Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian proto-fascists—have been generally ecumenical and areligious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of antisemitism. But that’s beginning to change, as Jack Jenkins explored this week at the Washington Post.

With “Groyper” leader Nick Fuentes leading the way, it’s becoming much more common to hear them embracing Christian nationalism—an ideology long embraced by the larger radical right, particularly the so-called “Patriot” movement. Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even farther into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,” that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all nonwhite people are soulless “mud people.”

As Jenkins reports, since the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Fuentes’ white-nationalist “America First” organization has increasingly employed Christian nationalist rhetoric: Chanting “Christ is King” at the antiabortion “March for Life” last week and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its White demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”

“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told Jenkins.

Christian nationalism has long been a feature of the nation’s extremist right, dating back to the original Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and its later version in the 1920s. Fuentes’s rhetoric “could have come word-for-word from a Klan speech in 1922,” historian Kelly J. Baker told Jenkins. “The Klan’s goal here was patriotism and nationalism, but it was combined with their focus on White Christianity.”

This worldview was a powerful animating force at the Jan. 6 insurrection, embodied by the moment when the self-described “Patriots” entered the vacated Senate chambers, took over the dais, and proceeded to share a prayer led by Jacob “QAnon Shaman” Chansley.

A video captured by The New Yorker shows the moment: One insurrectionist shouts, “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name!” The men bellow “Amen!” Then Chansley begins to lead them in prayer, saying: “Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity to stand up for our God-given inalienable rights.” He also thanks God for allowing them to “exercise our rights, to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, the communists and the globalists that this is our nation, not theirs.”

He concluded: “Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”

As historian Katherine Stewart explained in the New York Times:

A final precondition for the coup attempt was the belief, among the target population, that the legitimacy of the United States government derives from its commitment to a particular religious and cultural heritage, and not from its democratic form. It is astonishing to many that the leaders of the Jan. 6 attack on the constitutional electoral process styled themselves as “patriots.” But it makes a glimmer of sense once you understand that their allegiance is to a belief in blood, earth and religion, rather than to the mere idea of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A number of the groups, notably the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who led the insurrection similarly voiced their affinity for Christian nationalism. The morning of Jan. 6, as Jenkins reports, a group of Proud Boys led by Ethan Nordean—the primary leader of the men who later spearheaded the siege of the Capitol, were seen praying together.

At a gathering of Proud Boys near the Washington Monument on Dec. 11 captured on video by independent journalist Dakota Santiago for Religion News Service, Nordean had spoken about “sacrificing ourselves for our country” while speaking at an impromptu Proud Boys rally near the Washington Monument, according to footage provided to Religion News Service (RNS) by independent journalist Dakota Santiago.

Nordean—a notorious street brawler nicknamed “Rufio Panman”—described an epiphany he had during a protest about Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross:

I had a moment of realization where I was like, “You know what, I’m going to be diehard about everything in my life. I’m gonna be real.” Because everything that we have sacrificed—because you know how hard it is in this environment that we live in—it is time that you rise to the occasion. Be real.
Now you may not believe in that, but it’s important in the very least for my case for me, because this man did this thing. Just as we sacrifice ourselves for our country. A man provides and protects even when he’s not loved. That is what we do. We are hated but we do it in anyway, we keep showing up every day and we protect these people from these tyrannical dictators.

The same religious fervor has intensified in the aftermath of the insurrection, particularly as “Patriot” movement believers and their mainstream Republican enablers have doubled down with a gaslighting narrative insisting that what happened Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection, it was a righteous protest by Real Americans.

That narrative has been ardently adopted by Christian nationalists like the Trump supporters interviewed earlier this month by NPR:

Outside on the walkway, Murray Clemetson stands with an armful of hand-made signs he brought to church, such as, "Set the DC Patriots Free" and "We Are Americans, Not Terrorists." The law-school student and father of three —all home-schooled— was at the "Stop The Steal" rally in Washington, D.C., last year.
"The only insurrection that happened on Jan. 6 was by the agent provocateurs, paid actors, and corrupt police and FBI," he says, disputing all the evidence made public in the more than 700 criminal cases that the rioters were Trump fanatics.

The church the interviewers reported from is Ken Peters’ Patriot Church in Tennessee, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian nationalist congregations. Peters is a rabidly pro-Trump pastor who has appeared onstage in recent months with Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” conspiracy theorist who claims Donald Trump was the victim of election fraud. Peters also spoke to the crowd gathered in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5 at a pre-rally for the next day’s “Stop the Steal” protest that devolved into the Capitol insurrection.

Peters’ predilection for linking arms with violent white-nationalist thugs like the Proud Boys manifested itself in summer 2021 in Salem, Oregon, outside a Planned Parenthood clinic targeted by Peters’ “Church at Planned Parenthood” campaign. A phalanx of Proud Boys provided “security” for the event, including notorious brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, currently in jail awaiting trial on assault charges.

The sermon Peters delivered during NPR’s visit to his church turned a similarly convenient blind eye to Donald Trump’s manifest flaws as a Christian hero. "We consider the left in our nation today to be a giant bully,” Peters said. “And when there is a bully on the schoolyard and somebody rises up and punches back, 'Hallelujah!' So we are thankful for Trump."

Then he added: "But you know what? If Trump passes away tomorrow, God forbid, does that stop us? Does that slow us down? Not one bit. We'll be looking for the next guy to lead the way."

Indeed, the long-term determination of Christian nationalists to impose a narrow sectarian view on American government and society are reflected in its legislative assault on state laws, an attempt to reshape U.S. laws from the ground up as well as the top down. Their program “Project Blitz,” revealed by journalist Frederick Clarkson in 2018—a detailed and complex system of proposed legislation with which Christian nationalist beliefs are gradually embedded within state laws—is only one example of the breadth and depth of their assault on liberal democracy.

"The use of Christian symbols, iconography, Scripture in efforts to dominate and exclude are as old the republic itself," Rev. Fred Davie, executive vice president of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, told Trevor Hughes of USA Today. "It's deeply baked into our nation. It's deep, but it's also been proven time and time again to be wrong."

While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of broadening their community of white supremacists and expanding their recruitment base.

"For them, it's just shorthand for identity," Edward Ahmed Mitchell, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told Hughes. "There absolutely is a connection between far-right political extremism and far-right religious extremism, but I doubt these people are showing up at church every Sunday and reading their Bibles."

Research sociologist Matthew DeMichele told Hughes that many of today's religious displays are an "intense redeployment of old tactics."

"People don't want to say that this is a country founded on white supremacy. But we know that to be true," DeMichele said. "It's very important to understand that it's not new for white supremacists to have a Christian identity. But it is intriguing there has been the strengthening overlap of the white nationalists and those of Christian Identity."

The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented “Patriots” to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult. Alex Newhouse, deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies Besides faith, told Jenkins that social media have been powerful vectors for this confluence.

“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Newhouse said. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”

Newhouse particularly has noticed a sudden uptick, since 2019, of interest in Christian Identity, the infamous religious movement long associated with neo-Nazis, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church. Newhouse noted that Christian nationalist appeals may “disguise a much more dangerous uptick in adoption of Christian Identity.”

