A long-held wish of the hard right was fulfilled this month when President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard and, later, 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to Los Angeles ostensibly to crack down on people demonstrating against the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The massive demonstration of state power occurred against the objections of state and local officials, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who called the president’s moves “purposefully inflammatory.” But for the hard right, sending the National Guard and Marines into an American city to use their might against social justice activists was a welcome sight after years of attempts to provoke such action under the first Trump administration. Groups such as the Proud Boys, for example, did their best to create combustible situations in cities like Portland, Oregon, to encourage the state to crack down on people they saw as their shared political enemies.
The movement also sees the government’s actions in Los Angeles as retribution — for the imprisonment of people after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, for the Black Lives Matter protest movement in 2020 and, more broadly, for progressives’ support for migrants, the LGBTQ+ community and others the hard right believes tarnish the body politic. Liberal cities and states, they contend, should not be governed democratically by residents, but brought under the heel of Trump’s federal government and forced to obey his movement’s political agenda.
More worrying, the hard right appears to hope that the violence of the last several weeks, whether it comes from the federal government or members of its movement, is a sign of things to come.
‘We are staying here to liberate this city’
The hard right has a complicated relationship with the federal government. When the state’s power comes down on the movement, in the form of policing or criminal prosecutions, it fuels adherents’ conspiratorial beliefs. For decades, segments of the movement have falsely warned that a tyrannical federal government is organizing to disarm the population and impose a “New World Order.”
But the hard right is just as likely to cheer the work of the state when it uses its force against the people the hard right considers its political enemies. The movement was gleeful in 2020, for instance, as it watched law enforcement assault Black Lives Matter protesters. Even members of the so-called “boogaloo bois,” a loose coalition of far-right activists who saw the government as tyrannical and wanted to purposefully push the country toward civil war, could be found praising the police when they cracked down on leftist protests.
No group has tried harder to broker a relationship with law enforcement — and with Trump himself — than the Proud Boys. They endeavored, through a series of rallies they held from 2018 through 2020, to highlight how the city of Portland was supposedly being destroyed by liberal policies and frenzied antifascists, thereby necessitating a show of force from the state. Even though the Proud Boys were themselves creating the conditions for violence, marching into Portland wearing makeshift armor and often carrying weapons, the real threat, the Proud Boys contended, was the counterprotesters who opposed them.
The group framed its rallies as a challenge to city officials.
“The path forward for [then-Portland] Mayor [Ted] Wheeler is simple,” Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio told The Gateway Punditafter a rally in 2019. “Free your city from the grip of Antifa, take direct and meaningful action,” Tarrio warned, or the Proud Boys would continue coming to the city to cause chaos. The group managed, not for the last time, to spark the interest of the president, who tweeted on the morning of the rally: “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.’ Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!”
By 2020, when waves of Black Lives Matter protests swept across the country, Proud Boys begged the president to take more aggressive action to punish liberal U.S. cities. Proud Boy Joe Biggs, who was later convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the 2021 insurrection (before his sentence was commuted by the President), argued that the “Feds should just federalize is [sic] and let the Proud Boys clean up Portland, Seattle and Philly.”
The group eventually got its call to arms from Trump. It came in late September 2020, after months of Proud Boys descending on Portland — hosting rallies in which hard-right demonstrators shot people with paintball guns, sprayed them with tear gas and carried out other acts of violence. And it was only days after then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency in response to an especially large Proud Boys rally. Against this backdrop, Trump told the group to “stand back and stand by” from the stage of the first presidential debate. On Jan. 6, 2021, the group was on the front lines of the events at the Capitol.
By deploying the National Guard to Los Angeles, Trump seemed to be making a decision that mirrored the strategy of the Proud Boys: targeting a liberal city to escalate tension there and justify a further show of force.
Comments by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have suggested that the administration might have broader goals beyond ending the protests against ICE. “We are not going away,” she told the audience at a June 12 press conference. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.”
The Proud Boys have, so far, not been on the ground in Los Angeles. They have already, in many ways, achieved their goal: using their rallies and propaganda to foster deep distrust of the left and convincing the broader right-wing movement that they should use force and violence — even preemptively — against the people they consider their political enemies.
