Yeah, yeah, yeah. 2023 was the year I bought new recordings by the Beatles and the Stones, changed my opinion about Barbie, Taylor Swift, and Bud Light (support!), but also Robert Kennedy, Jr. (who should take a long walk on a short pier). It was the year I found out I didn’t have cancer but was surrounded by people who do. It was the year I became obsessed with Joan of Arc, Henry V, and what clues 15th century Europe might offer us about the chaos and collapse that is at our doorstep. The year began with power grid attacks across the country and ended with watching rising seas and rogue waves attacking our coastline. In between, 2023 was the year I took a journey to the center of my mind.
The biggest story of 2023 should have been the growing climate crisis and the hottest summer on record, but we all know it will be worse next year and every year after that for the rest of our and our children’s lives. So instead we focused on doomed Chinese spy balloons above and doomed billionaire submarines below. The countless criminal indictments against Donald Trump seemed to only embolden his crusade to become an American dictator, while mass shootings, and continued wars in Ukraine and the Middle East became background noise to life as we approached the quarter century mark.
There was certainly plenty of good news this year. The COVID pandemic that killed so many people was finally declared over. Gas prices started dropping and a whole bunch of labor strikes made things better for workers, including my daughter’s teachers, who were on strike for over three weeks. (And it looks like Cozy’s dad will be on strike in February.) The Barbie movie had everyone at least talking about patriarchy and that’s a good thing. The news story that hit hardest was the death of singer Sinead O’Conner in July. Sinead and I had a brief romance in the eighties and the pang of not being a better friend when she was in pain had me reflecting on all the missed opportunities to be a more present partner over the course of my life.
I think when we look back on 2023, we’ll see it as the year when Artificial Intelligence became an issue that we have to reckon with. The U.S. Senate held hearings as AI threatened to eliminate jobs and deep fakes rendered truth passé. I had my first final exam essay answers lifted from ChatGBT and wondered if traditional academia was a thing of the past as student brains become replaced with AI bots. The AI worst-case scenarios could make The Terminator look like The Teletubbies. I don’t know what I will be writing at the end of 2024 but there’s a good chance I won’t be the one writing it.
Personally, the year was a period of intense growth. Mindfulness and meditation helped me to learn to monitor my internal states and make better decisions. I thought the growth would help me repair my marriage but my wife had other plans, so it’s up to me to keep on this path. I occasionally tried my hand at dating and had a mad fling with a movie producer and even, however briefly, had a girlfriend. Most of my energy went into teaching and the federal grant I have been working on, charged with reducing political violence. Portland, as it turns out, might not be a great dating city but it’s the perfect place to tackle radical extremism.
While 2022 was framed by my trip to Ukraine to offer assistance in that horrific battle against Russia, 2023 was framed by my trip to Georgia to help my brother with his horrific battle against cancer. Bringing him back to Oregon, where our more “socialized” health care coverage offered him a fighting chance, was quite an ordeal. And he’s still fighting, out of hospice care and back into chemotherapy. The cancer “caretaker” work became a primary role for me but offered me a chance to build the relationship with my brother I didn’t have when we were younger. He can be a pain in the neck sometimes (Who wouldn’t be in this situation?), but I am happy to see him enter the new year with the rest of us.
I suppose I am 365 days wiser. I tried to share little bits of that insight here in this blog. My post about Sinéad O’Conner was the most popular, as we all sat in shock over her sudden death. I was honored to post several articles related to the Cure-PDX project I’m working on. They are partially intended to prepare us for 2024 and the danger that is sure to come as Trump and his minions plot to reclaim power by any means necessary. Hopefully, both the personal and the political musings have offered something to think about this year. We’re all trying to figure this out together.
