on the 405
Revelation 3:9
I will make those who are of the synagogue of Satan, who claim to be Jews though they are not, but are liars - I will make them come and fall down at your feet and acknowledge that I have loved you.
John 8:44
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
ADL:
During an interview on Revolt TV’s “Drink Champs” series that was posted and then removed on October 16, Ye repeatedly blamed “Jewish media” and “Jewish Zionists” for numerous alleged misdeeds, stating that “Jewish people have owned the Black voice” and that “the Jewish community, especially in the music industry…they’ll take us and milk us till we die.” Referencing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, he also commented that he was “#MeToo-ing the Jewish culture. I’m saying y’all gotta stand up and admit to what you been doing.”
Ye doubled down on his antisemitism during an October 17 interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, criticizing the so-called “Jewish underground media mafia” and alleging that “every celebrity has Jewish people in their contract.” He also claimed that his life was threatened by his Jewish managers, lawyer and accountant due to his political beliefs. On both “Drink Champs” and “Cuomo,” Ye repeated his previous defense that Black people cannot be antisemitic, stating that “we are Semite, we Jew, so I can’t be antisemite.”
Organizations that have recently dropped Ye:
- Balenciaga: Kering, the parent company of luxury fashion house Balenciaga, told the fashion publication Women's Wear Daily last week that it severed ties with Ye.
- MRC: The film and television studio MRC announced on Monday that it would not distribute a recently completed documentary on Ye over his comments, saying it could not "support any platform that amplifies his platform."
- Vogue: A spokesperson for the magazine told Page Six last week that it and its editor-in-chief Anna Wintour do not intend to work with him in the future.
- CAA: The Creative Artists Agency, a major Hollywood talent and sports agency, confirmed to Axios on Monday that Ye was no longer a client. The Los Angeles Times first reported the agency ended its relationship with Ye over his antisemitic comments.
- Adidas: The German multinational retailer announced Tuesday that it had ended its partnership with Ye, effective immediately, and saying, "Ye’s recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous."
- Gap: The company said Tuesday it was "taking immediate steps" to remove Yeezy Gap product from their stores, and said it had shut down YeezyGap.com.
1. TRENDS IN ACCEPTANCE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE
According to nearly every measure of both beliefs and actual incidents, political violence is considered more acceptable than it was five years ago before then-President Trump took office.
BELIEFS:
The most consistent survey data comes from scholars Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, who have been tracking public opinion on political violence using identical questions and methods for the last five years.1 From 2017 when their tracking begins, support for political violence rises across several measures prior to the midterm elections and declines after the elections. It also spikes (especially for Republicans) around then-President Trump’s first impeachment, and again drops afterward. Support for violence from 2017 through the summer of 2020 is generally quite close across parties but somewhat higher for Democrats, though as I’ll show later, actual incidents of violence are far higher for Republicans.
The 2020 election season was an inflection point that led to a step-change in acceptance of violence as a political tool, particularly among Republicans. During the month of the election, Republican support for violence leaps across each of Kalmoe and Mason’s questions. Democratic justifications rise in response to some questions but fall in others, and their support moves after Republican opinion and grows less quickly.
By February 2021, 25% of Republicans and 17% of Democrats felt threats against the other party’s leaders were justifiable, and 19% of Republicans and 10% of Democrats believed it was justified to harass ordinary members of the other party. One in five Republicans (20%) and 13% of Democrats claimed that political violence was justified “these days”.
In each case, support for political violence has doubled for Republicans since 2017 and has grown for Democrats.
INCIDENTS OF THREAT, HARASSMENT AND VIOLENCE
Another way of measuring the growing acceptance of violence is the rise in actual incidents, which demonstrate the mainstreaming of threats, intimidation, and violence in American political life.
Threats against members of Congress
Threats against members of Congress are more than ten times as high as just five years ago. From 902 threats investigated by Capitol Police in 2016, they leapt to 3,939 in the first year of the Trump presidency, 5,206 by 2018, 6,955 in 2019, 8,613 in 2020, and hit 9,600 in 2021.
Armed Demonstrations
In the 11 weeks between the election and Inauguration Day, armed actors at protests grew by 47% compared to the 11 weeks prior to the elections, and organized paramilitary groups grew by 96%. Stop the Steal demonstrations were more than four times as likely to feature armed actors or unlawful paramilitary compared to other demonstrations. More than a fifth of all Stop the Steal rallies nationally featured armed actors or unlawful paramilitary.
Armed demonstrations are legal in many states; however, they are 6.5 times more likely to lead to violence than demonstrations without the presence of firearms. In 2020, 6.2% of all pro-Trump demonstrations were armed, numbers that climbed to 8.8% in 2021. These rates are not only increasing but are far higher than protests that were not supportive of Trump: from January 2020 to November 2021, only 1.5% of all other demonstrations across the United States involved armed protestors.