One of the leading voices in this resurgence of Identity beliefs, Newhouse says, is Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys-affiliated Fraternal Order of the Alt-Knights who later attempted to create an explicitly racist and antisemitic offshoot called “Proud Goys.” (Chapman is currently awaiting trial in Idaho on charges of assaulting a health-care worker when he was hospitalized last November.)

Newhouse said Chapman has been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram, while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda.” Another key Trumpist figure—Qanon influencer GhostEzra,who has 300,000 followers on Telegram—posted explicit Identity messages. Identity theology—including references to the “two seedline theory,” which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews—has been popping up with regularity on QAnon and Proud Boys channels on Telegram, Newhouse reported.

“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.

As Stewart explained in the NYT, Christian nationalist beliefs are not merely spreading among far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious is their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the Republican Party:

National organizations like the Faith & Freedom Coalition and the Ziklag Group, which bring together prominent Republican leaders with donors and religious right activists, feature “Seven Mountains” workshops and panels at their gatherings. Nationalist leaders and their political dependents in the Republican Party now state quite openly what before they whispered to one another over their prayer breakfasts. Whether the public will take notice remains to be seen.

As I’ve observed previously (while reviewing Stewart’s excellent review of Christian nationalism, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism): When viewed through the lens of its real-world outcomes, fundamentalist Christianity is less a coherent theology than it is a form of spiritual or religious totalitarianism, one that requires abject submission to what is actually a very perverse and narrow interpretation of the meaning of Scripture.

This approach translated naturally into political authoritarianism—the kind that Donald Trump practices. And Trump in turn has proven very adept at feeding the psychological needs of the kinds of personalities that adhere to such movements.

Many leaders of the Christian right like to dress up in red, white, and blue and announce themselves as true patriots. But they are the same people who seek to pervert our institutions, betray our international alliances, treat the Constitution as a subcategory of their holy texts, demean whole segments of the population, foist their authoritarian creed upon other people’s children, and celebrate the elevation of a “king” to the presidency who made a sport out of violating democratic laws and norms.

We can only be grateful that he is out of power now. And it will be incumbent on everyone who treasures their democratic institutions to do everything in their power to defend them against this lethal tide of extremism now.

After the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, American conservatives were faced with a stark choice: Recognize that their movement had inspired a seditious attack on democracy itself and work to restore the damage, swallowing the cold blue pill of the reality that they lost the 2020 election; or instead embracing the authoritarianism that had inspired a significant chunk of their base to attempt to lynch members of Congress and overthrow the legitimate counting of ballots, gulping down the red pill of conspiracism that fueled those warped beliefs.

It is now abundantly clear that they have chosen the latter. They have lied brazenly about who committed the attack, tried to claim that efforts to counter extremists' presence in the military and law enforcement are an attack on conservatives, and muttered darkly about secession while punishing members of Congress for voting to impeach Donald Trump. The final step—an open embrace of fascism—is now being discussed as a rational option among their leading pundits, including Fox News' Tucker Carlson.

Tucker Carlson and Jesse Kelly agree that Republicans are headed into fascismwww.youtube.com

On his nightly Fox News show last Thursday, Carlson invited radio talk-show Jesse Kelly on to discuss how Hunter Biden's gun permit somehow proves Democrats have rigged the system to their own exclusive benefit (no mention of Ivanka's multitudinous business deals was made). Kelly complained that "it's just item Number 1,000 in proving to people that there's two sets of rules in this country, there are rules for powerful Democrats, and there are rules for people like you and I. This is what they do and people are sick of it. It's making people feel helpless, it makes people feel like there is no justice out there, it feels as useless as going to a feminist rally and trying to find a woman who can cook."

Carlson then veered into a discussion of how all this undermines society:

CARLSON: I think you make a really solid point about the sadness and the powerlessness that people feel in the face of this. And at some point people are going to say, "Why should I follow the rules? Why should I be a good citizen if they don't have to follow the rules?" I mean, things kind of break down at some point, don't they?

KELLY: They will break down, they are breaking down, Tucker. I have said this before, and I'm telling you I'm worried that I'm right, the right is going to pick a fascist within 10 to 20 years. Because they're not going to be the only ones on the outs. There's 60, 70 million of us. We're not a tiny minority, and if we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free and Hunter Biden goes free, then the right's going to take drastic measures.

And it's not about Hunter Biden and his drug use. Nobody cares that he was bumpin' Booger Sugar and European hookers on the weekend, it's about justice, that he's never held accountable for it and none of the Bidens are, but you would be, Tucker, and so would I.

CARLSON: That's so well put, and you're absolutely right. We're moving toward actual extremism because they're undermining the system that kept extremism at bay. I don't think we can say that enough. I'm so glad that you just said it. Jesse Kelly, thank you.

This is an argument straight out of a Matt Bors cartoon—you know the one, where a young MAGA fanatic embraces neo-Nazism because of mild criticism from a liberal , saying: "I feel bullied, really"—that is recycled with great regularity on the right, particularly by young men who've embraced a proto-fascist ethos: "The left is making people become Nazis!" Portland Proud Boys figure Tusitala "Tiny" Toese is fond of regaling audiences with a similar origin story.

I have heard versions of this legend for many years in covering the radical right, and each time, given further probing with questions, it uniformly became clear that people who say they were pushed into extremism were already there in most regards, and whatever "pushed" them simply removed the pretense. Each of them had a pre-existing antipathy toward liberalism and "the left"—the same animus that historically fueled fascist movements—as well as a predilection toward conspiracism and violence.

But take special note of how Kelly frames the discussion: The Jan. 6 insurrection is never mentioned, but it forms the subtext of his complaint that "we're going to be all treated like criminals and all subject to every single law, while antifa, Black Lives Matter guys go free"—because in their minds, those are the factions responsible for terrorist violence in America, not a mob of right-thinking MAGA folks.

This narrative runs throughout much of mainstream conservative discourse in the aftermath of the Capitol siege. Seizing on modern variations of the timeworn "bloody shirt" trope, they have tried to depict the insurrectionists as "decent Americans in good standing" being victimized by a vengeful left. When the military sought to offer fresh training intended to weed out far-right extremists from their ranks, right-wing pundits complained that it was an "attack on conservatives."

The left is not driving conservatives towards fascism: Rather, their own embrace of far-right radicalization is the engine in all this. The simple existence of "the left" is enough to drive them into an eliminationist rage, and provides a handy rationalization for their own radicalized worldview.

This reality was crystallized in an article published this week in the house organ of the right-wing Claremont Institute, The American Mind, headlined "Conservatism is no Longer Enough: All hands on deck as we enter the counter-revolutionary moment," from an Institute fellow named Glenn Ellmers. Unlike Carlson and Kelly, the piece does not embrace fascism explicitly, but rather explicates in detail a political ethos that is almost classically fascist in the scholarly sense.

Besides being authoritarian, populist, and palingenetic, the piece—an attempt at laying out a fighting plan for the American right after the epistemic break of Jan. 6 (which again goes unmentioned specifically, but is an essential subtext of the piece)—is a remarkable example of undiluted eliminationism, rhetoric that dehumanizes, demonizes, and disenfranchises other members of a society and argue for their elimination.

Ellmers divides the nation into two warring halves: the "real Americans" (who, seemingly, engage in violent seditionist insurrection out of patriotic impulses) and the "not Americans"—i.e., the rest of us. And only the former half deserves to hold the political franchise:

Fewer are willing to take the next step and accept that most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.

