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Is Trump Building an Army of Modern Blackshirts?
September 5, 2024
Is Trump Building an Army of Modern Blackshirts?
The proliferation of pro-Trump militia groups across the country eerily echoes the rise of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi.
Bob Dreyfuss
Supporters of former president Trump hold a rally on April 6, 2024, in Bedminster, New Jersey.
(Stephanie Keith / Getty Images)
On March 23, 2023, former president Donald Trump launched his third presidential bid in front of a raucous, rollicking crowd in Waco, Texas. Waco, a city of about 145,000 people in west Texas, situated halfway between Dallas and Austin, was the scene 30 years earlier of a bloody showdown between federal and state law enforcement officers and the heavily armed Branch Davidian cult, a siege that left scores of Branch Davidians dead in a suicidal conflagration. Since those events, which began on February 28 and ended on April 19, 1993, Waco has become iconic in the memory of far-right, violence-prone militia groups, and it inspired a militia-affiliated extremist, Timothy McVeigh, to explode a truck bomb in Oklahoma City exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people and injured 680.
By selecting Waco as his campaign kickoff event, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to violence-prone extremists nationwide. The Houston Chronicle, in an editorial about Trump’s rally, wrote that the choice of Waco went far beyond a “dog whistle” and compared it to “the blaring of air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10,” adding that Trump was “stoking the fires of Waco.”
In his speech, Trump fed his audience the red meat that many of them were looking for. He opened the rally by playing a song, “Justice for All” by the “J6 Choir,” recorded by men imprisoned for the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, accompanied by footage of the mob attack. Claiming that the United States has been taken over by “Marxists and communists,” Trump said ominously, “2024 is the final battle. That’s going to be the big one.”
And he added: “I am your warrior.… I am your retribution.”
Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he suggested that “the Second Amendment people”—i.e., his gun-owning backers—might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court choices. In 2019, he said, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” And in 2020 Trump famously told the Proud Boys militia to “stand down and stand by.” Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.
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https://archive.ph/9Weme
Is Trump Building an Army of Modern Blackshirts?
The proliferation of pro-Trump militia groups across the country eerily echoes the rise of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi.
Bob Dreyfuss
Supporters of former president Trump hold a rally on April 6, 2024, in Bedminster, New Jersey.
(Stephanie Keith / Getty Images)
On March 23, 2023, former president Donald Trump launched his third presidential bid in front of a raucous, rollicking crowd in Waco, Texas. Waco, a city of about 145,000 people in west Texas, situated halfway between Dallas and Austin, was the scene 30 years earlier of a bloody showdown between federal and state law enforcement officers and the heavily armed Branch Davidian cult, a siege that left scores of Branch Davidians dead in a suicidal conflagration. Since those events, which began on February 28 and ended on April 19, 1993, Waco has become iconic in the memory of far-right, violence-prone militia groups, and it inspired a militia-affiliated extremist, Timothy McVeigh, to explode a truck bomb in Oklahoma City exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people and injured 680.
By selecting Waco as his campaign kickoff event, Trump sent an unmistakable signal to violence-prone extremists nationwide. The Houston Chronicle, in an editorial about Trump’s rally, wrote that the choice of Waco went far beyond a “dog whistle” and compared it to “the blaring of air horn of a Mack 18-wheeler barreling down I-10,” adding that Trump was “stoking the fires of Waco.”
In his speech, Trump fed his audience the red meat that many of them were looking for. He opened the rally by playing a song, “Justice for All” by the “J6 Choir,” recorded by men imprisoned for the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, accompanied by footage of the mob attack. Claiming that the United States has been taken over by “Marxists and communists,” Trump said ominously, “2024 is the final battle. That’s going to be the big one.”
And he added: “I am your warrior.… I am your retribution.”
Trump, of course, has a long history of supporting and encouraging potentially violent supporters. In 2016, during his first campaign, he suggested that “the Second Amendment people”—i.e., his gun-owning backers—might be able to stop the nomination of Democratic Supreme Court choices. In 2019, he said, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” And in 2020 Trump famously told the Proud Boys militia to “stand down and stand by.” Ultimately, the Proud Boys would help lead the January 6 insurrection.
Snip...more...
https://archive.ph/9Weme
❤️pants
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