Interview: How Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement Will Legalize and Deploy Vigilantes to Enforce Their Agenda, with David Noll
"There is an effort to normalize these [vigilante] activities and make them part of our regular politics — the play is to say this is the way things work..."
“All these supports for vigilantism are being quietly enacted in states like Texas and Tennessee and Florida. And when you take a step back and look at all of these laws, they’re sending a very clear message that the MAGA movement wants foot soldiers on the ground throughout our communities, surveilling people, snitching on them, and doing the work of enforcing the MAGA agenda.”
David Noll is a professor of law at Rutgers University. An academic fellow of the National Institute for Civil Justice, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, the New York Law Journal, and many others. He clerked for Judges Pierre N. Leval and Raymond J. Lohier Jr. on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Richard J. Holwell on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
I spoke with him about his new book, which he co-authored with Jon Michaels: VIGILANTE NATION: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy. We discuss the history of vigilantism in the country and how we can expect the second Trump Administration, with the help of the Christian right, to continue to normalize and legalize vigilante activities in order to serve and enforce this new militant, MAGA, political moment we find ourselves in after this past election.
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