The first epic film was D.W. Griffith’s 1915 opus, The Birth of the Nation. The 193 minute-long silent black & white classic is based on the novel, The Clansman, which glorified the birth of the Ku Klux Klan after the defeat of the South in the Civil War. A central character is Silas Lynch, a mulatto who Reconstructionists elect lieutenant governor of South Carolina. Lynch, who lusts for a white congressman’s daughter, attempts to reign in the KKK, who ride to a violent victory in the end of the movie.
The word “mulatto” has fallen out of favor but has become relevant again with Donald Trump’s inability to define Kamala Harris’s racial identity,
The term mulatto was originated by Spanish and Portuguese slave traders to identify the children of African slaves who had been raped by Europeans and served to blur the color line between white and black. American slave states popularized terms like “quadroon” and “octoroon” to identify slaves that had a white grandparent or great grandparent. In 1910, Tennessee adopted the “One Drop” rule that dictated that if an individual was 1/32 black, they were legally a “negro.” The original 1859 Oregon constitution contained references to mulattos, including an 1849 exclusion clause that stated, “Be it enacted by the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Oregon that it shall not be lawful for any negro or mulatto to enter into, or reside within the limits of this Territory.”
So what’s the problem with mulattos?
Yesterday’s mulatto is today’s bi-racial person, which includes a massive percentage of the human race, including my daughter. But in the slave days this designation was essential as all non-European people were defined as less-than human after Pope Nicholas V signed the Dum Divervas in 1452. The decree paved the way for four centuries of chattel slavery. The dehumanization of non-whites also meant the offspring of white and non-white unions were not fully human, even if they looked white. And by looking white, these half-human beasts could sneak into white civilization. So the need to maintain the white/not white color line became the prime directive of white supremacy. They believed then, as they do now, that miscegenation (“race mixing!”) would destroy the white race and, therefore, their God-given domain over non-white subhumans.
This is why Silas Lynch is the villain of The Birth of a Nation. His whiteness gets him access to the halls of power and his blackness brands him a “savage” with his sights set on planting his seed in white women and oppressing white men. Once the color-line is destroyed, white supremacists no longer can tell who is on their side and who is the enemy. Much of this narrative was revised when bi-racial Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008. Racists argued his whiteness would get him elected and then he would unleash blackness on white America. “He’s firing white people from their jobs,” a racist skinhead told me shortly after the election. “He hasn’t even been sworn in yet and we’re in a massive recession. Everybody is getting fired!” I told him.
Next to the fear of non-whites “passing” as white is the need to maintain a simple us vs. them color line. Race is a human invention so it’s always been challenging to maintain racial boundaries. One hundred years ago, the Irish were not considered “white,” and Irish immigrants were the target of the 1920s KKK. Most people who call themselves “white” are multiracial mutts. I’m Slavic on my father’s side and Anglo-Saxon on my mothers side (and, according to 23 and Me, 0.2 Middle Eastern!). We’re all “mulatto.” Among those who identify as African-American, 18 percent have identifiable white ancestors and a whole bunch of white supremacists of have black branches in their family tree. But the myth of racial purity continues to fuel racist ideologies over who is more “human.”
But there’s a certain brain type that can’t handle the complexity of our racial identities. They need people people to fit into one box or the other. They ask people of color, “What are you?” The many shades of gray explode their brains. “Are you Asian or Mexican?” “Um, I’m Filipino.” Their world is divided into good vs. evil, right vs. left, and white vs. black. “Context” is a liberal concept and non-duality is some foreign Buddhist mumbo jumbo. “You’re either my version of Christian or you are an agent of Satan.”
This is where Donald Trump’s buffoonery comes in. While speaking to a convention of black journalists last week, in one of his more unhinged word salads, Trump mused on when Kamala Harris “turned black.” “So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” he said. Trump’s binary brain can’t understand that she is both, Indian and Black. “You can’t be both! That’s not allowed!” Tell that to anyone who defines themselves as Scotch-Irish. Unlike millions of Americans, Trump’s never had to choose which box to check on a form when more than one apply. And he’s never had anyone stare at his face and ask, “What are you?”
Trump’s limited cognitive ability is reflected in his knuckle-dragging MAGA base, who immediately went to work attacking Harris’ racial identity. One Trumpie on my social media feed posted, “She’s not African-American, her father is Jamaican!” I had to give him a brief lesson on the African diaspora. He agreed that Bob Marley was black, so I took it as a win. The MAGA narrative that Harris is a “ho” and a “DEI hire,” is in line with their core values of racism and misogyny and their need fit human beings into handy categories. The 33.8 million Americans who identified as multiracial in the 2020 census have heard the “What are you?” question too many times and are just about done with trying to fit in a box for the comfort of white people. Their box routine allows them to define you. Shattering the box allows you to define yourself and that’s exactly what Kamala Harris is doing.
