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far-right extremism
What ICE's Extremism in Minnesota Reveals
We have arrived at a critical juncture in the history of this country and the world beyond, which is being buffeted by reactionary forces.
Jan 28, 2026
In principle, extremists primarily seek to harm people who do not share their race, religion, or nationality. In practice, they often harm the very people they claim to serve and protect, people with whom they share some supposedly sacred demographic.
Consider Minnesota, currently under siege by anti-immigrant extremists in the employ of the federal government, with ICE and CBP at the forefront. Immigrants have indisputably suffered the most from this program of harm, but we have seen a recent turn toward harming non-immigrants.
This change was starkly illustrated with the January 7 slaying of Renee Good by anti-immigration forces, which was followed by an escalating crackdown on protesters, observers, and people simply trying to go about their lives. On Saturday, January 24, ICE killed another Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, a registered nurse who worked to help veterans, who put his body between immigration officials and other citizens targeted for violence, as clearly seen in multiple videos of the slaying. Federal government agents are shown shooting Pretti in the back while he was pinned to the ground, immobilized, and disarmed.
It goes without saying that citizens and immigrants alike should be equally entitled to live with dignity and free of state violence, and it should be emphasized that citizens are not “more important” victims than immigrants. However, these recent attacks highlight an important dynamic and key vulnerability in any extremist movement.
Through their courage and solidarity, Minnesotans from all walks of life are asserting an authentic American identity based on inclusive ideals in the face of adversity and escalating violence.
To make sense of this, we must first discuss how and why extremists classify people according to their social identity. The broadest categories of identity are in-groups and out-groups. An in-group is the group to which one belongs, and an out-group is anyone excluded from that in-group. As defined in my MIT Press book on the subject, extremism is the belief that an in-group’s success or survival can never be separated from the need for hostile action against an out-group.
Enacting harm on out-groups is risky, difficult, and costly, so extremists almost always seek to make the task easier by enlisting the entire in-group. To understand how this works, it’s useful to break the in-group down into subcategories.
- The extremist in-group is a movement based on a demand to harm out-groups. Examples include Al-Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan.
- The eligible in-group is the category of people an extremist movement claims to represent and from which it seeks support. For Al-Qaeda, the eligible in-group is Sunni Muslims. For the KKK, the eligible in-group is white people.
In the extremist context, eligibility refers to the traits that make someone eligible for in-group membership. For instance, according to the KKK, light-colored skin is the minimum requirement for eligibility in the category of “white people.” But eligibility implies a counterpart: ineligibility. To continue with the same example, the most obviously ineligible people are members of an out-group, such as those with dark-colored skin.
But eligible in-groups often rebuke the extremists who claim to represent them, throwing the extremist movement’s legitimacy into crisis. If the extremist movement can’t persuade the eligible in-group to enact harm on out-groups, it may try to change the composition of the in-group by declaring that dissenters have forfeited the right to their in-group identity.
Extremist movements are at their most dangerous during times of uncertainty or upheaval.
The ineligible in-group thus consists of people who possess the canonical qualifications for membership but whose actions put them at risk of expulsion. In white supremacist extremism, for example, the ineligible in-group usually includes white people who have sexual relations with non-white people and are therefore subjected to even harsher treatment than the out-group. For instance, the infamous “Day of the Rope” massacre described in the neo-Nazi novel “The Turner Diaries” refers to the gruesome public execution of white “race traitors,” while racial out-group members are killed without fanfare “off camera.”
Extremist movements are at their most dangerous during times of uncertainty or upheaval, when group boundaries can be suddenly redrawn, with control of the in-group hanging in the balance. An extremist movement that hasn’t consolidated control of the in-group often declares war against “ineligible” dissenters. We saw this play out in the mid-2010s, when the Islamic State organization (IS) attempted to consolidate its control of a large swath of Iraq and Syria. Sunni Muslims who opposed IS control were massacred mercilessly under the principle “nine bullets for the traitors, one for the crusader.”
