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The Far Right is absolutely obsessed with martyrdom.

This week, we got another glimpse of this obsession with Trump’s commemoration of Ashli Babbit’s birthday. After the last five or so years, I’ve built up a sort of emotional callous to shock that usually protects me from the sort of almost daily, bordering on parodical political circus act that the American political non-system has become, but seeing this particular news gave me chills.

The Business Insider article details a Texas rally dubbed the “Texas Loves Ashli Babbitt” in which Trump, depicted in a pre-recorded video interview, calls for justice for Babbitt’s death, before Babbitt’s mother says, quote, “They squashed the movement that day… They killed my daughter and they jailed patriots, and they said ‘look what happens when you question us’… Fuck off and die, Nancy Pelosi.” Babbitt, whose death is being mourned by the former president who, for all intents and purposes, called her there, died after a Capitol Police officer shot her as she attempted to enter a door that lead to the House of Representatives on January 6th, 2021.

Former president Trump said “Together, we grieve her terrible loss… There was no reason Ashli should’ve lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family. So on this solemn occasion, as we celebrate her life, we renew our call for a fair and nonpartisan investigation into the death of Ashli Babbitt.” Notably, there was a Department of Justice investigation, as well as investigation by the Capitol Police, both of which exonerated the officer that shot and killed Ashli Babbitt as she stood at the front of a mob that injured and killed multiple officers over the course of a single day. The mob that she had joined was one that explicitly called for the execution of politicians on multiple occasions throughout the day. So when she attempted to climb through a broken glass window to approach elected representatives, there was very good reason to believe that she, and the mob of insurrectionists behind her, were out for blood. Especially when accompanied by pictures like this.

We can whine all day about the hypocrisy of the right, or the dangers of martyring insurrectionists. Instead, I want to talk about the theme of martyrdom in the far right and its implications throughout the movement. Notably, the far right isn’t monolithic: it ranges from the benign fiscal and social conservatives who just believe that the market should remain relatively unregulated and that progressive agendas shouldn’t influence politics the way they are (perceptually) doing now, to the neo-fascist accelerationist Boogaloo adherents who believe in an increasingly violent mode of fascist insurrection against what they perceive as a totalitarian, anti-white government. There are right wingers to the left and to the right of those two poles, and many, many in between. However, it can sometimes be helpful to generalize the far right to view thematic elements that hold in the very general sense. So, understand that when I say “the far right” I mean it in the general sense, applied to a wide range of individuals, and when I am instead speaking about a more niche section of the far right, I will do my best to explicitly say so.

The Silly Martyrdom: The Myth of Christian Oppression and Genocide

Growing up in an extremely conservative, southern baptist church, you would think that much of the Christian world was being treated like the tiny minorities in Chinese underground churches were, or the Yazidi Christians in ISIS-held territories in the Middle East were. According to an endless stream of preachers, speakers, radio hosts, politicians, family members, youth pastors, and friends, Christians were among the most oppressed groups, constantly in an ongoing war, whether spiritual, emotional or physical, with enemies that run the faux-oppressive gamut: pornography and philandering women on every webpage and every corner, assaulting us with their omnipresent temptation and lustful gaze, totalitarian states constantly threatening to imprison the upright and moral Christian for their beliefs, extremists beheading Christians by the hundreds on a daily basis in mass genocides that the mainstream media is too woke to cover.

The true story, obviously, is quite different from the terror spread from the pulpit. Christians face oppression in totalitarian states and faced horrors unknown and unknowable by the average person in the West in ISIS-held territories over the last few years, but to say that this sort of violent oppression is even remotely typical of one of the most widespread religious beliefs in the world, one whose adherents hold most political offices in most established western countries across Europe, one whose sect in the Catholic Church is the most powerful religious political structures in the world, is, frankly, offensive to those who are facing systemic, violent oppression for their religious beliefs and identities. The obviously rampant misogynistic characterization of women taking ownership of their bodies in the form of their dress or decisions to enter into consensual sex work doesn’t even merit a response here, either.

