The Terrifying Group About to Stage a Pro-Trump Comeback

Far-right groups that rioted through the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, are readying themselves for the aftermath of Election Day.

Local chapters of the Proud Boys are congregating on Telegram, a popular anonymous messaging app that played a key role in organizing the insurrection, to prepare a response to what they believe is widespread voter fraud in the 2024 race. In closed chats, users that affiliate themselves with the neofascist, white supremacist–adjacent group are sharing telling and suggestive images, including photos of armed men and guns, while suggesting that they’re ready to revolt unless Donald Trump wins.

“The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible,” read one post from an Ohio chapter of the Proud Boys, according to a New York Times analysis of one million messages across several dozen Telegram channels with more than 500,000 collective members. “You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”

Other users in the Ohio chapter warned that the nonviolent, antifascist political movement antifa will riot “once Trump wins,” telling its members to “prepare accordingly,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

“While other platforms are primarily about self-expression, ‘owning the libs’ and hateful buffoonery, Telegram often generates an ambience of ‘let’s get something done,’” Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, told the Times.

The Telegram chat of a Texas chapter of the decentralized paramilitary group recently shared a post claiming that it was Vice President Kamala Harris—and not Trump—who planned to leverage allegations of “millions of fake ballots” to retake the White House.

One commenter with a Proud Boys flag in the background of their profile picture replied: “So we can shoot them then, right?”

But Telegram isn’t the only place that the group is spreading the plan, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. A North Phoenix chapter of the group posted pictures of a gun arsenal on Trump’s platform Truth Social last month, writing that the “Proud Boys stocking up getting ready for Nov.… It’s going to be biggley!!”

Many of the groups calling people to action are labeling themselves as “election integrity” networks. But in reality, they are spreading false or misleading information about the vote that could disrupt the election, including encouraging members to grill local officials in person about absentee ballot tallies or elevating claims that election workers are giving Republican voters writing tools for their ballots that won’t be compatible with voting machines to undermine the results.

Trump has tacitly embraced the Proud Boys’ support, infamously telling the group to “stand back and stand by” when asked during his September 2020 presidential debate against Joe Biden to condemn the white supremacists.

During a political rally in Aston, Pennsylvania, Sunday, JD Vance told quite a whopper about Donald Trump: that the Republican presidential nominee doesn’t believe in censorship and would not suppress Americans’ free speech.

“You know something Donald Trump will never do? Donald Trump will never go out there and say that his fellow citizens should be censored or silenced for disagreeing with them,” Vance said to cheers from the pro-MAGA crowd.

Vance said this about a man who has threatened multiple media outlets in the last month alone, whether it was filing an FEC complaint against The Washington Post, suing CBS for $10 million over an interview of Kamala Harris, or calling for ABC’s broadcast license to be revoked because he thought his debate with Harris on the network was rigged.

Trump has even bragged that his attacks have undermined the credibility of where much of his criticism comes from: the news media. Naturally, Vance’s words elicited incredulous reactions on social media.

It’s not just the media. Trump has also named his political opponents part of the “enemy within” and has threatened to unleash the military against them. Previously, Vance seemed to be earning his keep as Trump’s running mate by attempting to sanitize and explain away the former president’s rhetoric, calling Trump’s threats “unfiltered” and “from the heart.” It seems that the Ohio senator has graduated to out-and-out lying about what Trump actually stands for.

Herschel Walker is back and ready to lead our country’s missile defense system.

That is not some cruel joke, but a very real thing Donald Trump proposed at his Georgia rally on Sunday—minutes after Walker confused Trump with his eldest son while encouraging people to go out and vote

“We will build a missile defense shield, all made in the USA—wrapped around our country to defend ourselves and our country. It’s all gonna be made in the United States, and a lot of it in your great state. We’ll put Herschel Walker in charge of that little sucker.” 

Walker, a devoted Trump acolyte, is one of the most famous Black men in Georgia. The college football legend was thrust into the national political eye when he ran against and lost to Democrat Raphael Warnock in the heated 2022 Senate race.

That campaign was plagued by countless gaffes and scandals of Walker’s own creation. He lambasted absent Black fathers while lying to his campaign about being one himself. He criticized abortion rights, even as it was revealed he paid for his girlfriend’s abortion. He lied about his college degree, where he lived, a charity he claimed to have founded, and so much more. As a Black Republican, he denied racism even existed, as he told a crowd of (mostly) white voters that “we use Black power to create white guilt.… Reparations teaches separation.”

On Sunday, Walker kept the gaffes going, as he ended his speech by telling rallygoers to “get to the polls and vote for my friend, and your friend, Donald Trump Jr.” Walker awkwardly tried to correct himself afterward, speaking back into the microphone. “Donald Trump—Donald J. Trump.”

