WHEN FLYERS BEGAN APPEARING around Kitsap County—a mostly rural place in Washington’s southwestern Puget Sound, centered around the midsize city of Bremerton and its US Navy shipyard—in the fall of 2017, officials quietly took them down. But then someone plastered them along a busy boulevard in Gig Harbor (located in neighboring Pierce County), forcing local police to peel them off lampposts, and attracting local news reporters.[1]
In large black letters, they read, variously: “Resurrection Through Insurrection,” featuring a large fascist symbol, and “Conquered Not Stolen,” accompanied by a map of the United States. They all directed readers to the Patriot Front website at bloodandsoil.org.
Residents were shocked and baffled at the prospect of neo-Nazis in their midst. “I didn’t even know there were any in Gig Harbor, or anywhere else in this area,” one woman told a KIRO-TV reporter.[2]
The flyers, and other auguries of white-supremacist organizing activity, were not just relegated to one small rural county in western Washington, however. All around the United States—in Texas, Maryland, Florida, California, South Carolina, Kansas, and Delaware—identical flyers were appearing, plastered onto light poles and windows, all of them touting the same Patriot Front and its website.
What people were seeing, in fact, was not just a tiny local faction of neo-Nazis, but the first manifestations of a new nationwide network. Although still relatively small, they were eager to band together as a white-nationalist army working to create “the new American nation state.” As their website promised: “Democracy has failed in this once great nation, now the time for a new Caesar to revive the American spirit has dawned.”
In those nascent phases, the bulk of that activism had revolved around guerrilla-plastering various public locales at nighttime, as well as setting up freeway banners on overpasses that advertised their website to drivers.
In Gig Harbor, police chief Kelly Busey wound up with a pile of about thirty crumpled flyers on his desk, which he told a Tacoma reporter he threw away. City officials said the flyers were taken down not because of their content, but because posters of any kind weren’t permitted at those locations.
There had been other indications of neo-Nazi organizing in Kitsap County, as well as elsewhere in the Puget Sound region generally, notably the freeway overpass banners. One of those, reading “America is White,” was reported to Busey, but had been taken down before an officer could arrive to remove it.
“I went on their website and read their manifesto,” Busey said. “It’s a bunch of blah, and towards the end it talks about minorities. This does not come to a free-speech issue for us. We did look to see if this was a hate crime, but the answer to that was no.”
Wherever the flyers have appeared, authorities have wondered: Where are these neo-Nazis coming from? And just who and what is Patriot Front anyway?
The answers lay in Charlottesville.
THE ALT-RIGHT—THE MOSTLY ONLINE white-nationalist movement that arose amid the wide-open internet and social media environment of the early 2010s, festering and growing in chat rooms, on message boards, and on overtly racist websites—was feeling its oats in early 2017. It had played a key role in Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency, and there was a broad sense of empowerment within the movement.[3] It had its moment in the spotlight in 2016, when the alt-right claimed credit for Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election; alt-right godfather Richard Spencer infamously flashed a Nazi salute at a press conference, saying, “Hail Trump!”[4]
The core of the alt-right’s recruitment process was essentially a process of online radicalization. Alt-righters called it “red-pilling,” as though they were the Neos of The Matrix who had awakened to the reality of a world run by nefarious conspiracies. It’s a conceit with a toxic double bind: once you believe you see this new reality, then reality itself becomes unmoored.
These theories tell the same larger narrative: that the world is secretly run by a cabal of globalists (who just happen to be Jewish), and that they employ an endless catalog of dirty tricks and “false flags” to ensure the world doesn’t know about its manipulations, the whole purpose of which ultimately is the enslavement of mankind. Each day’s news events can thus be interpreted through the up-is-down prism this worldview imposes, ensuring that every national tragedy or mass shooting is soon enmeshed in a web of theories about its real purpose.
The alt-right itself had little compunction about identifying its target demographic for red-pilling. Andrew Anglin, publisher and founder of the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer, asserted in 2017, “My site is mainly designed to target children.”[5] At the annual white-nationalist American Renaissance conference in Tennessee in April 2018, longtime supremacists bragged about their demographic support: “American Renaissance attendees are now younger and more evenly divided among the sexes than in the past,” one speaker noted, before gushing over the white-nationalist college campus group Identity Evropa.[6]
When authorities, both in the United States and abroad, have talked about online radicalization in the recent past, they tended to think of it in terms of radical Islamists from groups such as the Islamic State who have been known to leverage the technology to their advantage, particularly social media. A study by terrorism expert J. M. Berger published in 2016 found that white nationalists were far outstripping their Islamist counterparts, however: “On Twitter, ISIS’s preferred social platform, American white nationalist movements have seen their followers grow by more than 600 percent since 2012. Today, they outperform ISIS in nearly every social metric, from follower counts to tweets per day.”[7]
“Online radicalization seems to be speeding up, with young men, particularly white men, diving into extremist ideologies quicker and quicker,” Berger said, adding that “the result seems to be more violence, as these examples indicate. It is a serious problem and we don’t seem to have any real solutions for it. These cases also show that an era of violence brought on by the internet is indeed upon us, with no end in sight.”
The radicalization process itself often begins with seemingly benign activity, such as spending hours in chat rooms or playing computer games, and these activities provide a kind of cover for the process as it accelerates. Eventually, recruits grow tired of playing rhetorical games online and start organizing ways to bring their ideas to life in the real world—preferably on the streets.
This was where alt-right-adjacent street-brawling groups like the Proud Boys came in. The violence around Proud Boys protests created the impetus for various kinds of street-fighting groups, including a number of explicitly white-nationalist groups such as Identity Evropa and the Rise Above Movement (RAM), both of which had played major roles in the violence around the first Proud Boys event in Berkeley in April 2017.[8]
RAM members were among the first people to cross the police barrier separating the attendees and protestors that day, and were seen viciously assaulting protestors. Afterward, they boasted on Twitter about how they instigated the violence at the event throughout the day, saying, “We were the first guys to jump over the barrier and engage [which] had a huge impact.”[9]
Several were caught on camera engaging in some of the more extreme violence. One RAM leader named Michael Miselis had broken his hand by punching someone in the back of the head, and later casually stood by and watched other RAM members beat protesters, texting his cohorts that he “was about to jump into that but our guys were just wrecking them” and that there was “not even any room to get a hit in.” Another RAM leader, Ben Daley, was seen pursuing other protestors down the street, one of whom he ran up to and kicked from behind.[10]
RAM’s primary line of recruitment was a combination of the promise of street violence—their meetings were often just white-nationalist variations on “fight clubs” in which members battered each other in preparation—and explicit neo-Nazi-style racism, replete with anti-Semitic conspiracism and fantasies of engaging in race war. They were also explicitly accelerationist: cynically hoping to push humankind over the brink because they saw people as a foul infection on the planet.
