I lived long enough to see several nations cease to exist, including Rhodesia (1979), the USSR (1991), and Yugoslavia (1992). Even though many believe that “God likes us the best,” there is no guarantee that the United States will exist in perpetuity. We could exist for thousands of years, like Iran, or the U.S. could be kaput by this time next year. There are certainly warning signs that the great American experiment may have a rapidly approaching expiration date.
The idea of America was born in The Enlightenment, the European Age of Reason. Intellectuals, inspired by cracks in the medieval divine right of kings that propped up the authority of the Catholic Church, fashioned a new paradigm in which free thinkers were no longer burned at the stake as heretics. Those cracks were created by the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, that encouraged the translation of the Bible and believers to seek the truth themselves instead of trusting the dogma of the Church. (Many of those reformers were killed by the Church, including William Tyndale, who dared to translate the Bible into English.) The new rebellion was embodied by Galileo Galilei who’s crime was to present evidence that the earth went around the sun, and not reverse (and who was put on trial by the Church in 1633).
Galileo laid out the framework for the new intellectual movements, taking root in oppressive monarchies in France and across Europe. Like Galileo, who did research based on a theory that made logical sense, the new thinking would be rooted in the values of rationality and empiricism, not blind trust and superstition. This “enlightenment” gave birth to an explosion of science that often contradicted the teachings of the Church. (“How do you reconcile the new fossil evidence with Genesis? Let’s do some research and find a truth rooted in the empirical!”) Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) infused this philosophy with the binding rights and responsibilities of the autonomous individual, a radical new conceptualization of freedom.
The founders of the United States were not brutish patriots who merely wanted independence from their taxers. They were deep thinkers who studied and debated the Enlightenment tenets. Thomas Paine was involved in the French Revolution and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson’s time in Paris deeply informed how the rational and empirical experiment of American democracy would be constructed. The United States of America is a child of the Enlightenment and exists because the core values of the Enlightenment have persisted for 248 years.
When I taught social theory at Portland State University, we’d often get get into a spirited discussion about the end of the Enlightenment. If the Enlightenment was born in coffeeshops in the 18th Century Europe, when did it end? Some students would argue for 2001, when religious extremists attacked America and a hostility to climate science was a hallmark of the Bush administration. I would counter-argue that as long as democracy and science are still widely valued, the Enlightenment is alive and well. I have since changed my mind. The Enlightenment, that lifted humanity out of the Dark Ages, died on January 6th, 2021.
We knew that the Trump Administration was hostile to science. We saw it on a regular bases during Trump’s COVID briefings, with his ludicrous suggestions that the virus could be cured with sunlight or by injecting bleach. One of the world’s leading immunologists, Anthony Fauci, became a meme as he regularly face-palmed behind Trump’s “I know better than the scientists” buffoonery. And we knew that Trump was hostile to democracy. His administration was characterized by attempts to weaken voting access, Congress, the Department of Justice, and the courts, and a constant war on the free press (parallel to his Russian compatriot, Vladimir Putin). January 6th, was the culmination where he unleashed his anti-vax hordes on the Capital. Believing, despite of all empirical evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 election was “stolen,” the Trump mob tried to prevent the constitutional transfer of power and install their monarch.
In the following years, Trump has cozied up to the world’s dictators, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and made it clear that, if re-elected, he would weaponize the federal government to seek retribution against all his political enemies. I hope Mitt Romney has a safe room. Authoritarianism is six months away from America’s doorstep. Trump has joked that he would be a dictator on the first day of his presidency if he wins. But if he loses, he’s already told his moronic anti-Enlightenment base that the election will have been stolen, and they are armed and ready to rectify the situation. Democracy’s only hope may be that Trump dies comically on the toilet this summer.
I routinely warn against the “sky is falling” prognostications. I remember thinking the Cold War tensions of 1983 would be the endpoint of the human race. (Remember Korean Air Flight 007?) We survived that and 1984. “The world moves on, another day, another drama, drama,” as Taylor Swift sings. But things are different this time. My feelings may be shaped by this federally funded project I’ve been working on for the last two years. We are tasked with interrupting political violence and the chatter I’m seeing about a “second civil war” has been ramping up the closer we get to Election Day. The Trump droogs are locked and loaded and ready to wage holy war on anything they deem to be “woke” or that stands in the way of their dear leader taking control of the reins of power. They are clear that both science and democracy will be fired from Trump 2.0, and if you don’t believe me, take a look at the Handmaid’s Taleagenda of the evangelicals at the Heritage Foundation who think Trump is God’s gift to embryos.
I try to talk about the Enlightenment whenever I can. It’s why America is here. It’s why we walked on the moon. It’s why we can save millions of lives with immunizations. And it’s why infertile couples can have children (except in Alabama). Trump and his minions embody the exact opposite of the values of the Age of Reason. They wanted to burn Anthony Fauci at the stake and hang Mike Pence from the gallows. If they succeed, three centuries of the triumph of rationality and empiricism will be succeeded by a new dark ages where the only value will be fealty to the sovereign, who is currently selling Bibles wrapped in an American flag. This is not dystopian fantasy. This a coming storm that could put out the light for a thousand years. But we stopped that storm 79 years ago. Can we do it again?
As a “subject matter expert” on right-wing extremism, I often get asked, “What about the left?” There are obviously some stark differences between the two political wings (I would offer bodycount as one measure), but there also might be some parallels worth considering as we look for ways to reduce political violence.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this blog discussing the “militia funnel” that became a useful tool in explaining anti-government violence in the wake of the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City. I even got to sit down and explain it with W. Kamau Bell on CNN’s United Shades of America in 2021 (and CNN turned it into a cool animation). There was a great need after the bombing in Oklahoma City, that included 19 children among the 168 casualties, to explain how “average people” were falling into the world of domestic terrorism.
In April 1995, I was just finishing up my dissertation on right wing extremism, when the news of a massive bombing in the “nation’s heartland” blasted across the news. It was devastating, and the images of dead children in the building’s daycare center brought the country to its knees. I stayed up that night, listening to talk radio from my Atlanta apartment. The talking heads were sure the carnage was the work of the usual suspects, Muslim terrorists. It wasn’t a crazy hunch. Two years earlier, Ramzi Yousef and a small band of jihadists tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York City, killing 6 people. But Oklahoma was on April 19th, so I knew it was probably one of my guys.
April 19, 1993 was the culmination of the standoff in Waco, Texas that had become a rallying cry for the far-right. That carnage (that included the death of 28 children) was being framed as the result of an out-of-control federal government that was no longer by and for the people. So when on April 20, 1995, a white guy named Timothy McVeigh, who had been at Waco, was arrested for the Oklahoma bombing, I got a chill. These were the anti-government white supremacists I had spent the last seven years studying. The radio hosts who had been quick to blame “Muslim terrorists,” pivoted to the “Wacko from Waco” narrative. It was the act of a crazy person. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with their aggrieved white male hatred of the government.
