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Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, you probably considered January’s final three weeks to be of a rather dystopian nature. To some, the dystopia was when Trump supporters, disputing valid election results, forced their way into the country’s capitol in an open symbol of democracy’s decline. To others, the response from the powers that be is the truly dreadful stuff.

There’s something to fear in both, of course. (And no, I’m not some centrist dead-ender who insists on reducing everything to “both sides”). But to be honest with you:

As poorly as the DC riot portends for our future, the response is arguably more ominous. Scary as mobs may be, a look at institutional power describes a different threat to democratic society—and that threat is much less obvious. I do not expect all of you to agree with me, and that’s fine. Feel welcome to email me your disagreements—I would be happy to discuss with you, and would be willing to post your arguments on this blog if you wished.

But even if your position does not reverse, I’d be happy enough making you a little more skeptical. So I would like to start with something that I believe should raise alarm bells for just about anyone:

Some media red flags

It is completely understandable (actually, reasonable) to freak out about the dangers posed by the far right. Take a minute, however, and consider some basic things about the current moment:

Damn near every liberal media outlet (center and left-of-center) is united around a single, coherent narrative: that we are facing an extraordinarily dangerous, domestic terror threat from Trump supporters (particularly white identity extremists). Whenever the mainstream media suddenly pushes a single narrative, I feel uneasy. Everyone should. It doesn’t necessarily mean the narrative is baseless, but it should at least prompt second thoughts.

It’s easy to see a couple headlines in passing and claim to find a big media narrative. So to illustrate my point, here’s a brief sampling of what was published in a 48-hour span between January 18th and 19th:

  • Increasingly militant ‘Parler refugees’ and anxious Qanon adherents prep for doomsday. (NBC)
  • Investigators eye right-wing militias at capitol riot. (New York Times)
  • At Least 13 Off-Duty Police Officers Suspected Of Having Taken Part In Capitol Riot. (NPR)
  • “We’re coming for you”: New videos provide inside look at U.S. Capitol riot. (CBS)
  • The Capitol riot wasn’t a fringe ‘uprising’. It was enabled by very deep pockets. (The Guardian)
  • Police command structure crumbled fast during Capitol riot. (AP)
  • ‘Everyone Thinks I’m a Terrorist’: Capitol Riot Fuels Calls for Domestic War on Terror. (Time)
    • This one at least tackles the issue more fairly.
  • Armed groups from Capitol riot pose longer-term threat to Biden presidency. (The Conversation)
  • How law enforcement and internet detectives are identifying the Capitol rioters. (Vox)
    • (I cheated a little bit. That’s the subheading).
  • In fortified Washington, residents wonder whether Capitol riot was a one-off or omen of worse to come. (CBC)
  • Donald Trump’s Disorganized Brand of Terrorism. (Slate)
  • This is white supremacist domestic terrorism. We’ve been here before. (The Washington Post)
  • Why it’s important to call the Capitol attacks ‘domestic terrorism.’ (Philadelphia Inquirer)
  • White supremacy fueled the Capitol Hill riot. Take it seriously. (Houston Chronicle)
  • FBI Gave D.C. Bureau’s Domestic Terrorism Response ‘Failing Grade’ Years Before Capitol Riot. (Daily Beast)
  • Can U.S. Spy Agencies Stop White Terror? (Daily Beast)
  • Washington Must Treat White Supremacist Terrorism as a Transnational Threat. (Foreign Policy)
  • The assault on the US Capitol opens a new chapter in domestic terrorism. (Brookings Institute)

Remember, that’s just a window of 2 days, not a selection from the course of even a week of news, and there’s more from that time period that I left out for length. The list does not, save for the Vox article, include the litany of coverage of FBI arrests. The narrative comes from nationally mainstream outlets, established regional outlets, and outlets influential among policy-makers (the latter two being good examples).

You might argue that, while there is indeed a coherent narrative in the mainstream press, it’s not an incorrect narrative. But that begs some basic questions:

  • Is it possible that mainstream media outlets would hype up domestic threats because fear sells?
  • Is it possible for large media outlets to be wrong?
  • Is it possible that the mainstream media acts in coordination with, or subservience to, the ruling class?
  • Has the mainstream media ever been wrong about the threat of terrorism before? Within the last two decades, even?
  • Is it really so hard to believe that these questions could be worth asking now? Has the mainstream media earned your trust solely for this particularly tense moment?