The religious right, frankly, needs to be embattled. They need to be martyred like the Christ of their cross. It keeps the rapt attention of the drooling masses on the central figure in the pulpit, and not on their hundreds of millions of dollars of accrued wealth, built on the backs of the gullible tither who believes their hard-earned dollar will go to fund the next crusade against Obama’s gun-snatching Jade Helm brownshirts that haunt their every nightmare.

Martyrdom is a central theme to certain parts of modern Christianity, but instead of focusing on actual martyrs, biblical figures like Timothy or the brave (but, likely, overly brown) Yazidis who faced ISIS in Northern Iraq, they must make martyrs of every man on Main Street. Men are facing unparalleled horrors in the modern world, societal terrors not known in many centuries. These terrors aren’t a growing opioid epidemic, a shrinking middle class, the global rise of fascism or unending wars that have wiped out thousands of men and women across two decades with very little to show for it. Instead, modern men (and it’s always men having to face the evils of the world, not women, after all) must face the horrors of an empowered female and non-binary gender, growing recognition of the rights of previously marginalized classes and races, the growing and constant threat of Obama’s socialist takeover, the threat of the death of Christianity as an organized religion, which has nothing to do with the religion itself, after all, and has everything to do with The War on Christmas, and, most importantly, the great demographic shift.

What, you thought we weren’t going to touch on race here?

At least in the church I grew up in, the race issue was more or less clumsily danced around by the newest pious preacher of the pulpit. Speaking to an audience that, most Sundays and Wednesdays, was exclusively white and almost exclusively middle or upper-middle class, despite attending a church in the poorest and blackest part of our town, the preacher usually spoke of invasions of an unknown and unseen enemy, one whose culture is outright incompatible with a good, Christian country such as ours. The rhetoric often increased in volume and frequency in (surely coincidental) parallel to the rise of the Tea Party and other neoconservative groups and peaked during the Obama era. They spoke of the need for bravery in the face of a growing secular world whose values born of a life in sin and against the Christian God threatened to overthrow the natural order of things, where Christians are somehow simultaneously under threat and oppressed while also living in a “Christian nation” founded by Christian founders, despite many of the founders being more or less devout atheists and despite many of them believing in a strong divide between the church and the state.

Frankly, The Mysterious Other was an incredibly thin mask over a supposedly invading Central and South American refugee population, which was also supposedly a guise for an invading army of cartel members, gang bangers and terrorists, as well as a growing non-white demographic and a growing trend toward secularism. The martyrdom sought by many of the preachers in those days and into today was a martyrdom of a holy race war variety, one who seeks to do battle with the mysterious (and mostly brown) enemy, though if you choose not to read between the lines, this battle was to be fought primarily in the religious domain. Religious extremists didn’t care to entertain the dog whistling, though, as they attacked abortion clinics and physicians, innocent Muslim (or vaguely Arabic-looking) pedestrians and supposedly anti-Christian politicians and celebrities.

You don’t have to snicker silently about the obvious irony that the sect that constantly fanned the flames of xenophobic fear of hyperconservative Islamic Sharia law seeking to murder, enslave and oppress Christians were, themselves, obsessed with the idea of martyrdom, by the way. There are some ways that all religious extremists are the same.

Social Media Martyrdom and the Myth of the Embattled Right Wing Ecosystem

None of us are strangers to the incessant argument that figures on the right are constantly being targeted for “shadow banning,” suspension and outright termination online. It didn’t matter that Trump spent a year of his campaign and four years in office consistently threatening and supporting political violence using Facebook and Twitter, only being deplatformed after the insurrection on the 6th: if the far right was the Messiah sent to rid the world of the leftist-controlled social media ecosystem, then Twitter suspensions would be the cross they bare.