Kamala Harris is a successful woman, who is the daughter of immigrants. She has a complex racial identity and has a husband who actually loves her. And she loves America. You can see why that confuses Donald Trump and his base.
One of the most depressing things about the 2020 election was seeing more white women move into the Trump voting pool. While only 47 percent of white women voted Republican in 2016, 53 percent voted for the GOP in 2020, according to Pew Research. While women of color largely remained Democratic voters, the “soccer moms” seemed to be falling for Trump. Those Republican women were rewarded in June 2022 when the Supreme Court took away their reproductive rights in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. Dobbs woke many of those Republican women up. That fall, conservative women in redder than red Kansas voted, en masse, against a proposed state abortion ban. Was the sleeping giant waking?
Dissertations are being written on why so many white women support a convicted felon, who brags about wanting to date his daughter and grabbing women by the genitals. “And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. A man who was found, by a jury of his peers, liable for sexual assault, in a case the judge equated with rape. Why would white women support this pig? What woman would tell their daughter that, “This is a good man and should be our president”? My theory is that their racism trumps his sexism. They see themselves as white first and women second.
Now, of all possible running mates, Trump has picked first term Ohio senator J.D. Vance to be his wingman. While it’s not surprising Trump picked a white male MAGA loyalist (who won’t stray like that Constitution-abiding Mike Pence), it is a little surprising that Trump would pick someone as anti-woman as Vance. Vance opposes no-fault divorce and wants a national ban on all abortion, even if a girl is raped by her father. (As J.D. says, “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”) You’d think forced government birth for rape victims would not be a good look for the G.O.P., who should be trying to lure female voters back after Dobbs. But there is no G.O.P. anymore. There is only Trump, a party of one. In high school, I learned this was called “fascism.”
So the Trump-Vance ticket is the most misogynistic ticket of this century. And, suddenly, they are up against, not Old Man Biden, but Vice President Kamala Harris, who has also been a successful senator, state attorney general, and prosecutor of the same crimes for which Trump has been convicted. Sunday, after Biden’s announcement, I dove into right wing social media and charted the avalanche of racism and sexism that was being unleashed by the white men of MAGA. Then I took the shower.
Accusations that Harris is “incompetent,” “slept her way to the top,” and is a “DEI hire,” should be familiar to every single woman who has tried to find equity in the workplace. This includes Republican women – the ones in the workplace, not the ones homeschooling their kids. That women have to work twice as hard and get half as much is a lived reality known to all working women (and people of color). These are the women that belt out the line from the Taylor Swift song, “I’m so sick of running as fast as I can, wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man.” But the fact that this avalanche of “women are not qualified” misogyny is coming from the supporters of Trump-Vance may work in Harris favor.
Kathleen Blee’s pioneering 2008 book, Women of the Klan, found that women joined racist hate groups with their racist men, not on their own, and were challenged by the sexism that went hand in hand with the racism. Trump women who fawned over Trump at the RNC, with fake bandages on their right ears, may start to fall away when they hear the uncheck anti-woman rhetoric coming from their men, especially when they start to understand Harris has their back.
I’ve already witnessed this. Don’t tell anyone, but I belong to a Gen X Swiftie Facebook page. (Not all Taylor Swift fans are 9-year-old girls, like my daughter.) Swift is a strong feminist and has come out as a Democratic supporter. The 2020 documentary Miss Americana tells the powerful story of her political coming out. Taylor’s epic break-up song, “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” which is an updating of Dylan’s “Tangled Up In Blue,” contains the line, “And you were tossing me the the car keys, ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ keychain on the ground.” Of course, being a feminist Swiftie over fifty, I went straight to Amazon and bought a “Fuck the Patriarchy” key chain.
After the Republican convention last week, which was the pinnacle of patriarchal bullshit, I posted a picture of my keychain on Gen X Swifties, with the tag, “Current mood.” I got hundreds of likes but some anger from a few Swifties that felt I had introduced politics into their “safe space.”
Then something amazing happened.
The other women on Gen X Swifties started a conversation with the “no politics” women. Not a “You’re stupid!” shouting match but a calm conversation that clearly stated, Taylor is political and so being a Taylor Swift fan is political. That Taylor has strongly come out for women’s rights and LGBTQ rights and against politicians who oppose those civil rights and you can’t separate these things. To be for Taylor is to be for women’s and queer rights and the taking of a strong stance against those that would suppress those rights is in line with Swift’s values of equality. People began posting memes of friendship bracelets that said, “In our Kamala era,” and repurposing Swift lyrics, like, “Kamala’s a relaxing thought.” And those “no politics” women didn’t bail. They stayed and listened.
