MAGA diehards jumpstart a new year of political violence

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Donald Trump isn't in office yet but his fans are already getting excited about hurting and stealing from people of color. Last week, Mother Jones reported on a letter circulating through Lincoln County, Oregon, calling on locals not to wait for Trump officials to start the promised mass deportations, but to take action for themselves. "Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate of brown folks," the letter instructed. "Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate."

The goal, the letter explains, is to gather information to help Trump's incoming appointments for Homeland Security in their quest to deport millions of non-white people, which will necessitate rounding them up in concentration camps. The letter ends with a promise of material rewards for people who participate. "When the brown folks are rounded up, their properties will be confiscated," the letter promises. "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."

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This promise has strong echoes from history. When Jews were kidnapped for the Holocaust during WWII, 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. 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 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. It was one of the earliest and strongest indicators that MAGA is a fascist movement, and they later proved instrumental in the attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021. Since that failed, the organized paramilitary arm of MAGA has died down, though far-right violence against minorities has continued to rise. The lengthy sentences that Proud Boys and Oath Keepers received — especially compared to the much lighter sentences for the unorganized insurrectionists — appear to have had a chilling effect on those who would want to keep paramilitary fascist violence going.

Unfortunately, Trump won and has been promising widespread pardons for Jan. 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. That's almost certainly the point. Trump didn't hide his disappointment when his calls for his followers to "rally" at the courthouse to prevent his trials failed. MAGA spaces online showed they understood he was asking for them to storm the proceedings, but were afraid of being arrested like the Jan. 6 defendants. If he can remove that concern, the equation will change.

Earlier this month, police in Colorado arrested Patrick Thomas Egan, 39, accusing him of assaulting TV reporter Ja’Ronn Alex, who has Pacific Islander heritage. Witnesses say Egan followed Alex in his car for 40 miles, yelling, "Are you even a U.S. citizen? This is Trump’s America now!" When Alex, who had been out reporting, returned to the station, Egan allegedly tackled him and strangled him so hard people on the scene feared he couldn't breathe.

Trump has also nominated Kash Patel to head the FBI. Patel is extreme even by MAGA standards, parroting wild-eyed conspiracy theories that all point to the same conclusion: that Trump and MAGA are justified in doing whatever they wish to get "revenge" on people who tried to hold them accountable. Patel calls Trump "King Donald" and has showily drawn up enemy lists of people he wants to harass. The result of all this is predictable and likely desired: a strong signal shown to would-be domestic terrorists that they have nothing to worry about from the FBI.

Most MAGA commentators are smart enough to avoid overt threats of violence after Trump's election, though there are incidents like popular Christian nationalist pastor Terri Copeland Pearsons telling her audience they must "take up the enemy's sword and cut his head off with it." But while sidestepping the inherent violence of their views, MAGA influencers are getting bold in their demands for what Trump's America must look like — which is very white, very Christian, and with no tolerance for people who are different.

Doug Wilson — who runs the church attended by Trump's defense secretary nominee, Pete Hegseth — has called for a ban on any non-Christian displays in public spaces. Christian nationalist pastor Lance Wallnau has declared that cities and counties that voted for Vice President Kamala Harris are infected with demons, which is an unsubtle way of justifying violence against them. Another pastor at Hegseth's church, Joshua Haymes, insisted that the Founding Fathers "didn't have in view mosques being erected" when they enshrined freedom of religion and that they only meant it for Christian churches. (This is flat-out false, not that any of these guys care about actual history.)

In that same clip, Haymes declares, "We need 10,000 more Michael Cassidys," referencing a failed Republican congressional candidate who drove from Mississippi to Iowa to destroy a Satanic display in the state capitol. The display was part of a longstanding project of the Satanic Temple to put up shrines wherever Christians put up overtly religious displays on public property to illustrate the absurdity of such monuments on secular government lands. Cassidy avoided a felony hate crime charge by pleading down to criminal mischief. Haymes may think he's being cute by applauding a man who only attacked property and not people, but his implication is not subtle. He wants more white Christians to commit crimes to show their displeasure at having to share the country with people who aren't them.

Similar word games were played by the pastors at Right Response Ministries, another popular group of Christian nationalists, in a video last month calling for the persecution of religious minorities. "When you establish a Christian nation and you say no more mosques, no more synagogues," argued Wesley Todd in a video released shortly after Trump's electoral victory. He insisted this wouldn't be "conversion at the point of the sword" or "going into people’s homes, holding a gun to them." In the real world, of course, people will rebel and attempt to hold services. Shutting that down would lead to violence. In general, there is no way for MAGA to get what it wants — the elimination or serious reduction of the population of people they don't like — without violence.

Earlier this month at the New York Times, researcher Stuart Thompson published the results of watching 47 hours of MAGA content on the Rumble network post-election. "I expected many of the videos to feel triumphant," he said, but "their happiness quickly gave way to a relentless outpouring of anger and frustration, as they fixated on a cast of perceived enemies." What's striking about his report is how much the Rumble content centers on violence. Hosts claimed that the Department of Homeland Security is running a "sex-trafficking operation" and that Republican politicians are being targeted by the left for assassination. Intimations of imminent war were routinely made, with one host asking viewers to secure a "fallout shelter." This rhetoric isn't just dishonest. It keeps viewers in a violent state of mind, convincing them they are victims, so they feel justified in committing violence of their own.

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. With 42% 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. The frustration Thompson clocked is likely MAGA's dawning realization that Trump is not going to make their racist dreams come true. 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.

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MAGA diehards jumpstart a new year of political violence

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