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The alt-right, QAnon, paramilitary and Donald Trump-supporting mob that stormed the US Capitol on January 6 claimed they were only doing what the so-called founding fathers of the US had done in 1776: overthrowing an illegitimate government that no longer represented them.

This was the start of what they called the second American Revolution.

This is why the Dont Tread on Me flag was visible in the chaos a symbol of resistance that dates back to the (first) American Revolution and was resurrected a decade ago by Republican Tea Party activists.

It is not hard to understand the appeal of this history to Trumps followers. The era of the founding fathers has always loomed large in the minds of most Americans. And stories about the past are, after all, how individuals, families, and communities small and large, make sense of themselves.

Yet, it is worth noting these recollections of the past are necessarily selective.

Alt-right extremists, following conservative politicians, have also drawn succour from the Constitution, particularly when it comes to their rights, such as the right to free speech and bear arms.

These and other rights were not actually enumerated in the original Constitution, but rather tacked on in the Bill of Rights a set of ten amendments passed to appease opponents of the Constitution and get it ratified.

These rights are fused together with the more vague yet unalienable rights enunciated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence chief among them being the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Read more: Why were the Capitol rioters so angry? Because they're scared of losing grip on their perverse idea of democracy

Drawing on philosopher John Lockes ideas, the Declaration of Independence proclaims we the people come together to form a government to protect these rights.

And crucial to Trump supporters today, it says,

whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

This was the sentiment voiced on January 6 when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol. They chanted This is our America and Whose house? Our house!

Trump himself encouraged this thinking when he told the crowd before they marched to the Capitol, Youll never take back our country with weakness.

The question is: who do Trump and, more broadly speaking, the alt-right think has taken the United States from them?

The answer is evident in how the alt-right imagines the past: their vision of history omits or callously ignores the fact their constitutional rights have come at the cost of the lives and rights of others.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence it was a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Generations of enslaved and free Black activists and their allies have worked towards realising this goal.

Read more: Why the far-right and white supremecists have embraced the Middle Ages and their symbols

But for the founding fathers, and many of their white supremacist heirs, true citizens were exclusively white and male. A few years after penning the declaration, Jefferson denounced Black people as inferior. He owned hundreds of slaves. Even his own children, whom he fathered with Sally Hemings, were born into slavery.

Almost all of the founding fathers, in fact, were slaveholders or profited from the slave trade. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution freed any of the half million enslaved people in the new United States one-fifth of the population.

Rather, the Constitution purposefully entrenched the institution of slavery. By protecting the rights of slaveholders to pursue their happiness by holding on to their property, it doomed four more generations to enslavement.

By the start of the Civil War in 1861, there were 4 million people enslaved in the US.

The Constitution also gave the government the power to raise an army. After the American Revolution, this power was used time and again to wage a long genocidal war against Native Americans across the continent.

When enslaved and free Black people and their white abolitionist allies acted against slavery, slaveholders invoked the Revolution. They claimed they were undertaking Gods will to complete the work begun in 1776 of creating a free nation, and made slave-holding former President George Washington their hero.

It took an unprecedented and destructive Civil War to finally put an end to slavery, and another century or so for African Americans to achieve full rights as citizens in the United States. Every step of the way, they were contested and blocked by individuals, groups, states and judges who claimed they were upholding the principles of the Constitution.

Read more: Why is the Confederate flag so offensive?

It should be no surprise, then, the alt-right movement is invoking the same Revolution today.

After Barack Obamas presidency, Trump gave a voice to the grievances of his largely white supporters who feared they were being displaced in their own country.

And following the summer of the Black Lives Matter movement and Trumps baseless claims the 2020 election was stolen, the Capitol Hill insurrectionists firmly believed they had lost control of the United States. They were no longer the we the people in charge.

As in the past, they also had the support of prominent politicians beyond Trump. One of their supporters, the newly elected Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (who is also a QAnon supporter) declared before the January 6 move to block the certification of Joe Bidens presidential victory, This is our 1776 moment.

And Congressman Paul Gosar, a prominent Trump supporter, wrote an op-ed entitled Are we witnessing a coup detat? in which he advised followers to be ready to defend the Constitution and the White House.

It has never been entirely clear when exactly the United States was last great in the minds of Trump supporters wearing their Make America Great Again caps. It might be the Ronald Reagan presidency of the 1980s for some, or sometime prior to the civil rights, womens and gay liberation movements and the US defeat in Vietnam.

But theres no doubt as to when this mythical greatness started. The yearning for the founding era a time when slaveholders overthrew a government to protect their rights (including the right to hold people as property) is palpable.