I’d like to make a prediction. Swift’s Eras tour returns to the United States in October. As boyfriend Travis Kelce joined her onstage in London, there will be night when the vice president takes the stage. Preferably it will be during “You Need to Calm Down,” Swift’s brilliant anti-homophobia anthem, and Harris will do her famous Kamala dance. Swift will wink and that will be that. No words will be said and the massive Swift voting block will be activated.
So let Trump-Vance and their MAGA droogs unleash their pathetic misogynistic attacks. It’s like water off of Kamala’s back. She’s heard it all before. It can only work to peel those coveted white women, formerly known as soccer moms, away from the Trump cesspool and into the Harris camp. They may tell their men that they are voting for Trump, but in the privacy of the voting booth they’ll pull the lever for the prosecutor, not the felon. And when Taylor Swift sings, “Screaming, crying, perfect storms, I can make the tables turn. Rose garden full of thorns, keep you second guessing, like ‘Oh, my God, who is she?” They can sing along and say, “Yeah, that was me.”
I remember my first presidential candidate assassination attempt. I was a second grader in Boca Raton, Florida in May 1972, when we heard that Alabama governor George Wallace, a Democratic candidate for president, had been shot by a 21-year-old man dressed in red, white, and blue. I remember that Wallace was known to be a white supremacist. At 8, based on my Sesame Street education, and love of the Mod Squad, I knew that was a bad thing. Wallace, survived, although paralyzed, and George McGovern went on the be the Democratic nominee, only to lose to Tricky Dick Nixon.
The Wallace shooting has been on my mind as I watch the coverage of Saturday’s attempt on Donald Trump’s life with my 9-year-old daughter. “This is your first political assassination attempt, Cozy,” I told her. “I’m sure it won’t be my last,” she replied. She already knows how America works.
I remember where I was when I first heard that John Hinckley had shot Ronald Reagan in 1981 (in my Gran Torino in the parking lot of Redan High School) and when I heard that Charles Manson acolyte Squeaky Fromm (and another woman 17 days later) tried to shoot Gerald Ford in 1975 (in my rec room in Stone Mountain, Georgia). I was only 4 when Sirhan Sirhan shot Democratic candidate Robert Kennedy in 1968 and in utero when his brother, President John Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. The shooting of American politicians will mark my life, from womb to tomb.
When JFK was killed in 1963 by a gunman from an elevated position 266 feet away, it shocked a nation that thought it was beyond political violence, even though three previous presidents had been assassinated (Lincoln, 1865, Garfield, 1881, and McKinley, 1901). Black nationalist civil rights icon Malcolm X created a firestorm when asked to comment on the murder of Kennedy. “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they’ve always made me glad.” The response was fierce and the Nation of Islam, the group X spoke for, sanctioned him for speaking ill of the president loved by so many black Americans.
But Malcom X’s sentiment is worth considering. In The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Minister X explained his comment as a form of social karma. That an administration, and a society, that had foist so much violence on its citizens, especially on black people, should not be shocked when that violence bounces back on them. You reap what you sow. And America has a long history of launching violence into the world, and defending the violent. Live by the gun, die by the gun.
So when Trump was shot by a white kid, a registered Republican, and a gun club member, with his dad’s AR-15, I heard those words. The chickens have come home to roost.
America loves violence and nobody loves the language of violence more than Donald J. Trump. We don’t have to go down the sizable list of offenses (but him asking if the BLM protesters could be shot in the legs in 2020 is a favorite). Trump Saturday, with a barely winged ear, chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!” with clenched fist, was part of his faux macho man performance. Ever the showman, under the dog pile of Secret Service agents, he was probably thinking, “I need a fundraising meme!” Fifteen minutes later, the image was everywhere. Trump looking like 50 Cent. “My body eats bullets.”
The shooting of Trump is a horrible event for so many reasons. While this nation was founded in bloody revolution, we solve our disputes with ballots not bullets. The worst liberals (including some friends) publicly wished the kid was a better shot. The worst conservatives saw the hand of nutzo conspiracies that blamed Biden, antifa, the “deep state,” and (surprise) the Jews. The shooting was seen as “evidence” of whatever your binary us vs. them political position. Many, on both the left and the right, we were convinced that attempt, that killed a father in the crowd, would guarantee a Trump victory and whatever glory/hell that creates. “America is saved/doomed!”
The violent rhetoric of Trump (much of which I’ve written about here) is not exactly balanced out by peace and love vibes from Democrats. On Monday, when NBC’s Lester Holt interviewed President Biden, Holt asked the President about his rhetoric toward Trump. ““It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye.” Biden, instead of apologizing or engaging in a heartfelt conversation about the overly violent nature of political speech, played a moronic game of what-about-ism. “Look, I’m not the guy that said I want to be a dictator on day one.” You’re not helping, Joe. Take a nap.
