
In the first week Donald Trump returned to the White House, he followed through on dozens of campaign pledges, many detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 that the twice-impeached president had earlier disavowed. Most alarmingly, Trump pardoned 1500 Jan. 6th insurrectionists, many of whom were found guilty of violent attacks against Capitol police officers. Trump also commuted the sentences of 14 Oath Keepers and Proud Boy militia leaders sentenced to long prison terms, some for the crime of seditious conspiracy.
He also issued executive orders which included the launch of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, the mass firing of civil servants including 18 inspectors general across government agencies, eliminating federal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs and what appeared to be an unconstitutional freeze on all government loans and grants.
Many Republican legislators and Vice President J.D. Vance had expressed opposition to granting pardons to those Jan. 6th insurrectionists that attacked police. But after Trump announced the blanket pardons, most were either silent, or publicly supported the president, contradicting their earlier positions. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Lawrence Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher with the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies University of California, who discusses how these pardons have eroded the rule of law and emboldened the insurrectionists to commit future acts of political violence targeting Trump’s perceived enemies.
LAWRENCE ROSENTHAL: I think there’s no way around looking at the pardons as close to an invitation to greater political violence. It’s very hard to put a happier picture on it than that.
During the election campaign, we had Gen. Mark Milley and Gen. John Kelly explicitly calling Donald Trump a fascist. That kind of thinking goes way back, you know, to the 1930s Wilhelm Reich’s (description) of the authoritarian personality and so forth in which you talk about an individual as a fascist personality.
What’s not talked about, which is now kind of implicated, is not a fascist personality, but a fascist movement. It seems to me that the defining characteristic of a fascist movement is the marriage between an electoral party and a private militia. Is that what we have now? The Proud Boys, let’s say, what is their relationship now to the Republican party?
I think it’s quite ambiguous. You know, back in the 2020 campaign in a debate with then compos mentis Joe Biden, Trump referred to or stated, addressing the militias, “Stand back and stand by.” And on the Internet from people like the head of the Proud Boys, you got back: “Yes, sir,” immediately, as though they recognized Trump as their commander.
Trump was at that time the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed forces. But it turned out in some respect, he was the commandant of the American right-wing militias. That relationship has been confirmed by letting these people out of jail. And so the question of the relationship of a private militia, which is prepared to engage in violence for this electoral party which is in power, is a question of the gravest urgency. In as much as I suggest, it is the very definition or the very defining characteristic of a fascist party.
So we’re talking about the difference between what Milley and Kelly talked about a fascist personal party versus a fascist movement, which is yet a further disturbing at the very least factor.
SCOTT HARRIS: Dr. Rosenthal, is it not also possible because of these pardons and the green light many of these armed insurrection feel they have now from the president, that on the other end of the political spectrum, there are people and groups who may feel it necessary to begin arming themselves to defend against right-wing militia groups embraced by Donald Trump. Could this not spiral out of control?
LAWRENCE ROSENTHAL: I can tell you my immediate and most significant reaction is that’s what the right-wing militias want. The dress rehearsal for Jan. 6th was Charlottesville. That was August of 2017. You had a night-time parade with torches. You had someone killed and you had chanting, “You will not replace us.” “Jews will not replace us.” And “Blood and soil,” which is a straightforward old Nazi chant.
What was Charlottesville? It called itself the Unite the Right rally. And what it was an attempt to create a united, right-wing national militia. That’s what was intended to be united in the Unite the Right rally. The person most well-known in organizing that back then, we talked about, if you remember the Alt-Right, the person who is reputed to have given the name of Alt Right to that movement was somebody called Richard Spencer.
Richard Spencer at the time kind of waxed poetic about “It is time for fighting in the streets and to dominate the streets.” He explicitly talked how about the moment in America resembled Weimar Germany — that is, to say, the period before the rise of or the coming to power of the Nazi party and what he was talking about was fighting in the streets.
And that is an end (result) of the right-wing militias. It is the thing they would most like to see happen.
So whether it creates a left-wing response that may or may not happen, but if it does, it is in a historic manner playing into the hands of the likes of Stewart Rhodes, head of the Oath Keepers.
For more information, visit the Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California at issi.berkeley.edu/crws.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Lawrence Rosenthal (25:34) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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