Mother Jones
The Rapid Rise of Right-Wing Militias
A photo went viral on Independence Day this year. It showed a Black woman on a Metro train in Washington, DC, surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a far-right white nationalist group. The picture, taken on America’s 250th anniversary, seemed to encapsulate not only the continuing story of race in America, but also this current moment when right-wing groups seem louder, prouder, and more public than they’ve been in decades.
Mary McCord has been working to prosecute groups like Patriot Front for years. Following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the Georgetown University law professor and former federal prosecutor successfully won a consent decree that banned the rally’s lead organizer from planning future paramilitary activity in the city. Still, McCord says right-wing militias are benefiting from a friendly administration that has stretched back to Donald Trump’s earliest days campaigning for the presidency.
The president is “aligned with them, whether he believes in white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or not,” McCord says, referring to far-right groups. “That permission that he started giving back in 2016 and 2017 is just even greater permission now.”
On this week’s More To The Story, McCord sits down with host Al Letson to talk about Patriot Front’s origins, a decade of growing white nationalism in America, and the troubling direction of the US Department of Justice under the Trump administration.
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