I just walked out of the new Alex Garland (Ex Machina) film Civil War and am wondering if I need to arm up. The dystopian film, starring Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura as war journalists, feels a little like a flash forward to America after the fallout of the upcoming election. The film is clear not identify who the bad guys are, but America is under the leadership of a “third term president” who sure sounds like a certain authoritarian-wannabe we all know, currently on trial in a criminal court in New York City. The “Western Forces” of Texas and California (I about choked on my popcorn at that thought) are trying to retake Washington DC. I don’t want spoil any of the fun, but firefight between the Western Forces and the Secret Service on Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty lit.
The movie is more of a meditation on the need for emotional detachment required to document wars than a treatise on the polarized nature of the our uncivil society. There’s a scene where Dunst’s character, reflecting on her coverage of brutal foreign wars, states that the subconscious message of her war photos was, “Don’t do this here at home.” Oh, the irony. But my work has me highly focused on the “the don’t think it can’t happen here” scenarios. So my heart is racing.
I’ve written plenty in this blog about the looming fantasies of a second civil war from the far right, who made their first attempt in 1995 in Oklahoma City. This project I’m working on, funded by Homeland Security, has me spending an inordinate amount of time in spaces where the far right fantasizes about launching a second American revolution if Trump wins or loses. If he wins, they’ll see it as a green light to string up woke traitors from lampposts and if he loses, they’ll see it as proof that democracy has been hijacked by “communist libtards,” only to be restored by the blood of patriots. Either way, there will be blood.
Not long ago I was in the parking lot of Home Depot near the Portland airport. I was parked next to a pickup truck with a ton of anti-Biden stickers. The truck had a very small “III %” sticker in the window. The Three Percenters are a local militia group that were heavily present at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. I waited to talk to him (after moving my car). When he came out, I struck up a conversation with him. (He also had a University of Oregon sticker, so that was my in.) “Hey, I noticed your Three Percenter sticker and I have to ask your position about armed violence.” He seemed surprised and a little leery I knew that deeply underground imagery. “We’re locked in loaded,” he calmly said. “When we get the call from above, we’re ready to go. Locked and loaded.” Stand back and stand by, someone said.
Whether or not the Bubba Militia would be able to defeat the U.S. military is another discussion, but if the Commander in Chief was also their commander, it might not be that hard. Even if they couldn’t, as Timmothy McVeigh demonstrated in 1995, they’re willing to take out a lot of innocent civilians in their long game to make America that again. That America, where kids were safe to play “Smear the Queer” in the street and you know who better be off the street when the sun goes down.
Civil War is just a movie. I was pretty freaked out the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead and I’m not too concerned about a zombie apocalypse (although HBO’s The Last of Us has me thinking about it). But we know the Trump harbors fantasies of a regime of retribution if he is elected, democracy be damned. And we know the heavily armed MAGA minions are fueled by the politics of grievance and entitlement. There’s a reference in Civil War to “Portland Maoists” and the “antifa massacre” that reminded me of the summer of 2020 when caravans of armed Trump supporters drove into Portland from the exurbs to attack BLM protestors. It just feels close, and that I should have a plan to protect my family.
In the meantime, while either side stockpiles supplies, I’m going to continue to find ways to bridge the divide. It does’t have to be like this. We have so much the unites us. Red state and blue states share some deep connections that can bring us back from the edge. Our movie can have a different ending.
I lived long enough to see several nations cease to exist, including Rhodesia (1979), the USSR (1991), and Yugoslavia (1992). Even though many believe that “God likes us the best,” there is no guarantee that the United States will exist in perpetuity. We could exist for thousands of years, like Iran, or the U.S. could be kaput by this time next year. There are certainly warning signs that the great American experiment may have a rapidly approaching expiration date.
The idea of America was born in The Enlightenment, the European Age of Reason. Intellectuals, inspired by cracks in the medieval divine right of kings that propped up the authority of the Catholic Church, fashioned a new paradigm in which free thinkers were no longer burned at the stake as heretics. Those cracks were created by the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, that encouraged the translation of the Bible and believers to seek the truth themselves instead of trusting the dogma of the Church. (Many of those reformers were killed by the Church, including William Tyndale, who dared to translate the Bible into English.) The new rebellion was embodied by Galileo Galilei who’s crime was to present evidence that the earth went around the sun, and not reverse (and who was put on trial by the Church in 1633).
Galileo laid out the framework for the new intellectual movements, taking root in oppressive monarchies in France and across Europe. Like Galileo, who did research based on a theory that made logical sense, the new thinking would be rooted in the values of rationality and empiricism, not blind trust and superstition. This “enlightenment” gave birth to an explosion of science that often contradicted the teachings of the Church. (“How do you reconcile the new fossil evidence with Genesis? Let’s do some research and find a truth rooted in the empirical!”) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) infused this philosophy with the binding rights and responsibilities of the autonomous individual, a radical new conceptualization of freedom.
The founders of the United States were not brutish patriots who merely wanted independence from their taxers. They were deep thinkers who studied and debated the Enlightenment tenets. Thomas Paine was involved in the French Revolution and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s time in Paris deeply informed how the rational and empirical experiment of American democracy would be constructed. The United States of America is a child of the Enlightenment and exists because the core values of the Enlightenment have persisted for 248 years.
When I taught social theory at Portland State University, we’d often get get into a spirited discussion about the end of the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment was born in coffeeshops in the 18th Century Europe, when did it end? Some students would argue for 2001, when religious extremists attacked America and a hostility to climate science was a hallmark of the Bush administration. I would counter-argue that as long as democracy and science are still widely valued, the Enlightenment is alive and well. I have since changed my mind. The Enlightenment, that lifted humanity out of the Dark Ages, died on January 6th, 2021.
