Far-Right Groups Are Splintering in Wake of the
Capitol Riot
The breakdown of larger organizations sets the stage
for small groups or lone offenders, who are more difficult to track.
Neil MacFarquhar
By Neil
MacFarquhar
March 1,
2021, 7:19 p.m. ET
Just eight
weeks after the Capitol riot, some of the most prominent groups that
participated are fracturing amid a torrent of backbiting and finger-pointing.
The fallout will determine the future of some of the most high-profile
far-right organizations and raises the specter of splinter groups that could
make the movement even more dangerous.
“This group
needs new leadership and a new direction,” the St. Louis branch of the Proud
Boys announced recently on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, echoing
denunciations by at least six other chapters also rupturing with the national
organization. “The fame we’ve attained hasn’t been worth it.”
Similar
rifts have emerged in the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary group that recruits
veterans, and the Groyper Army, a white nationalist organization focused on
college campuses and a vocal proponent of the false claim that Donald J. Trump
won the 2020 presidential election.
The
shake-up is driven in part by the large number of arrests in the aftermath of
the Capitol riot and the subsequent crackdown on some groups by law
enforcement. As some members of the far right exit more established groups and
strike out on their own, it may become even more difficult to track extremists
who have become more emboldened to carry out violent attacks.
“What you
are seeing right now is a regrouping phase,” said Devin Burghart, who runs the
Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a Seattle-based center
that monitors far-right movements. “They are trying to reassess their
strengths, trying to find new foot soldiers and trying to prepare for the next
conflict.”
The top
leaders of the Groyper Army, Nick Fuentes and Patrick Casey, have been in a
bitter public dispute in the weeks since the riot. Mr. Casey accused Mr.
Fuentes of putting followers at risk of arrest by continuing high-profile
activities. Mr. Fuentes wrote on Telegram, “It’s not easy but it is important
to keep pushing forward now more than ever.”
Among the
Proud Boys, a far-right fight club that claims to defend the values of Western
civilization, the recriminations were compounded by revelations that Enrique
Tarrio, the organization’s leader, once worked as an informant for law
enforcement. Despite denials from Mr. Tarrio, the news has thrown the
organization’s future into question.
“We reject
and disavow the proven federal informant, Enrique Tarrio, and any and all
chapters that choose to associate with him,” the Alabama chapter of the Proud
Boys announced on Telegram using language identical to other chapters.
After the
Capitol siege on Jan. 6, accusations about informants and undercover agents
have been particularly pointed. “Traitors are everywhere, everywhere,” wrote
one participant on a far-right Telegram channel.
The
chapters breaking away accused Mr. Tarrio of leading the group astray with
high-profile clashes with far-left demonstrators and by storming the Capitol.
“The Proud
Boys were founded to provide brotherhood to men on the right, not to yell
slogans at the sky” and “get arrested,” the St. Louis chapter said in its
announcement.
Extremist
organizations tend to experience internal upheaval after any cataclysmic event,
as seen in the case of the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Va., that left one
woman dead, or the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which killed 168 people,
including 19 children.
Daryl
Johnson, who has studied the Three Percenters and other paramilitary groups,
said the current infighting could lead to further hardening and radicalization.
“When these groups get disrupted by law enforcement, all it does is scatter the
rats,” he said. “It does not get rid of the rodent problem.”
President
Biden has pledged to make fighting extremism a priority and Merrick B. Garland,
his nominee for attorney general, said during his Senate confirmation hearings
that he promised to “do everything in the power of the Justice Department” to
stop domestic terrorism. Mr. Garland, the lead prosecutor in the Oklahoma City
bombing case, also said the United States was facing “a more dangerous period
than we faced in Oklahoma City” or in recent memory.
More than
300 people have been charged in the Capitol riot, with roughly 500 total cases
expected. At least 26 people facing some of the most serious accusations have
been tied to the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys.
Most of
those in the crowd were probably unaffiliated with a particular group yet
radicalized enough to show up in Washington to support Mr. Trump’s false
election claim, experts said, feeding concerns about how they will channel
their anger going forward. The legal fallout from the riot will most likely
push people underground as well. Over all, the hazy affiliations and the
potential for lone offenders will make it more difficult to uncover planned
attacks.
