A FEDERATION OF FANTASISTS
Proud neo-Nazis. Gun obsessives. Conspiracy theorists. But the most terrifying thing about the Capitol mob? They’re convinced they’re fighting FOR democracy ... and they’ll never give up
Among the hundreds of Trump supporters – or ‘patriots’ as the President described them – who stormed the US Capitol, one protester was hard to miss. Jake Angeli, an Arizona actor who calls himself the QAnon Shaman, was among the first to be identified following Wednesday’s dramatic scenes.
Sporting a heavily tattooed torso, painted face and a horned buffalo-style furry headdress, Angeli used a megaphone to amplify his message while clutching a spear to which the US flag was tied.
Like other devotees of the far- right, conspiracy theory-driven QAnon movement, he believes Donald Trump is secretly fighting a powerful cabal of ‘deep state’ satanic paedophiles in government, business and the media. Such views are par for the course for many of Trump’s diehard supporters.
But whether they are uniformed neo-nazis, members of the white nationalist Proud Boys, gun-obsessed militia men or just your average ‘make America great Again’ Republicans who – without a shred of evidence – insist Trump has been cheated out of a second term, they all share a single and terrifying belief: that it’s they who are the true guardians of democracy in America.
The left-wing drift of the Democrats has encouraged those who believe Joe Biden’s party has taken an alarmingly undemocratic turn. There is increasing Democratic support for sweeping reforms such as ‘defunding’ the police, or erasing from history anyone even vaguely connected with slavery.
However, there is a more deep-seated explanation for why some Americans feel they can run riot through the nation’s capital, vandalise its temple of democracy, and it had become a sanctuary for still claim to be good citizens. those who fled oppression.
It lies in the fact that President The Pilgrim Fathers, for example, Trump has spent the last four left England in search of religious years persuading them they are freedom. They were suspicious of the victims of a vast conspiracy authority in their new homeland, theory that aims to destroy the and what they saw as heavyhanded standing of the United States. British colonial authority
Americans have long been prone only reinforced that feeling. to such paranoia; even before the This antipathy to being told what US declared independence in 1776, to do fitted perfectly with America’s wide- open geography. The rugged frontier tradition of westward expansion fostered a strong survivalist streak, of which an attachment to guns was the most obvious component.
Courting today’s anti-establishment types won Trump a loyal following – but it has had dire consequences. Take, for example, the President’s repeated contradicting of his scientific advisors on coronavirus – surely a factor in his country’s death toll topping 360,000.
After telling his supporters for weeks that they been cheated out of a 2020 election victory, he urged them on their way to the Capitol on the day mr Biden was to be formally recognised as his successor by Congress. ‘Be there, will be wild!’ he tweeted last month. His followers took him at his word.
They included conservative Christians who are well-represented in the ranks of QAnon. Indeed, this virulent alliance of conspiracy theorists who insist only Trump can save America were a defining presence at the Capitol. Banners and clothing bore the movement’s cryptic slogans – proof
of the dangerous grip it now has on its disciples.
Interest in QAnon, launched in 2017 by an anonymous internet poster calling himself Q, has exploded during the pandemic. ‘Believers’ are awaiting ‘The Storm’, an apocalyptic day of reckoning on which the guilty – including Hillary Clinton – will be punished. Yet they weren’t the most sinister participants in the Capitol invasion.
There were neo- Nazis, including one wearing a sweatshirt bearing the chilling logo ‘Camp Auschwitz’ above an SS badge. Then there were the gun campaigners. Mr Biden wants to rein in their supposedly constitutional right to own ( and preferably carry) ridiculously deadly weapons. Armed right-wing groups frequently turn up at left-wing protests and Black Lives Matter rallies, claiming they are there to protect citizens, property, and free speech.
Many call themselves ‘constitutional militias’ in the belief they have the right to take up arms against an oppressive federal government. Trump has been conspicuous in his failure to condemn the actions of such groups. On the contrary, he’s spent four years convincing a string of militant fringe organisations of varying degrees of nastiness and looniness that he is their president.
This week, as we saw, they answered his call to arms.