Where Does The American Far Right Go From Here?

After pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the country’s democratic elections last Wednesday, many researchers, activists and journalists covering the American far right were disturbed but not necessarily surprised.

They had long warned about the potential for violence from the far right. Now the rest of America finally understands the threat. The question is what far-right extremists will do next ― and what the country will do to stop them.

As the U.S. processes what happened last week and prepares for a wave of similar anti-democratic protests in the coming days, there are big questions about how members of the far right may shift their tactics and goals during President-elect Joe Biden’s administration and what danger they pose to democracy.

HuffPost spoke with David Neiwert, a staff writer for Daily Kos as well as the author of “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump” and “Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us,” to discuss what the American far right may look like after the presidency of Donald Trump.

You’ve been tracking the far right for decades and recently wrote about how Wednesday’s riot was a culmination of where this movement had been heading for a while.

The thing that I’ve been most assiduously tracking for the last 20 years is the sort of crossover and mainstreaming of the radical right within the mainstream conservative movement. We saw it during the Bush years, but it really started taking off after Obama was elected. What a lot of us were seeing during the whole tea party phenomenon was that movement had really become a major conduit for the transmission of radical right ideas. Agendas and ideas from the patriot movement and other blocs. It just kept accelerating during the Obama years and finally culminated in Trump in many ways.

During the Trump years, he just basically took the lid off Pandora’s box and all the demons came out. Right now, we’re hoping at least to try to get the lid back on, but we’re going to be dealing with all those demons that came flying out for many years afterwards. That’s kind of the big picture.