These people are not brownshirts. They are Red Front, following the exact behavior and game plan Thallman's communists did in Weimar Berlin.
They know, just as one of Obama's heroes once said, "people follow the strong horse".
By demonstrating that the President and his few supporters in Washington can't keep you safe - so you had better shut your mouth - they expect to prevail. Win the streets, win the vote.
It's a good strategy. The communists won Berlin and did very well everywhere else except Bavaria.
Of course, the brownshirts came next. They fought Red Front in the streets all over the country. And the brownshirts had the advantage of being nationalists, unlike the Trotskyist Red Front which supported borderless international communism.
The rest, as they say, belongs to history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roter_Frontk%C3%A4mpferbund
(Roter_Frontk%C3%A4mpferbund)
(FR html tends to swallow some special characters such as umlaut a’s)