Already,
there has been chatter among members of paramilitary groups that stormed the
Capitol about trying to attack it while the president addresses a joint session
of Congress, Yogananda D. Pittman, the acting chief of the Capitol Police, told
a House subcommittee last week.
But even as
some extremist groups push for more confrontation, all kinds of adherents want
out.
The
president of the North Carolina chapter of the Oath Keepers, Doug Smith,
announced last month that he was splitting from the national organization.
Mr. Smith
did not respond to messages seeking comment, but he told The News Reporter, his
local newspaper in Whiteville, N.C., that he was ashamed by demonstrators who
attacked the Capitol and beat police officers.
For others,
however, the riot was a resounding success, an opening shot across the bows of
the law and the establishment.
“There is a
small segment that is going to see this as Lexington and Concord, the shot
heard around the world, and the beginning of either the racial holy war or the
fall of our society, of our government,” said Tom O’Connor, a retired F.B.I.
counterterrorism specialist who continues to train agents on the subject.
Far-right
groups are already rallying around opposition to proposed changes to
immigration policy and the discussion of stricter gun control under Mr. Biden’s
administration.
The number
of people inclined toward violence is impossible to count, but experts agree
that harsh political divisions have expanded the potential pool on both right
and left fringes.
The
splintering of larger organizations sets the stage for small groups or lone
offenders, who are more difficult to track. “That makes them more dangerous,”
said J.J. MacNab, an expert on paramilitary groups at George Washington
University’s Program on Extremism.
Timothy
McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, did not join a
paramilitary group but still adopted the violent ideology.
“The
rhetoric is fuel to the fire for those lone offenders,” said Mr. O’Connor,
echoing a common worry. “My concern now is that there are many McVeighs in the
offing.”
Experts cite
a variety of reasons for why the propensity toward violence might be worse now
than during previous times when far-right organizations declared war on the
government.
The
Oklahoma City attack caused a period of retreat, but the election of a Black
president in 2008 resurrected the white supremacy movement. These groups have
now experienced some 13 years without any sustained effort by law enforcement
to counter them, experts said.
Some groups
that organized the far-right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 fell apart over
the subsequent internal squabbling and a lawsuit that threatens to bankrupt
them. Others, including the Proud Boys and various paramilitary organizations,
grew larger and went on to participate in the Jan. 6 riot.
The number of people inclined toward violence is
impossible to count, but experts agree that harsh political divisions have
expanded the potential pool on both right and left fringes.
At the same
time, extremist ideology has spread farther and much more rapidly on social
media, and foreign governments like Russia have worked actively to disseminate
such thoughts to sow divisions within the United States.
New threats
and concerns about potential targets continue to surface. The announcement in
early February that hackers attempted to poison the water supply in a small
Florida city attracted the attention of Rinaldo Nazzaro, the founder of a
violent white supremacist group called the Base.
Seven
members of the Base in three states were rounded up last year on charges of planning
to commit murder, kidnapping and other violence in order to ignite a wider
civil war that would allow a white homeland to emerge.
Mr.
Nazzaro, out of the reach of U.S. law enforcement in Russia, wrote on Telegram
that the water poisoning plot was a possible template for something larger.
The kind of
extremists who worry experts the most emerged in October, when a paramilitary
cell planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan was exposed.
In federal
court in January, the F.B.I. portrayed one of the 14 defendants, Barry G. Croft
Jr., 44, as a national leader of the Three Percenters, a loosely allied
coalition of paramilitary groups that is difficult to track because virtually
anyone can claim allegiance.
Mr. Croft
helped to build and test shrapnel bombs to target people, according to court documents,
and a hit list that he posted on Facebook included threats to Mr. Trump and
Barack Obama.
In denying
him bail, Judge Sally J. Berens quoted from transcripts of conversations taped
by an informant in which he threatened to hurt people or to blow things up. “I
am going to do some of the most nasty, disgusting things that you have ever
read about in the history of your life,” the judge quoted him as saying.
Ben Decker
contributed reporting.
Neil
MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he
was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. He
spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as
Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region. @NeilMacFarquhar
.jpg)
.jpg)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário