The Threat of Violence
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Rick Perlstein interviews David Neiwert on what November might look like:
So let’s talk scenarios. What if Trump wins?
There are two components. One is the immigrant front, the whole Minutemen ethos is going to come into play here, where these guys armed with AR-15s will claim we’re just supplementing the government; we’re just rounding people up and serving them up to the Border Patrol. Which is what they did in Arizona for quite a few years. But this will spread to the national scale.
The second component, it’s pretty obvious that Trump and his minions basically hope that they can work the electoral count to a point where they can force the outcome of the election to either go through the Republican Congress or the Republican Supreme Court. But either way, it will be a de facto installment of a dictator. Then there will be massive protests—I think quite deservedly so. And the Three Percenters, militias, the Proud Boys, who have all been gearing up for this, are going to come out to play, not just defending the Trump administration but attacking the protesters. And doing so with reckless abandon. They’ll just call them “antifa”—[they] have a ready-made excuse.
If we’re talking about the kind of rhetoric we’re seeing in right-wing Telegram spaces, they’re basically talking about how it will be “decided by the bullet box, not the ballot box.”
What happens if the Democrats win?
Even a Joe Biden–sized victory, I think, could lead to instability. There will be contested states, like we saw in Arizona as well as Georgia. These actors will show up at ballot-counting centers, as well as at any other sort of body involved in counting and certifying the votes. We certainly saw in the spring of 2020, these armed bodies of men entering state legislatures. I think that this is their hope: that they can create a lot of chaos in places like Arizona and Georgia so that they can’t actually carry out their votes, can’t actually certify the votes. Then they will say, “Well, we’ll now throw it to the state legislatures.”
There’s no easy solution (it is very possible that Elon will go all-in on claims of election fraud if Trump loses close, meaning that X will become a far-right tinderbox), especially because the paramilitary organizations one would hope to manage the problem (police) are themselves quite likely to be implicated in it. The best to hope and work for is a solid electoral college victory that puts Harris-Walz out of easy reach of alternate slate shenanigans. It’s certainly a good thing that Biden will be at the helm of the federal government this time around instead of Trump.