Right-wing rallies flop as extremists head underground following Capitol riot blowback

Following a day when nationwide "White Lives Matter" rallies attracted more counter-protesters than right-wing extremists attempting to make their case, Axios is reporting that the street protests by a loose amalgam of white power advocates, anti-government militias and groups like the Proud Boys are turning into flops instead of photo-ops.

As the report notes, blowback from Jan 6th. Capitol riot that demonstrated to a horrified country the growth of right-wing extremism has forced those groups to go underground which, some authorities warn, could make them more dangerous,

As Rebecca Falconer of Axios writes, "The poor showings demonstrate how the white supremacist movement has been driven underground in the face of media and police scrutiny since the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, with extremists using encryption services to arrange the rallies," adding, "Evidence emerged in the weeks after the U.S. Capitol riots that the subsequent online purge of far-right figures and platforms had driven radicalized users into darker corners of the internet."

According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, divisions among the groups have led to a splintering, with Levin warning the risk now is from, "loners and cells, who act on their own combination of hatreds and idiosyncrasies often cobbled together from a constant all-you-can-eat buffet of stereotyping and conspiracies that still populate online discourse."

This falls in line with a report from the Daily Beast in February that stated members of rightwing groups, including the Proud Boys, are at each others' throat over fears that some members have become informants for the FBI, with the report stating, "Now racist live-streamers are accusing their former comrades of attempting to turn over followers to law enforcement, while Proud Boys chapters are splintering from the national organization over similar fears."

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