We knew that the Trump Administration was hostile to science. We saw it on a regular bases during Trump’s COVID briefings, with his ludicrous suggestions that the virus could be cured with sunlight or by injecting bleach. One of the world’s leading immunologists, Anthony Fauci, became a meme as he regularly face-palmed behind Trump’s “I know better than the scientists” buffoonery. And we knew that Trump was hostile to democracy. His administration was characterized by attempts to weaken voting access, Congress, the Department of Justice, and the courts, and a constant war on the free press (parallel to his Russian compatriot, Vladimir Putin). January 6th, was the culmination where he unleashed his anti-vax hordes on the Capital. Believing, despite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was “stolen,” the Trump mob tried to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and install their monarch.
In the following years, Trump has cozied up to the world’s dictators, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and made it clear that, if re-elected, he would weaponize the federal government to seek retribution against all his political enemies. I hope Mitt Romney has a safe room. Authoritarianism is six months away from America’s doorstep. Trump has joked that he would be a dictator on the first day of his presidency if he wins. But if he loses, he’s already told his moronic anti-Enlightenment base that the election will have been stolen, and they are armed and ready to rectify the situation. Democracy’s only hope may be that Trump dies comically on the toilet this summer.
I routinely warn against the “sky is falling” prognostications. I remember thinking the Cold War tensions of 1983 would be the endpoint of the human race. (Remember Korean Air Flight 007?) We survived that and 1984. “The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama,” as Taylor Swift sings. But things are different this time. My feelings may be shaped by this federally funded project I’ve been working on for the last two years. We are tasked with interrupting political violence and the chatter I’m seeing about a “second civil war” has been ramping up the closer we get to Election Day. The Trump droogs are locked and loaded and ready to wage holy war on anything they deem to be “woke” or that stands in the way of their dear leader taking control of the reins of power. They are clear that both science and democracy will be fired from Trump 2.0, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at the Handmaid’s Taleagenda of the evangelicals at the Heritage Foundation who think Trump is God’s gift to embryos.
I try to talk about the Enlightenment whenever I can. It’s why America is here. It’s why we walked on the moon. It’s why we can save millions of lives with immunizations. And it’s why infertile couples can have children (except in Alabama). Trump and his minions embody the exact opposite of the values of the Age of Reason. They wanted to burn Anthony Fauci at the stake and hang Mike Pence from the gallows. If they succeed, three centuries of the triumph of rationality and empiricism will be succeeded by a new dark ages where the only value will be fealty to the sovereign, who is currently selling Bibles wrapped in an American flag. This is not dystopian fantasy. This a coming storm that could put out the light for a thousand years. But we stopped that storm 79 years ago. Can we do it again?
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.
“Hindsight is 20-20. Looking back, we should have known that would happen.” That is a common refrain for every major historical calamity, from Hitler invading Poland to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. We have an entire federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security, created, in large part, to address all the indicators the intelligence community missed in the lead up to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Will we ever have the science down that accurately predicts some calamitous event so we can prevent it?
The good news is we’re getting better at preventing bad things from happening. After the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, that killed 168 people (including 19 children), the FBI made the investigation of right-wing militia groups a priority and broke up several plots leading up to Y2K. Since 9/11, there are 44 known terrorist plots that were thwarted by government agents, including a 2012 al-Qaeda plot during the Obama administration to blow up the U.S. Capitol, and 2019 neo-Nazi plot during the Trump administration to kill numerous Democratic politicians and mainstream journalists.
These acts of mass violence are prevented for three main reasons. First, people who are close to the plotters come forward to authorities with concerns that there is some suspicious activity. “Hello, 911? I think my neighbor and his friends are building a bomb in his garage.” Second is old fashioned gumshoe detective work by law enforcement agents. “Our confidential informant in that anti-government militia group is telling us the plan of attack has been made.” But group working on this issue is the not-as-exciting work of data scientists. “The chat on Discord referencing gun training spiked 63.2% following the fourth Trump indictment.” It may be the data scientists that keep us safe at night.
Since 2021, I have been working on a federally funded project that looks for ways to reduce extremist violence across the political spectrum called Cure-PDX. The sheer scope of the attack of the January 6th attack woke up a lot of folks in both public and private sectors to the fact that the stability of our democracy might be more fragile than we ever thought. Part of this work has been utilizing data to find where the flashpoints for political violence are, and it is a sad reality that they are often school board meetings and LGTBQ events. How drag queens managed to trigger the Proud Boys would probably give Sigmund Freud a thrill, but there are real victims in these violent clashes. For example, last March, the Proud Boys and other right-wing activists attacked a crowd at a Drag Queen Story Hour in Manhattan’s West Village, a historically gay enclave of the New York City.
Focusing on the Pacific Northwest, our project has noticed more tension around these flashpoints. Much of this has been fueled by local right-wing groups, like the Portland Active Club, Patriot Front, and the Rose City Nationalists. These groups have been dubbed White Nationalists 3.0 by monitoring groups (and by the activists themselves). The violent skinheads of the 1980s and 1990s were 1.0. The keyboard racists of the “alt right” that rose under Obama and came to the mainstream under Trump were 2.0. These new 3.0 groups are not hiding behind keyboards, and are actively fashioning themselves as foot soldiers in what they believe to be an approaching race war. I was bantering with one last weekend and he was quite clear what his immediate agenda was:
Him: Be scared, buddy always be scared of the republicans lol
Me: done
Him: I’m sure
Me: I feel sorry for you and want to help you.
Him: You all could not survive three days without food
Me: Oh, lord. Let me guess. You are prepping for the race war.
Him: Absolutely and you will be the first I’m coming after
Much like in the Timothy McVeigh-era of the 1990s, there is a growing subculture of heavily armed anti-government activists who are hellbent on a second civil war in which the Confederate values of white supremacy are an organizing principles. Unlike the 90s patriot militia movement, thanks to social media and the encouragement of a certain four time indicted presidential candidate, this well-armed anti-government movement is massive. In the 1990s, it was a handful of guys building bunkers in Idaho. Now, it’s soccer moms, drunk on QAnon conspiracy theories, and suburban mixed martial art clubs training for combat with the “woke mob.”