The structure of the militia funnel
I learned about the militia funnel from Kenneth Stern’s excellent 1996 book, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate. He got it from Ken Toole, at the Montana Human Rights Network. The funnel model explains how people can enter a world that sees violent revolution as the only solution from very mundane starting points that have nothing to do with violence or terrorism. For decades, my work has focused on the movement of people through a ‘right-wing funnel.’ I have written and spoken extensively about this dynamic. At the bottom of this article, I set forth how the funnel analysis applies to current willingness to use political extremist violence among some people in the left wing of politics. First, let’s address how the funnel has been used for the last nearly 30 years to frame pathways to right wing extremism.
At the top of the funnel are just a lot of people who are activated by fairly mainstream conservative issues. They are second amendment gun activists, tax protestors, or think the federal government shouldn’t be taking perfectly good timber land to save spotted owls. They come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including black and Jewish conservative spaces.
Some (importantly, not all) fall into the next level, based in a deep hatred for the federal government. Instead of “we the people,” the feds have too much power and have superseded their Constitutional mandate. Some of these folks are part of the Posse Comitatus movement who believe the highest legal authority is the county sheriff and any constitutional amendment after the first ten is hokum. But the bottom line is the federal government is the bad guy. Growing up in the rural South, the term we’d hear for this was “revenuer.”
At the third level down the funnel, some of these folks start buying into some pretty pervasive conspiracy theories. We are now into the world of Freemasons and the Illuminati and who REALLY killed JFK. Just watch those Nicholas Cage National Treasure movies for a dose of this world. Here the Republican and Democratic parties are both controlled by the same puppet master, leveraging the federal government against hard-working (white) Americans for their own benefit.
Some of those conspiracy believers make it down to the next level, where the conspiracy takes a familiar turn. The elite Bilderbergers are rebranded as simply “the Jews.” In a same way Hitler used anti-Semitic tropes to explain Germany’s downfall, anti-government conspiracy theorists here see a global Jewish cabal behind everything from immigration to gay rights to why their kids are listening to rap music instead of Lee Greenwood.
Again, this is a funnel, so each level has fewer people than the one above it. In the final stage of the model are the revolutionaries. It’s one thing to have analysis, but here is the belief you have to act on it. The people who make it to the bottom of the funnel are consumed with language about a second American Revolution, and a second Civil War, and “Rahowa” (short for Racial Holy War) and a whole bunch of stuff concerning the “blood of patriots.” The funnel starts wide and ends very small, but as we saw in 1995, it only takes a small band of self-proclaimed patriots to change the face of a nation. And McVeigh’s intent was to inspire other like-minded Americans to commit similar acts of terrorism.
The militia funnel in the MAGA-era
The militia model became useful again in the Obama era when anti-government militias roared back into action. Here in Oregon, a militia group occupied a federal wildlife refuge for 40 days in 2016, resulting in one death. Then the surge of militia activists, like the Oath Keepers and the 3 Percenters, under Donald Trump’s MAGA movement made the militia model even more applicable, especially after the January 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
In the Trump years, I regularly updated the 1990s militia model when explaining the “new” right-wing activism. Because of social media and reach of the Trump message, the mouth of the funnel was much wider than it was in the 1990s. It included some of those same conservative issues, like gun rights, but now included “culture war issues,” like opposition to rights for transgender people and hostility to Critical Race Theory, but also a rejection of lockdown mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This wider funnel served to attract not just rural white men who were the 90s candidates for patriot militia groups, but suburban moms, aging incels, and others who thought America was last great before the civil rights movements made “inclusion” a weapon against white privilege.
The rest of the funnel, took an updated sheen. The anti-federal government level was rebranded as “the swamp,” full of libtards and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). The conspiracy theory level was now the domain of QAnon adherents and beliefs in the “deep state.” Below that were the anti-Semitic theories about “global Jews,” including George Soros, Anthony Fauci, and a belief (spread by Robert Kennedy, Jr.) that COVID was created to kill non-Jews. At the bottom of the funnel, the revolutionaries renamed their call to arms the “Boogaloo,” and began stockpiling weapons. In 2020, I had a chat with a 3 Percenter in a Home Depot parking lot and asked him what he thought about the escalation of violent rhetoric. His only reply was, “We’re locked and loaded.”
That this funnel was exponentially wider at the top meant more Americans were ending up at the violent bottom level. This was evident in the massive turnout for Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6th, motivated by the President of the United States, not a fringe website, spreading a fully debunked conspiracy theory that the “deep state” stole the 2020 election. While organized militia groups, like the Oath Keepers, were key players in the attack, many of the over 1,2000 people arrested have claimed they just got “swept up” in the moment. They had fallen down the funnel into the land of Timothy McVeighs and Stewart Rhodes. I half expected to see my Trump-loving father there that day (but his feet are bad).
The value of the militia funnel in this work is that there are multiple points along the pathway down to violence where intervention can take place. Someone who angry about public school dollars going to a student Gay Straight Alliance isn’t automatically destined to become a domestic terrorist, but if they are, there are places where that path can be diverted. Could there be a similar trajectory for activists on the left?
Constructing a left-wing funnel
The origin of the right-left political spectrum, that has its roots in the French Revolution, is all about who should have power. On the right, power should be concentrated and on the left, power should be dispersed. That’s why the far right values fascism and the far left values communism. But all along that spectrum there are values concerning fairness. The liberal is concerned teachers’ low pay is unfair and the conservative thinks their tax dollars supporting a curriculum they think opposes their values is unfair. Oh, yeah, and plenty of people on both sides think the government sucks.
The structure of the militia funnel offers a guide to what a left-wing militia funnel might look like.
At the top level are widely popular liberal issues related to social justice-based matters of equity, including Black Lives Matters, abortion access, and LGBTQ+ rights, along with other stalwart liberal causes. The next level finds strong distrust of the federal government as the historic defender of status quo power dynamics. The feds are “the Man,” who surveilled MLK and protected alleged sex-offenders, like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. And also, all cops are “bastards.” Further down the funnel, we see the appearance of all-encompassing conspiracy theories that see Republicans and Democrats as puppets of corporations, the monied class (Google “Bohemian Grove”), and the World Trade Organization. Like on the right, there is a darker level that introduces anti-Semitism to the conspiracy theories. This is where Robert Kennedy, Jr. lives and where anti-Zionism slides into a broader anti-Jewish narrative, most recently seen as an element of some pro-Gaza rallies. (It should be pointed out is that anti-Semitism is less visible on the left than it is on the right, but it does rear its ugly head in places.) At the bottom of this funnel is the rhetoric of Marxist revolution, which sees the entire capitalist system, and all its institutions, as corrupt and in need of overthrow.
Those of us who are older than millennials and Gen Z kids will remember that in the 1970s there were hundreds of terrorist bombings in the United States. They weren’t from patriot or neo-Nazi groups. They were committed by radical leftist groups like the Weather Underground, the New World Liberation Front, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And there were casualties. In 1970, a group of leftists angry about the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s participation in military work related to the Vietnam War, detonated a massive bomb in Sterling Hall, killing one researcher and injuring several others. The FBI has counted 2500 bombings connected to the Weather Underground, including one that killed four people in a Wall Street restaurant in 1975.