I’ll concede: that’s all good for suspicion, not automatic dismissal. But it’s not just the angle that the DC riot was really bad. Many of the opinions that are in vogue this month are downright authoritarian. At times, it feels like this is a 9/11 moment just for liberals. Does that comparison sound extreme to you?

It shouldn’t, because I’m hardly alone in making that comparison: plenty of pundits and politicians are making the connection themselves.

  • Congress United After 9/11, but 1/6 Has Deepened the Divide. (New York Times)
  • Stephen Colbert found Capitol riots more upsetting than 9/11: ‘No Americans were cheering for the terrorists back then’. (The Independent)
  • NY state Sen. John Liu sparks outrage with tweet calling Capitol siege scarier than 9/11. (New York Post)
  • Calls grow for 9/11-style panel to probe Capitol attack. (The Hill)
  • Everything Is Different Now. (The Atlantic)
    • The subheading: The U.S. Capitol did not fall the way the Twin Towers did, but the American idea it embodies was brutalized. We must remember 1/6 the way we remember 9/11.

Just to keep my position clear, I don’t think this is exactly a post-9/11 moment. This time there is more public resistance to further anti-terror laws (ie., the Squad) and open skepticism from one of our two major parties. Plus, it’s not clear to me that there will necessarily be a landmark piece of legislation passed, because the government already has a lot of the powers it wants anyway.

Nonetheless, there are still similarities to the post-9/11 era, and because we still live with the post-9/11 security framework, that is cause enough for worry. In the heat of the moment, the general message from the top is that society needs more policing on several fronts from already-powerful institutions. Just look for the basic “moral of the story” in the headlines you see.

For example, this NBC article:

Oh dear. This whole calamity would’ve been averted, if our domestic intelligence agencies didn’t have to worry about free speech! Darn.

Or consider the argument made in this Washington Post article, which was published a month before the DC riot, entitled, The risk of right-wing terrorism is rising dramatically:

To be clear, I’m not saying a substantial portion of Republicans will decide in January that politics has failed them once and for all and the only way to achieve their ends is through terrorism. But it won’t take a substantial portion. If just 1 in 100,000 of the people who voted for Trump came to that conclusion, you’d have an army of 740 domestic terrorists. How much death and chaos could they cause with a campaign of bombings and mass shootings?

That makes a lot of sense right? It’s a pretty convincing, and frightening argument. It’s more frightening than realistic, though:

Similar arguments were frequently made for the War on Terror. The world has over a billion Muslims, so even if the vast majority of them are peaceful, if just 1% of Muslims decided to take up arms (or so the argument went), then we’d have millions of terrorists to worry about. Much post-9/11 mischaracterizing of Islam rests on the poor citation of opinion polls to paint the group as highly tolerant of terrorism. Such arguments regularly feature some amount of over-extrapolated math to make you fear large numbers of hypothetical insurgents.

And like that rhetorical line from the War on Terror, the hypothetical threat didn’t really materialize. That article was written weeks before the Capitol riot, in anticipation of something happening. What did the potential army of 740 domestic terrorists do when game time came? They delayed Congress’ certification of the votes by just a few hours and didn’t even have a coherent plan for changing who holds office. Even a failed coup would’ve managed to delay things at least a day.

Most mainstream media content about domestic right wing extremism has a kernel of truth, but only a kernel. That was true before the DC riot, and it’s ticked up a lot since. A good recent example: leading up to Biden’s inauguration, there was nonstop coverage about the prospect of future violence. The FBI picked up “online chatter” on forums that called for armed protests across the country, and news outlets ran with the story, without ever asking the basic question of how serious of a threat it might actually be. Which led to a bunch of coverage like this:

  • States Brace for Armed Protests in Wake of U.S. Capitol Attack. (New York Times)
  • FBI warns ‘armed protests’ being planned at all 50 state capitols and in Washington DC. (CNN)
  • FBI memo warns law enforcement across U.S. of possible armed protests at 50 state capitols. (NBC)
  • ‘A Real Nightmare.’ State Capitols Are Racing to Catch Up to the Far-Right Threat. (Time)
  • State Capitols Become Targets of Pro-Trump Attacks. (Bloomberg)
  • Threat of violence in state capitals leaves the nation on edge. (PBS)
  • State Capitols Are Bracing For Violent Attacks By Pro-Trump Mobs. (Buzzfeed)
  • How State Capitals Are Bracing for Possible Violence Ahead of Biden’s Inauguration. (Mother Jones)

That sounds terrifying. This coverage made it seem like there was a pressing threat growing under our noses, and suddenly dozens of state capitol buildings would be under siege; that there would be direct betrayals from sleeper cell Nazis in law enforcement and the National Guard.

