A Deep State Affair

How the Right Fell out of Love with the FBI
Collage of FBI agents posing near Mount Carmel in 1993, Kash Patel, and J. Edgar Hoover. (Credit: PRA)
Faith Lazar
July 2, 2025
The Public Eye, Summer 2025

On March 15, 1963, the far-right militia known as the Minutemen issued a chilling threat. They published an “in memoriam” list naming twenty congressmen who had voted to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the powerful Congressional body created to root out alleged subversive activity of private citizens. Other suspected “reds” received cards at their homes warning, “Traitors beware….the cross-hairs are on the back of your necks.”[1]

The Minutemen believed communist interlopers had overtaken the U.S. government, supplanting the legitimate constitutional republic. Seeing themselves as auxiliary enforcers for HUAC and the FBI, they adopted similar investigative tactics. They spied on labor unions, civil rights groups, and leftist organizations while preparing for guerilla warfare from fortified bunkers. They aimed to overthrow what they called the “Invisible Government,” a precursor to today’s “Deep State.” [2]

For mid-20th-century far-right groups like the Minutemen, communism and New Deal-era “welfarism” were seen as one and the same: collectivist threats to freedom.[3] Though often described as “anti-government,” they were selectively so, championing security institutions like the FBI when used against leftist opponents, while opposing state efforts at redistributing power or wealth.[4]

This alliance with the security state frayed over time. By the mid-1960s, far-right leaders who had once modeled their organizations on the FBI—like Minutemen founder Robert Depugh[5]— turned against the very agency they had once supported, denouncing the FBI as irreparably infiltrated and a lethal apparatus of the “occupied” or “invisible government.” By the twentieth century’s end, mistrust of federal police had become a defining feature of militia movements, fueling violent clashes and turning fear of the state into a rallying cry.

The difference in the present is that the electoral Right has historically supported the FBI, whereas now MAGAism, framed as a populist rebellion against an “elite” bent on destroying true Americans, denounces the FBI and the so-called “Deep State.” This anti-FBI rhetoric taps into the Far Right’s insurgent energy while resonating with broader public distrust of the FBI as a repressive institution. One clear example is Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who began selling “Defund the FBI” and “Enemy of the State” merchandise after the FBI raided Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.[6] Though far from a civil libertarian—given her attacks on trans people, immigrants, and opponents of the genocide in Gaza—Greene appeals to a right-wing populist base that feels crushed by the status quo and is eager to see its enemies punished. Before his confirmation as Trump’s new FBI Director, Kash Patel tapped into this retributive desire, threatening to go after “Deep State” officials and “conspirators.”[7]

The MAGA Right’s supposed rebellion is less a break than a power struggle within an antidemocratic framework that enables the security state’s continued expansion while dismantling the redistributive state.  It intensifies far-right militancy while expanding state surveillance and deepening public distrust of government, all while destroying the other half of the so-called “Deep State”—the administrative state and what remains of public provision—which has been steadily privatized, defunded, or, in terms of real growth, left at a standstill over the past several decades.[8]

The “Deep State” Narrative’s Ultraconservative Roots

The concept of the “Deep State” has deep historical roots, but Trump adopted the phrase into his lexicon during his first term to describe a group of shadowy elites allegedly orchestrating coordinated opposition to his mandate.[9] This includes opponents in intelligence agencies (especially the FBI), and senior officials in the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department who supposedly leak false intelligence, targeting Trump and his allies through the courts and the media in cooperation with the Democratic party. But similar concepts had been circulating within the Right, such as “one-worldism,” “the invisible government,” and “the New World Order.”[10]

“Deep State” is a direct translation of the Turkish concept derin devlet. Originating in the late Ottoman Empire, the term evokes the shadow side of civil governance, specifically the hidden, undemocratic systems and conspiracies wielded by military factions and organized crime within government.[11] However, the notion of a secret, replacement government that holds true power is a feature of U.S. right-wing thought that dates back to at least World War I. The concept gained significant traction during the second Red Scare, when the FBI stoked fears of a lurking communist menace and called for citizens’ “eternal vigilance” to fight such subversion.[12] Ultraconservatives responded to this call, blending libertarian anti-statism with authoritarian anticommunism.