Disturbingly, we’re seeing the early stages of this dynamic right now in Minnesota, although we can hope it will not evolve into atrocities of the same scale. Anti-immigrant extremists in the U.S. federal government have increasingly menaced and used violence against dissenters and observers who are U.S. citizens — members of the in-group that the extremists claim to serve and protect. In addition to the Good and Pretti shootings, federal agents have roughed up and detained observers without provocation, and have repeatedly used pepper spray on peaceful gatherings, sometimes at close range and in violation of safe operation guidelines. In one horrific incident, a car full of children was exposed to tear gas while their parents tried to drive them home from a school event. The extremists continue to escalate their program of harm against the ineligible in-group, with no end in sight.
One of the most important ways extremists seek control of the eligible in-group is by exploiting the socially constructed nature of reality. The theory of social construction is popularly understood as “consensus reality,” and its premise is simple enough: The world is too big and complicated for people to experience in its entirety. We can only understand the world through consultation with trusted others, who tell us what happens out of our sight and help us determine right from wrong. Put simply, we can only understand the world in dialogue with others.
In-groups and out-groups come into play during social construction. We tend to trust people whose experience of life is most like our own, typically those with whom we share some concept of identity — anything from race and religion to neighborhood and nationality. When this normal instinct congeals into an excessive attachment to a specific identity and a mandate to harm people who don’t share that identity, it becomes extremism. Almost everything done by authoritarians and fascists (for whom extremism is an essential tool) can be understood as an effort to control the social construction of reality by amplifying selected in-group views and entirely suppressing the views of out-groups through methods that range from discrimination to segregation to genocide.
To this end, the current generation of anti-immigration extremists is navigating turbulent waters, in part because its coalition is complex and not exclusively focused on immigration writ large. The alliance includes often-overlapping categories of racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, and transphobes, and the priorities of its factions are not always aligned. This increasingly fractious coalition is ill-equipped to face down an increasingly cohesive coalition of Americans united by anger that our nation’s peace, progress, and safety have been intentionally undermined.
Minnesotans are courageously demonstrating this unity, mobilizing to defend neighbors whose race or national origin puts them at risk. In the process, they are communicating a strong in-group consensus to their persecutors by turning out in large numbers and loudly asserting their condemnation through shouting, blowing whistles, giving sermons, honking horns, posting signs, and painting graffiti. These expressions of in-group disapproval can help defuse the psychological drivers of violence and undermine competing narratives and political power structures that seek to validate an extremist orientation and the repressive tactics that it justifies.
In a globalized media environment like America’s, the in-group is never just local. People around the country can support Minnesotans using many of the same tactics — by speaking out and showing up in large numbers, both online and offline, as so many have already done. In conjunction — and perhaps even more importantly — we can fight the tide of hate by demanding that institutions, including politicians and the media, recognize the severity of the current crisis in American democracy and respond proportionately.
Those institutions are critically important precisely because America’s consensus reality is, again, too big and too diverse to observe directly. You could spend your entire life talking to Americans and still understand only a tiny fragment of the American experience. For in-groups larger than a neighborhood, the consensus is therefore described and defined by institutions and individuals in journalism, politics, and the arts. These portraits of the in-group consensus are distributed through traditional and new media platforms, and none of them are neutral.
The winner of this struggle will define what values the American in-group stands for, perhaps for generations to come.
It is no accident that the purveyors of hate have moved to take control of major news and social media platforms through a combination of money and pressure tactics, and to discredit and defund those they can’t control. In some cases, these platforms have been bought outright and subjected to blunt and obvious manipulation. In other cases, reporters have succumbed to flawed journalistic conventions, such as providing “both sides” of every controversy with equal weight, even when one side is obviously lying or otherwise detached from reality. This practice misleads the public by inflating the extremists’ appearance of strength and credibility under the guise of “balance.” (Imagine news programs inviting a flat-earth believer to weigh in whenever the subject of the globe comes up. That’s what happens now when the topic is immigration or vaccines.)
The in-group consensus can never be determined with perfect objectivity. The tools for measuring it, such as polls, are complex and subject to bias. Even if polls were perfectly composed and executed, they would still be open to wildly divergent interpretations. Look through the archives and ask which presidents won “with a mandate” over the last 100 years. Then compare their vote counts.
