Could Trump shooting embolden white extremist groups?
Amid continued calls for peace and calm following the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, leaders and experts have expressed concern for retaliatory actions, particularly among extremist groups and the safety of Black and brown communities leading up to and during Election Day.
“It’s been documented over the last couple of years that we’ve seen a rise in violence around political violence in particular,” Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis told theGrio. “I’m certainly concerned for sure that folks have the opportunity to exercise their rights as Americans, whether it be at the ballot box or voicing their opinions.”
Davis, who said Saturday’s shooting at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was “jarring” for the state, added, “We can’t let a few people change the way we are as Americans, the way we conduct our discourse, and the way we carry out our fundamental rights.”
But a white extremist expert, Rachel Carroll Rivas of Southern Poverty Law Center, told theGrio that conspiracies surrounding the shooting that killed one man and injured Trump and two others are already beginning to incite the far-right corners of the internet.
Rivas, the interim director of SPLC’s Intelligence Project, said in the days and hours after the attempted assassination of Trump, far-right figures and extremists spewed and amplified conspiracies about the shooting.
“We saw people like Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon [and] Michael Flynn, all claim that they had prophesized that this was going to happen,” said Rivas, who shared that conspiracists began “prophesizing about who did it” and “leaning on existing bigotries” in doing so.
Rivas said those bigotries included claims that the shooter, now identified as Matthew Thomas Crooks, may have been trans or Chinese (SPLC noted an AI-generated photo of the incident falsely displayed a Chinese balloon) and that a Secret Service agent didn’t shoot back right away at the shooter because the agent was Jewish.
“We also see that there were conspiracies that DEI in our government agencies and law enforcement … led to some failure in law enforcement,” Rivas noted.
The conspiracy theories can be found on less-moderated “alt-tech” social platforms like Telegram and on X, formerly known as Twitter, which Rivas noted is less moderated than in previous years.
She told theGrio “we can’t know for sure” the impact Saturday’s shooting could have on emboldening white supremacist and extremist groups.
Far-right groups played a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, as a result of conspiracy theories pushed by the then-president and his supporters about voter fraud.
While there is a concern of a second Jan. 6 incident if Trump loses in November among government officials, law enforcement, and anti-extremist groups, Rivas noted that the “infrastructure” of these movements has been whittled by the prosecutions of Jan. 6 insurrectionists – some of whom were armed.
Rivas said the Proud Boys, who Trump infamously told to “stand back and stand by” when asked to condemn them during a 2020 presidential debate with President Joe Biden, are “very much opportunistic at this moment,” but pointed out that they “haven’t mobilized” like they did in previous years.
“They haven’t sort of mobilized in the same ways. We don’t see the same kinds of things that happened in advance, like Charlottesville,” said Rivas, in reference to a mob of white men marching in Virginia that led to a deadly brawl. She added, “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have our eyes open.”
Over two weekends this month in Tennessee, members of the white supremacist group, Patriot Front, marched on the streets of downtown Nashville wearing white cloths and sunglasses on their heads. The mob of white men carried Nazi flags and wore shirts that read: “Whites against replacement.”
As Election Day nears, elected officials have vowed to protect election systems, particularly as concerns grow about safety for voters and election workers as the Trump campaign vowed to deploy tens of thousands of volunteers to “monitor” voting poll stations in November.
A report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that a majority of election officials share concerns about physical safety and harassment. The Black mother-daughter duo, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, faced death threats after former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani pushed conspiracy theories about them rigging the 2020 election against Trump in Atlanta. In December, they were awarded $148 million in a lawsuit against Giuliani.
“We’ve got to, for sure, give localities the resources they need to make sure that polling places are safe,” said Markus Batchelor, national political director at People For the American Way. “These hallmarks of political violence, whether it was the current assassination attempt on President Trump, or whether it was Jan. 6, or whether it was two Black women in Georgia being intimidated because of their role – all of these have an impact.”
Protecting Black voters and election workers, which has been a major concern since 2020, is imperative, said Batchelor, who called on elected officials to do what is necessary so that they can “participate and make their voices heard without fear of intimidation or harm.”
Concerns about extremist groups being emboldened by the Trump assassination attempt aside, Batchelor told theGrio that People For the American Way, a progressive advocacy group founded by famed TV producer Norman Lear, hopes it will “spark” a moment for “both sides of these [political] divisions” to use their power to quell tensions.
“It’s going to be important that everybody … really just tries to bring the temperature down,” he urged.
Lt. Gov. Davis told theGrio that there are “underlying problems” in the U.S. that must also be addressed, like the “mental health crisis” and bad actors “having access to firearms.”
“Those are issues that we really need to address that are exacerbating these problems,” he added.