Mid-century ultraconservatives viewed domestic subversion as posing an even greater threat than foreign communist forces.[13] They revered figures like Joseph McCarthy and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, viewing them as defenders of American values against communism. They saw them as protectors of the “good state,” the security state, in opposition to the “bad state,” the New Deal state, which ultraconservatives viewed as a Trojan horse for Soviet-style communism. Ultraconservatives and some of the Right’s most radical voices, like the militant Minutemen and the John Birch Society, thus became the grassroots base of a deeply antidemocratic security state.

Conspiratorial Anti-Statism and Loyalism to the Security State

The Right supported the FBI in establishing a massive domestic surveillance apparatus, advocating for the agency’s right to act with little restraint. Backed by nationalist business interests, segregationists, and grassroots groups, ultraconservative activists rallied behind the conspiratorial anticommunism that went hand-in-hand with their crusade to dismantle the New Deal welfare state while supporting the security state’s expansion.[14] This dual strategy allowed movement leaders to root out communist infiltrators domestically through Hoover’s FBI, and engage in aggressive military actions and covert operations to combat communism abroad. Under Hoover’s leadership the FBI expanded its surveillance powers, identifying communism as a pervasive threat in American society.[15] The Far Right legitimized itself through the FBI’s analysis, blending anti-communism with virulent and sometimes insurgent anti-statism.

This alliance with the security state was opportunistic—far-right groups selectively used state power to suppress leftist enemies while advocating for small government when it suited them. For instance, while pushing for a free-market agenda, they supported expanded FBI surveillance to root out subversion. By the 1950s, the FBI had greatly deepened its reach through measures like the 1947 “Loyalty Order,” enabling invasive investigations into federal employees.[16] HUAC collaborated with the FBI to investigate people and groups suspected of having associations with the American Communist Party, together embodying the Far Right’s selective anti-statism: using the state to suppress leftist movements while opposing any redistribution of power and wealth.

The communist threat had been a flexible and expansive concept for American conservative politics since the first Red Scare, representing fears ranging from sexual liberalism to integration. But factions within the ultraconservative milieu profoundly disagreed about whether its “true nature” was a political or racial problem.[17]

For the racialist faction, the communist conspiracy was a Jewish conspiracy. World War II military intelligence officer John O. Beaty’s Iron Curtain Over America (1951) provided the theoretical framework for the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government) conspiracy. Racialists claimed that a cabal of Jews had surreptitiously infiltrated the government in order to socially engineer race-mixing to subdue and conquer the White, Christian American population.[18]

The Americanist faction’s ultraconservative groups, like the John Birch Society, avoided explicit race-based explanations but also believed that malevolent forces secretly occupied the positions of state power to enforce collectivism. The Society’s founder, Robert Welch, repeated the phony statistic that “70% to 90% of the responsible personnel in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare are Communists.”[19] Even Republican President Eisenhower was accused of taking direct orders from the Kremlin.[20]

Despite their differences, both factions generally agreed on supporting the Bureau.[21]  The John Birch Society promoted Hoover’s Masters of Deceit in each monthly issue of its newsletter, American Opinion.[22] The official United Klans of America newsletter The Fiery Cross praised Hoover as an ally in maintaining White supremacy, working to reveal the communist conspiracies underlying the Civil Rights Movement.[23] And the American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell declared “Heil Hoover” in honor of the long-serving director.[24]

The Far Right’s Break with the FBI

As FBI surveillance of Rightist groups ramped up in the mid-1960s, Hoover and his bureau—once the “patron saint of the Far Right”[25]—became the central villain within the far-right imagination and its evidence that the “Invisible Government” had taken over the state.[26]

The FBI first initiated investigations into fascist groups during WWII and continued to monitor other Far Right, anticommunist groups on a small scale since the 1940s. Monitoring and infiltration increased as armed right-wing organizations, such as the Minutemen and the Klan, grew. These groups opposed federally mandated integration with vigilante violence and terror directed at Black liberationists and civil rights advocates, leading to the launch of COINTELPRO-White Hate (1964–1971). During the same period—and to an even greater extent—the FBI aggressively infiltrated left-wing groups, including socialists, civil rights organizations, and antiwar activists.[27] Before this significant escalation, some far-right organizations had already begun noticing informants within their ranks and had caught FBI agents recording license plate numbers outside their meeting halls. Racist paramilitary groups like the National States Rights Party emerged as vocal critics of the FBI, referring to it as the “Federal Bureau of Integration.”[28]