I don't just mean the millions of illegal immigrants. Obviously, those foreigners who have bypassed the regular process for entering our country, and probably will never assimilate to our language and culture, are—politically as well as legally—aliens. I'm really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans. They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.

Like so many other red-pilled right-wing authoritarians, Ellmer's cognitive worldview is so skewed that he engages in outright projection here, especially in describing the enemy in greater detail as "a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism," and that the Real Americans voted against a "senile figurehead." This cognitive difference made voting for Trump "an easy choice," and in his view, voting for Biden branded one instantly a Not Real American: "Both Right and Left know where they stand today… and it is not together. Not anymore."

Ellmer somehow concludes that "the progressive, or woke, or 'antiracist' agenda" attacks and "repudiates" the notion that "any temporary majority in power must represent the rights and interests of all"—a concept that seems not to apply to vote-suppressing, anti-immigrant Republicans, not to mention precluding a liberal majority from applying policies that represent the rights and interests of people outside the majority—and so it "now corrupts our republic, assaults our morality, and suffocates our liberty."

Ellmer explains that his goal "is to show why we must all unite around the one, authentic America, the only one which transcends all the factional navel-gazing and pointless conservababble." A photo illustrating the piece, showing a muscular man in a tank top wrapping his hands in preparation for a fistfight, suggested what he has in mind: the thuggish street-brawler strategy of the Proud Boys.

As historian John Ganz explored in a responding piece at Substack, given there really is only one word to accurately describe this kind of authoritarian political ethos: fascism. His opening salvo—arguing for the disenfranchisement of the majority of the nation's voters on the basis of being insufficiently American is really only the beginning.

"These themes of pervading national corruption and decadence, and the need for a counter-revolution and a national rebirth put this text firmly in the radical reactionary or fascist ballpark," Ganz observes.

He also notes the obvious eliminationism: "Like many fascist theoreticians, the author of the Claremont essay puts the condition of America in terms of a 'toxin,' a 'disease,' a 'sickness,' and awaits the appearance of a providential man with the cure: 'What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.'

"There are also hints of the kind of dehumanizing rhetoric that fascist propagandists employ: 'If you are a zombie or a human rodent (who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.' "

Ganz also discusses Kelly's appearance on Carlson's show, noting that both of them clearly stated that fascism is a justifiable response to the left, one forced on the right. "Carlson, of course, has long been a mouthpiece of mainstream conservatism, and has now taken a more radical turn," he adds.

It's probably also worth noting that Kelly has a history of spinning reality through his own authoritarian prism, as Vanity Fair details:

In a 2018 Federalist piece titled "It's Time for the United States to Divorce Before Things Get Dangerous," Kelly pointed to intracountry division on the issues of firearms, immigration, and religion to predict that "sooner or later, the left-wing rage mob will start coming for the careers (and lives) of any normal American who sees things differently." He further warned that right-wing Americans could be massacred in a liberal-led purge, writing in his Federalist post "America Is Over, but I Won't See It Go Without an Epic Fight" that conservatives should fight to the death against "an eventual socialist abyss" that Kelly believes will take over the country. "Close your eyes and imagine holding someone's scalp in your hands," the article's first line reads. "I mean a real scalp, Indian-style, of some enemy you just killed on the battlefield; somebody you hated and who hated you back." After projecting that conservatives will "almost certainly" be massacred in an America's "inevitable communist purges," Kelly jumped "back to the scalping thing" and insinuated that conservatives should prepare to wage a bloody insurgency against fellow Americans: "When you make that long trek to the reservation the leftists have set up for you—and make that trek you will—what memories do you want to take with you? When living in the liberal utopian nightmare of 57 genders and government control over everything in your life…You'll want to know, to remember, even just cherish the knowledge that, one day, you rode out onto the plains and made them feel pain."

In the epistemologically demented world that people like Kelly and Carlson occupy, the left is the source of all the world's ills, its political violence, its social dysfunctions, while "real Americans" like themselves are standing up for goodness and righteousness. In the end, this is why fascism becomes an acceptable option, especially after Jan. 6, when the web of denial that normalized the American right's descent into radicalization was wiped away and its inherent authoritarianism and anti-democratic intent became unmistakable.

As I wrote after the insurrection:

The Republican Party's hostility to democracy—embodied by conservatives' running refrain that "America is not a democracy, it's a republic"—has become its official policy over the past decade, manifested most apparently in its egregious voter suppression policies and court rulings that reached a fever pitch in recent years. It's now a commonplace for Republican politicians (notably Trump himself) to fret that a high voter turnout is nearly certain to translate into Democratic wins as a reason to even further suppress the vote.

As David Frum (a never-Trump conservative) noted in his book Trumpocracy: "If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." On Wednesday, that rejection became undeniably, irrevocably manifest.

Rather than taking a hard look at what they have become after the mob their president ginned up stormed the Capitol, today's lame attempts by conservatives to gaslight the public about what happened Wednesday (with figures like Matt Gaetz and Mo Brooks trying to gaslight the public by claiming the invaders were actually "antifa") make all too clear that the Republican Party, now consumed by right-wing authoritarianism, has ceased to be a viable partner in a working democracy. The problem the rest of us now face is how to proceed from here.

The red pill of authoritarianism is a helluva drug. And as its addicts descend into an embrace of fascism, it's clear they have the capability of not only warping their own reality, but everyone else's too.

Tucker Carlson has never been one to shy away from using extremist or even white-nationalist talking points, as he demonstrated recently while rolling out the right's latest rhetorical vehicle for leveraging the surge in asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border as a weapon to attack the Biden administration: The crowding at the border is a threat to the environment!

It's a claim Carlson has used before, but then, so have many others—notably, organized anti-immigrant hate groups, white nationalists, and the far-right "ecofascist" movement. Again, that's never stopped Carlson from regurgitating their a-factual garbage.

Tucker Carlson claims Biden border policies are harming the environmentwww.youtube.com

On his March 9 show, Carlson attacked Biden's border policies by claiming that Democrats just want to let all these immigrants into the country in order to gain voters. And in the meantime, they're degrading the environment in places like southern Texas:

It doesn't really matter what effect it has on the country. It doesn't really matter what more crowding does to the natural environment. We have about 100 million more people living in the United States now than we had 30 years ago. What does that do to the environment? No one cares. Who does it hurt? They don't care.

This is a recurring theme for Carlson. Back in November 2019, Carlson opined that immigrants were making America a grubby, unpleasant place:

[I]f you cared about the environment, which I personally do, emphatically care—I actually go outside once in a while unlike most people on the left—why would you want a crowded country? Isn't crowding your country the fastest way to despoil it, to pollute it, to make it, you know, a place you wouldn't want to live?

A few weeks later, in an interview, he falsely claimed that immigrants were dirtying up the Potomac River: "It has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier," he said. "I go down there, and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants."

He continued harping along these lines on Wednesday when he again attacked Biden's border policies by talking about how America was becoming too crowded because of these immigrants:

Over the past 30 years, the population of the United States has exploded by nearly 100 million people, mostly due to immigration. Were you even aware that that happened? This is becoming a crowded country, and crowded countries are ugly, unhappy countries. Why are we letting that happen?

