Rallying the Paramilitary Right

The Functional Point of a Myth

Proud Boys and Counter-Protestors, Alex Milan Tracy, AP, 2021

Now I realize that about 1,000 people have already written about the Springfield, Ohio story—and I have nothing to add to most of that. People like Jamelle Bouie have already rightly pointed out that this is a reflection of J.D. Vance’s New Right-inspired blood and soil nationalism, and plenty more have pointed out how this is creating conditions for the use of violence.

I think a result of this—and what I did want to point out—is that one part of the election campaign that hasn’t emerged yet is the paramilitary violence that accompanied the 2016 and 2020 campaigns.

While there has been an assassination attempt against Trump, and as I’m writing this there’s been a possible second attempt—there has been a notable absence of paramilitary street violence. Groups like Patriot Front and the Proud Boys have had the occasional small march, but they haven’t amounted to much. There just hasn’t been anything to fight over thus far.

That is until the Right Wing ecosystem started to whip up a firestorm around a blatant lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio.

It’s also functionally important to them however in that it gives their supporters (especially their supporters who embrace violence) an actual cause to fight over. Trump has a long history of advocating violence in support of his chosen domestic political goals, and his current plans are no different.

The idea that there are tens of thousands of roving criminals in Springfield who are acting outside the bounds of humanity (claiming that they’re eating people’s pets is indisputably dehumanization) and being protected by corrupt/ineffectual legal authorities is a permission structure for extralegal violence as a defense of a community. It is the only solution if you believe (or choose to believe) what Vance and Trump are selling.

After all, if the police are covering it up, who else will protect the citizens of Springfield from the roving gangs of cat-eaters?

Which gets me to my main point here. It’s a crystallizing event for why people would engage in right-wing political violence again. Many of the previous paramilitary figures willing to engage in violence largely lost heart after the crackdown following January 6th, and with brief spasms, haven’t had any sort of story for why they should be out on the streets again.

Now, I do want to say, I have no idea if this gets these groups back out on the streets again like in 2016 and 2020. The perceived slight of Trump “abandoning” them after January 6th has long dampened their enthusiasm for extralegal violence on his behalf, and like with most things Trump-related there’s a likely chance that next week we’re onto a new story and everyone forgets this happened.

I’m more just saying this is the sort of thing that has the power to get people to grab their helmets and riot shields again.

I also want to be clear here, I don’t think this was the purposeful plan of people like Vance or Trump in amplifying this narrative. I think it’s as plainly simple as painting immigration as sowing chaos and crime as helping fire up their base.

I’m confident in saying it’s just amoral electoral politics on their part.

However, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an important component of Trump’s theory of power and that it doesn’t make them useful if Trump wants to once again attempt extralegal political acts.

It remains to be seen if he plans to accept the results of the election—although he is batting .000 historically—if he chooses to again contest the transfer of power it will rely upon mobilizing cadres of right-wing paramilitary members to sow chaos. For anyone unaware, the Claremont Institute has already run a “war game” to define exactly how that would work.

If you don’t feel like reading all of their plans, it functions on a supposition that law and order would break down to the extent that local officials and state leaders across the country could declare states of emergency and so thoroughly disrupt the proceeding of government functions that Trump would be able to be installed as President in a state of exception.

Now while I realize that while this sounds like the plot of a Tom Clancy novel—John Eastman of Claremont was the man who manufactured the 2020 plans to subvert the election.¹ It is something that has already been explicitly theorized, and there’s no real other route to contesting an electoral outcome without people willing to do violence on your behalf.

The other notable policy that comes to mind when it comes to a reenergized paramilitary right is Trump’s deportation plans if he wins the election.

The plan² (or at least the concepts of the plan) calls for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants through a nationwide deployment of the National Guard. It would—as best as I can tell—involve mass sweeps and raids covering every city and town in the country in an attempt to find the millions of people that Trump wants to deport.

The problem (among many) with this is that nobody joined the National Guard to kick in the door of some random mother and her kids and drag them out of their home screaming.

We’re not talking about IED makers here. It’s going to be millions of regular people just living their lives—and I’m pretty confident that there aren’t many of our service members out there who are interested in walking patrol routes in Philadelphia so they can hunt down random people whose worst crime in life was overstaying a visa.

It is—like with most mass attempts at forcible population transfers in history—going to be a task for partisan paramilitary forces who are significantly more willing to engage in mass violence against civilians. It’s the Proud Boys who are willing to go marching through random neighborhoods screaming at random people for the sake of their political leader.

Never mind that in the case of Ohio the immigrants in Springfield are there legally—I don’t think it’s controversial to say the mass deportation plan has been about more than just people who are in the United States illegally. It’s about anyone that the MAGA right feels shouldn’t be here. The entire enterprise revolves around an ineffable emotional nationalism that defines itself as being beyond the bounds of the law—because the law itself is a corrupt construct in contemporary America anyway.

But first, they just need a story about who they’re targeting and why those people aren’t worthy of protection.

1. I’m putting aside that this would all need to be modified since Trump doesn’t have the Presidency this time, more that there have been explicit theories in the Trump milieu around using these paramilitaries to circumvent the elections. Moreover, January 6th itself likely wouldn’t have been as violent or successful without the participation of these paramilitaries.

2. I might actually return and write about this later. I don’t think anyone has really gotten to the point of what something like this would entail, and how fundamentally it would change daily American life if they attempted this plan.