Wired published a good piece this week, warning that in response to the Charlie Kirk news, you’re starting to see a reemergence of the street right in the US. It spotted some factual trends that are worth seeing: fundraising by the far-right National Network to relaunch the Nick Fuentes street movement, similar moves by the Texas Nationalist Network, the relaunch of the Proud Boys in Ohop and (again) Texas, the reappearance of former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio (pictured, more on him below), and of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, who has been telling the press he’ll relaunch the Oath Keppers. Wired’s reporting explains, “Rhodes added that he was already in the process of preparing a written proposal for the Trump administration about how it could activate militias across the country.”
Here, I wanted to put that piece in context for friends, who are smarting after we’ve seen similar developments in London, but might not grasp how much this news increases the risk of something even worse happening in the US.
The story of Trump’s first term should be familiar so I’ll run through it quickly. He had a slowly-deepening alliance between his regime and the far-right street militia. That faction of the right had an ally in the regime: Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist. The relationship with Trump challenged by events at Charlottesville in August 2017, when a crowd wearing fascist symbols, chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” Trump tried to both-sides the events, was criticised in the press and by Republicans and eventually folded, dismissing Bannon. Following that setback, for two years, Trump was largely silent in relation to the milita. Then, in Trump’s fourth year, he began systematically courting the street right. He treated them as one instrument he could use to secure his own re-election. He magnified their claims that the US was being infiltrated by a vast horde of black-clad “antifa” responsible for forest fires and other imaginary acts of domestic terrorism. He defended individual supporters of the far right such as Kyle Rittenhouse, who had attended militia events, was hostile to Black Lives matter and was acquitted of two murders and one attempted killing of anti-fascists. Trump also backed the QAnon conspiracy theory, which presented his Democratic opponents as Satan-worshiping and child-abducting rapists. We know how that period ended; on January 6, 2021, Trump instructed his supporters to march on Capitol Hill, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 election. Such fascist militia as Patriot Front, the Proud Boys, the Oath-keepers, and the Minutemen all participated in that action.
Coming forwards to the present, Trump has signalled that he is still on searching for a street army. He continues to make overtures to the same elements of the right as in 2020-1. To the discomfort of JD Vance, the President pardoned all of those sentenced for taking part in the storming of the Capitol, even Daniel Rodriguez who received 12 years for plunging an electro-shock weapon into an officer’s neck, or Ronald McAbee who hit a cop with a knuckleduster. His regime is negotiating a $5 million payout for QAnon conspiracy spreader Ashli Babbitt who was shot while trying to scale the Capitol. In May 2025, one of the lieutenants of that fascist street movement, Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys (him again), who had been sentenced for 22 years for his involvement in the Capitol attach, was dining at Trump’s resort at Mar-a-Lago. Trump recognised him and they spoke for about ten minutes. Tarrio said he thanked the President for his pardon, and Trump replied: “I love you guys.”
Undoubtedly, Trump wants to have a militia and sees the street movement as a potential power of his own, something that can be used to purge the judges or Republican lawmakers, or to prepare a second January 6 should it be necessary for him to try that same tactic again. Trump has said repeatedly that he is seeking a third term; but if he is stand again he would have to find a way round the 22nd Amendment which is both unambiguous (“No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice…”) and widely known. He would need to employ the open threat of violence as a means of overcoming any conventional resistance, whether from Republican lawmakers or from the courts.
Yet the street far right in the United States has been - through most of 2025 - at a much lower ebb than it was in 2017 during Charlottesville, or 2019, when groups such as the Proud Boys and Three Percenters attempted to take back Portland, or in than it was in 2020, when the right mobilised against the Covid lockdowns and against Black Lives Matter, and there was a busy, active, street right which was building towards the events of 6 January.
Enrique Tarrio had made himself an unpopular figure within the Proud Boys; he spent some time trying to reinvent himself as a potential figure of the right-wing mainstream, with liberal journalists eager to boost his self-representation as a remade man. He turned away from politics to business – launching a phone app “Iceraid,” which rewards racists who make allegations of immigration breaches by paying them in units of cryptocurrency. That’s why it’s so significant to see him – after Kirk’s killing – now talking of going back to the street.
From the point of view of making a more authoritarian state, Trump has been doing very little during his second term to cultivate the street right: he hasn't been amplifying their voices to the same level he was, he's been fighting other battles - making executive orders - and some of his struggles (eg over tariffs) he's been waging unsuccesfully. He’s been missing an opportunity to deepen his control of society.
Why should any of this matter? After all, Trump controls ICE, enough federal troops so that he could invade LA and DC. Why should he need a street movement?
I’d put it like this - Trump hasn’t yet won the battle for control of popular opinion. He hasn’t employed enough violence at home to cow his own people. He had a vision of society as something united by him – against all possible return of class struggle. The scale he is working on now is larger than his first term. His desire is to make the workers’ movement seem impossible weak, its victories unimaginable. And to do the same to liberal democracy. To acheive all that, Trump needs to swamp class identification entirely in a series of other signifiers: the white race, the united nation. To succeed in that historic task requires great, purging, acts of violence against class fighters. He needs to leave his enemies fearful, broken, sobbing. It is much easier to achieve that task if you have an army independent of you, above legal scrutiny, willing to go further than he ever could.
Usually, at this point in the argument, people start talking about the 30s and fascism. A more recent comparison would be with another of those far-right governments which are likewise poised at a late stage before the abolition of democracy – I’m thinking of the BJP government in India. That regime came to power through acts of violence and through the collective failure to Indian society to restrain even mass killing: the 1990 chariot procession through India to create a temple at Ayodhya, the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, the further anti-Muslim riots a decade later in Gujarat which were overseen by the country’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The RSS, the ideological body which was set up in the 1925 in the same moment as fascism and with a similar project of creating a reborn Hindu nation, was the body which carried out many of those purges. It and the BJP waged this violence on society successfully, and subjugated opposition which is united by shame and weakness. Up to this point, it has been a much more successful reactionary force than Trump.
He lacks a counterpart to the white-shirted and ochre-scarfed Bajrang Dal, which boasts of having hundreds of thousands of bladed weapons to its supporters, and claims a national membership of more than a million people. He does not have a cadre of supporters who regularly close Muslim or Christian religious sites, pillage buildings, conduct attacks – including murders – on imams or pastors accused of making converts, kill priests. He does not have an equivalent of the Hindu Yiva Hahini militia, founded in 2002, which attacks Muslim sites and whose founder Yogi Adityanath has been the BJP’s Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh since 2017. The BJP has all these things and yet even it respects, so far, the boundary line of dictatorship
Compared to that model, compared even to his own first term, by failing to cultivate a movement of street allies. Trump has wasted time by neglecting this potential source of authoritarian power. The danger is that the street itself might just have reawoken.
Chilling piece. As you remark at the end, it remains to be seen how all of these things will play out, especially in the wake of Kirk's death. Perhaps the street violence will reemerge. We'll all have to see and then plan and act accordingly in terms of appropriate resistance. These next few months should be interesting (sigh).
"To the discomfort of JD Vance, the President pardoned all of those sentenced for taking part in the storming of the Capitol, even Daniel Rodriguez ..."
There doesn't seem to be anything suggesting Vance was displeased with the move. On the contrary, I think the move was to Vance's delight (and perhaps urging). Let Orange make the actual crazy move. He and the regime benefit ..."
In an interview a day or two before, he spewed his smarmy, "Of course those convicted of violent blah, blah won't be blah, blah..." Because he kind of had to at that point. But "Of course" is one of his verbal tics, when he's twisting reality to justify the unthinkable.