2024 is gonna be a rough year. Gas prices aren’t coming down. LGBTQ people are not going to be shoved back into the closet, triggering Kid Rock and all his fragile boys who pretend this is the fall of the Roman Empire. The southern border, which has always been a rolling crisis, will be shoved in our faces on the nightly news. There could well be another COVID lockdown (or whatever the next plague will be). And whether Donald Trump wins, loses, or gets thrown in jail, there are going to be some people who will be seriously pissed off.
We’re heading into a dark season and yes, we’re going to need whistleblowers and ace detectives to foil plots. But we’re also going to need an army of data scientists who are willing to scrape the data from the armpits of the internet and other electronic platforms (including CB radios!) where the enemies of civility thrive. With good data, we can plan interventions that include preventing people falling into the rabbit holes of violent extremism. It’s go time for democracy and we need science to save us.
You hate to say it’s textbook, but Saturday’s mass shooting in Jacksonville, Florida, that killed three innocent African-American people at a Dollar General store, fits a now familiar pattern. A young white man, living at home, with swastikas drawn on legally purchased guns, travels to an area associated with a minority community with the specific intent to kill non-white people. Terrorism experts, like Tim Clancy, refer to his method as a template.
The shooter, Ryan Palmeter, 21, penned lengthy a racist manifesto, alerting the authorities (and his parents) to his murderous intentions, and scrawled racist messages in white on his weapons. This is now the template, seen in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019, 51 killed), El Paso, Texas (2019, 23 killed), Buffalo, New York (2022, 10 killed), and other racist attacks. Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand gunman, has become a role model for disaffected white males in America who see “their” country being “stolen” by the “woke mob” and their only recourse is mass violence.
But is it?
Much of will be made that this attack happened in Florida, a state framed by policies hostile to civil rights, critical race theory, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) efforts, black history, and a particular practice of disproportionately incarcerating its black population. African-Americans make up 14 percent of Florida’s population but 48 percent of its prison population. (African-Americans represent 12 percent of the U.S. population and about a third of the prison population.) Black Floridians are five times more likely to be locked up than white Floridians but offending is relatively equal across races. Florida is not a good place to be black.
On May 20, 2023 the NAACP issued a rare “travel advisory” for black people thinking of visiting the Sunshine State: “Florida is openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals. Before traveling to Florida, please understand that the state of Florida devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”
But the assertions made about the imbedded nature of racism in Florida could be made in every state in this country, included here in the “woke” (whatever that means) Pacific Northwest. This happened in Florida but it could just have easily happened here in Oregon. As someone who is wrestling with a family a member with cancer, I recognize that denial is the first obstacle in solving deeply systemic problems. My brother is in denial that his Stage 4 rectal cancer is in multiple parts of his body and will likely be the cause of his death. Similarly, America in denial that white supremacy has metastasized and is present throughout our society.
It’s 2023 and America has a serious white supremacy problem. In 1992, during the Rodney King riots, a white student raised his hand to tell me, “Racism ended in the sixties. Black people are just complaining now.” I responded, “What day? What day racism end? Shouldn’t we mark such an important day with a holiday, or at least a comparative plate that says, ‘The Day Racism Ended and Black People Just Started Complaining’?” He had no response because racism never ended. It evolved.
Diagnosis
So dealing with the denial allows us to get to the diagnosis; America has a white supremacy problem in 2023 and it’s not just the criminal justice system. Like a cancer run wild, it is in every aspect of our society. Every system in this county, from schools to health care, is infected with white supremacist norms. There is still a “death gap” between black and white life expectancies in America. The extra 4 years that whites get has nothing to do with gun violence and everything to do with access to health care. But it’s also in all of us. The most progressive liberal Barbie-loving, Bud Light-drinking American, white, black, or otherwise, internalizes white supremacist ideas. I’ve seen it in my young daughter and in myself. Racism is a cancer.
The good news is many of us are treating it. We’re reading, learning, and talking, and acknowledging our mistakes, and building our resistance with healthy doses of antiracist ideologies. We’re exercising our antiracist muscles in hopes of exorcising the racist demons inside us. But a whole bunch of people aren’t. And they are ripe for body crushing tumors.
The treatment
I don’t know if there will ever be a cure for cancer. It’s a slippery thing. There are a bunch of treatments, including surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. My brother is in chemo but he thinks buying pills advertised on InfoWars will save him. Who knows? He might be right. Racism is much the same. We know education and interaction with different populations can serve as a good inoculation, like sticking to a solid Mediterranean diet (olives!), but it’s not perfect. Greeks die of cancer and white people in diverse Florida get infected with Stage 4 racism.
So, like investments, you want to diversify your treatment options (to mix metaphors). My brother can stick with chemo and put his hopes in turmeric. When treating (not curing) racism we need a number of options for different stages of sickness.
So let’s come back to Jacksonville. We should not go any farther in this discussion without acknowledging the incredible trauma that the August 26 attack inflicted on black people across the country. To be black in America is to be constantly reminded that there are people who want to kill you for being black in America. I am writing this in a bar in Northeast Portland and I happened to open my laptop next to a young African-American man who noticed me writing.
Him: What are you working on?
Me: I’m writing a piece about what happened in Jacksonville on Saturday.
Him: They will never stop killing us just for existing.
I didn’t have to tell him what happened in Jacksonville. He’s black. He knew. And he didn’t say “They will never stop trying to kill us,” because we white people are killing them, and not just in discount stores.
So doctors who view black pain differently than white pain (and recent research shows they do), might need a different treatment plan than neo-Nazis who draw swastikas on their AR-15s.
Could Ryan Palmeter have been treated?
Ryan Palmeter, the Jacksonville shooter, is dead. His racism killed him, along with three innocent people who he took out on the way. He initially wanted his killing field to be the halls of Edward Waters University, a historically black college, but he was turned away at the gate. He is not here to answer for his crime. He has ceased to exist. But we are left wondering what could have been done to prevent this wounding of America.
According to the FBI, 80 percent of terrorist plots that are thwarted are stopped because someone close to terrorist came forward. They contacted law enforcement with concerns or talked the potential terrorist into turning themselves in. That’s a lot of carnage that didn’t happen because someone acted. Palmeter lived with his parents and in the days to come we might learn why his parents did not intervene. (Palmeter had come to the attention of authorities in the past.) But what if others had done so?
We will likely get a glimpse of Palmeter’s manifesto, what Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters called a “diary of a madmen.” And we will learn that Palmeter had been building to this attack over a long period of time. He didn’t suddenly become angry at blacks on Friday and go on a killing spree on Saturday. There will be a long trail of red flags that pointed to his escalation towards terrorism. Obviously, he had been studying previous attacks, including Christchurch, Buffalo, and others. What if someone had seen this young man’s obsession with violent racism and stepped in to divert his path to death?
All of us are credible messengers to someone. There is at least one person on this planet who cares about what we have to say. What if some of those people in Ryan Palmeter’s circle had said, “Dude, what’s going on? I’m worried you’re going down some black hole that you’re not going to come out of.” And if had replied, “Well, black people blah, blah, blah….” And then his credible messengers could have said, “Are you 100% sure that’s true? Where did you learn that? And if it is 100% true, what’s the most effective way to do something about it? It’s probably not violence. Let’s look at other options.”
Violence has become an unacceptable norm in this country. It’s too easy to utilize gun violence as a form of expression. “I’m angry at the world, so I want the world to suffer.” But we’re all angry about something. I’m angry that CenturyLink charged me for three months of wifi after I had their router unplugged. I could go shoot up a CenturyLink kiosk at the mall or I could try to be better about keeping track of my bills. Grievances can be incredibly emotional but we have choices about what to do about them. Sometimes we need a little help figuring that out, especially if we are young men with access to high powered weapons.
Treating Stage 4 racism
In my line of work I encounter a lot of angry white men. They have been told that all of their problems are because of “them.” And the scapegoating comes from the hills to the ivory halls. They haven’t learned that for every problem they’ve got, people of color have 99. They think “their” country is being stolen. But it’s never been their country. It’s only ever been our country. If we can empower the credible messengers among us to have those hard conversations, things may sink in with those angry people. That includes some kid who has been hanging out on fringe websites, like 4chan, and drafting his manifesto. “Yeah, I never thought of it that way. Killing people is probably a stupid idea.”
We’re not going to “cure” every racist mass murderer, like the one who put Jacksonville in the news on Saturday, but there is a chance that this treatment changes the culture, making it more resistant to racism, like getting Americans to eat more Mediterranean food. And that these intervening conversations may help to de-escalate situations that might otherwise add to America’s long national nightmare of hate crime. For those who suffer from the trauma of our past inaction, it’s worth the effort.
My name is Dr. Randall Blazak. I am a sociology professor and I serve as the chair of the Oregon Coalition Against Hate Crimes and the vice chair of the Oregon Department of Justice Steering Committee on Bias Crimes and Incidents. I grew up in a Georgia Klan town and earned my PhD from Emory University in Atlanta after completing a study of right-wing extremism that included several years spent undercover in the white supremacist movement. I moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1995 because this area, not the deep south, was the growing hotbed of domestic violent extremism.
The Pacific Northwest has a long history of cultivating fringe political movements, especially those in the racist right. The 1980s, saw a wave of terror from a neo-Nazi group called The Order, that fueled their call for a race war in America with a campaign of armed robbery and murder, which ended with a FBI shootout on Whidbey Island in 1984 that made the group’s leader, Robert Matthews, a martyr for many domestic terrorists to come.
More recently, we’ve seen patriot militia groups repopulate the region. Inspired by Timothy McVeigh’s deadly attack on Oklahoma City in 1995, they have rebranded their call for a race war as the Boogaloo. Militia groups like the Oath Keepers and the 3 Percenters were heavily present at the January 6th Capitol insurrection in 2021. Just yesterday three Oath Keepers and one compatriot were convicted of seditious conspiracy because of their role in the January 6th attack.
Beginning in the early 1980s, these groups began formulating a vision they labeled the Northwest Imperative. Since the white supremacist dream of making America “white again,” seemed increasingly unlikely in the face of demographic trends, racists felt they still had a shot at carving out a racial homeland in the Pacific Northwest. They began encouraging fellow racist patriots to move to Washington, Idaho, and Oregon, with the fantasy of driving out racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ people, liberals, and anyone they deemed to be a “race traitor.” This plan included sending members into the military, police, and local government to facilitate the revolution from within.
In 2004 I was interviewing the leader of Volksfront, one of the largest neo-Nazi skinhead groups in the world and I asked him how this racist fantasy was, in anyway, possible in the United States of America. He answered with one word and it still chills me to this day; Yugoslavia. In 2002 Yugoslavia ceased to exist as a nation. Because of racist hatred and fascist political movements, it had been balkanized into several more ethnically homogenous countries. That is the racist right’s dream of the Pacific Northwest in the near future.
The anti-government underground that waged a low grade terror campaign in the 1990s has exploded in the last six years. All the sociological factors have lined up in their favor. Massive demographic shifts that have undermined the long held authority of straight white men, the de-industrialization of the American work force that has replaced the job at the auto factory with a gig driving for Uber and evaporated the American dream, a technological explosion that has injected the most toxic conspiracy theories into everyone’s news feeds, and last, but hardly least, charismatic political leaders that fuel the anger for their own personal gain. This is not your father’s terrorist movement. There is now a massive inflow of everyday Americans who are being sucked into the rabbit hole of extremism and the calls for political violence from formerly mainstream Americans are getting louder by the day. They will use accelerationist tactics, like attacks on infrastructure, including the power grid, to create the chaos they hope to capitalize on.
