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.
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.
I’m at a complete loss. Tomorrow, it will have been one week since Hamas’ barbaric invasion of Israel that left so many people, especially those beautiful young people at a music festival, dead or kidnapped. Since then, those images and the images of Gaza, the most densely populated place on earth, being bombed into dust have kept me in a constant state of nausea.
I’m at a complete loss on how to talk about Israel and Palestine, in general. I have so many friends on both sides of the issue. Being an undergraduate at Emory (a Methodist university) was a crash course on the Jewish diaspora and how important Israel is to the stability of the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. I read Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, Exodus, like it was first-person history. I’ve also met so many Palestinians, including students of mine, who describe the apartheid they now live in since the state of Israel was created in 1948. They both present the need for their states with such complete legitimacy, it seems insane to even think one side has the most airtight claim on the land.
Since the 1990s, we’ve been able to put our faith in the “two state solution,” that the Gaza Strip in the south and the West Bank in the north will be the nation of Palestine. As a teenager, I watched Jimmy Carter broker a peace deal between Israel and Egypt, so maybe this would work. The deal, which turned the two territories over to the Palestinian National Authority, allowed me to not think as much about Israel and Palestine. The problem was solved, right? But when the terrorist group Hamas, took over Gaza in 2007 and the Gaza Strip became a walled-off prison of 2 million people, I probably should have paid more attention.
I don’t know if this war, which is now almost a week old, ends the idea of a two-state solution. There are already reports of Jewish settlers and Hezbollah militants clashing in the West Bank and media and politicians seem fixated on the war spilling over into a “wider conflict.” Like on 9/11, it does feel like the Earth forever shifted on its axis on 10/7. I saw the image of a child’s bedroom in Ashkelon, Portland’s sister city in Israel. The blood of that child, similar in age to my child, was spattered across the wall by Hamas raiders. I couldn’t hold back the tears. The next image was an apartment block in Gaza City flatted by Israeli rockets, a child, again like my own, covered in dust was searching for her family in the rubble. And again, I cry.
There is a tidal wave of false information already flooding social media about this conflict. Some of it is misinformation that is just wrong on the facts. But much of it is disinformation, purposely shared misinformation to inflame one side or the other, or malinformation, which is true but is shared to cause harm, like the showing of child casualties to enrage viewers to violence. It’s so hard to know what is real. I have to start out with the assumption that most of what I see on social media (and all of what I see on “X/Twitter”) is false. If people are getting their primary information from TikTok, we have a huge problem.
There is also a weird false narrative at work. People (especially non-Jewish Americans) often conflate “Israel” and “Jews,” making anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism fast friends. The opinions among Jews about the policies of Israel are probably as varied as the opinions among non-Jews about the policies of Israel. But there is a parallel line that conflates “Palestinian” with “Hamas.” One could easily argue that the vast amount of suffering in Gaza is because of Hamas. But then this conflation then equates “Hamas” with “Israel,” and that is madness. Israel, like all nations, has all kinds of problems. As in the United States, Israel has human rights issues to answer for. But, unlike Hamas, Israel is a democratic state that submits itself to the scrutiny of its global neighbors. The recent peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia are evidence of that. Hamas, harbors genocidal fantasies akin to Hitler’s, and has no desire for “peace.”
So much of my work on violent extremism highlights the role of trauma. And yes, there is a story to be told of generations of Palestinian trauma that would produce the type of mind that could have been capable of slaughtering kids at the “Supernova Sukkot Gathering” music festival last Saturday. But one could argue the history of Jewish trauma is much longer and deeper and doesn’t lead Israelis to rape, murder, and torture anyone in the manner we’ve seen this week. Again, I don’t know how to talk about this because it all defies the limitations of words. I just want to understand how humans are capable of this.
This conversation could go into all kinds of directions. How Putin, neo-Nazis, Iran, arms dealers, and evangelicals who believe Israel will soon be delivered to Christians are the likely beneficiaries of this mess. About how we have already seen a spike in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes in the United States in response to the war. About how dare we enjoy our pumpkin spice latte’s and post-season baseball while hundreds are being held hostage in Gaza. I’m just here to say, as a human being, I don’t know how to talk about this.
