'Brownshirt impulses': How 'MAGA vigilante' proposals recall 'looting' of Jewish businesses

30 December 2024

On December 22, Mother Jones' Julianne McShane reported on an overtly racist letter that was being distributed in Lincoln County, Oregon, where supporters of mass deportations were calling for "white folks" to take the properties of "brown illegals."

The letter read, "When the brown folks are rounded up, their properties will be confiscated. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high — the prices will be very low and affordable."

In a scathing article published on the penultimate day of 2024, Salon's Amanda Marcotte notes the parallels between this letter's proposals and the theft of Jewish property in Nazi Germany during World War 2. And she emphasizes that although most MAGA Republicans won't use language as overtly racist as the rhetoric in that letter, the "fascist" tendencies are there nonetheless.

"When Jews were kidnapped for the Holocaust during WWII," Marcotte explains, "it was common for their Christian neighbors to ransack their homes, stealing everything and enriching themselves. 'They raided Jewish people’s homes, businesses, and offices in search of valuables,' reads the Holocaust Museum's online exhibit, which includes pictures of people going through piles of stolen goods and selling off looted valuables."

Marcotte continues, "It's unclear if the letter writer knows this history and finds it inspiring, or if they are unconsciously recreating the Nazi past. Either way, the main takeaway is whoever is behind this letter doesn't want to sit back and let the Trump Administration do their own dirty work. They believe the MAGA masses can be harnessed to help, in a vigilante fashion."

This "brownshirt impulse," Marcotte warns, "has always been a part of Trumpism, as we saw with the rise of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other paramilitary gangs during the first Trump Administration." MAGA, she adds, showed itself to be a "fascist movement" when the U.S. Capitol Building was violently attacked on January 6, 2021.

President-elect Donald Trump, Marcotte notes, "has been promising widespread pardons for January 6 defendants, even those convicted of violence or seditious conspiracy."

"This will likely embolden more far-right people to get back into the brownshirt business," Marcotte warns. "That's almost certainly the point."

Marcotte argues that although "most MAGA commentators are smart enough to avoid overt threats of violence after Trump's election," some will say the quiet part out loud — for example, "Christian nationalist pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons telling her audience they must 'take up the enemy's sword and cut his head off with it.'"

"Trump made a lot of bold promises to get elected, leaving his followers with hopes that the U.S. will soon have the racial and religious homogeneity they crave," Marcotte argues. "With 42 percent of Americans belonging to a racial minority, however, even Trump's outrageous deportation plans will do little to make the U.S. look as white as MAGA wants…. Unfortunately, Trump and his mouthpieces have conveyed a 'take measures into your own hands' message to the MAGA faithful. How this will manifest is still unknown, but there's every reason to worry it could get bad."

Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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