The good news is we know not only how to break up domestic terrorist plots, but how to prevent people from falling into that rabbit hole in the first place. In the nearly 35 years I have been doing this work, I’ve found that the most effective agents in preventing right-wing extremist violence are former right-wing extremists themselves. Groups like Parallel Networks and Life After Hate have worked tirelessly to prevent Oklahoma City inspired attacks. The collection of real-time data by academics and civil rights groups, like the ADL, helps us to monitor trends and target hotspots for intervention. And federally funded projects like mine, Cure-PDX, develop tools for community members to become credible messengers to extremists and serve to de-escalate political violence, utilizing a public health approach.
The formation of this state commission on domestic terrorism could serve to pull all these resources together. To the growing chorus of anti-government extremists, the Boogaloo is not just a racist fantasy to re-create Washington, the Pacific Northwest, and the nation. It is a well armed movement, with members in law enforcement and the military, with a very strategic plan to ethnically cleanse this land. This commission is vital to not only preserve the inclusive culture of Washington, but to keep its population safe from traumatizing terror.
On Christmas Day, four utility substations were knocked out in Pierce County, Washington, shutting off electricity to more than 14,000 homes on the holiday. The previous month, on Thanksgiving, there were similar attacks on utility substations in both Washington and Oregon. Officials and customers are concerned that these attacks, following a similar but larger attack in North Carolina, are part of a new trend of domestic terrorism.
The extreme right has long had the soft-targets of America’s infrastructure in its sights. For decades, their guidebook has been The Turner Diaries, a novel about a future fictional race war in America. It was a crucial part of Timothy McVeigh’s planning of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. The book, and subsequent right-wing manifestos, call for “patriots” to attack infrastructure to destabilize society and “accelerate” the chaos that will lead to a civil war. In the late 1990s, there were numerous militia plots to attack power stations and dams leading up to Y2K and the gang of extremists who plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Whitmer in 2020 also plotted to blow up a bridge.
With the advent of social media, shifts in demographics and the economy, and the influence of right-wing celebrities like Donald Trump and Alex Jones, more and more Americans have fallen into the conspiracy theory-driven counterculture of violent extremism. But each of those individuals is a person acting on the information and influence that surrounds them. Those forces can be countered and the subsequent violence can be prevented. According to the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, at the University of Chicago, 87% of the individuals arrested for attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 were not members of any identifiable group, like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Most were just swept up in the moment.
This gives us a vector for intervention. If those ramping towards violence, either because they read The Turner Diaries or watched one too many episodes of Info Wars, as well as those MAGA followers who are angry the midterm elections didn’t go their way, can be reached, deescalation is possible. Nearly every future domestic terrorist has a person in their orbit that can talk them off the ledge of violence. These “credible messengers” might be friends, family members, co-workers, or neighbors, who just take the extra time to appeal to the individual who is inching toward violence. This intervention could be a heartfelt conversation about the real damage of violent actions, or it could just be grabbing a coffee and having a chat about the value on non-violence. According to research, even watching cat videos can reduce violent impulses.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin in late 2022 stating that infrastructure locations will be likely targets by extremists in the coming years. Attacks on the relatively accessible targets can have a massive impact on civilian populations. At least 2.5 million Americans rely on durable medical devices that can create life-threatening situations during power outages. Many millions more rely on the power grid for work, communication, and keeping the lights on in our homes. Extremists’ desire to create chaos to force their insurgent revolution make this issue, quite literally, one of life or death.
It’s time to activate the credible messengers in our communities. Instead of shying away from uncomfortable conversations with folks that seem to be “crazy radicals,” we can train people on how to better engage with those who are ramping up to violent action. The approach might not prevent every instance of domestic terrorism, but it can surely lower the body count. So if you’ve got a family member who loves guns and hates the government, invite them over to watch some cat videos. You might be saving lives.
The good news is most Americans don’t want Donald Trump to run for president again. In a recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, 61 percent of Americans said they want the orange oaf off the ballot. Of course, another poll, from Harvard, found 67 percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run for re-election (citing his age, not his attempt to overthrow the government). But Trump has become the drunk uncle who won’t leave after the holidays. Based on the spotty attendance of Ultra MAGA weirdos at his recent rallies (“Huge!” pfft!), Trump’s cult of personality seems to be shrinking like his legal team.
But it only takes one Timothy McVeigh to ruin your whole day.
Just take one look at the people showing up at these MAGA rallies. On one hand, if you ever wondered were old white people go to die, it’s to a mostly empty arena dressed in red, white, and blue “Let’s Go Brandon” golf shirts. But on the other hand, these people are batshit crazy. That fascistic devotion to Trump is reflected in numerous polls that report the majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie, that the Con Man from Queens won the 2020 election. As Joseph Goebbels is alleged to have said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Behind the wack-a-doo attendees at Trump rallies are numerous “patriot” militia members who are heavily armed and waiting for the go from their dear leader to kick off their “boogaloo” with the promise that the rednecks will win this civil war. A recent ADL report found scores of Oath Keepers in the ranks of the military, police, first responders, and among elected officials. Like a page out of the racist playbook, The Turner Diaries, these Timothy McVeigh-wannabees hope to make January 6 look like a Beach Boys concert on the DC Mall.
Which brings up to the conundrum of 2024 and Trump’s concerning attempt to force his way back into the White House. There are three possible scenarios, and none of them end well for this great nation.
Scenario 1: Trump runs in 2024 and a crushing recession, endless memes about “black crime,” the harassment of poll workers, and a well-timed news story about an undocumented immigrant from Latin America savaging a white woman (whether true or not), and 45 becomes 47. Trump takes it as a mandate to further deconstruct American democracy. Can you imagine what the federal courts will be capable of doing after another four years of Trump appointments? Suddenly The Handmaid’s Tale will look like a utopia instead of a dystopia. As forces loyal to the Constitution try to prevent America from sliding into an authoritarian state, civll war becomes eminent.