Signifying their political intent, armed pro-Trump demonstrations were far more likely to occur at legislative buildings: 47.3% of all armed pro-Trump protests occurred on legislative grounds compared to 12.2% of all other armed demonstrations. Armed protests on legislative grounds increased by nearly 20% between 2020 and 2021 and were also more likely to turn violent. For example, on January 6, in addition to events in Washington D.C., 12 states were forced to disrupt activities and evacuate their capitol buildings and/or faced crowds threatening or breaching state capitol buildings.
Prior to the 2020 election, armed demonstrations occurred for a variety of reasons around the country, from Second Amendment rallies to militias countering Black Lives Matter protests, and in a few instances, armed Black paramilitary groups. Following the election, however, each peak of armed protest coincided with election-related activities that had previously been purely procedural, such as election tabulation, safe harbor deadlines, electoral college results and Inauguration Day.14 Thus, violence was taking on the pattern seen in other countries where popular anger is coalesced by politicians and put to the service of political goals.
FBI hate crimes
Reported hate crimes peaked in the year of the September 11, 2001 attacks at 9,730 incidents. They then declined, hitting a low of 5,479 in 2014. They started growing after that by up to a few hundred annually – but the trend line rose sharply during the former President’s administration. From 2016 to 2017 hate crimes rose by over a thousand cases, and they rose by nearly the same amount again in 2020. In that year (the last numbers the FBI have reported), 8,263 hate crimes were recorded by the FBI, the highest number since 9/11. The rise is especially notable because 452 agencies that had previously reported statistics failed to report in 2020, meaning the actual increase is greater.
White Supremacist Propaganda and Organizing
White supremacist propaganda and organizing have also grown dramatically. As measured by the Anti-Defamation League, the presence of public, openly white supremacist activity rose more than twelve-fold from 421 incidents in 2017 to 5,125 in 2020. While 2021 saw a slight drop, there were still around 13 incidents of white supremacist propaganda occurring every day – compared to just over one incident a day five years ago. White supremacists have also moved from the shadows to the mainstream: in 2021 there were at least 183 incidents where white supremacists hung banners on highway overpasses or other highly visible locations, a 40 percent increase from the year before. Organizing is also no longer clandestine: in 2021 white supremacists held 108 public events, more than double the year before and the most recorded in the last five years.
2. WHY THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE TODAY IS SO DANGEROUS TO DEMOCRACY
The growing acceptance of political violence and the volume of incidents is deeply worrying. However, as problematic is the structure of today’s political violence.
On the right, violence previously the purview of radical, fringe groups is now mainstream: From the 1970s until the mid-2010s, violence remained an activity of extremist groups on the fringes of society. In the late 1970s, for instance, only 6% of Americans justified violence for political goals.
Throughout past decades, political violence in the U.S. operated in the classic, clandestine terrorist cell model. Intensely ideological organizations such as the Weathermen or Operation Rescue pulled recruits away from family and friends to deepen their connection to the violent group. In the late 1960s and 1970s, most political violence was committed by organizations on the far left acting in the name of perceived social justice, environmental, and animal rights causes, generally against property. From the 1980s through the 2010s, violence shifted towards the right with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia organizations, though environmental and animal rights attacks continued. Violent events diminished greatly from the 1970s peak, but lethality grew as targets shifted from property to people: minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents.
Today, the majority of individuals committing spontaneous or organized political violence do not formally belong to any radical group. Instead, violent beliefs and activities have moved into the mainstream. Ideas once confined to hardcore white supremacists – such as the Great Replacement theory – appear on Fox News and even in the halls of Congress.18 White supremacists have become commonplace on popular gaming sites – a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 23% of respondents who played online multiplayer games had been exposed to white supremacist ideology and one in ten had encountered Holocaust denial.19 Women stumble into the violent Q-Anon conspiracy via a host of mothering blogs and Instagram yoga wellness pages. Once people begin to consider these violent ideas, a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and supporting violence, slipping past mental brakes and normalizing activities and ideologies long viewed as beyond the pale of normal politics.
While desire is bipartisan, violence is overwhelmingly on the right, suggesting a role played by political leaders: Despite similar sentiments regarding violence among Democrats and Republicans from 2017 to pre-election 2020, incidents of violence are overwhelmingly on the right. The Global Terrorist Database (GTD), managed by National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, is considered the most comprehensive global dataset for domestic, transnational, and international terrorist incidents since the 1970s. It charts a rise in violent far-right terrorist activity that begins in 2013 (possibly in reaction to the reelection of America’s first Black president) but skyrockets in 2016.
As START director William Braniff testified to the Congressional Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in 2019, “Among domestic terrorists, violent far-right terrorists are by far the most numerous, lethal and criminally active. Over the last several decades, they are responsible for more: failed plots; successful plots; pursuits of chemical or biological weapons; homicide events; and illicit financial schemes than international terrorists, including HVEs.”
