From Reconstruction to Day of the Rope: The Evolution and Persistence of Assassination as a Tool for White Supremacist Terror
“What can you and I do to a state legislator besides kill them?” Two days prior to the January 6th Capitol Siege, white supremacist commentator Nick Fuentes launched a livestream to ask this question, condemning lawmakers and the democratic process itself. In the same breath with which he began to walk back this incendiary rhetoric, Fuentes again inquired, “what else can you do, right? Nothing.” In the lead-up to the Siege, content posted on TheDonald.win likewise glorified political violence, including a post from January 5th that justified the lynching of elected officials. Less than twenty-four hours later, a crowd of thousands chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and spoke about executing the then-Vice President for his failure to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. Law enforcement officials later recovered a pair of pipe bombs, one outside the Democratic National Committee building and the other in an alley behind the Capitol Hill Club and the Republican National Committee building. To date, the unidentified suspect of this plot remains at large.
On that day, a mix of anti-government militia extremists, conspiracy theorists, white supremacist extremists (WSEs), and partisan demonstrators primarily sought to prevent the Congressional certification of election results as they stormed the Capitol building. The calls for violence, however, suggest an additional motivation among some rioters. Some of those involved, writes sociologist Kathleen Blee, seemed “intent on assassinating politicians they saw as enemies.” Even after authorities finally wrested control of the building from the mob, the threat of political violence continued, with rhetoric aimed at Democrats and Republicans alike. On Telegram, for example, users levied “threats of public hanging” and other violent imagery towards Republican officials who did not vote to dismiss impeachment proceedings against former President Trump.
This environment—in which the threat of political assassination looms large, and extremists target the heart of America’s democratic process—may feel like an aberration, or an unprecedented moment in U.S. history. Reality, however, lies far from this perception. For generations, violent white supremacists have targeted political leaders and prominent activists in an attempt to subvert multiracial democracy.
Studying the long arc of assassination sheds light on the factors that have sustained the use of this tactic over the course of generational shifts, ideological developments, and organizational evolutions within the WSE movement. This paper argues that existing scholarly criteria for sustained terrorist campaigns—particularly, the importance of a belief in the efficacy of violence, the resonance of a violent movement’s belief with a wider audience, and the influence of ideological leadership—help to explain the persistent use of assassination as a tactic of white supremacist terrorism. Over time, the increasing salience of one factor may help mitigate another’s decline and contribute to the tactic’s continued use in an evolving environment.
As the United States experiences a period of heightened animosity toward elected officials and other political leaders, the history of WSE assassination—and the context in which these attacks have occurred—suggests a stark outlook for the future landscape of violent extremism. Though today’s WSE movement may not match the strength of its predecessors, the confluence of a rhetorical environment that glorifies political violence and a growing consensus that violence will deliver preferred political outcomes suggest the threat of assassination will remain an ongoing concern. This threat is only one piece of a broader campaign to undermine democracy and intimidate public leaders, but to understand the threat of political violence in the United States today, it is crucial to understand its complete historical context. As an increasingly diverse contingent of extremists prompts security officials to issue threat advisories related to the 2022 midterm elections, this paper seeks to provide one component of that foundation.