Scenario 2: Trump runs in ’24 and loses to Biden (or Kamala Harris because Joe fell off his bike). It will be seen as evidence of another “stolen election.” Nearly every MAGA candidate that lost a primary this year claimed to be a victim of “voter fraud.” As funny as it’s been they are sitting up the expectation that if Trump loses in ’24, it will be because the unseen evil forces. (Spend some time on Trump’s Truth Social or Gab and you know it’s the “Jews.”) Since peaceful means will be seen as no longer effective, violence will be called for – Civil War 2: The MAGA Boogaloo.
Scenario 3: Merrick Garland indicts Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection or handing over classified documents to Putin, or throwing ketchup at the wall. Whatever. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits ANY politician who has taken the oath of office from holding future public office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Engaged in, not caused. You better believe the DOJ is mulling this one over with sweating brows. While this is probably the best option that demonstrates that our Constitution and the rule of law actually fucking mean something in this country, the “defund the FBI” crowd is still going to be triggered and urged to drag themselves out of their troll holes and shoot SOMEBODY.
This really sucks. It sucks for America and for those of us that just want to live in peace and not have to have to defend ourselves from roving gangs of MAGA militias looking for liberals, Black Live Matter activists, and drag queens to hang. I have weapons training but I’d rather spend my gun budget on some shrubbery and taking my kid to Disney World (if the DeSantis Army hasn’t nuked it). Plus, I suck at that Big Buck Hunter game. I don’t know how good I would be at mowing down marauding Proud Boys on my street.
So America’s hope seems to lie in Scenario 4: The death of Donald J. Trump. And it can’t be from the most likely cause, a massive heart attack. The QAnon loons will see conspiracy all over that outcome. You thought bunker dwellers had a field day with JFK’s (and JFK Jr.’s) death. They will see the hand of Fauci and/or Antifa in Trump’s “natural causes” bucket kicking. And then we’re back to the armed rebellion of the sub-moronic legions. No, it has to be in public and as mundane as possible. He’s gotta trip over his feet and break his neck at a golf course, or fall off a stage at rally while doing that embarrassing white man dance. He could choke on an Egg McMuffin or maybe he could step out of a speeding limo after an argument with Eric. It’s gotta be Darwin Award-level stupid.
We know from research that cult-like movements tend to fade when the charismatic personality at the center expires. (Except for the Dead Head thing. That shit refuses to go away.) The MAGA faithful might rally around Junior, or the more frightening Ron DeSantis. But they can’t give them what Don gave them, the ability to be stupid but feel smart. And the Trump chapter closes, not with a bang, but with a briefly lingering oder.
This is where we are America. The threat of armed political violence is very real and the clock to 2024 is ticking. The great hope of America may just be Donald Trump driving his golf cart into a pool at Mar-a-Lago and getting his khakis caught in the pool drain or being hugged to death by Diamond and Silk and the My Pillow guy. But it’s gotta be spectacularly stupid, like the man himself.
PS. Scenario 5: Ukrainian victory drives Putin from power and the kompromat that Vladimir has on Trump falls into pro-democracy hands. Trump is told it will be released if he doesn’t permanently retire. Trump moves to Moscow where he spends his remaining days paying prostitutes to pee on pictures of Barack Obama.
Note: This piece was written in different sessions, usually while listening to The Monkees, or Death Angel’s “The Ultra-Violence,” and not the usual one-session stream of consciousness that is my usual blog brilliance.
Ms. McSwilly has been teaching 5th Grade math for over 40 years. She is just a few weeks away from retirement. On this day, she is discussing square roots with her students who are more focused on the AR-15 that’s slung over her shoulder. The gun and ammo were given to her to her by the government, who told her it was the best weapon to stop a school shooter. The government also paid for her training. That’s where she learned to keep her rifle on her shoulder at all times, to keep it out of the hands of students. Also, if a shooter burst into the classroom, she might not have time to retrieve it. Ms. McSwilly needed to be ready to shoot and kill in seconds. But on this day her headaches were back and she was losing focus. The classroom door opened as the school janitor entered to empty the trashcan. Ms. McSwilly spun around at the sound and unloaded three rounds into the man, killing him in front of her students.
Somewhere I wrote, “Life is a bedspring.” It was some metaphor for something. Now it feels like it was a bedspring in a mattress that needs to be replaced. Too many heavy dudes have been jumping on it. Too many bad headlines. The Russians are advancing in Ukraine. The Supreme Court wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. A white supremacist goes on a killing spree in New York. Another sociopathic teenager kills scores of grade school kids in Texas. Elon Musk wants to re-platform every hate monger on earth, including Donald Trump. My wife is choosing her boyfriend instead of her husband. And a tank of gas just drained America’s bank account. That bedspring just don’t bounce back like it used to.
When the mass shooting happened to Buffalo, I had to go into my “hate crime expert” mode, giving numerous interviews, including on CNN and Turkish News. Sadly, it was a fairly textbook case but I tried to keep the focus on the black community and the endless trauma people of color endure just being not white in America. When the shooting at Robb Elementary School unfolded, I just wanted to crawl in a hole with my second grader. Watching Ted Cruz suggest arming teachers made me want to throw up. The school drop-off the following morning was just about the hardest thing ever. Parents were in tears, extra hugging their kids, hugging the teacher, hoping that she would be able to protect them from a man-child with AR-15. The weight of the world falling on kids who shouldn’t know they are somebody’s target.
Andi had a great idea the day after the Uvalde shooting because we were both trying to figure out what to do in a nation where there are more guns than people and little will to stand up to the gun lobby. Her idea was to have “a day without children,” and let the country’s classrooms be empty for a day of protest. It was brilliant, but the school calendar was running out. Wanting desperately to please her, I tried the make the day happen two days later but the plan didn’t have time to catch fire and fizzled quickly. I felt impotent in the face of the entrenched status of bad news headlines.