From Marjorie Taylor Greene’s suspension from Twitter to Trump’s final, almost merciful banning from Facebook and Twitter, the far right is emblematic of the stick-in-bicycle-spoke meme. They spread mis-/disinformation, threaten violence, dox leftists and spread hate and bigotry and then whine incessantly at the eventual suspension or ban, throwing up their hands as if to say “see what I’m talking about? This is oppression!” Somehow, the marvels of the free market only extend to businesses that actively enable violence, harassment, and the spread of misinformation and stop short the second a wingnut is censored. If a Twitter suspension is the cross of the far right martyr, they very frequently nail themselves to it and beg for the sword of a Twitter timeout to be thrust between their ribs.

The list of martyrs flows long in this sector, and it doesn’t just include mainstream voices on mainstream platforms. The near full disappearance of Alex Jones from the face of the web after he was censored into oblivion for spreading conspiracies that included the Sandy Hook Hoax conspiracy, Obama birtherism conspiracies, rumors of satanic cabals that included the Clintons worshipping Moloch and sacrificing babies on an island full of the elite is still, even years after Jones’ online presence took a nose dive, frequently discussed in some right wing circles. Still more include Laura Loomer, the infamous attempted politician whose platform almost solely consists of Islamophobia, suspended from Twitter for, you guessed it, Islamophobia, and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, who was suspended from YouTube for glorifying violence, a charge so laughably fitting that it makes one wonder how he was able to build up an audience in the millions in the first place.

It’s unbelievably petty, yes, but the constant virtue signaling surrounding the censorship of blatantly dangerous speech on private social media platforms is an important rallying cry for the right. Trump knows that he massively screwed up in hamstringing his greatest PR podiums in Facebook and Twitter after the 6th. He had a free platform to issue a press release from the toilet, something he very likely did, and he blew that in an almost comical way.

A Darker Martyrdom

If one were to take a hard right turn from the aforementioned social media martyrdom frequently trumpeted by the far right and drive to a much darker corner of the movement, one would eventually arrive at compound in West Virginia that housed what might be modern America’s most hateful individual. William Luther Pierce was the author of what has been called “the bible of the racist right,” more formally known as The Turner Diaries.

I’m not going to devote as much space to The Turner Diaries as the tome deserves. It is, genuinely, one of the foremost works in the darkest, most violent and most well-read and philosophically adherent parts of the far right. It has been described as a literal how-to book on a genocidal, fascistic and white supremacist takeover of the national government. The conspiracy theories run the gamut, placing as the antagonist a global order of malicious, explicitly Jewish cabal that runs everything from the media to the military. The book is filled to the brim with violent rape fantasy, genocide, lynchings, race murders, terror plots with extremely specific and vivid detail and explicitly white supremacist, fascistic ideology that could only have been born of the ideological and formal founder of the National Alliance. If you need any more reference, it was also a book preferred by Timothy McVeigh and quite a few members of the Atomwaffen Division, a white supremacist accelerationist terrorist group that has actually claimed the lives of five people, including two members of the terrorist group.

The bible of the racist right is also full of themes of martyrdom.

Main thematic elements include the classic, fascistic trope of The Great Replacement, an idea recently echoed by Tucker Carlson, that there is an ongoing, sometimes intentional, replacement of whites in America and internationally with non-white persons of color. This is a critical element of far right martyrdom; The Great Replacement makes a martyr of any person willing to commit mass violence to reverse the supposed trend of disposition and oppression of white people across the nation and the globe.

Great Replacement Themes are present throughout the entirety of The Turner Diaries and are accompanied by more direct appeals to martyrdom, including the insistence of the protagonist and the racist army that they fight for that soldiers in the great race war need to be ready to die for the cause as it will bring about a resurgence of the white race and a new, clean world, devoid of leftists, people of color, LGBTQ persons and those with physical or mental disabilities. The plot presupposes the idea that this is a zero sum game: the white race takes over, or it disappears. This makes martyrdom a requirement, a prerequisite for being a genuine aryan.