Read more:
Why the alt-right believes another American Revolution is coming - The Conversation AU

Militiamen showed up proudly bearing the emblems of their groups American flags with the stars replaced by the Roman numeral III, patches that read Oath Keepers. Alt-right types wore Pepe the Frog masks, and QAnon adherents could be seen in T-shirts urging people to Trust the Plan. White supremacists brought their variant of the Crusader cross.

And then there were thousands of Trump supporters with MAGA gear flags, hats, T-shirts, thermoses, socks. One flag portrayed President Trump as Rambo; another featured him riding a Tyrannosaurus rex and carrying the kind of rocket-propelled grenade launcher seen on the streets of Mogadishu or Kandahar.

The iconography of the American far right was on display on Jan 6. during the violence at the Capitol. The dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images was, to many Americans, a striking aspect of the unrest, revealing an alternate political universe where violent extremists, outright racists and conspiracy theorists march side by side with evangelical Christians, suburban Trump supporters and young men who revel in making memes to own the libs.

Uniting them is a loyalty to Mr. Trump and a firm belief in his false and discredited insistence that the election was stolen. The absurdity of many images the patches that read Zombie Outbreak Response Team," for instance only masked a devotion that inspired hundreds from the crowd to mount a deadly attack on Congress.

Its often all a caricature it looks like military fan fiction until its not and it crosses a very dangerous line, said Joan Donovan, the research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Its funny until its scary, she said.

These are some of the groups and their insignia.

Out in force were right-wing militias like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, whose symbol, the Roman numeral III, could be seen on patches and flags. Both groups are anti-government, pro-guns and, nowadays, devoted to Mr. Trump.

Others on the right who share the militias anti-government views often signal their beliefs with the Gadsden flag, a yellow banner dating to the American Revolution with a rattlesnake and the phrase Dont Tread on Me. Dozens were waved at the Capitol last week.

And then there is the Confederate battle flag. A man carried the banner of secession and slavery through the halls of the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Boogaloos marked themselves by wearing their signature Hawaiian shirts. A group of Proud Boys showed up in orange hats.

Both the Boogaloos and the Proud Boys include racists and anti-Semites, though the outright white supremacists tend to keep a lower profile. Some wear Crusader crosses or Germanic pagan imagery that has become popular on the racist and anti-Semitic fringes. Others have adopted the OK hand gesture as their own, seeing it as mimicking the letters W and P, for white power.

Pepe the Frog, the smirking cartoon amphibian that has become a widely recognized symbol of the alt-right crowd, was a common sight.

Also on display were the green-and-white flags of Kekistan, the fictional country that is home to the deity Kek. In the meme-driven culture of the alt-right, a satirical religion has sprouted up around Kek as a way to troll liberals and self-righteous conservatives, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. He is a god of chaos and darkness, with the head of a frog, the source of their mimetic magic, to whom the alt-right and Donald Trump owe their success.

The flag is partly derived from the Nazi flag, a design that is treated as a provocative joke in alt-right circles.

This conspiracy theory falsely claims that there is a cabal of Democrats, deep-state bureaucrats and international financiers who use their power to rape and kill children, and that Mr. Trump was elected to vanquish them.

The canard is convoluted and confusing, but its iconography is clear and was plentiful: There were shirts with the letter Q or slogans like Trust the Plan; signs saying Save the Children; and flags with the abbreviation WWG1WGA, which stands for Where We Go One, We Go All.

Alongside the violent, the overtly racist and the paranoid were thousands of devoted Trump supporters, some of whom even brought young children. The crowd was filled with people in MAGA regalia, and Trump flags were everywhere. Most just said Trump; others were a bit more outlandish.

The skull-like symbol of the Punisher, a crime-fighting Marvel comic book antihero, was a common sight. It has become a popular emblem on the far right in recent years and is sometimes used by police officers to signal one another without having to wear badges.

There were people waving the South Vietnamese flag, which disappeared decades ago when the North won the war. But now it lives again, adopted by some on the American right as a symbol of anti-communist resistance.

Then there was the Zombie Outbreak Response Team. A man wearing a sticker with its emblem was photographed inside the Capitol. His face is obscured in the picture, and he has not been identified. But the zombie teams website describes its members as preppers and survivalists preparing for all worst case scenarios.

Continued here:
Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot - The New York Times

Stephanie Warsmith|Akron Beacon Journal

The Proud Boys call themselves Western chauvinists.

They wear black and yellow Polo-style shirts that make them easy to spot.

And, increasingly, the group is being tied to demonstrations that have turned destructive and deadly, including the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week.

With President-elect Joe Bidens inauguration next week and threats made to target Washington D.C. and state capitals, many are concerned that the Proud Boys and other radical, right-leaning groups could wreak more havoc.

Youre seeing a lot of rhetoric revolution, attacks on statehouses, Bidens inauguration, said David Licate, a University of Akron criminal justice professor who once served on an FBI team that studied violent extremists. You have to take it seriously. They (Proud Boys) are becoming more violent.

