The Wars to Come
Right Wing Propaganda and Violence in a Post-Trump America
By Stephanie Pierotti
On the cusp of the 2020 election the Trump campaign is facing a challenging set of circumstances, and reelection is in real jeopardy. The Biden campaign has a sizable national lead, and is ahead in almost all of the critical swing states. Biden has a substantial lead in the early voting returns, which have aligned with polling expectations. Trump has been desperate for additional campaign donations as he struggles to compete with Biden, especially on television. It is not certain that Trump will lose, but it is reasonable to consider the consequences if Democrats potentially sweep into power. A president losing a reelection bid is the most powerful rebuke the country can have against a president's agenda. However, a Trump loss is unlikely to dissuade his followers from pushing the Republican Party further down the far right path that began long before 2016. The last two Democratic presidents saw a substantial and powerful opposition emerge regardless of either their margin of victory or their opponent. This opposition took a political form in the Republican Party’s response in Washington, but also a social form in the growth of right wing groups that attracted Republican Party supporters. Right wing media tapped into this phenomenon as an echo-chamber for the most extreme ideology, resulting in their largest and most loyal audience to date. The momentum of these groups pushed Republican politics further to the right, and the most extreme members of these groups were spurred into militant action.
President Clinton was elected In 1992 with the smallest portion of the voting age population in modern history due to the independent candidacy of Ross Perot fracturing the electorate. The Republican Party held the White House for the previous twelve years, but Democrats held the House for the previous thirty-eight years, and the Senate for thirty-two of the previous thirty-eight years. Republican power had been exceptionally dependent on the executive branch, and the party quickly reacted to the shift in this equilibrium. Led by Newt Gingirch, the Republicans built a visceral fear-based narrative that Democrats were radical socialists. They insisted that with the unfettered power of both Congress and the White House, Democrats would shift our country into a godless totalitarian state. This message resonated with millions of Americans, and the Republican Party swept into power in both the House and Senate, and would hold both houses through the remainder of the Clinton Presidency. Gingrich immediately began investigations into the Clintons under any pretense they could find, which ultimately led to the appointment of Ken Starr as Special Prosecutor to investigate the Clintons’ real estate investments. This investigation lasted more than four years, and ultimately yielded little more than a semantic debate over whether oral sex did or did not count as sexual relations. Despite this having nothing to do with the original investigation, the House impeached the President on two charges, although the president would later be acquitted after a Senate trial. Starr would later publicly exonerate the President on the issues that the investigation was originally convened for, but waited until after the 1998 congressional elections.
The Republicans had great success in driving voters away from Democratic candidates by focusing on the social issues surrounding guns and god. They painted Democrats as atheists out to seize your weapons, and this message nestled neatly into the ideology of the far right, where anti-government sentiment was already percolating. Talk radio was reaching new heights in the early 90s, led by Rush Limbaugh whose radio program had been nationally syndicated since 1988. On talk radio a more extreme and exaggerated version of this new Republican ideology was proliferated without any accountability to truth or consequences, and on local stations there were many voices far more incendiary than Limbaugh. While everyday Americans were being pushed right by talk radio, the fringes of the right were getting pushed into reactionary behavior. Some version of the Patriot movement has always been a part of the fabric of the nation, but in the early 1990s a very strong and distinct militia movement had evolved, with a presence in every state and an estimated membership of up to 60,000. These militias had a strong anti-government, anti-socialist, and white supremacist belief structure, with a strong emphasis on sovereign citizen and conservative Christian beliefs. At a compound in Waco, Texas in 1993 the cross section of god and guns led to a government standoff with the Branch Dividians. Their leader, David Koresh, believed in an imminent apocalypse at the hands of the armies of Babylon, which the U.S. government was a convenient stand-in for. After a siege of fifty-one days the FBI stormed the compound, which resulted in the deaths of 76 people including Koresh himself. The standoff in Waco, and a previous standoff at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, aided recruitment for white supremacist anti-government groups. The crescendo of this movement was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Timothy McViegh and Terry Nichols planned and executed the bombing. They were both militia members, and cited Ruby Ridge, Waco and the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, as motivation for their actions. In 1996, there were 858 militia groups in the United States, but by 2001 these groups were in substantial decline. The election of George W. Bush as President, a sharp shift of pro-god and pro-gun groups to the existential threat of foreign terrorists, and wars in the middle east fostered a more unified and pro-government movement in the period after 9/11. These groups did not entirely disappear, their tentacles were still prevalent on the internet where conspiracy theories about one world governments, 9/11 being an inside job, and the deaths of Clinton associates, still found a small but loyal following.
