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After a jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony charges yesterday, Bronze Age Pervert, the alter ego of edgelord influencer Costin Alamariu, retweeted one of his own posts from March. It is a film clip depicting a scene in which armed men storm buildings and shoot people. In the text accompanying the post, Bronze Age Pervert jokes that the clip is real footage of a “well-planned neutralization operation” that will take place after Trump wins his re-election campaign.
The MAGA faithful are once again threatening violence on the internet. Many Republicans, of course, reacted to Trump’s felony conviction with simple outrage, rather than with calls for a “neutralization operation.” But more extreme language has appeared across the right-wing post-ecosystem. Some Proud Boys chapters responded with the word “war” on their Telegram channels, as reported by Wiredand Reuters found examples of Trump supporters calling for violence against jurors and the judge in the case, as well as calls for civil war and insurrection. An anonymous right-wing X account went viral by posting “Third World Problems Require Third World Solutions” on top of a video of the 2020 military coup in Myanmar.
Incitement to violence and aggressive political retaliation is not new to the right, but has often been limited to the hardened edges. When it does leak out, it is usually at least somewhat darkened. But now “some of the more intense rhetoric is coming from the top,” Jared Holt, an extremism researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told me. Auron MacIntyre, a podcast host for the right-wing station Blaze Media, called on Republican prosecutors to manipulate the courts and “immediately put corrupt Democrats in jail,” with “no excuses, no equivocation.” Sean Davis, the CEO of the right-wing publication The Federaliststated that members of the right have a “moral obligation to terrorize the left with its own rules and tactics until it is destroyed.”
So what will happen next? Probably nothing at this point. There’s always the possibility that people will be inspired by online posts and engage in real-world violence, like when a pedophilia conspiracy theory led to a man with a gun coming to a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC in 2016, or when a white supremacist gunman killed ten people in Buffalo, New York in 2022. But mass mobilizations are difficult and require work. There is usually a pattern that precedes it. MAGA believers and the far right did not wake up on January 6, 2021 and decided to storm the Capitol. The foundation for this had not even been laid in the days or weeks beforehand. Instead, it was a process that unfolded over months. And that process could be traced in part in the increasingly violent rhetoric and violent memes that the MAGA world spread across the internet.
Even as rhetoric online helped fuel the energy around right-wing movements, the anti-lockdown protests in statehouses across the country helped actually establish the original framework of what was possible. They showed members of the far right that there were other people like them and that there were ways to express their feelings. This is also one of the reasons why, in addition to the Capitol, several statehouses were overrun on January 6, some of which had to be evacuated.
And separately, two MAGA protests with thousands in attendance were held in DC in the months leading up to January 6. They helped establish patterns and expanded the imagination of what was possible on the right. The idea of heading to DC to possibly storm the Capitol becomes less far-fetched when you’ve seen fellow MAGA patriots show up in the city before and you’ve seen and possibly done the same in statehouses across the country. so yourself.
The boring little logistics are being ironed out, too: right-wing protesters have set rough patterns for where they meet. The Hotel Harrington, in downtown DC, became a recurring hotspot for out-of-towners, and its first-floor bar, Harry’s, became a well-known meeting place for the Proud Boys and anyone else who wanted to get involved with them. Everything becomes easier when you are not the first to tread the path. January 6 “came after a build-up of social and civil unrest in the US,” Holt said. “People were already going out into the streets and getting things.”
Movements associated with the left have occasionally managed to ignite mass protests very quickly, but that is because they exhibit characteristics that right-wing targets generally do not have access to. (Movements on the left have also turned violent at times, but those who most closely study violent extremism repeatedly say that the greatest threat of political violence in the United States today comes from the right.) The George Floyd protests reached their peak within weeks ( some within days), because a majority of Americans, left or right, “oppose racism.” This means very different things to different people, but it is still far more popular than Donald Trump, who despite his devoted base has at times been voted one of the least popular presidents since the advent of modern polling.
At this point, the building blocks of political violence have not yet been established. In August, some Trump supporters showed up outside a federal courthouse in D.C. as the former president was indicted, but including anti-Trump protesters, the count came to only about 100 people. Some of his fans demonstrated during his trial in New York City, but the raucous protests Trump predicted never materialized.
Holt told me he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of violence in the future, but he thinks the rhetoric isn’t gaining momentum for grassroots violence; instead, it is “building consent structures so that the next Republican majority in the US can hit its critics incredibly hard.” Even if mass mobilization does not seem imminent, some rough foundations from 2020 remain. Polemical rhetoric is increasingly penetrating the mainstream and portends something dark. But it will probably take time to get there. Until then, there will likely be escalating moments – protests and other physical actions in real life, not just online – that need to be taken into account.