Though the Proud Boys have been gaining national notoriety, they havent drawn as much attention in the Akron area.

I have heard of this group in a national context, said Lt. Michael Miller, an Akron police spokesman. I am not aware of any local activity or chatter.

But in the past two years, there have been signs of the groups presence locally and in Ohio:

Proud Boys sent a press release to the Canton Repository, another USA TODAY Network Ohio newspaper, last month promoting food and toy donations in Canton and Lorain around the holidays.

However, the Beacon Journal was unable to find anyone involved in the group locally to talk to for this story. No one responded to a request for comment made on the Proud Boys website or an email sent to the address on the poster hung in Wooster.

We dont talk to the media, said Dan Ciammaichella, who was identified as a media spokesman for the Akron-Canton Proud Boys in the release sent to the Repository. Thank you very much.

Proud Boys is a relatively new group, kicked off in 2016.

Gavin McGinnes, co-founder of Vice Media, started the group and called it a club for men. He espoused misogynistic and anti-Islamic views, as well as racist overtones.

He claimed they were not alt-right, not white nationalist but pro-west, like a fraternity, said Licate, a 20-year UA professor.

The groups tenets, according to its website, include: minimal government, maximum freedom, anti-political correctness, anti-drug war, closed borders, anti-racial guilt, anti-racism, pro-free speech, pro-gun rights, glorifying the entrepreneurand venerating the house wife.

To become a Proud Boy, a man must declare he is a Western chauvinist who refuses to apologize for creating a modern world, according to the website. Leaders of the group define this chauvinism as patriotism or extreme nationalism.

The groups name is a nod to a song in Disneys "Aladdin" called Proud of Your Boy.

I just made it up, McGinnes said in a video on the Proud Boys website.

McGinnes said the group has gained thousands of members all over the world, including in Africa, Japan and Australia.

New Proud Boys members must be beaten up by five men until they can name five breakfast cereals, quit porn and get a tattoo, McGinnis said.

McGinnis recalled a timewhen he went to New York University to give a talk and the group's members clashed with protesters.

We beat the crap out of them, McGinnis said in the video, drawing cheers and applause from the audience.

McGinnis has now stepped away from the group and Enrique Tarrio, who is originally from Cuba, is the new leader.

Licate said the group has gotten more violent and well-armed.

New members are now asked to beat up someone they thinkis liberal or left-leaning, Licate said.

They went from a pseudo-fraternity that gets it name from an Aladdins song and has to recite cereals to becoming increasingly militant, Licate said.

Some Proud Boys members werent happy with the groups alt-light characterization and started the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights (FOAK), who are considered the groups bodyguards or strike force, Licate said.

Tarrio, the new Proud Boys leader, was arrested for burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a historic Black church in a December demonstration in Washington, D.C. to protest Trumps election defeat. Tarrio also faces weapons charges and wasbanned from being in the Capitol, besides going to court.

Licatesaid he would characterize Proud Boys as a hate group. He said hes not sure if they meet the definition of domestic terrorists, which refers to a group that has engaged in violence for a political or social end.

Licate said Proud Boys were at the Jan. 6 protest outside of the Capitol, but he isnt sure if they were among those who breached the building.

Proud Boys, Three Percenters and Oath Keepers were among the right-wing extremist groups captured in photos and videos at the Capitol insurrection. Five people were killed, including a police officer.

Licate said Three Percenters and Oath Keepers both have an ex-military/law enforcement base and the Oath Keepers are staunch constitutionalists. He said Proud Boys lean heavier on misogyny and racism than these other groups.

They are all anti-left and hard-core conservative, Licate said.

Closer to home, Licate said hes aware the Proud Boys have chapters in Columbus and the Akron area but hasnt heard much about their activities.

They havent really made themselves known, beyond an online presence, he said.

The Akron-Canton Proud Boys had an open-carry display on the Kent State campus in September 2019 as a counter to a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Beto ORourke. ORourke had proposed a mandatory gun buyback program during a presidential debate.

The Proud Boys display featured an array of rifles and smaller firearms, secured with metal rope and padlocks. A sign on the front asked onlookers, Which one of these should be banned?

Were out here, pretty much, just to spark conversation with people, Ron Jones, a Proud Boys member, told the Record-Courier. Were hoping people from their side will come up and talk with us a little bit and maybe bridge the gap a little bit.

The event was largely peaceful, though a Kent student was arrested for throwing a milkshake on Proud Boys members.

In early November, a Proud Boys flier was hung in the front of the Spoon Market & Deli in downtown Wooster, angering the owners of the business.