Seeking revenge
The events in LA have unleashed a wave of racist, anti-immigrant fervor from the hard right.
Many have responded by depicting Los Angeles as a city destroyed by immigration. Hard-right influencer Jack Posobiec, for example, retweeted images of the LA protests with a quote from arch anti-immigrant politician Pat Buchanan: “If one wishes to see America’s future, he need only drive through LA.” Those words come from Buchanan’s 2006 book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America. It argues that non-white immigrants — especially those from Mexico — are pushing us toward “the final act of our civilization.” The book argues that “This idea of America as a creedal nation bound together not by ‘blood or birth or soil’ but by ‘ideals’ that must be taught and learned … is demonstrably false.”
Such influencers as Posobiec, Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk posted messages on X calling for a ban on “third world immigration,” whether “legal or illegal.” “Importing third worlders who contribute nothing of value and actively hate your country and want to destroy it is an act of national suicide,” Walsh wrote on the site on June 9. “We will not have a country for much longer if we keep allowing people like this to come here.” Revolver News, an outlet started by Darren Beattie, who is now an employee at the Department of State, said the outpouring to ban “third-world immigration” was “long overdue.”
Other commentators seemed to relish the cruelty of both the ICE raids and law enforcement action against protesters. “Removing and deporting clutches of illiterate El Salvadoran dry wall installers in Westlake Village is like pulling up a few weeds in a hundred football fields,” Peachy Keenan, a pseudonymous hard-right, pro-natalist writer, wrote on her Substack. She also argued in favor of deporting children: “Entire school districts should be sent south—but people aren’t ready for that conversation yet.”
Many on the right see Trump’s crackdown on Los Angeles and its activists as a correction for not taking a heavy enough hand to quell racial justice protests in 2020. “The Left got away with mass rioting in 2020. That’s why it’s happening again,” Walsh posted on X on June 8. “The only solution is to treat them like the terrorists they are.” He advocated using “overwhelming force” and imprisoning protesters.
“Ruin their lives. Show no mercy,” Walsh wrote.
Others argue that this is the moment for Trump supporters to seek their revenge for consequences people faced from the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. An editorial in The Daily Caller alleged that Democrats treated insurrectionists as the “enemy of the state,” and now is the time to turn that treatment around. “Now, Trump faces an actual violent mob of insurrectionists,” The Daily Caller piece argued, inadvertently giving Trump “the perfect opportunity to secure America’s sovereignty.”
Violence on the rise
The Trump administration has, outside of its use of the National Guard and military in LA, been making extraordinary use of federal power against elected officials. U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed and handcuffed after trying to ask Noem a question at a press conference — the same one in which she said the Department of Homeland Security would “liberate” Los Angeles.
Trump border czar Tom Homan threatened to arrest those who interfere with immigration enforcement. When pressed about whether that could include Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass or the governor, he replied: “I’ll say it about anybody. You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.”
Actions like these, alongside the right’s widespread demonization of immigrants, leftists, racial justice activists and others, have contributed to a permissive atmosphere for violence. The lines between who is a federal official and who is a hard-right activist seem to be blurring, especially as ICE officials don street clothes, tactical vests and face masks — the uniform of militias, Proud Boys and other extremist actors — as they arrest and detain people on the streets. Across the country, people have been accused of impersonating ICE officers in seeming acts of intimidation.
Just a week after Trump deployed the National Guard in LA, a horrific act of political violence occurred in Minnesota. A man who targeted Democratic politicians and abortion providers assassinated a Minnesota state representative and her husband and attempted to murder a state senator and his wife. Trump simply called the attack “a terrible thing” before he shifted his attention to demonizing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. “I think he’s a terrible governor. I think he’s a grossly incompetent person,” he said.
Image at top: By deploying the National Guard and Marines to crack down on anti-ICE protests, the Trump administration has fed into the far right’s efforts to silence political enemies (Illustration by SPLC; original photo by Matt Gush / Shutterstock).