Revelations of COINTELPRO and its impact on the broader Far Right did not unfold all at once. Though hard to miss, some Klan leaders, like UKA Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, refused to believe the evidence. Shelton and others reconsidered only after a group of anti-war activists broke into a records office and accidentally uncovered the mass operations. In a 1971 speech, Shelton decried his newfound foes: “[t]he FBI ladies and Gentlemen is no longer the respected and honorable arm of justice that it once appeared to be, it is the pawn of the one-worlders… and we intend to fight them as long as they continue to fight us.”[29] Hostility and, at times, outright warfare defined the Far Right’s relationship with the FBI throughout the 1970s and 1980s. As far-right militancy escalated, the Bureau responded with sweeping crackdowns and infiltration by informants and undercover agents.[30]

The exposure of FBI infiltration and covert operations aimed at neutralizing far-right organizations crystallized a sense of betrayal and anti-government animus that became central to conservatism following Waco, where over 80 people died in 1993 while under siege by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Federal agents’ excessive use of force helped fuse a narrative of political repression and anti-government resentment with standard conservative critiques of government encroachment on gun ownership, federal land regulation, taxes, and religious freedom.[31]

Anti-FBI Rhetoric Post-Waco: The Militia Movement’s Rise

Waco marked a pivotal moment for the nascent U.S. militia movement, galvanizing fears of a tyrannical federal government and sparking a militant response that would define the 1990s. In the months following the violent standoff, the militia movement swelled, attracting tens of thousands of new members. They were drawn in by myths steeped in White producerist ideology and conspiracy theories that depicted heroic patriots resisting what they viewed as a parasitic federal government eroding individual freedoms and traditional American values.[32] Anti-federal sentiment, fueled by Waco, served as the glue that united the Far Right’s various factions.

The 1990s militia movement is often characterized by its most extreme paranoid fantasies. Scattered and loosely affiliated outposts of militant activists shared rumors and other “intelligence” through short-wave radio, newsletters, and a country-wide fax chain; fax machines belched out conspiratorial reports about United Nations troops secretly camped out on U.S. soil, infringing on its sovereignty; black helicopters carrying jack-booted state agents who would raid houses and disarm the population to institute a totalitarian regime; false-flag terrorist attacks being planned by the FBI to discredit the militia movement; and maps of FEMA camp locations that would be used to intern patriotic Americans who tried to resist the New World Order.[33]

The fantasies were paranoid in their extravagances, but like many conspiracy theories, they resonated because they spoke to real conditions—like militarized police; national sovereignty eroded by the frictionless, unfettered movement of transnational corporations and intragovernmental agencies; mass surveillance and aggressive counterintelligence; and a permanent, unelected national security state.[34]

But militia members exceptionalized their circumstances instead of recognizing that they were “the most recent victim[s]”[35] of repressive state power and economic disparity, or connecting preemptive and paramilitarized policing policies as a thread binding them to people impacted by racist criminalization. In their analysis of the second wave of post-Obama era militias, Joseph Lowndes and Daniel Martinez HoSang identify a dynamic: as the government’s role in providing services has weakened, its repressive powers have grown, a process aided by “racialized discourse[s] that demonized public provision.”[36] The militias positioned themselves as the primary victims of state violence and repression, and simultaneously, the only legitimate authority to enforce law and order. Members took up arms, claiming self-defense against a tyrannical government, while asserting that they, as unfairly treated law-abiding citizens, were best suited to tackle lawlessness and threats to national security, as organized militias.[37]

The bitter irony of the militias’ security state concerns was that they railed against the expanded police powers that far-right movements had played a part in creating —like the surveillance dragnet and its seeming ubiquity of informants, militarized raids in lieu of regulation, and the police’s ability to use deadly force with impunity. Expanded federal law enforcement power and mass incarceration had largely been accomplished as a bipartisan effort; but conservatives and the Far Right had played a historic role not merely supporting the growth of the security state and its mandate to operate without restriction but had often played the role of an informal security state in the face of overcoming such restrictions.

Clinton-Era Policies and the Growth of Antigovernment Rage

The Right’s fury against the “New World Order” in the 1990s was rooted in the legacy of 1950s ultraconservative grassroots red-baiting and “invisible government” conspiracies that contributed to a rightward shift in U.S. domestic politics and a period of intense political repression. At the same time, this rage reflected the post-Cold War era’s contradictions, in which many ultraconservative goals were realized under a Democratic president instead of a Republican one. Clinton-era policies continued attacks on labor, accelerated deregulation that enabled the offshoring of manufacturing and jobs, militarized the U.S.–Mexico border, and most significantly, restructured welfare.[38]

One striking example is the dismantling of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a New Deal legacy program targeted by conservatives. They portrayed it as emblematic of government waste and moral decay, often through racialized stereotypes of Black single mothers as dependent and sexually irresponsible. In reality, AFDC accounted for just short of one percent of the federal budget at its peak in the 1994 fiscal year. Yet it was slashed and replaced in 1996 by the deeply punitive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which imposed work requirements and limited windows in which recipients could receive benefits.[39]

As Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons have argued, the relatively small gap between Clinton and the Right fueled the latter’s fury,[40] which “made it possible to lose sight of how much ultraconservatives had already won, and how far they had succeeded in shifting the whole political spectrum.”[41] The contradictory and self-perpetuating immiseration and rage that accompany the successes of eliminating the state are often articulated through radical self-reliance and a refusal of “dependency” on government assistance or services. This dependency is often racialized or even literally demonized as a trap set by an evil, plotting, malevolent state. As HoSang and Lowndes have argued, “the more people…are abandoned by the state, the greater the possibility for anti-statist sentiment to grow.”[42]

This dynamic set the stage for what Ruth Wilson Gilmore terms the “anti-state state,” in which political figures and institutions gain power by denouncing the state while simultaneously expanding carceral and military institutions such as prisons, policing, and the military.[43] This dynamic narrows the public sector’s legitimacy in everyday life, often replacing it with security solutions.

Such an erosion of state legitimacy found expression in the militia movement, which sought to challenge the security state’s monopoly on force. It claimed a share of that repressive power for itself, decentralizing it to “the people,” who could then arm and govern themselves. Militias began to operate in the shadow of the state by taking on repressive roles the state traditionally held. Their critique of federal policing was not a call for abolition or mutual aid, but for privatization and localized policing rooted in the “private” sphere of male-headed family households. The ability to police and defend oneself became the ultimate expression of a fantasy to eliminate the state in the name of “freedom.”

How MAGA Uses Anti-FBI Talk to Undermine Social Provision

Before his confirmation as FBI Director, Kash Patel promised to shutter the Bureau’s headquarters and turn it into a “museum of the deep state.”[44] Framed as a populist rebellion against a corrupt elite, Patel’s anti-“Deep State” crusade recasts the FBI director as an anti-establishment maverick. His break from institutional norms and the agency’s nonpartisan image—one that was always more fantasy than fact—transforms his blatant partisanship and sycophancy into a virtue.

Ultimately, despite the bluster of figures like Rep. Greene and Director Patel, the FBI is in no real danger of being defunded and the “Museum” isn’t selling tickets. Patel recently boasted that he’s already restored public trust in the FBI. The bureau, he says, is seeing a record number of applicants, allowing “good cops [to] be cops” again.[45]

So, what are these “good cop” FBI agents up to? They are pulling all-nighters to process the agency’s “Epstein Files” amid a FOIA backlog,[46] which the Trump administration touts to its QAnon-minded MAGA base as transparency toward uncovering the “Deep State.”[47] And in April, they arrested a Wisconsin judge, accusing her of obstructing justice for directing an undocumented immigrant out of her courtroom as ICE agents waited to arrest him—presumably to intimidate judges who appear to challenge the administration’s mass deportation efforts.[48]

Meanwhile, the Trump-Musk DOGE initiative has launched a blitzkrieg of mass layoffs and intimidation of federal employees to gut the federal budget. Basic social programs are also facing serious threats of being slashed, including the Department of Education, Medicaid, food assistance for low-income families, and emergency income support.[49]

“Deep State” conspiracies have helped MAGA maintain an aura of insurgency and support from its popular base, even while becoming the Republican Party’s mainstream. But it’s doubtful that its current slash-and-burn approach to the federal government can be sustained. As a conservative National Review analyst recently put it: “Firing lefty bureaucrats is exhilarating. DOGE’s savings to the budget are the equivalent of pocket change in the sofa cushions: good to collect, no substitute for a realistic budget.”[50]

Even the “Deep State” conspiracy’s loudest proponent, Steve Bannon, understands that dismantling the administrative state is a balancing act.[51] While musing on his War Room podcast that Americans need to, “stop whining about Entitlements,” he cautioned: “A lot of MAGAs on Medicaid… Just can’t take a meat axe to it.”[52]

Ultimately, the Far Right’s anti-government rhetoric and conflicted relationship with federal policing masks deep investments in state power. Rather than reject the state, they seek to reshape it. From red-baiting and glorifying J. Edgar Hoover to today’s “Defund the FBI” slogans, far-right movements have oscillated between collaborating with and opposing federal policing. They have also grown as the security state and military have expanded, with declining living standards, antidemocratic revanchism, and returning veterans continuing to fuel their ranks.[53] This history reveals that today’s anti-FBI rhetoric is not a principled anti-statism concerned with ending repressive power, but one that aims to reallocate it from public accountability to privatized, authoritarian control within racialized, patriarchal domains by eliminating the redistributive state.

Endnotes

  1. Robert H. Collins, "Minutemen warned on 'CIA-backed Rivals,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 20, 1968; Some of the cards swapped the phrase “traitors beware” to “Jews beware.” Documentation of this can be found in archived FBI surveillance of people associated with this group. See "Kenneth Goff Denver 4," FBI files for Kenneth Goff, https://archive.org/details/KennethGoff/Goff%2C%20Kenneth-Denver-4/page/n59/mode/2up?view=theater.
  2. J. Harry Jones, Jr. The Minutemen (Doubleday, 1968) and Robert DePugh, Blueprint for Victory (Self-published, 1966), for the Minutemen’s methods.
  3. DePugh, Blueprint for Victory, 92.
  4. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (Guilford Press, 1995), 9; John S. Huntington, Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), 1-12, for more on the Right’s selective anti-statism.
  5. Jones, Jr., The Minutemen, 55.
  6. “Shop,” Marjorie Taylor Greene for America, accessed April 6, 2025, https://secure.winred.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-s-people-over-politicians-c/storefront.
  7. Eric Tucker and Alan Suderman, “Trump names loyalist Kash Patel as FBI director to help with effort to upend law enforcement,” PBS, November, 30, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-names-loyalist-kash-patel-as-fbi-director-to-help-with-effort-to-upend-law-enforcement.
  8. Elaine Kamarck, "Is Government Too Big? Reflections on the Size and Composition of Today’s Federal Government," Brookings Institution, January 28, 2025, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-government-too-big-reflections-on-the-size-and-composition-of-todays-federal-government/.
  9. Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Rumblings of a ‘Deep State’ Undermining Trump? It Was a Foreign Concept,” The New York Times, March 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/politics/deep-state-trump.html.
  10. Heather Hendershot, What's Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 66-101; D.J. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society: Conspiracy, Conservatism and the Cold War (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 53-68; Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort (Guilford Press, 2000), 287-304, for histories of the longevity of these concepts on the Right.
  11. Ryan Gingeras, “Last Rites for a ‘Pure Bandit’: Clandestine Service, Historiography, and the Origins of the Turkish ‘Deep State,’” Past & Present 206 (2010): 151–74, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40586942.
  12. J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1958), 309, for an example of how the FBI encouraged private citizens to assist the Bureau in monitoring subversive activities.
  13. Kim Phillips-Fein, "Ultras: The rise of America's far right," The Nation, January 11, 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/john-huntington-far-right-vanguard/.
  14. Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, 164-70
  15. Ivan Greenberg, Surveillance in America: Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present (The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2012).
  16. Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, 158.
  17. David Austin Walsh, Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right (Yale University Press, 2024), for recent scholarship on factions within ultraconservatism.
  18. Jaclyn Fox and Carolyn Gallaher, “Conspiracy for the Masses: Mapping a QAnon Lockdown Network,” The Public Eye, January 29, 2021, https://politicalresearch.org/2021/01/29/conspiracy-masses/.
  19. "Minutes from ‘A Confidential Report to Members of The Council of The John Birch Society,’" FBI files on John Birch Society, January 1, 1960.
  20. Mulloy, The World of the John Birch Society, 12-13.
  21. Historian Beverly Gage describes Hoover as the “patron saint of the Far Right.” Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the American Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2022), 508-19.