After the Trump shooting, “Civil War” was trending on X (Twitter) and the dark web I monitored over the weekend was full of “keep your powder dry” posts. But the ray of hope may come from Trump himself. After his brush with death (and we were millimeters from his head exploding in that Pennsylvania field), the former president allegedly tore up his original fiery speech for his crowning Thursday at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He could return to his “Crooked Joe and Them Evil Democrats” stump speech template, full of rambling stories about sharks and Hannibal Lector. But maybe, just maybe, Donald has had a come to Jesus moment (the real Jesus, not White Republican Jesus). Perhaps this Thursday’s speech will be his version of Obama’s brilliant 2004 Democratic Convention oratory, when Obama said, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.” After naming misogynist MAGA sycophant J.D. Vance as his running mate, I don’t hold out much hope, but you never know. A new Trump could urge calm amid Terrordome-like political chaos.
We desperately need leadership that says, we are not red or blue, just beautiful and varying shades of purple. We need a chorus of voices that says all this political violence is endlessly counter productive. We need credible messengers to tell us there is a better way and show us how to do it. If not, we’re done.
There have been red flags along the way; the Civil War, Watergate, Rosanne Barr singing the national anthem at a Padres game. America has always been an idea more than a reality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” referred to a small group of white men in 1776, some of whom owned slaves and none of whom (except for Thomas Paine) thought women should have a vote. America was a work in a progress. It wasn’t until the arrival of an orange-hued huxter that this grand experiment went completely off the rails.
When Trump and his mail order bride came down the golden escalator in 2015, no sane thinking person thought this malignant narcissistic game show host could become the leader to the free world. Trump was a buffoon with a string of bankruptcies. (You have to be a special kind of moron to bankrupt a casino.) But his rough justice brand of racism (“Mexicans are murderers and rapists”) spoke to the victims of globalization and, while he lost the popular vote, he managed to sneak in to the high office. Thus began the campaign to hijack the no-longer Grand Ol Party and dismantle the guard rails of democracy.
If the 2022 Dobbs decision, that ended women’s bodily sovereignty, was a sign that this was democracy’s sunset, the July first Supreme Court decision in Trump vs. United States, that gave presidents absolute immunity, was our lights-out moment. Goodnight, John Boy. The President is now officially above the law. Trump will claim that he is now immune from all indictments, past and future. If re-elected, he becomes Caesar.
The once revered Supreme Court has gone down this road before. In 2000, the court literally stopped the counting of ballots in Florida and handed the presidency to George W. Bush. But the Federalist Trump Court, stacked with his three nominees and insurrection supporters Alito and Thomas, represent the complete obliteration of the checks and balances system our Founding Fathers designed. The federal judiciary is now merely an extension of MAGA. MAGA controls the House of Representatives as well. So if Trump’s minions take the Senate and he takes back the White House, which controls the entire Executive Branch, America is completely under the control of this madman who has already proclaimed he will be a dictator on Day 1.
Since 1984, when I became a political science major at Emory University (on top of my sociology major), I have dedicated my life to understanding how fascism happens. My work has included going undercover in fascist movements to see how they recruit young people, to entering war zones in Eastern Europe to help children escape the invasion of fascists. For forty years, I have been consumed with this work in hopes that I could prevent it from happening here. That forty years of work, of expertise in this field, tells me one thing. It is happening here.
Let me put this into the most simple words I can, Donald Trump does not give a fuck about America or Americans. He would never let any of his knuckle-dragging MAGA base into his haughty Mar-a-Lago affairs where he flaunts his stolen wealth. Trump cares about power and ego and ratings. And he cares about retribution. He has made it exceedingly clear that his second term would be about revenge, including firing any and all federal workers that are not absolutely loyal to him. His (currently imprisoned) top advisor, Steve Bannon, has said Trump 2.0 will arrest, try, and imprison Biden officials and anyone viewed as not supporting Trump, including former FBI acting Director Andrew McCabe, former FBI Director James Comey, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former Attorney General William Barr and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
Trump 2.0, would be modeled on the authoritarian regimes Trump has only shown admiration for. A national abortion ban, the releasing of the January 6 terrorists, and detention camps for immigrants would be the first impact. The hollowing out of voting access for minority populations and the protection of corporations from regulations comes next. Then, as Trump has publicly supported, the implementation of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, replacing every federal worker not loyal to Trump, from the highest executive office staff to the lowest park ranger, with Christian nationalists. Department of Education? Gone. Environmental regulations? Gone. Civil rights enforcements? Gone. And finally, because of the July 1 ruling, Trump can legally “take out” any perceived opponents, from Nancy Pelosi to the teenage anarchist down the street. America becomes a hellscape where the Confederacy has won the long civil war. There will be blood.