I wondered allowed with my students what it would be like to have a year where nothing happened. You know, like the Obama years. Do we have the resilience to withstand what’s to come this summer? They say the personal is the political and both have been pretty traumatizing over the last few years. And, as we know, trauma can be debilitating, turning us inward into a state of learned helplessness. Getting up to fight seem pointless. Slide into bed and scroll through posts about Johnny and Amber instead.
It seems increasingly overwhelming and carbs (or whatever is your drug of choice) tastes so good. Bitcoin is down but suicide is up, way up. Is there a secret to resilience? A lifeline until happy days are here again? A reason to hunker down between mass shootings and GOP landslides?
Turns out there is; optimism. Not every solider that comes back from the battlefield is plagued by PTSD and not every kid with who is the victim of bullying shoots up his school. Research has shown a key factor in trauma recovery is simple optimism. A positive outlook is your hedge against the plunge into the black hole of despair. You might not know it, but reflecting on how (and that) you got through past shit will help you get through future shit. And there will be future shit.
Worried that you might implode this summer and be Googling “Can I hold my breath until I die?” by Election Day? Here’s three things that will help keep you from losing it.
1. Get some friends. One thing all these shooters have in common is that they are loners. Most guys who go through job loss and divorce go out with their friends and get shit-faced until they’ve come though it. The guy with no friends (and easy access to guns) is the one shooting up his former office place. Get friends. Church, the bowling alley, adult kickball, even those LARP weirdos. Plug into your tribe. We all need each other right now. And not faceless Zoom or 4chan. Go have a beer, you wuss. We’ll get through this with karaoke.
2. Volunteer. Mr. Rogers famously said, “Life is for service.” Stop whining and do something to help. Not only is your aid desperately needed, it makes you feel damn good. The work I do on hate crime and Ukraine issues is unpaid but if feeds my soul. I just went to a Moms Demand Action gun violence event and those mothers were motivated to be the change they want to see. It was intoxicating. These narcissists who just want to “live their best lives,” taking and never giving, are draining energy and missing out on the magical spring of optimism, service to others.
3. Make a list. Setting simple goals is such an easy thing to do. After a session with my therapist, where I was feeling overwhelmed by my financial situation, I acted instead of wallowed. I bought a whiteboard and started organizing my bills and made lists of things to do to improve my situation and then began erasing said things as I did them. A few days ago I called both my senators to ask them to close the loopholes on gun background checks. It took five minutes and it made me feel like I was moving the ball forward. Just get shit done.
There’s so much happening right now. When we’re all super old, we can read about the history of the 2020s and be like, “How the fuck did we survive that?” But now is the time to be like sharks. Keep moving forward. Forest fires? Timmothy McVeigh wannabes? Custody battles? Trump tweets? It will all be in the rearview mirror at some point and me and all my rowdy friends will have a laugh and say, “Look how bad-ass we are. You kids today suck.”
This was going to be a piece about how if you arm teachers, we might pull a January 6 on all the assholes that have defunded education, like Ted Cruz, but, halfway through, I decided to write about resilience. There’s no flowchart for this moment we are in.
Watching the Wheels began as a parenting blog but it’s turning into a policy blog. My broader social commentary started with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and exploded with the ascent of Donald J. Trump. I promise we’ll get back to the kid, but there is a pressing reason I’m spending some extra energy on right wing extremism: April 19.
April 19th is the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children, collapsing a federal office building, and has since been linked to “Patriots’ Day” by the right-wing underground. That underground is now very overground and the chatter in their world is that is that the January 6th Capitol attack was just the warm up. Fasten your seatbelts for April 19, 2021. We could see another wave of right-wing violence as they make their play for Civil War II.
It’s been encouraging to see the Biden Administration pivot to make the threat of domestic terrorism a priority, including ordering a nationwide assessment of the emerging threat, with the National Security Council responding in a way reminiscent of how the intelligence community responded after 9/11. The Biden team’s focus and the fact that capable experts like Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) will take the lead on the Counterterrorism Subcommittee are an encouraging start. There are plenty of challenges ahead, including our lack of a federal definition of “domestic terrorism” and the policing of such actions that also respects our first amendment protections.
But domestic terrorism is also an international issue.
I was having a conversation last week with a representative of a foreign consulate who was looking for ways that her government could navigate the post-January 6th world that the Biden Administration had inherited. (I won’t name her nation, but we’ve had a relationship with them since 1776.) As we spoke, it became clear that there are multiple international intersections in our efforts to confront right-wing extremism. The issues that came up revolved around three themes; intelligence, trade issues, and international relations. There are probably more but this is what came up in our hour-long talk.
White supremacy as a global movement
Over the last thirty years we’ve seen a decidedly internationalist trend in the nationalist responses to globalization. For me, this began in 1990s and charting how racist skinheads in America were looking to Serbian nationalism and the Balkanization of Yugoslavia as a roadmap to a race war in the United States. Notorious white supremacists like David Duke have cultivated large followings (and income flows) from Mother Russia. Any European nation that has struggled with an inflow of migrants has seen a surge in Neo-Nazi violence. In July 2018, I was in the UK to study British CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) programs and I worked my way into an English Defense League rally in London, under the shadow of Big Ben. Supporters of banned nationalist Tommy Robinson were laying out anti-immigrant tirades to a crowd of angry white men, many in Trump hats. In England. Two weeks ago, Germany handed a right-wing extremist a life sentence after he was found guilty of shooting a pro-immigration politician in the head at point-blank range, killing him. Racist nationalism is an international problem. The fact that mass casualty events in Oslo, Norway, lead to similar attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, which lead to similar attacks in El Paso, Texas is proof.
The specter of a pan-Aryan movement has long been a reality. I discussed it in my search on Odinist prison gangs in the 2000s. An international network of racist pagans shared plans for their racial holy war from behind prison walls. Before that, research on white power rock bands traveling to Europe, revealed the trafficking of Neo-Nazi paraphernalia and ideology across the Atlantic. In 1991, I was interviewing a skinhead in (what had just been East) Berlin, Germany, and told me, in broken English, “We have many friends in your country.”