When the Right-Left political spectrum becomes a circle
There is also a weird space where the extremes at the end of the left side and right side meet to form a circle. In the 1990s, some neo-Nazi groups began publicly (and financially) supporting the PLO’s campaign against Israel under the guise of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” The Seattle WTO protests in 1999 that brought labor union members, environmentalists, and other liberal activists to the streets also saw participation far-right activists, who saw the “global bankers” behind the World Trade Organization as the hand of Jewish control. In the 2000s, the right also joined the left on issues related to climate change. Their angle was the climate crisis was the result of immigration, non-white population growth, and (again) Jewish monied interests.
More recently, the language of “accelerationism” has pervaded extremists on bother the far-right and far-left. The philosophy states that standard democratic forms of social change, like voting, are too hopelessly glued to institutions of power to ever affect real change. Each November we vote for a Tweedle Dum or a Tweedle Dee and hope things will be different. Accelerationists believe the only way to achieve their desired society is to bring the current one crashing down and rebuild the new one out of the ashes. The right and left have radically different visions of what those societies look like. (I know the right has no place for progressive academics like me, but they left would probably see me as a “collaborator” with “the Man” and exclude me from their Utopia, so I’m likely SOL whoever wins fantasy league fanaticism.) We have seen extremists on the right, like Proud Boys and active clubs look at their counterparts on the left in anarchist and Antifa circles, not as enemies, but as allies in bringing the system down. In 2021 a Boogaloo activist said, “Right now it’s about provoking BLM, antifa and militias or 3 Percenters into engaging in violence that will provoke disproportionate police response, which can be used to fuel further unrest.”
If the value of understanding the militia funnel is to interrupt well-meaning conservatives’ slide down the rabbit hole of violent extremism, there should be a similar opportunity for those escalating towards left wing violence. Again, the intent is not to “de-radicalize” anyone one either side, just to prevent the violence that might emerge at the bottom of those funnels. Working on constructive engagement with the government as, not an oppressive entity, but a reflection of our collective will can slow the roll down the funnel. Also, the work on critical thinking skills that disrupt simplistic conspiracy theories can be hugely helpful in dismantling the binary thinking that characterizes extremist ideologies.
The vast majority of activists are doing the important work of putting democracy to the test and advancing their shared values. A small fraction fall into the black hole of political violence. Understanding these paths across the political spectrum allows to us design strategies to reroute those who may see terrorism as a legitimate expression of their political agendas.
I haven’t spoken to my father in six months. At the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, he posted on my Facebook page, “You can either support Antifa or be my son.” I replied, “You know I’ve worked to oppose fascism my entire adult life. I am, by definition Antifa – anti-fascist.” His response was to unfriend me on Facebook. Unfriended by my Trump-loving father.
I know this scenario has played out in thousands of ways in American families as the lines of division have been drawn up. “Trump cult” brother against “libtard” brother, QAnon daughter against “communist mother,” or in my case, Antifa son against “Anyone who listens to the mainstream media has drank the Kool Aid” father. I was going to call my dad after election day, and then after inauguration day. I keep putting it off because I don’t want to hear his fragile old white man “sky is falling/Joe Biden is too old” blather. (For the record, Joe is eight months younger than my father.) If I can’t heal my relationship with my old man, how can America heal this chasm that separates us? And is this how families felt before that last civil war?
Like a lot of Americans, while watching the January 6 storming of the capitol (It’s its own Wikipedia entry now) unfold on TV, I more than half-expected to see someone I knew (including my older-than-Biden father). We might have heard some great calls for unity on Inauguration Day but it feels like we’re more divided than ever. Trump still holds the reigns of the GOP from his gilded palace in Florida. A large percentage of the 74 million people who voted for Trump think that a large percentage of the 81 million people who voted for Biden were dead people. And complete nut jobs like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green are either seen as prophets or complete nut jobs.
It seems so hard to cross this divide. The mother of one of my childhood friends (who I had a mad crush on when I was 12) just posted something about Biden letting in “illegal immigrants who carry diseases.” My first response was to call out her racism. That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? But am I just driving her back into her fragile white castle? I’m good on a Facebook smackdown. I’ve got links to New York Times articles, persuasive statistics, hilarious memes, and, if all else fails, a facepalm gif.
Then I remember what I’ve been doing for the last 25 years, helping people leave the white supremacist movement (WSM). There are two ways to think of the WSM. The first is a fractured subculture of hate groups, white nationalists, and anti-immigrant organizations. The second way is to see the white supremacist movement is as America writ large. The real advocates of making America white again are not Klansmen and Proud Boys, they are people like my friend’s mom who would never own her own racism. “I’m not racist, but…” So maybe the things I learned about extracting Neo-Nazi skinheads could be helpful to talking to people stuck Trump’s in narrow nationalist vision of “patriotism.”
How has this improved your life?
One of the questions that has helped to get racist to rethink their commitment to racist activism is, “Has anything about this choice you’ve made made your life better?” They’ll sputter a bit and maybe parrot some line about finding “pride.” But then you push them with questions about their family relations, their economic prospects, their legal problems, their love lives and they’ll start to see they’ve painted themselves into a corner. The silly “white utopia” that they are physically fighting for isn’t coming and they are increasing socially isolated. I had one troubled young skinhead tell me, “It’s so hard to be racially pure and know what to eat. I love Mexican food but I can’t eat it anymore.” He left the movement shortly after that.
I wonder how my father’s life has changed with his devotion to this failed businessman from Queens. He chose that over a relationship with his son. It must be hard to be a Trump loyalist, having to believe so many things that are obviously untrue; that COVID-19 is “just the flu,” that the January 6 insurgence was a false flag plot by Antifa, that Trump won the election. The emotional labor it must take to ride the wave of disinformation while everyone around you watches you fall down the rabbit hole must be taxing. Just like the QAnon cult that saw their prophecy fail when the “Storm” failed to materialized to prevent Biden’s swearing in, Trumpists must have to expend a lot of energy to just not look crazy.
We’re always telling racists that life is better on the other side, with our wide open cuisine and limitless playlist. Maybe an open invitation to Trumpists to break bread at the mosque and talk about Jesus in a black church would work. When you take off your Giuliani-stained blinders, so much great comedy, music, and NPR is there to enjoy. All that Ted Nugent and Scott Baio must get old. There’s so much celebration of life over here. Invite a Proud Boy to a Gay Pride parade. They kinda seem like overlapping circles anyway.
The power of the open hand instead of the clenched fist
I get it. It’s fun to fight. I’m always up for a few rounds with my high school posse, most of whom have become pot-bellied Trumpies. Sarcastic insults worked in high school so let them fly. I have a 50-something classmate who still calls me “Ballsack.” I won’t say he’s been emboldened by Trump’s bullying. This guy was always a prick. The political banter can take on a sport-like quality. Who gets the best jibe and obscure historical fact in last? I have dialed down my social media time (at the request of my wife and humanity), so I get a lot of “He stopped responding. I won.” Cheerio, desktop gladiator.
But the stories of haters leaving their racist lives have a similar element. Most had someone who they were supposed to hate reach out to them. A Muslim, a gay bashing victim, a black man harassed by Klansmen. In The Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, former skinhead Frankie Meeink tells the story of a Jewish boss who helped him out of a tight jam and how he never wore another swastika after that act of undeserved act of kindness. I published a book chapter in 2004 after numerous interviews with former Neo-Nazis remarking on the pattern that females in their lives (girlfriends, teachers, daughters) had helped them out by showing the hate that they experienced as females was no different than the hurtful hate their men expressed as racists, opening the door to empathy.