In other words, the consensus is won through perception. And when an authority figure, an institution, or an algorithm creates the perception that extremists are winning, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People have a well-documented tendency to justify the legitimacy of the status quo as they perceive it.
Although we can reject those who would assign us to an out-group or an ineligible in-group, we cannot assume that our voices will be acknowledged. If America is to climb out of this era of rage and hate, those who stand against the extremist wave cannot just show up and expect to be counted. They must loudly demand their voices be acknowledged in every setting and institution of civic life, from business to politics, from news to the creative arts. With every death at the hands of anti-immigrant extremists, this assertion becomes more necessary and potentially more powerful.
Even so, a winning narrative or communication strategy may not be enough to defeat those who seek to control the in-group consensus using state violence. If the extremists can’t persuade the ineligible in-group to surrender, they will seek to intimidate and perhaps kill its members, an escalation that is now well underway. That is why the eligible in-group must defend its relevance with all available methods, including the courts, the ballot box, mutual aid, and more. Justice must be pursued, regardless of whether accused murderers wear a badge. And all of these in-group actions will build and reinforce support and mobilization networks that will be sorely needed before this is over.
We’ve arrived at a critical juncture in the history of this country and the world beyond, which is being buffeted by the same reactionary forces. The winner of this struggle will define what values the American in-group stands for, perhaps for generations to come. Through their courage and solidarity, Minnesotans from all walks of life are asserting an authentic American identity based on inclusive ideals in the face of adversity and escalating violence. For those values to prevail, we must stand together in their defense.
This piece was originally published by The MIT Press Reader and appears here at Common Dreams with permission.
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Constitutional Convention: A Right-Wing Fever Dream Would Destroy This Nation Once and for All
Time to wake up, people. It's no longer just a dream—but a nightmare one step closer to happening.
Dec 14, 2023
One of the right’s favorite fever dreams over the years has been to gut the US Constitution of many of its checks and balances and officially turn America into a legal oligarchy with a strongman presidency, nearly bulletproof legal immunity for the morbidly rich, and full personhood for corporations.
As of this month, it’s no longer just a dream.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) completed their winter “National Policy Summit” get-together in Scottsdale, Arizona last week with Speaker Mike Johnson as its keynote speaker. This is the group that’s brought “Stand Your Ground” and voter suppression “model legislation” to Red states across America and, for fifty years now, has been bringing together corporate lobbyists and Republican state-level politicians to make state after state more corporate- and billionaire-friendly.
If their plan works, these Republican toadies of the billionaires who fund and own them will rewrite our Constitution and state governors, the US Congress, and the President will have no say whatsoever in the process.
At this recent meeting they rolled out a new strategy to convene a Constitutional Convention, so they can finally remake America in their own image: they’re going to try to get the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court — who all have direct or indirect ties back to ALEC, its related/affiliated organizations, and/or its funders — to go along with it.
Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold (now a professor of law and president of the American Constitution Society) is not prone to hyperbole; he’s always been a thoughtful and measured speaker and writer. So, it’s worth taking him seriously when he recently said of MAGA Mike Johnson:
“It is alarming to have a speaker of the House who supports the extremist Convention of States movement, which is striving to radically rewrite the U.S. Constitution.”
Please consider the horrifying possibilities.
- Imagine if most public schools in the country closed and were replaced by for-profit charter and private academies — often racially segregated and only serving families who could afford their tuition — because the Constitution forbade state-level compulsory education laws and taxpayer funding for education (at all levels).
- Imagine if the U.S. Constitution required the EPA, FDA, USDA, DOT, Department of Education, and Department of Labor to shut down. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with an end to the national minimum wage and the income tax, both individual and corporate.
- Imagine that the new billionaire-written Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks, and even big food and pharma — all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures — because the Constitution now prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can no longer even enforce voting or civil rights laws.
- Imagine if Citizens United and its position that political bribery is merely a First Amendment exercise of “free speech” were put into the US Constitution so it can never be overturned by Congress or a future court, meaning that whichever political candidates have the backing of the wealthiest donors pretty much win every election for the rest of American history.
