Reporting on Right-Wing Movements

November 10, 2024

While writing The Highest Law in the Land, I thought a lot about how to cover right-wing movements, including those that some might call “extremist” as well as what constitutes the past and present GOP. One decision I made early on in writing the book was that “constitutional sheriffs” could not be categorized as “anti-government,” even though many of them view the federal government and its agencies as enemies. There was a simple reason why: they are the government. They are elected officials.

Now that we are facing a second Trump term, I think writers who cover the “far-right” need to come to grips with how these groups are traditionally covered and what is really going on. In essence, the “far-right” is just the GOP. There is no daylight between the two. And while some might argue this is a Trump-specific phenomenon, I would argue this has been going on for a very long time.

Two political forces created the results of the 2024 election. (I’m simplifying, yes.) One was the ascendancy of the Republican party as the party of change and rebellion. By embracing what the mainstream media continues to call “fringe” ideologies – including, for example, the desire to wipe out the administrative state – the right was able to assemble a wider coalition of supporters, everyone from cops, to tech bros, to white men and women, to Latinos, to Proud Boys, to groypers, to anti-vaxxers.

The other was the mainstream liberal rejection of left-wing movements. The DNC, for example, refused to allow a Palestinian speaker (a sitting state representative, no less, not exactly “fringe”). The mainstream left not only looked aside but celebrated the arrests of student protestors, arrests made by the cops who went out and voted for Trump.

I keep thinking back to how mainstream liberals rejected “defund the police” as a slogan, even though in the summer of 2020 there were protests across the county – even in very rural towns – led by mostly multi-ethnic young people. (Does this sound like the student protests against genocide? Yes, yes, it does.) They did this even though data from 2016 showed that Trump largely won because of broad support from law enforcement. It did not occur to the Democratic party that, perhaps, supporting law enforcement was just giving energy to a group of people who were all Trump voters.

Looking at the mainstream left’s rejection of “defund the police” is a useful analysis of how these two forces work together. Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd in May of 2020. Protests in favor of racial justice and against police violence erupted across the country, led by racially diverse coalitions. At the time, I lived in North Dallas, and there was a march in support of Black Lives Matter led by mostly white families. Rural towns held similar protests, once again, led by mostly young people, even in places where you might think residents were hostile.

Initially, mainstream lefty groups embraced “defund the police” to some extent. Nonprofits previously focused on police reforms began to consider non-police interventions, like mental health units of unarmed social workers. Minneapolis briefly considered disbanding its police department. A few states passed substantive reform laws.

Those protests across the country were very quickly met with right-wing counter-protests, largely under the supervision and permission of local law enforcement. Militias like the III% and Oath Keepers, groups like the Proud Boys, and general masses of angry armed white people showed up at these BLM protests, threatening protestors with their guns, flagpoles, and cars. They threw water bottles at them. Kyle Rittenhouse, then 17, was inspired to attend a BLM protest armed and killed three people in August of 2020. A cop gave him water.

By the time Rittenhouse committed murder, the tides were already turning. Democrats ran away from “defund the police,” considering it too radical. It was unpopular, Democrats said. It was something no one wanted, protests across the country notwithstanding. Police reforms were rolled back.  Law enforcement, always loathe to give up power, agreed. While some law enforcement officials made gestures towards the protestors as signs of solidarity – kneeling with them, marching with them, etc. – they were eager to point out the excesses. Every single law enforcement officer I spoke to over the past four years mentioned the violence of the BLM protests (mostly property damage) and would complain that “no one was arrested.” (This is just not true. Many thousands of BLM protestors were arrested across the country.)

All of a sudden, the Democrats – including nonprofits, academics, journalists, and pundits – stood arm-in-arm with police, arguing that “defund the police” was too radical. Police needed more funding they said. This general position, in my view, helped Joe Biden get elected in the fall of 2020. He was no radical. In fact, he went out of his way to give the police more money than they ever had before. Sure, his administration tried to pass some basic police reforms. It failed. Democrats gave up.

It did not occur to the Democrats that they had just fused the Republican party. Now, “constitutional sheriffs” and law enforcement unions, trolls like Charlie Kirk and J.D. Vance, and stalwarts of the GOP like Tim Scott, could all unite under the banner of hating Democrats, which would always be the party of “defund the police,” even though they ran away from that label as fast as they could. No matter. That hypocrisy by Democrats, the denial that perhaps law enforcement did need to be defunded and changed in critical ways, sealed their fate.

The same thing happened with the police response to anti-genocide student protestors on college campuses. The left condemned them. A major “anti-extremist group” (which also always supported law enforcement) called these young people “terrorists.” The police attacked them, and the Democrats sighed in relief. Again, it did not occur to them that while they thought they were dealing with “extremist” elements, they were again sealing their fate. They had tied their future to the GOP, the party of both the police and so-called “anti-government” groups.

 The signs were always there. It was very clear in 2016 that Trump won because he had the support of law enforcement. That support only got stronger. Instead of allowing the Uncommitted Movement a voice at the DNC, they had…two sheriffs.

This failure to see how law enforcement and so-called “anti-government extremists” work hand-in-hand – not just alongside each other to subdue and punish leftist protestors, but also to elect Donald Trump – is a major failing. The number of hand-wringing articles about how police abolition is unpopular and bad for Democrats reflects just how lost the party was/is. Even still, today, within the past few months before the election, I have heard repeatedly the two truths the Democrats hold dear – that the anti-genocide student protestors were themselves “extremists” and that “defund the police” was a stupid slogan.

We don’t need a very powerful Republican party to create a right-wing coalition when the Democrats are doing it for them. I know that a lot of pundits are talking about how the Democrats lost because they failed the “working class” or “identity politics” or whatever. This may be true, but it’s not really my area of expertise, and I am sure people will be fighting about this forever rather than rethinking how the Democrats effectively fused a right-wing, multi-ethnic coalition.

I will say that the vast majority of law enforcement – local, state, and federal – supported Trump, even though he defunded them. The point was never who gave law enforcement money. It was about who was going to support oppression. By running away from leftist ideas – rejecting efforts to rethink policing, promising to build a border wall, embracing fracking, condemning student protests, leaving the trans community on their own to suffer, and failing to embrace actual reproductive justice – the Democrats sealed their fate as the party of a consensus that simply does not exist. It’s a phantom they chase.

Telling people that far-right groups are aberrations, anti-government, fringe, crank, etc., is just giving the GOP more fuel. They are embracing their fringe. There is no daylight between the “constitutional sheriff” movement and the mainstream GOP, between the Proud Boys and the cops, between the Anti-Defamation League and Elise Stefanik. Journalists need to be clear-eyed and see this for what it is. You can’t pull apart the “good police” from the bad. You can’t say that some genocide is acceptable, that some trans health care is “too much.” Rather than condemn the left for “going too far,” they should focus on how these fused groups became so powerful, so persuasive, that they threaten all of our lives and the safety of our children.