Proud Boys and Trump supporters call for violence after assassination attempt

After the assassination attempt on Trump, the extreme right is trying to “strike back,” says a US expert. The Proud Boys are already issuing death threats.

Washington, DC – Immediately after the assassination attempt on the former US President Donald Trumpthere were calls for violence from his supporters at the scene of the attempted murder. According to a reporter from the US portal Axios attempted to attack journalists in the press area of ​​the rally. They are said to have accused the press people of being responsible for the attempted murder. They threatened: “You are next, it will be your turn soon”. Fuelled by conspiracy theories, the extreme right in the USA Now there are concerns about further outbreaks of violence.

“Killing is easy” – Right-wing extremists threaten after Trump assassination attempt

The right-wing extremist propagandist Alex Jones spread all kinds of conspiracy theories about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday on his channels with millions of viewers. For example, that US President Joe Biden had ordered this. A quite obviously completely unfounded claim. Based on this, Jones threatened everyone he thought was behind the attack: “Killing is easy, even at 50 years old I can still kill with my bare hands.”

Also shortly after the attack, leading republicansuch as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, to capture the extremist part of their supporters. Violence has “no place in politics,” McConnell wrote on X. Since Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the storming of the Capitol in 2021, many in the US have feared a renewed outbreak of violence by the radicalized Republican base before or after the US election in November. Other MPs of the party, however, agreed with the conspiracy theories that Democrats were behind the attack on Trump, such as House Representative Majorie Taylor Greene.

Proud Boys want to plunge the USA into civil war – How they are using the assassination attempt on Trump

Even further than Taylor Greene, individual offshoots of the right-wing extremist group Proud Boyswho were significantly involved in the storming of the US Capitol on January 6th and whose ranks have already committed assassinations; in 2017, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was murdered at a demonstration in Charlottesville that was largely organized by the group. The group’s leader at the time subsequently pleaded guilty to deliberately spreading misinformation about the attack. The Proud Boys are one group in a whole spectrum of militant right-wing extremists in the USA. After the attack, calls for violence spread like wildfire within the group via Telegram.

According to an analysis by the US Military Academy West Point, there have been influential players within the Proud Boys for years who have been pursuing the strategy of “militant accelerationism”. This aims to bring about a civil war and thus the overthrow of the state order through acts of violence against political opponents or minorities.

The New York branch of the militia, for example, compared Trump to the Spanish José Calvo Sotelo, whom the fascist propaganda of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain called the “first martyr” of their cause. The murder of Sotelo “triggered” the Spanish Civil War, the right-wing extremists claimed. That is not true, since it was Franco and his allies who overthrew the Spanish Republic because it did not fit into their authoritarian worldview. The Proud Boys’ post can therefore be understood as a veiled threat of civil war against the democratic order of the United States.

Leftists will “reap what they sow” – Proud Boys from Ohio threaten after Trump assassination attempt

In Ohio, the Proud Boys threatened “the left” after the attack, a very flexible term for them, that they would “reap what they sow,” as the group wrote on Telegram. A blatant threat by the militia to carry out assassination attempts against political opponents. A Texas Proud Boys group spread a X-Post claiming that “leftists” are pedophile sex offenders, implying that it is OK to shoot them because of that.

Jon Lewis, extremism researcher at Georgetown University in Washington DC, summed up the tenor of the calls to the US portal Wired “We must fight back” is the slogan of the hour on the extreme right in the USA, from the Proud Boys to the US CongressThe extreme right in the USA is already heavily armed and has been training for years for exactly such attacks on political opponents. (kb)