- Imagine if the free and independent press protections of the First Amendment are gone and, like in today’s Hungary and Russia, politicians can sue anybody who writes anything about them for defamation or slander, effectively putting any kind of opposition media or even honest news operations out of business.
- Imagine, to add injury to insult, that the federal government has shut down Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, Pell grants, housing supports, and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate, or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do because they’re now unconstitutional.
Morbidly rich billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to do all this and more.
They want to provide corporations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits while chopping away at anything smelling of “socialism” like Social Security, child labor laws, or inheritance, income, and wealth taxes.
The Constitution provides for three ways to change or amend itself. The first is that Congress can propose a constitutional amendment, pass it with a supermajority in both houses, and have three-quarters of the states ratify it. This is the way it’s been done for every one of the existing 27 amendments.
The second strategy is done by using Article V of the Constitution and driving the process up from the states. The easiest way to do this is for three-quarters of the states to legislatively approve (with simple majority votes in the legislatures of each state) an amendment, in which case Congress is unnecessary and upon ratification by the 38th state, it becomes a permanent amendment to the Constitution.
While this strategy has never been used, it’s one process many of the good-government groups like Move To Amend and Public Citizen are pushing for a “Corporations are not people, and money is not speech” amendment to reverse Citizens United.
The third — and incredibly dangerous — strategy to amend the Constitution is to simply call a “Convention of the States,” again using Article V, and open the entire document itself up to rewriting and tinkering.
This third strategy is the one ALEC was pushing this month. If they can pull it off in the states (where it’s cheaper to buy politicians), then Congress, state governors, the president, and even the courts would have no say over it. And ALEC has spent the past 50 years becoming a major — some would say controlling — factor in Republican-controlled state legislatures.
Their barrier has been that it takes 34 states to call for a convention, and there have never been that many states calling call for one at the same time since the founding of our republic. However, as was pointed out at ALEC last week, every state except Hawaii has — at one time or another, starting with Virginia in 1788 — passed a resolution proposing a constitutional convention (there have been 400 such resolutions since the founding of our nation).
While most of history’s resolutions for a convention have been specific to one issue or another (New York’s 1789 resolution called for a Bill of Rights to be added to the Constitution, for example, something that Congress and the states did in 1791), a half-dozen were simply calls for a convention without specifics. These are sometimes referred to as “generic” convention resolutions.
The theory pushed at ALEC, first rolled out three years ago at an ALEC workshop by conservative activist David Biddulph but now apparently fully endorsed, is to combine the existing 28 Red state resolutions along with the six “generic” ones (going all the way back to 1789) to hit the magic number of 34 states to open the convention.
The key to the strategy is to get it before the Supreme Court and let the billionaire-owned Republican justices do ALEC’s work for it by ruling that those old resolutions are still valid, even though the people who proposed and passed them are all long dead.
Utah Republican State Rep. Ken Ivory told ALEC lawmakers it was imperative to get the issue before the Supreme Court:
“Please join us in the state of Utah as we look into the legal mechanisms that we have under the Constitution… to [get the Court to] declare that Congress must count the [old] applications. … And if, as we believe, we’ve already achieved 34 applications to Congress for a fiscal responsibility convention, call [it]… and hold a Convention of States.”
If their plan works, these Republican toadies of the billionaires who fund and own them will rewrite our Constitution and state governors, the US Congress, and the President will have no say whatsoever in the process. Only state legislatures are necessary for rewriting the Constitution and then ratifying their own work, according to Article V of the Constitution, and governors can’t veto their actions.
Much like the many cases that have suddenly burst onto the scene and then been used by the six corrupt Republicans on the Court to alter American law and take away citizens’ rights, this one could move quickly. Now that the ALEC meeting is over, expect to see states begin putting together the lawsuits or other legal actions necessary to get this proposal before the Court.
Alexander Hamilton was prescient: in the last sentence of Federalist 85, he warns us of efforts to re-write or replace our Constitution:
“I dread the more the consequences of new attempts, because I know that powerful individuals, in this and in other States, are enemies to a general national government in every possible shape.”
