These first two weeks have been dizzying. Trump and his billionaire bros have attacked multiple aspects of our democracy. They have ripped the guardrails off while Democrats have stood there, dazed and confused. The flurry of bias-motivated executive actions, appointments of merit-less droogs hell-bent on dismantling the imagined “deep state,” inflation driving tariffs, saber-rattling at our allies, and the pardoning of violent criminals who, in 2021, tried stop democracy in its tracks. It’s all too much.
The chaos of Trump, ripped from the pages of Project 2025, is the intent. In a normal world, each action would occupy a few weeks in the news cycle, but there’s a dozen actions a day. The chaos is the point. The opposition is playing Wack-a-Mole to each insane impulse from the orange madmen who is declaring war on our allies with one hand and canceling Black History Month celebrations with other. He’s throwing countless federal employees into economic crisis (as well as those, like me, who are employed by federal grants), while blaming the airline crashes on Obama and dwarves. It’s like being punched in the face over and over again with no chance to land a counterpunch.
Trump didn’t invent this strategy. Bush used it to destroy Iraq in 2003. Twenty-two years ago, they called it “Shock and Awe.” Use the military might of the United States to overwhelm Iraq and out of the chaos, create a machine that would profit post-war contractors. Just Google: Halliburton, Iraq, and Profit. This “shock doctrine” (as Naomi Klein called in her 2007 book) has a history of effectiveness. The disaster capitalism employed in nations like Chile was utilized to generate billions in profits for war contractors in Iraq. This week, as witnessed by the plunging of markets after Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, Trump has brought disaster capitalism to the homeland and he and his billionaire bros stand to take home all the money.
The shock doctrine relies on chaos to shake up markets and political organization. Not only is the opposition stuck on the back foot trying to respond to each affront, economic destabilization paralyzes the working class who is more worried about inflation and holding on to their jobs than developing a strategy to fight back. Meanwhile, oligarchs are positioned to swoop in and calmly reassemble the pieces in a way that permanently protects their power and profit. This happened in Russia in the 1990s and it’s happening here now. It’s like that scene in It’s a Wonderful Life when there’s a run on the banks and George Bailey tries to calm the panic, saying, “Don’t you see what’s happening? Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky and he’s not.”
Trump, unregistered foreign agent Elon Musk, and their army of gangster capitalists are crashing the economy on purpose. Shipping migrant labor across the border, ludicrous tariffs, rampant deregulation, and appointing insanely unqualified loyalists are all meant to tank financial stability. Trump no longer needs his MAGA troops who were told he would lower the price of groceries on “Day 1.” They served their purpose of installing him back in the White House. They will suffer at the checkout line along with the rest of us. But at least they got to “own the libs.” Musk, now with the keys to the U.S. Treasury, can let the air out of America’s tires and jack up his global banking portfolio and Trump’s voters will have no idea what happened.
Like Mr. Potter, Trump’s billionaire bros will come in to “manage” the economic crisis. The German National Socialist Party did this when the Great Depression hit Germany. They consolidated power with the promise of affordable eggs. And now, when we look for the storied institutions of democracy to prevent an authoritarian takeover in the United States, including a free press, an independent judiciary, and a non-partisan Department of Justice, we will find they have been hollowed out during MAGA’s war of the “deep state.” Trump’s vow to purge the FBI of agents and analysts who investigated January 6th should be all the warning Americans need.
It’s easy to draw on the rise of Hitler as a historical parallel. And even though Melania has claimed that Trump kept Mein Kampf on his nightstand, Donald probably isn’t going back 90 years for a playbook. The rise of Putin and the rule of Russian oligarchs provide the formula. Just read Garry Kasparov’s 2015 book, Winter is Coming. Putin used economic calamity and the fear of Chechen terrorists to dismantle Russian democracy, making him President for Life. Dissidents get poisoned or sent to a Siberian gulag. Trump using the federal government to go after his political enemies is a page out of his comrade’s manifesto.
So what do we do?
We’ve have three weeks of the worst assault on American democracy in our lifetime. We’re all in shock that it’s really this bad. And it’s going to get worse. We can’t depend on Chuck Schumer and the corporate toadies of the Democratic Party save us. Many of them are in line to profit from the consolidation of power by the billionaire class. The Democrats who stand against them need to make themselves known now (or hang separately, as Ben Franklin said). But this is about us first. Us who are battered and defeated by the task at hand. Do we retreat into Netflix binges, or is there a path forward?
This is great opportunity to remember the practices of mindfulness. We’re all in reaction mode right now. Personally, I’ve had to resist the desire to punch someone, especially fellow working class people who think DEI is their enemy while their egg prices skyrocket. This is time to stop. Take a pause and breathe. Then we can start planning. There’s a great device popular in AA circles called “HALT.” Does this situation make me “Hungry Angry Lonely or Tired”? If so, just stop and take stock. So slowing the freakout roll is key.
Swiss sociologist Jennifer Walter offers a simple strategy to re-enage with solutions. First, focus on a few key issues you care about instead of being overwhelmed by the tsunami of fires that need to be put out (to mix metaphors). Second, find trusted sources of information who can do the work of providing needed facts and analysis. Third, if their goal is to overwhelm you, take mental health breaks. Meditation is a favorite “self gift” of mine. Next, Walter suggests taking 48 hours to respond to a news story to let your emotions subside and sort out what’s important. And lastly, build community to share the load. My faculty union president sent out an email last week, entitled, “What to Do in a Burning House,” asking faculty not disengage but step forward. I immediately joined a union committee.
Progressives, real patriots, and those who just care about the price of heat this winter, have been knocked to their knees by the Trump/Musk war on the buttresses of American democracy. But it’s time to stand back up. A lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by lawyers who still have access to the courts to stop Trump’s actions, many of which are illegal and/or unconstitutional. The rest of us who are not the uber rich have a role, whether it’s monkey-wrenching the shock doctrine or building a viable alternative to Trump’s fear-fueled vision of America. Take a breath. We will do this.
He said he was going to do it, so we shouldn’t be shocked. We hoped there would be some rhyme or reason, some forethought, some restraint. But there was none of that. President Trump blanket pardoned approximately 1500 of the terrorists who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an attempt to overthrow our democratically elected government. This includes the most violent attackers who beat Capitol police, causing injury, trauma, and death. Today the leaders of violent extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys walk free and our nation is much less safe. Trump did this in his first 24-hours as president.
