From the Proud Boys to QAnon: Trump's Army

Pro-Trump protesters in front of the Capitol, this Wednesday DPA via Europa Press / Europa Press

The FBI has asked this Thursday for citizen collaboration, and specifically that of witnesses to the assault on the Capitol, to identify the insurgents.

Any graphic or audiovisual evidence of the tumult posted on social networks can be used by the agency of the Department of Justice to find out who were the individuals who on Wednesday trampled the seat of popular sovereignty in an uncivil attempt to prevent Joe Biden from being confirmed as president from the United States.

The pawns, the shock force, are part of the MAGA movement (an acronym for

Make America Great Again

, the motto of Trump's mandate) but the ideological rearguard corresponds to old acquaintances in the world of the extreme right, the alternative right, or

alt-right

, and the white supremacist movement, as evidenced by the Confederate flags that some protesters flew.

The shock force included Ashli ​​Babbitt, 35, an Air Force veteran who was wounded by the gunshot of an officer and died shortly after in hospital.

Three other people, whose identities are unknown and about whom there is no information even in the ultra digital cennacles, required emergency medical attention during the attempt and subsequently died.

That the FBI asks for help to identify the rioters is not surprising: many entered the Capitol disguised as characters to which more pilgrim, but not at the whim of the costume designer, who drew a cast halfway between

Braveheart

and

Dersu Uzala

, but because of the need to hide the firearms that were later drawn inside the building.

Given that Wednesday's spectacle is not the first - and for many, it will not be the last, even with Donald Trump out of the White House - the list of insurgents orbits around the usual suspects of Trumpism.

First up are the Proud Boys, an alt-right gang whose leader, Enrique Tarrio, was arrested the day before for vandalizing symbols of the Black Lives Matter movement in a black church, precisely during a previous Trump rally.

The FBI links the group, which the Republican president has always avoided condemning, with white nationalism and a militant exercise in misogyny.

Formed only by men, after drinking in the sewers of Internet hatred, it took center stage in the 2017 Charlottesville riots, when a neo-Nazi hit an anti-racist protest with his car, killing one person and wounding about twenty.

The Proud Boys were founded in 2016, the year Trump won the election.

The QAnon movement dates from that time, even more viscous and unspecific - that is, less articulate - than the Proud Boys.

His theories about the existence of a pedophile network that satisfies world elites and about the replacement of white civilization by the mass immigration of other races have not only taken root in the body and the dominant discourse of the Republican Party, they are also linked to numerous acts of violence and conspiracies of that terrorism, considered low intensity until recently, the domestic one, but which already constitutes a greater threat than the Islamist one.

Proud Boys and QAnon splash in the bog of the Boogaloo movement.

Halfway between the cultural current and the militia, this doctrine in favor of provoking a second civil war has lived its consecration in 2020. Because another of the characteristics of this ultra-popular magma is that, during Trump's mandate - and also thanks to him -, have ceased to be relegated to the confines of the Internet to reach a prominence that even sneaks into primetime television, as shown by the live broadcast of the assault on the Capitol.

All of them share the messianic vision of the redeemer forced to prevent acts of evil (an alleged electoral fraud, or the alleged control of a vaccine) for the benefit of a defenseless mass before the power of the elites.

More than ideology, they exude an emotional state, in episodes of massive radicalization - 75% of Republicans believe that there has been theft of the elections - that give them as much feedback as Trump's insidious harangues.

"The Republican has lost the presidency, but he still has his Army," concluded an analysis of a political information blog on the website of the NBC television network on Thursday.

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