Raw America managing editor Carl Gibson sat down with Open Measures senior researcher and Posting Through It podcast co-host Jared Holt to discuss the far right’s influence on President Donald Trump’s White House. They also touched on the recidivism rates of January 6 insurrectionists, the normalization of right-wing political violence, the Trump administration’s war on groups fighting right-wing extremism, and how right-wing populists are attempting to hoodwink progressives.
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Trump’s $1.776 Billion Slush Fund Is an Endorsement of Right-Wing Violence
The Trump administration’s plan to funnel $1.776 billion to January 6 defendants — a figure whose digits are no accident — is, in Holt’s view, about as explicit an endorsement of that day’s violence as you can get. He described the original pardons as a sweeping “hall pass” issued with no moral or legal distinctions drawn between those who wandered in with the crowd and those who arrived with violent intent and proved their capacity to act on it.
“Because the pardons and commuted sentences were issued so indiscriminately ... that meant that some individuals who had gone to the Capitol — you know, in court being argued with the explicit intention of doing this, or had engaged in violent activity, had proven their capacity for crimes of that nature — also got the same pass,” Holt said. “I think it was interpreted as a thank-you card.”
Holt praised journalist Mike Wendling’s reporting, which identified dozens of pardon recipients who subsequently committed additional crimes, including violent offenses and crimes against children. When viewed collectively, Holt said, the recidivism rate is “pretty shocking.”
“If you could plausibly make an argument against these pardons being a hall pass or condoning what these folks engaged in, cutting them checks — or the prospect of cutting them checks — is about as explicit of an endorsement as you can get.”
Celebrating Vigilante Violence: Does Trump Have His Own Paramilitary?
The conversation turned to the administration’s pattern of elevating right-wing vigilante figures like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny — men who killed people and were subsequently hosted in VIP boxes at championship games alongside Trump, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson — and what that pattern signals about the relationship between this White House and far-right street-level violence.
Holt drew a careful distinction between legal defense of an acquittal (as in the case of Rittenhouse) and the spectacle of organizations like Turning Point USA putting Rittenhouse on stage with fireworks, allowing him to build a public career on implicit threats of further violence. He connected this to a broader authoritarian playbook.
“Authoritarians throughout history around the world will gain power as a minority, and then attempt to maintain that control over society, over government, through the use of state force — which includes either the explicit or implied threat of violence against their opponents,” Holt said.
He stopped short of saying Trump has a formal militia in the mold of Mussolini’s Black Shirts or Hitler’s SA, but noted the administration has gone further than Trump’s first term in courting, cozying up to, and empowering far-right movements.
“[The administration wants] to have their cake and eat it too,” Holt said. “They want the electricity that is found in these movements, the ability to animate people in that intense way you can by fomenting hate and resentment and cynicism in society, but they also want to be treated as respectable, as real statesmen.”
Far-Right Dog Whistles Inside Federal Agencies — and the Reporters Who Could Expose Them
Holt confirmed that something significant is happening inside the social media operations of federal agencies like DHS and the Department of Labor. Executive branch agencies have repeatedly posted content containing recognizable far-right signals — including, in one notable case, a song with ties to white power movement that circulated on extremist Telegram channels around 2017 and would be virtually unknown to anyone who hadn’t been “marinating in those spaces” at the time.
“I know this song,” Holt said of the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which Trump administration social media channels have invoked in the recent past.
He identified this as a significant and under-covered story, arguing there is genuine public interest in knowing who is writing and approving these posts — and that the answers would likely raise serious questions about vetting and how far up the chain awareness goes. He acknowledged the investigative path is difficult, noting that FOIA requests under this administration will almost certainly require litigation to enforce, and even then may yield heavily redacted documents. But he was unambiguous about the value of pursuing it.
“I would imagine that if we figured out who those people are, there would be a pretty concerning story there,” Holt said. “It raises a lot of questions about how they’re vetting people — or just how high up in the agency it goes. Is it just someone showing the press secretary ten tweets for the week and they say ‘yep, looks good’? Or are they fully aware?”
The Insurrection Succeeded — Just Not on January 6th
Holt agreed with the framing that while the Capitol riot failed in its immediate tactical objective of stopping the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory, it has in a meaningful sense been vindicated. The same ideological universe that drove people to the building that day now staffs federal agencies and shapes White House policy. What changed between then and now is not the movement — it’s the Republican Party’s willingness to say so out loud.
“The government is loaded with sympathizers,” Holt said. “There are people working in the White House that are entirely sympathetic and entirely on board with the kind of thinking that motivated so many people to go to DC that day.”
He recalled the brief, anomalous moment of bipartisan condemnation in the days after January 6 — a moment that has been completely erased from the modern GOP. Those who condemned the attack, like Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney, have been driven out or sidelined. The machinery of retaliation now extends to state legislators who resist Trump’s midterm redistricting push, where even Republicans who privately oppose it are having primary challengers backed against them.
“Any criticism against the administration, against the tip-top brass of federal leadership, especially Trump, is extremely penalized,” Holt said. “There’s no room for dissent in the modern Republican Party. And I think that — just to boil it all down — that complete follow-the-leader mentality, and all the extreme rhetoric that comes along to justify it, is what’s dangerous.”