Almost 30 years ago, I had just completed my PhD when Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder Truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer up to the federal building in Oklahoma City, lit the fuse and ran. The explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s daycare center. On that spring day in 1995, my research went from focusing on racist skinheads to the even darker corners of the far right. This included interviews with militia members in western Montana in 1998, who told me in very clear terms that the only salvation America would be born from a violent civil war.
The patriot militia movement that birthed McVeigh and his fellow anti-government extremists would die, not with a bang, but with a whimper at the turn of the century. Janet Reno’s Department of Justice broke up numerous plots, aided by many community members reporting bomb-making neighbors. The 2000 election of George W. Bush took the wind out of their sails as many of their core issues, like guns and land rights, had gone mainstream. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed and exactly three months later, the nation would launch a new war on terror.
But the racist reaction to the 2008 election of Barrack Obama, the Tea Party, and the advent of social media, brought the militia movement back. The election of Donald Trump and the COVID pandemic took it from survivalist bunkers to the laptops of soccer moms. And the end result was the violent assault on our Capitol sparked by conspiracy theories that used to be the domain of tinfoil hat kooks, now spread by the President of the United States.
Many of those that attacked the Capitol were members of violent extremist groups, like the Oath Keepers, the 3 Percenters, and the Proud Boys. Over 75 of those arrested for entering the building were carrying weapons, including guns. They had been told by Trump to “fight like hell,” and they did. When the dust cleared the besieged members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, called for the rioters to be arrested and charged to the fullest extent of the law. After encouraging them on January 6th, on January 7th, Trump said, “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”
Thanks to vigilant work of community members, dubbed “sedition hunters,” and the diligence of the Department of Justice, over 1,500 rioters were arrested and charged with federal crimes and over a thousand plead guilty (with 64% receiving jail sentences). This included leaders of well-known extremists groups who were charged with sedition. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, received a 22-year prison sentence. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes received 18 years. The January 6th attack was the most violent assault on our Capital since the War of 1812.
And Donald Trump freed all of these terrorists. Every single one. They were not hostages, as he called them. Hostages are bound in the tunnels of Gaza. They were convicted criminals. But criminals who committed their crimes for Trump, so he let them loose, back into society.
Much of my work over the past four years has been in response to January 6. This includes my academic work as well as my ongoing work on a project, funded by the Department of Homeland Security, to reduce political violence. One of the things I can say for certain is the prosecution and sentencing of the J6 rioters has served to greatly suppress anti-government violence. Proud Boy-wannabes and militia members who missed the bus to DC saw the long sentences of Tarrio and Rhodes and hundreds of others and cooled their jets about the “boogaloo” and dreams of civil war.
Trump just erased that powerful deterrent with the stroke of a pen.
Where Timothy McVeigh’s story ended with a lethal ejection, the January 6 terrorists have been made into folk heroes by Trump and the far right. He has routinely sung their praises as lovers of the country. “These people have been destroyed,” Trump, said shortly after returning to the Oval Office. ”What they’ve done to these people is outrageous.” They are now living martyrs, rock stars of the anti-government movement, and will use their celebrity to bring more into the rabbit hole of paranoid conspiracy theories of the “deep state” and into the rhetoric of violent retribution for the agents of justice who dared imprison them. Tarrio has already promised revenge on those that jailed him. His Proud Boys marched in Washington DC, while Trump was being sworn in Monday. Rhodes and other militia members are free to reinvigorate the violent anti-government patriot movement that sees bloody revolution and a “Day of Ropes’ as required to wrestle America from the “deep state.”
Donald Trump, with the support of stiff armed ally Elon Musk, has opened Pandora’s Box. The core of the J6 terrorists see the Oklahoma City Bombing as the model for accelerating mass chaos to collapse society. Their anti-DEI policy ends with bodies hanging from lampposts. And don’t expect a Defense Department headed by fellow nationalist Pete Hegseth to get in their way. Where Reno shut plots down, Hegseth will enable a reign of terror.
We have seen versions of this in other countries. January 6, 2021 was the rehearsal for the coup. Trump and his corporate-fascist “patriots” have played the long game. In other countries, it has been the military that has quashed the coup. (It won’t be Hegseth’s military here, perhaps the rank and file.) We are heading towards that showdown and I wish I wasn’t so certain of that fact. What we do know is that with these pardons, Donald Trump has normalized political violence and ensured the loyalty of militia groups who will violently fight to keep him power. Welcome to the new Civil War.
I just walked out of the new Alex Garland (Ex Machina) film Civil War and am wondering if I need to arm up. The dystopian film, starring Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura as war journalists, feels a little like a flash forward to America after the fallout of the upcoming election. The film is clear not identify who the bad guys are, but America is under the leadership of a “third term president” who sure sounds like a certain authoritarian-wannabe we all know, currently on trial in a criminal court in New York City. The “Western Forces” of Texas and California (I about choked on my popcorn at that thought) are trying to retake Washington DC. I don’t want spoil any of the fun, but firefight between the Western Forces and the Secret Service on Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty lit.
The movie is more of a meditation on the need for emotional detachment required to document wars than a treatise on the polarized nature of the our uncivil society. There’s a scene where Dunst’s character, reflecting on her coverage of brutal foreign wars, states that the subconscious message of her war photos was, “Don’t do this here at home.” Oh, the irony. But my work has me highly focused on the “the don’t think it can’t happen here” scenarios. So my heart is racing.
I’ve written plenty in this blog about the looming fantasies of a second civil war from the far right, who made their first attempt in 1995 in Oklahoma City. This project I’m working on, funded by Homeland Security, has me spending an inordinate amount of time in spaces where the far right fantasizes about launching a second American revolution if Trump wins or loses. If he wins, they’ll see it as a green light to string up woke traitors from lampposts and if he loses, they’ll see it as proof that democracy has been hijacked by “communist libtards,” only to be restored by the blood of patriots. Either way, there will be blood.
Not long ago I was in the parking lot of Home Depot near the Portland airport. I was parked next to a pickup truck with a ton of anti-Biden stickers. The truck had a very small “III %” sticker in the window. The Three Percenters are a local militia group that were heavily present at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. I waited to talk to him (after moving my car). When he came out, I struck up a conversation with him. (He also had a University of Oregon sticker, so that was my in.) “Hey, I noticed your Three Percenter sticker and I have to ask your position about armed violence.” He seemed surprised and a little leery I knew that deeply underground imagery. “We’re locked in loaded,” he calmly said. “When we get the call from above, we’re ready to go. Locked and loaded.” Stand back and stand by, someone said.