The last years of the Bush Presidency saw the first notable leftist movement since the Vietnam War. The Global Financial Crisis was the genesis of Occupy Wall Street, but the movement faded after the election of Barack Obama in 2008. However, Obama’s election would see another predictably sharp right wing and white supremacist response. The Republican Party’s brand had taken a severe hit in the final years of the Bush administration, losing both the House and Senate in 2006. On Obama’s inauguration day, while the president was celebrating at that evening's events, Republicans met and agreed to a hardline obstructionist agenda. They would insert themselves firmly into the political process by presenting themselves as being in the majority even though they were the minority in both houses of congress. Using the same anti-socialist narrative they had used against Clinton, they attacked Obama on all fronts. The primary target was the President’s health care bill, which they warped into an Orwellian socialist agenda equipped with ‘Death Panels’. The Affordable Care Act was passed, but at great political cost. The goal was to win the House in 2010, which the Republicans successfully achieved and thereafter were able to grind his administration to a halt. Jim Boener became Speaker of The House, and despite staunchly being part of the obstructionist agenda from the outset, the mere fact he was willing to work with Obama led him to be abruptly removed from power by his own party. In 2012, Obama easily won reelection, but the Democrats lost the Senate, and the Republicans were effectively able to run out the clock on his administration.
In the Bush years right wing media had gone mainstream. Rush Limbaugh was a national institution, and Fox News had grown into the most powerful cable news network. The right wing narrative was now televised. Fox News propagates the same rhetoric as talk radio with equal indifference to truth or consequence. During the Obama administration Fox News propagated the theory that Obama was not a citizen of the United States, cast doubt on his Christianity, and accused him and his administration of being everything from communists to traitors. In the 2008 presidential election the far right found a prominent political surrogate for the first time in Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. In the myriad of political personalities of the House of Representatives there had been some representation of fringe ideas, but no one of the stature of a vice presidential candidate. Palin was comfortable with conspiracy theories and propaganda, and Fox News was more than willing to give her a platform to peddle them. The McCain/Palin ticket was steamrolled in the general election, but Palin’s candidacy gave momentum to a new movement. What became known as the Tea Party, would revolutionize Republican politics, and move the entire party further to the right. Centrist and Reagan Republicans were weeded out through Republican primaries against Tea Party candidates. Fox News became a bully pulpit for the far right of the Republican Party, since the Tea Party’s ideology is very much in line with Fox News’ owner Rupert Murdoch. At the grassroots level, Tea Party events became a new venue for the extreme ideology of the militia movement from the 1990s. With the wars in the Middle East winding down, the threat of foreign terrorism waning, and a Democrat in the White House, the ‘threat from within’ narrative resurfaced - the government out to get your guns, ban God and institute a totalitarian socialist agenda. Immediately after Obama’s election the formation and membership of militias rapidly increased. Although there were several armed standoffs with militias during the Obama presidency, none of them escalated into armed conflict, with the government very hesitant to use force. The most notable of these was the forty day occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016, as a response to a lengthy land usage dispute between the Federal Bureau of Land Management and the Bundy family.
In 2016 President Trump was elected, and with his inaugural speech he painted a bleak picture of American society under siege not only by outside forces, but also from those within. Contrary to most previous presidents he has sown distrust and fear amongst the people of this nation from day one. Trump has propagated conspiracy theories and justified his actions with bold-faced lies. He has not only accepted the support of the most extreme right wing, he refused to admonish their actions, and used his social media platforms to proliferate their messages. In Sarah Palin these groups had a surrogate, but in Trump they have an actual seat at the table. Simultaneously the media environment has evolved once again. The internet has usurped radio and television, and the right wing movement has only become more extreme, fueled by message board ghosts like QAnon. There are actually many Americans that believe that there is a secret socialist cabal of child molesters based in pizzerias that control the world. In 2016, a man fired an AR-15 at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington D.C. in an attempt to save the kidnapped children inside. Reporting from the FBI indicates that militia groups represent a serious domestic terror threat, which became self-evident after the foiled plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.
Based on current polling data the Trump campaign is in a difficult spot, although his reelection seems unlikely, he is still close enough in swing states that his defeat is anything but certain. If he does lose, the country will still have to reckon with the powerful right wing movement that has flourished under Trump’s watch. The Republican Party has, as a whole, been very reluctant to push back on this sharp move to the right, and has publicly embraced some of the candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene that have been elected under the umbrella of these right wing elements. Republicans will likely find themselves either embracing QAnon ideology or fighting off primary challenges against those who do. QAnon supporters are now holding rallies and events similar to the early days of the Tea Party, so the future power that this group may hold within the Republican party should not be ignored. The Republican Party will certainly have an aggressive response to a Biden administration, especially if they simultaneously lose the House and Senate. Any push to resolve social justice issues, address climate change or slow the increasing economic disparity in this country will be fought tooth and nail by Republicans in Washington. The right wing will again paint the Democrats as socialists looking to ban god and take your guns, but with the added power of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, the social response may be darker than anything we have seen before. Buoyed by the three headed media serpent of talk radio, Fox News and QAnon, this movement will only get pushed further to the right and continue to erode the fabric of our democracy. In Charlottesville and Kenosha we have already seen violence that has resulted in deaths, and given the history of these groups and the momentum this movement currently has, we are headed for a disturbing escalation in armed confrontation.
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Additional Resources:
The Right’s Disinformation Machine Is Getting Ready for Trump to Lose - The Atlantic
What Is QAnon, the Viral Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory? - New York Times
/reply-all/ podcast #166 on QAnon
Unites States of Conspiracy - Frontline