Why Americans are not out in the streets, I’ll never know. Maybe we’re the frog in the slowly boiling pot. Maybe it’s, as John Lennon sang in 1970, they “keep you doped with religion and sex and TV and you think you’re so clever and classless and free.” Or maybe we have prematurely achieved Idiocracy. Whatever reason, fascism is at our doorstep and turning the knob.
Even if you think my words alarmist, you know another four years of Trump appointments to the federal judiciary will fundamentally transform the nation for generations in a way that will make America the nineteenth century again. An immunized presidency will provide no disincentive to the wanton criminal behavior of a sociopath. A sociopath who only cares about his own power.
Yeah, Joe Biden’s performance at the recent debate was a train wreck, but I would vote for Biden in a coma if it meant keeping this very real threat to the nation from access to the levers of our democracy. Trump and his GOP cult of personality will burn it to the ground.
Free the Israeli hostages. Hamas is a terrorists organization. Israel has a right to exist. Also, no Jewish college student should be made to feel unsafe because they are Jewish, including at my alma mater, Emory University. I wanted to get that out of the way before someone on Fox News accuses me of anti-Semitism. As someone who has dedicated his entire adult life to studying and combatting neo-Nazism, I think I have a pretty good feel for what anti-Semitism is and there is an alarming lot of it, but the de facto defending of the right of Palestinians to live is not anti-Semitism. But I’m not Jewish, so I might be missing things that don’t look anti-Semitic but feel anti-Semitic.
I’m writing this on the fifth anniversary of the Poway synagogue shooting. On April 27, 2019, a 19-year-old white supremacist walked into the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego and opened fire, with an AR-15 rifle, on the last day of Passover. He killed one woman and injured three others, including the rabbi. Before the shooting, he posted a manifesto on 8chan that claimed Jews “meticulously planned genocide of the European race.” Because he was inspired by the Christchurch mosque shootings that had resulted in 51 deaths in New Zealand a month earlier, the killer had attempted to burn down a mosque in Escondido before his deadly shooting spree in Poway.
Last week, I sat in on an ADL webinar that shared that anti-Semitic incidents in 2023 increased 140 percent over those reported in 2022, spiking after the Hamas attack in Israel. If I’ve learned one thing in the 30+ years I’ve done this work, it’s that racists and neo-Nazis are opportunists. When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 767 civilians (including 36 children), they saw a massive opportunity. So how do I speak about the over 38,000 Palestinian civilians (including nearly 16,000 children) killed by Israel in their war on Hamas without being pulled into the black hole of anti-Semitism?
It’s sickeningly clear that the far right is coming at this issue from both sides. On one side, it has injected anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories into a part of the pro-Palestinian movement. (We can debate how big or small that part is.) They’ve also utilized the claim of “anti-Semitism” to shut down sincere protests to defend the human rights of Palestinians, that can include the accusation that Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza (which was alleged by the United Nations last month).
I feel the need to point out four basic assertions:
Thing 1: A firm critique of the policies of the government of Israel is not anti-Semitism. Being critical of the misogynistic policies of the Taliban in Afghanistan does not make one Islamophobic. There are countless Jews, both inside and outside of Israel, who oppose the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and reject the actions of Bibi Netanyahu. Are those Jews anti-Semitic?
Thing 2: The core tenant of anti-Semitism is that Jewish people, as a group, have some secret control of the world (banks, the media, government, hip hop, etc.) that shapes global events. It is completely possible to see Israel’s military campaign as an action of a sovereign nation and not an operation of a “global cabal” of “evil Jews.”
Thing 3: The heartbreaking spike in anti-Semitic incidents and crimes has been paralleled by an equally heartbreaking spike in anti-Muslim incidents and crimes, including the murder of Wadea al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian boy in Illinois who was stabbed 26 times by his landlord who had been listening to conservative radio following the October 7 attack.
Thing 4: The vast majority of the deaths caused by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been civilians, including women and children, who are not members of Hamas, and have not resulted in the liberation of Israeli hostages. Additionally, the created famine and destruction of schools, hospitals, and infrastructure in Gaza has not resulted in the freeing of Israeli hostages.
Having said all that, we cannot deny anti-Semitism has been witnessed in pro-Palestine protests in two ways.
First is the idea that a free Palestine requires the elimination of the state of Israel. There are many, including myself and President Biden, who believe a “two state solution” is the most rational way out of this mess. But those who chant, “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free!” do not see Israel existing in that vision. (Although, I’m willing to bet a lot of the college students chanting that have no idea were the Jordan River is. Americans are pretty stupid when it comes to geography.) You know who also wants the destruction of Israel? Hamas and neo-Nazis.
The second issue is how Jews in general (including Jewish Americans) are scapegoated for policies of the government of Israel. While there are significant numbers of American Jews who are in the streets and college quads protesting for the human rights of Palestinians, that any Jewish person be made to feel unsafe or targeted for the policies of government over 6000 miles away is the definition of irrational. But Jews have long have been the target of irrational scapegoating, including by one well known anti-Semite, Adolf Hitler.