“Contrary to many white supremacist groups, RAM’s image and its membership were calculated to make their more incendiary racist and anti-Semitic views appeal to the mainstream right-wing and alt-right sympathizers with the goal of later indoctrinating new recruits,” a later Justice Department memorandum explained. “RAM members also sought to infiltrate traditional and mainstream conservative groups, conceal their extremist views, and indoctrinate (or 'red-pill') them. For example, when an individual contacted Daley on whether any RAM groups were in his area, Daley told him that 'We are not branching out but we do heav[il]y encourage our style of networking and activism…if the[y] have trump or maga events out where you are definitely go. Good place to meet people. Also can have guys get in with the college republicans.'”[11]
After Berkeley, a number of alt-right figures, particularly Spencer and several of his white-nationalist cohorts, decided to create an event that would draw white nationalists and their allies from around the country into a singular place. They settled on Charlottesville, Virginia.
A monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee in the town’s center had become the focus of a campaign to remove it and a countercampaign to keep it in place. After the city council voted in favor of removal, one of the local organizers of the latter—a Charlottesville white nationalist named Jason Kessler, who had been leading anti-removal protests since 2016, calling it an effort to “attack white history”—decided to create an event called Unite the Right on August 11–12 to protest the change.
It quickly attracted the attention and support of white nationalists around the nation, including Spencer, Anglin, and the growing cadre of alt-right online-media figures, all of whom joined in sponsoring the event. Longtime neo-Nazi David Duke announced that he planned to attend. They were joined by neo-Confederate groups like the League of the South and Identity Dixie, as well as various chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Neo-Nazi groups like the Traditionalist Worker Party and National Socialist Movement also signed on, as did alt-right white nationalists like Identity Evropa, Vanguard America, and the Rise Above Movement. Only the Proud Boys—an organization Kessler belonged to—declined to participate, though it did not bar members from attending (as a number did).[12]
Like all of these groups, RAM members prepared to travel to Charlottesville knowing full well they intended to participate in acts of violence, so they worked hard to cover their paper trail—buying tickets through friends, disguising purchases of helmets and tiki torches. The latter were Richard Spencer’s idea; he wanted all the participants to arrive prepared for a march on Friday night, August 11, with the torches and uniforms composed of white shirts and khakis.
As Spencer told participants both before and after the march, his idea was to create an event that would supersede the issue of Confederate monuments and instead announce the presence of the white-nationalist movement as a significant player in American politics. The march, he told them, would proceed to the University of Virginia (UVA) campus—rather than the Lee monument—with the statue of Thomas Jefferson there the destination.
So at about 8:45 p.m., some 250 men dressed in the prescribed uniform and carrying lit tiki torches began to gather at an area behind UVA’s Memorial Gymnasium called Nameless Field. They marched in a two-by-two formation, heading to the university’s rotunda, where the Jefferson statue stands. As they marched, they chanted “Blood and Soil!”—a translation of the Nazi slogan “Blud und Boden,” extolling one’s ties to their ethnic origins and homeland—and “You Will Not Replace Us!”—a reference to the white-nationalist conspiracy that white people are being deliberately replaced by immigrants imported by a nefarious Jewish cabal. It quickly morphed into “Jews Will Not Replace Us!”
At the base of the Jefferson statue, the marchers encountered about thirty students from the university who were attempting to defend the site with arms locked in a circle. The mob of marchers encircled them and began shouting, “White lives matter!” and making monkey sounds, before they began assaulting the students. Police intervened eventually, and there were injuries reported on both sides.
The men were exultant. On his GoPro, Michael Miselis could be heard yelling, “Total victory!” and “We beat you tonight, we’ll beat you tomorrow too!’ ”[13]
The next morning, both sides of the protest began gathering early in the area around the park at the Lee monument, well before the rally’s scheduled noon starting time. The protesters grew restless, and at 10:30 a.m., a group of alt-right protesters with shields began advancing on a line of anti-fascists who were trying to prevent them from entering the park. They swung sticks at one another and sprayed mace; soon, bottles and rocks were thrown. The violence lasted for nearly an hour before police broke it up.
Members of RAM knocked protesters to the ground, kicking them so hard that Miselis broke his own toe. Daley infamously attacked a feminist and began strangling her, and then threw her to the pavement with such force that she suffered a concussion.
Afterward, online conversations made clear that their chief regret about their time in Charlottesville, as the DOJ put it, “was not having exacted enough violence.”
The two sides retreated, with counterprotesters spreading out to the city streets, but followed by alt-right protesters, so brawls continued to break out. The main force of alt-righters retreated to a park a mile north of downtown. But others remained behind.
One of them was a twenty-year-old member of Vanguard America from Maumee, Ohio, named James Alex Fields, who had driven to Charlottesville in his beefed-up Dodge Challenger. At 1:42 p.m., Fields revved up his engine and tore off at high speed down Fourth Street, ramming his vehicle into a large crowd of counterprotesters, then putting his damaged car in reverse and heading back in the other direction.
He maimed twenty people, including a thirty-two-year-old Charlottesville woman named Heather Heyer, who was killed instantly. The other victims eventually recovered, but several suffered permanent injuries. Fields was arrested shortly afterward and charged with murder, malicious wounding, and, eventually, federal hate crimes law violations.[14]
The next day, Spencer was recorded ranting angrily to his cohorts:
We are coming back here like a hundred fucking times. I am so mad. I am so fucking mad at these people. They don’t do this to fucking me. We are going to fucking ritualistically humiliate them. I am coming back here every fucking weekend if I have to. Like this is never over. I win! They fucking lose! That’s how the world fucking works.
