Exposing
the links between the Trump team and the far right is important for
saving American democracy and defeating global fascism.
The
first single that the English punk band The Clash released in 1979
was controversial. Entitled “White Riot,” the song seemed
to call on White kids to launch a race-based uprising. The song
begins:
White
riot, I wanna riot
White riot, a riot of my own
The
Clash’s lead singer Joe Strummer strenuously
denied
charges that the song was racist. It was, he said, explicitly
anti-racist. The song approvingly cites the uprising of Black youth
in British cities against poverty and racism. The lyrics urge White
youth to rise up in solidarity since, after all,
All
the power’s in the hands
Of people rich enough to buy
it
While we walk the street
Too chicken to even try it
The
events of January 6, 2021 are an eerie, fun-house reflection of these
lyrics. In what turned into a White riot, the insurrectionists
effectively wanted a “riot of my own” after observing the
BlackLivesMatter protests that broke out in the wake of George
Floyd’s killing half a year earlier. But this was hardly a
demonstration of solidarity. Even though the January 6 riot ended up
being far more antagonistic and violent toward the police than any
#BLM demonstration, it was a direct repudiation of the efforts by
African Americans and others against police brutality, political
disenfranchisement, and economic inequality.
Trump
supporters have sought to play down the significance of the January 6
insurrection by comparing it to the supposedly more violent protests
of the summer of 2020. The defensive coordinator of the Washington
Commanders football team, Jack Del Rio, recently
called
the White riot of 2021 a “dust-up” compared to that
“summer of riots, looting, burning and the destruction of
personal property.” Trump famously
called
#BLM protesters “thugs” but the Capitol rioters “very
special.” In other words, “their Black riot” was
illegitimate but “our White riot” was basically “a
normal tourist visit” (as one House Republican called
the January 6 insurrection).
The
vast majority of the “very special” people who stormed
the Capitol on January 6 were White: 93
percent
according to the Chicago Program on Security & Threats. Many of
the rioters carried
Confederate flags, flashed the OK hand signal of White power,
deployed even more esoteric references to their neofascist leanings
such as Pepe the Frog and the flag of “Kekistan,” or
chillingly brought along nooses, with their connotation of lynching.
Yes,
yes, I know: Trump managed to attract quite a lot of support from
people of color in the 2020 election, with roughly one-third of
Latino
and Asian
voters backing him along with nearly one in ten African-Americans.
Equally disturbing, Trump improved
his standing
with these constituencies from the 2016 elections. Not surprisingly,
some people of color showed up on January 6 and were even represented
in the far-right paramilitaries. The leader of the Proud Boys,
Enrique Tarrio, is of Afro-Cuban descent, for instance, and was only
absent from the January 6 insurrection because he’d been
arrested two days before.
But
even if there were some non-White faces in the crowd on January 6, it
was a White riot nonetheless. The racist dimension of the
insurrection has been previously noted, particularly in the testimony
of the police officers who defended the Capitol and endured
the onslaught
of racial epithets. The insurrectionists were determined to overturn
the election of a candidate overwhelmingly supported by people of
color and deliver the White House (once again) to a politician who
has actively cultivated White supremacists, both as voters and as
shock troops against his opponents.
The
congressional investigation into the events of January 6 started up
again this week after the extraordinary testimony of Cassidy
Hutchinson at the end of last month. The former aide to White House
chief of staff Mark Meadows provided the critical information that
the Trump team knew full well that there would be violence on that
day, that Trump knew that his supporters were armed and dangerous,
that the former president was eager to lead the mob to the Capitol,
and that he was more than happy to throw his vice president quite
literally to the wolves.
In
this latest round of revelations, the committee is establishing the
concrete links between the administration and the far-right
organizers of the attempted coup. Once again, we are revisiting the
critical distinction of the Russia investigation between cooperation,
coordination, and collusion. How much did members of the Trump team
knowingly work behind the scenes with far-right plotters to
orchestrate the events of January 6?
Proving
these links is essential not only for proving criminality and
preventing Trump (and his cronies) from ever holding future political
office. Because Trump is a symbol for the far right worldwide, this
investigation is a full-on challenge to global fascism as well.
The
Racism of the Far Right
The
testimony this week of Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for
the Oath Keepers, reveals the degree to which the militia movement
has been permeated by White nationalism.
