sixty-five thousand were displaced.
When people think of elections, they usually focus on who might win and the policies that the winner is likely to enact once in office. But equally important in a democracy is how the loser reacts. If he or she does not accept the vote, then portions of a country can become ungovernable. Buhari’s devoted followers did what many, throughout history, have done when their favored leader faced defeat: they turned to violence. Democracies survive only if losers accept the results.
As the United States barrels toward another contentious election, the spectre of such violence looms. The last Presidential election was followed by an attack on the Capitol, and just weeks ago the man who encouraged that attack, Donald Trump, was nearly assassinated. I have been studying contested elections in deeply divided democracies for decades, reading about thousands that have taken place. It’s a rich field filled with experts who have analyzed enormous amounts of data. We know the ways in which an election loss can spark violence, and we know what risk factors make unrest more likely.
The first rule is that, in order to accept defeat, citizens need hope. Hope—the belief that every election will not be the last—is the glue that binds citizens to the democratic process. It drives them to vote, to run for office, and to care that the system survives. When people and parties believe that they can win in the future, they are more likely to accept temporary setbacks. But hope relies on uncertainty. If people feel that they know the outcome of an election in advance, either because their party does not have enough votes or they believe the outcome is rigged, hope disappears.
In its place, violence tends to break out. This is what happened after Buhari’s second and third defeats, but it’s a pattern found throughout history. In Northern Ireland, many Irish Catholics eventually backed the I.R.A. and its violent methods when they became convinced that Protestants, using gerrymandering, voter suppression, and London’s military support, would always win. In Venezuela, violent protests started in 2013, after the incumbent party was declared the winner by a narrow margin and the opposition candidate cried foul. The 2007 Presidential election in Kenya provoked widespread violence—initially, from opposition supporters of Raila Odinga, who alleged that the election was rigged—resulting in more than a thousand deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands.
We know what political conditions make populations vulnerable to losing hope. Majoritarian systems with strong Presidents—such as Nigeria’s—create a winner-takes-all dynamic, in which the party that wins the most votes assumes all, or nearly all, the power. In a parliamentary system, power is often shared by different parties, making coöperation essential. Majoritarian-style systems are more dangerous: losing an election may leave significant portions of the electorate without representation, reduce incentives for interparty collaboration, and allow the winning side to impose its agenda on the losers. This type of system existed in most countries that experienced significant political violence between 1960 and 1995, including Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Rwanda. In the past century, the majority of civil wars appear to have occurred in winner-takes-all systems, rather than in parliamentary ones. After the 2007 election in Kenya, much of the violence occurred between the Kikuyu and Luo ethnic groups, likely because each viewed the election as a high-stakes, zero-sum contest for its political and economic survival. It is the fear of exclusion that drives people to fight.
Governments with parties that are organized by race, ethnicity, or religion make elections even more fraught. Think of the Catholic and Protestant parties in Northern Ireland. If voters choose a party based mainly on their religious or racial identity, then elections become a numbers game, determined by the shifting demographics of the country. If your group is shrinking as a percentage of the population, then you can anticipate, with dreadful precision, the year you will essentially be shut out of the system. Nothing kills hope as fast as knowing that you are becoming a minority in a majoritarian system.
Finally, elections are particularly dangerous in democracies whose institutions are weak or under attack. If citizens believe those in power can manipulate the outcome of an election, then some will come to believe that violence and even war may be justified. Demagogues and would-be dictators, anticipating a potential loss, can groom their supporters to reject the results, using claims of fraud and calls for retribution. Jair Bolsonaro did this in Brazil. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., has done this in the Philippines. Each used lies and fear to convince their supporters that a loss in the polls was proof that the system itself was illegitimate.