As a college professor, I find my young students tend to fall into two categories. The first are emphatic and righteous. They firmly believe that “Israel is a terrorist state” or that “Hamas are subhuman aberrations that must wiped from the face off the earth.” The other, larger group are just completely checked out, endlessly watching reels on their phones. They couldn’t find the “Middle East” on a map, let alone the Gaza Strip. I was trying to engage them in class yesterday and they looked me like, “What does this have to do with me?” I don’t know what’s worse, their indifference or the students who are actively cheering for Hamas.
It’s clear that Hamas wants to escalate the violence and kidnapping Israeli babies is a good way to do it. If rockets and a ground assault from Israel leads to the death of thousands of Palestinians, it furthers their dream of a “holy war” in the region. But I don’t know what the alternative is. A zombie apocalypse (a la World War Z)? An alien invasion? A faster, deadlier version of COVID? I told you I don’t know how to talk about this.
I’m at such a loss for words. The trauma being levied on the children of Israel and the children of Gaza will forever shape their brains. Unlike my emphatic students, I have no idea what the solution is. I can urge for de-escalation, but I also understand the impulse to take up arms and fire rockets. Inaction is off the table but what is the action? We must respond immediately but also wait to better assess the situation.
So I’m here to say I have no answers to this. I’m angry and I’m heartbroken and I know this is so much bigger than me. It seems like the international community, especially Muslim nations in the Middle East, need to defend Israel’s right to exist while fully enfranchising the citizens of Gaza and the West Bank. I don’t know. And I’m going to have to be OK without knowing. As a citizen of nation founded in violence, I can’t tell others not to use violence to form their nations. I can only bear witness to this moment of fire and pain.
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.
Fifty-four years ago this week, the dramatic violence outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago (August 23 to 28, 1968) defined an era of protest. It is now generally viewed as a “police riot.” The Chicago Police violently assaulted peaceful demonstrators, leading to numerous arrests and injuries, escalating the bloody street clashes. The mayhem was mostly broadcast on live TV, with the young protestors chanting, “The whole world is watching!”
In 2011, 43 years later those who studied the carnage from Chicago ’68 put those lessons to work. As the Occupy Wallstreet protests spread across the country, especially here in Portland, police utilized a new tactic – de-escalation. The old method of police knocking hippie heads tended to backfire and bring more civilians into the battle (and spurred increasingly costly lawsuits against police departments). In 2011, I spent many long nights in the three downtown squares claimed by Occupy protestors. The police kept their distance and let the people air their grievances. Eventually the protest ran its course and everyone went home. No teargas. No violence. The opposite was the case in 2020 when federal law enforcement arrived to quash the Black Lives Matter protests and turned downtown Portland into a war zone. I will never forget hiding behind concrete columns as feds, in heavily militarized gear, shot their weapons randomly down 5th Avenue.
Following the January 6th riot, we’ve re-entered the debate about de-escalating the violence. A 2022 University of California, Davis survey found that 1 in 4 Americans think violence against the government is sometimes OK and 1 in 10 feel political violence is justified right now. (Not surprisingly, these numbers are much higher among Republicans.) This call to violence has only escalated in the wake of the FBI’s warranted search (it wasn’t a “raid”) of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound to retrieve stolen classified documents. America suddenly seems close to falling into the tarpit of another civil war. Maybe the country needs to take a massive chill pill.
I’m privileged to be a part of a federally funded project to look at ways to interrupt extremist violence in America called Cure-PDX. The basic idea is that if there are individuals at risk of committing acts of political violence, whether they’re coming from the right or left or somewhere off the charts, there should be a way to get them to “de-escalate” and find a non-violent way to express their, perhaps legitimate, grievances. It’s not about de-radicalization. (As a sociology professor, I like to joke that I’m the radicalization field.) It’s about moving individuals back from the ledge of violence, before they go on a shooting spree, blow something up, or commit a hate crime.
