Still, Premo found the constant macho rhetoric and violence he witnessed while filming mentally and emotionally exhausting. He went to rallies dressed in protective gear, prepared for a riot. Even if there weren’t skirmishes between the Proud Boys and other groups, there were men talking about what they wanted to do to antifa or others.

While he included the violence in his film, Premo is clear that it is not meant to make these men exceptions, but to situate them within a broader pattern.

“One of my critiques of American history and polite, middle-class white liberal society is this idea that violence is only an aberration of the norm. It’s only something that is carried out by the fringe or the extremes of society, when fundamentally, the American project is a project built by violence,” he says.

…

I found the ease with which Quaglin committed these acts astounding. The interspersion of political violence and domesticity doesn’t allow viewers to compartmentalize what’s on screen as fringe behavior, safely outside the bounds of ordinary American life. It suggests something more uncomfortable: that the difference is often not one of belief, but of expression—who says what out loud, and who knows not to.