Masked fascists paraded through DC this weekend. I know why they weren't afraid.
If the 250th taught us anything, it’s that the current regime has swapped the definitions of “terrorist” and “patriot.”
Donald Trump’s pro-fascist coalition is done “alluding” to their true beliefs. Over the weekend, they wore them proudly through the nation’s capital (albeit while hiding their faces behind masks).
Lately, it’s been said that metaphor and symbolism are dead. For instance, instead of draining the swamp, Trump created a new one with an algae-infested reflecting pool. But some of those “on-the-nose” caricatures of the second Trump administration have more profound consequences for American life. Like the fact that one of the main images Americans saw this weekend on Independence Day was hundreds of bigoted extremists marching through our nation’s capital.
On the 250th anniversary of America, while tourists streamed toward the Mall for a presidential “Salute to America,” the masked men in matching khakis chanted among them, ominously: “Reclaim America!” They carried the Confederate battle flag, the banner of the men who took up arms against the United States in defense of their way of life (namely, the institution of enslaving Black Americans). And they carried the emblems of Patriot Front, a white supremacist organization born from the ashes of a deadly far-right rally that has come to tell us a lot about our president.
Although many of the marchers were tied to convicted violent extremists, they had no fear of entering the nation’s capital and commandeering the celebrations this past Saturday. How could that be? Let me tell you. I was there at the beginning.
* * *
In August 2017, I was leading the Trump administration’s terrorism prevention efforts in the United States. When the “Unite the Right” rally converged on Charlottesville, it was obvious to those of us in the counterterrorism world what we were looking at. The rally was engineered to provoke violence. And under the law, the definition of terrorism is not complicated. Terrorism is violence intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
When a young neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, killing Heather Heyer, the attack clearly met the definition. The violence was meant to send the protesters a message that the alt-right was “united” and that their extreme views would be literally forced upon fellow Americans. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions (no one’s idea of a squishy moderate) said publicly that the attack fit the legal definition of terrorism.
At the time, I was in early conversations with the White House about how serious the domestic terrorism problem had become. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we saw the light blinking red. We briefed Trump and his team about the spike in cases DHS and our FBI colleagues were seeing from far-right militant groups in particular. Charlottesville seemed to validate everything we’d been warning about.
Then Donald Trump spoke.
I won’t forget watching John Kelly (my former boss, newly installed as White House chief of staff) drop his head in exasperation, as he stood off to the side and listened to the president praise the “very fine people” on “both sides” of a terrorist attack. Kelly understood what was happening. He knew that the president wasn’t confused and wasn’t misspeaking. Trump was protecting people who liked him.
Imagine, for a moment, a president standing at the Flight 93 memorial (the site I wrote about on Friday, where ordinary passengers on 9/11 charged a cockpit to stop another attack) and musing that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the struggle aboard that plane. The country would have recoiled in horror. Yet that’s what Trump did after Charlottesville. It was so crass and shocking that most people refused to believe it.
For months afterward, I fought with the White House over the national counterterrorism strategy. My colleagues and I submitted what I considered the “dream draft.” We put forward a document that named the surging threat from domestic terrorist organizations, gave our agencies the top cover they needed to pursue these violent extremists, and positioned us to win the budget increases from Congress that we needed to go after the bad guys. We’d be ready to fight the scourge.
The document sent back to us was revealing. Nearly everything about “domestic terrorism” had been redlined — struck from the document entirely — except a few throwaway sentences that lumped the danger together with “animal rights extremism” and “environmental extremism,” as if the DHS-FBI caseload was buckling under the weight of complex, coordinated attacks planned by PETA members and climate scientists. Meanwhile, in the real world, armed militia groups were drilling, plotting, and carrying out violence in service of a white supremacist worldview.
Trump didn’t see them as terrorists. He saw them as supporters.
Two years after Charlottesville, a gunman walked into a Walmart in El Paso and shot dozens of people, killing 23, in the type of terrorist attack we’d been worried about. In his screed, the shooter parroted the president’s own immigration rhetoric, casting his massacre as a response to the “invasion” at the border. He shared the president’s stated goals. And in the moral universe the president was constructing, he felt empowered to carry out Trump’s agenda by force.
Look at the progression since then.