I remember what it feels like to be young and righteous. When I was an undergraduate at Emory, our issue was apartheid in South Africa. Like the students there now, we set up a shantytown on the quad and called for the university to divest from the country. Emory was built on Coca-Cola money and Coke had plenty of operations in South Africa. (In 1986, Coca-Cola pulled out of South Africa. You’re welcome.) Is the movement to divest from Israeli “apartheid” the same situation? As an undergrad in 2024, I might see the similarities. I also might get caught up in the chants and rallies the blur the lines between anti-Netanyahu-ism and anti-Zionism. But utilizing police to crush the protests doesn’t help protestors (including well-meaning college students) to better understand the complexities of this issue. I’ll tell you this, when the cops came for us in the 1980s, it further radicalized my position as I dug my heels in for the long fight. These protests seem the perfect opportunity to widen the conversation, centering both Jewish and Palestinian voices. (Note: Not all Gaza residents are Muslim. There is a small Christian population there. And probably a few Goths.) Police crackdowns silence the discussion.
This could be a lengthy tome about the need to find a “middle ground” in this crisis. That talk does not serve the children of Gaza, who face the same certainty of death from Israeli rockets that the children of Ukraine face from Russian rockets. Those kids don’t know about Hamas or Israel’s tortured history in a hostile landscape. That call for compromise would also not soothe the families of the 133 Israeli hostages still being held in some God-forsaken hellhole. That is not the intent.
The intent is highlight how the very powerful charge of anti-Semitism has been weaponized to shut down calls for a cease fire, calls to stop the slaughter, calls to choose policies that don’t result in human carnage. Some Americans are afraid to oppose the war out of fear of being labeled anti-Jewish. As I said when this thing started last fall, it is possible to be both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel. The deep emotional nature of this conflict obscures what should be ethical clarity. I will leave it to the psychoanalysts to determine if Jewish trauma is now being levied on Palestine. I will leave it to the philosophers to determine if genocide is a defense against genocide. (And if “genocide” is even an accurate term.) I just want to hold space where we are allowed to express our outrage and sadness for what we continue to do to each other. Stop the killing.
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?
I had a dream I turned on the classic rock radio station and heard a song I never heard before. I woke up thinking how boring nostalgia was. As much as I love a good Steve Miller Band single from 50 years ago, there has to be something more to life. Thanks to my 9-year old Swiftie daughter, the car radio is now locked into the Top 40 station. Z100! I know Steve Miller and his Jet Airliner are still there, but we’re in a droptop ride with SZA today.
I’ve now entered the age where I’m surrounded by peers, Baby Boomers and increasingly crotchety Gen Xers, complaining about “kids today” and how much better things were back in the day, music and values and the price of gas. It’s endlessly annoying. Just because Van Halen made “totally awesome” music in 1980, doesn’t mean there aren’t a ton of bands making great music now. (I’m writing this as I’m playing the new Bleachers record.) But I’m regularly being beaten over the head by Grumpy Old Men who don’t think any music released this century is worth a damn. They desperately want the world be like it was when they were young and you could ride in the back of a pick-up truck to the drive-in.
Let’s first deal with three important facts.
FACT 1: I love when I read old timers complain that youth today have no morals or respect or blah, blah, blah. They forget that their parents’ generation said the same thing about them. Kids have never had any goddamn respect. Socrates, over 2400 years ago said much the same thing. “The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” They might be assholes half the time, but the kids are alright.
FACT 2: Rock and roll was created in the 1950s for one specific reason, to annoy your parents. The noise of youth creates space for young people separate themselves from adult society. Adults thought Elvis was noise in the 1950s, with his gyrating hips and “negro intonations.” Every year kids have had something to push their parents back, including Hendrix (1960s), Kiss (1970s), Run DMC (1980s), Nirvana (1990s), Eminem (2000s), Beyoncé (2010s), and Doja Cat (now). I remember my father endlessly perplexed at why I preferred Led Zeppelin to Ricky Nelson. “That’s not music,” was the constant refrain. “I hope I die before I get old,” I’d reply. I remember elders thinking Van Halen was absolute garbage when they came out. (I saw them get booed when they opened for Black Sabbath in 1978.) Now grandma and grandpa are in a heated Sammy Hagar versus David Lee Roth debate.
FACT 3: The past always looks great through the rear view mirror, but the past was always a mixed bag. Yeah, it was fun to ride around in the back of a pick-up truck, but a bunch of kids fell out and died. Yeah, there were some great songs back then but there were some super shitty ones, too. Does anyone really miss “Disco Duck”? Yeah, it was fun to play in the streets with your pals, but often you were playing “Smear the Queer.” Whenever someone waxes on and on about the dreamlike good old days, I flash to me holding the TV antenna in just the right position so I could watch the Watergate hearings on one of the three channels we got, while also trying to manage the horizontal hold. I’ll take my Roku, thank you.