Whether or not the Bubba Militia would be able to defeat the U.S. military is another discussion, but if the Commander in Chief was also their commander, it might not be that hard. Even if they couldn’t, as Timmothy McVeigh demonstrated in 1995, they’re willing to take out a lot of innocent civilians in their long game to make America that again. That America, where kids were safe to play “Smear the Queer” in the street and you know who better be off the street when the sun goes down.
Civil War is just a movie. I was pretty freaked out the first time I saw Night of the Living Dead and I’m not too concerned about a zombie apocalypse (although HBO’s The Last of Us has me thinking about it). But we know the Trump harbors fantasies of a regime of retribution if he is elected, democracy be damned. And we know the heavily armed MAGA minions are fueled by the politics of grievance and entitlement. There’s a reference in Civil War to “Portland Maoists” and the “antifa massacre” that reminded me of the summer of 2020 when caravans of armed Trump supporters drove into Portland from the exurbs to attack BLM protestors. It just feels close, and that I should have a plan to protect my family.
In the meantime, while either side stockpiles supplies, I’m going to continue to find ways to bridge the divide. It does’t have to be like this. We have so much the unites us. Red state and blue states share some deep connections that can bring us back from the edge. Our movie can have a different ending.
I lived long enough to see several nations cease to exist, including Rhodesia (1979), the USSR (1991), and Yugoslavia (1992). Even though many believe that “God likes us the best,” there is no guarantee that the United States will exist in perpetuity. We could exist for thousands of years, like Iran, or the U.S. could be kaput by this time next year. There are certainly warning signs that the great American experiment may have a rapidly approaching expiration date.
The idea of America was born in The Enlightenment, the European Age of Reason. Intellectuals, inspired by cracks in the medieval divine right of kings that propped up the authority of the Catholic Church, fashioned a new paradigm in which free thinkers were no longer burned at the stake as heretics. Those cracks were created by the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, that encouraged the translation of the Bible and believers to seek the truth themselves instead of trusting the dogma of the Church. (Many of those reformers were killed by the Church, including William Tyndale, who dared to translate the Bible into English.) The new rebellion was embodied by Galileo Galilei who’s crime was to present evidence that the earth went around the sun, and not reverse (and who was put on trial by the Church in 1633).
Galileo laid out the framework for the new intellectual movements, taking root in oppressive monarchies in France and across Europe. Like Galileo, who did research based on a theory that made logical sense, the new thinking would be rooted in the values of rationality and empiricism, not blind trust and superstition. This “enlightenment” gave birth to an explosion of science that often contradicted the teachings of the Church. (“How do you reconcile the new fossil evidence with Genesis? Let’s do some research and find a truth rooted in the empirical!”) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) infused this philosophy with the binding rights and responsibilities of the autonomous individual, a radical new conceptualization of freedom.
The founders of the United States were not brutish patriots who merely wanted independence from their taxers. They were deep thinkers who studied and debated the Enlightenment tenets. Thomas Paine was involved in the French Revolution and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s time in Paris deeply informed how the rational and empirical experiment of American democracy would be constructed. The United States of America is a child of the Enlightenment and exists because the core values of the Enlightenment have persisted for 248 years.
When I taught social theory at Portland State University, we’d often get get into a spirited discussion about the end of the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment was born in coffeeshops in the 18th Century Europe, when did it end? Some students would argue for 2001, when religious extremists attacked America and a hostility to climate science was a hallmark of the Bush administration. I would counter-argue that as long as democracy and science are still widely valued, the Enlightenment is alive and well. I have since changed my mind. The Enlightenment, that lifted humanity out of the Dark Ages, died on January 6th, 2021.
We knew that the Trump Administration was hostile to science. We saw it on a regular bases during Trump’s COVID briefings, with his ludicrous suggestions that the virus could be cured with sunlight or by injecting bleach. One of the world’s leading immunologists, Anthony Fauci, became a meme as he regularly face-palmed behind Trump’s “I know better than the scientists” buffoonery. And we knew that Trump was hostile to democracy. His administration was characterized by attempts to weaken voting access, Congress, the Department of Justice, and the courts, and a constant war on the free press (parallel to his Russian compatriot, Vladimir Putin). January 6th, was the culmination where he unleashed his anti-vax hordes on the Capital. Believing, despite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was “stolen,” the Trump mob tried to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and install their monarch.
In the following years, Trump has cozied up to the world’s dictators, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and made it clear that, if re-elected, he would weaponize the federal government to seek retribution against all his political enemies. I hope Mitt Romney has a safe room. Authoritarianism is six months away from America’s doorstep. Trump has joked that he would be a dictator on the first day of his presidency if he wins. But if he loses, he’s already told his moronic anti-Enlightenment base that the election will have been stolen, and they are armed and ready to rectify the situation. Democracy’s only hope may be that Trump dies comically on the toilet this summer.
I routinely warn against the “sky is falling” prognostications. I remember thinking the Cold War tensions of 1983 would be the endpoint of the human race. (Remember Korean Air Flight 007?) We survived that and 1984. “The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama,” as Taylor Swift sings. But things are different this time. My feelings may be shaped by this federally funded project I’ve been working on for the last two years. We are tasked with interrupting political violence and the chatter I’m seeing about a “second civil war” has been ramping up the closer we get to Election Day. The Trump droogs are locked and loaded and ready to wage holy war on anything they deem to be “woke” or that stands in the way of their dear leader taking control of the reins of power. They are clear that both science and democracy will be fired from Trump 2.0, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at the Handmaid’s Taleagenda of the evangelicals at the Heritage Foundation who think Trump is God’s gift to embryos.
I try to talk about the Enlightenment whenever I can. It’s why America is here. It’s why we walked on the moon. It’s why we can save millions of lives with immunizations. And it’s why infertile couples can have children (except in Alabama). Trump and his minions embody the exact opposite of the values of the Age of Reason. They wanted to burn Anthony Fauci at the stake and hang Mike Pence from the gallows. If they succeed, three centuries of the triumph of rationality and empiricism will be succeeded by a new dark ages where the only value will be fealty to the sovereign, who is currently selling Bibles wrapped in an American flag. This is not dystopian fantasy. This a coming storm that could put out the light for a thousand years. But we stopped that storm 79 years ago. Can we do it again?
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.”
As a “subject matter expert” on right-wing extremism, I often get asked, “What about the left?” There are obviously some stark differences between the two political wings (I would offer bodycount as one measure), but there also might be some parallels worth considering as we look for ways to reduce political violence.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing the “militia funnel” that became a useful tool in explaining anti-government violence in the wake of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. I even got to sit down and explain it with W. Kamau Bell on CNN’s United Shades of America in 2021 (and CNN turned it into a cool animation). There was a great need after the bombing in Oklahoma City, that included 19 children among the 168 casualties, to explain how “average people” were falling into the world of domestic terrorism.
