Malcolm Nance - They Want to Kill Americans: The Militias, Terrorists, and Deranged Ideology of the Trump Insurgency

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When I sat down on the set of the HBO TV show Real Time with Bill Maher just three days after the 2020 election, I knew what I was going to say would be exceedingly unpopular. The counting of the votes to determine who had won the election took almost three days. By the time the show was taped in Los Angeles, all that remained to do was declare then former vice president Joe Biden the president-elect of the United States. A feeling of relief was in the air. For the first time in a year, I felt it too.

On the masked, high-precaution flight from New York to LAX, one could feel the lighter attitude. Gone were the sullen feelings and dark shadow over the country. The Trump voters were still standing by for him to be declared the winner, but it was apparent to everyone else in America that the spell of hatred was breaking. The numbers were against him. Trump was losing badly. The last states to be called, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, were all falling solidly in the Biden camp. The closest vote counts were in Georgia and Arizona, but by Friday evening Biden was ahead with small but insurmountable leads in both. He already had enough votes to win the presidency, but few in the mainstream media were ready to make that call publicly. Bill Maher relished in calling it and so he did, with his usual boldness and swagger. Twelve hours later, the rest of the national media would join him.

So, there I sat. Ready to spoil the party, trip up the parade, and pop the bubble of Kumbaya that was forming over America. I was doing my usual job of marring an otherwise happy occasion by warning that a grave threat was looming. And journalists, commentators, analysts, and pundits of all stripes started to anticipate the prospect of being able to sleep in without Trumps tweets waking them in the middle of the night. The joy of the elections results would form a crust of tears when the risk outgrew the adrenaline rush of happiness.

Not me. Im going to give you doom and gloom, I said to Maher. We are going to have a political paramilitary insurgency in which Donald Trump will be Saddam Hussein; we already have his sons, Uday and Qusay. Maher was a bit incredulous but asked the right question and caught on quickly. He said, Paramilitaryin other words, not the military like in these countries; they dont want to use the official military, so they have their Boogaloo Bois.

I agreed that paramilitary meant the Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, and all the rest of the Vanilla ISIS crew. We then discussed what would happen when Trumps supporters rejected the election results and started active armed resistance.

I went on that show with an agenda. I wanted to associate the events that were to come with the word insurgency, and I wanted to do so as soon as possible and from a highly visible platform.

I had been tracking a disturbing trend all throughout 2019 that had reached a crescendo by the 2020 election, and so I could not enjoy the momentary silence. A new movement was slowly emerging from the embers of the American right-wing extremists known as the alternative right, or alt-right. They were angry. They were armed. And they would reject the Biden victory vocally and violently. They were primed to become insurgents in a low-grade civil resistance.

As predicted, they started with an act of blatant insurrection. Based on Trumps seditious words, his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, with the intent to stop the certification of the election by force. Most came to storm the building and to stop the vote. Others may have come to hunt and possibly kill Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Only a miracle and the bravery of the Capitol Hill and Washington, D.C., police officers prevented there being more than the five deaths that resulted that day.

In my role as a counterterrorism expert on MSNBC News, I have a track record of offering well-grounded warnings based on intelligence analyses that have proved uncanny in their accuracy. There is a reason for that. As an intelligence professional, I dont guess. My work is years ahead of most media investigations because I collect hard data and analyze events through the lens of my thirty-plus years of intelligence community experience. My career in monitoring, tracking, and destroying foreign threats to America gives me the ability to call out risks and incoming challenges that might not reveal themselves easily to others. That body of knowledge and a natural alacrity at detecting the right pattern means I identify risks faster, more accurately, and with greater depth than the average journalist or amateur web sleuth.

In July 2016, I was the first person in U.S. news media to warn that the United States was under attack through a massive political warfare operation using foreign disinformation created by a hostile agency, the Russian Directorate of Military Intelligence, the GRU. This operation corrupted the mindset of more than a third of Americans. It was successful in generating so many false narratives that most journalists looked in the wrong direction not just for the origins of the attack but to determine Russias objectives.

In my first Trump-Russia scandal book, The Plot to Hack America: How Putins Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election, I accurately predicted the strategy, tactics, players, and foreign intelligence operations that worked to put Donald Trump into the presidency. And I did it six weeks before the 2016 election. Two years later, the Mueller report, a House Intelligence Committee report, a joint intelligence community report, and a Senate Intelligence Committee report all validated every assertion I made.

They Want to Kill Americans also has disturbing links to my 2018 book The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, in which I present cooperative links between Russian-backed European far-right extremists and the new American alt-right. The alt-right is a hodgepodge of American hatredan unglued assemblage of racist and anti-Semitic neo-Nazis, fascism-loving white supremacists, white evangelical dominionists, and dead-ender Southern neo-Confederates. The alt-right had its international coming out in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 11 and 12, 2017, at the Unite the Right rally. Their aim: to show the world America had a serious fascist army that would bring this country into the fight to defend the white race.

The right-wing extremists first held a torch-lit night march reminiscent of the Nazis Nuremberg rallies. The next day, they tore into the lines of liberal protesters and a melee ensued. One alt-right militant drove his car into a crowd of protesters and killed a young woman named Heather Heyer. The youth wing of the conservative movement had made its mark. By evening, all of America and, by extension, the world knew who the alt-right were.

At the time, they were all unabashed supporters of President Trump, but the love was not publicly or openly reciprocated until the day of Heather Heyers death. President Trump knew who they were; they were Trump voters. Instead of condemning their actions, he called them very fine people. The savageness of the national rejection stunned Trump, but it also stunned the alt-right. Seemingly overnight, even the limited public support for their activities disappeared.