“And you never ask questions, when God’s on your side.” – Bob Dylan
December 27, 2023
The current bloody conflict in the Holy Land, also known as Israel and Palestine, has me reflecting on the challenges of breaking through religious dogmatism to find anything that looks like common ground. I’m sure there are currently Jews and Muslims alike who feel God is on their side of the conflict. I’m mindful of the 1431 trail of Joan of Arc in which the English were desperate to prove the teenaged “Maiden of Orleans” was a heretic and not carrying out God’s mission to drive the English from France in the Hundred Years War.
When I was working on my dissertation research on white supremacists, I spent a lot of time with members of the Ku Klux Klan and members of a religious sect called Christian Identity. They were all quite sure the Christian Bible mandated their racism. In fact, the doctrine of Christian Identity states that a white God created white Adam and Eve in his image and the Jewish race are the descendants of Cain and the Serpent (Satan) and are inherently evil. And what about non-white and non-Jewish people? Oh, they are all the offspring of the soulless beasts of Eden. “It’s right here in Genesis!” They would tell me, quoting chapter and verse.
When I would bring up the concept of liberation theology and how Martin Luther King, Jr. found a very different message in their sacred texts, they would tell me that all that was “the devil’s work.”
We are in a similar moment where chapter and verse are quoted around the world to legitimize political positions, whether it’s opposition to LGBTQ rights or in support of Hindu nationalism. While many, and I hope most, people of faith are open to conversations about how their faith frames their political views while honoring that there are alternative faith-based interpretations, there is a significant phalanx in all religious traditions who are quite convinced that they have the one true interpretation of scripture. To those of us on the outside, that dogmatism seems pathological.
While toxic dogmatism can come in all ideological and theological disguises, it can be particularly tricky for us folks on the outside to have productive conversations with those who don’t share our foundational beliefs. When we don’t agree on foundational premises, like in the authority of scripture, or if we use vastly different interpretive lenses to make sense of the same passage, common ground can seem impossible to find.
So how do you talk to someone who has God on their side?
In most settings this might be a situation where a person backs away slowly, so as to not get stuck in the tarpit of religious debate. There’s a great spot in London called Speaker’s Corner where people have those debates/shouting matches as a form of entertainment. The rest of us have more productive things to do, like doom scroll through our social media feeds. However, some of that dogmatism becomes violence very quickly. And we don’t have to go back to Joan of Arc and the Hundred Year’s War to see it. Just turn on CNN.
This project I’ve been working on for the past two years, called Cure-PDX, is charged with reducing political violence and some of that violence has a religious element. For example, there is an evangelical church in the region that has preached that God does not punish violence against gays and lesbians. There is a church right down the street from them that preaches a more inclusive message from the same Bible, and they have experienced vandalism from the anti-gay church. Here is an opportunity for us to bring in the de-escalation work before somebody gets hurt.
One of things that makes our team so well positioned to do the work is that we represent a wide variety of political and social positions; we are liberal and conservative, Buddhist, Christian, and wandering agnostic. We have pastors on our team that help facilitate outreach to various faith based communities and I thought I’d rely on their lived experience and vital insight into this matter. Here’s the question:
Americans often rely on their faith traditions to inform their political opinions. However, there are those who are so wedded to a narrow interpretation of their sacred texts that it often leads to the vilification of those who don’t follow the same interpretation, as well as others, who may all fall under some label of “infidels,” and may become targets for violence. For example, we’ve seen a spike in religiously motivated hate crimes across the country, as well as attacks targeting the transgender community. Given this dynamic, is there a way to talk to the more dogmatic members of faith communities that encourages them to accept more nuanced interpretations of text that allows them to take a step back from more hostile rhetoric?
I asked this question to Pastor Jeff Hoover, who founded and pastored a church in Longview, Washington for 31 years, when he got a new “assignment.” Today, he leads an organization called CitiServe of Cowlitz County, where he walks with pastors and leaders, encouraging, equipping, and uniting the church in the local area and is a new member of our Cure-PDX team.