I’m currently reading The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity by Sally Kohn. She describes how both sides of the political divide are pretty good at dehumanizing each other. Internet trolls can lay some pretty hateful rhetoric on their victims, but referring to them as trolls makes them less human as well. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” comment dehumanized Trump supporters who she accused of dehumanizing others. (We don’t put people in baskets, Hill.)
Remember when Barack Obama said in 2004 that. “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states”? In fact we’re all shades of purple. We’re not so divided as we pretend to be and there’s more that unites us. As a life-long anti-racist, I can have a pretty good conversation with a racist skinhead about our common love of Slayer albums or classic WWF wrestling stars. Then, if we have time, we can get to the deeper stuff. I promise you this; no Nazi has ever stopped being a Nazi because they were told they were wrong just the right amount of times. You’ve got to win hearts and minds. I have to remind myself of this fact when I’m armoring up for a Facebook battle with my Georgia homies.
Being a part of something that matters
The teenage skinheads and the old white men who stormed the Capitol have one thing in common. They all want to belong to something that matters. The skinheads I studied wanted to save American from Jewish communists and the Trump loyalists want to save America from, well, Jewish communists. The both see a country that is about to “cease to exist” because of perceived enemies of “real Americans” and feel the rush of engaging in a great historic cause to the “save the country.”
The left has a similar raison d’etre, as we call others to, “Man the barricades!” and burst into lyrics from Les Miserables and Hamilton. “We’ll tell the story of tonight. Let’s have another round!” When I was getting teargassed by the police last summer at the George Floyd protests, I had a feeling that I was a part of something that really mattered, a page in American history. A younger version of me might have seen fit to hurl a projectile at the symbols of oppression. (Older me has several friends who are cops.) We want to feel like we are bigger than just our small one man/women shows. That we can change the world for the better.
The Trump loyalists and Nazi skinheads feel the same way. They see an injustice, however upside down or lie-based it might be, and they want to set it right. “Raise a glass to freedom. Something you will never see again!’ as they sing in Hamilton. What if they were brought into our great cause, the cause that expands the rights millions of Americans, not one that expands the right of one bloated con-artist to become America’s first dictator?
One of the best weapons against hate is an organization called Life After Hate, made up of former extremists, like Frankie Meeink. They use their time in the rabbit hole of racist violence to pull others out and advertise the waste of the dead-end world of hate. There are plenty of former Trumpies, Proud Boys, and QAnon cultists who can serve a similar function. I’ve interviewed militia members and former militia members, and the formers have all said the same thing, “I wish I could meet my younger self and talk some sense into him.” The Life After Hate members are a part of something that matters. Former racists make the best anti-racists, because they understand the humanity of the racist.
Adapting to these times
We’re in strange times. The uncertainty of life makes the comfort of a perfect conspiracy theory seem all that more appealing. It creates a world that is easily understandable. But unfortunately it also creates a world where half of the country thinks the other half is brainwashed, and vice versa. This may be the time to reach out.
My friend’s mom felt like I was picking on her on Facebook and I responded that I loved her and that her ignorant comments broke my heart. I forgot that calling a white person in the South “ignorant” is essentially calling them “black.” (The phrase “ignorant black” has long been a part of the racist Southern lexicon.) She immediately shut down and ended the conversation. I forgot how to talk to fragile white people. I should have said, “I don’t think YOU are ignorant, but I find some of your racial comments not based in fact.” I apologized for my poor approach hoping to have another opportunity to reach out to her. Nobody said this would be easy. Part of me wonders why I should waste any time with people whose thinking is so entrenched in fear and hate and conspiracy theories and just incorrect information. But another part of me thinks that nothing is ever going to change unless we try. As Axl Rose once sang, “I don’t want a civil war.”
I understand this approach centers the haters and doesn’t address the trauma caused by the hate itself. But one way to allow the victims of hate to heal is to stop the wounding done by the haters.
I’m pro-radicalization. I want to radicalize people to be critical of power structures and constructs. I want them to ask questions about government, gender, guns, and Genesis. I want them to dig deep and talk to people outside of their comfort zone. I want them to show up on the front line. I want to admit that they can be well-meaning but wrong.
The latest buzzword in my academic field is CVE – Countering Violent Extremism. It basically represents a constellation of various strategies to prevent people from becoming violent religious and right-wing extremists. (I can already hear right-wingers asking, “But what about violent left-wing extremists?” To which I would say, “Touché.”) It is inherently of value to people like myself working to reduce hate crimes. My first exposure to this work was this spring when I was flown to the Middle East to participate in a United Nations/Haditha program to explore the role of gender in CVE.
In those three days, I heard zero about surveillance or government programs to profile Muslims. I heard from ex-jihadists and ex-skinheads and people working in community-based groups to rescue teenage girls who thought running away to Syria to become a bride of an ISIS fighter seemed kinda cool and rebellious. I was honored to be in their company to talk about the my research on the role toxic masculinity plays in right-wing extremism.
So when I got an invite from the U.S. Embassy to be a part of a “CVE Community Leaders Exchange” in the United Kingdom, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. I had presented on confronting hate crimes to the British delegation when they visited Portland earlier this year and now ten of us, from Portland and Seattle, would be on a ten day trip to talk to community agencies in Luton, London, and Leeds, England. (Why didn’t we get to go to Liverpool?) The Portland delegation was four folks who work for the city, including a police captain who heads the youth service division, and me, representing the Coalition Against Hate Crimes. The Seattle delegation had a similar mix of city officials and community advocates. The trip, organized by a non-profit called Cultural Vistas, would allow us a chance to observe important community work on the issue.
To be clear, I think most of the people in our group had no interest in “CVE” anything, and were motivated by learning how community groups help young people. As a criminologist, this was my connection to the whole thing.
Off to the UK
Our first stop was three days in Luton, England. Luton had been a hotbed of activity for the right-wing, anti-Muslim English Defense League (EDL), as well as Al-Muhairoun (ALM), the Islamacist group that had been linked to several terror incidents including last summer’s attack on the London Bridge. We spent our days talking to people who are working to divert youth from this type of extremism. This included teachers at the Al-Hikmah School and Mosque, and youth intervention workers, and Carnival mask makers, scholars studying right-wing nationalism, and a group called the Luton Tigers who gets kids on the football pitch as an alternative to radicalization. The young imam at Al-Hikmah explained that the best way to strengthen their Muslim faith was to clarify the teachings of the Koran, which are in direct opposition to the call for violence.
What I learned right off the bat was that all this work was done by committed community leaders desperately working to help young people make the most of their lives instead of becoming Nazis or jihadists. Instead of talking, these people were doing. Unlike their critics, they were actually working with those most at risk. I didn’t see one single covert government plot unfolding or double agent spying for MI5. I just saw motivated people putting their shoulder to the wheel.
Then we headed down to London where I slipped off to a “Free Tommy Robinson” rally in front of Scotland Yard. Robinson is the nationalist leader of the EDL who was jailed for contempt of court. The small crowd of rabid older white blokes (many in Trump hats) wanted their Islamaphobic leader released and, briefly, set on me for holding an anti-Nazi sign. It was a reminder of how important this work was as a British member of parliament had been stabbed to death by one of Robinson’s followers, while he shouted, “Britain first!” (And five police officers were attacked at the rally I attended, making it all even more dire.)