Similar trends are found in FBI statistics (the FBI’s investigations into white supremacists have tripled since 2017), the Joint Regional Intelligence Center of DHS, and independent counts from organizations such as ACLED. While the Global Terrorism Database is still compiling data from 2020 and 2021, and left-wing violence has risen, the difference appears to remain: in 2020, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that violence from both sides reached the highest recorded levels since they began collecting data in 1994 – but right-wing incidents were still nearly three times as high (73) as left-wing (25).
This discrepancy points to the role of political leaders. In both Israel and Germany, research has found that domestic terrorists are emboldened when they believe that politicians encourage violence or that authorities will tolerate it from their side of the political spectrum. Trends in U.S. political violence show similar patterns.22 The Oath Keepers, for example, issued a call to action as early as 2016 to “protect” the polls after then-candidate Trump’s claims of potential fraud. Militia groups mobilized in response to Trump’s statements surrounding his inauguration and with his rhetoric on border security.23 At regular intervals they provided security to Trump campaign rallies and events from 2016 to 2020, and in all of these instances there was no negative governmental reaction. At least one Oath Keeper has claimed that she was providing official security at the rally on the mall on January 6, 2020 for VIPs and legislators; Trump supporter Roger Stone appeared to use Oath Keeper militia members as part of his personal security outfit that morning.24 Given that history, it is reasonable that they would assume they were secure from prosecution for their violence at the Capitol on January 6, should Trump prevail in the 2020 election. Indeed, Stewart Rhodes’ statements suggest that he expected lenience directly from then-President Trump – specifically pardons for those arrested for the January 6 riots and money for their legal defense.
The left is growing in anger and violence is inching up: While violent events to date have been overwhelmingly concentrated on the right, early evidence suggests that they rose for the left in 2020 and that partisans on the left are growing increasingly angry. The most recent December 2021 poll by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found increased justifications of violence from the left: 21% of Democrats (and 16% of Republicans) thought punching members of the other party was justified, while 13% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) justified killing at least some members of the other party. This emotion is not yet appearing in many actual incidents, which global research suggests would require that potential perpetrators feel a greater sense of impunity from prosecution. But these numbers indicate ominous trends were left-wing leaders to encourage violence, given the well-established effects on followers’ actions.
Extremist groups are using mainstream causes to recruit, expanding their membership: In the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, daily internet monitoring showed right-wing violent extremists were encouraging members to use mainstream conservative causes and local rallies to increase recruitment while flying under the radar of national news. For instance, the Proud Boys, a European chauvinist group known for politically violent protest, held a number of rallies using anti-critical race theory to recruit new members. In Oregon, the Proud Boys, People’s Rights (founded by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy), and Patriot Prayer used Telegram to call on supporters to appear at a local school to oppose COVID mask requirements, triggering the school district into lockdown.26 Extremist organizations – particularly the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Boogaloo Bois, and their respective affiliates, were present at nearly half of all the armed demonstrations carried out for any cause in 2021, an increase from their presence at 1/3 of assorted rallies in the year prior.27 As these examples also demonstrate, violent organizations that are often in competition and which previously focused on different targets and goals are now beginning to collude under a more encompassing, melded ideology.28 Their recruiting tactics build on efforts over the last five years to mainstream violent extremism: the militia movement, which previously focused its violence on the federal government, for instance, mobilized against the Women’s March in 2016 and myriad Black Lives Matter marches in 2020.
As extremist organizations capitalize on mainstream concerns, more people enter a radical world that once required joining secretive fringe groups in-person. These trends are expanding the pool of potentially violent individuals, as well as those who might not be violent normally, but who will act violently when excited by the crowd dynamics of an emotional rally.
Targets are becoming partisan, not just ideological: In past decades, violent actors may have been ideologically left (such as many environmental and animal rights terrorists) or right (such as most militia members and abortion clinic attackers), but they were not overtly partisan. In the previous graph of GTD data showing political violence by ideology, many anti-Semitic, anti-government, pro-gun, and other types of attack were classified in past years as “single-issue”, rather than “right- or left-wing”, because while the ideology may be associated with a political side, the perpetrator showed no partisan affiliation or motivation, or seemed to have a mix of motivations from different sides of the political spectrum. Such violence also did not track the electoral calendar and was not used to affect the prospects of either political party.
Now, individuals committing violence on the right tend to be closely aligned with a political party and can be mobilized for partisan purposes. For instance, In November 2021, Bright Line Watch found that right-wing individuals who felt a stronger connection to the Republican Party endorsed concrete violent actions at significantly higher rates.29 Concerns that were once the purview of very separate extremist groups, or were ideological but not partisan – from policies concerning masks, vaccines, election rules, and school curricula, and encompassing dislike of Jews, Muslims, people of different races, immigrants, and other causes – are all triggers that now reinforce a shared identity that is also connected to a political party. For instance, several individuals who took part in armed counter-protests to BLM events have since been charged in the January 6 attacks. In contrast, Bright Line Watch found that on the left, violent sentiment was higher among respondents who felt more distant from the Democratic Party.30 While violence for causes associated with the left still appear disconnected from the Party and political cycle, post-election violence and intimidation on the right began to align with the political calendar in 2016 and 2018, and in 2020 became highly connected to election dates and procedures.
