Extremism reporter David Neiwert outlined how former President Donald Trump brought domestic extremists to the forefront of American politics in a Daily Beast article adapted from his new book, "The Age of Insurrection."
Neiwart spent much of his career covering the modern generations of political violence in the United States, including the rise of the Aryan Nations in Southern California.
"What made the spread of these toxic extremists into the host community so seamless, I came to realize, was their seeming normalcy," wrote Neiwart. Most of the devotees weren't skinheads sporting swastikas — "the large majority of the people I would interview at these gatherings looked and dressed like anyone else in Idaho at the time. More importantly, I came to recognize that their views were only extreme variations of ideas and beliefs — about the federal government or education or minority and women’s rights or homosexuality — that I knew were already common among my conservative Idaho neighbors, particularly among those already immersed in the far-right John Birch Society, which had long been a significant political presence in the state. They were only a few turns of the paranoia ratchet away from being the same."
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The Oklahoma City bombing — carried out by Timothy McVeigh in revenge for the Waco siege and the Ruby Ridge incident, a common flashpoint for extremist militias — convinced Neiwart the movement was "toxically dangerous." But it took Donald Trump's ascent to the presidency to give these groups power on a scale that let them push into the mainstream.
"I knew on the night that Trump was elected that life in America would never be the same," wrote Neiwart. "In the succeeding years, Trump would unleash a politics of menace and intimidation on the national landscape unlike anything seen since the Klan years. As a correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, I was there to report on much of it ... I was present as gangs of street brawlers who gave themselves names like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys organized riots in West Coast urban centers like Berkeley, Portland, and Seattle, using the pretext of defending 'free speech' to deliberately create scenes of violence for which they came fully prepared. The trend spread to other locations and culminated in the lethal Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, at the end of which a neo-Nazi rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one and maiming dozens." Eventually this escalation led to the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"January 6 demonstrated that the threat to democracy by these forces is very real, and its aftermath has manifested that the problem is not going away, but rather redoubling its forces in preparation for a culminating victory," concluded Neiwart. "Herein, I hope, you will find a toolbox containing the knowledge we all will need to deny them that."