Even though political scientists have long studied these risk factors, almost no one considered the U.S. a serious candidate for post-election violence until recently. Americans have historically had a great deal of trust in their system of government, and hence a long tradition of electoral losers conceding gracefully. America’s first President, George Washington, refused to seek a third term, making clear that the Presidency was not a lifetime appointment. Since then, five Americans have lost the election even after winning the popular vote: Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton. Tilden won the popular vote in 1876, the highest-turnout election, by percentage of eligible voters, in U.S. history. He also possibly won the Electoral College vote, yet an ad-hoc commission handed the Presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, likely because of a back-room deal to end military Reconstruction in the South. Tilden, valuing the country’s stability, conceded. In a speech at the Manhattan Club that year, he said, “If my voice could reach throughout our country and be heard in its remotest hamlet I would say, ‘Be of good cheer. The Republic will live. The institutions of our fathers are not to expire in shame.’ ”
But, in the past eight years, these attitudes have changed. It’s now impossible to ignore that America has all the characteristics of a country at risk. We have the exact type of political system—Presidential, winner-takes-all—that is most vulnerable. Various democratic norms are being degraded by gerrymandering and voter suppression, and long-harmful features of our political system—the Electoral College, corporate money, lifetime appointments for judges—show little sign of reform. We also have a candidate for President who is actively sowing mistrust in the upcoming election. Trump has accused Democrats and others, hundreds of times, of attempting to “influence,” “cheat,” “rig,” and “steal” November’s election. In July, he told a group of Christian conservatives that, if they voted for him, “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.” J. D. Vance, his running mate, has championed the January 6th rioters and said he would have tried to overturn the 2020 election results. This is the type of incendiary rhetoric that Buhari and his team used in the lead-up to the 2011 election.
Meanwhile, the parties themselves seem increasingly split along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Project 2025, the well-funded Republican initiative backing Trump’s election, aims to yoke the government to Christian nationalist values, creating a state that will impose stringent limits on immigration. The demographic change that has left so many white Americans feeling insecure and threatened will continue to advance. History tells us that the groups that initiate violence tend to be those which had once been politically dominant but are in decline. If Trump loses again, the more extreme members of the MAGA base will have even more evidence that the system no longer works for them, and that their chance of winning in the future is going to plummet. They will lose hope in our federal government, and in our democracy.
What would violence look like if Trump loses? It would likely start with protests against the election results, which could turn into riots. Far-right militias might join in. They would not begin by attacking Democratic voters. Instead, they would first target those they perceive to be traitors within their own party: Republicans who are deemed too moderate, those who have reached across party lines, refused to support MAGA, or who have enacted laws with which these extremists disagree. This is what happened in Nigeria in 2011. Buhari’s most ardent supporters didn’t start by killing Christians who happened to live in the north. They attacked groups who seemed to be collaborating with the federal government: police, party officials. The January 6th rioters who stormed the Capitol also seemed to have targets in mind, including Trump’s own Vice-President, Mike Pence. Rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” for his role in refusing to certify the election for Trump.
In the U.S., extremists would likely then target minorities living in red and purple states, attempting to marginalize supposed interlopers in their communities. In Nigeria, rioters in Muslim-majority areas attacked local Christians, burning their churches and shops. When people feel insecure, they seek to cleanse their communities of those they deem a potential threat. If the white, Christian males who make up the core of the MAGA base no longer have the votes to control the federal government, then they will insure that they have the votes to control many of the red and purple states in which they live.
But the most violence can be expected in the states with a fairly equal balance of white Americans and nonwhite Americans, where power is still being contested. Experts have found that some of the most volatile countries are the ones whose societies are divided into two relatively large groups. Some of the greatest racial tension in the United States has occurred in places where the white and nonwhite populations were relatively even. This included several former Confederate states during Reconstruction, after Black people were given the right to vote and hold office, as well as cities such as Birmingham, Memphis, Cleveland, Gary, and Newark, which experienced bursts of violence as they became minority-white, starting in the nineteen-sixties. It is the mixed cities, states, and regions—just like Kaduna, in Nigeria—where the declining side feels most threatened. In the United States today, this means that places like Georgia, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona could become hot spots of violence.