Last summer, the U.S. Senate introduced S. 4080 – the Countering Global White Supremacist Terrorism Act. It’s a great start (if it ever passes) to assess the nature of the global connections to the domestic white supremacist call for a racial revolution. In the wake of the “dry run” on January 6th, the intelligence part of this effort needs to include four key elements.
Foreign support for domestic extremists. While privacy rules make the work difficult, intrepid journalists have started following the money and unmasking the financial backers of the radical right, like the Mercer family. It is likely that money coming to back the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other groups hell bent on their “boogaloo” civil war is also coming from sources outside the United States, including Russia. The financial streams must be revealed and interrupted.
Foreign disruption and misinformation. If the 2016 election taught us anything, it’s that a little disinformation dropped into your cousin’s Facebook feed can turn a country upside down. In 2015, few people (including Republicans) thought Donald Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming president. In January, 2017 he was sworn in. We know that Russia played a role in that campaign. Foreign interference that repeats tropes like “Black Lives Matter is a communist organization” are a part of our digital realities and serve to push “I’m not racist, but..” Americans into white supremacist worldviews.
Encrypted communications. A lot of racist cross-national communication is right out there in the open, on Parler, Twitter, 4chan, and even Instagram. But white supremacists have long utilized encrypted communications. Whether they are sending messages on Telegram, Tox, through video game networks, or communicating in handmade codes on the deep deep web, the chat includes bomb making techniques, hit lists, and potential coordination on terrorist plots. They’ve looked to ISIS and other international terror groups for both mainstream recruitment techniques (ex. YouTube) as well as for tips on secretive channels of communication. We must work with our international partners to penetrate this information flow.
Pan-Aryan movements. More must be done to understand the international connections of white supremacist terror organizations, like Atomwaffen Division. We’ve tended to think of these groups as “home grown” and disregarded their international connections. The internet has linked racist organizations in South Africa to similar groups in South Carolina. The role that Facebook live-streaming played in the 2019 Christchurch shooting that left 51 dead demonstrated that these so-called nationalists are playing to an international audience.
How trade policy impacts white nationalism
During my discussion with the consulate’s office, the issue of trade policy came up. It wasn’t a topic I was expecting or felt qualified to talk about, but it was clear there were some issues that were relevant. Much of racial nationalism is fueled by globalization. Globalization diminishes national identity (There’s an infinite number of McDonalds and Starbucks in Paris) and increases immigration. This was an obvious driver in Britain’s 2016 Brexit vote, the rise of Trump (“America first!”), as well as racialized nationalist movements in Poland, Germany, and Greece. Trade policies designed to reduce pushes into white supremacist movements and their calls for violence must be mindful of the following two questions:
How does this policy impact agrarian or manufacturing labor segments? The very first of racist skinheads I studied in the late 1980s were racist skinheads because of deindustrialization. Their parents were being laid off of their manufacturing jobs which were being shipped to Mexico and China. And the only analysis they were getting was from the White Aryan Resistance who told them that it was a global Jewish cabal that was destroying their shot at the American dream. My 1990s skinheads added the giant sucking sound of NAFTA as the backdrop of their downward mobility. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that over 600,000 manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico after President Clinton signed NAFTA in 1994. Any trade policy must look at the impact on blue collar labor, whether in the factory or the field. An example of countering the trend, Samsung ovens are now made in Tennessee. The profits still flow to South Korea, but a lot of workers are getting to bank their money thanks to the push to revitalize our industrial labor force. This type of trade policy breaks the back of jingoism.
How does this policy impact labor migration? Environmental policies will impact migration patterns as the planet warms. Refugees leaving drought ravaged lands where farming and access to clean water are stressed will become a fact of life unless international policies tackle climate change. Similarly, trade policies (which now often have an environmental component) can be mindful on the impact of the migration of labor. If a policy is likely to increase the migration into the United States, the benefit to Americans must be made clear. Otherwise, the policy (and the earnest foreign workforce that emerges because of it) becomes a white supremacist weapon for scapegoating, xenophobia, and hate crimes.
To work with America you must understand America
There is also a conversation going on from Philadelphia to the Philippines about what kind of country America is in 2021. Especially after four years of Trump. Our standing on the world stage has plummeted as our national interests were supplanted by Donald’s personal interests. As the Biden diplomatic team repairs the damage done to our international relationships, our global partners need to be mindful of four factors that drive activism in the extreme right.
Because each of these is a complex issue, worthy of pages of analysis, I’ll be incredibly brief.
Understanding the split in the Republican Party. The symbolic division between the party of Representative Lynne Cheney (R-WY) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) reflects the split between the “Grand Ol’ Party,” with it’s core conservative values, and the nut-job wing that remains loyal to Trump, QAnon and the calls for an uprising to defeat the “communist” Democrats.
Understanding that nationalism is a response to globalization. Over one hundred years ago fervent calls to “(Your country here) first!” set the stage for the “war to end all wars” and paved the way for the rise of fascism. Without the strength of our international treaties (I’m looking at you, UK), we’re back to square one.
Understanding paths to radicalism and access to resources for deradicalization. There’s more than enough scholarship on why people become extremists. Programs in Sweden (Exit) and Britain (Prevent) have pioneered excellent methods to deradicalize extremists. It’s time to share the wisdom.
Confronting extremism in the military. We are not the only nation whose militaries contain Neo-Nazis who dream of bombing Israel, African and Arab countries, and liberal metropolitan areas. A global strategy to confront this issue should be the first step in an international effort to prevent large scale attacks.
And now the work begins
We talked about a great deal in one hour. I can really squeeze a lot in when I think there’s a ticking time bomb, like April 19th. That day may come and go without event, which I desperately hope will be the case. (April 20th is Hitler’s birthday, so wait to exhale.) America is starting from less than zero because of the hole Donald Trump dug. But, with the help of our friends around the world, we can put our shoulders to the wheel and ensure our common dream to live in a safe and stable nation.
Watching the Wheels 