Dave Neiwert (“Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump“) of Daily Kos knows his right-wing reactionaries, and there were there plenty of them in Washington, D.C. over the weekend:
The anti-democratic strategy concocted and nurtured by the radical right over the past four years—organize busfuls of out-of-town far-right thugs to invade liberal urban centers in order to engage in faux “protests” primarily designed to spark violence—came to the nation’s capital this weekend. The results were as ugly as they were predictable.
Following Saturday’s “Million MAGA March” featuring thousands of far-right extremists commingling with ordinary Donald Trump supporters as they marched to proclaim (with only conspiracy theories for evidence) that Trump and not Joe Biden had won the presidential election, the large contingent of hate-group street-brawlers—Proud Boys, American Guard, Oath Keepers, and Groypers—took to the streets of Washington, D.C., provoking fights and aggressively assaulting counter-protesters.
This is a well-established pattern, one we have seen evolving and being perfected by the radical right since early 2017—primarily in liberal urban centers such as Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and the Bay Area. The politics of violent confrontation this strategy manifests may have reached a kind of dark fruition on Saturday, with a large helping hand from Trump himself, who tweeted out encouragement to the same thugs he had told on national television to “stand down and stand by.”
Most of the violence came after dark. Multiple accounts suggest the D.C. Metro Police did their own version of “stand down and stand by” as the new brown shirts destroyed property and assaulted counter-protesters. They stepped in mainly to control anti-Trump protesters.
Neiwert writes that Proud Boys national chairman Enrique Tarrio posted an overt threat on Parler: “DC antifa ends tonight.” And on a Proud Boys Twitter account:
Neiwert explains:
The “day of the rope” is a reference to white supremacists’ long-hoped-for racial war, the blueprint for which remains The Turner Diaries, a neo-Nazi “novel” that depicts, among other things, a day in which an angry society rises up and lynches all American “race traitors” from lampposts in a single day. Similar sentiments could be heard from the mouths of MAGA fans throughout the day Saturday.
Trump brown-nosers fresh off the campaign trail came out to speak to the crowd. Republican congresswoman-elect Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Republican congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and QAnon both spoke to the crowd.
“It was not a Million MAGA on the streets of DC today, but it would be catastrophic to not take what happened today seriously,” commented researcher Devin Burghart of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who was present for the events. “This is a beginning, not the end. We’re witnessing the initial coalescing of a wide range of far-right forces into mass opposition.”
Neiwert summarized what this even portends in a Sunday tweet: