January 22, 2025

He said he was going to do it, so we shouldn’t be shocked. We hoped there would be some rhyme or reason, some forethought, some restraint. But there was none of that. President Trump blanket pardoned approximately 1500 of the terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overthrow our democratically elected government. This includes the most violent attackers who beat Capitol police, causing injury, trauma, and death. Today the leaders of violent extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys walk free and our nation is much less safe. Trump did this in his first 24-hours as president.

Almost 30 years ago, I had just completed my PhD when Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder Truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer up to the federal building in Oklahoma City, lit the fuse and ran. The explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s daycare center. On that spring day in 1995, my research went from focusing on racist skinheads to the even darker corners of the far right. This included interviews with militia members in western Montana in 1998, who told me in very clear terms that the only salvation America would be born from a violent civil war.

The patriot militia movement that birthed McVeigh and his fellow anti-government extremists would die, not with a bang, but with a whimper at the turn of the century. Janet Reno’s Department of Justice broke up numerous plots, aided by many community members reporting bomb-making neighbors. The 2000 election of George W. Bush took the wind out of their sails as many of their core issues, like guns and land rights, had gone mainstream. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed and exactly three months later, the nation would launch a new war on terror.

But the racist reaction to the 2008 election of Barrack Obama, the Tea Party, and the advent of social media, brought the militia movement back. The election of Donald Trump and the COVID pandemic took it from survivalist bunkers to the laptops of soccer moms. And the end result was the violent assault on our Capitol sparked by conspiracy theories that used to be the domain of tinfoil hat kooks, now spread by the President of the United States.

Many of those that attacked the Capitol were members of violent extremist groups, like the Oath Keepers, the 3 Percenters, and the Proud Boys. Over 75 of those arrested for entering the building were carrying weapons, including guns. They had been told by Trump to “fight like hell,” and they did. When the dust cleared the besieged members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, called for the rioters to be arrested and charged to the fullest extent of the law. After encouraging them on January 6th, on January 7th, Trump said, “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

Thanks to vigilant work of community members, dubbed “sedition hunters,” and the diligence of the Department of Justice, over 1,500 rioters were arrested and charged with federal crimes and over a thousand plead guilty (with 64% receiving jail sentences). This included leaders of well-known extremists groups who were charged with sedition.  Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, received a 22-year prison sentence. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes received 18 years.  The January 6th attack was the most violent assault on our Capital since the War of 1812.

And Donald Trump freed all of these terrorists. Every single one. They were not hostages, as he called them. Hostages are bound in the tunnels of Gaza. They were convicted criminals. But criminals who committed their crimes for Trump, so he let them loose, back into society.

Much of my work over the past four years has been in response to January 6. This includes my academic work as well as my ongoing work on a project, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, to reduce political violence. One of the things I can say for certain is the prosecution and sentencing of the J6 rioters has served to greatly suppress anti-government violence. Proud Boy-wannabes and militia members who missed the bus to DC saw the long sentences of Tarrio and Rhodes and hundreds of others and cooled their jets about the “boogaloo” and dreams of civil war.

Trump just erased that powerful deterrent with the stroke of a pen.

Where Timothy McVeigh’s story ended with a lethal ejection, the January 6 terrorists have been made into folk heroes by Trump and the far right. He has routinely sung their praises as lovers of the country. “These people have been destroyed,” Trump, said shortly after returning to the Oval Office. ”What they’ve done to these people is outrageous.” They are now living martyrs, rock stars of the anti-government movement, and will use their celebrity to bring more into the rabbit hole of paranoid conspiracy theories of the “deep state” and into the rhetoric of violent retribution for the agents of justice who dared imprison them. Tarrio has already promised revenge on those that jailed him. His Proud Boys marched in Washington DC, while Trump was being sworn in Monday. Rhodes and other militia members are free to reinvigorate the violent anti-government patriot movement that sees bloody revolution and a “Day of Ropes’ as required to wrestle America from the “deep state.”

Donald Trump, with the support of stiff armed ally Elon Musk, has opened Pandora’s Box. The core of the J6 terrorists see the Oklahoma City Bombing as the model for accelerating mass chaos to collapse society. Their anti-DEI policy ends with bodies hanging from lampposts. And don’t expect a Defense Department headed by fellow nationalist Pete Hegseth to get in their way. Where Reno shut plots down, Hegseth will enable a reign of terror.

We have seen versions of this in other countries. January 6, 2021 was the rehearsal for the coup. Trump and his corporate-fascist “patriots” have played the long game. In other countries, it has been the military that has quashed the coup. (It won’t be Hegseth’s military here, perhaps the rank and file.) We are heading towards that showdown and I wish I wasn’t so certain of that fact. What we do know is that with these pardons, Donald Trump has normalized political violence and ensured the loyalty of militia groups who will violently fight to keep him power. Welcome to the new Civil War.