Of course, when we got to Inauguration Day, something kind of funny happened:

Pictured: A lone protestor commits a vile act of terror in front of Missouri’s capitol. Source: US News & World Report.

Nothing.

Here is where you get to argue that the reason nothing happened is that we had beefed up our security to the max. 4x as many US troops were occupying DC than there are in Iraq and Afghanistan: who would try to commit an act of terror there?

And that coincidentally is the same argument for why we still have the TSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and a few foreign wars. It’s the reason why we may not see the end to any of those things any time soon; because ‘nothing happened‘ is proof that ‘our precautions worked.’ We can already see the logical extension of that approach: now the National Guard will remain deployed in DC until March, to make sure Trump’s impeachment trial (which is bound to fail) has no attendant violence.

Catching the terrorists

Don’t fool yourself into thinking the security state is totally complacent about all this. According to two professors of criminal justice writing for The Conversation:

A growing body of evidence shows the large amount of data some companies have been collecting from social media and other publicly available sources, as well as from CCTV systems in public spaces around the globe. Law enforcement agencies can simply purchase the services of these companies.

Social media companies are assisting law enforcement in accessing content that may be useful to locate and prosecute specific individuals.

The vast majority of participants in the Capitol unrest carried mobile devices with them and had them powered on, which makes it possible for law enforcement agencies to determine the movements of the cellphone’s owner. Even if users have location services, cellular data and Wi-Fi disabled, law enforcement has access to technology that can determine the location of a device at a specified time.

Law enforcement has already arrested and charged many people. Some of those charges are serious. They sound scary. It makes you happy that real threats to the peace are going to be put away. For example, US prosecutors have claimed that at least two DC rioters planned to capture and even assassinate lawmakers. That’s a pretty serious attempt at political terrorism. There was only one problem:

Lack of evidence.

From the Washington Examiner: The words and actions of “Qanon Shaman” Jacob Chansley (the idiot with the bull horns), a U.S. attorney argued in a detention memo, “supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials.”

But the U.S.’ top attorney, Michael Sherwin, said (emphasis mine):

“In terms of complex cases, looking for these organized groups, I think I’ve stated this before, you know, we have specialized prosecutors here working with specialized counterterrorism investigators looking at these type of organizations for these most egregious acts, but right now, again, we don’t have any direct evidence of kill-capture teams.”

Meanwhile, another prosecutor argued that Larry Brock, who was seen near Nancy Pelosi’s office carrying zip-ties, not only had a plan to capture lawmakers, but ought to be detained because his experience as a combat veteran made him a threat. But that was basically conjecture:

[…] the Associated Press noted that the prosecutor “did not detail a specific plan by Brock” and that Brock’s lawyer “asked an FBI agent who was testifying whether it was possible Brock had just picked up the cuffs, and the agent acknowledged that was a possibility.”

Now, you might say that this is all ridiculous. Why else would you have zip ties? These people clearly are nut jobs who would’ve been happy to harm lawmakers.

That’s wrong: they’re clearly nut jobs who might have been happy to harm lawmakers. The difference may sound silly to you, but it’s a pretty essential one to a nation with civil liberties. You’re innocent until proven guilty. Prosecutors can always make you look guilty with circumstantial evidence. Surprising as it may be, this happens all the time in the world’s biggest jailer.

This point is also worth emphasizing because many, in the process of cheering on federal prosecutions, take everything the federal government asserts as proof of a serious terror threat. But the FBI and other agencies have a poor track record here. In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report claiming that most high-profile terror plots since 9/11 had featured the direct involvement of government agents. Some of that involvement blurred the lines between normal sting operations and simply creating problems out of thin air to justify the Bureau’s operations.

From The Guardian‘s synopsis of the report (emphasis mine):

About 30% of post-9/11 terrorism cases are considered sting operations in which informants played an “active role” in incubating plots leading to arrest, according to studies cited in the Human Rights Watch report.

“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.

Out of the 494 cases related to terrorism the US has tried since 9/11, the plurality of convictions – 18% overall – are not for thwarted plots but for “material support” charges, a broad category expanded further by the 2001 Patriot Act that permits prosecutors to pursue charges with tenuous connections to a terrorist act or group.

In one such incident, the initial basis for a material-support case alleging a man provided “military gear” to al-Qaida turned out to be waterproof socks in his luggage.