Globally, democracies facing this pattern see intimidation, violence, and harassment rise and fall around each election cycle when elections are close or contentious. Election day itself is often not violent, though intimidation may take place. Instead, violence tends to ramp up in the months prior to election as politicians try to solidify bases of support within more homogenous political parties by creating distinctions with other racial, ethnic, or religious groups, often using dehumanizing rhetoric that inflames their supporters. Violence also occurs after an election but before the final settlement of power (Inauguration Day, in the United States), as politicians whip up anger and intimidation among their supporters to affect vote tallies or as a tool to jockey for the fruits of power. Violence then subsides until the next close election. What may appear to be spontaneous or mob-led is, upon inspection, closely linked to the electoral calendar and serves a political function.32 This a pattern that previously occurred in America during the rise of the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” party and again following Reconstruction among Southern Democrats. For more on this pattern, see my attached article from the Journal of Democracy.
While data for 2021 is not generally available (FBI data, for instance, is generally published in November or December of the following year); incidents appear to have lessened. Given the evidence suggesting that extremist organizing, armed protest, and violent beliefs are all high or increasing, this pattern should not lull anyone into complacency. It is instead a feature to be expected with violence that is encouraged by politicians for a political purpose.
Organized violence on the right is being committed by established community members: Most criminal violence globally is committed by young, unmarried, childless, unemployed men with low levels of education. This is also the demographic profile of the majority of Americans who commit spontaneous hate crimes, who also generally have prior criminal records.
This is not the demographic of those involved in violence and intimidation at right-wing political events and armed demonstrations such as Stop the Steal rallies. These individuals are more likely to be middle-aged, married with children, middle class, and have jobs. The majority of those arrested for the January 6 insurrection belong to this more established demographic.34 They also gained most of their news from the mainstream media, not far-right or social media, and 25% have college degrees.35 Respondents who told the December 2021 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll that violence was justified were also more likely to have college degrees.
The individuals who are taking part in violent right-wing or pro-Trump events and espousing violent political beliefs do not have the profile of extremists, criminals, or hate crime offenders. Indeed, many people arrested on January 6, like the majority of violent extremists today, have no history of violence and aren’t part of a violent group. Instead, America is facing a mainstreaming of violence among people who are well-established in their communities and who seem to view their violence not as a criminal act but as an extension of political behavior. That behavior is clearly influenced by the conspiracy that the 2020 election was “stolen”. In fact, far from being on the fringe, greater community involvement on the right has been found by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life to correlate with greater belief in conspiracies such as Stop the Steal and Q-Anon, as does church membership among white Evangelicals.37 Problematically, this was also the demographic picture as Nazi extremism mainstreamed among regular Germans in the 1930s – in fact, German towns with more civic associations saw a faster rise in Nazi Party membership.
According to nearly every measure of both beliefs and actual incidents, political violence is considered more acceptable than it was five years ago before then-President Trump took office.
BELIEFS:
The most consistent survey data comes from scholars Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, who have been tracking public opinion on political violence using identical questions and methods for the last five years.1 From 2017 when their tracking begins, support for political violence rises across several measures prior to the midterm elections and declines after the elections. It also spikes (especially for Republicans) around then-President Trump’s first impeachment, and again drops afterward. Support for violence from 2017 through the summer of 2020 is generally quite close across parties but somewhat higher for Democrats, though as I’ll show later, actual incidents of violence are far higher for Republicans.
The 2020 election season was an inflection point that led to a step-change in acceptance of violence as a political tool, particularly among Republicans. During the month of the election, Republican support for violence leaps across each of Kalmoe and Mason’s questions. Democratic justifications rise in response to some questions but fall in others, and their support moves after Republican opinion and grows less quickly.
By February 2021, 25% of Republicans and 17% of Democrats felt threats against the other party’s leaders were justifiable, and 19% of Republicans and 10% of Democrats believed it was justified to harass ordinary members of the other party. One in five Republicans (20%) and 13% of Democrats claimed that political violence was justified “these days”.
In each case, support for political violence has doubled for Republicans since 2017 and has grown for Democrats.
The U.S. is fast approaching these numbers.
Other polls trace the same leap in acceptance of violence following the election, particularly among Republicans. For instance, similar questions were posed a year apart by scholar Larry Bartels and the AEI Survey Center on American Life. In January 2020, half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” By January 2021, this number had risen to 56%, and by June 2021 another poll found 68% support across both parties.