  22. “Book List,” American Opinion (1968), 23.
  23. “The Philandering Preacher and the FBI,” The Fiery Cross 5, no. 11 (November 1970), 5-6.
  24. George Lincoln Rockwell, “Another Jew Spy,” The Rockwell Report 2, no. 2 (November 1, 1962), 4.
  25. Gage, G-Man, 508–19.
  26. “Book List”; “Special Edition”; Rockwell.
  27. David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (University of California Press, 2005).
  28. Gage, G-Man, 615-27; John Drabble, "To Ensure Domestic Tranquility: The FBI, COINTELPRO-White Hate and Political Discourse, 1964-1971," Journal of American Studies 38, no. 2 (2004): 297-328; John Drabble, "From White Supremacy to White Power: The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s," American Studies 48, no. 3 (2007): 53, for more on the implementation of COINTELPRO: White Hate.
  29. Robert Shelton, "Robert Shelton's 10th Anniversary Banquet Address," The Fiery Cross 6, no. 12 (December 1971), 8.
  30. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Harvard University Press, 2018), for background on violent conflict between the FBI and the White power movement during the 1970s-1980s.
  31. Catherine Wessinger, "The FBI’s 'Cult War' against the Branch Davidians," in The FBI and Religion: Faith and National Security before and after 9/11, ed. Sylvester A. Johnson and Steven Weitzman (February 2017), for background on Waco siege.
  32. Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, 287-304, for more background on producerism and the 1990s militia movement.
  33. Amy Cooter, Nostalgia, Nationalism and the US Militia Movement (Routledge, 2024), 56, 67-68, 75, 84-85.
  34. Annie Wilkinson, “Conspiracy / Theory: Author Q&A with Lisa Wedeen and Joseph Masco,” The Public Eye, May 16, 2024, https://politicalresearch.org/2024/05/16/conspiracy-theory.
  35. Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 150.
  36. HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 150.
  37. Daniel Immerwahr, "A Fire Started in Waco," The New Yorker, May 1, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/08/waco-jeff-guinn-waco-rising-kevin-cook-book-review-homegrown-jeffrey-toobin, for more on how the right-wing interpretation of Waco as a story of White victimhood was not an inevitable outcome and also an inaccurate representation of the members of the Branch Davidian congregation who died.
  38. Dave Denison, “Casualities of Clintonism,” The Baffler, no.73, April 2024, https://thebaffler.com/after-the-fact/casualties-of-clintonism-denison.
  39. Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017), 61.
  40. Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, 309.
  41. Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America, 322.
  42. HoSang and Lowndes, Producers, Parasites, Patriots, 149.
  43. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London: Verso, 2022), 285-6.
  44. Emma Marsden, “What Kash Patel has said about the FBI,” Newsweek, December 1, 2024, https://www.newsweek.com/what-kash-patel-has-said-about-fbi-1993764.
  45. Brooke Singman, “FBI flooded with record number of new agent applications in Kash Patel's first month leading bureau,” Fox News, April 2, 2025, https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-flooded-record-number-new-agent-applications-kash-patels-first-month-leading-bureau.
  46. Jason Leopold, “FBI Agents, FOIA Staff Pulling All Nighters Reviewing Jeffrey Epstein Files,” Bloomberg, March 28, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-28/fbi-agents-foia-staff-pulling-all-nighters-reviewing-jeffrey-epstein-files.
  47. Fox and Gallaher, “Conspiracy for the Masses.”
  48. Devlin Barrett, “Wisconsin Judge Arrested, Accused of Shielding Immigrant From Federal Agents,” The New York Times, April 25, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/us/politics/fbi-arrest-judge.html.
  49. Peter Montgomery, “Project 2025 How Trump Loyalists and Right-Wing Leaders Are Paving a Fast Road to Fascism,” The Public Eye, February 14, 2024, https://politicalresearch.org/2024/02/14/project-2025.
  50. NR Editors, "The Week," National Review, February 20, 2025, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/04/the-week-169/.
  51. Edward Wong and Karoun Demirjian, “Trump Administration Memo Proposes Cutting State Department Funding by Nearly Half,” The New York Times, April 14, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-state-department-budget-cuts.html.
  52. Steve Bannon, “NY State Attorney Resigns; Building Back the Strength of the US,” Steve Bannon’s War Room, February 13, 2024, 55:35–55:55, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-4268-ny-state-attorney-resigns-building-back/id1485351658?i=1000692080772.
  53. Peter Maas, “America’s 9/11 Wars Created the Foot Soldiers of Far-Right Violence at Home,” The Intercept, November 6, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/11/06/jan-6-far-right-us-military/.