Photograph Source: Evan Nesterak – CC BY 2.0

A combat veteran argues that voting out the Republicans won’t be enough without a public reckoning

The right wing in American politics has been radicalized, and I don’t think most Americans realize how far.

I’m saying that as both a veteran of the Global War on Terror and a student of political violence. I did fifteen months in Kunar Province, Afghanistan, in 2007 and 2008 with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. Ever since I got out of the Army I’ve continued to be interested in the radicalization process, extremism, political violence and domestic terrorism, as well as authoritarianism, basically the dysfunctions of government and the political process. For the last several years I’ve been a student of sociology, political science and history at Middle Tennessee State University, where I’ve continued to pursue these interests and become more knowledgeable about these topics.

Vice President J.D. Vance has told blatant lies about domestic terrorism in the United States, and about the lopsided amount of terrorism and political violence coming from the right wing, much more so than the left. In September 2025, Vance said, “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left.”

The data from extremism studies says otherwise. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which tracks hundreds of domestic terrorist attacks and plots going back to 1994, counts 152 attacks from the far right between 2016 and mid-2025 against 35 from the far left. Over that same stretch, right-wing attacks killed 112 people and left-wing attacks killed 13. A vice president who calls his claim a statistical fact is either ignorant of the statistics or lying about them.

To understand how we got here, you have to understand Charlottesville. Before August of 2017, most of the far right had been delegitimized as far as the political process and the American conversation went. I don’t know that enough people really understand what happened in Charlottesville that month, what it represented and what it has really done. The Unite the Right rally culminated in a terrorist attack, when James Alex Fields drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters and killed Heather Heyer. What that rally really represented was the far right’s coming out party. They rode the coattails of Donald Trump’s elevation to the presidency into political legitimacy.

Then Trump said there were very fine people on both sides. That false equivocation, and the rest of his administration’s reaction, legitimized white supremacist groups, Christian nationalist groups, the xenophobic, nativist, ugly underbelly of right-wing populism, and the whole of conspiracy culture. All of it had been relegated to the fringes before that. Any Republican president of my lifetime, from Reagan to Bush one to Bush two, would have found it an easy thing to condemn neo-Nazis and the KKK. They would not have equivocated. Trump did, and the far right has enjoyed political legitimacy ever since. From an extremism studies perspective, a political science and sociological perspective, the effect has been to integrate far-right politics into mainstream politics. Mainstream American politics now contains much more of the far-right narrative; it is much more prevalent, much more popular and much more widely accepted than it was before that hot August........

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