The perception that an election was stolen is known to be a major instigator of political unrest worldwide. Researchers have found that incumbents play an outsized role in shaping whether elections that are perceived as fraudulent (whether that perception is real or imaginary) lead to violent riots or street protests. Political parties can also reduce the risk of violence by channeling anger towards non-violent demonstrations. This is one reason it is so disturbing to note that by late November, 2020: “a significant portion of the online infrastructure” that had been built to support Trump’s reelection had been retooled to promote election misinformation and upcoming protests, according to the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, which has done a forensic analysis of that cyberinfrastructure.
The consciously propagated false narrative regarding election theft is directly linked to the growing support for violence on the right. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were twice as likely in Kalmoe and Mason’s survey data to endorse a military coup and were more likely to justify armed citizen rebellion. Of the 9% of Americans who agreed that “force is justified to restore Trump to the Presidency” in a separate University of Chicago survey in June 2021, 90% believed Biden’s presidency was illegitimate.6 Throughout 2021, a time during which the Bright Line Watch organization found that 73-74% of Republicans felt that President Biden was not the rightful winner of the election, a separate 22,900 person poll found that almost 1 in 5 among Republican men claimed that violence was justifiable “right now”.
Some experts believe that these numbers are emotional or philosophical statements and thus overstate the acceptance of actual violence. Abstract questions with no definition of violence opens surveys to that claim, and no doubt a percentage of respondents are not serious. Yet there is reason to believe a significant number of respondents mean what they say.
For instance, Bright Line Watch found that when survey respondents were asked about concrete examples and were forced to pay more attention before answering, support for violence reduced – but even with these safeguards, they found in November 2021 that among Republicans who most strongly identified with the party, 17% were willing to endorse violence to usher Trump back into the presidency, 18% endorsed threats, and 9% were willing to justify violence if the other party wins the 2024 election.
Similarly, a month after January 6, 2021, Kalmoe and Mason polled respondents on what they meant when they spoke of violence. When presented with concrete actions, a third of those who initially endorsed political violence picked “none of these options”, suggesting some posturing had been occurring. Of the remaining two-thirds, however, 7% justified “widespread violence by armed groups that kill lots of people”, 17% endorsed “violence by armed individuals that might kill a few people,” and 22% endorsed “fistfights and beating people up”, while 24% intended property crime. Respondents on the right and left justified these forms of violence. When asked: “Do you believe the use of violence to take over state government buildings to advance your political goals is justified?” a quarter of Republicans and 13% of Democrats agreed, while 12% of Republicans and 11% of Democrats agreed that “assassination of opposing political leaders is justified to advance political goals” was justified.
Other polls trace the same leap in acceptance of violence following the election, particularly among Republicans. For instance, similar questions were posed a year apart by scholar Larry Bartels and the AEI Survey Center on American Life. In January 2020, half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” By January 2021, this number had risen to 56%, and by June 2021 another poll found 68% support across both parties.
The perception that an election was stolen is known to be a major instigator of political unrest worldwide. Researchers have found that incumbents play an outsized role in shaping whether elections that are perceived as fraudulent (whether that perception is real or imaginary) lead to violent riots or street protests. Political parties can also reduce the risk of violence by channeling anger towards non-violent demonstrations. This is one reason it is so disturbing to note that by late November, 2020: “a significant portion of the online infrastructure” that had been built to support Trump’s reelection had been retooled to promote election misinformation and upcoming protests, according to the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, which has done a forensic analysis of that cyberinfrastructure.
The consciously propagated false narrative regarding election theft is directly linked to the growing support for violence on the right. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were twice as likely in Kalmoe and Mason’s survey data to endorse a military coup and were more likely to justify armed citizen rebellion. Of the 9% of Americans who agreed that “force is justified to restore Trump to the Presidency” in a separate University of Chicago survey in June 2021, 90% believed Biden’s presidency was illegitimate.6 Throughout 2021, a time during which the Bright Line Watch organization found that 73-74% of Republicans felt that President Biden was not the rightful winner of the election, a separate 22,900 person poll found that almost 1 in 5 among Republican men claimed that violence was justifiable “right now”.
Some experts believe that these numbers are emotional or philosophical statements and thus overstate the acceptance of actual violence. Abstract questions with no definition of violence opens surveys to that claim, and no doubt a percentage of respondents are not serious. Yet there is reason to believe a significant number of respondents mean what they say.
For instance, Bright Line Watch found that when survey respondents were asked about concrete examples and were forced to pay more attention before answering, support for violence reduced – but even with these safeguards, they found in November 2021 that among Republicans who most strongly identified with the party, 17% were willing to endorse violence to usher Trump back into the presidency, 18% endorsed threats, and 9% were willing to justify violence if the other party wins the 2024 election.