‘Nihilistic Violence’ Is a Law Enforcement Cop-Out for Right-Wing Terrorism
When a gunman attacked a mosque in San Diego — leaving behind documents filled with neo-Nazi references — local police attributed the attack to what they called “nihilistic violence.” Holt argued that this language is being systematically misapplied in ways that launder racially motivated terrorism into something more generic and less politically inconvenient.
He explained that “nihilistic violent extremism” originated as a useful, narrow descriptor for a particular category of online radicalization networks — like the 764 network — in which violent ideology functions more as an aesthetic costume than a sincere political belief system. In that limited context, the term had analytic value.
“My criticism, my issue with the term is that what has been included in the scope of that has broadened out and broadened out over the years, to the point where you could ask four or five organizations that track hate movements to define it and get five different answers,” he said.
His sharpest critique was reserved for how the term gets applied to attacks with unmistakable ideological fingerprints. In San Diego, he noted, the perpetrator appeared to replicate the 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand mosque attack almost exactly — and yet no one debates what motivated that attack. He placed the misapplication in broader political context: the Trump administration has simultaneously stripped resources from countering right-wing extremism while redirecting public attention toward undocumented immigrants and left-wing organizers.
“I just kind of think the way it’s being over-applied comes at a detriment to public understanding of these threats and what’s actually happening in these attacks,” Holt argued.
The Trump Administration Is Waging War on the Organizations That Expose It
The Department of Justice’s criminal prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center — which the SPLC is fighting as vindictive prosecution stemming from a 2019 exposé of Stephen Miller’s white nationalist email history — is, in Holt’s view, part of a coordinated campaign to destroy the institutional infrastructure that tracks and exposes far-right movements.
The escalation takes multiple forms: Elon Musk suing Media Matters and the Center for Countering Digital Hate with litigation expensive enough to bankrupt nonprofits operating on six-month budget cycles; congressional Republicans subpoenaing and grilling researchers on Capitol Hill; and now the federal government attempting criminal charges against the SPLC. Holt noted that many of his colleagues inside these organizations have significantly curtailed their public work and messaging as a result.
“This administration has explicitly saber-rattled against these kinds of organizations. Not just ones that track hate movements, but ones that track disinformation and misinformation,” he said. “A nonprofit gets sued for $50 million and they’re facing three or four million dollars in legal fees to defend themselves against the wealthiest man on the planet. Lights out.”
He expressed skepticism that the SPLC charges will stick, but emphasized that the point isn’t necessarily conviction, but cost. For the SPLC, which has substantial resources, the legal fight is survivable. For most organizations in the sector, it wouldn’t be. Holt and his Posting Through It co-host Mike Hayden — the SPLC reporter whose Miller story the prosecution appears to have originated from — have responded by doing their work independently, treating the podcast as a space that exists precisely because mainstream news organizations have fewer, not more, resources dedicated to this beat during the second Trump administration than they did during the first.
“At a time where this is front and center, breathing down your neck — a lot of news organizations in this country have less resources devoted to this issue than they did during the first Trump administration,” Holt said. “A fractured media is a weaker media.”
Nick Fuentes and the Groypers Are Bluffing
When asked about figures like Nick Fuentes openly rooting for Democratic candidates in 2026 and 2028 as a form of protest against what they see as an insufficiently extreme Trump administration, Holt was blunt.
“They’re full of shit,” he said. “Nick Fuentes is not about to rally up support for Democratic candidates. He threatened to do that during the 2024 election, and he did not.”
The frustration itself, however, is real. The far-right base of the MAGA coalition feels the administration hasn’t delivered the racially focused, brutalist version of governance they believed they were voting for. They’re looking at rising prices, an Iran conflict they didn’t want, legal setbacks to the immigration agenda and ongoing entanglements with Wall Street and cryptocurrency interests they were told to overlook as the price of admission.
“What they’ve got is inflation going up, everything’s getting more expensive, a huge issue with Trump’s loyalty to Israel, a war they didn’t want — and they’re not really getting what they want exactly on immigration,” Holt said. “They’re frustrated because they don’t think he upheld his extreme far-right end of the bargain.”
Holt’s read is that figures like Fuentes, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly are engaged in a pressure campaignby threatening to fracture the base in order to force the administration to appease them. He noted that the White House is aware of and responsive to that dynamic. However, he dismissed the actual threat as hollow. Going from “I might sit this one out” to “I want a Democrat to win” is, he suggested, not a line that crowd will cross.
Tucker Carlson Is Dangling Bait — Don’t Take It
Holt pushed back firmly on the notion that Tucker Carlson’s occasional use of populist economic language — his acknowledgments of healthcare dysfunction, wealth inequality, and the unattainability of the American dream — makes him any kind of ally for people on the left. He characterized it as sophisticated audience-capture.
“What people like Tucker Carlson have realized is that if they can acknowledge those sentiments, validate those sentiments, that will differentiate them from the Fox Newses of the world. Once they get that audience, particularly younger audiences who feel the effects of this stuff in a much more profound way, they can start steering them in a right-wing direction,” he said.
The trap, Holt argued, is mistaking shared diagnosis for shared vision. Carlson may agree that healthcare in America is broken. But his prescription isn’t single-payer coverage — it’s building a deportation force to remove brown people from the country. Holt said when it comes to the fundamental question of what a positive future looks like, the left’s vision is “so diametrically opposed” to Carlson’s that no tactical alliance is coherent.
“One is creative, one is destructive. I just don’t think it’s advantageous or wise to take the bait,” he said. “Because the way I see it, that’s ultimately what it is.”
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