In the short term, a Democratic loss in November is likely to yield a more peaceful transition. But, in the longer term, we’ll probably see more violence under a Trump Presidency, especially if he uses the office to favor white Americans. Nonwhites are projected to represent a majority of Americans by 2044, and they will not remain silent should they become excluded from power. A response from the left might start, for example, with mass protests around the country. Whether this escalates to violence will depend on how Trump responds; one of the fastest ways to radicalize a population is to answer peaceful protests with force. This is what happened with the Basques in Spain, the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, and Syrians during the Arab Spring. Trump has shown every indication of advocating for a heavy-handed military response.
Is there a way out? One reason to maintain hope is that numerous places in America have already completed the demographic shift, with white majorities becoming minorities. In California, and in cities like Memphis and Birmingham, racial conflict eventually decreased after this transition was complete. California, for example, began to embrace its diversity as its minority population amassed enough support to wield political power. The state shed its reputation for anti-immigrant activism—in the nineties, voters passed a measure that would prevent the undocumented from attending public school—to become a forward-thinking model for policies on inclusion. And, in many cities that elected Black mayors for the first time, tensions declined when it became clear that nonwhite leadership would not hurt whites. White fears of a Black mayor in Los Angeles greatly diminished after Tom Bradley’s highly successful, twenty-year tenure, even though violence flared again during the 1992 riots. In these cases, racial fear was broadly replaced with racial acceptance.
Our greatest hope may be uncertainty itself. A key piece of data that most Americans don’t know is that much of the immigrant population in the United States is unaffiliated with either the Democratic or Republican Party. Surveys also show that many Latinos and Asian Americans remain independent; they don’t feel any affinity for either party, and don’t know where they themselves fit in. This is the gift of democracy—the opportunity to persuade, to work toward new and better futures, and to recognize that both.
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JD Vance working to "hijack" MAGA to push theocracy, ex-friend warns
Sofia Nelson, a lawyer and former Yale Law School classmate of Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, warned on Saturday that the Ohio senator is working to "hijack" former President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in favor of a far more rigid and orthodox theocracy called post-liberalism.
In an op-ed for MSNBC published Saturday morning, Nelson said that the post-liberal movement, unlike MAGA, seeks to replace existing social and political power structures with orders rooted in conservative Catholic social teachings.
Nelson contends that post-liberalists, like Vance, seek to position themselves within the MAGA movement with the aim of inheriting Trump's political base once he leaves politics. Their goal is to turn the GOP into a pro-theocracy party, Nelson said. The op-ed warns about the danger of a post-liberal rise and the need to counteract it, not just for the sake of defeating Trump, but to maintain the democratic values underpinning U.S. society.
"There is some policy overlap between MAGA and post-liberalism in their shared opposition, for example, to immigration and transgender rights. But the ideological overlap between the groups is a shared affinity for authoritarianism," Nelson wrote. "The post-liberal right, which has goals that even MAGA Republicans would find extreme, is attempting to hijack the MAGA movement to push its own agenda."
Nelson befriended Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, while they were attending Yale Law School. Nelson, who is transgender and uses they/them pronouns, had a falling out with JD Vance when he launched his political career and backed bans on transgender minors receiving gender-affirming care. They told CNN's Erin Burnett in July that the senator's shift in opinions were motivated by his ambition for "political power and wealth."
In the op-ed, Nelson pointed to Vance's alleged influences within the post-liberal movement.
"Despite the time we spent as friends, I have no real insights (other than political expediency) into what drew him to post-liberal men like the academic Patrick Deneen, columnist Sohrab Ahmari, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and expat journalist and author Rod Dreher, who was present for Vance's baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019," Nelson wrote. "What I do know is that Vance used to condemn Trump's racism and be empathetic to how such rhetoric made Americans feel unwelcome in their own country. But these men have had an obvious and heartbreaking effect on Vance's worldview."
Nelson said Vance's "obsession" with birth rates and his remarks about childless women reflect his post-liberal belief structure. They also point out that Vance's comments in favor of eliminating "no-fault divorce" drifts further to the right on marriage issues than what is contained in The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 initiative, a political movement led by conservative think tanks that aim to shape the next Republican administration's policies.