The logic of de-escalation makes sense. Fewer victims of extremist violence seems like an easy sell. But our team ran to some push-back from some activists on both the right and left who argued, given the current state of affairs, this is the exact time TO escalate violence, before things tip over. Political scientists will tell you that extremists movements tend to have an apocalyptic element. The sky is always falling. But these days it’s hard not to share that sentiment. The left thinks democracy is one election away from disappearing and the right thinks the “Biden FBI” is coming to throw patriots into concentration camps. I will admit one thing, a part of me has considered arming up to protect my family from Proud Boys and the unorganized militias of the right.
I reflected on my time this spring in Ukraine. I was not involved in de-escalation. I was helping the Ukrainian army escalate the you-know-what out of things. The stuff I brought in from Poland in the back of a van ended up in the hands of soldiers in Irpin and very likely helped them kill many Russian conscripts as they valiantly reclaimed the city. I may have Russian blood on my hands. How do I sleep at night? Like a baby. I wish there was a non-violent solution but if you had seen what I had, you wouldn’t want de-escalation in that moment either. While there, I kept remembering a Bruce Cockburn song that went, “If I had a rocket launcher…Some son of a bitch would die.”
So who am I to tell other people to de-escalate?
Well, we’re not Ukraine, occupied by a civilian-slaughtering invader. We still have a Constitution and free elections. Despite Trump’s attempt to dismantle our democracy, the house still stands. Everything the left and right want can be addressed without violence. There are political strategies that can build the middle while giving voice to those who feel marginalized, including 70-something straight white cis men who are scared shitless by “woke politics” (whatever that is).
I just watched Netflix’s three-part documentary on Woodstock ’99. (I was briefly a Limp Bizkit fan, shhh.) The violent destruction at the 3-day festival, including the numerous sexual assaults, is a perfect example of the contagious nature of violence. Kids were suddenly burning down buildings. The madness of the moment consumed them. If I had been there (as I had planned to), I could have been one of them. America is at risk of “Woodstock ’22” becoming our descent into political violence as the mob mentality of us versus them sweeps the nation. Libtards versus Nazis. But, there is no us versus them, just us. And we have a brief window in history to de-escalate. If we miss it, it’s gonna make Woodstock ’99 look like Woodstock ’69.
Recent data shows that 80 percent of domestic terrorist plots that have been prevented were stopped because someone known to the potential offender came forward. We all can play the role of “credible messenger” to those at risk of escalating to violence. “Hey Frank, I now you want to storm the capitol, but can we just hang out and watch some cat videos?” Frank just got saved from a world of regret. It is worth pursuing this approach first and save the insanity (and body count) of escalation for another day. Non-violence is still the preferred path.
They say one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. From the perspective of a lowly stormtrooper inside the Death Star, Luke Skywalker and his band of rebel fighters, guided by an archaic religion, were not heroes, but mass murderers. Was the U.S drone strike that targeted ISIS-K in Kabul on August 29th a part of our righteous war on terror or was it a terrorist attack that killed seven children (and no ISIS fighters)? Remember when Bill Maher said, on his show Politically Incorrect, the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards, but those who launch cruise missiles from 2000 miles away were and ABC canned him? Are we even allowed to ask these questions?
Today is not the day to debate whether or not the attacks twenty years ago were terrorism. They most certainly were. If they weren’t, the word has no meaning. Anyone who was alive and old enough to pay attention on September 11, 2001 (and now a quarter of Americans weren’t), felt the terror. I had just flown to Atlanta on 9/10 for my 20th high school reunion and my dad woke me up in time for me to see the second plane slam into the World Trade Center. I remember saying out loud, “What the hell is happening?” as Peter Jennings attempted to translate the untranslatable. It was about to get worse. Much worse.
The U.S. government defines terrorism as, ““the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85). Much of my work is built around the description of hate crimes as acts of terrorism. Why do we not think of the 9/11 attacks as merely 2,977 murders? Because all Americans were the targets. I had a friend from college who was in Tower 1. Osama bin Laden didn’t know about him, or have anything against him personally. (Three of my former Emory classmates were killed in the New York attacks.) He was a random target, a death meant to intimidate a larger civilian population. And it worked. It was several months after 9/11 before I could enter a tall building or drive over a Portland bridge without thinking of a passenger plane crashing into it.
