The American far right is angry: angry with Joe Biden, angry with Donald Trump, angry with the enigmatic “Q” and angry with itself.
Extremist online posts and chat rooms display deep disappointment since the failed Jan.6 assault on Congress and since Biden’s inauguration as president.
Followers of the QAnon conspiratorial movement are even more uneasy: His millennial predictions of chaos and doom that would accompany Biden’s rise to the presidency have not come true (or at any rate not yet).
Ultranationalists like the Proud Boys, armed militias like the Oath Keepers, and dangerous white supremacists and neo-Nazis have been driven underground, and the activists who participated in the attack on the Capitol were swept up by the police.
Experts on extremism and domestic terrorism say these groups have taken a hit with Trump’s removal from power.
But they also maintain that they have not disappeared and that they are somehow now more motivated to undertake more dangerous attacks.
The most extreme groups are looking for recruits.
“The rhetoric is still heated, people are not cooling down. They are not adjusting well to Biden,” said Michael Edison Hayden, a star reporter for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigates extremism.
Far from exhausting, said Colin P. Clarke, Director of Policy and Research at The Soufan Group, “The energy and momentum that the far right has is stronger than at any recent time. The question is, what will happen next? “
– United in anger –
Many hoped that Trump’s departure and the expulsion of extremists from Facebook, Twitter, Parler and other social media would calm things down.
But it has not been that way.
These far-right groups “are much more united in what they reject than in what they tout,” Clarke said.
Hayden thinks that the elimination of users who have crossed certain limits of the social networks more in vogue is “becoming a unifying factor” of those individuals.
Most have moved to other platforms, mainly Telegram, where the new pages for QAnon and Proud Boys have hundreds of thousands of followers.
“The infrastructure really still exists” for the far right to rally, Hayden said.
– Q y Trump –
QAnon emerged in late 2017 with cryptic statements from the enigmatic Q on the 8kun website.
No one knew who Q was, but his statements convinced Trump supporters of the existence of a Democratic plot against the president.
As time passed, they developed other conspiracy theories, including one about the worldwide kidnapping of children and strange predictions about the end of time.
And Trump’s tweets, campaigns, and rallies became a focal point for Q’s supporters.
After the Republican mogul’s electoral defeat, they boosted their “Stop the Steal” campaign centered on the false claim that Biden’s victory was fraudulent.
This led directly to the January 6 rebellion in Washington on behalf of Trump that left five dead.
But Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday and Trump’s quiet departure for Florida closed that door.
Many are even angry at Trump for failing to clearly stand up for the more than 120 people who were arrested and the hundreds who are being investigated for the attack on Capitol Hill.
But the far right is “accepting” Trump’s departure and regrouping without him, Hayden said.
– A new wound –
However, QAnon’s followers suffered a second shock.
On Wednesday, Ron Watkins, whose father controls 8kun and is believed by many to be or knows the real Q, announced that he was leaving the movement and deleted all of 8kun’s QAnon files.
“We gave it our all. Now we have to keep our heads up and get back to our lives the best we can,” he posted on Telegram.
“We have a new sworn president and it is our responsibility as citizens to respect the Constitution,” he added.
“It was a very hard blow,” said Karim Zidan, a researcher at Right Wing Watch.
But the movement has shown that it can live without Q, he observed.
QAnon’s “influencers,” who have tens of thousands of followers, and the public figures who drove Trump’s “Stop the Steal” campaign, such as attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, are fighting to let the movement continue.
Wood, for example, amassed 592,000 followers in just one week after switching to Telegram, Zidan said. Powell has about 300,000.
– Recruitment and radicalization –
The possibility that moderate supporters of QAnon and Proud Boys will be “radicalized” online by more violent right-wing extremists is worrying, Clarke noted.
They can build networks capable of generating destructive violence, Clarke said.
The analyst compared the current level of anger to that prevailing in the early 1990s, when right-wing extremists staged actions such as a bomb attack that killed 165 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.
“The possibility of violence like that remains high,” Hayden said.
pmh/ft/dg/dga
–