“I feel the key to having a conversation with someone you may disagree with is curiosity. Instead of going into a potentially difficult conversation wanting to prove or discover who is right or wrong, go in with authentic curiosity about just how the other person arrived at their particular viewpoint. It is astounding just how much we can learn from and about each other if we would simply be open to see things through someone else’s eyes.”
Pastor Jeff hit on a key tool that has been so useful in this project, the power of curiosity; the power of asking instead of telling. Between people’s strongly held beliefs and their relationship with the world is a whole backstory worth investigating. Spending time getting to know a person will likely create more openings in that dogmatic wall than going at it with a sledgehammer of counter arguments.
Sociologists use the term “religiosity,” to describe how committed people are towards their faith traditions. Some completely define themselves by their beliefs and practices, bordering on fanaticism. Others have no engagement with any religious beliefs or practices. Most folks are comfortably somewhere between those two poles. (You will find me at mass most Christmas Eves, on my knees praying for peace, and the other 364 days of the year offering lectures on the problems of religions rooted in Bronze Age thinking.) But, unless there is a mental health issue involved, even people on the “fanatical” end of the religiosity spectrum have a very human story about how they arrived at their conclusions.
We are looking for ways to interrupt violence. Much of this work has to do with finding ways to identify common values with people who may be escalating towards violence. I’m guessing matters of faith provide a perfect place to find those values.
Note: Thank you to team member Ryan Nakade for some of the framing in this piece.
This blog has many things over the last nine years. It started out as a parenting blog in 2014, as Andi went back to work after the birth of our child, Cozy, and I did the John Lennon “househusband” thing. Then Ferguson, Missouri and the murder of Michael Brown happened, and I went into “sociology of racism” mode. Since then, it’s covered a wide range of the personal and the political. From the fascist rise of Donald Trump to the collapse of my marriage. Over the summer, I posted a blog entitled “Dating While Married,” where I shared the excitement and trepidation of rejoining the dating world while separated.
It was both the most read blog post in ages and the worst thing I’ve written.
I was all in the flush of a new romance with a wonderful woman named Jaime. Unfortunately, I used the opportunity to lash out at Andi and did a pretty obvious job of throwing her (and her boyfriend) under the bus. There was a juvenile tone that, upon reflection, looked like, “My new girlfriend is better than your dopey boyfriend.” There was anger and pettiness and a lot of unobserved shittyness. I could have made the same pitch about the challenges of dating and finding love after marriage (that so many responded to) without the barbs. I can’t even bring myself to go back and read it. Maybe it was my cruel summer.
2023 has been the year that I finally learned how to let go of my anger. It’s still there, but now I’m better equipped to deal with it. The mantra, “You are not your emotions” and regular mediation provided a new path. By December, June seemed like a century ago. And I like this new me that is emerging from all the pain.
Friends often ask me, “What happened to you and Jaime?” Jaime is an incredibly smart woman and I think she recognized she was being pulled into someone else’s drama, even, perhaps, being used as a game piece in that conflict. After a few months she wisely backed away slowly and then cut off contact. I can’t say that I blame her even though I constantly missed her wit, charm, and obsession with all things Taylor Swift. I’m sure there are others entering the DWM zone who have faced similar dynamics. It reminded me of Princess Diana talking about the “three” people in her marriage.
The hardest lesson was reflecting how quickly I brought my daughter into the picture. I love my time with Cozy and I thought I could combine Cozy time and Jaime time. I was sure they would hit it off, and they did famously. But they met each other after Jaime and I had only been dating one week and now that seems like an impulse that could have been slow rolled. The relationship should have been on more solid ground before bringing Cozy in. When it ended, I had to answer Cozy’s question, “When are we going to see Jaime again?” Cozy needed consistency not chaos. And posting that first picture of Cozy and Jaime probably could have waited as well. I wanted to tell the world, I’m OK! I have a new love! But it probably felt crummy to Andi, who I was trying to rebuild trust with.
