Minneapolis Proves the Far-Right Isn’t Anti-Tyranny

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What happened to the whole “Don’t Tread on Me” crowd?

In the wake of Saturday’s shooting by federal agents in Minnesota, it was striking how quickly so many voices on the right — voices in a movement that have long prized the Second Amendment as the most sacred protection against a tyrannical government and who turned Kyle Rittenhouse into a movement hero after he brought a gun to a “Black Lives Matter” protest in Wisconsin and killed two protesters — turned to criticizing the Saturday victim, Alex Pretti, for carrying a weapon in public or justified the killing simply because Pretti had a gun. “You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It is that simple,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. (Actually, you can! That’s the point of the twisted jurisprudence that the right has pushed over the last four decades.)

The criticism was in line with another major recent rhetorical twist as the Trump administration’s heavy-handed crackdown on immigration has spread nationwide: The MAGA right, which just six years ago criticized Covid vaccine mandates as the first step toward concentration camps, have quickly fallen in line behind ICE and CBP raids — agreeing that Americans should just carry their citizenship documents everywhere and obey law enforcement demands instantly.

In the wake of the shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer, President Trump — who began his presidency by pardoning the 1,600 protestors convicted of federal crimes for their role in January 6th, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, and whose movement has made a martyr of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by Capitol Police after ignoring orders from officers to stop forcing her way toward the US House chamber — brushed off the shooting, saying, “That woman was very, very disrespectful to law enforcement.”

Anyone who didn’t obey law enforcement, like Good, deserved the ICE death penalty, the argument appeared to be.

In a similar vein in recent days, Kristi Noem — who as South Dakota governor rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 over her refusal to issue a statewide mandate to wear face masks — now in her role as DHS secretary proclaimed that Americans should just get used to carrying citizenship documents and showing them as necessary.

At first the series of rhetorical flip-flops may seem nonsensical — as if the world is upside down — but all of them are consistent with decades of evolution of white nationalist ideology and the far-right movement, which isn’t against tyranny per se, just tyranny by the “wrong people”: Democrats, women, or minorities.

In fact, what many have long short-handed as “anti-government extremists,” from Ruby Ridge and Waco to the Bundy showdowns of the Obama years to the crowd that stormed the Michigan State Capitol amid the Covid lockdown, are not actually “anti-government” or even “anti-tyranny.” They are instead simply “extremists,” driven by secondary motives — often threads of white Christian nationalism or white supremacy that date their vision back to texts like the 1978 bible-of-the-fringe Turner Diaries.

And now, looking across the American landscape, those far-right white nationalists feel comfortable flipping their rhetoric because they recognize the Trump administration is doing their business for them. The government is their kind of extremist now.

If Donald Trump’s first term was notable for how right-wing terror and extremism broke into the open, from incidents like the deadly and violent white supremacist march on Charlottesville in its first months to the anti-Covid-lockdown protests in Michigan and Idaho to its closing days, when militia groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys helped lead the January 6th assault on the Capitol, the first year of his second term has been notable for the quiet of the far-right, at least outside of government.

Instead, inside, the government itself has fully embraced the imagery, rhetoric, and policy goals of even the most extreme corners of the far-right. The far-right could not ask for a better “acting president” than Stephen Miller. Many scholars have pointed in shock and surprise at how blatantly the social media of the Trump administration — including, explicitly the ICE and CBP recruiting imagery of DHS — mimics and echoes both white supremacist and Nazi-era propaganda, including using a line from a popular neo-Nazi song celebrating a race war.

Amid such an environment — when ICE and CBP officers are running terror campaigns in major cities against immigrants and minorities out in public — there’s less need for the kind of outside terrorism commonly associated with the far-right. Terrorism scholars noted with surprise how extralegal right-wing violence plunged in 2025; according to a September study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, through July 4, “2025 marks the first time in more than 30 years that left-wing terrorist attacks outnumber those from the violent far right.”