The flier said, The lies of the left are meant to dissuade, distract and demoralize, and called Proud Boys the most lied about, slandered and targeted group. Why? it asked and included a website and email addressfor the group.

Patrice Smith, co-owner of the deli, posted the flier on her Facebook page, seeking information on the cowardly person or people who posted it. Her post drew both backlash and support.

We will not compromise our integrity, ethics and responsibility, Smith wrote.

The Akron-Canton Proud Boys, in an emailed statementto the Daily-Record newspaper, said its members distributed fliers in the Wooster area Oct. 30.

"Proud Boys wanted to send a message to the voters in America that we are EVERYWHERE, so they can feel safe casting their votes through November 3rd," said the statement, signed by the group.

Flyers also were posted in Amherst Plaza in Massillon.

More: Proud Boys, counter-protesters clash

In mid-December, a 43-year-old Akron man was among 39 people arrested after a group of Proud Boys protesting Trumps election defeat clashed with anti-Trump counter-protesters in Washington D.C.

Four people were stabbed, while others were beaten and pepper-sprayed and several churches were vandalized.

These Proud Boys are avowed white nationalists and have been called to stand up against a fair and legal election, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, told the Washington Post.

The Akron man is accused of being part of a large group spotted by an officer chasing down another man, knocking him to the ground and beating him with what appeared to be long, thin batons. The officer saw the Akron man take a running start and kick the other man in the head several times while he was on the ground, according to court records.

The man who was beaten fled and didnt return to the scene.

The Akron man wore black para-military style clothing, including a helmet, vest, backpack and gloves, as well as a yellow scarf. He also had a black plastic and rubber baton that was about 4 feet long, according to court records.

Police charged the Akron man with rioting, attempted possession of a criminal weapon and assault, all misdemeanors. He pleaded not guilty in D.C. Superior Court and was released until his next court appearance.

Neither the Akron man nor his attorney could be reached for comment.

Law enforcement in the Capitol and across the country are worried that the type of violence seen in D.C. in December or at the Capitol could be repeated or escalated before and on inauguration day.

Licate said law enforcement must prepare for the worst, while weighing the right to protest with the need to protect safety and prevent destruction.

Were stuck in a holding pattern, Licatesaid. When people take the jump from word to deed, thats when law enforcement can get involved.

Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at swarsmith@thebeaconjournal.com, 330-996-3705 and on Twitter: @swarsmithabj.

Continued here:
Proud Boys among groups being watched as inauguration approaches. Do they have Northeast Ohio ties? - Akron Beacon Journal

The alt-right, QAnon, paramilitary and Donald Trump-supporting mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6 claimed they were only doing what the so-called founding fathers of the US had done in 1776: overthrowing an illegitimate government that no longer represented them.

This was the start of what they called the second American Revolution.

This is why the Dont Tread on Me flag was visible in the chaos a symbol of resistance that dates back to the (first) American Revolution and was resurrected a decade ago by Republican Tea Party activists.

It is not hard to understand the appeal of this history to Trumps followers. The era of the founding fathers has always loomed large in the minds of most Americans. And stories about the past are, after all, how individuals, families and communities small and large, make sense of themselves.

Yet, it is worth noting these recollections of the past are necessarily selective.

Alt-right extremists, following conservative politicians, have also drawn succour from the Constitution, particularly when it comes to their rights, such as the right to free speech and bear arms.

These and other rights were not actually enumerated in the original Constitution, but rather tacked on in the Bill of Rights a set of ten amendments passed to appease opponents of the Constitution and get it ratified.

These rights are fused together with the more vague yet unalienable rights enunciated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence chief among them being the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Drawing on philosopher John Lockes ideas, the Declaration of Independence proclaims we the people come together to form a government to protect these rights.

And crucial to Trump supporters today, it says, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

This was the sentiment voiced on January 6 when pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol. They chanted This is our America and Whose house? Our house!

Trump himself encouraged this thinking when he told the crowd before they marched to the Capitol, You will never take back our country with weakness.

The question is: who do Trump and, more broadly speaking, the alt-right think has taken the United States from them?

The answer is evident in how the alt-right imagines the past: their vision of history omits or callously ignores the fact their constitutional rights have come at the cost of the lives and rights of others.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence it was a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Generations of enslaved and free Black activists and their allies have worked towards realising this goal.

But for the founding fathers, and many of their white supremacist heirs, true citizens were exclusively white and male. A few years after penning the declaration, Jefferson denounced Black people as inferior. He owned hundreds of slaves. Even his own children, whom he fathered with Sally Hemings, were born into slavery.

Almost all of the founding fathers, in fact, were slaveholders or profited from the slave trade. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution freed any of the half-million enslaved people in the new United States one-fifth of the population.

