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Different groups unite

Belew divided the people who forced their way into the Capitol on January 6 into three broad groups:

First, there were what she called the garden variety President Trump faithful the MAGA stop the steal ralliers. A lot of those people, she said, were there simply to demonstrate their support for Donald Trump to exercise their right of assembly and free speech and to peaceably demonstrate.

Second, there were the far-right conspiracy theorists who follow the QAnon movement. These people have been recently radicalized, said Belew, most of them being only one or two years into radical activity. QAnon, as a whole, represents a somewhat new phenomenon in many ways.

The third strand of this crowd, she said, is one that poses a substantial threat to democratic institutions and to the nation as a whole, and that is the organized white power movement, which comprises several different groups. We know that many of these groups preplanned their attack. We also know that they made a deliberate plan to work together. There was communication about setting aside group differences and banding together to deliberately attack the workings of democracy.

Belew stressed that the behavior witnessed on January 6 is not new. Its part of a movement thats been in our public life since the late 1970s. It's a movement that is well organized, includes people in every region of the country, and in all ways but race is quite diverse and opportunistic, willing to incorporate a broad array of people and beliefs, bringing them together through this shared sense of emergency.

Its also a movement that has already carried out mass casualty attacks, most notably the 1995 attack on a federal building in Oklahama City that killed 168 people, including nineteen children. The attack was perpetrated by extremists Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran, but Belew said its wrong to attribute the atrocity to a few bad apples or lone wolves. The attack was the culmination of decades of organizing. The movement that carried it out, the white power movement, brought together a bunch of different currents of activity. It united Klansmen, neo Nazis, radical tax resistors, and later on skinheads and parts of the militia movement. Worryingly, said Belew, this kind of collaboration within the white power movement could also be seen on January 6.

The next event in the Conversations on Democracy series will be on April 13, when US Senator Susan Collins (R) will talk about The State of Our Democracy and Political System.

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Conversations on Democracy: White Power and the Capitol Riots - Bowdoin News