The good news is that over the holidays I reconnected with Jaime. I even spent Christmas Eve with her and her mom in a dimly lit bourbon bar in Northwest Portland. Jaime and I are going to explore our friendship while keeping the drama, ulterior motives, and bus-throwing-under at a distance. Kindness is more fun than anger. I can’t say what 2024 holds. I imagine this separation will become something more settled and formal. So many of us have been through this minefield of the transition of a relationship. If we care about “love” as a thing, that can be the emotion we become. Lessons learned.
2023 A.D. will always be the first (and only?) year that my daughter saw new releases from the Beatles and the Stones in the same year. The thrill of taking her to the record store to get the new Rolling Stones album and ask for the “new single by the Beatles” created great memories for both of us. Obviously, for us Beatle freaks, the release of “Now and Then” in November was the musical highlight of the year. Cozy proclaimed it her “favorite song of all time” and I devoted an episode of my YouTube channel to it. I’ll never forget first hearing John’s AI cleaned up voice singing, “I know it’s true.” Chills to have the Fab Four together one last time.
There wasn’t a massive concert binge this year. The highlights were taking Cozy and her friend to see Ringo Starr in Bend in June and the brilliant DakhaBrakha show at Revolution Hall in August. Most of the live music was enjoyed at small local Portland venues, like Mississippi Studios, No Fun, and Turn, Turn, Turn (which is sadly closing at the end of year). I am looking forward to shows at the new Doug Fir in 2024.
2023 was year I really utilized Spotify to do some deep dives. Long chronologies of Brian Eno and explorations of Ethiopian jazz, the thrill of having an ever expanding universe of music was like my teenage dream manifest. I used Spotify to make probably hundreds of playlists (I currently have 925 playlists on the platform) and even used it to DJ a loft party in the East Village in New York in February. Its ease of use certainly cut into my album purchases in 2023.
Most of my vinyl purchases (Did I even buy a CD in 23?) were old jazz sides from the numerous little record stores that keep popping up in my neighborhood. I did listen to a lot of albums, especially by Taylor Swift (Sorry, not sorry.) 2023 was the year I became a fan, especially of her brilliant 2022 release, Midnights. I finally got it. And it gave me a fun way to connect with my students, dropping TS lyrics in the middle of lectures. The album that dominated the year (and my car radio) was the Barbie soundtrack. It exploded into the music world much the way the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack did in 1977. Some of the hype of 2023, I just didn’t get. Boygenius I thought was a snooze fest. And, even though I’ve been massive fans in the past, releases by PJ Harvey, Yo La Tengo, and Sufjan Stevens didn’t catch my attention (but I did dig that one new Paramore song, “This is Why”).
So here is my annual Top 20. Not necessarily the 20 best releases of 2023, but the albums I spent a lot of time on and really lived in. At the top of the list is a Brooklyn band called Geese. Their album, 3D Country (released in June) was the most wide open (in the style of John Spencer Blues Explosion) and yet diverse album of the year. Their track, “I See Myself” wormed its way into my soul and I’m sure made it on to many mixtapes of young hipsters in love. Besides the Stones, some old favorites showed up, including Dolly Parton and her “rock” album (worth it for her environmental anthem, “World On Fire”) and Dexy’s Midnight Runners and their feminist manifesto, Feminine Divine.
Here we go.
Geese – 3D Country
Rolling Stones – Hackney Diamonds
The New Pornographers – Continue as a Guest
Olivia Rodrigo – Guts
The National – First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Taylor Swift – 1989 (Taylor’s Version)
Lana Del Rey – Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes
John Cale – Mercy
Blur – The Ballad of Darren
Anohni (Antony & the Johnsons) – My Back Was a Bridge For You to Cross
Fred Again and Brian Eno – Secret Life
Dexys – Feminine Devine
Dolly Parton – Rockstar
Bob Dylan – Shadow Kingdom
The Kills – God Games
Quasi – Breaking the Balls of History
Ryuichi Sakamoto – 12
Black Thought – Glorious Game
Brad Mehldau – Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles
Honorable mention for albums from Rhiannon Giddens, PIL, Rancid, The Zombies, Rufus Wainwright, Bad Bunny, and Metallica. I still need to listen to that new Wilco album. (And this week the ANOHNI album is my favorite.)