In April 1995, I was just finishing up my dissertation on right wing extremism, when the news of a massive bombing in the “nation’s heartland” blasted across the news. It was devastating, and the images of dead children in the building’s daycare center brought the country to its knees. I stayed up that night, listening to talk radio from my Atlanta apartment. The talking heads were sure the carnage was the work of the usual suspects, Muslim terrorists. It wasn’t a crazy hunch. Two years earlier, Ramzi Yousef and a small band of jihadists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 6 people. But Oklahoma was on April 19th, so I knew it was probably one of my guys.
April 19, 1993 was the culmination of the standoff in Waco, Texas that had become a rallying cry for the far-right. That carnage (that included the death of 28 children) was being framed as the result of an out-of-control federal government that was no longer by and for the people. So when on April 20, 1995, a white guy named Timothy McVeigh, who had been at Waco, was arrested for the Oklahoma bombing, I got a chill. These were the anti-government white supremacists I had spent the last seven years studying. The radio hosts who had been quick to blame “Muslim terrorists,” pivoted to the “Wacko from Waco” narrative. It was the act of a crazy person. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with their aggrieved white male hatred of the government.
The structure of the militia funnel
I learned about the militia funnel from Kenneth Stern’s excellent 1996 book, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. He got it from Ken Toole, at the Montana Human Rights Network. The funnel model explains how people can enter a world that sees violent revolution as the only solution from very mundane starting points that have nothing to do with violence or terrorism. For decades, my work has focused on the movement of people through a ‘right-wing funnel.’ I have written and spoken extensively about this dynamic. At the bottom of this article, I set forth how the funnel analysis applies to current willingness to use political extremist violence among some people in the left wing of politics. First, let’s address how the funnel has been used for the last nearly 30 years to frame pathways to right wing extremism.
At the top of the funnel are just a lot of people who are activated by fairly mainstream conservative issues. They are second amendment gun activists, tax protestors, or think the federal government shouldn’t be taking perfectly good timber land to save spotted owls. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including black and Jewish conservative spaces.
Some (importantly, not all) fall into the next level, based in a deep hatred for the federal government. Instead of “we the people,” the feds have too much power and have superseded their Constitutional mandate. Some of these folks are part of the Posse Comitatus movement who believe the highest legal authority is the county sheriff and any constitutional amendment after the first ten is hokum. But the bottom line is the federal government is the bad guy. Growing up in the rural South, the term we’d hear for this was “revenuer.”
At the third level down the funnel, some of these folks start buying into some pretty pervasive conspiracy theories. We are now into the world of Freemasons and the Illuminati and who REALLY killed JFK. Just watch those Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies for a dose of this world. Here the Republican and Democratic parties are both controlled by the same puppet master, leveraging the federal government against hard-working (white) Americans for their own benefit.
Some of those conspiracy believers make it down to the next level, where the conspiracy takes a familiar turn. The elite Bilderbergers are rebranded as simply “the Jews.” In a same way Hitler used anti-Semitic tropes to explain Germany’s downfall, anti-government conspiracy theorists here see a global Jewish cabal behind everything from immigration to gay rights to why their kids are listening to rap music instead of Lee Greenwood.
Again, this is a funnel, so each level has fewer people than the one above it. In the final stage of the model are the revolutionaries. It’s one thing to have analysis, but here is the belief you have to act on it. The people who make it to the bottom of the funnel are consumed with language about a second American Revolution, and a second Civil War, and “Rahowa” (short for Racial Holy War) and a whole bunch of stuff concerning the “blood of patriots.” The funnel starts wide and ends very small, but as we saw in 1995, it only takes a small band of self-proclaimed patriots to change the face of a nation. And McVeigh’s intent was to inspire other like-minded Americans to commit similar acts of terrorism.
The militia funnel in the MAGA-era
The militia model became useful again in the Obama era when anti-government militias roared back into action. Here in Oregon, a militia group occupied a federal wildlife refuge for 40 days in 2016, resulting in one death. Then the surge of militia activists, like the Oath Keepers and the 3 Percenters, under Donald Trump’s MAGA movement made the militia model even more applicable, especially after the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
In the Trump years, I regularly updated the 1990s militia model when explaining the “new” right-wing activism. Because of social media and reach of the Trump message, the mouth of the funnel was much wider than it was in the 1990s. It included some of those same conservative issues, like gun rights, but now included “culture war issues,” like opposition to rights for transgender people and hostility to Critical Race Theory, but also a rejection of lockdown mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This wider funnel served to attract not just rural white men who were the 90s candidates for patriot militia groups, but suburban moms, aging incels, and others who thought America was last great before the civil rights movements made “inclusion” a weapon against white privilege.
The rest of the funnel, took an updated sheen. The anti-federal government level was rebranded as “the swamp,” full of libtards and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). The conspiracy theory level was now the domain of QAnon adherents and beliefs in the “deep state.” Below that were the anti-Semitic theories about “global Jews,” including George Soros, Anthony Fauci, and a belief (spread by Robert Kennedy, Jr.) that COVID was created to kill non-Jews. At the bottom of the funnel, the revolutionaries renamed their call to arms the “Boogaloo,” and began stockpiling weapons. In 2020, I had a chat with a 3 Percenter in a Home Depot parking lot and asked him what he thought about the escalation of violent rhetoric. His only reply was, “We’re locked and loaded.”
That this funnel was exponentially wider at the top meant more Americans were ending up at the violent bottom level. This was evident in the massive turnout for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, motivated by the President of the United States, not a fringe website, spreading a fully debunked conspiracy theory that the “deep state” stole the 2020 election. While organized militia groups, like the Oath Keepers, were key players in the attack, many of the over 1,2000 people arrested have claimed they just got “swept up” in the moment. They had fallen down the funnel into the land of Timothy McVeighs and Stewart Rhodes. I half expected to see my Trump-loving father there that day (but his feet are bad).
The value of the militia funnel in this work is that there are multiple points along the pathway down to violence where intervention can take place. Someone who angry about public school dollars going to a student Gay Straight Alliance isn’t automatically destined to become a domestic terrorist, but if they are, there are places where that path can be diverted. Could there be a similar trajectory for activists on the left?
