At the storming of the U.S. Capitol last week, rioters displayed Nazi paraphernalia and other racist propaganda. New investigations have found that some of those rioters are involved in far-right white supremacist organizations.
Louie Dean Valencia-García, a professor of digital history at Texas State University, said the violent mob is part of a history of home-grown fascism — a movement that promotes nationalism and racism.
He said it’s important to know what fascism is, so people can call it out:
"...to be a fascist you probably are in some way racist, you're xenophobic, ethnocentric, nationalist, misogynistic, queerphobic, all of these things..."
Valencia-García, who studies fascism, said the extremist violence displayed at the Capitol is part of a long history of white supremacy and racism in the United States.
He said Americans often think of Italian fascism or Nazism as separate from the U.S., when they're connected.
"For example, in Nazi Germany, one of the things that Hitler's regime did was they actually sent people to the United States to learn how the United States used Jim Crow laws to segregate Black people within the United States," he said.
Valencia-García said the Capitol attack is a reiteration of early 20th century fascism. Some scholars point to the Ku Klux Klan as one of the predecessors of modern fascism.
"Whether we call them the KKK, or skinheads, or the America First party of the 1930s, which was a fascist group, all of these things sort of have waves that continue today..."
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