Maybe that’s all over now. Maybe that stopped. But I wouldn’t be so sure, because about a week ago, news dropped that the leader of the Proud Boys was a “prolific” informant to law enforcement, including the FBI. One basic take is that law enforcement loves the Proud Boys and the Proud Boys love law enforcement back—that was a big theme in the initial criticism of the DC police’s response, and it’s merited. Another possibility is that the FBI, through a vast network of informants and other legal powers, simply has a foot in every door that could one day lead to a terror threat for the Bureau to “prevent.” I’ll avoid speculating too much, but the point is that no reading of that news should allow one to feel comfortable with the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

So when you see breathless coverage about how all these dastardly would-be terrorists have been apprehended by the FBI, it’s worth taking it with a grain of salt.

At least for now though, it’s all fun and games. The FBI is just arresting people who want to overturn the results of a democratic election, and were stupid enough to make themselves easily identifiable when trespassing on the nation’s capitol. But the state and large corporations are unlikely to only ever use their tools against your enemies. If that were the case, we could have a high-minded discussion about principles. But we are so far removed from that situation that we need to be talking first and foremost about tactics.

The War on Terror framework should not be encouraged. It shouldn’t even be ignored; it should be flat out rejected. Because the fact of the matter is that it’s idiocy to think this framework will never come back around to your side. That’s not hypothetical. If you’re anti-establishment, or even generally left-wing, you’re more likely to be the target of counterterrorism than a beneficiary of it.

A recent history of the anti-terror framework keeping you safe

This list could be way longer if we toyed with the term “recent,” but to keep it readable, I’ve decided to start things off around 2011.

In case you missed it, can I repeat one of the bullet points? As early as August 2020, the FBI had already opened hundreds of terror investigations in response to the George Floyd protests. That’s not the 1960s; that just happened. Now ask yourself honestly: will all of this never repeat itself? Will the things listed never occur again? Since January 2021, have we entered a different world in which only the far right will be the target of counter-terrorism efforts?

Or is it more likely that the political and corporate establishment has seen an excuse to broaden its policing powers, and social justice is just the language in which this effort is to be disguised?

If your critique is that the DC police were themselves racist and showed preferential treatment to the MAGA rioters, do you think those problems would not surface in the FBI? Local police are institutionally racist, but the three-letter agency that tried to sabotage the Civil Rights movement has been sufficiently redeemed?

Is Big Tech censorship something to worry about?

In the case of Trump being banned from social media, it’s reasonable to argue that he exceeded the limits of acceptable free speech: incitement to violence is simply not tolerable for a free society. This is all the more the case when a given person is one of the most influential people in the world, and very clearly has a loyal following.

Unfortunately for those who would make this argument in favor of Trump’s account suspensions, he did not technically call for violence. You may feel aggrieved by this point: it might seem like a pretty slim technicality. Trump spent months disputing the election results and whipped up his base to fight for him. He called for them to gather in the first place.

But the technicality does matter. Because if we granted that Trump didn’t technically incite violence but that he did so through subtext, we would have to consider the following as being on similar grounds for incitement:

  • In July, Nancy Pelosi was asked about a crowd toppling a statue of Christopher Columbus in Baltimore. She responded, “People will do what they do.”
  • After a New York Post op-ed entitled “Call Them the 1619 Riots” attributed civil unrest in cities this summer to the New York Times’ 1619 project, 1619 leader Nikole Hannah-Jones said “It would be an honor. Thank you.”
  • There was, in fact, a much-talked-about book released in 2020 titled In Defense of Looting.
  • And while there was a general condemnation of looting in the media, there were also many popular outlets that published pieces that were not exactly negative.
    • 9 Historical Triumphs to Make You Rethink Property Destruction. (Rolling Stone)
    • 9 Times Riots Created Real Change In America. (Bustle)
    • Why Violent Protests Work. (GQ)
    • Riots Aren’t Irrational. (Mother Jones)
    • Proportionate Response: When destroying a police precinct is a reasonable reaction. (Slate)
    • In Defense of Destroying Property. (The Nation)

Allow me to be clear: I do not believe Nancy Pelosi, or any Democratic politician truly incited violence. I think Trump functionally did. And I do not in the slightest view the racial justice protests of this summer to be of equal merit to the DC riot. I believe 2020’s rioting was often directly preceded by police violence, and that the police response was very disproportionate: that police ultimately injured far more people than rioters did. And while I don’t think riots are always effective, I do view some of them as understandable (the burning of the Minneapolis police precinct being a good example). Lastly, I don’t give a shit if a statue of Columbus goes down.

My point is that it doesn’t really matter what I think. What matters are the parameters we define, and the precedents we set. And the parameters we’re setting right now to clamp down on Trump supporters could easily be applied in the other direction.

And in all honesty, while Trump’s social media suspensions have gotten the most attention, they’re the least frightening development in Big Tech’s crackdown. They’re the grayest area, so to speak, because at least there you can argue censoring Trump could prevent future violence in the near term. More notable were the account suspensions of others in the immediate wake of the DC riot:

I’m not mentioning them because I think they’re great people, or because I agree with them. They’re worth noting because the causal link between those accounts and real-world violence simply isn’t concrete. And even those are less worrying than Parler being taken down.

What was that common refrain in favor of content moderation on social media? That it’s okay if big tech companies police speech, because you can freely go to another platform? That was sort of the point of Parler, right? With the most popular social media sites moderating content, Parler was formed as the alternative. It was the attempt at “going somewhere else.” And what happened?

Google, which controls half of the US mobile operating system market, removed it from the Google Play store. Apple, which controls the other half, removed it from the app store. And then Amazon, which holds half the public cloud (and hosts its own competitors, like Netflix), revoked its hosting for Parler.

These monopolies are a lot more frightening. Because even if you can’t build your own public square at Facebook’s scale, at least you can make your own site. But you can’t build your own app store that half the country uses.

Now, there’s absolutely no denying that Parler was a joke, considering its anti-establishment rhetoric. Hell, Parler actually required its users to provide a scan of their driver’s licenses to sign up. As one of the founders of the Pirate Bay put it:

Fair enough. But that’s not an argument against the actions taken by Apple and Google, it’s an argument that Parler was poorly run. And as comical as the Parler saga is, there’s yet another tactical error made in dismissing it:

Is it at all conceivable that a future leftist website or app could be similarly poorly run, and also easily taken down by Big Tech? Do you think a future grassroots movement is guaranteed to have a team of computer experts running an online infrastructure independent of the corporate-owned channels? I haven’t met a zoomer who’s even visited the Pirate Bay, let alone torrented something.

Hell, the biggest protest movement in American history took place last year almost entirely on popular social media websites. What would happen if a movement of a similar size demanded the redistribution of wealth, lacked media support, and had a few violent incidents along the way?

We don’t need to stretch our imaginations much, because just a couple weeks after the DC riot, we had a pretty big example of tech companies censoring a grassroots, anti-establishment movement: the Gamestop revolt. Despite entirely taking place online, it was a rare example of protest that actually challenged power. When’s the last time you can remember a bottom-up movement strategically making the wealthiest members of our society lose billions in a matter of days?

And it took very little time for tech companies and financial institutions to respond. Discord, citing hate speech, banned the main server for the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, where this whole thing took off. Robinhood limited trading on Gamestop and AMC. This reasonably prompted thousands of people to leave negative reviews about the app they use violating its most fundamental principle, so Google deleted 100,000+ bad reviews to bump Robinhood’s 1-star rating back to a 4-star rating.

So there you go. Far from taking a decade to prove that tech censorship can come back around to bite the good guys, it took a few weeks.

But there are now many on the left who argue that free speech enables fascism and extremism; that the world we live in must contain stricter limits on what can be said. If you hold that view and have read thus far, let me interrogate that notion:

The “dangers” of free speech

Vanishingly few people actually believe that 100% of speech ought to be legally protected. Even free speech absolutists tend to make a few allowances. The generally-agreed upon limit is that which can directly lead to harm; shouting fire in a crowded building without reason, or actively inciting violence being classic examples. It’s the precise limit of these things that captures the real debate.

But expanding our definitions, and shrinking our outer limits on acceptable free speech will always be fraught. I would like to echo an observation made by Glenn Greenwald:

If you think that you’re edgy for considering free speech laws (and norms) outdated, you shouldn’t feel so smug, because neoconservatives beat you to it a while ago. In 2006, Newt Gingrich argued that the first amendment should be revisited for the War on Terror. The push against civil liberties in the name of fighting extremism was quite a trend around that time, and Gingrich was particularly inspired in this case by an essay by Andrew McCarthy—a columnist for the interventionist National Review, and one of several leading conservative voices.

McCarthy’s argument is curiously similar to that used by many so-called progressives today. Just as how woke Twitter and woke Reddit will claim that far-right speech poses such a threat to democracy that censorship is necessary to preserve democracy, Andrew McCarthy argued the same thing 16 years ago:

Do we so lack confidence (except in the sacrosanct status of speech itself) that we are unable to say with assurance that some things are truly evil, and that advocating them not only fails to serve any socially desirable purpose but guarantees more evil? Must our historical deference to opinion, however noxious, defer as well to a call to arms against innocents, or a call to destroy a form of representative government that protects religious and political freedom?