Little fucking kikes. They get ruled by people like me. Little fucking octoroons…I fucking…my ancestors fucking enslaved those little pieces of fucking shit.[15]
It didn’t work out that way. Instead, the violence turned Charlottesville into the alt-right’s Waterloo.
Spencer’s think tank—the National Policy Institute (NPI), based in Virginia and Montana—was named a codefendant in the civil lawsuit against Unite the Right organizers filed in 2019 by the victims of the violence, largely for its key role in co-organizing the event. The man who filed the lawsuit, Bill Burke of Athens, Ohio, was among the twenty people injured by Fields’s rampage. Burke suffered a crushed left arm and head and knee injuries, and is expected to require treatment for years, perhaps permanently.[16]
However, neither NPI nor Spencer ever responded to Burke’s legal filings. Because no attorney ever entered a court appearance, filed any response to the lawsuit, or otherwise tried to defend the group, the court found NPI in default. Federal judge Michael Watson closed the lawsuit by handing down a $2.4 million judgment against NPI—including $217,613 for past and future medical expenses, $350,000 in punitive damages, $500,000 for pain and suffering, and $1 million for emotional distress.
Spencer’s NPI gradually vanished from public view. In 2017, the Internal Revenue Service revoked its nonprofit status. Most of Spencer’s former allies abandoned him. Since 2019, its website has been entirely silent, and the group ceased any kind of activism or organizing. Spencer, however, was not yet done facing culpability for Charlottesville.
Neither were the leaders of the RAM group that flew out to Charlottesville from California, who faced even more severe consequences—though it took a while. Over a year later, on October 2, 2018, the Justice Department charged four of them—Daley, twenty-six, of Hermosa Beach; Miselis, thirty, of Lawndale; Tom Gillen, twenty-five, of Torrance; and Cole Evan White, twenty-four, of Clayton—with multiple federal counts of conspiracy to riot and crossing state lines to riot. Four others—Robert Rundo, twenty-eight, of Huntington Beach; Robert Boman, twenty-five, of Torrance; Tyler Laube, twenty-two, of Redondo Beach; and Aaron Eason, thirty-eight, of Anza—were charged three weeks later with traveling around California to participate in violence at street rallies.[17]
White cut a cooperative plea deal with prosecutors, providing key evidence in the case, and wound up serving seven months in prison. The rest of the group charged with traveling to Charlottesville—Daley, Gillen, and Miselis—pleaded guilty the following May and were given prison sentences of thirty-seven months, thirty-three months, and twenty-seven months, respectively.
Robert Rundo fled to Central America but was promptly arrested and extradited.[18] However, US district judge Cormac J. Carney dismissed the charges against Rundo, Boman, Laube, and Eason in June 2019, ruling that using the federal Anti-Riot Act was “unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment.”[19] That ruling, however, was subsequently overturned by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2021, which found the challenged provisions of the Anti-Riot Act were, in fact, constitutional, and the charges were reinstated.[20]
The Ninth Circuit panel wrote that “the freedoms to speak and assemble which are enshrined in the First Amendment are of the utmost importance in maintaining a truly free society. Nevertheless, it would be cavalier to assert that the government and its citizens cannot act, but must sit quietly and wait until they are actually physically injured or have had their property destroyed by those who are trying to perpetrate, or cause the perpetration of, those violent outrages against them.”[21]
Boman, Laube, and Eason currently are in limbo, having filed an appeal of the appeals court ruling to the US Supreme Court. Rundo again fled the country, reportedly hiding out in Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.[22]
The main effect Charlottesville had on the alt-right was a crushing one: Groups splintered and organizers sought cover from the legal and social consequences. A number of newer recruits peeled away, and most of the less radical groups—particularly any Patriot militiamen in the crowd—disavowed the whole affair. However, many of the radicalized white nationalists doubled down, more convinced of their righteousness than ever.
But no one wanted to be associated with the alt-right any longer. So the term—and, in most regards, the movement itself—was quickly discarded. No one identified as an alt-right group after Charlottesville.
That hardly meant the white nationalists and neofascist extremists went away; rather the opposite. Like a blob of mercury crushed under a thumb, they simply spread out into newer, smaller blobs—some of them more toxic and pernicious than ever.
AMONG THE PEOPLE MARCHING alongside James Fields that day with Vanguard America was the aforementioned Thomas Rousseau, just eighteen at the time. He managed to avoid any legal consequences for his participation in the day’s violence, and upon returning home to Texas, set about to create a new organization that would avoid its predecessors’ mistakes. He called it Patriot Front.[23]
Rousseau’s idea originated in neo-Nazi organizing that began in 2015 at the messageboard IronMarch.org, itself an outgrowth of the community of dedicated fascists who commented at online forums such as 4chan and Stormfront, and allegedly founded by Russian nationalist Alexander Slavros. IronMarch in turn spun off the neo-Nazi activist group Atomwaffen (German for “Atomic Bomb”) Division, whose members engaged in various far-right terrorist actions. Atomwaffen activists also favored plastering flyers advertising their organization.[24]
While Atomwaffen was explicit in its embrace of German-style Nazism, other fascists at IronMarch began discussing ways to broaden their reach in order to compete with alt-right and “white identitarian” groups such as Identity Evropa for young recruits. Out of these discussions they created a new group in 2015, first named Reaction America, then renamed in 2016 as American Vanguard (AV).
When one of that group’s leaders was exposed for offering up information to an anti-fascist group and IronMarch users and administrators began doxing AV members, the group broke away from IronMarch. In early 2017, the organization once again rebranded as Vanguard America (VA). After an Atomwaffen member in Florida shot and killed two other members in May 2017, telling authorities the group was planning to blow up a nuclear plant, a number of Atomwaffen participants joined ranks with Vanguard America.
The leader of Vanguard America, a Marine Corps veteran from New Mexico named Dillon Irizarry (but better known by his nom de plume Dillon Hopper), began organizing rallies at which members openly carried firearms. At its website, VA claimed that America was built on the foundation of white Europeans, and demanded the nation recapture the glory of the Aryan nation, free of the influence of the international Jews.
VA had a significant presence in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally, particularly in the person of James Alex Fields. The organization later issued a statement claiming that Fields was not actually a member of VA. Yet photographed only two marchers away from Fields was Rousseau, who had been responsible for vetting the VA’s roster that day. Rousseau noted in chats that VA’s statement “never said that [Fields] did anything wrong.” Soon after Charlottesville, he and other participants were recommending yet another name change.