Trump has repeatedly denied having any relation to Project 2025, but many of its contributors are former members of his administration, and his own platform, called Agenda 47, shares broad policy similarities on several issues.
Trump again stated during Tuesday's presidential debate that he has "nothing to do with Project 2025," adding, "I haven't read it. I don't want to read it, purposely. I'm not going to read it."
"Post-liberalism, unlike MAGA, has no grassroots following. Most Americans aren't Catholic, and most Catholics support the separation of church and state. But post-liberalism, despite its ideological and moral disdain for Trump, needs MAGA, Nelson wrote. "To accomplish any of its goals, it must leech off of a populist movement. The movement needs to exploit Trump's popularity for its own unpopular aims. This may explain why Vance, who had more integrity when I knew him, abruptly flipped from calling Trump "cultural heroin" to the greatest president of his lifetime."
Newsweek has emailed Vance's office, along with the Trump-Vance campaign, Saturday morning for comment.
In July, The New York Times published an article on 90 emails and text messages from Vance to Nelson from 2014 to 2017. The then-future senator expressed opinions in the messages that differ greatly from his more recent public remarks, including telling Nelson: "I hate the police."
Luke Schroeder, a Vance spokesperson, said in a statement issued after the article was published that it was "unfortunate this individual chose to leak decade-old private conversations between friends to The New York Times,"while insisting that "despite their disagreements, Senator Vance cares for Sofia and wishes Sofia the very best."
Vance's opinions on Trump have shifted considerably over the years, with the Hillbilly Elegy author previously declaring himself a "never Trumper" and questioning whether the then-future president was "America's Hitler" in 2016.
In June, Vance told the Times that he "first met Trump in 2021" and changed his opinions on the former president soon after.
Opinion | My former friend JD Vance has aligned with something far worse than MAGA
Most Americans haven’t heard of the post-liberal right, the small but influential group of conservative, mostly Catholic men who have declared that liberal democracy, the animating principle of America’s founding, has failed and want to bring about a new social order where there is no separation of church and state and men and a hyperconservative Catholicism reign supreme. They are disdainful of secularism and individual liberty. Just like Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump illustrated during Tuesday night’s debate against Vice President Kamala Harris, these men idolize the authoritarian Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary.
My former friend JD Vance is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated
They’re also nostalgic for Spain as it was run by the dictator Franco and see Orbán’s government and Franco’s as potential models for the kind of regime they wish to install in the United States. The group’s political priorities — which include restricting access to contraception and divorce and banning marriage equality and pornography — are wildly unpopular. And yet the Republican nominee for vice president, my former friend JD Vance, is a prominent voice of this fringe movement, as so many of his regrettable podcast interviews have demonstrated.
To repeat, I once considered Vance a friend. We were in the same class at Yale Law School, he knew me as an openly trans person, and we remained in communication until 2021. That’s the year that he announced he would be running in the U.S. Senate race in Ohio the next year. Before running in post-liberal and neoreactionary circles, Vance was far less angry and extreme. He was also, as everybody will remember, riding the attention from his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and was a vocal and unambiguous critic of Trump, using words like “idiot” to describe Trump and “reprehensible” to describe his views on “Immigrants, Muslims, etc.”
Despite the time we spent as friends, I have no real insights (other than political expediency) into what drew him to post-liberal men like the academic Patrick Deneen, columnist Sohrab Ahmari, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule and expat journalist and author Rod Dreher, who was present for Vance’s baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019. What I do know is that Vance used to condemn Trump’s racism and be empathetic to how such rhetoric made Americans feel unwelcome in their own country. But these men have had an obvious and heartbreaking effect on Vance’s worldview.
The leaders in the post-liberal movement are elites steeped in classical and Catholic philosophy who fancy themselves warriors for the average man. Vermeule, for example, is explicitly against the separation of church and state, and believes the Catholic Church should have ultimate control over all moral questions. (Well, maybe not the church as it’s run by Pope Francis.)
Vance and his intellectual mentors like Deneen are benefiting from the conflation of MAGA and post-liberalism, because if Americans truly understood post-liberalism, they’d realize it seeks to strip them of individual freedom.