Nostalgia was originally defined as a sickness in the 1680s to describe Swiss mercenaries who couldn’t fight because the longed for home. During the American Civil War, nostalgia was seen as a problematic form a depression, melancholia to be cured so the soldiers could wage war. It’s root as a mental disability is not lost on the lives of those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, endlessly caught in loops of their past, unable to engage in the present world in a meaningful way. “If I could just go back to when I was happy.” Odds are you weren’t as happy as you imagine.
There’s a dangerous political aspect to all this hyper-nostalgia, this over romanticizing of the past. It’s the impetus behind all forms of fascism, from Hitler’s mythologizing of Germany’s past or Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. For Trump’s crowd it’s the belief that America was great BEFORE all the various civil rights movements upset the “natural” authority of straight white cis-gender men. The America before pronouns, diversity trainings, and black lives mattering. Make America Jim Crow Again. It’s not surprising that Trump has leaned heavily on 20th century music artists to take his MAGA crowd back to the GOD (Good Old Days). It’s encouraging that dozens of these artists (or their estates) have petitioned Trump to stop using their music, including Aerosmith, The Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eddy Grant, Elton John, the Village People (!), Everlast, Guns N Roses, Isaac Hayes, The Smiths, Leonard Cohen, Linkin Park, Neil Young, Ozzy Osbourne, Phil Collins, Prince, Queen, R.E.M., The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and even Nickelback. Just this week, the estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Trump to stop using her version of “Nothing Compares to You.” Fascism requires nostalgia but they are not doing it with Nickelback!
Two Important Points
Number 1: I get nostalgia. When we are young, and the world is in front us, every new experience is massively vibrant, the first kiss, the first time listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Those experiences and their soundtrack are woven into our very construction, like the iron beams that hold up the Empire State Building. Sitting in a smoke field movie theater watching The Empire Strike Back or falling to sleep to Steely Dan on the FM headphones has been fused into our DNA. As we age, and more of our life is behind us instead of in front of us, we start to lean on those iron beams. The Empire State Building, built 93 years ago, might not be here 93 years from now (2117), but it will always remind us of a specific moment in history that was both “great” and horrible.
I can get caught up in nostalgia, just like everyone else. I currently have 955 public playlists on Spotify, most mining the music of my youth. (Playlist #956 is going to be songs from albums released in March 1974, starting with Grand Funk’s “Locomotion.”) If I have any actual hobbies, it’s collecting vinyl LPs and anything related to the Beatles. And I would trade my eye teeth to get behind the wheel of my first car, a ’73 Gran Torino, again. But that brings me to Point #2.
Number 2: Nostalgia can block out our ability to be present in the present. We’re so focused on the past and making America “that” again, we miss out on the wonderful stuff right in front of us. I will never stop listening to Top 40 radio and looking for new bands to obsess over. (Currently, it’s Blood Command.) I love sharing my daughter’s love of all things Taylor Swift and discovering this music with her (Lover is our current favorite album, although I’m starting to get into folklore.) Listening to contemporary music connects me to the present moment, not when America Was Ricky Nelson. Even if for a moment, it liberates me from the endless nostalgia loop. And it’s inevitable that Taylor Swift will be on “oldies” rotation in 30 years and my kid will say, “When I was a kid, we had REAL music, like Dua Lipa. These kids today…” And so it goes.
So enjoy the past. There’s great wisdom in a Crosby, Stills, and Nash lyric and a Jimmy Carter foreign policy. Huey Lewis and Ronald Reagan don’t seem as horrid as they did 40 years ago. And some of our fond memories are shockingly marginalizing now. (If you can’t remember how racist, sexist, and homophobic we were, just watch any 80’s comedy film. Weird Science has not aged well.) But also plug into the present reality. The kids today have both the exact same issues we contended with and so much more. And their world is reflected in their culture, which should not be dismissed as our parents dismissed ours. Their soundtrack is worth a listen.
This January 6th we mark the 3rd anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, with the help of his troglodyte hoard, and end American democracy. I’m choosing to, instead, mark the 612th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc, and her cinematic campaign to save her nation.
Portland has a wonderful statue to the “Maid of Orleans” in the Coe Circle roundabout. It was erected on Memorial Day 1925, after pioneer doctor (and close friend of Teddy Roosevelt) Henry Waldo Coe saw French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet‘s equestrian statue, Jeanne d’Arc, in Paris. I guess he thought Portland was going to become the Paris of the Pacific Northwest. For the last 28 years, I’ve been circling around the golden teenager, atop Sunflower, her horse, without thinking too much about it. I’d seen the original statue in the Place de Pyramides on one of my early trips to Paris. But other than that, I just thought about it as something “kinda cool.”