On August 30, Rousseau split with Irizarry/Hopper, and announced that his new group would be known as Patriots Front (the “s” was dropped in short order). “The new name was carefully chosen, as it serves several purposes. It can help inspire sympathy among those more inclined to fence-sitting, and can easily be used to justify our worldview.”
The mention of “fence-sitting” referred to the ongoing discussion within the online neo-Nazi community about recruiting young men sympathetic to their underlying cause but not yet fully radicalized. There have been similar discussions about drawing in “Patriots” from the far-right militia movement, which has traditionally (though not rigorously) drawn a line at participating in outright white-supremacist activity.
Rousseau’s plan was to translate online discussion into real-world, concrete activism: “You will be expected to work, and work hard to meet the bar rising,” he wrote. “Inactivity will get you expelled, unwillingness to work and contribute in any capacity will as well.”[25]
The “work” has primarily comprised making their presence felt at rallies and protests, spreading the word with freeway banners, and plastering flyers in public locations, where they are often summarily removed. The group first made its presence felt in Houston in September 2017, about a month after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, when about a dozen members appeared outside a book fair and demanded a fight with anti-fascist organizers who reportedly were inside giving a talk. (Rousseau later led a similar protest outside an Austin bookstore.)
Other members began taking their activism public. In Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood in September 2017, a group of masked neo-Nazis briefly unfurled a swastika-laden banner advertising IronMarch.org; two months later, in suburban Bellevue, a similar group put up a banner advertising bloodandsoil.org on an Interstate 90 overpass, where it was shortly removed by Department of Transportation workers. In October, someone erected a Patriot Front “Resurrection Through Insurrection” banner on a freeway near Los Angeles. And in November, Patriot Front activists put up a banner in San Antonio, Texas, on the Texas–San Antonio campus.
Places like Gig Harbor and San Antonio were deluged with stark black-and-white posters—featuring a variety of slogans, including “We Have a Right to Exist,” “Fascism: The Next Step for America,” and “Will Your Speech Be Hate Speech?” as well as screeds urging “Patriots” to “reconquer your birthright,” while others urged “all white Americans” to “report any and all illegal aliens”—that were glued to lampposts, telephone poles, windows, doors, bulletin boards, and anywhere else they could be seen by the public. They especially targeted college campuses.
Patriot Front was notable for its utterly undisguised and unrepentant fascism. It also lacked the often transgressive, juvenile humor, and use of pop culture and irony that were core to much of the appeal of the alt-right online. Instead, its dead-serious advocacy of white-supremacist ideology was intended to appeal to a more militant mindset. As the manifesto on its website explains:
The American identity was something uniquely forged in the struggle that our ancestors waged to survive in this new continent. America is truly unique in this pan-European identity which forms the roots of our nationhood. To be an American is to realize this identity and take up the national struggle upon one’s shoulders.
In its nascent stages, Patriot Front was mainly composed of small clusters of dedicated neo-Nazis intent on spreading their fascist gospel, especially to “fence-sitting” alt-righters potentially attracted to violent street action. What was noteworthy, even alarming, was the speed with which it spread to nearly every corner of the country, and the success of its open appeals to young white males—as well as the confidence with which they not only spread hateful ideologies but indulged in their real-world violence and criminality.
ANOTHER FACE IN THE alt-right crowd that August day in 2017 in Charlottesville was one that would become well-known by January 6, 2021: a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old from the Chicago suburbs named Nicholas Fuentes, who had promoted Unite the Right on Facebook the morning of August 12 by writing that “a tidal wave of white identity is coming.” He did not participate in the violence that day, but blamed James Fields’s lethal car attack on the leftist counterprotesters: “I don’t think it’s a surprise that you’re going to get a lunatic doing something like that,” he said.[26]
Fuentes had made a minor reputation with his YouTube live stream channel called “America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes” during his freshman year at Boston University in 2016–17, but left the school because of what he called harassment directed at him for his views. These views included his open expressions of contempt for immigrants and non-whites, and his conspiracist eliminationism: “Who runs the media? Globalists. Time to kill the globalists,” he said in April 2017, adding: “I want the people that run CNN to be arrested and deported because this is deliberate.”[27]
“We can talk about black pride, Latino pride, and gay pride all day long, but talk about white pride, or pride in European heritage, and you’re suddenly an apologist for Adolf Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan,” he wrote on Facebook in August, shortly after the Charlottesville riots. “Enough is enough! I’m sick of being asked to condemn or apologize for racism every 15 minutes for being born white.”[28]
The volume of criticism for his participation drove him to consider attending Auburn University in Alabama (“I think I will be happy there and I will be safe. It’s solidly red territory”) but he never followed through. However, his increasingly violent rhetoric finally convinced the network hosting his program, Auburn-based Right Side Broadcasting Network, to dump him: “Nick was just taking things a little too far into right field for us,” its chagrined CEO told reporters.[29]
So he shifted gears and gave up on higher education altogether. He set up shop with another noted white nationalist named James Allsup, a Pacific Northwest agitator who had been present at the April 2017 Berkeley protest and Charlottesville as well. They ran a podcast titled Nationalist Review, which billed itself as a “weekly podcast about American nationalism, traditionalism, and alternative right-wing politics.” However, that quickly fell apart due to egos and mutual accusations of laziness, ineptitude, and malfeasance, and they each turned to cultivating audiences at their personal YouTube channels.[30]
Fuentes returned to using “America First” as his primary brand name, creating live stream podcast talk shows almost daily. Though it took its name from Trump’s campaign slogans and speeches, it began to veer sharply from Trump, even denouncing the White House for being too congenial to Israel, a nation that the profoundly anti-Semitic Fuentes openly loathes. And it largely worked, especially as he began cultivating his knack for saying outrageously hateful things.