Hate crimes work the same way. Like the victims of 9/11, targets are randomly selected for their symbolic value, to coerce others like the targets that they aren’t wanted here. Leave. A burning cross, a gay bashing, a swastika on a synagogue, all meant to terrorize large populations. After the 9/11 attacks hate crimes against American Arabs and Muslim (and people perceived to be Arab and/or Muslim) increased 500%. Four days after the attack a Sikh named Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot in the head in a gas station in Mesa, Arizona by a white male who claimed he seeking revenge for the 9/11 attacks. Not only were Arab and Muslim-Americans living in fear, but so were Sikhs and others. (Here in Portland, an Italian man was beaten by three teenagers after the attacks because he was perceived to be Middle Eastern.) 2001 wasn’t an anomaly. Just this week, data released but the FBI revealed that hate crimes increased dramatically in 2020. Who is terrorizing whom?
On this sad occasion, I’m reminded of how the Bush-Cheney-Halliburton Administration tried to falsely pin 9/11 on Saddam Hussein, leading to the invasion of the wrong county, a protracted and completely unnecessary war that was responsible for the death in over 4000 U.S. troops, and over half a million Iraqi men, women, and children killed. But we were the ones fighting terrorism. We couldn’t possibly be the terrorists. Could we?
I visited Ground Zero the summer following the attack and I could still smell the dust of all the souls who had been atomized on that Tuesday in September. I’ve been to New York at least a dozen times since then and always notice what’s not there and what is. My recurring 9/11 dreams were central to my 2016 novel, The Dream Police. At the 9/11 memorial when I see the names of the victims who were pregnant women, I can’t help but convulse and every trip I make to Washington DC, I have a moment when I wonder what would have happened if the fourth plane had hit its intended target, the U.S. Capitol building. I carry this as trauma as does every American, to varying degrees, who remembers that day.
But we also carry the trauma of all the other acts of terrorism, many done in our name or done by people who look like us against people who don’t look like us. We’ve become blasé to the trauma and really good at rationalizing the traumatizing of others. We’ve become masters at dehumanizing the “other.” They see us as “infidels” and we see them as “fanatics.” They see us as “libtards” and we see them as “Nazis.” Nobody is just a human being capable of love and redeemable imperfection. If you told members of the radical right or the radical left they could push a button to launch a drone strike to wipe out the other side, the air would be filled robots on their death trips.
Trauma requires healing and there has been a lot of healing in the last 20 years. New Yorkers are resilient. The passengers on Flight 93 showed great courage in the face of their own deaths. And the work of the war machine that launches drone strikes into wherever continues at the Pentagon. But the healing is hampered by all the other terror we inflict on each other. An open wound never truly heals.
I will never forget that day. The confusion of wondering if it was real or a movie. The image of people choosing to jump rather than burn. The realization that the world would never be the same. But I will also never forget a lot of other things, including what happened in a Mesa, Arizona gas station four days after the attack and what happened two weeks ago in Kabul. Never forget any of it.
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.
Trump is gone. We survived the inauguration, not only unbloodied, but closer to united, which I am crediting to J. Lo. She sang a rousing rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” written by the OG Antifa Woody Guthrie. Besides Bernie’s mittens, the grand ritual was notable for one key sentence from the newly sworn in president. “And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.” It was a first for an inaugural address and a focus that is desperately needed.
I’ve written much in this blog about the threat of right-wing extremism and the through-line that connects the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The 25,000 National Guardsmen and the collapse of the ludicrous QAnon prophecy helped us to deflate the threat this past week but that doesn’t mean the barbarians are not still at the gate, hoping to cripple our democracy. The election of Barack Obama (and a Democratic congress) in 2008 gave raise to the Tea Party movement. 2021 will see a post-Q antigovernment movement that, with the help of social media, will fuse all the bad actors of the past. It’s already a broad counterculture the ranges from Trump’s “suburban housewife” that still thinks Joe Biden is fronting an underground pedophile ring to the self-styled Timothy McVeigh-wannabe who plots to bring down federal office buildings to strike a blow against the “Zionist Occupation Government.”