The
Oath Keepers are a militia movement devoted to defending the
Constitution against what they perceive to be a tyrannical
government. It’s one
of the bigger groups
in the constellation of “patriot militias.” Originally
critical of both main political parties, the Oath Keepers went all in
to support Donald Trump. Given its anti-government ideology, the
group obviously had to make some adjustments to fight on behalf of
the head of that government. After 2016, the founder of the group
Stewart Rhodes began to fulminate against the “deep state”
opposition to Trump even as he embraced QAnon conspiracy theories.
Tatenhove
makes clear, however, that the Oath Keepers had a clear racist
agenda. The group drifted “further and further right—into
the alt-right world, into White nationalists and even straight-up
racists,” he testified,
“and it came to a point where I could no longer continue to
work for them.”
Tatenhove
might be a little self-serving here. After all, the Oath Keepers
showed up in Missouri all the way back in 2014 and again in 2015 on
the first anniversary of the police killing of Michael Brown in
Ferguson. They were ostensibly protecting conservative journalists
from protestors, but the optics were
revealing:
armed White vigilantes squaring off against predominantly
African-American protestors. The optics reversed six years later when
White Oath Keepers confronted African-American police officers on
January 6.
The
alt-right has often adopted a policy of “plausible deniability”
when it comes to charges of racism. These organizations are experts
at code-switching. They are White supremacists among their followers
but they are race-neutral when talking with reporters. As a
spokesperson, Tatenhove perhaps believed the race-neutral language he
once used with the press. In truth, it’s never going to be
clear when an organization like the Oath Keepers slips into White
nationalism because of the strategic ambiguity of its approach.
What’s
important is the role the Oath Keepers and similar organizations
played as instruments of the Trump administration. The congressional
commission is exploring
the links
between the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys to top Trump allies like
political operative Roger Stone and former National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn, both of whom used these organizations to provide for
their own personal security.
As
in the Russia case, however, the Trump team relied heavily on the
power of social media to rally the troops. In 2016, it was Wikileaks
that spread the damaging information that Russian hackers obtained
from the Democratic Party. In 2020, it was Twitter that
spread
Trump’s call to arms—particularly his December 19 “be
there, will be wild” tweet—to a ready-and-waiting network
of alt-right activists, militia members, and White nationalists. In
both cases, Stone and Flynn facilitated the contacts. Even in the
absence of explicit collusion, however, the evidence of collaboration
is damning.
What
This Means Globally
For
some time, the United States has been a symbol of multiculturalism
and, to use an even more academic term, hybridity. Long before Barack
Obama, a multiracial politician, became the country’s first
non-White president, the United States was represented abroad by
non-White writers, musicians, filmmakers, athletes, businesspeople,
movement activists, and so on. Think James Baldwin, Toni Morrison,
Spike Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Martin Luther King, Jr., Michael
Jordan, Selena, Serena and Venus Williams, and Oprah Winfrey, to name
just a few.
Trump
and the Republican Party, in their courting of the alt-right and
White nationalists, have been trying in their ham-handed but
dangerous way to slow down and reverse the transformation of American
politics, culture, and economy by non-Whites. This project of turning
back the clock on decades of advancement appeals to far-right
movements all around the world who yearn for a lily-white France, a
pre-immigration Germany, a Fortress Australia. It even appeals to the
far right in non-White countries such as anti-immigrant activists in
Japan and anti-Muslim forces in India. And this explains, in part,
the support that Trump has received from non-White voters. They see
in Trump a permission to indulge in their own parochial hatreds.
The
January 6 commission sees itself as restoring American democracy.
This is an essential task, and it will require the sanctioning of the
criminal behavior of Trump and his allies. It’s time to apply
the same “law and order” yardstick against those who have
trumpeted “law and order” for so much of their careers
(like Trump’s outrageous advertisements
in favor of the death penalty
for the wrongly accused Central Park Five, who were eventually
exonerated).
But
in restoring democracy, the commission will also send a strong signal
to all those around the world who believe that might makes right (I’m
looking at you, Vladimir), who have dressed up their racism in
respectable clothes (sound familiar, Bibi?), and who are fighting for
an illusory homogeneity that privileges a powerful majority (if the
shoe fits, Narendra).
Much
depends on the outcome of this January 6 investigation. Powerful
testimony is important. Moral outrage is important. But this is no
time for mere hand-slapping. I don’t want to hear that the arc
of the moral universe eventually
bends
toward justice. I want the arc of the moral universe, like the
proverbial buck, to stop here, with the repudiation of Trump’s
White riot, the expulsion of him and his advisors from politics, and
jail time for everyone who committed crimes from the hapless QAnon
shaman to the president himself.
le