The audience Fuentes attracted was the same alt-right crowd, brimming with social-media-ese and its ironic racism-as-humor detachment (their responses always seem to include at least one “LOL”) and references to memes and 4chan trends like Pepe the Frog. Fuentes’s followers adopted a variation on Pepe—with a broader mouth and eyes, longer fingers, and more sardonic smirk—named Groyper as their symbol and mascot, and began calling themselves the “Groyper army.”[31]
Fuentes rejected the white-nationalist label as an annoying encumbrance, even as he embraced every aspect of white-nationalist ideology. He insisted that he was only an “American nationalist”—even though he and his group parroted hoary white-supremacist ideas like “white genocide,” not to mention his unrepentant anti-Semitism and fanatical authoritarianism, eventually advocating for a dictatorship: “We need to take control of the media, take control of the government, and force the people to believe what we believe.”[32]
As Ben Lorber explained at Political Research Associates: “Fuentes seeks to secure a place for white nationalist concerns within the shifting consensus that defines movement conservatism. His momentum both accelerates and reflects the mainstreaming of white nationalism in U.S. politics, and highlights the challenges posed to existing ‘counter-extremism’ strategies in the face of an increasingly normalized far right.”[33]
Fuentes described this strategy on one of his podcasts:
My job, and the job of the Groypers and America First, is to keep pushing further…We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, bigoted, whatever…and when the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular…but that’s OK. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party, and if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time, constantly falling backwards, receding into the center and the left.
Fuentes strategically decided that this entailed a frontal assault on mainstream conservatives and timid Republicans, particularly those he decided were competing for the demographic group he wanted to recruit—namely, angry young white males, and young authoritarians like himself more generally. This put Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA organization directly in his line of fire.
Kirk, another product of the Chicago suburbs, had been building TPUSA in a more traditional fashion—slowly obtaining financial support from mainstream conservatives and cultivating ties to the Republican Party while focusing its recruitment and messaging for college-age conservatives. Founded in 2012, by 2016 it had raised $8.2 million and was surreptitiously financing the campaigns of student conservatives in campus elections.
The Groypers, however, had little patience for his mainstream-friendly approach; they soon began turning up at TPUSA events featuring Kirk and his accompanying speakers, who they deemed insufficiently “red-pilled.” Groyper audience members would roil these events by asking Kirk and other speakers openly anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic questions.
In 2019, Kirk embarked on a national speaking tour to tell college students about how nasty leftists were to conservatives these days, but found himself unprepared to deal with how much nastier far-right extremists can be as well. Kirk and his speakers ran into a blizzard of white nationalist, paleo-conservative, and homophobic trolls at a late October event on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus. During a question-and-answer session featuring Kirk and Black gay conservative Rob Smith, trolls pelted them with relentless questions about immigration, gay rights, and white nationalism that clearly demonstrated that Kirk’s attempts to separate his would-be youth movement from the alt-right were not working.[34]
One questioner asked: “How does anal sex help us win the culture war?” Another asked: “Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?”
One young man, wearing a red MAGA ball cap and a pro-Israel button, mocked Kirk in classic alt-right fashion by ironically speaking as though he were an ardent supporter of TPUSA’s philo-Semitic positions, and then concluded by urging everyone to google a notoriously anti-Semitic white-nationalist meme about “dancing Israelis.”
Kirk attempted to push back (“I find that to be a racist question,” he responded at one point) but shouts of derision and boos could be heard throughout the affair. Afterward, Kirk and TPUSA denounced his alt-right interlocutors, and Kirk went on the syndicated radio show of former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka the next day to “reject the vile anti-Semites.”
Kirk, of course, had no one to blame but himself for the company he has kept. TPUSA, in fact, first attracted an audience by making explicit appeals to the alt-right.
An organization that claimed to have chapters at more than one thousand colleges, TPUSA’s ties to the alt-right date back to its earliest days organizing on campuses in 2014–16, thanks largely to Kirk’s fondness for inflammatory far-right rhetoric friendly to white-nationalist sentiments, such as his insistence that white privilege is a myth: “They’re trying to discredit good ideas and good arguments, just because you’re white, and that’s ridiculous,” he liked to say.[35]
Bloomsburg University professor Wendy Lynne Lee collected a “bibliography” that documented, as the Southern Poverty Law Center described it, “connections between TPUSA, its funders, advisors and guest speakers and online expressions of anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim sentiment, racism, misogyny and anti-LGBT bias, as well as connections to prominent alt-right personalities.” The publication of the piece resulted in Lee being viciously attacked by the alt-right on social media and elsewhere.
A New Yorker exposé similarly revealed that the organization was indulging in shady “dark money” operations on some campuses, and was looking the other way when it came to ugly expressions of racism within its ranks.[36]
After at least one campus chapter disbanded and several of TPUSA’s most prominent figures—including gun activist Kaitlin Bennett and Black conservative Candace Owens—left the group, Kirk began working to distance the group from the alt-right. A chapter president from Las Vegas was prominently booted from TPUSA in 2019 after a viral video of him surfaced in which he screamed “White power!” at the camera.
Realizing the association had become a toxic one, Kirk and TPUSA began threatening activists and others who described the organization as “alt-right” with libel. He also promoted the work of Smith, whose presence angered many conservatives, even despite his rabidly far-right, pro-Trump pronouncements attacking liberals.
An internecine war broke out on the far right between the alt-right and the alt-lite. While more mainstream figures like ex–Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka supported Kirk, the unapologetically white-nationalist alt-right—including many TPUSA members who were radicalized into believing anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories through the organization’s community—began organizing to attack Kirk and other conservatives who were deemed too friendly to Jews, gays, and immigrants.
Donald Trump Jr. found himself confronted by Groypers during a TPUSA event in Los Angeles on the UCLA campus. They were trying to promote Trump Jr.’s ghost-written book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. They were silenced that day, it turned out, by right-wing extremists who heckled Trump Jr. off the stage after organizers—spotting a number of Groypers in the crowd—announced that there would be no question-and-answer session.[37]
The crowd grew so hostile that Trump Jr.’s fiancé, Kimberly Guilfoyle, chastised them: “Let me tell you something, I bet you engage and go on online dating because you’re impressing no one here to get a date in person.” That inflamed them even further, and Trump and Guilfoyle soon retreated backstage.
“Our problem is not with @DonaldJTrumpJr who is a patriot—We are supporters of his father!” Fuentes tweeted the next day. “Our problem is with Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA organization that SHUTS DOWN and SMEARS socially conservative Christians and supporters of President Trump’s agenda. We are AMERICA FIRST!”[38]
A similar TPUSA event in Tempe, Arizona, featuring Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas, also attracted the army of Groypers, and it similarly turned into a shouting match and was cut short.
