This Was Absolutely Predictable

 Around 2015 or so; I warned a friend of mine, with whom I disagree with politically, not to take the newly named "alt-right" lightly. This person, whom I'm not going to name for obvious reasons, identifies as as conservative but was expressing some amusement at the worrywarts on the left over these people. These people, like Yiannapolis, Cernovich, Baldwin, Bannon, etc. were not just people that were disliked by the left, they were dangerous I warned.

I was familiar with these people from the travesty known as gamergate. This occurred about a year before my conversation (2014) and was an organized campaign of harassment under the guise of wanting to protect the integrity of video game journalism. The entire shit show involved harassing anyone that dared to make mention of any kind of sexism in the video game industry--whether that sexism was in the games or in the industry that produced them. Paraphrasing one of the victims of gamergate in a twee yesterday, gamergate was not the cause of what we are seeing now, but a symptom of a larger problem.

In order to understand why yesterday happened, we have to go back a few decades. We can take a short divergence in 1995 to look at the Oklahoma City Bombing as being a different harvest of the seed I will shortly describe. I only separate this event out, because it wasn't an organized event. It was conducted by two men angry that the federal government was no longer representing them. That anger was fueled by conspiracy theorists and ideologues in the 90s Patriot Movement. People such as Milton Cooper and his show "The Hour of the Time" which discussed a coming New World Order and a subversion of the government (Cooper claims to have met Timothy McVeigh though this cannot be substantiated) by hidden actors--an unaccountable group of elites. It was reflected in McVeigh's favorite book, "The Turner Diaries" a notoriously racist and anti-semitic book that describes the takeover of the government by a communist liberals of various hated races and ethnic groups. The rhetoric then is the same as it is now with only the proper names showing any difference. 

The root of what we saw on January 6th: pro-Trump wannabee fascists violently assaulting the Capitol building in a vain, futile, and ignorant gesture to stop something that was merely a formality--has roots in 1958 and the John Birch Society (JBS). If you are unfamiliar with the John Birch Society, it was the incubator for the ultra-right wing mess that we have now. The JBS was named after a man, John Birch, who was killed by Chinese forces on August 25th, 1945. To be absolutely clear, Birch was not killed in warfare, and he was not killed fighting Communist China. His death seems to be largely the result of an altercation in the area he was patrolling with other Chinese forces. Birch, the man, is largely a myth to Birch the society. 

The JBS was fiercely anti-communist. The kind of group that thought Hoover, the HUAC, and McCarthy weren't going far enough for. They internally published a book that claimed Eisenhower was a communist. A belief that while never said out loud by the right today, seems to be have ripples as they never mention Eisenhower as a contender for greatest Republican president. It was, after all Eisenhower that was the first modern Republican president--but he would be loudly and publicly called a leftist liberal today by even the most mainstream of GOP politicians. The problem is, if you look at the JBS literature from the 50s and 60s, it looks like a list of today's right wing talking points. This is not a coincidence.

What the JBS did was frame a political debate not as competing ways forward from different points of view--but it framed them as a battle of survival. If their brand of ultra (at the time)-conservatism was not adopted by those in power it wasn't just that they had to suck it up and wait until the next election. In their mindset if they lost the country was finished, the people enslaved, and the Constitution would be a memory. You have to understand what this means to the people who believe it, as it explains what happened on January 6th: it is not a political struggle, it is a struggle for survival. They do not perceive themselves to the aggressors any more than Edgar Welch did when he assaulted Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15. They believe themselves to be the defense against an enemy that has assumed all power. Their only recourse is assault. Timothy McVeigh didn't kill 168 people to draw attention to some belief he had, he did it to strike a blow against a government he felt was controlled by some villainous organization having abandoned the principles in the Constitution. 

The JBS's political legacy takes hold in the candidacy of Barry Goldwater. Considered extreme then but his positions are more in line with mainstream conservatism than we would like to admit. Goldwater held extremist positions on communism and foreign policy, and the JBS flocked to him. He never publicly denounced their views even after he began thinking that they were too extreme because he needed their numbers. His campaign merely tested the ground for the modern conservative who he would be slightly to the left of today (though I have to be fair he did warn us about allowing the Christian Evangelicals to hijack our political parties so maybe he wasn't that far right). Goldwater embraced the conspiracism that we see now, he was fiercely critical of the Tri-Lateral Commission believing it to essentially being what we now know as the Illuminati super-conspiracy. Every time you hear one of these people talk about their political opposition as "the elites," "working from an X-agenda," "the media hates us," or loudly proclaiming their love of the Constitution: it's the JBS speaking through them. The modern language of the "deep state" is theirs only lacking the direct accusation of "communist"--though that is there sometimes too.

This brings us to the present. If the struggle for survival is real we can have debates on what is permitted and what is not permitted. However, the struggle here is not real. The voters spoke and the president lost. Instead of acting with integrity he fed those alt-right supporters the conspiracy theories they already believed. Theories which he had been claiming from before he was elected. He framed the election process, the very essence of democracy, as being rigged--only this time he had half of the GOP congress, a news media station, and legions of online social media accounts also claiming the same thing. He's been telling people that the system is against him, because it has been usurped. This is not an interpretation or something concealed. An FBI bulletin from May of 2019 claimed that this kind of thinking was becoming a threat, but the Trump DoJ wasn't going to act on it too quickly because those people are their supporters. That his happened was exactly what the FBI was warning about. The people that did this believe a wide variety of things but they believe at the top, with a religious zeal (both figuratively and literally), that the outgoing president is their savior. Take this and then combine it with his words that he's been cheated and you have the Capitol insurrection. For the last four years the people claiming this have been dismissed as hyperbolic pearl-clutchers, but we were only using the president's own words. As a private citizen many of us could only do so much, the failure to stop this lies in the very chamber that was briefly seized. Instead of worrying about poll numbers, or angering an already rabid base, maybe they could have thrown water on the fire instead of stoking it.