Similarly, a month after January 6, 2021, Kalmoe and Mason polled respondents on what they meant when they spoke of violence. When presented with concrete actions, a third of those who initially endorsed political violence picked “none of these options”, suggesting some posturing had been occurring. Of the remaining two-thirds, however, 7% justified “widespread violence by armed groups that kill lots of people”, 17% endorsed “violence by armed individuals that might kill a few people,” and 22% endorsed “fistfights and beating people up”, while 24% intended property crime. Respondents on the right and left justified these forms of violence. When asked: “Do you believe the use of violence to take over state government buildings to advance your political goals is justified?” a quarter of Republicans and 13% of Democrats agreed, while 12% of Republicans and 11% of Democrats agreed that “assassination of opposing political leaders is justified to advance political goals” was justified.
INCIDENTS OF THREAT, HARASSMENT AND VIOLENCE
Another way of measuring the growing acceptance of violence is the rise in actual incidents, which demonstrate the mainstreaming of threats, intimidation, and violence in American political life.
Threats against members of Congress
Threats against members of Congress are more than ten times as high as just five years ago. From 902 threats investigated by Capitol Police in 2016, they leapt to 3,939 in the first year of the Trump presidency, 5,206 by 2018, 6,955 in 2019, 8,613 in 2020, and hit 9,600 in 2021.
Armed Demonstrations
In the 11 weeks between the election and Inauguration Day, armed actors at protests grew by 47% compared to the 11 weeks prior to the elections, and organized paramilitary groups grew by 96%. Stop the Steal demonstrations were more than four times as likely to feature armed actors or unlawful paramilitary compared to other demonstrations. More than a fifth of all Stop the Steal rallies nationally featured armed actors or unlawful paramilitary.
Armed demonstrations are legal in many states; however, they are 6.5 times more likely to lead to violence than demonstrations without the presence of firearms. In 2020, 6.2% of all pro-Trump demonstrations were armed, numbers that climbed to 8.8% in 2021. These rates are not only increasing but are far higher than protests that were not supportive of Trump: from January 2020 to November 2021, only 1.5% of all other demonstrations across the United States involved armed protestors.
Signifying their political intent, armed pro-Trump demonstrations were far more likely to occur at legislative buildings: 47.3% of all armed pro-Trump protests occurred on legislative grounds compared to 12.2% of all other armed demonstrations. Armed protests on legislative grounds increased by nearly 20% between 2020 and 2021 and were also more likely to turn violent. For example, on January 6, in addition to events in Washington D.C., 12 states were forced to disrupt activities and evacuate their capitol buildings and/or faced crowds threatening or breaching state capitol buildings.
Prior to the 2020 election, armed demonstrations occurred for a variety of reasons around the country, from Second Amendment rallies to militias countering Black Lives Matter protests, and in a few instances, armed Black paramilitary groups. Following the election, however, each peak of armed protest coincided with election-related activities that had previously been purely procedural, such as election tabulation, safe harbor deadlines, electoral college results and Inauguration Day.14 Thus, violence was taking on the pattern seen in other countries where popular anger is coalesced by politicians and put to the service of political goals.
FBI hate crimes
Reported hate crimes peaked in the year of the September 11, 2001 attacks at 9,730 incidents. They then declined, hitting a low of 5,479 in 2014. They started growing after that by up to a few hundred annually – but the trend line rose sharply during the former President’s administration. From 2016 to 2017 hate crimes rose by over a thousand cases, and they rose by nearly the same amount again in 2020. In that year (the last numbers the FBI have reported), 8,263 hate crimes were recorded by the FBI, the highest number since 9/11. The rise is especially notable because 452 agencies that had previously reported statistics failed to report in 2020, meaning the actual increase is greater.
White Supremacist Propaganda and Organizing
White supremacist propaganda and organizing have also grown dramatically. As measured by the Anti-Defamation League, the presence of public, openly white supremacist activity rose more than twelve-fold from 421 incidents in 2017 to 5,125 in 2020. While 2021 saw a slight drop, there were still around 13 incidents of white supremacist propaganda occurring every day – compared to just over one incident a day five years ago. White supremacists have also moved from the shadows to the mainstream: in 2021 there were at least 183 incidents where white supremacists hung banners on highway overpasses or other highly visible locations, a 40 percent increase from the year before. Organizing is also no longer clandestine: in 2021 white supremacists held 108 public events, more than double the year before and the most recorded in the last five years.
2. WHY THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE TODAY IS SO DANGEROUS TO DEMOCRACY
The growing acceptance of political violence and the volume of incidents is deeply worrying. However, as problematic is the structure of today’s political violence.
On the right, violence previously the purview of radical, fringe groups is now mainstream: From the 1970s until the mid-2010s, violence remained an activity of extremist groups on the fringes of society. In the late 1970s, for instance, only 6% of Americans justified violence for political goals.
