I’ve long been a fan of two excellent progressive journalists, Rick Perlstein and David Neiwert. So an interview of Neiwert by Perlstein really made my Wednesday even though the topic was one to cause sleepless nights. The interview was published in the latest edition of Perlstein’s “The Infernal Triangle” at The American Prospect, one of the best progressive sites there is, and one that ought to be on everybody’s must-read list.
As many Daily Kos readers know, David was on the paid staff here in the days when funding was ample. Here’s an excerpt from Perlstein’s introduction:
David Neiwert was a 21-year-old newspaper editor in the Idaho Panhandle in 1978 when the Aryan Nation hate group showed up in town. He and his publisher arrived at a fateful decision.
“We decided, ‘Oh, these guys just want publicity and we’re not going to give it to them,’” he said. “Well, within about three years that policy was completely discarded, because what followed was an endless litany of criminality, culminating in ’84 with the rampage of the Order, including bank robberies and assassination.”
It taught him a lesson that has informed his work for almost five decades as America’s most important writer and thinker on far-right violent extremism and its incursions into the conservative “mainstream”: There is no acceptable choice but to shine a light on forces like these.
Here are some excerpts from the interview:
Rick Perlstein: What are the basic outlines of this story no one wants to talk about?
David Neiwert: We’re once again faced with a situation where a substantial bloc of American politics is talking about committing acts of violence and bringing down the government. We saw this before, in 2020, in the run-up to that election and the aftermath. A lot of us held back; obviously, these guys have a long history of blowing off a lot of steam, talking, and wildly exaggerating their actual ability to carry out a threat. But I think we saw on January 6th, that was probably not the wisest view to take. We should have been paying more attention to what these guys were saying amongst themselves online. And what they’re saying amongst themselves right now is probably disturbing. Because they’re talking about shooting their neighbors.
Perlstein: Let’s talk about what exactly we saw before: Was the system blinking red in the run-up to January 6th?
Neiwert: Absolutely. I was trying to warn in my columns that they were really gearing up for violence.
Perlstein: The response of a lot of people to warnings like those is that you’re crying wolf.
Neiwert: Sure. I’m used to that. And that’s the thing: It does come from this contingent that has a track record of just laying out a deluge of bullshit. But it’s getting frantic and ugly enough that we’re getting to the point where I don’t think it’s just hot talk. I suspect that there’s guys involved in militias, particularly with Kamala Harris taking the lead in the polls, running paramilitary training operations. Some of these guys are actually well-trained veterans, some of them with combat experience.
Perlstein: I know, in part from your work, that these things tend to come in waves. Do you tend to see them coming?
Neiwert: To some extent, mostly because I keep a finger on the pulse of what these guys are saying online amongst themselves. But it’s incredibly hard to predict; we’re talking about unstable people, acting out. Except in the case of January 6th, when it wasn’t just that; it was that the unstable people were being ginned up. [...]
Perlstein: And if Harris is inaugurated? Are we in the clear?
Neiwert: No. I think that we’ll have at least a year or two of dedicated domestic terrorism against various government entities, as well as liberal figures, including stepped-up attacks against drag queens. They’ll lean quite heavily into the Christian nationalist authoritarian agenda, against anyone supporting the, um, "demonic liberal agenda" …
Perlstein:Do you think appropriate law enforcement preparations are being made?
Neiwert: No. Nobody even talks about it, Rick. That’s why this is a problem. Nobody is even recognizing that this is building.
To counter this effectively, obviously you want to have the DOJ tuned in and ready, and I’m not sure that they are. Certainly, the FBI has shown itself to be extremely problematic under Christopher Wray in terms of the ongoing presence of dedicated Trumpists within the FBI. That’s the wild card. Law enforcement is our main guardrail for these kinds of things, and we have Trumpist cops working on the local level, we have them working on the state level, and we have them working on the federal level.
I think they actually played a large role in our failure to prosecute these January 6th insurrectionists adequately. Just think about how the Secret Service deleted all their freaking texts. And likewise, the FBI was not particularly forthcoming about their own internal communication regarding Proud Boys and Oath Keepers prior to January 6th, but we know that they were looking entirely in the wrong direction. [...]
Perlstein: Is the media ready?
Neiwert: No. None of them are considering it as a factor. I think it’s amazing that someone like Amanda Moore, who did this incredible undercover work exposing these neo-Nazis’ connections to the Republican Party, she can’t even get an editor to pick up her work. All these editors and all these producers are all like, “That’s not interesting anymore, we don’t care about that stuff.” They are basically dismissing the problem: “We don’t need to keep talking about that sort of thing.” [An honorable exception, as so often, is Talking Points Memo.] [...]