This past summer I decided I needed to learn more about this child warrior, so I dove into the deep end. My starting knowledge was that she was a French teen that rallied her nation against the English in the Hundred Years War and was burned at the stake. That was about it. So I started reading everything I could get my hands on, including the insanely well chronicled transcripts of her 1431 heresy trial in Rouen, Normandy, the heart of English controlled France. I watched over a dozen films, from Cecil B. DeMille’s Joan the Woman (1917) and Carl Theodor Dryer’s restored 1928 silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, to Bruno Dumont’s heavy metal musicals Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) and Joan of Arc (2019). Cozy started to think I was losing my mind, as we took extra spins around Coe Circle to say hello to my new favorite person.
The Joan obsession took me into a wider investigation of the Hundred Years War, which many historians see as paving the wave for modern nation states. That 15th century fasciation took a slight detour into all things Henry V and the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. (I’m currently reading Shakespeare’s Henry V play. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”) It was such a different world, emerging out of the pandemic of bubonic plague, facing a new form of religious nationalism. Oh, wait, maybe not.
First, let’s put Jeanne d’Arc in her historical context. Her birthdate may be a fiction as even she didn’t know how old she was and January 6 is the Epiphany in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. (I just finished off the King Cake in our house.) But she was likely born around 1412 in Domrémy, in an English controlled part of Northern France. Around age 13, she started reporting the religious visions, first from the archangel Michael, telling her to save France from the English and restore Charles VII to the throne. At 17, Joan made her way to the Royal Court in Chinon to ask Charlie for an army so she could drive the English out of their strategic stronghold in Orleans, on the River Loire. Since Joan claimed to be sent by God on a mission to restore Charles’ crown, he said, “Sure, why not.”
In April 1429, Joan, who was the age of a high school senior, had her army and, with standard in hand, sacked Orleans, sending the British running. And according to all the well documented eye-witness testimonies, she was 100% bad ass. The English would taunt her from behind their walls, calling her a “whore,” and she would just say, “OK, I guess you all will now die.” She’d get shot with arrows and keep going. She was nuts. After she got Charles VII his thrown back, her value wore off and he kinda just sorta accidentally let her get captured by the English, who were keen on proving that she was a devil. I mean if God was on France’s side, what did that say about England? And plus, she dressed like a man, which really pissed off the transphobic Catholic clergy. They were the only ones allowed to crossdress.
During her 1431 trial in Rouen, Joan was the same bad ass, dancing circles around the clerics, who really needed to prove she was a witch. This illiterate teenager outwitted her judges at every turn. They tried to trip her up, asking questions like, “Do you know whether or not you are in God’s grace?” Refusing to be trapped, she skillfully replied, “If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace.” They were like, “Oh, this chick is good.”
In the end, the political needs of the English overseers won out and Joan was ordered to be burned at the stake. In the intense desire to save herself from the fire, she briefly recanted and accepted a life in prison. But then she realized that would have invalidated her entire life dedicated to faith and France, and said, “Fuck it. Light me up.” (That might not be a direct translation.) On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake at the Old Marketplace in Rouen and her ashes were thrown into the Seine so there would be no relics left.
Cozy, my daughter (named after another tragic French girl, Victor Hugo’s Cosette), has been asking my why I’m so obsessed by Joan of Arc. After all, now if a teenager told you that God, angels, and saints had told them to demand an army so they could wage battle against foreign invaders, the term “mental health crisis” might be employed. What can a 15th century “religious fanatic” tell us about the challenges in 21st century? Patti Smith, in her blog this morning, posted a tribute to the maid, writing, “I keep returning to her story in order to contemplate the impossible decision she had to make, and her remarkable bravery in making it.” It’s not the religious fanaticism (perhaps schizophrenia) that brings us back to Joan. It’s the commitment to freedom from oppression. For Joan it was English rule and limiting gender norms of medieval Europe. For us it’s something different, but not much.
As we mark this day when we remember Trump’s desperate attempt to replace America’s democracy with some bizarre form of authoritarian rule, the story of Joan of Arc is instructive. Her trial was marked by a bizarre obsession her judges had with the fact she refused to dress as a woman. Ron DeSantis’ and the Proud Boys’ obsession with drag queens and banning gender affirming care for trans kids is cut from the same dogmatic cloth. But there is an even grander call to human potential here. The courage young Joan demonstrated to free France, in the face of older and more resourceful adversaries, will be required as American democracy is attacked from all angles. I’m not equating Putin with Henry V (Henry fought his own battles, for one), but the multi-front assault we face might demand a bit of Joan’s fanaticism and steadfast belief that our cause is just. As Joan said, as she led her legions to liberate Orleans, “All battles are first won or lost, in the mind.”
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.
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.
Watching the Wheels 