Constructing a left-wing funnel
The origin of the right-left political spectrum, that has its roots in the French Revolution, is all about who should have power. On the right, power should be concentrated and on the left, power should be dispersed. That’s why the far right values fascism and the far left values communism. But all along that spectrum there are values concerning fairness. The liberal is concerned teachers’ low pay is unfair and the conservative thinks their tax dollars supporting a curriculum they think opposes their values is unfair. Oh, yeah, and plenty of people on both sides think the government sucks.
The structure of the militia funnel offers a guide to what a left-wing militia funnel might look like.
At the top level are widely popular liberal issues related to social justice-based matters of equity, including Black Lives Matters, abortion access, and LGBTQ+ rights, along with other stalwart liberal causes. The next level finds strong distrust of the federal government as the historic defender of status quo power dynamics. The feds are “the Man,” who surveilled MLK and protected alleged sex-offenders, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And also, all cops are “bastards.” Further down the funnel, we see the appearance of all-encompassing conspiracy theories that see Republicans and Democrats as puppets of corporations, the monied class (Google “Bohemian Grove”), and the World Trade Organization. Like on the right, there is a darker level that introduces anti-Semitism to the conspiracy theories. This is where Robert Kennedy, Jr. lives and where anti-Zionism slides into a broader anti-Jewish narrative, most recently seen as an element of some pro-Gaza rallies. (It should be pointed out is that anti-Semitism is less visible on the left than it is on the right, but it does rear its ugly head in places.) At the bottom of this funnel is the rhetoric of Marxist revolution, which sees the entire capitalist system, and all its institutions, as corrupt and in need of overthrow.
Those of us who are older than millennials and Gen Z kids will remember that in the 1970s there were hundreds of terrorist bombings in the United States. They weren’t from patriot or neo-Nazi groups. They were committed by radical leftist groups like the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And there were casualties. In 1970, a group of leftists angry about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s participation in military work related to the Vietnam War, detonated a massive bomb in Sterling Hall, killing one researcher and injuring several others. The FBI has counted 2500 bombings connected to the Weather Underground, including one that killed four people in a Wall Street restaurant in 1975.
When the Right-Left political spectrum becomes a circle
There is also a weird space where the extremes at the end of the left side and right side meet to form a circle. In the 1990s, some neo-Nazi groups began publicly (and financially) supporting the PLO’s campaign against Israel under the guise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Seattle WTO protests in 1999 that brought labor union members, environmentalists, and other liberal activists to the streets also saw participation far-right activists, who saw the “global bankers” behind the World Trade Organization as the hand of Jewish control. In the 2000s, the right also joined the left on issues related to climate change. Their angle was the climate crisis was the result of immigration, non-white population growth, and (again) Jewish monied interests.
More recently, the language of “accelerationism” has pervaded extremists on bother the far-right and far-left. The philosophy states that standard democratic forms of social change, like voting, are too hopelessly glued to institutions of power to ever affect real change. Each November we vote for a Tweedle Dum or a Tweedle Dee and hope things will be different. Accelerationists believe the only way to achieve their desired society is to bring the current one crashing down and rebuild the new one out of the ashes. The right and left have radically different visions of what those societies look like. (I know the right has no place for progressive academics like me, but they left would probably see me as a “collaborator” with “the Man” and exclude me from their Utopia, so I’m likely SOL whoever wins fantasy league fanaticism.) We have seen extremists on the right, like Proud Boys and active clubs look at their counterparts on the left in anarchist and Antifa circles, not as enemies, but as allies in bringing the system down. In 2021 a Boogaloo activist said, “Right now it’s about provoking BLM, antifa and militias or 3 Percenters into engaging in violence that will provoke disproportionate police response, which can be used to fuel further unrest.”
If the value of understanding the militia funnel is to interrupt well-meaning conservatives’ slide down the rabbit hole of violent extremism, there should be a similar opportunity for those escalating towards left wing violence. Again, the intent is not to “de-radicalize” anyone one either side, just to prevent the violence that might emerge at the bottom of those funnels. Working on constructive engagement with the government as, not an oppressive entity, but a reflection of our collective will can slow the roll down the funnel. Also, the work on critical thinking skills that disrupt simplistic conspiracy theories can be hugely helpful in dismantling the binary thinking that characterizes extremist ideologies.
The vast majority of activists are doing the important work of putting democracy to the test and advancing their shared values. A small fraction fall into the black hole of political violence. Understanding these paths across the political spectrum allows to us design strategies to reroute those who may see terrorism as a legitimate expression of their political agendas.
“Hindsight is 20-20. Looking back, we should have known that would happen.” That is a common refrain for every major historical calamity, from Hitler invading Poland to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. We have an entire federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security, created, in large part, to address all the indicators the intelligence community missed in the lead up to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Will we ever have the science down that accurately predicts some calamitous event so we can prevent it?
The good news is we’re getting better at preventing bad things from happening. After the deadly 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, that killed 168 people (including 19 children), the FBI made the investigation of right-wing militia groups a priority and broke up several plots leading up to Y2K. Since 9/11, there are 44 known terrorist plots that were thwarted by government agents, including a 2012 al-Qaeda plot during the Obama administration to blow up the U.S. Capitol, and 2019 neo-Nazi plot during the Trump administration to kill numerous Democratic politicians and mainstream journalists.
These acts of mass violence are prevented for three main reasons. First, people who are close to the plotters come forward to authorities with concerns that there is some suspicious activity. “Hello, 911? I think my neighbor and his friends are building a bomb in his garage.” Second is old fashioned gumshoe detective work by law enforcement agents. “Our confidential informant in that anti-government militia group is telling us the plan of attack has been made.” But group working on this issue is the not-as-exciting work of data scientists. “The chat on Discord referencing gun training spiked 63.2% following the fourth Trump indictment.” It may be the data scientists that keep us safe at night.
Since 2021, I have been working on a federally funded project that looks for ways to reduce extremist violence across the political spectrum called Cure-PDX. The sheer scope of the attack of the January 6th attack woke up a lot of folks in both public and private sectors to the fact that the stability of our democracy might be more fragile than we ever thought. Part of this work has been utilizing data to find where the flashpoints for political violence are, and it is a sad reality that they are often school board meetings and LGTBQ events. How drag queens managed to trigger the Proud Boys would probably give Sigmund Freud a thrill, but there are real victims in these violent clashes. For example, last March, the Proud Boys and other right-wing activists attacked a crowd at a Drag Queen Story Hour in Manhattan’s West Village, a historically gay enclave of the New York City.
