
During his 2024 presidential election campaign, Donald Trump regularly stoked hate and fear targeting immigrants, communities of color and trans youth. As he prepares to be sworn into office in January, Trump has reiterated that he’ll follow through on his campaign pledge to pardon some or all of his 1,500 MAGA supporters charged with crimes related to the violent Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection that resulted in the deaths of 5 people and injuries to 174 police officers.
There’s growing concern that many of the right-wing hate groups, Christian nationalists and white supremacist armed militias that support Donald Trump will be emboldened by his return to the White House and could result in a dangerous increase in political violence targeting Trump’s perceived enemies.
In June, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a report titled, “The Year in Hate & Extremism 2023,” which documents the activities of more than 1,400 hate and antigovernment extremist organizations, the highest number of active white nationalist groups ever recorded by the SPLC. These record numbers coincide with a rise in direct actions targeting minority communities including Blacks, Jews, LGBTQ+ people, as well as libraries, schools and hospitals. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, who talks about the heightened level of concern regarding the threat posed by racist hate groups after Trump takes office in January.
RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: People at the state level have had to deal with kind of these repressive, aggressive authoritarian states for awhile. So I think we have some lessons to learn from folks in the Deep South, in some of our states that they’ve had to deal with some of these things at the state level. It is different when it’s the federal level. You can’t move states, you can’t change locations. It’s different when you have the kind of the level of influence, power, money in institution that a president would have. And I think it is really concerning that there are number of people that are being put in positions who have been directly associated involved with the hard right in the U.S. hate groups. When we look at something like Project 2025, many of the things that were kind of talked about during the election cycle were around the policies that were in that document outlined by in a coalition effort by the Heritage Foundation.
The policies are appalling. But the second piece of that effort was an effort to have a ready made list of people that could be put into positions of power during the nominations, the appointment process. And we see that playing out and the associations are not good with groups and there are many folks there who are being put forward who absolutely are happy to enact really regressive policies and have long histories of buddying up to hate groups. So I think there’s absolutely a concern. I think the places that we might find a little hope is that people are pretty resistant to, as a whole to when it sort of becomes a reality in their space. We’ve seen that resistance at the state level in the South. We’ve seen that during the last administration. So I am hopeful that people will say no. I think that there is a real risk though.
SCOTT HARRIS: Rachel, I did wanna ask you about this. With Trump’s control of all three branches of government come Jan. 20th, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, is it likely that investigations into armed right-wing militia or other white supremacist terrorist groups would be diminished or ended?
RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
SCOTT HARRIS: We’ve seen Republicans in the past try to expunge any investigation or public reports about the threat these white supremacist groups pose to the country. If that were to come to pass, what would be the result of little or no federal monitoring or prosecution of these groups?
RACHEL CARROLL RIVAS: Yeah, I’m absolutely concerned about that because we have seen a number of Department of Justice arrests of neo-Nazi terrorist groups that were planning to attack our infrastructure including, you know, our electric infrastructure, our transportation infrastructure. We’ve seen a number of kind of budding local militias that were kind of nipped in the bud by the DOJ these last few years.
And we know that it’s one of the only things that has really slowed down, particularly the more violent direct action kind of militia and white supremacist groups in this U.S. has been actually an attention by our federal law enforcement. That was true after Oklahoma City and that’s true this time. We see an impact on that. I think that there is unfortunate likelihood that that will wane and will refocus as it has before irresponsibly and incorrectly on black and brown communities and activist groups.
I think the other real concerning thing for me is that we’ve had an ATF that’s really leaned into making sure to crack down on the weapons issues in our country in which many of these groups are involved in, particularly the militia movement and everything from ghost guns to illegal sales. If that’s (where) we have our eyes off, we have a massive problem, especially in a country where we already have quite frankly, a mass armed society where, you know, militias used to be the folks with all the guns and now it’s like we’ve got, you know, anyone can really be a part of militia ’cause the guns are everywhere. So I think if ATF is taking their eyes off, that’s also particularly concerning in this moment.
For more information, visit the Southern Poverty Law Center at www.splcenter.org.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Rachel Carroll Rivas (18:13) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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