Rather, the Constitution purposefully entrenched the institution of slavery. By protecting the rights of slaveholders to pursue their happiness by holding on to their property, it doomed four more generations to enslavement.

By the start of the Civil War in 1861, there were 4 million people enslaved in the US.

The Constitution also gave the government the power to raise an army. After the American Revolution, this power was used time and again to wage a long genocidal war against Native Americans across the continent.

When enslaved and free Black people and their white abolitionist allies acted against slavery, slaveholders invoked the Revolution. They claimed they were undertaking Gods will to complete the work begun in 1776 of creating a free nation and made slave-holding former President George Washington their hero.

It took an unprecedented and destructive Civil War to finally put an end to slavery, and another century or so for African Americans to achieve full rights as citizens in the United States. Every step of the way, they were contested and blocked by individuals, groups, states and judges who claimed they were upholding the principles of the Constitution.

It should be no surprise, then, the alt-right movement is invoking the same Revolution today.

After Barack Obamas presidency, Trump gave a voice to the grievances of his largely white supporters who feared they were being displaced in their own country.

And following the summer of the Black Lives Matter movement and Trumps baseless claims the 2020 election was stolen, the Capitol Hill insurrectionists firmly believed they had lost control of the United States. They were no longer the we the people in charge.

As in the past, they also had the support of prominent politicians beyond Trump. One of their supporters, the newly elected Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (who is also a QAnon supporter) declared before the January 6 move to block the certification of Joe Bidens presidential victory, This is our 1776 moment.

And Congressman Paul Gosar, a prominent Trump supporter, wrote an op-ed entitled Are we witnessing a coup detat? in which he advised followers to be ready to defend the Constitution and the White House.

It has never been entirely clear when exactly the United States was last great in the minds of Trump supporters wearing their Make America Great Again caps. It might be the Ronald Reagan presidency of the 1980s for some, or sometime prior to the civil rights, womens and gay liberation movements and the US defeat in Vietnam.

But there is no doubt as to when this mythical greatness started. The yearning for the founding era a time when slaveholders overthrew a government to protect their rights (including the right to hold people as property) is palpable.

Clare Corbould Clare Corbould is an Associate Professor, Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University. Michael McDonnell is a Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Read the original:
Why some Trump supporters believe theres another American Revolution coming - Scroll.in

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal's radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson: Hey, hey, hey. It's Al, and I have some exciting news. Okay, so in July, we brought you American Rehab. That was our eight-episode series that uncovered tens of thousands of people desperately in need of help for their addictions, but instead of getting treatment, they were sent to work without pay, sometimes at big corporations. The New Yorker called it riveting, urgent, and mind-bending. Now we're making it available for your binging pleasure. You can find it by subscribing to Reveal Presents: American Rehab wherever you get your podcasts. Again, that's Reveal Presents: American Rehab. All right, get to binging.

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Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. The morning of January 6, before the storming of the halls of Congress, reporter David Neiwert tweeted a prediction, "Today is likely to be a historically violent day in the nation's capital."

David Neiwert: Yeah. No, that wound up being an understatement, didn't it?

Al Letson: David wasn't surprised that pro-Trump extremists did what they did. In fact, he linked to a video from the night before shot on the streets of D.C. in which a middle-aged white man in a Trump hat tells a young white nationalist livestreamer-

Speaker 4: In fact, tomorrow, I don't even like to say because I'll be arrested-

Speaker 5: Well, let's not say it.

Speaker 4: I'll say it.

Speaker 5: All right.

Speaker 4: We need to go into the Capitol.

Speaker 5: Let's go!

David Neiwert: It certainly wasn't a surprise for any of the people who've been reporting on and researching the radical right here in the United States in the past year, because they've been pretty upfront about it. They were saying they were going to do this.

Al Letson: David has been following the radical right for decades. A few years back, he and the nonprofit newsroom Type Investigations teamed up with Reveal to start tracking what looked to him like an uptick in far right terrorism. We put together a database of every single domestic terror event starting in 2008.

Al Letson: In 2017, that data showed that right-wing extremists had become the biggest threat, while law enforcement under President Obama was focused on those acting in the name of Islam. Last summer, we ran the numbers for terrorism under President Trump, and we found that far right terror had grown and become more lethal, responsible for almost the same number of deaths during Trump's first three years as during all eight years under Obama. The men, it's almost always men, who are responsible for many of those deaths were driven by the same ideology.

David Neiwert: There's a very specific stripe of white nationalism that we're seeing run through, especially, these more recent mass killings.

Al Letson: Today, we're bringing back a show we first aired last June. We're going to connect the dots to show how extremist ideas and extremist violence spread online, and we'll ask why law enforcement is still struggling to catch up. Reveal reporters Stan Alcorn and Priska Neely dug into this for months. Priska starts us off with the story of a man who witnessed the deadliest domestic terror attack of 2019.

