Regardless of whether such a movement ever emerges or not, the notion of a pro-Trump armed insurgency arising in the United States is now part of the official Democratic Party narrative. On Jan. 19, the day before Joe Biden’s inauguration as president, the Center for American Progress (CAP — a core Democratic Party think tank) released a statement which claimed that “there are troubling indicators, such as a shared grievance, a strong group identity, and recruitment and training, that America could be in the early days of a violent political movement that will endure after President Donald Trump leaves office. This movement, united by Trump, brings together conservatives, Christian nationalists, Nazi sympathizers, white supremacists, and ultranationalist groups such as the Proud Boys.”
Naturally, something must be done to shut this threat. “Politicians and government officials across the political spectrum must not underestimate the threat that this movement may continue to pose going forward,” it continued. “U.S. leaders must take immediate action to mitigate this threat. Left unaddressed, this movement could become a full-fledged insurgency that poses a significant and enduring threat to Americans. U.S. leaders must take immediate action to prioritize and mitigate this threat, making full use of existing tools and authorities.”
The thrust of the statement reflects discussions that have been going on among counterinsurgency experts for many months, including a previously reported statement by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal. At the center of these discussions appears to be David Kilcullen, an Australian counterinsurgency expert, close collaborator of Gen. David Petraeus, and advisor to the US Army in Iraq during the 2007 surge. Kilcullen, though having a teaching position in Australia, has evidently been spending a lot of time in the US profiling armed groups on both sides of the ideological divide and what he believes motivates them. Kilcullen doesn’t believe that a full-blown insurgency is underway... yet: “I think that the construct that’s actually best suited to where we are now is a concept from the CIA’s guide to the analysis of insurgency, and that’s a notion called incipient insurgency,” he said on Jan. 13 during a discussion hosted by Boston radio station WBUR on the Jan. 6 events in Washington. “So, an incipient insurgency is the pre-insurgency or organizational stage before an actual insurgency gets off the ground.”
The Jan. 6 events, he said, were driven by “a specific grievance,” he said, “which was the belief by something like 55 million Trump voters that the constituted government was under attack by election fraud. So we talked about the definition of insurrection earlier, as an attack on the constituted government. I suspect if you got people on the line who were involved in the protest or in the much smaller attack on the Capitol after the protest, they would say, ‘We weren’t attacking the constituted government, we were defending the constituted government.’”