As Sam Seder observed on his Majority Report radio show, this rhetoric echoes the same arguments made by the ecofascist movement—who blame immigrants and Third World nations for environmental degradation and climate change, and adopt a nihilistic "accelerationist" solution based ultimately on genocide. "He is walking right up to the line if not crossing it, with his eco-fascism," Seder commented.

"I mean, when he starts talking about how 'we don't have the room for these people in this country because we have resources and it's hurting our environment,' he is now like that El Paso shooter," he added.

This same rhetoric has been essential to the gradual creep of ecofascism into the mainstream because it cloaks itself in ostensibly liberal-leaning concerns—a clean environment, quality of living conditions, good public health. And this creep, as a report out this week from the UK organization Hope Not Hate (HNH)—titled "From Climate Denial to Blood and Soil"—explores in detail, is a phenomenon that's happening globally, particularly in Europe.

"This is something that's happening internationally," HNH researcher David Lawrence told The Independent. "Across Europe, for example, lots of the right wing populist parties are adopting environmental causes as in the [United] States."

The HNH report describes how ecofascist groups successfully disguise themselves with seemingly generic environmentalist or communitarian labels that don't immediately reveal their underlying far-right agendas. One such group calls itself "Local Matters" (LM), describing its activism as "agitating for radical, cross-spectrum policies for an environmentalist, regionalist, direct-democratic England," while encouraging homegrown vegetable gardening and railing against corporate carbon pollution, as well as other environmental issues.

This is only a façade, however:

Beneath this inoffensive green sheen, however, lies something nastier. LM is spearheaded by former members of Generation Identity, a European far-right network that promotes "identitarianism", a form of racial segregation. In an email obtained by the anti-fascist group Red Flare and published by Vice, co-founder Charlie Shaw describes LM as "a political project with a softer face […] The ideas are certainly identitarian, but it's [sic] presentation removes any interest that a group like Hope Not Hate or Antifa might have."

Like all ecofascist groups, LM blames overpopulation in the UK, fueled by immigration, for a decline in ecological health. Its solution: "Comprehensively put a stop to immigration in its entirety."

LM is only one of a number of such organizations whose agenda is a front for ecofascist ideology, some of whom have even taken to falsely presenting themselves in the guise of such established left-wing environmental movement entities as Extinction Rebellion. These groups, HNH found, are operating not just throughout Europe, but also enjoy rhetorical support from populist right-wing groups such as Nigel Farage's Reform UK and the UK Independence Party (UKIP)—whose manifesto reads: "The most significant threat to the Green Belt, and the UK environment in general, especially England, is unsustained population growth, which is predominantly fuelled by uncontrolled mass migration"—as well as such traditional far-right groups as the British National Party.

As Lawrence explained to the Independent, these movements are poised to take advantage of real-world crises as climate change and other environmental disasters manifest themselves.

"If you take the long view, as we see more extreme weather, extreme politics will come as a natural result of that," he said. "We're facing devastating effects on both the world's poorest people but also on wealthy nations and there'll be a volatile social situation, potentially destabilizing economies and unemployment. Of course this will be something that the far right will seek to capitalise on."

He added: "Anti-racism has to be woven into environmental action. This is the vital cause of our time, and we have to be very vigilant to combat the spread of divisive and hateful movements, stopping them co-opting those issues for their own ends."

The ecofascists' agenda melds neatly with the populist right's "instinctive distrust of established authorities and official narratives" which fuels conspiratorial thinking and coincides with the radical right's deep hostility towards left-wing positions, the HNH report explains. So mainstream or liberal environmental efforts combating climate change wind up being portrayed as a "globalist" scam by the left, part of a larger, more nefarious scheme to enslave ordinary people.

For instance, the UKIP splinter group For Britain claims: "The Far Left are extremely keen on the Climate Narrative, as part of the agenda is dismantling capitalism and wealth redistribution. As we have seen with the Black Lives Matter movement, it is foolish to take the narrative at face value, particularly when a cause is hijacked by Marxists and Communists."

"The blaming of immigration for overpopulation, and therefore environmental destruction, is near-ubiquitous across radical and far-right groups that delve into green issues," the report observes.

A report published last month by the Center for American Progress (CAP) explored how far-right extremists increasingly are blaming immigrants for environmental problems in the United States as their latest attempt in a long line of such attempts, some of them dating back more than a century and buried in the legacy of early conservationist activism, others reflecting more recent ongoing efforts by white nationalists to exploit what they believe is "common ground."

"While their scientifically meritless arguments are no longer welcome within the mainstream environmental movement, they continue to fuel the vitriol—and bad policy decisions, including draconian cuts to immigration levels, the evisceration of the U.S. refugee asylum systems, and the separation of families at the border—that hurt legitimate, effective solutions to the conservation and climate crisis," report observed.

One of the more pernicious aspects of ecofascist-friendly populism is that it's built on misinformation, deliberate smears, and a bedrock of flawed assumptions. These include the misconception that the U.S.'s environmental health exists in isolation from the rest of the world—something that the climate-change crisis Americans face in 2021 manifestly belies.

More importantly, it's a hollow diversionary distraction that allows the corporate and political interests responsible for the real problem—namely, unregulated development and overconsumption—off the hook. "Per capita, the United States has a greater rate of climate emissions, air pollution, and nature destruction than most other countries and is an outlier even among countries with similar standards of living," the report observes. "Policies aimed at limiting corporate capture and protecting public health—not curtailing immigration—are the solutions to these problems."

Indeed, one of the deep ironies around the right's growing "concern" for the environmental health of the southern border region is that one of the most devastating manmade environmental disasters in that region of the recent past has been the construction of the border wall, promoted by Donald Trump at the behest of his nativist base. As the CAP report observes:

One of the most dramatic examples of how greenwashed nativism can harm the planet is the Trump administration's U.S.-Mexico border wall. Its construction was not only regarded as ineffective and wasteful but has also caused immense damage to the environment, including by blasting mountains, destroying ancient cactus, desecrating sacred sites of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and disrupting the migration routes and survival of nearly 100 already imperiled species ranging from jaguars to monarch butterflies. Notably, the Trump administration's extensive use of waivers to circumvent environmental standards and regulations allowed the federal government to destroy these lands with impunity in the name of immigration control.

As Gabe Ortiz reported last year, the environmental damage inflicted by the wall's construction is, in the views of regional activists, "incalculable."

"Saguaro cactuses, some nearly a century old, in shards on the desert floor," Laiken Jordahl of the Center for Biological Diversity wroter for the New York Times. "Jaguars, lost, because a metal wall has blocked their migratory path. Endangered species homeless because their critical habitats have been destroyed. Living and working along the U.S.-Mexico border means watching the surreal, slow-motion leveling of the wild and fragile ecosystems I've spent my career fighting to protect."

All of which, as Ortiz reports, has fueled an effort by a coalition of 70 indigenous-rights, wildlife, and civil-rights groups to have Trump's wall removed posthaste. The Biden administration has paused all construction work as it reviews its legal options.

Tucker Carlson, of course, thought the border wall was a terrific idea. In fact, he hosted a segment in 2019 touting the wall as environmentally beneficial—because, you see, it would stop would-be border crossers from grubbying up the desert landscape, "damaging fragile ecosystems."