“Stand back and stand by.” When a debate moderator handed Trump a clean opportunity to condemn white supremacist violence on live television in September 2020, the president instead addressed the Proud Boys (then a street-fighting gang with a rap sheet of political violence) by name and issued what they immediately celebrated as marching orders. Within hours, the phrase was on their merchandise.
Then there were the armed men who answered the call to hold “Stop the Steal” rallies across America. In the weeks after the election, the same militant networks we in the national security community had been forbidden from naming mobilized on the president’s behalf, brandishing rifles outside vote-counting centers, menacing election workers into hiding, and storming statehouses. It was the operational debut of a movement that had spent four years learning steadily that it did, indeed, enjoy the president’s protection.
Are we surprised that Trump’s presidency culminated in a domestic terrorist attack on the United States Capitol? Violence — intended to intimidate or coerce — was deployed to overturn an American election. This was the same textbook definition I’d cited after Charlottesville, now playing out beneath the Capitol dome. More than 140 police officers were assaulted. And the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were convicted of seditious conspiracy, a charge prosecutors reserve for those who wage war on their own government.
Far from condemning the attack, Trump spent the years afterward transforming its perpetrators into icons of the conservative movement. He opened rallies with a recording of jailed rioters singing the national anthem. He called them “hostages” and “political prisoners.” Meanwhile, he turned their prosecutions into the founding mythology of his own comeback.
Among his first acts upon returning to office was to pardon them en masse. Roughly 1,500 people, including the seditious conspirators themselves, were released in a single stroke of the pen on day one. In one of the most audacious acts of corruption in all of American history, he has since pushed to use taxpayer dollars to turn those individuals into millionaires with a DOJ slush fund pegged at $1.776 billion, the nation’s founding year rendered as a payout (in case anyone still doubted whether this president believes terrorists are patriots).
Here is the kicker, and it’s a bitter one, folks. The second Trump administration has finally done what I spent years inside the first one begging it to do. They’ve elevated domestic terrorism to the top of the national agenda, and they’ve begun to aggressively investigate violent groups that threaten Americans. Great news, right?
Except they haven’t followed the data. They’ve followed the president’s directives by putting his political adversaries at the top of the target list. The administration insists “antifa” is the gravest terror threat facing the United States, even as FBI officials, testifying under oath before Congress, cannot say where this supposed organization is headquartered or who leads it. The counterterrorism enterprise I helped run, which was purpose-built after 9/11 to protect Americans from politically motivated violence, has effectively been repurposed to protect one man from political dissent.
To put it another way, Donald Trump has turned the terrorists into princes and the protesters into terrorists.
Which brings me back to Saturday’s parade.
The cowardice of their face masks notwithstanding, Patriot Front is not some mystery organization. It was founded by a man who marched at Charlottesville, in the same organization as Heather Heyer’s killer. The group rebranded itself when that attack made the old name inconvenient. Since then, its members have been arrested for conspiring to riot at a Pride celebration; a federal court has held the group liable for millions of dollars for the beating of a Black musician on the streets of Boston; and its manifesto calls for a whites-only ethnostate. In the days after bad floods in Texas, its leader boasted that the group was distributing aid with priority for “European peoples.”
These men marched through Washington on July 4th despite the government’s crusade against “domestic terrorism.” How? Well, they’ve read the target list, and they know they won’t be investigated. They understand better than many Americans do that the words “terrorist” and “patriot” have been surgically swapped. In this inverted American republic, extremists with a history of violence who hold Confederate flags are the ones who get to lead parades on the Fourth of July, while stay-at-home moms holding protest signs at NO KINGS rallies get investigated by the feds.
Two hundred fifty years ago, the men we call patriots pledged their lives to the proposition that no ruler stands above the law and no citizen is below its protection. This weekend, we saw men in the white masks claim the opposite, proudly carrying the banner of Donald Trump’s pro-fascist movement. Don’t let their costumes fool you. They weren’t hiding from the Trump administration. They were hiding from you. After all, it’s your democracy they’re attacking.
But there’s something the militant men of Trump’s authoritarian takeover don’t realize. For all their boasting about helping the president regress our nation to “better” days, they don’t seem to know much about history. It never ends well for the masked men and the bigots. In time, like their Confederate heroes before them, they’ll be forced to trade their far-right fame and banners for everlasting shame.
Your friend, in defiance,
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