Priska Neely: Guillermo Glenn is well-known in El Paso's Mexican-American community. He's 79 now, and he's been a community organizer and labor rights activist for most of his life.

Guillermo Glenn: We conducted a lot of protests. We blocked a bridge. We went to jail.

Priska Neely: On August 3, 2019, he was just going about his weekend routine.

Guillermo Glenn: It was a Saturday morning around 10:00. I had gone to Walmart to buy some pet food. I was way in the back, and I heard this great big noise.

Priska Neely: A warning, Guillermo is going to share graphic details about what happened that day.

Guillermo Glenn: A large number of families, women and men were running towards me from the front of the building, and then I noticed at least one of the women was dripping blood. I said, "Well, there's something really wrong." I ran into the woman who was... Both her legs had received some type, either shrapnel or bullet wounds, and she was bleeding. So I stopped there to help her, and I grabbed a first-aid kit and tried to at least tend to her wounds in her legs. One of the firemen or paramedic came and told, "You have to get her out. We're getting everybody out of the store." So we put her in one of those grocery baskets.

Priska Neely: When he wheeled the woman to the front, he saw what had happened.

Guillermo Glenn: Right at the front door, there was a lot of blood. I knew then that there'd been a shooter. It was a very traumatic scene. I saw the body of a man with half his head shot off. There was a lady laying on the pavement across from where we're loading the people. I didn't know exactly who he'd taken out. I didn't have that information that he was actually shooting Mexicans.

Priska Neely: The suspected gunman, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, drove roughly 10 hours from outside Dallas to the El Paso Walmart right near the Mexican border. Police say he opened fire, 23 people were killed and many were wounded, and then he drove off.

Speaker 8: Minutes later, Patrick Crusius stopped his car at an intersection near the Walmart. He came out with his hands raised in the air and stated out loud to the Texas Rangers, "I'm the shooter."

Priska Neely: He's facing 90 federal charges, including 45 hate crimes.

Priska Neely: After Guillermo witnessed what happened that day, he got in his car and went to the restaurant where his friends always gather on Saturdays.

Guillermo Glenn: Several of my friends came up and hugged me and said, "Oh, you're okay. We're so glad. We've been looking for you. We thought you might be there." Then they showed me the manifesto.

Priska Neely: The manifesto. Minutes before the attack, the shooter had posted a document filled with anti-immigrant rhetoric to the online message board 8chan. Some of Guillermo's friends showed him a copy.

Guillermo Glenn: I sat down. I had some food, had some of my regular Saturday menudo. Then I finally realized what had happened, right after I read the manifesto.

Priska Neely: The Crusius manifesto reads kind of like a corporate website. It has an About Me section and parts where he outlines his warped vision for America. He matter-of-factly explains how his attack will preserve a world where white people have the political and economic power. He says peaceful means will no longer achieve his goal.

Priska Neely: Reporter David Neiwert says this alleged shooter is the quintessential Trump-era terrorist, a man largely radicalized online, entrenched in white nationalist ideology, and fueled by the belief that white men like himself are being replaced by Latino immigrants. Crusius wrote that the media would blame President Trump for inspiring him, but he claimed that his ideas predated the Trump campaign. Here's David.

David Neiwert: Patrick Crusius, especially, was so filled with loathing for Latino people that he didn't see them as human.

Priska Neely: When David reads the manifesto, he can immediately see the fingerprints of other white nationalists.

David Neiwert: Here's how Crusius opens his manifesto. "In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion."

Priska Neely: That opening line is a direct signal back to a previous act of terrorism, the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, just months before. David says this is part of a trend. One terrorist inspires another, and the cycle continues. Guillermo says he didn't understand all of the references at first, but it was clear to him that the manifesto had ties to a larger movement.

Guillermo Glenn: I think he was trying to show that somebody had to take action, and that really angered me at that point. Why would somebody come and shoot innocent people like that?

Priska Neely: David say Crusius started doing online research because of the anger he felt over how the country was changing demographically.

David Neiwert: But in the process of doing this research, he came across multiple white genocide theories, including The Great Replacement.

Priska Neely: The Great Replacement, or replacement theory, unites many acts of hate that we see across the country, around the world.

David Neiwert: That's this idea that comes out of white nationalism that white Europeans face a global genocide at the hands of brown people and that they're being slowly rubbed out of existence.

Priska Neely: Only a few terrorists in recent years have referenced replacement theory by name, but it's widely popular among right-wing extremists. It's linked to ideas that are many decades old, but one attack in Europe showed how those ideas can be weaponized.

David Neiwert: Anders Breivik's terrorism attack in Oslo and Utya Island, Norway, in 2011.

