Extremist Trump supporters get fascist label from experts

Doug Fraser Cape Cod Times

Published Jan 19, 2021 

FALMOUTH — Until they disbanded after Joe Biden was elected president, "Move to Remove" spent every Saturday morning for the past 3½ years on the village green, advocating for the removal from office of President Donald Trump. 

Occasionally, they shared the green with Trump supporters from United Cape Patriots. The two groups would stand about 50 yards apart, Paul Rifkin, co-founder of Move to Remove, said. Over the years, Rifkin said he developed a relationship of sorts with United Cape Patriots founder Adam Lange.

The conciliatory tone between the two groups changed this year when Lange arrived at rallies in a huge military transport vehicle with a replica .50-caliber machine gun on the roof of the cab and a replica assault weapon mounted on the dashboard in the cabin.

In a May 29 Facebook post showing the replica weapon in its dashboard mount, Lange said the machine gun would be installed “this summer as we ramp up for the big Trump reelection.”

“That (military truck) says to me that someone is trying, in a not very subtle way, to lay out a threat to whoever is looking at the vehicle,” Rifkin said. “There’s nothing saying it’s a replica. It says, ‘Don’t f--- with me, we mean business’”

Lange said last week both his Twitter and Facebook accounts have been shut down.

The rise of a group such as the United Cape Patriots is a microcosm of a national movement that found its most powerful advocate in President Trump, whom experts say created a post-truth world — a world where there is no agreed-upon truth.

“This is the statecraft of fascism,” Thomas Whalen, Boston University Assistant Professor of Social Studies, said. “So many Americans are in the thrall of this. They don’t realize they are fascists, and that is the greatest problem.”

It's what happened in Europe and led to World War II, said Whalen, who pointed out that both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler started out as elected officials promising reform.

Probably the most distressing thing Whalen hears is people saying, "This is not us. This is not who we are’ as a country."

“This is who we are,” he said. “Our Founding Fathers would be horrified.”

While groups such as Lange's say they went to Washington to peacefully exercise their protected rights of assembly and freedom of speech, the postings on their social media pages are replete with conservative conspiracy podcasts that spread false claims of election fraud, and ominous warnings and calls to action just prior to the assault on the Capitol. On Jan. 6, a featured podcast on Lange's website warned that "Trump and the Patriots, they are moving forward with their plan," and that it was about "taking back the country."

Experts in terrorism and political movements see something else in pro-Trump groups such as Lange’s with their military props and language, espousing patriotism and law and order while claiming to be truth-tellers.

“It has all the trappings of fascism,” Whalen said. “You claim to have a monopoly on the truth, that you’re either for us or against us, and that the democratic process is standing in our way, taking our freedoms away."

'We don't have faith in our institutions'

The attack on the Capitol, experts say, was only possible with the support of grass-roots activists and conservative politicians, both national and local, who couldn't or wouldn't recognize that Biden had won in a free and fair election. The lie that the election was stolen, advanced by Trump and repeated down to the level of groups like Lange's and even elected Cape Cod Republicans, is anti-democratic, these experts said, and needs to be refuted.

“We don’t have faith in our institutions any longer,” Lange said. “And we have little confidence in the election that was just administered." A lot of people feel that way.”

A lot of people do have doubts about the election. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, about half of all Republicans believe that Trump won and that the election was stolen from him by widespread voter fraud. (According to a Dec. 17, 2020, Gallup Poll, 25% of Americans identify as Republicans, 31% as Democrats and 41% as independent.) An online survey of 24,000 people in November by Northeastern, Harvard, Northwestern and Rutgers found that more than half of Republican voters either believe that Trump won, or aren’t sure who won.

“By any measure, this was a fair election,” Mohammad Ali Kadivar, an assistant professor of sociology and international studies at Boston College, said. “When you have a large group of people who don’t respect this tenet of democracy, democracy is in danger.”

Hundreds of thousands rallied in Washington on Jan. 6 under the banner of a stolen election, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including 59 failed lawsuits, numerous recounts of ballots in battleground states and the assertion by both Republican and Democratic election officials and governors and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr that there was no widespread fraud.

Lange, who was not in Washington on Jan. 6, said he did not support the storming of the Capitol and told Fox 25 News that he “thinks all political violence is unacceptable.”

But then, why the military vehicle, why the machine gun?

“In this day and age, it’s pro-law and order and pro-military,” Lange said. “We have an antique truck as part of the brand, and if you’re offended by an antique military truck, there’s probably other things you’ll have an issue with."

But the messages on caps, T-shirts and sweatshirts sold online and visible inside the Capitol building during the assault and at the demonstration were not pro-law and order, and were not peaceful. Photographs and videos from the rally and the attack showed people wearing "MAGA Civil War Jan. 6, 2021" T-shirts, Camp Auschwitz and Q-Anon hoodies, and flags and T-shirts of white supremacist and far-right groups. One rioter carried a Confederate flag into the Capitol, which had never happened before.

These are groups that are aligned with Trump and have been supported by him, said American University professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss, speaking on PBS News Hour last week. She said social media and the actions of Trump have helped mainstream and normalize extremist ideas, legitimizing far-right extremists.