So what do we do now?
If President Biden is sincere about confronting political extremism and white supremacy and defeating domestic terrorism, now is the time to create an organized, cohesive interagency plan to get in front of this issue, or we’re going to need a lot more than 25,000 National Guard to protect our institutions of government. As a researcher and organizer working in this field for 30 years, I’ve started sketching out what a countering violent extremism strategy might look like. Similar to the institutional shifts that occurred after 9/11, it recognizes the capacities of existing agencies, including the Department of Education, the FBI, and the Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service. This initial approach contains four organizing principles; suppression, education, extraction, and vision.
Suppression: Addressing active threats
After the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, the Clinton Administration immediately pivoted to confront the threat of violence from the patriot militia movement. The reality is that, on October 25, 1994, the Southern Poverty Law Center urged Attorney General Janet Reno to alert “all federal law enforcement authorities to the growing danger posed by unauthorized militias that have recently sprung up in at least eighteen states.” While that warning may not have been heeded, after the terrorist attack the following April, Reno made the suppression of domestic terror groups a priority. The FBI broke up several plots, including those leading up to the “doomsday” prophecies connected to Y2K on January 1, 2000.
The events of 9/11 propelled President Bush to move many of those law enforcement resources to the investigation of international terrorist plots, particularly after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The “patriot movement” didn’t go away after 9/11. It retreated to the corners of the internet. In the Obama years it scooped up many Tea Party activists and by the Trump years it was in the streets, heavily armed and promising a revolution, rebranded as the “Boogaloo.” In 1997, I interviewed several militia members in western Montana and one told me, “We’re patient men but this war will happen in our lifetimes.”
The suppression plan of the Biden Administration must include 5 important areas. 1) The interruption of ongoing plots. While we still don’t have a federal definition of “domestic terrorism,” criminal conspiracy statues have been used and must be utilized with increased use of intelligence services and investigative resources. 2) The monitoring of e-chatter of threats, including open source social media posts, the dark web, and encrypted communications. Research from the Rand Corporation has found that this chatter increases before acts of hate-motivated violence occur. 3) Turning extremists into assets. Life After Hate is a group of former extremists who now work in the field of countering violent extremism. The Prevent Program in the UK has utilized former jihadists in the working of interrupting jihadist plots. “Formers” are a vital resource available but under used. 4) Disrupting extremist prison gangs. There is a pipeline that runs from white gangs inside prison to hate groups outside prison. A national strategy on these security threat groups would cut off a channel of extremist recruitment. 5) Monitoring foreign involvement in in-person and on-line extremism. Foreign actors, particularly from Russia, have been active in both bolstering the American white supremacist movement and spreading disinformation that increases hostility towards the American government.
Education: Confronting the issues that divide us
In this age of disinformation, we must honestly address the sins of the past while reaching out to those who are drawn into the conspiracy theories of radical right because of their lack of understanding of social and demographic changes (and how government itself works). The summer 2020 protests following the George Floyd killing highlighted the work that remains to be done to address institutional, cultural, and personal racism.
If we are going to have a national conversation about race, it needs two very important audiences. The first audience is people of color who need an honest acknowledgment of the generations of trauma that racism has cause. We’ve never really dealt with the impact of slavery on contemporary psyche. It’s not like anti-black racism magically disappeared in 1865 at the close of the Civil War. Similarly, we also haven’t confronted the trauma caused by Japanese internment, the Bracero Program, or separating migrant children from their parents at the border. The second audience must be white people, especially white people who have been economically dislocated by globalization and economic shifts. Lecturing about white privilege is a hard sell to a coal minor who has lost his job in the push for “renewable energy.” We don’t reduce the normalization of white supremacist thinking that pushes white people into thinking “their” country is disappearing if we don’t help white people see the value of inclusion and the futility of extremism.