"That's been known for a long time," Carlson told his guest, then-Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. "If you cared about the environment, you would care about that, and yet anyone who raises alarms is called names. We don't care because we care about the environment and this country."

"Well, the reality is that common sense says that when you have tremendous trafficking, trails, trash, debris and fires, you have a lot of damage to native vegetation, wildlife, and to the ecosystem," said Bernhardt.

"Spewing trash, debris, and fires," Carlson added. "So we are not allowed to be concerned about that. But if you care about the environment, that would be a concern, correct?"

Carlson, as far as we can find, never discussed, or expressed any concern for, the damage wreaked by the wall's construction itself.

It became clear in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection—which included the participation of dozens of off-duty officers from around the country—that any effort to confront the right-wing extremism that fueled it would need to include police reforms that rooted such extremists out of the ranks of law enforcement. Now it appears that the FBI is turning its attention to the reality of such infiltration.

ABC News' Josh Margolin reports that a confidential intelligence assessment by the FBI's San Antonio division concludes that white supremacists and other far-right extremists would "very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of" their ideologies. The report also outlines the extraordinary threat that this infiltration poses both to those authorities and to the public generally.

"In the long term, FBI San Antonio assesses [racially motivated violent extremists] successfully entering military and law enforcement careers almost certainly will gain access to non-public tradecraft and information, enabling them to enhance operational security and develop new tactics in and beyond the FBI San Antonio" region, the assessment said.

The document, which was based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, was distributed to law-enforcement agencies in Texas and around the nation. It particularly focuses on neo-Nazis inspired by the white supremacist tract Siege, written by an associate of Charles Manson named James Mason, which advocates for the destruction of American democracy through "race war" and its replacement with a white ethnostate. These include the domestic terrorism organization Atomwaffen Division, whose members have been the subject of multiple FBI arrests in the past couple of years.

Titled "Siege-Inspired Actors Very Likely Seek Military and Law Enforcement Affiliation, Increasing Risk of Tradecraft Proliferation and Color of Law Offenses in the FBI San Antonio Area of Responsibility," the report's authors wrote that their assessment is "based on evidence [extremists] expressed a desire to join the military and law enforcement primarily to obtain tradecraft to prepare for and initiate a collapse of society, specifically by engaging in violence against the US government and specified racial and ethnic groups. Online peers encouraged them to seek these careers and [extremists] built relationships with associates seeking military employment, focusing on the associates' current and future martial skills."

The assessment also says extremists are "likely to seek to exploit familial and social connections when pursuing military and law enforcement employment, reducing obstacles and increasing opportunities ... to acquire tradecraft."

"When we asked the FBI last year to testify about white supremacists executing plans to infiltrate law enforcement entities across America, the bureau refused and told us it had no evidence that racist infiltration was a problem," Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland told ABC News in a statement. "Now, the January insurrection—and the growing evidence of off-duty law enforcement officers being involved in the attack on Congress—and this newly leaked report confirm in my mind that the FBI's failure to level with the American people about organized racist infiltration of law enforcement is having dangerous and deadly consequences."

The problem was evident well before Jan. 6. Police participation in the QAnon conspiracy theory became an issue over the summer as increasing numbers of law enforcement officers started showing up in support of the Trumpian conspiracy cult. An August 2020 report by the Brennan Center for Justice's Michael German examined far-right infiltration of law enforcement and concluded that authorities' efforts at preventing it and rooting it out were lackluster at best.

"Efforts to address systemic and implicit biases in law enforcement are unlikely to be effective in reducing the racial disparities in the criminal justice system as long as explicit racism in law enforcement continues to endure. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that it does," German wrote. He also noted that the Justice Department has no national strategy designed to identify extremist officers or to protect the communities they are assigned to serve.

The presence of ideologically sympathetic extremists within law enforcement also poses a security threat to any agency dealing with their criminal activities, particularly officers who keep any fascist affiliations secret and work to implement a far-right agenda from within the force.

"Police officers have access to sensitive information," explains associate Georgetown Law professor Vida Johnson. "For example, they might know if they're looking into the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters or the Oath Keepers, so they can tip them off. That's one reason why careers in law enforcement are so appealing to people who hold far-right belief systems. They get this opportunity to not only police people of color, to control their goings and comings and how they live their lives, but also they get this inside information about whether [far-right groups] are in fact being investigated."

American law enforcement has never systematically addressed the problem of extremism within its ranks, which historically speaking is not a new phenomenon at all, but has worsened dramatically in the past few decades. "It's clear that extremist groups on the right and white supremacists have been agents of chaos, of violence in our community, and the fact that police are just now interested in training on this, I find more than disturbing," Johnson told the Los Angeles Times.

Johnson, in a 2019 academic paper titled "KKK in the PD: White Supremacist Police and What to Do About It," found that police departments across the country exhibited evidence of white supremacist ideology, citing "scandals in over 100 different police departments, in over 40 different states, in which individual police officers have sent overtly racist emails, texts or made racist comments via social media."

"We are continuing to press the FBI for information about how it plans to counteract the contagion of white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement bodies," Raskin said after learning of the new FBI report. "The FBI must answer specifically for what it is doing to combat white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement. It must work to root out officers who seek state power to terrorize our communities under color of law."

As German wrote in the Brennan Center report:

The failure of federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to aggressively respond to evidence of explicit racism among police officers undermines public confidence in fair and impartial law enforcement. Worse, it signals to white supremacists and far-right militants that their illegal acts enjoy government approval and authorization, making them all the more brazen and dangerous. Winning back public trust requires transparent and equal enforcement of the law, effective oversight, and public accountability that prioritizes targeted communities' interests.

American policymakers face a real conundrum when it comes to tackling the spread of right-wing extremism and its attendant terroristic violence, a problem that became self-evident amid the January 6 Capitol insurrection and its aftermath: How can law enforcement effectively curtail the illegal activities of right-wing extremists when so many officers are themselves participants in these movements?

The answer — which is that it cannot — suggests that effectively confronting far-right extremism must begin with police reform, and particularly the task of weeding extremists out of our police forces. The public cannot expect agencies tasked with enforcing the laws that prohibit extremist violence to do so seriously when those same extremists permeate their ranks.

The issue became self-evident when it emerged that some 31 law-enforcement officers in 12 states have been linked to the January 6 Capitol siege. Police departments around the country are now struggling with the enormity of the job, as the Los Angeles Times recently examined, focusing on the efforts of Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore to confront extremism within the force he oversees.

The most difficult aspect of the problem for police is the extent to which far-right views have been normalized within the mainstream, and particularly within the ranks of police officers. The issue gets to the heart of a police culture that has become increasingly penetrated by right-wing politics and is simultaneously hostile to accountability for its officers' behavior. When cops are also far-right extremists who engage in discriminatory policing, American police officials have a history of closing ranks and defending the status quo.

Moore, in an interview with the Times, voiced some of these cultural tensions when asked whether he would drum out officers who were found to be members of the Proud Boys, a far-right hate group. He at first suggested that the Proud Boys were part of a broad category of groups that included Black Lives Matter with which the public was still grappling.

"America is struggling today with understanding whether the Proud Boys, some aspects of BLM, other groups including Heritage Foundation and others, represent ideology that's counter to this democracy," Moore said. "What I know is that this democracy is made best when there is discussion and there's dialogue and debate."

