After the supreme court’s recent rulings against affirmative action and anti-discrimination precedent, researchers who track the far-right movement are flagging a new model of conservative activism: legal vigilantism, an aggressive, lawsuit-threatening tactic used to intimidate universities and private institutions to comply with the new rulings.
Experts have called the decisions a “catalytic event” while far-right groups and influencers are celebrating them with bigoted rhetoric online and mobilizing member support to roll back decades of progressive policy. Despite what they view as significant victories, hardline Trumpist politicians that rely on mining grievances in their quest for power may face a bleak fundraising season.
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, said far-right groups see the supreme court’s affirmative action decision as the first step in ending discrimination against whites. He called it a gateway for “all kinds of vile and racially bigoted statements” with engagement that crosses over to the mainstream. He compared the exchange of far-right extremist ideologies and mainstream conservatism to the wax mixtures whirling together in a lava lamp. For example, the “alt-right”, anti-immigration website VDARE published an Ann Coulter column about legacy admissions and university donor preferences being less impactful than race quotas.
“Now you have unbroken lines from extremist groups promoting Ann Coulter to extremist groups promoting more vile material. They can jump from one lily pond of hate to another toxic and more nauseating one,” Levin said. Extremist and fringe groups view Black people as biologically and culturally inferior whereas mainstream conservative groups are opposed to affirmative action due to a narrow reading of the constitution. Despite these differences, “even strands of violent extremism will find their way into civic discourse,” he said.
Levin said the end of affirmative action is just part of how anti-Black bigotry is getting promoted. Far-right groups are not looking at the finer points of constitutional law expressed in supreme court decisions, he contended. Extremist thinking is in binary terms. This supreme court decision, he predicted, will be used to further anchor and galvanize racial discrimination against Black people while serving as an affirmation for white nationalists that white people have been cheated – part of their narrative of white supremacy.
“The highest transmitting lowest common denominator influencers” emerge, and their rhetoric spreads and holds a “longer half-life”, leading to greater division and violence on the streets, Levin said. In 2020, he said attacks against Black people were the highest they had been since 2008, a statistic corroborated by a report in Time last year. Adding to researchers’ concerns is the upcoming election. Hate crimes and extremist activity historically ramp up during presidential election years, according to a new report from the Leadership Conference Education Fund.
Social media posts obtained by the Western States Center, which tracks anti-democracy activity, show far-right groups celebrating the supreme court decisions with anti-government, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ comments. Lindsay Schubiner, director of programs at Western States Center, reported that far-right groups are bolstering their ability to organize and build grassroots power around bigotry. She pointed to the rise of Moms for Liberty, a well-organized anti-LGBTQ+ group with more than 100,000 self-reported members, as a key group to watch due to its effectiveness in countering inclusionary policies in schools. The far right’s goal, she explained, is a broad rejection of LBGTQ+ people from public life, including elected office, community leadership decisions and their ability to access services.
The former Trump aide Stephen Miller is now the president of America First Legal, an organization whose mission involves opposing “the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police and anti-American crusade”. In an America First Legal video post on Telegram, Miller is featured in a call to action explaining that the supreme court ruled racial preferences violate the constitution and asking victims of racist policies at a university, corporation or workplace to contact the organization.
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said America First Legal sent 200 letters threatening to sue law schools if they demonstrated any racial preference during their admissions, which he argued was the most striking development in the aftermath of the end of affirmative action. Rosenthal said America First Legal and other legal organizations’ actions are a new type of rightwing activism he calls “legal vigilantism”.
After the Dobbs decision in 2022, the state of Texas’s trigger law prohibited almost all abortions and allowed people to bring charges against pregnant women, doctors and anyone who helped them pursue abortions and receive a $10,000 reward, Rosenthal said. He said the law was “reminiscent of the bounty hunting images of American western movies”. Rosenthal believes the right’s legal vigilantism will now move from the abortion model to the university admissions model.
The right’s focus on private institutions is novel, Rosenthal said, because the Republican right has historically been the political expression of private corporations. He cited Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and Disney’s continuing legal battle over the corporations’ ability to self-govern and its denunciation of Florida’s “don’t say gay” law. This trend, he argued, corresponds with what occurs in the bastions of illiberal democracies like Hungary and Russia, where executive power has developed considerable tools to dominate private institutions.
“Grievance is incredibly important to the foundational mythos of Maga. If it’s not abortion, it’s something else: Trump being persecuted by the dictatorial justice department, the threat of the woke mob, the demonization of blue states. There’s always one if not more enemies that are internal to the country,” explained Matt Dallek, professor at the George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management.
While far-right politicians like Majorie Taylor Greene might be capitalizing on and exploiting the supreme court decisions, they do their best fundraising when they are claiming grievance, not victory. The decisions, therefore, could dampen the fundraising efforts of far-right politicians, who need to keep their supporters “ginned up”, Dallek said. The ideology doesn’t function without a set of enemies, he said. They see themselves as embattled against the march of culture and politics over many decades, since the New Deal or the Progressive era.
“It’s never enough because there is always a sense that people in power are corrupt and un-American, that they are destroying the value,” Dallek said.
The movement has achieved more victories, in part because of the current supreme court, than it has in recent memory, explained Dallek. But the far right’s appetite won’t be diminished by the blockbuster decisions.
“A little taste of victory is going to make them want a lot more,” he said.
Members of the far right believe there is so much more to roll back and defeat, like Medicaid, same-sex marriage and progressive education. For decades, Dallek continued, they have been losing and they don’t believe they’ll reverse what they see as a disastrous state of affairs in two supreme court terms: “It’s a much larger project.”
