Adam G. House

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 in Virginia.

Now why am I talking about this? Because on Monday night, October 5, at a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, the sitting president of the United States stood in front of a crowd of his supporters and talked, in a flippant way, about Iran, an enemy with which we are currently at war. “Let them take out Los Angeles,” he said. “Let them take out San Diego.” He called it a very small price to pay.

There used to be this idea that the president was somebody we expected to act presidential. This is not presidential. Some people are excusing his words by saying it was just a joke, that he’s trolling the left or whatever. First of all, that’s a very unpresidential thing to do. But even if it was a joke, anyone who understands anything about national security, anyone who has been involved in terrorism studies at all, anyone familiar with the lay of the land in extremism in this country, knows this is not something a president jokes about. It paints a target onto American cities. We are talking about literally millions of people with crosshairs put on them by the president’s words, no matter what he meant by it.

What disturbs me even more is the crowd. When Donald Trump said those words, his supporters cheered. They cheered the idea of an enemy we are at war with carrying out violent, deadly attacks on American cities. And the United States Congress is so inept and cowardly and spineless that it did not immediately start impeachment proceedings or move under the 25th Amendment to remove him. That shows just how far we’ve fallen.

Far-right political culture has not stayed in one wing of the Republican Party. It has infiltrated the presidential administration, it has infiltrated our Republican Congress, and it has infiltrated enough of the vast body of the American people that a president can talk about letting a foreign enemy take out two American cities and be applauded for it. I don’t think Americans in general realize just how far they’ve been radicalized, by this infiltration of the far right into our politics and by Trump’s legitimization of political violence, lawlessness and corruption in general. I don’t think we realize what a cancer this has become, how toxic it’s become, how malignant it has become.

Donald Trump talks like Biff from Back to the Future, or Archie Bunker. That’s the type of character he is: ignorant, crass, hateful and divisive, playing on the fears and the ugly side of American culture, further polarizing the electorate and driving us toward violent confrontation among Americans. I don’t have to go back over every instance to prove it. It’s the internet age, and they always say do your own research, right? So do it.

Think about that old saying from the war in Iraq, that we should just bomb them back to the Stone Age. Now in this war with Iran, you hear the same thing. Anytime somebody uses that phrase, they’ve picked it up somewhere else and they’re just repeating it, because to them it sounds tough. It sounds big and bold and maybe a little shocking. There’s some edgelord stuff going on all across the board, and that culture has seeped into serious discussion. It used to be that when some jackass said we ought to bomb a whole country back to the Stone Age, we understood he was being hyperbolic and kind of ignorant, and that it was not something a statesman should ever say. No president, no senator, no Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense, no serious player on the national stage. Now the President of the United States can say something to that effect and it’s whitewashed. It’s given a pass, and the people who should move immediately to remove him have nothing to say.

Imagine it the other way around. In 2008, as a candidate, Barack Obama told a San Francisco fundraiser that bitter small-town voters “cling to guns or religion,” and you saw how the right wing reacted to that fairly benign comment. Now imagine President Obama saying we should bomb the Bible Belt back to the Stone Age. Or that we ought to let Russia do it for us. Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama, all those Republican-controlled states with their Republican governors, Republican congressmen, Republican mayors and county commissioners: just bomb them back to the Stone Age. You don’t ever really hear that kind of rhetoric from the left, because people know how asinine and stupid it would be. But here we are hearing it from the right, and not only from the right, but from the sitting president of the United States.

None of this is new. White supremacist political violence has been with us since the early colonial days. It is our nation’s original sin. I thought we had made a lot of progress in my lifetime, until the Trump MAGA era, and it still breaks my heart. There are so many people I used to think were good people, people I looked up to so much, and I’ve become so disappointed in who they have allowed Trump to make them.

Every now and then white Christian supremacy rears its head again and threatens our liberties and freedoms, and threatens the very basic sense of who and what America is: the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we believe in liberty and justice for all. That idea of America is quickly being replaced by the right wing’s fascist one. Americans have had to rise to the occasion and beat this tyrannical threat back many times over. The most easily understood example is the abolitionist movement that pushed back, won the Civil War, and then kept fighting the white supremacist Christian violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the groups aligned with it. Here we are in another one of those moments.