Source: Andrew McCarthy, writing for Commentary Magazine in 2005

I ask you, sincerely, to consider something: Why does an influential neocon sound like my progressive friends? If I didn’t tell you that this was published by Commentary in 2005, you could reasonably guess it was published in The Atlantic or The New Yorker last week. Might it be that this argument was fear-mongering and dangerous then, and that it still is now?

The arguments in favor of limiting free speech always sound harmless (we just want to limit the “bad speech“). They seldom work as intended, and often end up targeting the least privileged. In the U.S., some of the biggest pushes against free speech have come in the form of limiting criticism of Israel (namely by labeling the BDS movement as antisemitic). One recent example is a South Carolina town that has charged 6 people for hate speech under a new ordinance, of whom 5 are black and 2 are homeless. In Europe, prominent examples of hate speech laws in action include: the prosecution of activists for wearing t-shirts that say “Boycott Israel”; the arrest of a Muslim teenager who insulted troops stationed in Afghanistan; and the shutting down of a popular leftist website advocating the protest of the G20 summit, among other things.

Some would say that free speech allowed fascists in Germany and Italy rise to power. Did it?

It’s a pretty weak argument. Nazis used speech to amass a movement—but they also wore pants. Would Hitler have attracted such support from the populace if he gave speeches pants-less? It’s pretty unlikely. Arguably, Hitler and Mussolini wore pants so that they would be taken seriously. Clearly, there’s a 1 to 1 correlation between fascists and the wearing of pants in public; there is not a single case of fascists seizing power that does not also feature them wearing pants on their way to the top.

You might consider that to be a silly comparison. I disagree, because saying free speech helped the Nazis rise to power is incredibly vague and impossible to prove or disprove. It might be true that speech did, but only insofar as any other universal thing gets used by evil people; this whole line of reasoning quickly gets reduced to petty semantics.

It’s better to be grounded and realistic. So here’s a better question to ask: would speech alone have made the difference absent other circumstances? The answer to that question is pretty clear. Nazis had speech for years and years: no one listened until they became desperate. A massive economic downturn is what multiplied their ranks and got them votes.

And right now, with our economic downturn, are people more vulnerable to joining the ranks of the far-right? Without a doubt, and that’s something very scary. But the solution to this situation—speaking both practically and ethically—is not to preemptively censor and surveil, but to reduce economic hardship.

Do you fear the mob, or your rulers?

I admit, unfair question: you should fear both. And there are times in which one explicitly wants their rulers in place to protect them from mobs. Something-something about the social contract, yadda-yadda. Nonetheless, if you’d made it this far, could you indulge me for another minute?

This whole essay, in the simplest of terms, is really an argument in favor of fearing your rulers more. I contend that the true threat of the far-right mob is not the mob itself, but that it might one day find itself with all the levers of power. That hasn’t been the case so far:

Yes, Trump was president, and there were definitely dangerous ideologues in his administration. But Trump himself isn’t ideological, and his administration was so disorganized it failed to truly achieve the nightmare fascist vision many feared. Most essentially, however, the key levers of power tolerated Trump more than they embraced him.

The intelligence agencies and the higher-ups at the military are not fans of Trump: top officials regularly put roadblocks in his lazy attempts to withdraw from conflicts abroad (including misleading leadership about troop levels), and “unnamed intelligence sources” became the source of news cycle after news cycle—many of which turned out to be not true. Most establishment media outside of Fox despised Trump. Silicon Valley money (from tech workers and billionaires) overwhelmingly went to Biden’s campaign over Trump’s, and 4x as much Wall Street money went to Biden’s campaign as Trump’s.

Understanding these power dynamics does not require you to find the MAGA mob harmless, or to conclude Trump was secretly a good president. But it is important to understand the true dynamic at play because of the fact that it could change.

A more competent and genuinely ideological fascist could be elected, and wield both a long list of domestic terror tools and a long list of legal precedents. Any cultural change could prompt tech companies to redo their math on what should be policed. We could discover the media is more sympathetic to identity issues than class issues; that the “progressivism” seen thus far has been mostly an aesthetic.

We can dissolve the Trump mob without relying on the heavy hands of intelligence agencies or the world’s 5 largest corporations. If the world of tomorrow is dystopian, it’ll be because we mistook our rulers to be our allies.

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