The New Brown Shirts

If you imagined the post-election rash of pro-Trump right-wing violence and racist vandalism might go away, Salon's Amanda Marcotte reports that Stormtrumper goons are going to organize and take their hate into the streets. Apparently modeling themselves after the brown shirt thugs of  Hitler's Germany, white nationalist /neo-fascist supporters of autocratic goon-in-chief Donald "Rump" Trump are using social media to organize gangs of violent wingers to confront and battle progressive protesters, drawing them into fights to both promote their "movement" and to play the victim if need be. A demonstration in Seattle last January that resulted in the shooting of a leftist demonstrator by an armed proto-fascist counter-demonstrator was an example of that tactic.

One group attempting to organize calls itself the "Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights," a name evocative of the KKK's various "knights" groups. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's David Neiwert:

“These guys are there looking for a fight. These guys are clearly quasi-fascist, classic protofascists, and they’re on the track to full-fledged fascism. All we need to do is look at history and see how it happened.”

Neiwert suggests that these far-right extremists are seeking to expand their membership and power by appealing to conservatives through staging fights against a "far left uprising" that would threaten the conservative order, gaining sympathy and support from Rump's base. With the Justice Department in the hands of racist right-wing Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions looking the other way, don't expect anything approaching a national crack down on the new brown shirts instigating violence.