Years of white supremacist threats culminated in Capitol riots

Amid the American flags and Trump 2020 posters at the U.S. Capitol during last week’s insurrection were far more sinister symbols: A man walking the halls of Congress carrying a Confederate flag. Banners proclaiming white supremacy and anti-government extremism. A makeshift noose and gallows ominously erected outside.

In many ways this hatefilled display was the culmination of many others over the past few years, including the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., that gathered extremist factions from across the country under a single banner.

“These displays of white supremacy are not new,” said Lecia Brooks, chief of staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “Now it’s just reached a fever pitch.”

Extremist groups, including the pro-Trump, far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters, a loose anti-government network that’s part of the militia movement, were among those descending on the halls of power on Jan. 6.

The hateful imagery included an anti-Semitic “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt created years ago by white supremacists, who sold them on the nowdefunct website Aryanwear, said Aryeh Tuchman, associate director for the AntiDefamation League’s Center on Extremism.

The proliferation of white supremacist symbolism has a long history, with two clear peaks in the civil rights efforts following Reconstruction and during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Brooks said. Now, as the U.S. reckons with systemic racism following the police killing of George Floyd, she said Confederate symbols have been displayed more prominently, including at smaller-scale white supremacist rallies and by counterprotesters carrying Confederate flags at Black Lives Matter gatherings across the country.