While in London, we had a long morning in the basement of the Home Office (essentially the UK’s Department of Justice) learning about modifications to the Prevent program, Britain’s primary CVE program. The initial rollout went all kinds of sideways, with some horror stories of Muslim kids being wrongly profiled and thrown onto “Terrorists!” watch lists. We got the government line on the attempt to overcome the “toxic” branding of the program with a more bottom up, community-based model, which is what we witnessed in the field. Maybe it was the English accents, but it felt a little bit like we were sequestered in the inner sanctum of the Orwell’s Ministry of Information, so we asked the hard questions about CVE and civil liberties.
What we heard in Luton, London, and Leeds, was that when you asked critics of the Prevent program what should be done to divert youth from violent extremism, their answers were exactly what Prevent was doing in 2018. There was just an awareness gap. The program needed a PR campaign, said we Americans who know the value of a good advertising budget.
After our morning at the Home Office we had another community meeting at the new U.S. Embassy building, followed by a reception. Other than having to walk past a giant grinning photo of Donald Trump (who was having his secret meeting with Vladimir Putin as we walked in), everyone was completely hospitable and happy to host our delegation. When I lived abroad, I was always mindful of where my embassy was just in case things got weird (or I lost my passport). It was a true thrill to be inside. We took a group photo and I posted it online. From Stone Mountain punk to American diplomat. Kinda cool.
That’s when things got strange. A friend who works with the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Portland began posting on Facebook that we were complicit in some anti-Muslim governmental “training.” It just seemed silly at the time. I had just been watching the World Cup with the Muslim founders of the Luton Tigers. My only training was in what team to cheer for after England was knocked out of the cup. (France?) There was a hysterical storm brewing back in Portland, but we continued on. Most assuredly there are folks in the Muslim community who have been burned by “CVE” efforts in the past, but it wasn’t what we were seeing at all. There seemed to be a disconnect.
Up to Leeds, where I had last been in 1982 to see the Rolling Stones play. We did some fantastic site visits to communities that are on the front lines in the battle for souls. We visited a domestic violence shelter where a bad-ass Bangladeshi sister works to counter violent extremism by teaching men how to respect women. We went to a refugee service center where committed activists work to counter violent extremism by plugging migrants into the needed resources to build secure lives in their new home. We went to the Makkah Mosque where leaders from the local Muslim, Jewish, and Sikh communities talked about how strengthening faith networks worked to counter the pull of violent extremism. And we ended up a in a community center in the Harehills, the poorest section of Leeds, talking to a cop named Ash. Ash had, with the help of the neighborhood kids, built this center with his bare hands to create a meaningful community-based way to counter violent extremism. Four walls, two floors, plus a gym and football pitch, just from the energy of his desire to create alternatives for young people. Wow.
In none of these experience was there anything about surveillance or undermining the civil liberties of any group, especially Muslims. There was only committed community activists, including police officers and imams, who were going above the expectations of their role to give youth an alternative to become violent nationalists or jihadists.
Fake News?
So imagine my surprise when I was contacted by young journalist at a Portland weekly, the Portland Mercury, asking what was going on over there in England. The folks from CAIR had her ear and there must be some conspiracy afoot because anything associated with the government is inherently oppressive to minorities, right? I tried to let her know that our trip was nothing of the sort and was motivated by learning how to protect those communities from the rising tide of hate in America. I even sent her some boring pictures of the delegation sitting in various settings, listing to community presentations. Those pics weren’t used.
The Mercury’s piece was entitled, “City Officials Attend a Conference on Controversial Anti-Terrorism Surveillance Strategy” (with a creepy stock photo of someone doing some lurking). At first I laughed at the sophomoric reporting. There was no conference, just a series of community meetings. And, again, the issue of surveillance was never even on the table. How to get girls to play soccer and how to get boys to not join Nazi gangs were. That wasn’t headline grabbing, I guess. What Portland readers got was more hysterical knee jerking that conflated old and dealt-with criticisms of the UK’s Prevent program with Trump-era Department of Homeland Security anti-terrorism strategies. Suddenly, I was a part of Trump’s Muslim profiling thought police! And my friends at CAIR were convinced that I was either an agent of the Trump regime (Have they read this blog?) or a dupe of a massive Alex Jones-level conspiracy.
The whole charade has been deflating. It insults the efforts of those who are committed to do this work to protect youth and their communities as well as the delegation itself. I spent 10 days away from my family because I wanted find strategies to help Oregonians be safe from the wave of hate that has surged under the Trump presidency, targeting, among others, the Muslim community. The city workers and police in our delegation all had the same goal – find what works at preventing people from going down the rabbit hole of extremism and hurting (and killing) our friends and family. Certainly research must be done on what strategy is the most effective, but we saw plenty of anecdotal evidence on how small groups of people can change the world.
The other piece of this is locked into the binary thinking that breeds hysteria and, dare I say it, fascism. Here we have the simple good vs. evil duality. Reality is alway more complex. There is a large voice in Portland that thinks anything associated with the government is evil. All cops are evil and, I guess by extension, all equity workers for the city are evil. It requires little effort because everything drops into their binary paradigm. Just post an article from a few years ago and you’ve “proven your point.” Understanding the real world takes effort. First hand contact implies risks to challenging your perfect perspective. I can think all Trump supporters are “crazy racists.” Actually talking to them might upset what “I KNOW.” The Portland and Seattle city workers on this trip impressed me with their desire to work for social justice. And my conversations with Prevent coordinators in the UK (who were not white people, by the way) made it clear that Prevent had to make up for its past mistakes and rebuild trust with all the communities it serves. They were ready to do that heavy lifting, not from behind their laptops, but in the streets of some of the toughest streets in England.
The hysteria of the Mercury piece and those that still think we were all on some Trump secret mission threatened to affect important community relations in my city. Since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the local police bureau has engaged in numerous outreach efforts with the Muslim community and there has been a meaningful flow of good will and joint efforts to work to protect those communities. I have been a part of much of that work and it flies in the face of the “Cops suck” chant from the teenage anarchist crowd that gets so much attention. I wonder if my colleagues at CAIR have any practical ideas on how to fight extremism. I’m hoping it’s not more division between “them” and “us.” As much as I respect their work, I would inform them that there is only us.
Like the local leaders I met in the UK, we will continue to strengthen those community relations, build local capacity, and help young people build the strength to resist. Resist. This resistance builds bridges, not more walls. It smashes ignorance (on all sides) with truths. We fight hate by reaching out to our critics to find a common path forward. We’re in this together.
In the end, the trip really wasn’t about “CVE,” but BCC – Building Community Capacity. I learned some good lessons that I can’t wait to share.
I’ve been doing this anti-racism work for a long time. Thirty years ago I walked into the middle of a Klan rally in rural Georgia and held up a sign that said, “Racism is ignorance” and was dragged out by a National Guardsman. Racist skinheads set my scooter on fire, left threatening notes on my doorstep, and stalked me at my gym and outside my classes at Portland State. One night they plotted to severely beat me at a meeting in a bar, but I was tipped off to the plan and slipped out the back door. (I said I was going the john and just kept going.) I’ve had neo-Nazis post pictures of my house and car on the internet, post lies about me on gossip websites, and even post a fake Wikipedia entry about me. I was antifa before antifa was cool.