Education must revolve around four key agendas. 1) Racial reconciliation. As Germany did after WW II and South Africa did after apartheid, we need a healthy dose of truth and reconciliation that links the dark past to the problems of the present. This work is hard but must be done. 2) Diversity, equity, and inclusion training and celebration. The Biden team doesn’t have to give America a long HR diversity training, but there are some valuable skills that can be taught widely, including the understanding of implicit bias. This work can also be a lot of fun as we come together, not to melt into a national pot, but celebrate the diverse ingredients of our national gumbo. 3) Community healing and dialogue. Much of this work must be done locally, recognizing the intersectionality of different communities. “Asian-Americans” are not one monolithic group. 4) Outreach to dislocated populations. Equity requires actively bringing people to the table. We must recognize that many of those marginalized communities are white. They are better served at a table with their non-white neighbors than in a basement plotting attacks on their own government.
Extraction: Dealing with the internal threat
Nearly one in five of the participants in the Capitol attack were members of the U.S. military. There is a long list of police officers who have had ties to white supremacist groups. There is an alleged group of prison guards who work to support racist gangs, like the Aryan Brotherhood. The infiltration of groups sworn to protect us by extremists is the worst kept secret in America. Timothy McVeigh was a Gulf War vet who handed out copies of The Turner Diaries, the racist revolution handbook, to the white members of his platoon.
Addressing this problem is vital to this strategy for two reasons. The first is the utilization of the military for training by right wing extremists. Additionally, having people on the inside (cops, prison guards, National Guard, Air Force officers with access to nuclear weapons, etc.) makes waging a civil war at lot easier. While I was undercover with a group of racist skinheads in Orlando, Florida in 1989, four Stinger missiles disappeared from the armory of a nearby Army base and were recovered from the Aryan Nations compound in Idaho. And if you’ve got a Josh Hawley who can open the doors for you, all the easier.
The second is all about perception. The belief that police and the military reinforce white supremacy didn’t die with Bull Conner and is central to the protests for racial justice. We can’t move forward until we’ve proven this important work is incompatible with organized racism.
So this plank of the strategy must both respect government workers’ first amendment rights while managing extremist infiltrations in three areas; 1) the United States military, 2) municipal, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, and 3) correctional officers in local jails, and state and federal prisons.
Vision: Who are we as a nation?
If the “America Century” began at the end of World War I, the century is ending. Will there be a second American century that is different? Or will it just be a high tech version of Jim Crow and people begging for black lives to matter. For the last four years there has been a massive vacuum of leadership. All we heard was a call to make America 1950 again, a time when millions of Americans were institutionally disenfranchised. We need a clear message about what America is going to look like. The hard fact is that demographic trends don’t lie. The country is becoming less white, less Anglo-Saxon, and less Protestant. Will we sink into an endless battle between WASPs and everyone else? A clear articulation of what the other path looks like is desperately needed. It seems like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are willing to formulate that vision.
We need our national leaders to think about four central agendas in this “re-visioning.” 1) A clear articulation of our values. What does mean to be an American? We are a nation of people of deep empathy, willing to confront our demons and work together on meaningful solutions. If the military reminds us “you are only as strong as your weakest link,” we can do the work to lift all those in our country to “be best” (Sorry, Melania.) 2) Addressing intersections. These issues are complex and overlap with other important issues. For example, global warming is pushing environmental refugees into extremist groups around the globe and is having real impact on the American farming community. 3) Addressing the truth and pain of the past. Donald Trump tried to erase the past with his 1776 Project. We must confront it head on and that will include some sincere acknowledge of harm done. President Reagan’s 1988 apology to Japanese-Americans for the mass internment in the 1940s went a long way to heal the wounding that was done to so many families who had their lives ripped away because of racist war hysteria. 4) Envisioning the path forward. What will a “less white” America look like? Our president can guide to a stable, diverse, beautiful pluralist view of the future that won’t doom us to endless division and extremist violence.
We have the ability to achieve this. We can both prevent domestic terrorism and bring disaffected Americans back into our wonderful, diverse family. The second American century can be spectacular, not just for few, but for all. There is a heavy load to be lifted by the Biden Administration, but it will be made lighter if we all help carry it.