“Bringing back Herschel Walker is the kind of shit I would do if I were trying to lose an election but what do I know,” journalist Louis Peitzman said on X.

Walker is a walking faux pas, and will continue to be so in a nightmare scenario where he leads missile defense. We can only hope that Georgians heard him the first time and decide to write in Donald Trump Jr. on Election Day.   

MAGA Republicans are demanding equal time for Donald Trump after Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live over the weekend, even though the former president already received equal airtime within a day of her appearance.

Federal Communications Commissioner Brandon Carr, a Trump appointee, raised the alarm Saturday about Harris’s surprise appearance after it was announced just hours before the show aired. In a post on X, Carr wrote that Harris’s cameo was “a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC’s Equal Time rule.”

“The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct—a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election,” he wrote. “Unless the broadcaster offered Equal Time to other qualifying campaigns.”

When Trump hosted SNL in 2015, his appearance triggered the Equal Time rule, and NBC offered Trump’s opponents 12 minutes of free air time on NBC affiliate stations.

Trump was offered the same deal after Harris’s appearance. On Sunday afternoon, the Republican presidential nominee aired a short 60-second message after the end of a NASCAR race, according to CNN. Harris had been given around 30 seconds “without charge,” according to the FCC filing.

That certainly didn’t satisfy grievance-fueled MAGA acolytes, who seem to think Trump is somehow entitled to a booking on SNL.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio complained Sunday that her appearance was part of a “full-scale assault” to “depress and suppress Republican votes” and that it had happened “in violation of the law.”

“I hope she laughed on Saturday Night Live, in front of millions of people who heard her laughing for a few minutes, cause that’s probably worth two to three million votes right there,” he sneered.

During an appearance Monday on Fox News’s Mornings With Maria, Carr claimed that the FCC might consider “license revocation” as a possible remedy if they find Harris’s appearance to be “egregious.”

“The whole purpose of this rule is to give people a fair shot,” Carr said, not acknowledging that Trump had already been given equal time.

Elon Musk also boosted allegations Sunday that Harris’s appearance was illegal (it wasn’t), alongside claims that SNL had committed election inference because it “did a skit *literally* aimed at boosting the name recognition” of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.

The post implied that Kaine’s race was tightening against Republican candidate Hung Cao, after one single poll found Kaine’s 9–14 point lead shrank to only two points. It’s not illegal, however, for a political candidate to appear on a television show.

In the final stretch of the presidential race, Donald Trump has started to showcase the full extent of his disdain for the media.

During a Sunday rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the former reality TV star pondered how another potential assassin could make an attempt on his life—and whose lives would have to be taken first before they got to him.

“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much because I don’t mind. I don’t mind that,” Trump told a cheering crowd.

Trump has spent years deriding and eroding public trust in the media and government institutions, often to the benefit of his own political ambitions, which have skyrocketed as a growing demographic of the public pulls away from legitimate facts and reporting, effectively permitting Trump’s myriad lies and conspiracies to fester unfettered.

A Gallup poll published in October revealed that public trust in Democratic institutions, including the executive office and the legislative branches of government, is practically abysmal, with just 40 and 34 percent of Americans, respectively, believing that they’re trustworthy.

But somehow, the news media got even more demerits, with confidence in the information apparatus hitting its lowest point on record. Just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the industry’s ability to report news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Last week, Trump personally celebrated his role in creating that sentiment, bragging to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that it was, largely, thanks to him.

America’s trust in the media disintegrated in 2016 during his first run for the White House, when Trump routinely platformed the notion that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was receiving more positive media coverage than he was. He also levied attacks on the media to undermine the industry’s coverage of his myriad scandals, including his criminal trials.

That year, confidence in news dropped by eight percentage points—the most in a single year since the metric was first recorded in 1976—and for the first time in U.S. history sank below 40 percent. It was dragged down, predominantly, by Republican respondents, whose faith in the media plummeted from 32 percent in 2015 to just 14 percent in 2016, while surveyed Democrats and registered independents reported relatively minor dents in their confidence.

This year has shown the disheartening effects of that loss of trust: Newspapers and stations alike have laid off thousands of journalists, with dozens of major outlets downsizing or outright folding as the business side of the industry struggles to keep up with the market, the changing technological landscape (i.e., artificial intelligence), and rapidly changing leadership.

But encouraging the death of journalists echoes a more insidious political threat, harkening back to the fascist policies of Adolf Hitler, who squashed Germany’s trust in the press until he was able to turn the news media into a propaganda arm of the Nazi Party, a key component of his ascent to complete and total control of the nation.

And while traditional outlets failed to underscore the depth of Trump’s threat, some of the country’s biggest conservative outlets saw the writing on the wall. On Monday, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator—Drudge Report—topped its site with one headline: “MOVE OVER CHENEY, NOW HE WANTS REPORTERS SHOT!”