As a “subject matter expert” on right-wing extremism, I often get asked, “What about the left?” There are obviously some stark differences between the two political wings (I would offer bodycount as one measure), but there also might be some parallels worth considering as we look for ways to reduce political violence.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing the “militia funnel” that became a useful tool in explaining anti-government violence in the wake of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. I even got to sit down and explain it with W. Kamau Bell on CNN’s United Shades of America in 2021 (and CNN turned it into a cool animation). There was a great need after the bombing in Oklahoma City, that included 19 children among the 168 casualties, to explain how “average people” were falling into the world of domestic terrorism.
In April 1995, I was just finishing up my dissertation on right wing extremism, when the news of a massive bombing in the “nation’s heartland” blasted across the news. It was devastating, and the images of dead children in the building’s daycare center brought the country to its knees. I stayed up that night, listening to talk radio from my Atlanta apartment. The talking heads were sure the carnage was the work of the usual suspects, Muslim terrorists. It wasn’t a crazy hunch. Two years earlier, Ramzi Yousef and a small band of jihadists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 6 people. But Oklahoma was on April 19th, so I knew it was probably one of my guys.
April 19, 1993 was the culmination of the standoff in Waco, Texas that had become a rallying cry for the far-right. That carnage (that included the death of 28 children) was being framed as the result of an out-of-control federal government that was no longer by and for the people. So when on April 20, 1995, a white guy named Timothy McVeigh, who had been at Waco, was arrested for the Oklahoma bombing, I got a chill. These were the anti-government white supremacists I had spent the last seven years studying. The radio hosts who had been quick to blame “Muslim terrorists,” pivoted to the “Wacko from Waco” narrative. It was the act of a crazy person. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with their aggrieved white male hatred of the government.
The structure of the militia funnel
I learned about the militia funnel from Kenneth Stern’s excellent 1996 book, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. He got it from Ken Toole, at the Montana Human Rights Network. The funnel model explains how people can enter a world that sees violent revolution as the only solution from very mundane starting points that have nothing to do with violence or terrorism. For decades, my work has focused on the movement of people through a ‘right-wing funnel.’ I have written and spoken extensively about this dynamic. At the bottom of this article, I set forth how the funnel analysis applies to current willingness to use political extremist violence among some people in the left wing of politics. First, let’s address how the funnel has been used for the last nearly 30 years to frame pathways to right wing extremism.
At the top of the funnel are just a lot of people who are activated by fairly mainstream conservative issues. They are second amendment gun activists, tax protestors, or think the federal government shouldn’t be taking perfectly good timber land to save spotted owls. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including black and Jewish conservative spaces.
Some (importantly, not all) fall into the next level, based in a deep hatred for the federal government. Instead of “we the people,” the feds have too much power and have superseded their Constitutional mandate. Some of these folks are part of the Posse Comitatus movement who believe the highest legal authority is the county sheriff and any constitutional amendment after the first ten is hokum. But the bottom line is the federal government is the bad guy. Growing up in the rural South, the term we’d hear for this was “revenuer.”
At the third level down the funnel, some of these folks start buying into some pretty pervasive conspiracy theories. We are now into the world of Freemasons and the Illuminati and who REALLY killed JFK. Just watch those Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies for a dose of this world. Here the Republican and Democratic parties are both controlled by the same puppet master, leveraging the federal government against hard-working (white) Americans for their own benefit.
Some of those conspiracy believers make it down to the next level, where the conspiracy takes a familiar turn. The elite Bilderbergers are rebranded as simply “the Jews.” In a same way Hitler used anti-Semitic tropes to explain Germany’s downfall, anti-government conspiracy theorists here see a global Jewish cabal behind everything from immigration to gay rights to why their kids are listening to rap music instead of Lee Greenwood.