Throughout past decades, political violence in the U.S. operated in the classic, clandestine terrorist cell model. Intensely ideological organizations such as the Weathermen or Operation Rescue pulled recruits away from family and friends to deepen their connection to the violent group. In the late 1960s and 1970s, most political violence was committed by organizations on the far left acting in the name of perceived social justice, environmental, and animal rights causes, generally against property. From the 1980s through the 2010s, violence shifted towards the right with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia organizations, though environmental and animal rights attacks continued. Violent events diminished greatly from the 1970s peak, but lethality grew as targets shifted from property to people: minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents.
Today, the majority of individuals committing spontaneous or organized political violence do not formally belong to any radical group. Instead, violent beliefs and activities have moved into the mainstream. Ideas once confined to hardcore white supremacists – such as the Great Replacement theory – appear on Fox News and even in the halls of Congress.18 White supremacists have become commonplace on popular gaming sites – a 2019 study by the Anti-Defamation League found that 23% of respondents who played online multiplayer games had been exposed to white supremacist ideology and one in ten had encountered Holocaust denial.19 Women stumble into the violent Q-Anon conspiracy via a host of mothering blogs and Instagram yoga wellness pages. Once people begin to consider these violent ideas, a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and supporting violence, slipping past mental brakes and normalizing activities and ideologies long viewed as beyond the pale of normal politics.
While desire is bipartisan, violence is overwhelmingly on the right, suggesting a role played by political leaders: Despite similar sentiments regarding violence among Democrats and Republicans from 2017 to pre-election 2020, incidents of violence are overwhelmingly on the right. The Global Terrorist Database (GTD), managed by National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence, is considered the most comprehensive global dataset for domestic, transnational, and international terrorist incidents since the 1970s. It charts a rise in violent far-right terrorist activity that begins in 2013 (possibly in reaction to the reelection of America’s first Black president) but skyrockets in 2016.
As START director William Braniff testified to the Congressional Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in 2019, “Among domestic terrorists, violent far-right terrorists are by far the most numerous, lethal and criminally active. Over the last several decades, they are responsible for more: failed plots; successful plots; pursuits of chemical or biological weapons; homicide events; and illicit financial schemes than international terrorists, including HVEs.”
This discrepancy points to the role of political leaders. In both Israel and Germany, research has found that domestic terrorists are emboldened when they believe that politicians encourage violence or that authorities will tolerate it from their side of the political spectrum. Trends in U.S. political violence show similar patterns.22 The Oath Keepers, for example, issued a call to action as early as 2016 to “protect” the polls after then-candidate Trump’s claims of potential fraud. Militia groups mobilized in response to Trump’s statements surrounding his inauguration and with his rhetoric on border security.23 At regular intervals they provided security to Trump campaign rallies and events from 2016 to 2020, and in all of these instances there was no negative governmental reaction. At least one Oath Keeper has claimed that she was providing official security at the rally on the mall on January 6, 2020 for VIPs and legislators; Trump supporter Roger Stone appeared to use Oath Keeper militia members as part of his personal security outfit that morning.24 Given that history, it is reasonable that they would assume they were secure from prosecution for their violence at the Capitol on January 6, should Trump prevail in the 2020 election. Indeed, Stewart Rhodes’ statements suggest that he expected lenience directly from then-President Trump – specifically pardons for those arrested for the January 6 riots and money for their legal defense.
The left is growing in anger and violence is inching up: While violent events to date have been overwhelmingly concentrated on the right, early evidence suggests that they rose for the left in 2020 and that partisans on the left are growing increasingly angry. The most recent December 2021 poll by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found increased justifications of violence from the left: 21% of Democrats (and 16% of Republicans) thought punching members of the other party was justified, while 13% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) justified killing at least some members of the other party. This emotion is not yet appearing in many actual incidents, which global research suggests would require that potential perpetrators feel a greater sense of impunity from prosecution. But these numbers indicate ominous trends were left-wing leaders to encourage violence, given the well-established effects on followers’ actions.
Extremist groups are using mainstream causes to recruit, expanding their membership: In the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, daily internet monitoring showed right-wing violent extremists were encouraging members to use mainstream conservative causes and local rallies to increase recruitment while flying under the radar of national news. For instance, the Proud Boys, a European chauvinist group known for politically violent protest, held a number of rallies using anti-critical race theory to recruit new members. In Oregon, the Proud Boys, People’s Rights (founded by anti-government activist Ammon Bundy), and Patriot Prayer used Telegram to call on supporters to appear at a local school to oppose COVID mask requirements, triggering the school district into lockdown.26 Extremist organizations – particularly the Proud Boys, Three Percenters, and Boogaloo Bois, and their respective affiliates, were present at nearly half of all the armed demonstrations carried out for any cause in 2021, an increase from their presence at 1/3 of assorted rallies in the year prior.27 As these examples also demonstrate, violent organizations that are often in competition and which previously focused on different targets and goals are now beginning to collude under a more encompassing, melded ideology.28 Their recruiting tactics build on efforts over the last five years to mainstream violent extremism: the militia movement, which previously focused its violence on the federal government, for instance, mobilized against the Women’s March in 2016 and myriad Black Lives Matter marches in 2020.