There’s a response mode I go into when there is a mass killing, especially one by a white supremacist. I am called to write and comment on the news about toxic masculinity or my long research on right-wing extremists who want to spark joy among racists and launch a revolution to make America and Western Civilization “great” again. I give good soundbites to translate complex issues for the armchair sociologist. I’ve been through the drill dozens of time. “Something horrible happened in the world. I’m gonna be busy.”
The double mosque attack in Christchurch on Friday that killed 51 worshipers felt different. And not just because it happened in the violence-averse island nation of New Zealand. Maybe it was that I had just been to a meeting at the Muslim Education Trust (MET), a local Muslim school, community center, and mosque. We were starting to plan an educational event on the issue of Islamophobia. Maybe it was because I have to Muslim students in my Friday sociology class from Libya and Iraq. It certainly wasn’t because there was anything unique about the attacker. He was cut the white nationalist playbook, half Dylann Roof, half Timothy McVeigh.
I think it was the news about the victims. Many were refugees who had come to New Zealand to escape the horrors of endless wars. But among them were children. Three and four-year-olds, including a boy my daughter’s age, a refugee from Somalia named Abdullahi Dirie. He was shot in the head by the killer, who, according to new reports, was on his way to a Muslim school to kill more children when police stopped him. It’s next to impossible not to put your child in Abdullahi’s little shoes. But what do you do with that emotion?
The reports of the attack were relatively fresh on Friday when a community gathering was called at MET, attended by local mayors and police officials who dutifully reassured the Portland-area Muslim community that their safety was a priority. Members of many faiths led us in prayer, but I don’t think the reality of the horror on the other side of the planet had sunk in. I wanted to believe the God was Great. Allah akbar.
I got called into media rotation on CNN, where there were, of course, questions about Trump’s role in the rise of right-wing extremism around the globe. It did not help (as usual) that Trump stupidly (as usual) said that white nationalism was not a rising threat (Fact: It is) and then went on whining about whatever had is panties in a wad. I managed to get this gem on a global broadcast – “Either Trump is knowingly inflaming white supremacists, a Manchurian Candidate for the alt right, or he is completely clueless to the real threat level and growing bodycount from right-wing extremists. I’ll let your viewers decide which it is.”
By the third sit-down with CNN, I didn’t want to talk about Trump or guns or the looming Aryan revolution. I just wanted to talk about Abdullahi Dirie andthe slaughter of innocents. Saturday afternoon I was on with Ana Cabrera, who wanted to discuss the rambling 70-page “manifesto” of the shooter. I just wanted to talk about how it takes a sociopath to shoot children my daughter’s age in the head. And how the world of right-wing extremism is a magnet for sociopaths. If you get your kicks from cruelty, who better to idolize than Hitler? The shooter referenced various fascists (and Trump) in his rambling declaration of war on non-whites.
I had a foot in this world long before I began my field work on Nazi skinheads in 1988. I grew up around Klan members in Stone Mountain. I know exactly what kind of bullies gravitate to that darkness. They think the earth (or America or New Zealand) belongs to them, and everyone else is an “invader.” Invaders from Mexico, from Turkey, or like 4-year-old Abdullahi Dirie, from Somalia. This is “their land” and the invaders must be vanquished by any means necessary.
On Sunday, I was a guest on a radio show in New Zealand and begged them not to let the divisive rhetoric of the United States infect their small country. Keep the focus on what unites people.
We don’t know enough about sociopathy to cure it or prevent it, but we know plenty about the world that magnifies it. Contrary our clueless president’s claim, the counterculture of white nationalism is growing at an alarming rate. There will be more victims. Timothy McVeigh ended the lives of 19 children in a daycare facility when he ignited his truck bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Like the Christchurch terrorist, he did time in the sick world of white supremacy and believed the white race was “endangered.” Neither were “lone wolves” but products of a global subculture of hate.
There is no white race, only a human race. But there is a race war and our children are being slaughtered.
Watching the Wheels 