Elected officials won't say 'Biden won'

“(W)hat we’re seeing now is the very people — not just the president, but other elected officials — who are supposed to be trusted sources of information, helping to create and propagate a disinformation landscape that says this election is invalid, that there’s been a massive voter fraud, and really compelling these people to act,” Miller-Idriss said.

In the hours following the attack, Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham finally said that President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had won the 2020 election, and both houses of Congress certified the Electoral College results early Jan. 7 after the count was interrupted when rioters invaded the Capitol the day before.

Yet, even after a failed insurrection that had members of Congress fearing for their lives, six senators and 121 representatives, all Republicans, filed objections on Jan. 6 to the validity of the election vote in their respective states.

Even at the local level, Republicans had a tough time saying that Biden had won. Republican state Rep. Steven Xiarhos and former state representative and newly elected State Republican Committeeman Will Crocker demurred when asked to say that President-elect Joe Biden won in a free and fair election. They would only say that the constitutional process was followed. Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe also dodged the question, but went further, saying he thinks there was significant voter fraud and that courts had refused to hear lawsuits because they didn’t want to get involved in politics.

“They took this COVID-19 issue and made it an excuse to have these mass mail-in ballots,” O’Keefe said.

“I would say this is stunning,” said state Sen. Julian Cyr, a Democrat. “Cape Cod and the Islands have a longstanding history of bipartisan politics that respects the rule of law and gets things done. It is deeply worrisome to me that any elected official in the region would perpetrate such false and seditious information.”

Cyr said Massachusetts Republicans are afraid of the radical minority element of their base, but need to think long and hard about continuing to perpetuate these lies.

“People have already been killed,” he said. “To actively embrace these seditionist lies is not who we are on Cape Cod.”

Republican political consultant Rob Gray said Republicans in Massachusetts know that Trump has a small band of hardcore followers in the state. 

“Since winning as a Republican in Massachusetts is very difficult anyway, alienating any voter is hard for them,” Gray said.

That fear factor did not intimidate the state's top Republican.

"Gov. Charlie Baker has no problem saying it was a free and fair election and that President-elect Biden won. I think other elected Republicans would do well to agree with his take,” said Gray, who served as an adviser to the presidential campaigns of former President George W. Bush and the late Sen. John McCain, as well as Baker's and former Gov. William Weld’s campaigns.

Since more than half of Massachusetts voters are registered as unenrolled and don't declare affinity for either party, Gray said it's difficult for extremist candidates or those who back those points of view to succeed here. 

We can't be 'thought police'

But national politics is a different animal, and Gray said Trump has led a lot of Republicans down a false path from which it will be hard to extricate themselves.

"The next four years depend on how Republicans react, not just to Trump ... but to this type of behavior," Kadivar said.

Max Abrahms, a Northeastern University professor of political science with a focus on terrorism, says there is a danger in a backlash that impinges on constitutionally protected rights. He draws the line between those who may harbor extremist political views and those who have become what he calls “tactically extreme” and favor violence to change the political status quo.

“I think this is a very important distinction for law enforcement to respect because we have First Amendment rights. They can’t be in the business of being the thought police,” he said. “The key is really to crush the participants in the violence in a legal way without harming those who were just political.”

Extremism is a double-edge sword. Violent acts can be a recruitment tool because people believe they are joining the baddest of the bad, Abrahms said. But violence can also repulse prospective recruits.  

“My research shows that extremism tends to backfire by reducing support,” Abrahms said, noting Trump lost popular and political support after the attack on the Capitol. 

Trump's approval rating declines

Trump is leaving office with a 29% job approval rating, the lowest of his presidency, according to a Pew Research Center poll published Jan. 15. He also was found to have increasingly negative ratings for his post-election behavior.

“Even his own loyal people in Congress have turned against him,” Abrahms said. “There is a reputational cost to the use of violence.”

But that doesn’t mean that right-wing extremism is going away. They will feel more aggrieved with a new president who isn’t sympathetic to them, and with their access to social media terminated or greatly reduced, Abrahms said.

“They will reconvene elsewhere and will radicalize others,” Abrahms said. “I think over the next four years we will see more right-wing extremism and incidents with a higher death toll than (on Jan. 6).”

Whalen says the problem with the Republican Party is that it embraced Trump and has become the authoritarian party. He says that as 2024 presidential candidates jostle for position, they will move to the extreme right to capture Trump voters.

“That means a major political party run by radicals. This would have nothing to do with democracy. They will want to end pluralism, and that’s the end of democracy,” he said.

Kadivar said the U.S. needs to fix problems in the American democratic process, such as the Electoral College and gerrymandering. It also needs to address divisive social issues such as institutionalized racism. The Republican Party, evangelical churches and community leaders have to take responsibility for what happened.

"I think this was a planned white supremacist attack (on the Capitol), incited and encouraged by Trump. He's been the leader of this mob," Kadivar said. "But there have been community leaders that supported this kind of thing. There's a lot of people jumping the sinking ship now, but they have enabled these past four years."