Focusing on the Pacific Northwest, our project has noticed more tension around these flashpoints. Much of this has been fueled by local right-wing groups, like the Portland Active Club, Patriot Front, and the Rose City Nationalists. These groups have been dubbed White Nationalists 3.0 by monitoring groups (and by the activists themselves). The violent skinheads of the 1980s and 1990s were 1.0. The keyboard racists of the “alt right” that rose under Obama and came to the mainstream under Trump were 2.0. These new 3.0 groups are not hiding behind keyboards, and are actively fashioning themselves as foot soldiers in what they believe to be an approaching race war. I was bantering with one last weekend and he was quite clear what his immediate agenda was:
Him: Be scared, buddy always be scared of the republicans lol
Me: done
Him: I’m sure
Me: I feel sorry for you and want to help you.
Him: You all could not survive three days without food
Me: Oh, lord. Let me guess. You are prepping for the race war.
Him: Absolutely and you will be the first I’m coming after
Much like in the Timothy McVeigh-era of the 1990s, there is a growing subculture of heavily armed anti-government activists who are hellbent on a second civil war in which the Confederate values of white supremacy are an organizing principles. Unlike the 90s patriot militia movement, thanks to social media and the encouragement of a certain four time indicted presidential candidate, this well-armed anti-government movement is massive. In the 1990s, it was a handful of guys building bunkers in Idaho. Now, it’s soccer moms, drunk on QAnon conspiracy theories, and suburban mixed martial art clubs training for combat with the “woke mob.”
2024 is gonna be a rough year. Gas prices aren’t coming down. LGBTQ people are not going to be shoved back into the closet, triggering Kid Rock and all his fragile boys who pretend this is the fall of the Roman Empire. The southern border, which has always been a rolling crisis, will be shoved in our faces on the nightly news. There could well be another COVID lockdown (or whatever the next plague will be). And whether Donald Trump wins, loses, or gets thrown in jail, there are going to be some people who will be seriously pissed off.
We’re heading into a dark season and yes, we’re going to need whistleblowers and ace detectives to foil plots. But we’re also going to need an army of data scientists who are willing to scrape the data from the armpits of the internet and other electronic platforms (including CB radios!) where the enemies of civility thrive. With good data, we can plan interventions that include preventing people falling into the rabbit holes of violent extremism. It’s go time for democracy and we need science to save us.
“Regrets, I’ve had a few,” Sinatra once sang. We can claim to have no regrets but any thinking human has gobs of them. I’ve often joked that my epitaph should read, “He was his own worst enemy.” Better than Frank singing, “My Way,” would be Cher singing, “If I could turn back time, if I could find a way, I’d take back those words that have hurt you” (to a boatload of sailors). We’ve all been Cher.
When I was a young criminology professor, I would occasionally spend my lunch hour at the county courthouse, watching trials and hearings. The vast majority were for men who had made insanely stupid choices. Almost all offered the same defense, “It might have been me who committed that act, but it wasn’t really ME.” I remember one case of domestic violence that was particularly dramatic. The man attacked his wife after she said she was leaving him. In tears he told the judge, “I don’t know who that person was that hit her. It wasn’t me. I’m not that kind of man. It was like I was possessed.” I could tell the judge had heard that excuse many times and she booked him straight into the county clink for 90 days.
We have all done or said stupid things and wondered, who was that mad person in my body? I was commuting on my bicycle when a woman in an SUV ran a red light in front of me. I chased her down, accused her of being drunk, and spit on her window. That was 15 years ago and I still think about it with shock. (If SUV Lady is reading this, I’m sorry. I’m not that kind of man.)
Why do we do these things? Is it brief demonic possession?
There’s actually a simple answer and it has nothing to do with the devil and everything to do with our lizard brains. And fortunately, you don’t have to be a brain scientist to understand it.
Think of a lizard in the desert. It’s constantly on alert. It doesn’t sit around trying to figure out what’s funny or what’s hip. It’s constantly in survival mode. If there is a shadow on the ground, it isn’t going ponder what caused the shadow. It’s going to assume that it’s a hungry hawk and with zero pondering it is going to race under a rock or freeze and try to blend into the background.
Lizards have itty bitty brains that are primarily made up of something called the amygdala. It is quite literally prehistoric and it is the part of the brain that keeps animals alive. We think of it as the center of the fight or flight or freeze emotional response. Dinosaurs didn’t sit around wondering why the local T. Rex was hangry, they just ran or fought. The amygdala is connected to the sympathetic nervous system that turns those instantaneous brain impulse into immediate action. The lizard brain does not think. It makes a b-line for safety, fights with all its might, or freezes like a deer in headlights. The lizard brain is driven by hunger and, mostly, fear.
Humans have amygdalae. (I just learned that was the plural of amygdala.) Fortunately, millions of years of evolution have built an insanely complex structure around it that we call the “human brain.” One of the best parts of the human brain is the prefrontal cortex that gives us the ability to reason, imagine, and, yes, ponder. The prefrontal cortex regulates the lizard brain so we’re not alway freaking out every time we see a shadow on the ground. The prefrontal cortex allows us to function, otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with fear, aggression, and paralysis.
There’s an easy way to illustrate this point. Since the prefrontal cortex is the thing that makes us cognitively human, it’s the last part of our brain system to develop. Newborn babies are a lot like lizards. They just want their basic needs met. Babies don’t think, “I should wait for the sun to come up before I demand breakfast.” Babies are in survival mode all the time. Neuroscientists believe the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed until around age 25. So take a moment to think of all the epically stupid and impulsive things you did when you were a teenager that you would NEVER do now. It’s because your brain was like an IKEA kitchen that still had a thousand pieces to connect. Every time I go on Instagram, I see endless “reels” and “stories” of young people doing things that will make them cringe when they are older. You don’t see any 59-year-olds participating in street takeovers or skateboarding off of cliffs. Young brains can be dumb as lizards.
Side Story: When I was a 16-year-old in Stone Mountain, Georgia, one of my favorite TV shows was The Dukes of Hazzard. I would regularly borrow my dad’s 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix to “go to the store,” and end up doing donuts in the field like I was Bo and/or Luke Duke. If I happened to side-swipe a pine tree, I would tell my dad that it got hit in the parking lot. Fortunately, my father won’t read this. But if he does, I’M SORRY DAD! MY LIZARD BRAIN MADE ME DO IT!
If the human lizard brain had a motto, it would be, If it feels good do it. It is the knee jerk reaction that gets us into stupid fights, drives us to be sexual in situations where we shouldn’t, or causes us to completely shut down all normal interaction skills. Basically, our lizard brain gets us into trouble if our prefrontal cortex doesn’t regulate those very primitive impulses. Our brain (and body) gets hijacked by our amygdala. Sometimes, we need to fight or run away or freeze, but usually there’s some “context” to analyze. Bear is brown, lay down. Bear is black, fight back!