However, he clarified that he personally considers the Proud Boys an organization that "runs counter to this democracy," and does not believe that "there is any place for a law enforcement officer to be a member of such organization or advocate for their existence."

Moore added that he is unaware of any Proud Boys or members of any other extremist group within the ranks of current LAPD officers, but is prepared to investigate any such claims, indicating he would fire anyone who "crosses the line" of what is acceptable.

LAPD officials were driven by last summer's anti-police-brutality protests, Moore said, to examine how best to comb their ranks for extremists and weed them out, suggesting they were especially motivated by the realization that the presence of such police would seriously undermine efforts to rebuild trust within the city's diverse neighborhoods. Moore rejected any suggestion that extremism was prevalent among his officers, noting that the LAPD is a diverse department, both ethnically and politically.

"What's really critical I believe going forward is for America to ... recognize extremes and have no place for them in this democracy, but also to recognize views that are different from their own and not vilify or call them extremist," Moore said.

Extremism within the ranks of law enforcement, however, is not just a community relations problem. Much more broadly, it also affects what laws are enforced and how. And it has a direct impact on the broader national effort to push back the incoming tide of white nationalist and other far-right extremist violence.

The primary problem with domestic terrorism in America is that our law-enforcement apparatus at every level—federal, state, and local—has failed to enforce the laws already on the books that provide them with more than enough ability to confront it. The ongoing presence of officers sympathetic to their cause—and for whom, in fact, their radical extremism is invisible—is one of the major proximate causes of this failure.

It is already, for example, a federal crime to share bomb-making recipes on the internet. It's also a federal crime to advocate the assassinations of public officials or to otherwise threaten them with violence. Yet what began as a few angry voices on the fringes of the internet—and thus easy for law-enforcement authorities to ignore—has grown into a massive flood in large part because these laws are only selectively and lightly enforced.

As Moustafa Bayoumi observed at The Nation:

[T]here is already plenty of prosecutorial power on the books to deal with far-right violence. The problem is not that we need to expand our laws. Rather, the problem is making sure we use our laws, and that we use them fairly, consistently, and to the full extent possible. The real scandal here is not the lack of a domestic terrorism statute. The real scandal is the free pass white supremacy has had from law enforcement for all these years.

National security expert Michael German of the Brennan Center for Justice, in a paper for Just Security, has explored in detail why new laws are not necessary to confront the problem. As he explains, the problem for federal law enforcement has not been a lack of tools to deal with domestic terrorism, but an utter lack of prioritization of the issue by high-level officials.

"While Justice Department officials have used notorious incidents of white supremacist violence to push for a new domestic terrorism statute, the Department itself continues to de-prioritize far-right violence and focus its most aggressive tactics instead against environmentalists, political protesters, and communities of color," he wrote. "It isn't hard to guess who would likely be targeted with new domestic terrorism laws."

The presence of ideologically sympathetic extremists within law enforcement also poses a security threat to any agency dealing with their criminal activities, particularly officers who keep any fascist affiliations secret and work to implement a far-right agenda from within the force.

"Police officers have access to sensitive information," explains associate Georgetown Law professor Vida Johnson. "For example, they might know if they're looking into the Proud Boys or the Three Percenters or the Oath Keepers, so they can tip them off. That's one reason why careers in law enforcement are so appealing to people who hold far-right belief systems. They get this opportunity to not only police people of color, to control their goings and comings and how they live their lives, but also they get this inside information about whether [far-right groups] are in fact being investigated."

American law enforcement has never systematically addressed the problem of extremism within its ranks, which historically speaking is not a new phenomenon at all, but has worsened dramatically in the past few decades. "It's clear that extremist groups on the right and white supremacists have been agents of chaos, of violence in our community, and the fact that police are just now interested in training on this, I find more than disturbing," Johnson told the Times.

Johnson, in a 2019 academic paper titled "KKK in the PD: White Supremacist Police and What to Do About It," found that police departments across the country exhibited evidence of white supremacist ideology, citing "scandals in over 100 different police departments, in over 40 different states, in which individual police officers have sent overtly racist emails, texts, or made racist comments via social media."

She observed to the Times it should be a cause for concern when officers become followers of such conspiracy theories as QAnon, or the claim that COVID-19 is a hoax, or theories that Trump's reelection was fraudulently stolen from him.

"People who can't separate fact from fiction probably shouldn't be the ones enforcing laws with guns," Johnson said.

Johnson has a roadmap for rooting extremists out of police departments: stricter and more diligent hiring practices, social media checks that could reveal extremist beliefs or organizational membership, periodic background checkups for all police veterans, and a review apparatus that is fully independent.

"They're supposed to be protecting and serving us," Johnson told Mother Jones. "But unfortunately it seems like a lot of departments see themselves at odds with or even at war with the rest of the community. That's a culture within policing that needs to change."

The question about the QAnon cult that lingers in many people's minds is, "Where will they turn as the multiple failures of Q predictions begin to mount and their authoritarian belief in Donald Trump falls apart?" We're starting to get an answer: The vigilante militia movement and white nationalism.

Militia groups in Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, are forming alliances with an array of other Trump-supporting far-right organizations, including the QAnon groups aligned with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. It reflects a much broader trend in the post-Trump world of the radical right in which what used to be distinct movements with widely differing sets of beliefs are commingling and coalescing into a singular far-right insurgency against liberal democracy.

The goal of the Georgia groups, according to Justin Thayer of the Georgia III% Martyrs, is to advocate for the state's secession from the United States. He says the final straw was the arrests of people who were involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

"The way patriots are now being hunted down and arrested by fellow men and women who have taken the same oath has disheartened any faith I had in the redemption or reformation of the USA as one entity," Thayer told the Journal-Constitution.

Thayer's group have now allied themselves with other "Three Percenter" militias, mainly the American Brotherhood of Patriots and American Patriots USA (APUSA), headed by Chester Doles, a Dahlonega man with a background in neo-Nazi hate groups. Thayer foresees a need for Georgians to leave the union because of what he calls "the collapse of the American experiment."

Doles also told the paper he had given up on democracy: "Things are different now. Everything has changed. We've seen our last Republican president in American history. The ballot box—we tried as hard as we could try. It's not working."

Amy Iandiorio, an Anti-Defamation League researcher who has been monitoring these groups' online activities, told the Journal-Constitution that a "shared victimhood narrative" around Trump's defeat at the hands of Joe Biden had fostered an environment that encouraged "tactical" alliances among normally disparate groups.

"We saw members of traditional militias, white supremacists, QAnon and other people in the same spaces and claiming very similar enemies," she said.

These are "extensions of trends that extend back well before the Capitol insurrection," Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) told Daily Kos. "The silos that used to segment the far-right have been eroding since the days of the Tea Party. The Trump years obliterated that segmentation almost entirely."

The two militia groups had earlier had a kind of falling out revolving around Greene and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler when the Martyrs showed up at a joint campaign rally in Ringgold working as the private security detail for Greene. Doles had championed Greene's candidacy during both the primary and general campaigns with members of his group posing for photos with her, but had become an embarrassment when photos of him posing with Greene and Loeffler were publicized on social media. Loeffler subsequently disavowed Doles.

So when Doles showed up in Ringgold, Greene asked the Martyrs group to escort Doles out of the event, setting off a round of internecine bickering. Thayer said he and Doles have repaired the relationship.