Crenshaw asked the trolls: “What do you guys call yourselves? There’s a name for your group, right?”
His interlocutors responded with a series of sarcastic names. Eventually they started chanting: “America First! America First!”[39]
That was the recipe: after the Ohio State outburst, Andrew Anglin, editor/publisher of the explicitly neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, had explained to his readers how deniability was built into all these public expressions of support for white-nationalist beliefs: “If you say any of the things said in OSU on Tuesday night, you can just say ‘no of course I’m not an ALT-RIGHT NEO-NAZI RACIST WHITE SUPREMACIST, I’m just an America First nationalist and MAGA supporter.‘ ”[40]
Some well-known right-wing figures were also caught in the crossfire, but quickly sided with the Groypers. Michelle Malkin, a Filipina American pundit whose involvement in white nationalism dates back to her appearances in 2002 in the white-nationalist webzine VDARE, was fired by the mainstream-conservative Young America’s Foundation (YAF) (where she had been one of the organization’s mainstays in its campus lecture program) due to her ongoing support for Fuentes, which included speeches at some of his events.[41]
“There is no room in mainstream conservatism or at YAF for holocaust deniers, white nationalists, street brawlers, or racists,” the YAF tweeted as its official statement.
Malkin fired back that the “Keepers of the Gate” had spoken, adding: “My defense of unjustly prosecuted Proud Boys, patriotic young nationalists/groypers & demographic truth-tellers must not be tolerated. SPLC is cheering.”
As the battle lines in the “Groyper War” were drawn, Malkin consistently supported Fuentes and the Groypers. Malkin praised both Fuentes and his fans as “New Right leaders,” and called on establishment conservatives to engage with them. She labeled their critics “cringe.” Malkin’s stand earned her the deep affection of Fuentes’s followers, who dubbed her the “Groyper Mommy.”[42]
Fuentes continued to attract a large audience that, in truth, exhibited more fervency and energy than anything Charlie Kirk could concoct. Fuentes achieved near-viral status on Twitter with videos in which he defended racial segregation; called for the hanging of CNN reporters; and denied the Holocaust.
“Enough with the Jim Crow stuff,” he told his audience in one video. “Who cares? ‘Oh, I had to drink out of a different water fountain.‘ Big fucking deal…Oh no, they had to go to a different school…And even if it was bad, who cares?…It was better for them, it’s better for us.”[43]
Eventually, in January 2020, YouTube demonetized his videos—one of his primary sources of income—and then terminated his account a month later for violating its policies on hate speech. He promptly switched to an alternative hosting service, and continued to attract large numbers of followers and subscribers, quickly becoming the most-viewed live streamer on the DLive platform—which eventually banned him more than a year later.[44]
Not that that was going to stop him.
AS DONALD TRUMP’S FIRST term as president wound down and his imminent reelection defeat in 2020 began appearing more clearly on the horizon, white nationalists began preparing for life when their “Glorious Leader” (alt-right leader Andrew Anglin’s name for him) was no longer in charge. What would their movement look like after the man who had empowered them was gone from office?
For the openly fascist Patriot Front, it was seen as simply the next natural step in their political evolution. Thanks to group chats that were exposed in early 2022, we know they were already looking ahead by then. Indeed, Trump himself is often discussed in those pre-election 2020 chats with a kind of derisive contempt by many Patriot Front members, much as they see rival far-right groups as simply not radical enough.[45]
Even the election was irrelevant to Patriot Front. “It does not matter what people personally believe about it,” Thomas Rousseau wrote in a group chat on the encrypted forum Rocket.Chat. “Casting a ballot is a submissive gesture to legitimize tyranny. It is fundamentally amoral. It is done as an insult to the nation’s cause and the organization.”
“In many ways, a lot of people in the white power movement are not fans of Trump, but they do see him as useful to their movement, introducing some of their ideas and carrying out some of the policies that they favor,” said Cassie Miller, an analyst at the SPLC. “But in some ways, they see him as buying them time.”
They sneered at rival far-right organizations. “Proud Boys are a bunch of cucks,” wrote one Patriot Front member from Texas. “They call themselves ‘Western Chauvinists’ which means they are a bunch of liberals who don’t like PC culture and ‘snowflakes’ yet they are too scared to actually stand up to these things in a meaningful way lest they be called RACISTS!!!!”
Though they share similar goals, the “Boogaloo” civil-war movement is viewed similarly. “The whole ‘Boogaloo’ thing is a reminder that if you joke about anything long enough, you’ll stop joking,” Rousseau told another member online. “An offhand forum slapstick joke could become something that someone shoots someone over if its left to fester and rot like the moldlike idea it is.”
Nick Fuentes was similarly clear that overthrowing mainstream conservatism had to be the primary objective of white nationalists, but he was more focused on the pragmatic politics, which he saw as fundamental to his movement building. He promoted a strategy to overtake the Republican Party, primarily by driving out old-style conservatives, reflected in his oft-repeated catchphrase “destroy the GOP.” He told his podcast audience: “We needed to redefine the right wing by solidifying the political realignment that Donald Trump initiated in 2016, under the banner, and under the slogan, and under the principles of America First.”[46]
Fuentes emphasized that what he called the “civil war” between the “conservative establishment and the America First pro-Trump base” is “now playing out” in national electoral politics. Fuentes nonetheless saw Trump’s reelection as essential to white-nationalist interests, even if he too took a longer view of how their movement should evolve. He ardently supported Trump during the 2020 campaign, and became a fanatical supporter of the Stop the Steal campaign, showing up at events around the country to protest vote counts, and playing a leading role in the November 14 Million MAGA March protest in Washington, D.C., that served as a violent warmup for January 6—though with many fewer protesters.[47]
Throughout the November event, far-right extremists of all stripes announced their presence: Fuentes’s Groyper army rushed to lead the procession from the White House to the Congress and Supreme Court Building, their blue “America First” banners held high. Oath Keepers and other militiamen, wearing body armor and prepared for battle—though unarmed, since Washington forbids open carry of guns within its city limits—joined eagerly in the procession.
