A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism

The terrifying implications of pardoning insurrectionists who killed and maimed…

This past weekend, in his Meet The Press interview with Kristen Welker, Donald Trump reaffirmed his intention to pardon the people who attacked our Capitol, killing five civilians and three police officers and sending more than 140 cops to the hospital.

“I’m going to be acting very quickly. First day,” Trump said of pardoning Jan. 6 killers. “They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open.”

Most media and political observers and commentators appear to be of the opinion that this is simply Trump’s way of thanking the people who made what he considers a heroic effort to keep him in office through violence. That would be bad enough, but experts at The Critical Internet Studies Institute are worried that there may be a much more sinister explanation.

If they’re right, it would also go a long way toward explaining his picks for Attorney General, Defense Secretary, and FBI director.

This theory, increasingly shared among counterterrorism experts and people who monitor violent rightwing extremist groups, suggests that the real reason Trump would do the pardons (and is unafraid of discussing them) is because he’s recruiting. And you don’t need to go back to 1930s Europe to find examples of how that could work.

Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, for example, has often used non-state actors to intimidate and even kill his political enemies. The most well-known is the Night Wolves Motorcycle Club, aka “Putin’s Angels,” run by a man who calls himself “the Surgeon.”

They helped Putin invade Crimea and Ukraine, but most of their activity is against protestors, “communists” (anybody opposing Putin), and the queer community in Russia.

Similarly, five years and one week before Trump applauded the “Jews will not replace us” Nazis who rallied in Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer, a group of some 700 right-wing Hungarian “patriots” held a torchlight parade that ended in front of the homes of Hungary’s largest minority group, chanting, “We will set your homes on fire!”

Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán’s police watched the thugs, laughing and refusing to intervene, as Roma families fled their homes in terror. In 2013, Zsolt Bayer, one of the founders of Orbán’s party, had called the Roma “animals… unfit to live among people.”

Language strikingly similar, if not milder, to Trump‘s way of describing Black people, immigrants, and liberals.

Orbán refused to condemn Bayer or the violence, and life has become more and more difficult for racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Not only are they routinely excluded from job markets, but are also frequently subject to violence at the hands of all-white, Orbán-supporting Hungarian militias.

Armed rightwing militia groups in the United States have been on a recruiting jag of their own in anticipation of Trump’s presidency, according to press reports and terrorism experts. For example, Reuters notes:

“The Proud Boys are back. Four years after the failed effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat, the violent all-male extremist group that led the storming of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, is rebuilding and regaining strength as Trump campaigns to return to the White House, according to interviews with eight Proud Boys, two U.S. law enforcement officials and four experts who track the group’s online activity.”

Similarly, Wired magazine reports that Scott Seddon, the Pennsylvania-based founder of the American Patriots Three Percenters (APIII), is preparing for something like war:

“’This is not going to just go away. We need to become fuckin’ strong, fuckin’ lions,’ says Seddon. ‘Start reaching out to individuals in your state that are trustworthy, that have the like-minded vision of local strong communities, to hold down the fort, just in case [of] war, or for when shit hits the fan.’”

El Pais tells the story of armed militia groups who are looking forward to action on America’s southern border when Trump allows it. Referencing them, Tom Homan, who Trump has appointed as his “Border Czar,” told Fox “News”:

“There are thousands of retired agents, border patrols, retired military personnel who want to come and volunteer to help this president secure the border and do deportation operations.”

They also cite a Wired article that quotes Tim Foley, head of Arizona Border Recon, a white “civilian patrol group,” as saying they’re doing outreach:

“We’re in talks with a few different people. We have a better lay of the land than the federal agents do.”

It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.

Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:

“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

More recently, in his 2024 book “The War on Warriors,” Hegseth asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”

Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”

Our timid national media refuse to even consider such a savage scenario, but America should brace itself as Trump has not let up on his violent rhetoric and neither have his followers. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance told MSNBC’s Ari Melber:

“You know, when you listen to these comments and watch these videos, what you are forced to consider is the message that Donald Trump is sending, because it is not just to the January 6th defendants.

“It is to the people he hopes will support him in this next term, and the message is: ‘Support me at all costs, use violence, commit crimes, I will take care of you.’

“I find that to be deeply frightening.”

January 6th taught us that Trump and some of the people following him are deadly serious and willing to use violence and even murder to achieve their goals.

America needs to get ready. President Biden should be preparing (or reassuring) us. And, if the latter, explaining why.

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