January 6, 2021, was only the beginning.
When I enlisted in the army in 1995, I swore an oath to protect the country and the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. I served as a sniper and section leader for three years, during which I was deployed overseas defending the United States against foreign adversaries. I never imagined that years later I’d be deployed defending our country against enemies from within, in the form of domestic terrorists. Working as a confidential human source for the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, I infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan twice within a ten-year period, between 2007 and 2017, and witnessed the seeds being planted for January 6, as well as what those seeds have sown: the nexus for right-wing extremists uniting toward a common goal, which is nothing less than a second civil war.
In my first tour inside the KKK—the nation’s first domestic terrorist group, founded more than 150 years ago—I foiled a plot to assassinate then candidate Barack Obama, only to witness the Klan use his election as a rallying cry and recruiting tool that ignited a firestorm within the white nationalist right. In a subsequent stretch inside a second klavern, I watched a group that had long proclaimed itself the “Invisible Empire” gradually emerge from the shadows to unite the disparate forces that continue to roil this country today. It’s estimated that somewhere between half and three quarters of all self-identifying Republicans either identify as white nationalists or hold white nationalist beliefs. That means as much as 30 percent of the United States population wants to see the country burn.
And now we are witnessing the smoke rising from the mass grave that powerful forces within our own country want to dig.
On March 29, 2023, a young man from Missouri rammed the U-Haul truck he was driving into the barriers protecting the White House. According to reports, he told Secret Service agents that he wanted to seize power and would kill anyone in his way, including the president. When he stumbled out of his wrecked vehicle, he pulled out a flag emblazoned with a swastika.
Just over a month later, a gunman opened fire with an assault rifle inside Allen Premium Outlets, a mall in suburban Dallas, and killed nine people, including a three-year-old boy. The shooter, thirty-three-year-old Mauricio Martinez Garcia, was wearing a tactical vest embroidered with the letters RWDS, which stood for “Right Wing Death Squad.” What lay beneath the vest was even more telling: Garcia’s body was tattooed with fascist symbols, SS lightning bolts, and a swastika.
A June 2023 report from the Inspector General of the Department of Justice states that “threats posed by domestic extremists have not only increased over the past few years, but are also becoming more complicated due to the emergence of new violent ideologies, the impact of social media, and the response to recent political and social events.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the hard-right movement’s “fingerprints are everywhere: people’s homes or schools, doctor’s offices, libraries, bars, restaurants, churches, and other community spaces.”
Earlier in 2023, Ohio education officials uncovered Nazi-approved homeschooling lesson plans that were created and shared online by white supremacists. More recently, swastikas were displayed in the hands of neo-Nazis who were storming a drag queen storytelling event in a park, also in Ohio. In June 2023, a man named Taylor Taranto, a known January 6 rioter, showed up at the Washington home of former president Barack Obama. When he was arrested, two guns and four hundred rounds of ammunition were found in his van. In 2022, Congressman Paul Gosar of Arizona (via video) and Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene both attended a neo-Nazi convention, called the America First Political Action Committee conference, sponsored by avowed Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes; Gosar also has two alleged white nationalist sympathizers on his staff. In regard to his apparent support for white nationalists like Fuentes, Senator Tommy Tuberville said in May 2023, “You call them white nationalists. I call them Americans.”
Too many of those charged with protecting democracy, it would seem, instead appear fully committed to dissolving it.
In the state of Florida, vast numbers of books are being banned from schools and libraries. A librarian of the Kingsland Branch Library in Llano County, Texas, Suzette Baker, was fired for refusing to follow Florida’s lead. On May 5, 2023, Georgia passed a law that allowed the legislature to remove (read: fire) any elected district attorney for any number of arbitrary offenses. North Carolina narrowly lost a case in the Supreme Court on June 27, 2023, requesting that justices place control of all elections in the hands of the state legislature, potentially allowing it to change the results of an election in which that legislature’s preferred candidate did not emerge victorious. Alabama is currently refusing to follow an order by the Supreme Court of the United States to redraw its congressional districts, hoping to spur the justices to rehear the case because the state’s elected representatives did not like the outcome the first time.
Everything we’re witnessing today is a product of the sordid traditions and dogma of the Ku Klux Klan. But the Klan did not spawn the ideology roiling our country today; that ideology spawned the Klan and planted the roots for January 6. The January 6 insurrectionists may not have been card-carrying members of the Klan, but they demonstratively adhered to the same ideology that was the basis for the KKK’s founding in 1865. As a whole, white nationalists and white supremacists today have increasingly focused their movements on that original Klan orthodoxy, to the point where their belief systems are nearly indistinguishable from one another, as if the KKK’s offspring had collectively returned to the roots that had spawned it.
Now that same ideology has infested not just politicians but also the very forces that are supposed to protect us. A January 2021 analysis by NPR put the number of military veterans who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol at a staggering 20 percent. Also in January 2021, Business Insider reported that “31 police officers are under investigation over their suspected involvement in the Capitol riot, as departments face pressure to weed out white nationalists.”
This came as no surprise to me, because I witnessed it firsthand during my two separate stints undercover inside the Ku Klux Klan. The virulent ideology that spawned that hate group has mushroomed across the country. Law enforcement officials who once shunned the Klan, whatever their respective feelings might have been, are now supporting, even embracing, the group openly in broad daylight instead of under cover of darkness.
The Klan’s very existence is rooted in its self-identified status as the “Invisible Empire.” The stated goal since the group’s establishment in the wake of the Civil War has been to overthrow the government and replace it with one of its own making. At times, right-wing nationalist efforts toward that very goal have been as violent as January 6 or as subtle as the passage of bills in the dead of night. The Klan and the like-minded groups it has produced have learned to balance bullets with bluster and pistols with paper, both of which have the potential to do far more irrevocable damage on the state of our democracy than the former. The radical right cares nothing about process, only outcome. They’re not interested in a civil discussion to work out differences, because they are so consumed by ideology that it has hijacked their civility. They have a clear vision of what they want the country to look like, and democracy itself is the only thing standing in their way.
In my years serving as an army sniper and section leader on numerous overseas deployments—which I’m not permitted to disclose—in hostile, authoritarian countries, nothing I witnessed in any of them scares me as much as what we’re facing at home now.
Should we be afraid?
With the 2024 election looming, and democracy itself on the ballot, the answer is yes, we should be very afraid.