At one point, Fuentes addressed the crowd with a bullhorn. “We’re up against the media, and against the giant corporations, and against the swamp, and the government, and the CIA, and the FBI, and the intelligence community, and it is a pretty big path ahead of us,” he said. “There are a lot of them, and they wield much power. But I think to myself this: I have much confidence in knowing that God is on our side!” The crowd roared.[48]
So Fuentes’s presence outside the Capitol on January 6, exhorting the crowd to violence, as well as the presence of multiple Groypers inside the Capitol—a total of ten of them were charged afterward—was the next natural step.[49] After all, the worldview that Fuentes and the Groypers represented was considered conventional wisdom for much of the mob.
A post-insurrection survey of the participants in the January 6 attack by the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats found that, in addition to Trump’s lies about the election, white-nationalist beliefs formed much of the common ground among the mob that day. The survey showed that “the No. 1 belief among insurrectionists—shared by fully 75 percent of respondents—is the ‘great replacement’ of the electorate by the Democratic Party and that this idea is also the most important separator of people in the 21 million from the general population, where the theory doesn’t hold much sway.”[50]
Likewise, the key demographic characteristic of the insurrectionists was that they came from counties around the nation—particularly in urban areas—where the white share of the population is declining the fastest.
After the insurrection, Fuentes emphatically promoted the idea that the attempt to keep Trump in office was not merely justifiable, but the Capitol siege an event to be positively celebrated. That was the line he adopted the day after the siege on his podcast.
“At every step of the way, the Republican Party could have kept Trump in office,” Fuentes claimed. “Whether it was the party apparatus—the Republican Party itself, the RNC—stopping the voter fraud on Election Day. You could’ve had Republican state legislatures take their own electors and appoint them and send them to D.C. You could’ve had Trump-appointed justices intervene and make this right.
“And ultimately tomorrow you could’ve had Republican senators and House representatives object to and throw out enough votes that we could’ve forced a contingent election and gotten President Trump inaugurated that way,” he said.
“Frankly, I think it was completely justified,” he added. “And, if I’m being totally honest, I loved what happened yesterday. And we will see what the consequences will be of yesterday, and we will deal with them, and we will adapt to them, and they’re not gonna be good…But what I saw yesterday was beautiful. It was righteous. It was American. Our ancestors from our founding smiled upon us yesterday. And I have nothing to apologize for.”[51]
LIKE MOST LITERAL FASCISTS, the guys who run Patriot Front never miss a trick. Which is why they turned up in Washington, D.C., in late January 2021, a little over a week after Joe Biden’s inauguration, staking a claim as the first far-right group to return to the city and march down the Capitol Mall since the insurrection.[52]
ProPublica journalist Lydia DePillis observed them the morning of January 29 marching in formation, about one hundred strong, masked and wielding their organization’s banners—styled after the American flag, but featuring a fasces (an axe with a bundle of sticks, the traditional symbol of fascism) where the stars normally are—and then marching from the Jefferson Memorial up the Mall to the Capitol. They apparently dispersed afterward.
Founder Thomas Rousseau knew that marching down the National Mall so soon after the insurrection would attract a lot of attention. “[Rousseau] wants to really focus on spectacle, and he thinks that a performative show of strength is the most effective kind of propaganda that they can engage in,” SPLC analyst Cassie Miller remarked.[53]
Rousseau spectacularly lost control of the narrative, though, when Patriot Front’s Rocket.Chat data was leaked and published by the journalism collective Unicorn Riot in January 2022.[54] The leak did more than simply expose its members to public identification on social media—though that quickly began happening apace, much to the chagrin of the unmasked young fascists.
Most of all, it opened a window into the world of these young white male extremists, and how they are working to establish their organization within the American body politic. Besides revealing embarrassing personal details such as their porn habits and the amateurish combat “training” sessions for members, it also gave researchers a clear view of their recruitment methods and targets, as well as the breadth of their reach within the mainstream— including the military.
The leak featured thousands of pages of internal conversations within some four hundred gigabytes of data. This data originated on Patriot Front’s internal Rocket.Chat boards for members and prospective recruits. The portrait that emerged is of an organization intensely focused on recruiting like-minded young white men: ardent nationalists, nativists, segregationists, misogynists, and Hitler-worshiping fascists who’ve grown tired of concealing their secret lives, and want to begin making their fantasies of enacting his Final Solution real.
One report examining the data from the Southern Poverty Law Center found that one in five of the young men applying to join Patriot Front have ties to the US military. Of the eighty-seven applicants on the chat, eighteen of them (21 percent) claimed to have current or former military experience; one of these, claiming to be an ex-Marine, told the chat that he is currently employed by the Department of Homeland Security.[55]
One of the primary dangers of commingling far-right extremism with military service is that people who by training and nature are skilled at handling weapons and materiel and are knowledgeable about engagement tactics are being radicalized into this seditionist extremism. The chats revealed this danger explicitly: one applicant who claimed to have served as an Army Ranger listed “great land-navigation, great physical fitness, able to clear rooms,” as well as “basic medical training” as skills he would bring to Patriot Front.
Another applicant boasted of experience in “Marine martial arts,” adding that he had been “trained in firearms.” Others claimed they had worked in military intelligence, had backgrounds in computer networking and programming, and were conversant in signals intelligence. One who said he was an ex-Marine claimed to be a leader of a hate group, the Kansas Active Club.
Rousseau and senior members called “network directors” oversaw the chats, organized by region. They organized real-world “actions” in the chat rooms, which included several criminal acts of vandalism, such as defacing memorials, statues, and murals in highly public places. These included a memorial to George Floyd in New York City, as well as other works of public art that provoked their ire, such as a mural supporting Black Lives Matter in Olympia, Washington, and depictions of Black heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman.
They also clearly believed they could do so with impunity. “As our recent actions have shown we can walk down busy avenues at prime time in Seattle and deface the largest most well protected mural in shitlib Olympia without so much as being accosted once,” one member who apparently participated in the Olympia vandalization wrote.[56]
Patriot Front again organized a January march in Washington, D.C., in 2022, timed in conjunction with the antiabortion March For Life.[57] About forty of them formed a phalanx that eventually was forced to separate from the main crowd by counterprotesters and police.