Similarly, long-standing right-wing militia groups have gone quiet or dormant. An August article by The Atlantic asked, “Where have the Proud Boys Gone?” and concluded that there was little need anymore for the militia whose leadership was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” for their role in the January 6^th insurrection at the Capitol. “The group’s ideals are being pursued—but by ICE and the government itself,” the Atlantic wrote.

More recently, there was a brief online controversy sparked by the apparently false — but entirely believable — rumor that Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio had actually joined ICE. Tarrio’s response to the false rumor got at the deeper truth: He wrote online, “I FUCKING WISH I WORKED FOR ICE,” and added “Hire the FUCKING ProudBoys.”

Celebrating the “correct” kind of protester has long been central to far-right ideology and what has coalesced over the last 15 years into the MAGA movement, whether that was the Bundys in 2014 or 2016, or Kyle Rittenhouse, who was at Mar-a-Lago within a week of being acquitted of fatally shooting two people and wounding a third during protests in Wisconsin. In fact, the Republican National Convention in 2020 opened with a celebration of a St. Louis couple who infamously brandished weapons at peaceful Black Lives Matters protesters marching by their home; Mark and Patricia McCloskey, who faced felony charges and later pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, warned of a dark vision of a Democratic-led country where no gun owner would be safe. “[Democrats are] not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether,” Patricia said.

As another example: The attacks on police on January 6th — coming from a crowd that carried “Blue Lives Matter” flags — are easier to understand if you first grasp that the protesters didn’t see the arrayed lines of Capitol Police and D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department as “legitimate” police. The officers, instead, were guardians of a corrupt regime. (The “true” police in far-right circles are folks like the “Constitutional Sheriffs,” as Jessica Pishko has traced.)

Now, though, the ICE officers and CBP agents rampaging through cities like Minneapolis and harassing, assaulting, and arresting minorities who dare to exist in public spaces actually represent “them.” (As Tarrio’s enthusiasm shows there may be a more literal truth to that statement as well: The CBC ran an investigation this week about how ICE was relying on far-right subcultures for its recruitment.)

The events on the streets of Minneapolis — and the broader assault by CBP and ICE on cities across the country — is best understood in far-right ideology as a step toward the “Day of the Rope,” the blood-soaked denouement of the Turner Diaries. As terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman wrote with Jacob Ware, “The modern far-right canon is replete with European tracts such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. But perhaps no book has had so pervasive or sustained an influence over violent far-right extremism in the United States as the dystopian 1978 novel, The Turner Diaries.”

The pseudonymous 1978 book by the neo-Nazi leader William Pierce is part-handbook and how-to-guide and part-white supremacist fan fiction, and has served as a key reference point for many far-right extremists — including, notably, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Great literature it is not. (As Northwestern scholar Kathleen Belew once told me, “Were you to go and read it, you would very quickly discover it is a very bad novel. It's just a very bad novel.”)

The Turner Diaries, told by its eponymous star, looks back at a civil war that begins after a federal government makes firearms illegal. “September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking-and nothing but talking-we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words,” the book begins.

The “Day of the Rope” comes in the novel after white supremacists seize control of California and carry out mass reprisal executions focused against the “race traitors”: “the politicians, the lawyers, the businessmen, the TV newscasters, the newspaper reporters and editors, the judges, the teachers, the school officials, the ‘civic leaders,’ the bureaucrats, the preachers.” Ever since the book, far-right extremists have turned to that episode as the culmination of their vision; on January 6th, as rioters surged into the Capitol, hung nooses nearby, and chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” commenters online on far-right gathering spots like 4Chan and Stormfront celebrated what they thought was the start of the “Day of the Rope.”

While that celebration might have proved premature in 2021, waiting a few years returned an even more extreme Trump administration to power. “Probably the most important idea expressed in The Turner Diaries is that each of us has to stop being a spectator and start being a participant,” Pierce once said.

Now the far-right finds itself not just a participant, but that it’s in the driver’s seat of the US government.

GMG

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