For years, West Coast cities have borne the brunt of violent confrontations between far-right extremists and counterprotesters who come to meet them, reported the Washington Post.
Brawls broke out in Berkeley, Calif.
White-supremacist rallies in Sacramento ended in bloodshed. Violent clashes have become common in Portland, Ore., where gunfire broke out at demonstrations over
the summer. Demonstrators in Olympia, Wash., recently fired weapons into a crowd, wounding at least one person.
Up and down the western United States, protests have
devolved into violent clashes replete with thrown rocks, exploding fireworks
and streams of chemical irritants.
But the nation’s capital — with its strict gun laws
and history of orderly, peaceful protest — has largely avoided these violent
conflicts.
Until now.
Extremism experts who study the far-right warn that
D.C. is on a path to become the next battleground in increasingly violent
confrontations with left-leaning counterdemonstrators.
In the weeks since the 2020 presidential election, a
coalition of loyalists of President Trump, conspiracy theory adherents, white
nationalists, self-proclaimed militia members and other fringe figures
have flocked to the nation’s capital to
support the president’s baseless claims of election fraud. As Trump’s hopes of
reversing the election results have faltered, those who falsely believe the election was stolen or
fraudulent have grown increasingly angry and desperate.
Extremist groups intent on sowing chaos and division
have capitalized on these feelings to recruit members and spread
disinformation, experts say. In online chat groups and forums, political rage
and disbelief metastasizes into calls for violence.
“They feel
Trump won the election and that the country is being stolen from them, so this
is their last chance to save America,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the
Global Project Against Hate and Extremism and the former director of
intelligence at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “They’re a lot angrier now,
and that worries me. It worries me that now they’re deciding if they’re going
to bring guns to the street fight.”
During two weekends of pro-Trump demonstrations in
November and December, violent melees spilled into the streets of downtown
Washington.
Longtime D.C. protesters, many of whom have been
demonstrating since the May police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, have called for D.C.
residents and supporters to join them to stand against groups they see as an
existential threat. Both times, they have been outnumbered.
“D.C. is not exactly a Proud Boy-friendly city,”
said Eric Feinberg, who monitors online activity from extremist groups as vice
president of content moderation at Coalition for a Safer Web. “Activists are in
a more defensive position here. They see it as protecting their turf. But what
happens is then you get these other groups like the Proud Boys that want to
cause violence, and they know that if they come to D.C. they’ll be confronted
by these left-wing activists — that’s where it gets dangerous.”
On Wednesday, Trump’s supporters and a litany of
far-right groups who believe the president’s baseless claims of voter
fraud will again converge in D.C. to demand
that Congress overturn the results of the
election. That same day, Congress is set to convene to certify electoral
college votes, declaring President-elect Joe Biden the winner.
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