As extremist organizations capitalize on mainstream concerns, more people enter a radical world that once required joining secretive fringe groups in-person. These trends are expanding the pool of potentially violent individuals, as well as those who might not be violent normally, but who will act violently when excited by the crowd dynamics of an emotional rally.
Targets are becoming partisan, not just ideological: In past decades, violent actors may have been ideologically left (such as many environmental and animal rights terrorists) or right (such as most militia members and abortion clinic attackers), but they were not overtly partisan. In the previous graph of GTD data showing political violence by ideology, many anti-Semitic, anti-government, pro-gun, and other types of attack were classified in past years as “single-issue”, rather than “right- or left-wing”, because while the ideology may be associated with a political side, the perpetrator showed no partisan affiliation or motivation, or seemed to have a mix of motivations from different sides of the political spectrum. Such violence also did not track the electoral calendar and was not used to affect the prospects of either political party.
Now, individuals committing violence on the right tend to be closely aligned with a political party and can be mobilized for partisan purposes. For instance, In November 2021, Bright Line Watch found that right-wing individuals who felt a stronger connection to the Republican Party endorsed concrete violent actions at significantly higher rates.29 Concerns that were once the purview of very separate extremist groups, or were ideological but not partisan – from policies concerning masks, vaccines, election rules, and school curricula, and encompassing dislike of Jews, Muslims, people of different races, immigrants, and other causes – are all triggers that now reinforce a shared identity that is also connected to a political party. For instance, several individuals who took part in armed counter-protests to BLM events have since been charged in the January 6 attacks. In contrast, Bright Line Watch found that on the left, violent sentiment was higher among respondents who felt more distant from the Democratic Party.30 While violence for causes associated with the left still appear disconnected from the Party and political cycle, post-election violence and intimidation on the right began to align with the political calendar in 2016 and 2018, and in 2020 became highly connected to election dates and procedures.
Globally, democracies facing this pattern see intimidation, violence, and harassment rise and fall around each election cycle when elections are close or contentious. Election day itself is often not violent, though intimidation may take place. Instead, violence tends to ramp up in the months prior to election as politicians try to solidify bases of support within more homogenous political parties by creating distinctions with other racial, ethnic, or religious groups, often using dehumanizing rhetoric that inflames their supporters. Violence also occurs after an election but before the final settlement of power (Inauguration Day, in the United States), as politicians whip up anger and intimidation among their supporters to affect vote tallies or as a tool to jockey for the fruits of power. Violence then subsides until the next close election. What may appear to be spontaneous or mob-led is, upon inspection, closely linked to the electoral calendar and serves a political function.32 This a pattern that previously occurred in America during the rise of the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” party and again following Reconstruction among Southern Democrats. For more on this pattern, see my attached article from the Journal of Democracy.
While data for 2021 is not generally available (FBI data, for instance, is generally published in November or December of the following year); incidents appear to have lessened. Given the evidence suggesting that extremist organizing, armed protest, and violent beliefs are all high or increasing, this pattern should not lull anyone into complacency. It is instead a feature to be expected with violence that is encouraged by politicians for a political purpose.
Organized violence on the right is being committed by established community members: Most criminal violence globally is committed by young, unmarried, childless, unemployed men with low levels of education. This is also the demographic profile of the majority of Americans who commit spontaneous hate crimes, who also generally have prior criminal records.
This is not the demographic of those involved in violence and intimidation at right-wing political events and armed demonstrations such as Stop the Steal rallies. These individuals are more likely to be middle-aged, married with children, middle class, and have jobs. The majority of those arrested for the January 6 insurrection belong to this more established demographic.34 They also gained most of their news from the mainstream media, not far-right or social media, and 25% have college degrees.35 Respondents who told the December 2021 Washington Post-University of Maryland poll that violence was justified were also more likely to have college degrees.
The individuals who are taking part in violent right-wing or pro-Trump events and espousing violent political beliefs do not have the profile of extremists, criminals, or hate crime offenders. Indeed, many people arrested on January 6, like the majority of violent extremists today, have no history of violence and aren’t part of a violent group. Instead, America is facing a mainstreaming of violence among people who are well-established in their communities and who seem to view their violence not as a criminal act but as an extension of political behavior. That behavior is clearly influenced by the conspiracy that the 2020 election was “stolen”. In fact, far from being on the fringe, greater community involvement on the right has been found by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life to correlate with greater belief in conspiracies such as Stop the Steal and Q-Anon, as does church membership among white Evangelicals.37 Problematically, this was also the demographic picture as Nazi extremism mainstreamed among regular Germans in the 1930s – in fact, German towns with more civic associations saw a faster rise in Nazi Party membership.
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