Priska Neely: Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting. Before the attack, he sent out a 1,500-page manifesto about how he planned to lead white supremacists on a crusade against the "Islamification of Europe." Around the same time, a French writer named Renaud Camus refined and popularized the ideology in a book. The title translates to The Great Replacement.

David Neiwert: The Great Replacement essentially is this idea that brown people, particularly refugees and immigrants from Arab countries in Europe, are being deliberately brought into the country in order to replace white people as the chief demographic.

Priska Neely: The conspiracy theory claims all this is orchestrated by a cabal of nefarious globalists. That's code for Jews.

Speaker 9: You will not replace us!

Speaker 10: You will not replace us! You will not replace us! You will not replace us!

Priska Neely: In August 2017, white supremacists in the U.S. took up this concept as a rallying cry at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Speaker 10: Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!

Priska Neely: The next day, a neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer. This incident had an immediate impact on the public perception of terrorism, making it clear that white nationalists violence is a serious threat.

Speaker 11: Today, the nightmare has hit home here in the city of Pittsburgh.

Priska Neely: At a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, Robert Bowers is accused of killing 11 people.

David Neiwert: He went to a Jewish synagogue because he was angry about the Latin American caravans. The caravans had been in all the news in the weeks prior to that synagogue attack. He blamed Jews and went to a Jewish synagogue to take revenge for Latino immigration.

Priska Neely: These are the ideologies that are zigzagging across the globe. In March 2019, the gunman who livestreamed his mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Facebook also wrote a manifesto. The title, The Great Replacement. The New Zealand manifesto inspired the El Paso shooter to target the people he felt were replacing him. Recent manifestos and books put a new spin on violent, hateful acts, but David traces these sentiments back much further.

David Neiwert: What's remarkable in a lot of ways when I read these manifestos is so many of them are expressing ideas that I read in the 1920s coming from eugenicists. Look, I would even take it back to the 1890s, when we first started seeing the wave of lynchings in the South as a form of social control. This was very clearly a form of terrorism.

Priska Neely: After the El Paso shooting, activist Guillermo Glenn says white supremacist ideology was barely part of the conversation. There were brief efforts to unite the community against hate, a few events held under the banner El Paso Strong.

Guillermo Glenn: The politicians, the businessmen, the mayor, everybody was pushing this idea that we had to survive, but they weren't really talking about who caused it or why.

Priska Neely: Before we talked for this story, Guillermo says he didn't identify as part of this larger group of survivors that includes Jewish and Muslim communities.

Guillermo Glenn: You say, well, it's the Jewish people that they attacked, it's the Muslim people that they attacked, and here on the border it's the Mexican and Central Americans. But nobody talks about, what does the Great Replacement mean? Nobody put all these incidences together and say, "Hey, this is something that we should be aware of nationally."

Priska Neely: And he says that's part of the failure, part of the reason these attacks keep happening.

Al Letson: That story from Reveal's Priska Neely.

Al Letson: As we've been saying, these extremist groups are using online communities to spread their messages and find new recruits. When we come back, we'll hear how it works.

Josh Bates: It's a conditioning process, it's a grooming process, and I let myself fall into that.

Al Letson: The evolution of the white supremacist internet, next on Reveal.

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Al Letson: From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I'm Al Letson. We're continuing with our show we first broadcast last summer about domestic terrorism during the Trump administration.

Al Letson: The FBI and academic researchers say there's no such thing as a terrorist profile. You can't tell who's going to become a terrorist with a personality test or a demographic checklist. But the young white men who attacked the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway and the Walmart in El Paso, they had a lot in common. Not only were they motivated by the same conspiracy theory about white people being replaced, they developed those ideas in some of the same spaces online. Two of them even posted their manifestos to the same website, 8chan.

Al Letson: Now, you can't blame today's white supremacist terrorism on the internet, but you also can't understand it without talking about the way the white supremacist movement uses the internet and how it's changed over the last decade. Reveal's Stan Alcorn is going to tell that story through the eyes of a man who lived it. Here's Stan.

Stan Alcorn: Josh Bates's decade as a white supremacist started in his mid-20s, with a YouTube video about the presidential candidate he says he supported at the time, Barack Obama.

Josh Bates: I was scrolling through the comments section, "He's a Muslim," "He wasn't born here," things of that nature, and somebody said, "You guys sound like those Stormfront (beep)." I was like, "What in the world is Stormfront?"

Stan Alcorn: Stormfront is a message board that a former KKK leader set up in the '90s. Josh says he went there at first because he was curious, then to argue. But then the middle-aged message-board neo-Nazis started winning him over.

Stan Alcorn: How could they be convincing in these arguments? Can you help me understand that?