"We both have the same objective and work with other organizations," he told the Journal-Constitution. "So it was in the best interest of the movement to become ally's (sic) and work together."

Journal-Constitution reporter Chris Joyner was interviewed by Georgia Public Broadcasting. He observed that there was already a considerable overlap between people who joined vigilante militias and QAnon conspiracy theory subscribers:

QAnon is an entirely separate segment of sort of this universe of people who might have been at the Capitol. … Because it is so wide-ranging, parts of it have become ingrained in the militia movement to a degree that I found sort of surprising. 2020 was a really big year for QAnon. Part of that had to do with the pandemic, which was, you know, the conspiracy theories about the pandemic were absorbed into the sort of QAnon network of conspiracy theories. People were more inclined to stay at home. So they were online more often and they got sort of drawn into these at the time, Facebook groups that were incubators for QAnon and that did find its way into some channels of the militias as well. So there was there was crossover there between the QAnon conspiracy theory and … the Three Percenters, for instance.

Trump's ongoing refusal to concede the election—and his promotion of groundless conspiracy theories about "election fraud" at the core of that refusal—created a pressure cooker-like environment in which all those disparate parts came together. And Jan. 6 became the bursting point for all that pressure.

"Their backs were against the wall," Joyner observed. "This was a final opportunity. They felt like they were getting strong signals from the president himself as to there being some way they could change the outcome on this date if enough pressure was applied to, say, Vice President Pence or to Republicans in the Senate. I think one of the things that's sort of striking about this moment, compared to others, is these are not groups that normally talk to each other."

This was reflected in the way that the demographics of the people who entered the Capitol suggested a remarkable shift in the participants in the same far-right extremist groups that led the assault on the police barricades—the Proud Boys particularly, who have tended toward recruiting men between ages 18 and 35. The insurrectionists' average age was 40, according to a University of Chicago study, and only a handful of the people arrested so far belonged to organized far-right groups; a high percentage were employed, many were business owners, most were middle-aged, and nearly all of them were middle class.

The Capitol insurrection, as the study's authors concluded, "revealed a new force in American politics—not merely a mix of right-wing organizations, but a broader mass political movement that has violence at its core and draws strength even from places where Trump supporters are in the minority."

These trends have been coalescing all during the Trump era. "Going back as far as Charlottesville, heavily-armed Three Percenters and Oath Keepers marched alongside Proud Boy streetfighters and unabashed white nationalists," observed Burghart. "The President refused to denounce these 'fine people.'"

However, 2020 produced two extraordinary events that had the effect of driving this "multidimensional approach" straight from the margins to mainstream American politics: the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 election. Burghart says:

The pandemic mobilized a significant mass base of individuals who were radicalized in record time. Ammon Bundy and his group People's Rights demonstrated the power of armed confrontation and created a model for armed opposition to government intervention to stop the spread of COVID-19. Before the insurrection in DC, there are attacks on state capitol buildings in numerous states built on Bundy's model. Those efforts have been designed to be easily repurposed to fight against anything they dislike. Efforts like Bundy's also brought new constituencies into insurrectionism, particularly women.

The 2020 election, and the so-called "Stop the Steal" efforts to overturn the election results started to congeal the various segments of the far-right into an oppositional force against the Biden administration. The election cycle supercharged Qanon conspiracists as they reached a surprisingly large audience, while the Oath Keepers provided security at MAGA rallies and the Proud Boys got a shout-out from the President. In November, when election results showed Biden as the winner, we witnessed the coalescing of a wider range of far-right forces into mass opposition fueled by a sense of white dispossession and anti-democratic rage. That inchoate coalition included MAGA supporters, Tea Partiers, Qanon conspiracists, COVID insurrectionists, far-right paramilitaries, racist reactionaries, and unabashed white nationalists. Each of those segments provided multiple onramps onto the radicalization conveyor belt. The multiplier effect of those groups all working together turned the radicalization conveyor belt up to eleven, swiftly moving people from political opposition to insurrection.

After the Jan. 6 insurrection there has been some breakdown in intergroup relations and some internecine quarreling, mostly as a result of fallout from both the law enforcement crackdown on participants and the sudden deplatforming of far-right extremists from social media sites that followed the attack on the Capitol. This is not surprising since historically the American radical right has gone through periods of shakeup following high-profile public events involving them, such as the 1996 Oklahoma City bombing or the 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia.

But as Burghart observes, these periods mostly involve reshaping of the movement to fit new conditions on the ground. "The situation inside the Proud Boys right now captures many different movement dynamics," he told Daily Kos. "There is increased law enforcement scrutiny and multiple arrests on serious charges related to the Capitol insurrection. There are chapters in Indiana and Oklahoma that split from the national organization, largely because of that scrutiny (and the revelation that the group's leader was an informant). Most importantly, however, is that there is a faction trying to pull the group in a more explicitly white nationalist direction. Despite all the internal chaos, the Proud Boys are still looking to recruit disaffected Qanon believers."

As Joyner noted: "Over the last several years, the level of crosstalk between … disparate factions of outright racist groups, white nationalist groups to … militia groups, they may not share those same beliefs, but they there's a thread that runs through it that had allowed them to talk to each other and coordinate primarily on social media in a way that we had not seen before. That sort of led us to this moment, I think."

Burghart sees three major issues likely to bond the various sectors of the radical right during this period of adjustment:

• Look for nativism to be the glue that binds together mainstreamers and armed insurrectionists during the first years of the Biden administration.
• Opposition to COVID-19 health restrictions, widespread distribution of the vaccine, and spending to fight the virus can become a flashpoint for the far right, as recent confrontations in Los Angeles, California, and Vancouver, Washington, have demonstrated. Expect more confrontations.
• Attacking Black Lives Matter/antifascists has been a vital part of the far-right playbook for some time. It provides a common racialized enemy and their rationalization for street violence.

Regardless of how it all takes shape, we can expect that the insurgency the Biden-Harris administration will be facing will be relentlessly conspiracist, with those conspiracy theories providing "justification" for the various kinds of violence they will unleash: Proud Boys-style street violence with armed vigilante militias participating as well, and various acts of domestic terrorism—both so-called "lone wolf" violence by radicalized individuals as well as organized small-cell attacks of trained paramilitary groups, probably on both government and media targets.

It's going to be a very long four years, and probably much longer than that.

The American far right is comprised of an amalgam of widely varying belief systems, from QAnon conspiracy theorists to hardened neo-Nazis; the primary thing they all have in common is a powerful antipathy to democracy and its institutions. So that core exposed itself online in clear terms this week after Myanmar's military pulled off a coup that suspended the country's fragile democracy, and American right-wing extremists began chatting about it loudly—hoping for the same thing to happen to the United States.

QAnon cultists pronounced it a concrete sign foreshadowing the imminent arrest of President Biden, cheering the Myanmar coup as an "awakening." Meanwhile militant white nationalists posted memes showing a crying "Groyper" below the text: "TFW [that feeling when] you learn that Myanmar's military can't come over to arrest your politicians too."

As Media Matters' Alex Kaplan reports, top QAnon influencers wondered "when will this happen here" and when the military will "arrest [American] politicians too." Others believe the Myanmar coup ought to be "a lesson" for Biden.

