“They’ve been pretty docile this year” -Jared Holt, senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, October 2024
“They might pop up somewhere else, but I have to say: militias in the last year or so have been relatively inactive compared to earlier eras.” -Heidi Beirich, Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, October 2024
Probably like you, I lose sleep each night lately wondering about the 2024 US elections. I think about many aspects, but one I ponder more than others is: what will the paramilitary Far Right do after the elections are over?
It’s not hard to visualize what the Far Right will do if Trump wins; in keeping with Trump’s 2020 encouragement to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” we can imagine that January 6th convicts will be immediately pardoned and released, that hate groups will be among the first wave of assaulters on “enemies within,” and that their recruitments will blossom as the paramilitaries assault, attack, and harass perceived enemies. It’s hard to overstate how ugly this could be, and American centrists and liberals remain completely unprepared for what could happen to them, but that’s a subject for another article. (1)
But I am honestly perplexed as to what might happen in the street if Harris wins. I spent a fair amount of time chasing down data about this, and professional speculations around it are similarly vague. A consensus among many experts is that enlistments in groups like the Oath Keepers is much reduced after the January 6th prosecutions: “many of those far-right networks have dissolved, splintered or receded from public view since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack,” says a recent report from PBS, and the report mentions specifically that the Oath Keepers have withered since Stuart Rhodes’ arrest and incarceration.
Many others similarly maintain that memberships generally in Far Right groups have plummeted; a group called Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) summarizes it in a September 18th 2024 report:
- “2024 is currently on track to see the lowest single-year levels of extremist group mobilization since ACLED began collecting US data in January 2020…
- “…the number of acts of political violence involving extremist actors has also declined each year since 2020…
- “Many of the most active groups of previous years have seen their membership crumble and decay in the aftermath of the 6 January 2021 Capitol riot. Dozens of members of groups like the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Oath Keepers — including group leaders and high-ranking lieutenants — were arrested for their participation in the riot.”
“It is difficult to overstate how different conditions are in 2024 compared to the previous presidential election year,” continues the ACLED report, when there was widespread unrest around Covid restrictions, the George Floyd protests, and the 2020 elections. Hate groups and paramilitaries may now favor a “clandestine approach,” although this “represent(s) a drastic departure for many of these groups whose previous tactics sought to radicalize the public through displays of force and strength.” A non-profit called the Soufan Center similarly says that hate and militia groups have recently increased their “activities in the disinformation space,” providing as example the posts on Telegram and Gab and X about Haitians and Black people eating pets, which garnered 4.9 million views on the latter platform. The ACLED report agrees, and adds that the move to online platforms may be to avoid law enforcement, citing Proud Boy chats wherein street mobilizations are called “traps” and “honey pots.” They conclude that there is “little indication that 2024 will see a repeat of the patterns that characterized 2020,” but add that mobilization/recruitment could proceed quickly, as when dozens of Proud Boys rapidly materialized for protests in Springfield Ohio having to do with the aforementioned alleged eating of pets.
There are sources that disagree with the benign assessments above. A think tank called the Counter Terrorism Group emphasizes risks having to do with local security around voting locations and government buildings, but when it comes to organized paramilitary threats, says that if efforts to overturn the election are unsuccessful:
“Militia groups will likely attempt a second Insurrection, to prevent the ratification of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris as president. Oathkeepers and Three Percenters will likely stockpile weapons necessary to escalate a potential insurrection through large-scale violence using urban guerrilla tactics like ambushes and hit-and-run attacks. They will likely openly carry weapons at political rallies to intimidate and threaten elected officials, law enforcement, and federal government workers.”
Well, that’s a mighty ominous and specific stance, but it’s stated without reference to data. While the violence and attacks it specifies are certainly consistent with what we remember from 4 years ago, most other sources disagree that there are sufficient resources for the Far Right to carry out such operations today.
Or do they? Maybe let’s talk Proud Boys for a minute, because they appear to be a possible exception to the pattern of decay mentioned in most of the sources above.
Unlike the other analyses above, a June 2024 Reuters piece titled The Proud Boys are back: How the far-right group is rebuilding to rally behind Trump by Aram Roston maintains that the Proud Boys are “rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House.” Roston cites examples about Proud Boys actively recruiting, ranging from news about a Miami chapter to interviews with founder Gavin McInnes; “as the Proud Boys regroup, they’ve made changes designed to make them less vulnerable to law enforcement scrutiny, including doing away with layers of top leadership.” This includes, since Jan 6th, adopting a more decentralized structure. One tack mentioned by McInnes is for the Proud Boys to adopt “a loose organizational structure similar to the Hells Angels partly to avoid federal charges” under RICO. “The Proud Boys now operate with self-governing chapters in more than 40 states, with little apparent central coordination,” says Roston in the article; Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police assistant director of intelligence cited in the article, added that there were at the time of writing 154 Proud Boy chapters in 48 U.S. states.
In a superbly comprehensive and detailed piece written in October about the Proud Boy role in January 6th, Tom Joscelyn, on a forum called Just Security, makes an overwhelming case that January 6th, rather than being a rally that got out of hand, was orchestrated with forethought by the Proud Boys, who manipulated everyone from fellow travelers like the Oath Keepers to the “normies” who showed up for solidarity with Trump. Moreover, he faults the US government for lacking the hindsight to even properly frame the event afterwards: “the central lesson of January 6th clearly did not sink in,” he says; “the Proud Boys’ leadership marshaled a nationwide network, utilizing chapters in multiple states, to overrun the Capitol.”
Hmm. One would THINK that law enforcement and the US military might be prepared this time around, and that for January 6th 2025, there would be a surfeit of armed protection deployed in proper locations. But we should never underestimate the ability of government functionaries to misapprehend a given situation, such as when officials believed that the threats on January 6 would be from antifascists, or such as numerous other incidents where US government officials misread intentions about both foreign and domestic threats.
When I started writing this, my thinking was that if Harris wins, while of course nobody knows what will happen, it’s hard to imagine a Blackshirt march on Rome or another large-scale Capitol riot. (2) To be successful, magnetometers would have to be tampered with or destroyed, and locations like the Capitol and others will undoubtedly be heavily policed. Right now there aren’t even enough members in the paramilitaries to execute such operations; in order to muster enough rioters to carry things out, hate-group recruitment would have to blossom in a literal overnight fashion. Rather, as experts say lately, we should expect “lone wolf” events like the recent attempted assassinations of Trump, and, almost by definition, those are isolated and unpredictable.
But after reading some of these reports, although I still have trouble finding my crystal ball on all of this, I think I’ve changed my mind. I know what will happen if Trump wins, but I no longer think that the street will be secure from large-scale pre-planned ruination if Trump loses. I think that in the event of a Harris win and a failure to overthrow the result, there is a decidedly nonzero probability of directed and coordinated attack(s) by the paramilitary Far Right on American people, places, and institutions.
Notes
- In the event of a second Trump administration, it’s likely that the paramilitary right will do the initial dirty work in the streets before the National Guard or active duty troops are called to continue the same work. Unfortunately for the paramilitaries, it’s also likely that after their coarse tactics are no longer useful in the street, they will be banned, much as the SA (Brownshirts) were in 1934 Germany and the Red Guard were in 1968 China. On a related subject, after successfully consolidating their power, both Nazi Germany and the USSR banned firearms for most non-party citizens (excepting for hunting in the USSR).
- In October 1922, Mussolini was able to march to Rome with some 30,000 Blackshirts after King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Mussolini as Prime Minister.
References in no particular order
https://www.justsecurity.org/103956/proud-boys-threat-assessment/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-proudboys/