There is some policy overlap between MAGA and post-liberalism in their shared opposition, for example, to immigration and transgender rights. But the ideological overlap between the groups is a shared affinity for authoritarianism. The post-liberal right, which has goals that even MAGA Republicans would find extreme, is attempting to hijack the MAGA movement to push its own agenda.
Consider: Trump, who has been married three times and divorced two times, proudly appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine. He was convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a case that prosecutors successfully argued was about him trying to cover up an adulterous affair he had with an adult film star. He is not exactly an exemplar of Christian morality.
More importantly, Trump’s positions change with the tides of public opinion. They aren’t rooted in any religious or ideological convictions. ABC News’ Linsey Davis, a moderator at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, pointed out that, according to Vance, Trump “explicitly” said he’d veto a national abortion ban. That’s after Trump suggested in March that he’d support such a ban. But not only did Trump not state a clear position at the debate, he said, “I didn’t discuss it with JD.” This comes on the heels of him first indicating he would vote in favor of an abortion rights ballot initiative in Florida, only to say he would vote against it the next day.
The post-liberal right, which has goals that even MAGA Republicans would find extreme, is attempting to hijack the MAGA movement to push its own agenda.
Unlike the MAGA movement, which is led by a candidate who is defiantly amoral, post-liberalism is steeped in a revolutionary religiosity. Its goals include replacing our social and political power structures with a new social order rooted in a misogynist understanding of gender, sexuality, marriage and reproduction closely tethered to Catholic social teachings. This is reflected in Vance’s obsession with birth rates and the way he belittles women without children.
Some of the post-liberal right’s priorities are reflected in Project 2025, but not even the Heritage Foundation, which is behind that project, has set its sights on trapping people in violent marriages by repealing no-fault divorce, as Vance and the post-liberal right seek to do.
Post-liberalism, unlike MAGA, has no grassroots following. Most Americans aren’t Catholic, and most Catholics support the separation of church and state. But post-liberalism, despite its ideological and moral disdain for Trump, needs MAGA. To accomplish any of its goals, it must leech off of a populist movement. The movement needs to exploit Trump’s popularity for its own unpopular aims. This may explain why Vance, who had more integrity when I knew him, abruptly flipped from calling Trump “cultural heroin” to the greatest president of his lifetime.
Prior to MAGA gaining control of the Republican Party, the leaders of this movement, most notably Vance, were staunchly anti-Trump. And while the post-liberal right is excited one of its own has quickly risen through MAGA’s ranks — most leaders of post-liberalism still aren’t Trump fans.
But they understand that it’s more feasible for them to co-opt the MAGA base than to organically organize a political base of their own. MAGA is far from a majority of the country, 42% of self-identified Republicans or roughly 14% of the county, but it’s a larger political force than post-liberalism could ever hope to build on its own given the unpopularity of its policy priorities.
Post-liberalism further seeks to confuse the American people through its rhetorical support for labor unions, a definite break from mainstream Republican orthodoxy. However, Vance was booed by a group of union firefighters when he stated he sought to be part of the “most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” Nobody who’s pro-worker, as Vance claims to be, would team up with Trump, the candidate who laughed with Elon Musk about union busting. Nor would he oppose the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would expand the right to organize. Hardworking union firefighters recognize Vance’s support for organized labor for what it is: hollow political rhetoric.
A post-liberal devotee like Vance knows how to talk a populist game, but, like Trump, he has no interest in delivering for working people.
A post-liberal devotee like Vance knows how to talk a populist game, but, like Trump, he has no interest in delivering for working people. His real devotion is to the culture wars.
Instead of persuading Americans to support their ideas, leaders of the post-liberal right are covertly positioning themselves within MAGA to be the heirs of Trump’s political base when he’s off the scene. They seek to transform the GOP into a pro-theocracy party willing to ignore the Constitution and democratic norms.
Those of us who don’t want to live in a theocracy must look beyond just defeating Trump and must also seek to vanquish a post-liberal right. That also means defeating the ambitions of a classmate whom I once considered a friend.
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