So when some snot-nosed teenage (white) anarchist tells me I’m a “privileged white guy” who doesn’t know how to stand up to racists, I just laugh. It’s kinda cute.
I’ve written in this blog about the legitimate political philosophy of anarchism as opposed to the black masked kids who think setting trashcans on fire will somehow “smash capitalism.” I’ve also written about how violence against the alt-right idiots only helps the alt-right idiots. And I will keep banging the drum of civil political discourse as long as there is something to (non-violently) bang on.
The alt-right gang was back in Stumptown this past Sunday, bleating about “free speech” and not making much of case for anything, other than how much they hate the “communists” who don’t like their free speech. Of course, being Portland, lots of amazing folks came out to protest them, to make their case loud and clear that Portland stands united against hate. There were Buddhists meditating, and school kids, grandmothers, and clergy, peacefully marching in opposition to the alt-right’s message of intolerance and division. I’m proud that my city’s values are so clear here.
But there were also thugs. “Anti-Racist Thug,” as one of their t-shirts said. I don’t believe these are the core activists of Rose City Antifa. Antifa is not an organization, let alone a “terrorist organization.” Antifa is a movement against fascism and fascism has never seemed more like a real possibility in my lifetime than it does right now. Movements are inherently disorganized and can attract people for many reasons, including those who care more about thrill of the moment (and being in a riot can be a real hoot). Some are motivated by their own completely unrelated psychological issues. (I hate my father so I’m going to throw a rock at a cop!) Some are just followers, much like their hate group counterparts on the right, who are looking for a simple analysis of the world and a simple action plan to go with it. Like I said, I’ve ben doing this work for a long time and I have seen all of the above. Antifa has attracted all of the above and it might destroy their movement like so many movements before it. Calling Occupy Wall Street. Hello? Anyone there?
The events on Sunday were a mess. Alleged “Black Block” members allegedly threw bottles at cops and knocked down police barricades. Police allegedly threw a distraction grenade at counter-protestors and pushed a person allegedly video-taping the skirmish to the ground. An alleged Trump supporter in a parallel event across the river in Vancouver, Washington, backed his pick-up truck, with its confederate flag, into a group of counter-protestors, evoking the deadly car-attack in Charlottesville on August 12th. There were seven arrests made after some counter-protestors threw rocks and smoke bombs at the police. The guy that drove his truck into the crowd, strangely, was not arrested. I was glad I allegedly stayed home. Donald Trump has already used Portland’s “antifa violence” to justify his ignorant comments about Charlottesville, making more calls for Nixonian law and order. The greatest gift to fascists in this country might just be the thugs antifa is attracting.
I was frustrated that these agitators in masks and black hoodies were hurting our cause by driving away potential allies and giving Fox News more footage for their “violent liberals” narrative. Who wants to come out to a rally when masked trustafarians are throwing bottles at cops? I administer the Facebook page for the Coalition Against Hate Crime and I posted, “FYI: When I protest racism, I don’t hide my face under a mask like a Klansman.”
I should have expected the blowback from the fascisticly anti-fascist gang, one calling for me to be banned from the page (that I’m the admin of). When I tried to explain that one should be proud of protesting and showing their face at these rallies, I got accused of being a privileged media whore. When I said becoming a parent has reinforced my desire for nonviolence and empathy for the haters themselves, one woman said she couldn’t wait for my daughter to be old enough to call me on my “bullshit.” When one said they could care less how their violence played on Fox News, I said maybe they should if they care about the end goal. One antifan said I didn’t have to worry about Nazis coming after me. I tried to let him know I’ve had to deal with Nazis coming after me for 30 years. I could hear Beyoncé singing, “You must not know about me.”
But there were some valid points made, including the fear of alt righter Nazis coming after counter-protesters, trolling them on the internet, or showing up at their workplace. They have a reason to fear this as it’s been their tactic against racists for years. Here we go round the mulberry bush. An eye for an eye. I get that much of this is a radical performance for radical peers. “Look how well I defend the black flag. I told Blazak to STFU!” And we get absolutely nowhere.
I ended up taking down the post because it just became an attack on me by people who I had assumed were my allies in the struggle against racism. They consider me a collaborator because I work with the police and not against them. I might have accused some of them as being agent provocateurs working for the Trump camp, handing the alt-right evidence of their claims on a silver antifa platter. It wasn’t very productive. They’d ask me my solution to the problem and I said the hard work to reform the system. “Fuck that, revolution!” You let me know how that goes. How many burned-out cops are watching department budgets shift funds from community policing to over-time for this week’s alt-right/antifa wrestling match? How many city resources are spent cleaning up after the extremist boys on the right and left masturbate on our streets?
In the end, I think there are many paths and tactics in this cause. I admire the youth who are taking to the streets to stop our slide backwards. I was them at one point. Idealistic with simplistic solutions. I was fueled by the music of The Clash, not the analysis of NPR. Those kids are a big part of the struggle and should be supported but also guided by those of us who have done our time in the trenches. The one thing that we know absolutely does not work is violence. If fact, it only makes things worse. Young males have long romanticized marching off to heroic macho combat. Older veterans know nothing is won in the end. There’s a reason Martin Luther King, Jr. adopted the non-violent resistance tactics of Gandhi. Of course there were casualties in Gandhi’s struggle of Indian independence (and King’s). Heather Heyer, killed in Charlottesville, was just one of many casualties in the long non-violent struggle against violence in this country. And there will be more.
Hating the haters is not the solution. Understanding the haters is. I’ve said this many times; inside almost every alt-right Nazi white supremacist/separatist/nationalist asshole is an amazing anti-hate activist waiting to be released. You don’t stop a Nazi by punching him. You might by hugging him. Only love undoes hate.
A friend saw me in the weeds with these “revolutionaries” on Facebook and bailed me out by posting a video from a musician I dearly love, Michael Franti. I’ve followed his career from the Beatnigs, through the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, to Spearhead. I don’t doubt that most of these beautiful radical youth know his music as well. In a voice much more articulate than my post, he said exactly what I was trying to say. Stand up for love.
I’m working on crafting a statement of non-violence for our coalition. We can’t sink to the fascists’ level. We have a right to defend ourselves but if the alt-right is not actually using violence and we are, it just makes Donald Trump (God, I hate to say this) appear to be right. We have love on our side. We don’t need smoke bombs. If you want to wear a mask, that’s your choice. But I hope you will stand proudly as my ally and willingly be counted. Dr. King didn’t wear a mask, but the people he marched against did.
#PowerToThePeaceful
Postscript: It’s an important point that I, as a privileged white person, can walk away from the anti-racism struggle when I need a break from it. People of color cannot.
As a criminologist of extreme acts of violence, I spend a lot of my time talking about psychopaths and sociopaths (essentially the same social types with different focuses on causes). I’ve lectured about psychopathic serial killers and sociopathic hate criminals. My 2000 book with Wayne S. Wooden, Teenage Renegades, Suburban Outlaws: From Youth Culture to Delinquency, included a large piece I wrote about the psychopathic tendencies of school shooters. Boys with guns and without impulse control in places like Springfield, Oregon and Littleton, Colorado.