And here is the point I really want to make. I think we keep repeating this cycle of white Christian supremacist violence, lawlessness and corruption because we never adequately deal with the problem. As a people we tend to rise up and resist it, but only to a point, and then we kind of let it go. People affiliated with the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter and groups like them have a point when they say a lot of what we’re seeing today goes back to our failure to deal with the Confederacy after the Civil War, to hold those people accountable the way they should have been held accountable. I once heard an American history professor put it something like this: John Brown was executed for treason, and Robert E. Lee was not. That pretty well encapsulates the problem. Lee was in fact indicted for treason in June of 1865; by 1869 the government had simply dropped the charges, and within fifty years he was being celebrated across much of the country as an American hero. Yes, we abolished slavery. But we never adequately dealt with the perennial threat that drove it, not after the Civil War and not in the many eras since.

So I want to advocate for a new abolitionist movement. We need to embrace the spirit of the abolitionists again, and the spirit of what other countries have done when they had to face fascism and authoritarianism. Denazification. Truth and reconciliation. Our own version of de-Trumpification, and our own unique American way forward out of this. If you don’t take anything else from this, understand this one hundred percent: if the American people do not have a public reckoning with our long history of white Christian supremacist lawlessness and violence, in the wake of this Trump MAGA era, we are doomed to repeat it.

I am all about breaking the cycles of the past. Those of us who experienced abuse when we were younger, who came up through generations of unhealthy situations, understand that some cycles have to be broken on purpose. This one is real, and it has been going on for four hundred years or more. We are not going to get free of Trump authoritarianism or MAGA violence until we decide we are done with it. It’s time to have the reckoning. It’s time for real accountability, and for real legislation that goes to the heart of these matters and strikes at the root. Simply returning to normalcy, to the democratic norms we had before the Trump era, is not going to work, folks.

That accountability has to reach Trump and his cronies, and it has to reach the ICE Gestapo running around cosplaying like they’ve actually been to war, a bunch of spineless, cowardly little children playing soldier. They need to be held accountable. MAGA needs to be held accountable. The American people have to make it abundantly clear that we are done with white Christian supremacist violence. Until we do, we are doomed to repeat this cycle.

Even if we vote out the Republicans and hand the Democratic Party power, it is not going to be enough. It may fix a few things for a while, but in the long run all we’d be doing is dooming our children, or their children, to go through another version of the same thing America has repeated over and over again. We’re done being nice about it. We’re done just trying to return to norms. There have to be real consequences. Our children’s future depends on it.

So yes, let’s vote for the Democrats in the midterms. I’m not a Democrat and never have been. I’ve been a Republican, a Libertarian, and now I’m an Independent, and years ago I never would have dreamed I’d even consider voting for a Democrat. But here I am: a patriot who loves my country, who put my life on the line to serve it, and who still deals with the health consequences of doing this country’s dirty work on the battlefield. I’m proud to be a patriot, and I’m proud to be an anti-fascist. I still believe in my oath to stand up to all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The rest of the world has to see us make this move, too. I’ve spent a lot of time outside the United States, in and out of the military, and I have friends in dozens of countries. I’ll tell you, we have alienated our friends and allies, and not only their governments but ordinary people all over the world. The damage done by Trump’s isolationism and this MAGA hostility toward the global community is far beyond anything the average American has an inkling of. It’s going to take a lifetime, if not several, to win some of it back, and some of it we’re never getting back. There is an orange stain on Uncle Sam’s uniform now, and it’s never completely coming out.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, people, if we want to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. Let’s put the Democrats in political power, but understand that’s only a fraction of the work. Look to the abolitionists. They were radicals, and that’s the kind of radicalism we need now.

Know someone who should read this? Share it from the site.This essay is adapted from a video I posted on my Substack, Under Review, on October 8, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity, with sources added. You can watch the original here.

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Adam G. House is a U.S. Army Airborne combat veteran who served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in Kunar Province, Afghanistan. A former Republican and Libertarian who now identifies as an Independent, he is a long-time activist for individual liberty and is finishing his degree at Middle Tennessee State University, where he has studied sociology, political science, and history. He has written about politics for nearly twenty years and is a regular contributor to The Chaos Section. You can follow Adam on Substack at Under Review, where he writes and makes videos on extremism, political violence, and authoritarianism.

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