The main character is at one point captured by “the enemy” and decides to undergo torture instead of taking the cyanide capsule that every soldier is given in case they are captured. Upon escaping, he is reprimanded by those in charge and is ordered to explicitly make a martyr of himself by engaging in a series of suicide missions against the enemy. These missions, including nuclear attacks against strongholds of the enemy and the outbreak of a more general nuclear war that sees Tel Aviv bombed into oblivion, make the main character a hero in the eyes of the eventually victorious white nationalist nation, a martyr in the great last race war.

Right Wing Martyrs Abound, Even Outside of Literature

Finally, we arrive at the death of Ashli Babitt, after, admittedly, skipping many historical right wing martyrs in both literature and recent and past history. Ashli joins a growing list of martyrs held up by those across the spectrum of the far right as heroes, including Duncan Lemp, a self-titled member of the Boogaloo movement, whose name is spoken with honor and reverence for dying in a gun fight with law enforcement, and even Derek Chauvin, who adherents to the Blue Lives Matter flavor of the far right believe was set up as a fall-guy for an increasingly radically progressive political environment, as well as Kyle Rittenhouse who is viewed in a similar light to Chauvin as a protector of modern society from the savages on the left.

Trump is a martyr for losing the election, Alex Jones a martyr for being censored into irrelevance, Jusice Kavanaugh a martyr for being accused of rape, Trump again for being accused of rape, Jim Jordan for… being accused of covering up systemic rape.

Are you seeing some themes here?

The far right is beset on all sides by villains known and unknown seeking to remove them from the discussion and from power. With every scandal, there is a new martyr, a new cross-bearing Messiah screaming “forgive them, for they know not what they do” as they march through jeering crowds toward yet another torturous Twitter timeout. It would be humorous, if it didn’t work.

Andy Ngo, more aptly known as Milkshake Andy, has made significant sums of money after garnering massive amounts of attention for being beaten after being outed as a far right provocateur. It wasn’t enough to be beaten, he had to feign a brain injury and go on a national media tour exaggerating the extent of his relatively minor injuries. This lead to book deals and significant attention to The Post Millenial where he serves as the editor-at-large. Ngo’s entire schtick is serving as the constant martyr, the villified target of ridicule, assault and milk shakes.

Where to Go From Here

Frankly, the strategy of constant martyrdom is a good one. It frequently leads to advantageous media covereage, even only from right wing outlets like Fox and outlets that don’t (but likely should) know better. It gives a wide base a central pillar to gather around, leading to further opportunities to radicalize more centrist or peaceful members of the right. Victimhood is a fantastic motivator: if you think you are constantly beset by threats and forces far stronger than you, you are likely to stick with the pack for protection, and you’re very likely to fight back with force equivalent or greater than the perceived force brought to bare against you. It’s a good approach, and one that the far right has gotten fairly good at.

We do have several methods of fighting this strategy, however. To begin with, stop inviting provocateur’s like Milkshake Andy onto national and international news networks. Contrary to apparently popular belief, you don’t have to present every side equally. People who quite literally coordinated with the far right’s idiot attempt at modern brownshirts, also known as the Proud Boys, don’t need a massive platform to whine their victimhood. The less we intentionally or unintentionally amplify the constant victimhood, the better. The far right media is good enough at amplifying what they need to without our help.

Furthermore, call out nonsense. Every time you hear someone decrying the partisan nature of the DoJ’s investigation into the killing of Ashli Babitt, call the person out, loudly and firmly, politely if you can. Present facts and don’t let the conspiracy of martyrdom spread in your social circles. Stamp out the seeds of a political philosophy with a high potential for growing into fascism, even if only in your relatively small social circle. When you see a doctored video, don’t spread it. Prove that it was doctored to show a story that isn’t representative of reality.

We can’t stop the strategy of martyrdom in the far right, but we can do our part in slowing its spread and curtailing its effectiveness. It doesn’t take long for one’s pity for a far right provocateur’s banning from Twitter to turn into a more hateful longing to serve as a martyr themselves in a much more literal and violent sense. Do not let Ashli Babbit become the next Duncan Lemp or Earl Turner.

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