Common Cause and the Center for Media and Democracy have been at the forefront of sounding the alarm and I’ve hot-linked their names to their most recent articles about the work they’re doing to try to stop the billionaire machine devoted to rewriting our Constitution.
Please check them out, get on their mailing lists, and spread the word. This is one of those things that Republicans on the Court could use to seemingly spring out of nowhere and bring down our democracy once and for all.
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Media Coverage Must Stop Equating Congress’s Far Left and Far Right
Whenever lawmakers are debating a high-profile piece of legislation, the media returns to the easy description of pressures exerted by the far right and far left, as if these are similar forces.
Jun 03, 2023
Here’s how, in its lead story Thursday, The New York Times described the House’s vote to resolve Republicans’ self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis:
“With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks.”
It’s not just the Times. This false equivalence between the two parties’ activist wings has been on display in press coverage throughout the debt-ceiling votes. Politico Playbook on Sunday described Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal’s mixed reaction to the debt-ceiling compromise as indicating that the bill may have “a chance to win votes from some on the far left.” A Washington Post sub-headline that same day noted that “far-left and far-right corners of the House have criticized the compromise.”
These descriptions conjure a world in which the wing of the Republican Party defined by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Chip Roy (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) is somehow balanced out by the wing of the Democratic Party defined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Jayapal (D-Wash.), Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.).
On a scale of political ideology and positions from 100 to 0 (with 100 being the far left and 0 being the far right), and 50 being in the middle, even the most left-oriented Democrats (Ocasio-Cortez, Bush, Casar, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists.
This idea is, of course, farcical—both in terms of the vote on the debt-ceiling bill and our politics more generally. Yet whenever Congress is debating a high-profile piece of legislation, the media returns to the easy description of pressures exerted by the far right and far left, as if these are similar forces.
In the case of the debt-ceiling compromise, 46 House Democrats and 71 House Republicans voted “no” on the legislation.
The Democrats who voted “no” range from liberals like Reps. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) to progressives like Rosa DeLauro (D-Md.), Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), Jayapal and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) to democratic socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and Bush.
According to the Times’ own analysis, 40 of the 100 members of the Progressive Caucus (40%) voted “no,” while 34 out of 42 (81%) of hard-right Republicans (which the Times defines as members of the Freedom Caucus and those who opposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker) voted “no.”
Two Republicans (Boebert and Jim Banks of Indiana) and two Democrats (Angie Craig of Minnesota and Deborah Ross of Pennsylvania) didn’t vote. Interestingly, two of the most reactionary Republicans, Greene and Stefanik, voted “yes”—a testament to their closeness with McCarthy, who appointed them to influential committees.
It is difficult to rank House members on an ideological scale because rankings look solely at voting records, and each organization that attempts to rank members selects different votes as crucial. The more important point, though, is not necessarily about voting records. It’s a question of how we define “extremism.”
On a scale of political ideology and positions from 100 to 0 (with 100 being the far left and 0 being the far right), and 50 being in the middle, even the most left-oriented Democrats (Ocasio-Cortez, Bush, Casar, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists. They are different shades of social democrats; they espouse policies that are fairly mainstream across western democracies. They advocate for the rights of marginalized people and are pro-union, pro-choice, and concerned about climate change. They want to expand the social safety net, favor progressive taxation, and want to raise the minimum wage.
In contrast, the most right-wing Republicans are extremists and reactionaries. Many rub shoulders with, and speak in support of, white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and anti-Semites. In many cases, they want to repeal the political and cultural victories of the civil rights, feminist, gay rights, environmental, and labor movements. They deny that the 2020 election was legitimate, and took steps to overturn it. They support the January 6 insurrectionists, who they cast as freedom fighters. They have opposed the fundamentals of democracy—like the right to vote and the peaceful transition of power—and, in some cases, played active roles in the closest thing to a coup the U.S. has experienced in its nearly 250-year history.
It might be tempting to say that extremism is in the eye of the beholder. Ocasio-Cortez thinks that Greene is an extremist and vice versa. But for the media to continually create this false equivalence between the “far right” and the “far left” is misleading and distorts a crucial, critical reality of American politics in 2023—one that looms behind even the most anodyne legislative battle.
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