Now it’ time to talk our president and sociopathy. His visit to Texas on Tuesday in which he didn’t visit with a single victim of the devastating bomb blast of Hurricane Harvey raised a giant red flag. (Such visits are a typical response from the consolers in chief). He didn’t even mention them. He did mention the crowd size that came to see Him and how big and expensive His disaster was. “What a turnout!” he said. Nothing for the millions of Americans suffering . To be fair, a day later in Springfield, Missouri, he did read a speech that someone prepared for him, after much hand-wringing over the president’s lack of empathy, mentioning the flood victims. “All America is grieving with you,” he read.
Donald Trump has shown this cold lack of empathy before. Refugees fleeing war in Syria, the children of undocumented immigrants, families that will lose health coverage if Obamacare is repealed, our men and women in the military who are transgender, females he was accused of groping; he could care less about their stories. Women who get cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood? Meh. People who live downstream from deregulated chemical plants? Screw ‘em. DACA kids in college? Criminals.
Lack of empathy doesn’t make you a psychopath. It makes you an asshole. But the lack of empathy is one of the hallmarks of sociopathy. Psychopaths often have an early history with animal cruelty. Most of us see a puppy and think, “How cute! Snuggies!” A psychopath sees the same puppy and wonders what it would look like doused in gasoline. The clinical diagnosis is Antisocial Personality Disorder. The APA estimates that it impacts about 1% of the population (although in prison populations, it can be as high as 23%) and I’m guessing our president is one of them.
The best way to explain sociopathy is with some Freudian imagery. Imagine a cartoon character with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The devil is the primitive id that acts on basic impulses and the angel is the social superego that restrains those impulses with society’s rules. That’s why Freud put so much emphasis on potty training. It’s the first real attempt to put the “If it feels good, do it” idea in social check. You can’t poop in your diapers forever. There are rules up in here.
Most of us have a nice balance, and we know when to listen to the angel and when it’s okay to listen to the devil. But psychopaths are dominated by their ids. They say and do whatever they want. They can say something and they say the exact opposite minutes later just because they want to. They can grab women by their genitals just because they think they’re entitled. They can threaten nuclear war just because it’s kinda fun. They never apologize because they never feel guilt. It’s everyone else’s problem. They’re the greatest person in history.
The research on sociopathy is fascinating. Some of it explores the role a dysfunctional cerebral cortex plays in preventing psychopaths from seeing themselves in other’s shoes. Some of the research looks at the role of early childhood trauma, like sexual abuse. Research has demonstrated that the more comfortable a person is, the less empathy they show to others who are less comfortable. We also know that sociopaths tend be both narcissistic and compulsive liars. It’s all about them and what they can get away with. Sound like anybody we know?
Not all sociopaths become serial killers or school shooters. It’s a continuum. Mild sociopathy might be rewarded on Wall Street or in the military, or anywhere where there’s a “take no prisoners” or “show no mercy” value set. Psychopaths are common in the world of hate as it rewards the ethic of cruelty without guilt. If you ever wondered about people who make Hitler their role model, like Trump fan James Fields, who drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist protests in Charlottesville, there’s a good chance they’re a psychopath. These “evil” people tend to show some red flags early in life, including what’s known as the Macdonald Triad. Kids who engage in animal cruelty, fire-starting, and bed-wetting are at a higher risk of later sociopathic behavior. Is Trump’s nanny still alive? I have a few questions.
So sociopathy can range from a cruel boss who could care less about your sick kid to a serial killer who has sex with the heads he’s chopped off. The scariest part of sociopathy is how little we know about it and, therefore, how to treat it. While I was working on my book on the subject, I read Jonathan Kellerman’s Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children (1994). Kellerman, a psychologist, argues that until a reliable treatment for Antisocial Personality Disorder is found, the best course of action is to lock up psychopaths at the earliest opportunity, even if they are children, to protect society from their impulsive acts of terror.
My PhD is not in psychology, but I’ve been studying sociopaths long enough to know the red flags when I see them. Donald Trump’s trip to Texas, that served as a campaign stop instead of a sincere effort to understand the on-the-ground suffering, is one flag too many. He seemed more concerned with hawking his $40 USA hats than wading in the dirty water with Americans who have lost everything. I don’t know if Donald J. Trump is a psychopath and therefore unqualified to lead this great nation. I just think it’s a vitally important question to ask and answer as soon as possible.
Postscript: There’s a pattern where Trump does or says something stupid (Remember his initial comments about Charlottesville earlier this month?), but then his handlers set him back on script. Trump is going to donate one million dollars OF HIS OWN MONEY to flood relief. But the True Trump always comes back to undercut Teleprompter Trump.
Earlier this week a neighborhood in Southeast Portland was covered in spray-painted swastikas. Swastikas on cars, fences, trees, and sidewalks. It’s been part of a rash of similar graffiti in the metro area this winter, including “Kill niggers” and other racist scrawlings at Lake Oswego High School and a swastika with a “Heil Trump” tag in men’s room at Portland State University. A report released today by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism-California State University, San Bernardino found a 22% increase in reported hate crimes in 2016 in ten large cities across the country (including Seattle). Is this the new normal in Trump’s America?
I spent the morning testifying at the Oregon state capital in support of Senate Bill 356, that would refine the state’s hate crime law and add gender and ethnicity to the protected statuses. It was a chance to explain to our state’s lawmakers the “greater harm” of bias motivated criminality and why the nation started passing these laws in the 1980s. I began my testimony with the story of a woman named Loni Kai, who was born a male named Lorenzo Okaruru. Kai was brutally murdered in 2001. She was last seen hitchhiking on a main thoroughfare in Hillsboro, Oregon. Her body was found in a nearby field the following day with her head caved in from a savage beating. At the time, the case could not be investigated and prosecuted as a hate crime because gender (and gender identity) were not included in the state’s hate crime statute. Almost 16 years later there still have been no arrests in the murder of Loni Kai.
Since election day there has been a dramatic increase of hate crimes and hate incidents around the country. Hate incidents are acts that protected by the Constitution as free speech but are still hateful. After the election, there were numerous reports of high school boys telling Muslim and Latinx students that Trump was going to get them. It’s not uncommon to see cars and trucks in Oregon with swastika placards. Hate crimes are things that are already illegal (vandalism, assault, murder, etc.) that are committed because of a bias motive towards the victims perceived demographic membership. Yes, this includes kids who get beat up because they are white.
Hate Crimes as a form of terrorism
If I had the dollar for every time somebody asked me, “Isn’t every crime a hate crime?” I’d be a rich sociologist. Most crimes are motivated by financial gain, so I’d like to hear your argument that stealing a bike is a hate crime or burning down the business for insurance fraud is a hate crime. Hate crimes focus on the motive, a common thing in criminal prosecution. That’s why there is a difference between homicide and manslaughter. Did that guy break into your house to steal your gun or to just take a shower? Those are two different crimes.