"The Burmese military has arrested the country's leaders after credible evidence of widespread voter fraud became impossible to ignore. Read this Reuters article and watch them cover for the government, calling it a 'coup against a democratically elected government'," posted one influencer on Telegram with more than 45,000 subscribers. "Sounds like the controlled media and Biden admin are scared this might happen here."

"We will see this headline here soon," another QAnon believer with more than 50,000 subscribers on Telegram wrote, linking to a tweet from a far-right news website about the Myanmar coup.

One of the many theories floating about Telegram (featured in a thread with more than 165,000 subscribers) claims that Myanmar is a major site of human trafficking—which is the ostensible focus of the QAnon theories—and that, moreover, there are "links" between the country (notably deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi) and QAnon's primary suspects, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This theory's implication is that "we are seeing the first signs of military takeover that is also planned for the U.S.," Amaranth Amarasingam, a professor and researcher at Queen's University in Ontario, told Rolling Stone.

Another theory connected China and two companies that played major roles in Trumpian promoters of false voter-fraud conspiracy theories, Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, with the coup. The theory claimed that the two companies also oversaw fraud in Myanmar's elections, suggesting the military acted in order to blunt the electronic vote fraud.

On the far-right message board 4chan, one commenter posted: "They too had a disputed election in November but unlike the Americans, they seem to have actual balls."

Other comments from around the far-right corners of social media:

"That should be us."

"Maybe Q meant Myanmar this whole time?"

"I'm thinking this is a wake up call that not all military coups are bad."

"When will this happen here?"

"Take note; Let this Myanmar thing be a lesson; when the Military decides to move – it comes out of nowhere and is swift and clean."

"Myanmar's awakening and Peruvian government waking up. When will the rest of the world decide it's time to end the cyclical treasonous fraud and purge their government of the corruption? U.S. will you do the same? Letssss Gooo!"

"More and more having red pill revaluations. If we are to clean out the garbage we must ALL act. Words without action are just words!"

As Rolling Stone's Ed Dickson observes, QAnon cultists seeking vindication after the serial failure of all their conspiracy-theory predictions have become obsessed with the claim that the the results of the election were fraudulent: "Many have been pushing the claim that Trump will return to office, possibly by force of a military coup. And they have been invigorated by watching this exact scenario taking place in the small southeast Asian country."

There's been a buffoonish quality to Ammon Bundy's brand of far-right "constitutionalist" politics over the past six months, primarily organized in a typically paranoid response to COVID-19-related public-health measures: Protesting at the home of a police officer who had arrested an anti-vaccination fanatic for violating the closure of a playground. Trying to bully his way inside a health-board meeting. Getting arrested twice in two days for ignoring his ban from the Idaho Statehouse. Going maskless at a Caldwell High School football game that forced the game to be called off, for which he was not only ejected but banned from future games by the local school district.

The endless antics, however, have always obfuscated a darker, much more dangerous agenda. A disturbing new in-depth report by Devin Burghart at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights reveals that all the time that Bundy has been gathering media time and headlines, he's been building a massive army of volunteers—a network called People's Rights—intent on imposing a far-right authoritarian state, all under the guise of defending individual rights.

Bundy first announced the formation of the People's Rights network in March, when he held a gathering not far from his home in Emmett, Idaho, discussing plans to organize people to form ad-hoc gatherings to "defend" local citizens against COVID-19-related "tyranny." Bundy told the audience that they didn't need to obey the governor's stray-at-home or business-closure orders. And he pledged to bring fellow "Patriots" to the rescue if anyone felt pressure from "authorities" to comply.

"I will be there," Bundy told the Idaho Press. "I will bring as many people as we can. We will form a legal defense for you, a political defense for you, and we will also, if necessary, provide a physical defense for you, so that you can continue in your rights."

As it has played out on the ground, these gatherings have become bellicose, and frequently armed, mobs protesting police officers at their homes, breaking into health-board meetings that were being held online, and breaking down the doors inside the Statehouse and attending committee meetings unmasked in order to intimidate state legislators.

The incident resulting in the cancellation of the football game between Caldwell and Emmett high schools is emblematic of these anti-democratic intimidation tactics at work.

Bundy, whose son plays for Emmett High, showed up in Caldwell for the game without a mask—though one was required for entry—and refused to put one on, first taking a seat in the stands, then moving to a fenced area away from the stands. As he livestreamed the exchange, Bundy refused to leave when game officials asked him to.

Moreover, members of his network watching on Facebook sprang into action and began phoning 911 dispatchers in Caldwell—not merely to complain, but to threaten and intimidate. The flood of threats was so overwhelming and worrisome that at halftime, officials announced the game was being cancelled.

"The threats made to dispatch appear to have stemmed from the dispute between Mr. Bundy and the Caldwell School District personnel that requested he wear a mask while attending the game," a Caldwell police spokesman told the Idaho Statesman. "The calls did specifically reference the football game."

Ten days later, the district voted unanimously to ban Bundy from Caldwell school grounds for the next year.

The IREHR report explores how this is all being organized. The People's Rights network, it explains, has seen rapid growth fueled by "a fusion of Bundy's core of the far-right paramilitary supporters built up over years of armed standoffs with a mass base of new activists radicalized in protest over COVID-19 health directives."

Bundy devised a secure online system built on SMS text messaging to enable the network to organize without public scrutiny or exposure. IREHR managed to obtain access to the network, however, and reports that "Bundy has assembled a team of 153 'assistants' in sixteen states." It goes on to identify all of those people, and found that their backgrounds include significant activism in radical right causes—and that, somewhat unusually, the majority of those local assistants are women (though the national and state leadership remain dominated by men).

This network is not engaged in the usual far-right battle against "government tyranny," which is the usual rhetoric that surrounds "Patriot" groups. Bundy's network instead is pro-government—but one that has no compunction about erasing the rights of people its participants have deemed morally depraved:

Instead of a more traditional "anti-government" narrative, People's Rights leaders have expressed a desire for governmental power to be used to protect the "righteous" against "wicked" liberals, antifa, Black Lives Matter activists, and others. Several People's Rights leaders are running for elected office—to become the government. Absent that sort of intervention, leaders have proposed a type of armed enclave-style "neighborhood" nationalism, where "righteous" neighbors stand against the "wicked." People's Rights leaders have often defined the "wicked" using far-right conspiracism, racism, antisemitism, anti-indigenous, and anti-transgender sentiment.

Moreover, in addition to building an "Uber-like" paramilitary response system that can be mobilized whenever people believe their rights are under attack from godless liberals, IREHR's report explains that discussion within the surreptitious network go well beyond such imagined "self-defense" measures.

Some of the People's Rights network participants are running for elective office, hoping to promote the group's theocratic-state agenda from within the halls of power. Mario Perea, a People's Rights assistant from Idaho, told would-be participants in a rally for a political candidate: "We claim, and we use, and we defend our rights. In order to defend our rights, we have to get people into these government positions. That is a form of defense because we're being attacked politically. So we need to fight back and resist politically."

The politics include a sensibility attuned to modern "Patriot" movement rhetoric, particularly the rising "Boogaloo" talk about broad social breakdowns and violence surrounding the coming election. Mostly, there is a fairly typical eagerness for the battle to begin.

"Are you ready for Civil War November 4?" asked People's Rights leader Tony Pellegrino in a Facebook post.