Again, this is a funnel, so each level has fewer people than the one above it. In the final stage of the model are the revolutionaries. It’s one thing to have analysis, but here is the belief you have to act on it. The people who make it to the bottom of the funnel are consumed with language about a second American Revolution, and a second Civil War, and “Rahowa” (short for Racial Holy War) and a whole bunch of stuff concerning the “blood of patriots.” The funnel starts wide and ends very small, but as we saw in 1995, it only takes a small band of self-proclaimed patriots to change the face of a nation. And McVeigh’s intent was to inspire other like-minded Americans to commit similar acts of terrorism.
The militia funnel in the MAGA-era
The militia model became useful again in the Obama era when anti-government militias roared back into action. Here in Oregon, a militia group occupied a federal wildlife refuge for 40 days in 2016, resulting in one death. Then the surge of militia activists, like the Oath Keepers and the 3 Percenters, under Donald Trump’s MAGA movement made the militia model even more applicable, especially after the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
In the Trump years, I regularly updated the 1990s militia model when explaining the “new” right-wing activism. Because of social media and reach of the Trump message, the mouth of the funnel was much wider than it was in the 1990s. It included some of those same conservative issues, like gun rights, but now included “culture war issues,” like opposition to rights for transgender people and hostility to Critical Race Theory, but also a rejection of lockdown mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This wider funnel served to attract not just rural white men who were the 90s candidates for patriot militia groups, but suburban moms, aging incels, and others who thought America was last great before the civil rights movements made “inclusion” a weapon against white privilege.
The rest of the funnel, took an updated sheen. The anti-federal government level was rebranded as “the swamp,” full of libtards and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). The conspiracy theory level was now the domain of QAnon adherents and beliefs in the “deep state.” Below that were the anti-Semitic theories about “global Jews,” including George Soros, Anthony Fauci, and a belief (spread by Robert Kennedy, Jr.) that COVID was created to kill non-Jews. At the bottom of the funnel, the revolutionaries renamed their call to arms the “Boogaloo,” and began stockpiling weapons. In 2020, I had a chat with a 3 Percenter in a Home Depot parking lot and asked him what he thought about the escalation of violent rhetoric. His only reply was, “We’re locked and loaded.”
That this funnel was exponentially wider at the top meant more Americans were ending up at the violent bottom level. This was evident in the massive turnout for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, motivated by the President of the United States, not a fringe website, spreading a fully debunked conspiracy theory that the “deep state” stole the 2020 election. While organized militia groups, like the Oath Keepers, were key players in the attack, many of the over 1,2000 people arrested have claimed they just got “swept up” in the moment. They had fallen down the funnel into the land of Timothy McVeighs and Stewart Rhodes. I half expected to see my Trump-loving father there that day (but his feet are bad).
The value of the militia funnel in this work is that there are multiple points along the pathway down to violence where intervention can take place. Someone who angry about public school dollars going to a student Gay Straight Alliance isn’t automatically destined to become a domestic terrorist, but if they are, there are places where that path can be diverted. Could there be a similar trajectory for activists on the left?
Constructing a left-wing funnel
The origin of the right-left political spectrum, that has its roots in the French Revolution, is all about who should have power. On the right, power should be concentrated and on the left, power should be dispersed. That’s why the far right values fascism and the far left values communism. But all along that spectrum there are values concerning fairness. The liberal is concerned teachers’ low pay is unfair and the conservative thinks their tax dollars supporting a curriculum they think opposes their values is unfair. Oh, yeah, and plenty of people on both sides think the government sucks.
The structure of the militia funnel offers a guide to what a left-wing militia funnel might look like.