Josh Bates: Well, I wish I could answer that question, because I still ask myself that a lot. How could I end up falling for something like that? But I guess it's probably similar to how we look at people who fall into cults. It's a conditioning process, it's a grooming process, and I let myself fall into that.

Stan Alcorn: The experts I talked to say that first step is more about the person than what they're stepping into. Josh had just left the Marines, where he used to have a team and a mission. Now all he had was a computer.

Shannon Martine...: It's pretty concurrent with a whole lot of people, where they felt really deeply disempowered in their lives.

Stan Alcorn: Shannon Martinez is a former white supremacist who's helped people, including Josh, leave the movement.

Shannon Martine...: When you encounter information that's presented that this is the real truth, the true truth people don't want you to have because, if you did, it would be too empowering for you and too disempowering for them, that's an incredibly powerful, toxic drug.

Stan Alcorn: That drug, widely available on the internet, is, at its heart, a conspiracy theory. It says your problems aren't your fault; it's immigrants, Black people, Jews.

Josh Bates: They talk about, oh, Hollywood and the media and all these Jews that are in these positions of power. When you google that kind of stuff and you see it and you consume it, eventually after a few months you kind of get desensitized to it. Everybody's agreeing with everyone for the most part. You get along. There's that online community. Stormfront was my first one.

Stan Alcorn: He didn't know their names, but they were his team now. He'd spend the next 10 years as what he calls a keyboard warrior for the white supremacist movement. He'd be there for every step in its evolution, from joining the KKK and the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement to more diffuse groups and websites that called themselves alt-right and identitarian.

Stan Alcorn: Some of these groups would go to some lengths to appear respectable and say, "We're not racists. We're not Nazis. We're not the KKK." Then some of those groups were Nazis; they were the KKK. You were in all of them. Does that tell you that the differences between these groups are more about the image and the tactics than the core ideas or who they attract?

Josh Bates: Absolutely. We've been using the terms white nationalism 1.0 and white nationalism 2.0 for a few years now. 1.0 is your early groups, Ku Klux Klan. They're very explicit, National Socialist Movement, walking around with swastikas on their uniforms and their flags. Your 2.0 guys, they're your Identity Evropas, where they're dressing in khakis and collared shirts and dock shoes, and they've got these nice cropped haircuts. They call that good optics. But anybody who was in the early 1.0 movements like myself, I could see right through it. They just put lipstick on a pig. That's all they did.

Stan Alcorn: But people who followed the white supremacist movement for decades, like Type Investigations reporter David Neiwert, they say that this alt-right makeover of the old racist right, it was transformative.

David Neiwert: That radical right was very backward-looking, very stiff and formal. They didn't have any... Humor was not part of their repertoire. In fact, their primary recruitment demographic really was men between the ages of 40 and 60. With the advent of the alt-right, what we saw was this very tech-savvy, very agile movement that, instead of running away from the culturally savvy aspects of the internet, rather embraced them wholly.

Stan Alcorn: Instead of writing racist newsletters that people had to sign up for, they were making memes and jokes in places like Reddit and 4chan. These forums that celebrated being politically incorrect, they were the perfect place for those ideas to take root, hybridize with other fringe ideas, and grow into something that could be shared on more mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

David Neiwert: It was very brilliant because it meant that suddenly their recruitment demographic was much larger and had a lot more political activist energy. They were younger people.

Stan Alcorn: Josh Bates says that energy got a huge boost in 2016 with the rise of a new presidential candidate.

Donald Trump: They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. Some, I assume, are good people.

Josh Bates: Because Trump was spouting off a lot of the same talking points as general white nationalists, he breathed new life into that movement. The thought leaders of the movement just took full advantage, thinking that they could take it even further, and they did.

Stan Alcorn: They started to take their ideas into the real world.

Megan Squire: They were being emboldened by Trump and really acting out.

Stan Alcorn: After Trump's election in 2017, computer scientist Megan Squire set up software to track extremists on Facebook. She'd started out studying the misogynist Gamergate movement, but that had led her to all of these different anti-Muslim and neo-Confederate and white supremacist groups.

Megan Squire: At the time, Facebook was a central player, if not the central player, and it was the place where these guys all wanted to be. I was looking for ideological crossover, group membership crossover, just trying to, I guess, map the ecosystem of hate on Facebook.

Stan Alcorn: She watched this ecosystem plan what one neo-Nazi website would call the Summer of Hate, anti-Muslim marches, misogynist Proud Boy rallies, and what was shaping up to be this real-world meetup of all these different mostly online hate groups, the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This is where she came across Josh Bates.

Megan Squire: There was a person who was talking about they didn't have enough money to go to Charlottesville, and someone else suggested, "Hey, we have this crowdfunding site. Why don't you set up a fundraiser?"

Original post:
The Evolution of All-American Terrorism - Reveal