As adults, most of us develop the ability to self regulate. We know that throwing a punch ends up hurting our hands and getting the cops called. We know that sexually harassing a workmate gets a call to HR and makes us look like a serious creep. And we know that shutting down emotionally doesn’t really get us what we need, emotionally. In addition, or human brain allows us to develop empathy for others, so there is a greater benefit in centering others than just centering ourselves. But we do know that one of the things that throws the human brain into primitive lizard mode is trauma. Whether it’s something that happened when our brain was still forming, like childhood sexual abuse, or something that happened last week, like experiencing a serious car crash, trauma locks the brain into fight/flight/freeze mode. And it takes a lot of work to get the prefrontal cortex back on line to do the heavy lifting of regulation.
So we all have a lizard brain inside our heads. And we all have varying levels of ability in regulating that lizard brain. Some prefrontal cortexes are hampered by trauma, mental health issues, brain injuries, or substance abuse, but even the most sober “healthy brain” can find itself in a “road rage moment.” Something triggers us and we’re off to the races. And an hour later, we are singing that damn Cher song. “If I could turn back time…”
In my current work on political violence, we see a lot of dis-regulated lizard brains in control. The escalation of violence between protestors on the right and left in Portland is a sad example that has led to people dead on both sides. A case could be made that many of the insurgents at the January 6th riots in Washington DC never intended to storm the Capitol. They just got caught up in the mayhem and their lizard brains took over. It’s so easy to go from sane to insane when our amygdala is activated. We’ve all been there.
Fortunately, there are some well proven strategies to reign in our dino-brains and prevent the need to bust into the Cher song from the county jail (or divorce court). Here are a few:
1. Be aware of your triggers. If the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, avoid the factors that lead to escalation. If you know booze makes you more “lizardy,” moderate. If you know arguing about Trump sends you into the red zone, argue about sports instead. And if you know your crazy Uncle Ernie really likes to push your buttons, try not taking the bait.
2. Regulate when your lizard brain is activated. Uh oh, you’ve been activated and the fight/flight/freeze siren is wailing. What do you do now? You have the ability to insert your prefrontal cortex between the impulse and the action. This could be something as simple as a few deep breaths or a walk around the block. Anything to calm the lizard brain down before it gets your ass in trouble. Meditation is a great way to train your brain to become calm and see your thoughts AS thoughts, and not as orders to act.
3. Get curious. Your prefrontal cortex gave you the potential for radical empathy. That driver who cut you off or that politico who is trying to shove a nutzo conspiracy theory down your throat has a story. They are human beings with something that drives them. Instead of defaulting to fight/flee/freeze mode, get curious about their story. What makes them tick? Maybe you are more alike than different.
We live in fearful and polarizing times so it’s very easy for our lizard brains to be activated. Traffic, news stories about shootings, bizarre weather, people on TV screaming at each other, and the fact that so many of us (myself included) are walking around with scars of trauma, it’s shocking that we’re all not constantly living in fight/flight/freeze mode. But the fact we’re not reflects the triumph of our collective prefrontal cortex. We have the ability to not to be slaves to our impulses. We have the ability to calm our minds and make wise choices. We just need a little practice and thinking about how we think is a good place to start.
The good news is most Americans don’t want Donald Trump to run for president again. In a recent PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll, 61 percent of Americans said they want the orange oaf off the ballot. Of course, another poll, from Harvard, found 67 percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run for re-election (citing his age, not his attempt to overthrow the government). But Trump has become the drunk uncle who won’t leave after the holidays. Based on the spotty attendance of Ultra MAGA weirdos at his recent rallies (“Huge!” pfft!), Trump’s cult of personality seems to be shrinking like his legal team.
But it only takes one Timothy McVeigh to ruin your whole day.
Just take one look at the people showing up at these MAGA rallies. On one hand, if you ever wondered were old white people go to die, it’s to a mostly empty arena dressed in red, white, and blue “Let’s Go Brandon” golf shirts. But on the other hand, these people are batshit crazy. That fascistic devotion to Trump is reflected in numerous polls that report the majority of Republicans still believe the Big Lie, that the Con Man from Queens won the 2020 election. As Joseph Goebbels is alleged to have said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Behind the wack-a-doo attendees at Trump rallies are numerous “patriot” militia members who are heavily armed and waiting for the go from their dear leader to kick off their “boogaloo” with the promise that the rednecks will win this civil war. A recent ADL report found scores of Oath Keepers in the ranks of the military, police, first responders, and among elected officials. Like a page out of the racist playbook, The Turner Diaries, these Timothy McVeigh-wannabees hope to make January 6 look like a Beach Boys concert on the DC Mall.
Which brings up to the conundrum of 2024 and Trump’s concerning attempt to force his way back into the White House. There are three possible scenarios, and none of them end well for this great nation.
Scenario 1: Trump runs in 2024 and a crushing recession, endless memes about “black crime,” the harassment of poll workers, and a well-timed news story about an undocumented immigrant from Latin America savaging a white woman (whether true or not), and 45 becomes 47. Trump takes it as a mandate to further deconstruct American democracy. Can you imagine what the federal courts will be capable of doing after another four years of Trump appointments? Suddenly The Handmaid’s Tale will look like a utopia instead of a dystopia. As forces loyal to the Constitution try to prevent America from sliding into an authoritarian state, civll war becomes eminent.
Scenario 2: Trump runs in ’24 and loses to Biden (or Kamala Harris because Joe fell off his bike). It will be seen as evidence of another “stolen election.” Nearly every MAGA candidate that lost a primary this year claimed to be a victim of “voter fraud.” As funny as it’s been they are sitting up the expectation that if Trump loses in ’24, it will be because the unseen evil forces. (Spend some time on Trump’s Truth Social or Gab and you know it’s the “Jews.”) Since peaceful means will be seen as no longer effective, violence will be called for – Civil War 2: The MAGA Boogaloo.
Scenario 3: Merrick Garland indicts Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection or handing over classified documents to Putin, or throwing ketchup at the wall. Whatever. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits ANY politician who has taken the oath of office from holding future public office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.” Engaged in, not caused. You better believe the DOJ is mulling this one over with sweating brows. While this is probably the best option that demonstrates that our Constitution and the rule of law actually fucking mean something in this country, the “defund the FBI” crowd is still going to be triggered and urged to drag themselves out of their troll holes and shoot SOMEBODY.