At the top level are widely popular liberal issues related to social justice-based matters of equity, including Black Lives Matters, abortion access, and LGBTQ+ rights, along with other stalwart liberal causes. The next level finds strong distrust of the federal government as the historic defender of status quo power dynamics. The feds are “the Man,” who surveilled MLK and protected alleged sex-offenders, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And also, all cops are “bastards.” Further down the funnel, we see the appearance of all-encompassing conspiracy theories that see Republicans and Democrats as puppets of corporations, the monied class (Google “Bohemian Grove”), and the World Trade Organization. Like on the right, there is a darker level that introduces anti-Semitism to the conspiracy theories. This is where Robert Kennedy, Jr. lives and where anti-Zionism slides into a broader anti-Jewish narrative, most recently seen as an element of some pro-Gaza rallies. (It should be pointed out is that anti-Semitism is less visible on the left than it is on the right, but it does rear its ugly head in places.) At the bottom of this funnel is the rhetoric of Marxist revolution, which sees the entire capitalist system, and all its institutions, as corrupt and in need of overthrow.
Those of us who are older than millennials and Gen Z kids will remember that in the 1970s there were hundreds of terrorist bombings in the United States. They weren’t from patriot or neo-Nazi groups. They were committed by radical leftist groups like the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And there were casualties. In 1970, a group of leftists angry about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s participation in military work related to the Vietnam War, detonated a massive bomb in Sterling Hall, killing one researcher and injuring several others. The FBI has counted 2500 bombings connected to the Weather Underground, including one that killed four people in a Wall Street restaurant in 1975.
When the Right-Left political spectrum becomes a circle
There is also a weird space where the extremes at the end of the left side and right side meet to form a circle. In the 1990s, some neo-Nazi groups began publicly (and financially) supporting the PLO’s campaign against Israel under the guise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Seattle WTO protests in 1999 that brought labor union members, environmentalists, and other liberal activists to the streets also saw participation far-right activists, who saw the “global bankers” behind the World Trade Organization as the hand of Jewish control. In the 2000s, the right also joined the left on issues related to climate change. Their angle was the climate crisis was the result of immigration, non-white population growth, and (again) Jewish monied interests.
More recently, the language of “accelerationism” has pervaded extremists on bother the far-right and far-left. The philosophy states that standard democratic forms of social change, like voting, are too hopelessly glued to institutions of power to ever affect real change. Each November we vote for a Tweedle Dum or a Tweedle Dee and hope things will be different. Accelerationists believe the only way to achieve their desired society is to bring the current one crashing down and rebuild the new one out of the ashes. The right and left have radically different visions of what those societies look like. (I know the right has no place for progressive academics like me, but they left would probably see me as a “collaborator” with “the Man” and exclude me from their Utopia, so I’m likely SOL whoever wins fantasy league fanaticism.) We have seen extremists on the right, like Proud Boys and active clubs look at their counterparts on the left in anarchist and Antifa circles, not as enemies, but as allies in bringing the system down. In 2021 a Boogaloo activist said, “Right now it’s about provoking BLM, antifa and militias or 3 Percenters into engaging in violence that will provoke disproportionate police response, which can be used to fuel further unrest.”
If the value of understanding the militia funnel is to interrupt well-meaning conservatives’ slide down the rabbit hole of violent extremism, there should be a similar opportunity for those escalating towards left wing violence. Again, the intent is not to “de-radicalize” anyone one either side, just to prevent the violence that might emerge at the bottom of those funnels. Working on constructive engagement with the government as, not an oppressive entity, but a reflection of our collective will can slow the roll down the funnel. Also, the work on critical thinking skills that disrupt simplistic conspiracy theories can be hugely helpful in dismantling the binary thinking that characterizes extremist ideologies.
The vast majority of activists are doing the important work of putting democracy to the test and advancing their shared values. A small fraction fall into the black hole of political violence. Understanding these paths across the political spectrum allows to us design strategies to reroute those who may see terrorism as a legitimate expression of their political agendas.