Unicorn Riot reported that Patriot Front secured a police escort for that march by placing a “false” 911 call about themselves. Rousseau directed a member to call police “from a burner [phone]” as Patriot Front left their nearby camp for D.C., pretending to be a concerned citizen, ostensibly to “soften the police up before our big visual contact on the bridge, and provide a little confusion and misinfo that’s within the realm of honest dialogue.”[58]
Rousseau and his lieutenants set quotas for members to engage in various “actions,” including regional group quotas of at least “10 big actions a month.” Acts of vandalism were recorded in a spreadsheet.
The group also monitored its roughly 220 members’ personal lives in a fanatically controlling way. Members were required to regularly log their weight and fitness regimen, follow an apparently disordered diet obsessively, and update their superiors on their “bad habits,” such as pornography and junk food. Leaders pointedly chastised members for failing to participate in enough chats or meetings or to file their mandatory fitness updates.
This kind of routine humiliation was evident in several of the “training” videos that were uncovered in the leak: Out-of-shape men forced to perform push-ups and pull-ups while their cohorts harass them; men trying to wrestle each other to the ground while groping various body parts; groups practicing the use of shields, linking arms in group cohesion exercises; being groped as “trainers” demonstrate how to pat a suspect down for a weapon; trying (and failing) to carry “fallen” teammates; practicing tactical retreats in which they all run backward while touching one another’s shoulders.
WHILE THE YOUNG NEOFASCISTS in Patriot Front focused on training and other manly pursuits, the white-nationalist Groyper army got religion—specifically, Christian nationalism.[59]
Most of the far-right extremist movements that arose online and then in real life over the past decade—the alt-right, white nationalists, and other authoritarian protofascists—have been generally ecumenical and a-religious in their rhetorical appeals and organizing, other than their frequent expressions of anti-Semitism. But with Nick Fuentes leading the way, it became much more common to hear the America First Groypers and other white nationalists embracing Christian nationalism, a movement revolving around the idea of remaking the United States into a fundamentalist Christian theocratic state that dispenses with liberal democracy.
After the Capitol insurrection, Fuentes and his America First cohorts began employing Christian nationalist rhetoric: chanting “Christ is king” at the antiabortion March for Life in Washington and at anti-vaccine protests, using crucifixes as protest symbols, and similar rhetorical appeals. In a speech at the America First conference in Orlando in March at which he declared America “a Christian nation,” Fuentes warned his audience that America will cease to be America “if it loses its white demographic core and if it loses its faith in Jesus Christ.”
“Christian nationalism—and even the idea of separatism, with a subtext of White, Christian and conservative-leaning [influences]—took a more dominant role in the way that extremist groups talk to each other and try to propagandize in public,” Jared Holt of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab told The Washington Post.[60]
While many Christian nationalists are grounded in more traditional evangelical views, there is also a component who are cynically embracing religious fervor as a way of expanding their recruitment base.
The striking aspect of the surge of Christian nationalism has been its ability to unify sectors of the radical right, from militia-oriented Patriots to bigoted white nationalists to conspiracists like the authoritarian QAnon cult.
“This unification is pretty unprecedented,” Alex Newhouse, deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told the Post. “The infusion of Christian nationalism throughout that unification process has been particularly interesting and, in my opinion, is going to end up being pretty dangerous.”
Moreover, a number of these white nationalists appear to be pushing even further into a particularly ugly—and previously stagnant—brand of religious nationalism: Christian Identity, the bigoted theological movement claiming that white people are the true “Children of Israel,” that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan, and that all non-white people are soulless “mud people.”
Since 2019 Newhouse has noticed a sudden uptick of interest in Christian Identity, particularly the Aryan Nations operation in the northern Idaho Panhandle between 1978 and 2000, which was an Identity church.
One of the leading voices in this resurgence, Newhouse says, was Kyle Chapman, the cofounder of the Proud Boys–affiliated Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, who later attempted to create an explicitly racist and anti-Semitic offshoot called Proud Goys.
Newhouse said Chapman had been interacting with Christian Identity influencers on the encrypted chat platform Telegram while “blasting out Christian Identity propaganda,” the sort of propaganda like “two seedline theory”—which claims that Eve also mated with Satan in the Garden of Eden and thus gave birth to Jews.
“There’s this gradual move toward a more revolutionary, burn-it-all-down posture, and I think Christian Identity for a lot of these people has become a way for them to organize their thoughts,” he said.
Christian nationalist beliefs were not limited in their creeping influence only to far-right extremists. Perhaps even more pernicious and striking was their spread among mainstream conservatives in the media and especially within the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
Christian nationalists heavily supported Trump in the 2020 election, bringing not only their conspiracist belief in their persecution but also that the government’s legitimacy derives not from its democratic institutions but from its adherence to what they call a “traditional” cultural, ethnic, and religious heritage. Their innate authoritarian tendencies melded neatly with MAGA authoritarianism, which meant that their propensity for conspiracism quickly metastasized the further they became absorbed into Trump’s alternative universe. On January 6, they could be seen and heard in the mob attacking the Capitol, linking arms with all the other factions present, repeating Trump’s lies about being cheated out of the presidency.
And in the weeks following the insurrection, their embrace of those lies deepened. At Christian nationalist conferences, speakers regularly claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and valorized the January 6 defendants as “political prisoners.” Christian nationalist radio host Eric Metaxas told a Florida gathering, “The reason I think we are being so persecuted, why the January 6 folks are being persecuted—when you’re over the target like that, oh my.”[61]
Christian nationalist beliefs became conventional wisdom among MAGA Republicans. An October 2022 poll by Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of Republicans—and 45 percent of the nation—believe the United States should be a Christian nation, and 76 percent of them say that was the intention of the Founding Fathers. Among those who hold those views, 54 percent said that they believe the Bible should influence US laws and take precedence over the will of the people.[62]
This antidemocratic impulse was shared by the mainstream Republicans, white nationalists, Proud Boys, and conspiracy theorists with whom Christian nationalists coalesced in the months and years after the insurrection, amassing around a campaign of extreme election denialism. By the summer of 2022, evangelical churches had become the recruitment centers for building an army of Trump fans who believed the 2020 election was stolen through fraud, built on a series of carnival-like far-right roadshows that drew in the true believers like flies.
And while their anger revolved around Trump’s defeat, they were only focused on 2020 insofar as they could “prove” that American elections were riddled with “voter fraud.” Their chief focus, however, was the future.