This really sucks. It sucks for America and for those of us that just want to live in peace and not have to have to defend ourselves from roving gangs of MAGA militias looking for liberals, Black Live Matter activists, and drag queens to hang. I have weapons training but I’d rather spend my gun budget on some shrubbery and taking my kid to Disney World (if the DeSantis Army hasn’t nuked it). Plus, I suck at that Big Buck Hunter game. I don’t know how good I would be at mowing down marauding Proud Boys on my street.
So America’s hope seems to lie in Scenario 4: The death of Donald J. Trump. And it can’t be from the most likely cause, a massive heart attack. The QAnon loons will see conspiracy all over that outcome. You thought bunker dwellers had a field day with JFK’s (and JFK Jr.’s) death. They will see the hand of Fauci and/or Antifa in Trump’s “natural causes” bucket kicking. And then we’re back to the armed rebellion of the sub-moronic legions. No, it has to be in public and as mundane as possible. He’s gotta trip over his feet and break his neck at a golf course, or fall off a stage at rally while doing that embarrassing white man dance. He could choke on an Egg McMuffin or maybe he could step out of a speeding limo after an argument with Eric. It’s gotta be Darwin Award-level stupid.
We know from research that cult-like movements tend to fade when the charismatic personality at the center expires. (Except for the Dead Head thing. That shit refuses to go away.) The MAGA faithful might rally around Junior, or the more frightening Ron DeSantis. But they can’t give them what Don gave them, the ability to be stupid but feel smart. And the Trump chapter closes, not with a bang, but with a briefly lingering oder.
This is where we are America. The threat of armed political violence is very real and the clock to 2024 is ticking. The great hope of America may just be Donald Trump driving his golf cart into a pool at Mar-a-Lago and getting his khakis caught in the pool drain or being hugged to death by Diamond and Silk and the My Pillow guy. But it’s gotta be spectacularly stupid, like the man himself.
PS. Scenario 5: Ukrainian victory drives Putin from power and the kompromat that Vladimir has on Trump falls into pro-democracy hands. Trump is told it will be released if he doesn’t permanently retire. Trump moves to Moscow where he spends his remaining days paying prostitutes to pee on pictures of Barack Obama.
There’s so much going on in the world. The Earth is literally on fire. It’s a nice distraction from my personal problems. I can doom-scroll through some GoPro footage from the battlefields of Ukraine or watch endless hours of commentary on the January 6th hearings. I used to drink through the rough patches. Now I just mainline the outside world.
As a Pisces, I tend to be overdramatic. Things aren’t that bad. Just the summer doldrums of separation. I’ve been trying to learn more about co-dependent relationships and, man, did I have one. I’m not 100% sure that learning about it makes you any less co-dependent, or will help Andi end up back under the same roof, but it sure shines a light and why we were stuck and not making any progress. She was the fixer and I was he who perpetually needed be fixed.
I’ve been having some pretty good conversations about the topic with my therapist. Knowing I’m a Pisces, she’s liberal with the diagrams. She drew two overlapping equal sized circles on a piece of paper and explained that in a healthy relationship two people take up equal space and they overlap in the space of their relationship but they have a larger part of themselves that’s not defined by the relationship. And they can both bring in things to share in the overlap or keep them as part of themselves.
In a co-dependent relationship, one person is a bigger circle that completely envelopes the other circle. That enveloped person has a) a smaller space, b) has no self outside the relationship and c) is always struggling against the confines of the bigger circle. That was us. Even though I encouraged her life outside of our relationship (she got a master’s degree and was an elected officer in her union without my help), when we were together, I did a pretty good job of swallowing her back into what I was jokingly referred to as “Randyland” (a term she understandably loathed). Just like how a person of color is forced to define themselves in relation to “whiteland,” her existence was shaped by our relationship instead of the other way around.
My therapist asked me to conjure up a romantic image of us and I remembered our first trip to Andi’s home town of Morelia, Mexico in 2013. Instead of me being the tour guide in Portland, she led me through her beautiful city, holding my hand. I imagined myself as a balloon safely in her grasp, seeing the world through her eyes. But it was just a flip of our co-dependent dynamic. Now I was the small circle, encompassed by her. As wonderful as it felt, it still wasn’t balanced.
Then she asked me to remember another romantic moment that seemed more balanced and I immediately flashed to our trip to Oslo, Norway in 2018, a city that was new to both us. I was returning from a day at a conference and Andi was coming to find me because she had discovered the most amazing record store on earth and when we ran into each other on the sidewalk, we were those perfectly equal interlocking circles.
The reality is that we had those moments (our first week in a youth hostel on Isla Mujeres with sand in the bed and Macklemore playing every night), but there was a lot more suffocation in Randyland. I get why she needed to break free.
OK, this is the part where I link it to Trump. Hang with me.
You know the MAGA thing? That “Make America Great Again” implies that America’s not great but it was sometime in the mythical past. Trump picked 1950 when America was last great. 1950, the peak of Jim Crow segregation. 1950, before the modern feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the disability rights movement. If you were a black transperson in a wheelchair, America was not great in 1950. Or a woman. And TVs sucked. Give me my 2022 Samsung flatscreen TV and my pronouns and leave 1950 to your back & white fantasy. Father knew best, or so we were told. The MAGA crowd wants that bullshit past back. They dream of the by-gone days of Jim Crow. Colin Kaepernick “knew his place” in 1950.
But that’s the thing. We over-nostalgize the past. It was always better back then. Music was better. Fashion was better. It was a “simpler” time, blah, blah, blah. In fact, the past was both great and shitty, just like the present. And it was plenty complex, but we were familiar with the complexity. The future is uncertain and the past is a cozy blanket. No wonder people want to go back to it. And that tendency just gets worse the older you get. The 2010s, ah those were the days. The past is a safe haven for the timid. The future is scary as hell. You saw what happened with Bitcoin. But you’ve really gotta embrace the unknown, as frightening as it is. It might kick you in the crotch, but it’s better than spending your life reminiscing about your baseball card collection.
We do the same damn thing when a relationship is ending. “But it was so great! Look at how happy we are in these pictures.” The reality, like America in 1950, is more complex. It was great and shitty. There were plenty of hard times. But I remember it more fondly because I was the planet she revolved around. I was white Father Knows Best guy. For her it was Jim Crow. She was the “colored girl” who needed to get the hell out of Mississippi.
Coming to terms with co-dependency means acknowledging the imbalance. I don’t know if Andi and I will have any more “Oslo moments.” I hope so. But I understand why she had to escape Randyland. I’m escaping it, too.
Watching the Wheels 