What ‘They’ have done

In 2020, They stole the presidential election.

How They did this has never been explained clearly. At first, it was alleged that They did so through fraud, by stuffing ballot boxes or submitting fake absentee ballots. Robust efforts to prove this claim unearthed no such scheme, so the explanation shifted: Actually, what They did, was rig the election by painting Donald Trump as unpopular in the mass media and shielding Americans from the truth. Here, too, the rhetoric was not supported by the evidence — but the nebulousness of the assertion made that inconsequential. Unseen, unidentifiable influences can’t be proven to exist, which just reinforces how nefarious they truly are. Ergo, we can assume that They stole the election.

This idea found particular traction with adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory, an idea that emerged during Trump’s first term in office and which framed his administration as a direct, secret battle against Their evil forces. Trump leaned into this idea, naturally, and the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 was heavily populated by QAnon adherents joining Trump’s fight for power against Them.

Republicans more broadly were primed to accept Trump’s explanation for 2020 because they’d heard for years — for decades! — about how They are trying to indoctrinate our young. College professors, Hollywood communists, all of Them were dripping poison in the teens’ ears, turning them from red-blooded conservatives into climate-change and income-inequality obsessed liberals.

One thing that shifted in 2020 was that the president of the United States seized upon Their culpability for his defeat. Trump had targeted Them from his first days as a presidential candidate, siding with disaffected right-wing voters against their vaguely described oppressors. But in 2020, he could point to something specific that They had done to alter political power: They stole the election.

Four years later, they did something far worse. While Trump was speaking at a rally in Butler, Pa., They tried to kill him. In the immediate aftermath of that shooting, Trump’s allies insisted that Trump was being targeted by Them for his politics. When the shooter was identified as a local teenager of unclear political allegiances and no obvious ties to Them … it didn’t matter. They were still the culprit, with Republicans insisting that They had fired the bullet that narrowly missed killing the then-former president.

Last week, They killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. Again, an alleged shooter has been arrested and again his politics and intent are unclear. But, again, the real culprit has been known since the shot rang out: Them.

“They killed Charlie Kirk,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) told Politico — so “the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero [House] map.”

“Five years earlier, I was told he was a Trump supporter,” former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake said of the alleged shooter over the weekend. “And we sent our kids off to college, and [T]hey brainwashed him.”

“We’re dealing with a radical left group of lunatics,” Trump told NBC News in an interview about the shooting, “and [T]hey don’t play fair and [T]hey never did.”

And so on. There are myriad examples, often from prominent voices on the right, all making the same claim: They did this, and They will do it again.

“Fascists need a demonized enemy against which to mobilize followers,” Robert Paxton wrote in his 2004 book “The Anatomy of Fascism,” “but of course the enemy does not have to be Jewish. Each culture specifies the national enemy.” The original enemy identified by Trump was immigrants, a group that retains that status on the right to this day as evidenced by the lusty cheers for the administration’s targeting of people born outside the U.S. But particularly since Trump lost in 2020 and leaned so heavily into the purported evils of his opponents — stealing elections, trying to hold him accountable in criminal court, shooting at him — the primary They he seeks to uproot is his political opposition.

Many of his allies and supporters are hard at work identifying Them. Anyone with the temerity to question Kirk’s legacy or the administration’s response to his death is one of Them and, it seems, deserves to be publicly shamed and fired.

This has been organized and stoked on social media, which makes sense. “Tech giants and media benefit from the dramatic clash of friend and enemy,” Jason Stanley wrote in his 2018 book, “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.” “Fear and anger get people to the polls, but they also keep people online and glued to the media.”

Fascism does not always look like Nazi Germany and fascists do not always look like Hitler. Fascism does not always lead to death camps. But fascism does depend on a vague sense of oppression and victimization that flows from a powerful, shadowy opponent.

An opponent that can rig elections and corrupt children and place assassins on rooftops. An opponent who acts because They are evil and They are un-American — because They hate America. An opponent so hazily powerful that a president constrained by the old rules can’t combat it. So, the argument seems to go, we must give Trump whatever power he demands in order to keep us safe.

Photo: World War II poster from the VFW, edited to remove a racist caricature. (National Archives)