Trump's extreme right-wing supporters, still angry and far from disappearing

The American extreme right is angry. Angry at Joe Biden, at Donald Trump, at the mysterious "Q" figure, and at itself.

AFP

On the Internet, publications and forums where extremists meet are full of disappointment and dissension since the failure of the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and since Joe Biden's inauguration as President of the United States.

The followers of QAnon, a conspiracy movement with its "Q" oracle, are mostly in disarray, as their millennialist predictions of chaos with the arrival of the Democrat to power have not - for the moment - come true.

The ultra-nationalist groups, white supremacists and other neo-Nazis have been driven even further underground with the arrests of their members who took part in the insurrection on Capitol Hill.

According to experts on extremist movements and domestic terrorism, the end of Trump's presidency was a setback for these groups.

But they also say they are far from extinct and are, in some ways, even more prone to violence.

The most radical groups are turning to the vast recruitment pool of disappointed QAnon followers, the experts also argue.

"The rhetoric remains heated.... People don't accept [President] Biden," says Michael Edison Hayden of the extremism research group Southern Poverty Law Center.

Far from being exhausted, "the energy and momentum of the extreme right is stronger than at any time in recent history," says Colin P. Clarke of the Soufan Group, a security and intelligence research group.

United in anger

The end of Trump's presidency and the banning of extremists on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have only fueled passions. The banning of social networks itself "has become a unifying grievance" for disparate right-wing extremist groups, says Michael Edison Hayden.

Many have migrated to the few platforms that remain welcoming, most notably Telegram, where a few pages from QAnon and the ultra-nationalist Proud Boys group have hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

"The infrastructure still exists" for the far right to organize, Hayden says.

The QAnon movement began to emerge in late 2017 with the cryptic publications of an enigmatic user named "Q" on the 8kun website.

No one knew Q's identity, but his publications mobilized supporters of Donald Trump behind the persistent notion that there was a conspiracy against the Republican president, fomented by Democrats and a "deep state".

Following Trump's defeat, they were an important part of the momentum of the "Stop the Steal" movement, claiming that Joe Biden had stolen the election through a massive election fraud.

Many are now furious that Trump decided not to expressly defend the more than 120 protesters arrested and the hundreds of others under investigation for the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill.

And the far right has now resolved to leave him behind and assemble without him, says Michael Edison Hayden.

"Hard blow"

QAnon fans, however, received a second club hit.

On Wednesday, Ron Watkins, whose father controls the 8kun site, which many identify as Q, or at least an insider who would know his identity, announced that he was leaving the movement and erased the entire 8kun QAnon archive.

"We gave it all away. Now we have to hold our heads high and get back to our lives as best we can," he said on Telegram.

"It was a huge blow to the movement," said Karim Zidan, an investigator for the far-right Right Wing Watch project. But for Zidan, the movement has already proven that it can survive without Q.

The "influencers" linked to QAnon and their tens of thousands of subscribers, as well as the public figures who led Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" campaign, are encouraging the movement to continue.

Lawyer Lin Wood, for example, has amassed more than 592,000 subscribers in just one week after migrating to Telegram, says Karim Zidan.

For Colin P. Clarke, violent right-wing extremist groups need to recruit only a small proportion of followers of movements like QAnon to build networks capable of destructive violence.

The researcher compares the level of anger to that which existed in the early 1990s, when several acts of domestic terrorism were perpetrated by anti-government extremists, such as the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 165 people in 1995.