Is America on the Verge of Insurgency?

There have been several reports lately about a mobilization underway among radical rightwing groups such as the Boogaloo Bois and other white supremacists.

An op-ed in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, warns these groups could stage a mass uprising during or immediately after the November 3rd elections. The author, a professor from Portland, has logged 425 incidents of violence against anti-racism protesters and people of colour since the killing of George Floyd.

Most of these incidents appear to have been carried out by violent radicalized individuals with little to no specific training. However, the Portland incident fits an emerging pattern: an increasingly coordinated right-wing vigilante movement, fueled by organizers with counterinsurgency skills, committed to using their military or security forces experience against Black Lives Matter and the ever-amorphous "Antifa."

Their tactics arsenal includes the infiltration of local demonstrations as provocateurs to stir up violence, delegitimize the protests and invite a far harsher police response.

It’s not new that far-right activists inserting themselves in civil protest movements have come from military service and the ranks of the police, or that street militia actively recruit from those pools. Five years ago, the Oath Keepers, an extremist paramilitary organization drawing members form the police and armed services, did just that in Ferguson, Missouri and other places.

But now, since right-wing militias now feel that the serving U.S. president is on their team, they are refocusing their message: No longer anti-government, but anti-opposition.

As the Trump presidency brought fresh blood into the militia movement and pitched battles erupted in cities across the U.S., rural and urban groups, pro-Trump and anti-government groups began mingling and synthesizing. The Proud Boys, self-styled "Western chauvinists" with their own particular dress code and memes, started appearing in various cities in military fatigues and brandishing assault rifles.

As the COVID-19 crisis accelerated, they mobilized to "occupy" state capitol buildings, formally protesting lockdown regulations they considered a form of totalitarianism, turning out in their thousands with AR-15s and combat gear. From Washington to Michigan, Wisconsin to Kentucky, the far right found a locus point around which to organize and maneuver.

Another extremist group with a distinct iconography, the "Boogaloo boys" emerged: often heavily armed, they see their mission as accelerationists, agitating for what they see as an inevitable "Second Civil War." Some argue for left-right anti-government alliances to organize for the coming insurrection.

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There seems no doubt that America’s far right is keying up for conflict in the lead-up and aftermath of the presidential election in three months’ time.

Unlike at any time previously, they are enabled by technology to more effectively organize locally and incite violence as a collective enterprise; they have recruited military and security force veterans; in some cases, they seem to have implicit backing from police officers themselves; they have an apocalyptic and mobilizing hostility towards "Antifa" and BLM that is no longer a fringe position on the right; and they have a president floating the idea of rejecting an unfavorable election result.

If Trump refuses to acknowledge the results, his militias are certainly prepped to come out into the streets to prevent a peaceful transfer of power – or, as the far right prefer to call it, a "Democratic coup."