Why don’t we consider the September 11, 2001 attacks 2,977 cases of homicide (or one case of homicide with 2,977 victims)? Because all of America was the target. And those who were around on that day can testify that every single person was affected. (I had an irrational anxiety about crossing large bridges for months – a real problem in Portland). The goal wasn’t to kill just the people on the planes, in the Pentagon, and in the World Trade Center. The intended victim was all Americans. Terrorism is a message crime targeted at entire populations. A swastika spray-painted on a Jewish family’s car is going to impact more than just that family. This is why these laws exist. Greater harm.
The research is clear. Hate hurts more. Nobody wants to be a victim of a crime. It straight up sucks. But hate crimes tend to be more violent, like baseball repeatedly bashing a skull violent. Like Osama bin Laden, hate criminals want to send a clear message to a larger population. Get out of my land. If hate crime victims survive, they are more likely to need reconstructive surgery and long term-therapy compared to other victims of violent crime. We know that hate crime victims have deeper psychological scars and suicide attempts. When someone beats you for your gender identity, it’s deeper than someone beating you because they want your debit card. Victims of hate tend to withdraw and then the cavalcade of problems continue; at their job, in their family, and with their community.
It doesn’t end there. The target community also suffers. Who is going to be the next victim? Is this attack a reflection of wider beliefs? If there is a gay bashing in Portland tonight, all members of the LGBTQ community in Portland will experience the wave of anxiety and impulse to withdraw. The 1988 murder of Mulugeta Seraw in Portland by racist skineads created a wave of fear in the city, and not just among the local Ethiopian community. Many people of color shut their doors and focused on their and their children’s safety. Like how Americans felt after 9/11, but just think of a 9/11 after 9/11 after 9/11.
Wait, there’s more! Researchers have found that whole communities suffer after a hate crime. People start wondering what side their neighbors are on. Vibrant networks are strained as distrust grows. Yusef Hawkins was a 16-year-old black boy who was murdered by a white mob in Bensonhurst, New York in 1989. In the aftermath, the community erupted into months of racial conflict and violence. To this day, you can’t hear the name “Bensonhurst” and not think of how bad we can be to each other.
That leads to the last harm, the place itself. Like Bensonhurst, what do you think of when someone says Jasper, Texas or Laramie, Wyoming? There’s a good chance you recall the brutal 1998 murders of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard. Places become stigmatized by the hate crimes that occur there. Many people across the world still think of the Seraw killing (29 years ago!) when someone says “Portland, Oregon.” I’ve had numerous people ask me, “Is Portland safe? I’ve heard about these skinheads.” And pity the poor state of Idaho. Nobody is looking at brochures from the Chamber of Commerce these days. They’re using Google and guess what they find when they look up Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
I am not your white person
In the Academy Award-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, the late African-American author James Baldwin asks us to take a real look at the state of race in America. Not a Hollywood version, but a real hard look. And by “us,” he really means white people because everybody else pretty much knows what’s up. I’ve learned that most white people don’t like it when a person of color holds a mirror too close to their face. They’ll call them “racist” for trying to show them their own unstated racism. They’ll accuse them of “stirring up trouble” (as a white friend from Georgia said on my Facebook page today about Rev. Al Sharpton and Rep. John Lewis). Looking is uncomfortable. The airbrushed version of myself is so much prettier.
The ugly reflection is that hate crimes are on the increase in America. Bomb threats at Jewish Centers, Muslim-Americans being assaulted and told to leave the country, Latinos being beaten by self-styled vigilantes, gay and trans kids being bullied, and, yes, even some white folks getting beaten up just for being white. This is the civil war our current president has no interest in rectifying. In fact, he has only fanned the flames of hatred.
In Oregon, we are trying to take a stand against both the history of oppression and the current effort to take us back to “again,” when, for some people, America was “great.” Never again. I’m proud to be a part of that effort.
Riding on a Portland bus one time, I was talking to one of my PSU students and said, “I was at a Klan rally once…” and I think all talk on the bus stopped. My student knew I was referring my years of undercover work in the white supremacist world, but the passengers on the Number 8 likely thought I was one of the racist recruiters that pop up in the city looking for fresh cuts for the coming race war.
It’s impossible to count the number of white supremacists I’ve interviewed over the last 30 years. Over 200, for sure. Some of that was at covert Klan rallies in Georgia, in dark strip bars in Oregon, and in the bright light of the mainstream media. (Somebody please put my appearance on the Sally Jesse Raphael Show on YouTube. It’s a Klanriffic hoot!) I’ve interviewed anti-government militia members in a cabin in Montana and Aryan murderers in a Texas prison where I had to wear a Kevlar vest (to protect my vital organs, the guard said). And I’ve interviewed grandsons of real Nazis in Berlin, standing next to the rubble of the wall. And I’ve heard it all.
In qualitative research we call it “data saturation.” When you start hearing the same thing over and over again, you’ve probably got enough information to start building a theory. Did you know the world is controlled by a secret Jewish cabal? Did you know that Jews in the music business want white kids to listen to rap music so they won’t listen to their own “white” music? (Yodeling, perhaps.) Did you know that if a white woman has intercourse with a black man, his sperm is so potent, any child she has after that will be part black? (I always thought that one was a pretty good case for black supremacy.) These people were mastering alternative facts before Sean Spicer knew how to chew gum.
People often ask, “How can you sit down and talk to these Nazis?” Well, beer helps. And growing up in a Klan town, like Stone Mountain, Georgia, doesn’t hurt. Many of these “extremists” are a lot like the people I grew up with, a few who went off and joined the Klan or other racist groups. They are, at their core, human beings who are trying to make sense of the world with the tools they’ve been given. And that’s why there is hope.
When I started interviewing racist skinheads in the 1980s, people would ask me, “What happens to these people when they grow up?” And I’d say, “I don’t know. Talk to me in 30 years and I’ll tell you.” Now there is a whole world of former racist activists who are actively engaged in the other side, working to undue the hate they once spread. They have written amazing books, like Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, and formed vitally important organizations, Life After Hate. Individually and collectively they talk to young people about the mistakes and thinking errors they made that caused them to burn up valuable time in their lives while undermining the essential peace in our communities. The best person to talk about the problems with living in the extreme right-wing is somebody who used to live in the extreme right-wing.
I’ve been honored to help many people leave the world of hate. They use their experience as both a source of reflection and advocacy. I have to think the same will be true with many Trump followers. That as the true agenda of his administration becomes clear, many of those people who voted for him, including people in my family, will see the thinking errors and reject his dangerous demagoguery. The best people to talk about the dangers of supporting Donald Trump will be people who used to support Donald Trump. Just like inside every white supremacist is a potential committed anti-racist activist, inside every Trump supporter is a potential social justice warrior. The threat of Trump to core American values is just too serious to not try.
I want to briefly outline a few traps that both white supremacists and Trump fans (and plenty of liberals) get caught in. Maybe these issues can be addressed when attempting to appeal to the humanity of either. (By the way, I could write a book on each of these. But here are 3 quickies.)
Low-Effort Thinking
When we are young we learn in opposites. Up/down, good/bad, hot/cold. It’s been something of a miracle that I’ve convinced my 2-year-old daughter that there is a category called “warm.” But when we’re kids, the Good Guys are always good and the Bad Guys are always bad (and look it). Similarly, we think of gender as “opposite sexes.” As we get older, things become more nuanced and endlessly shaded in grey, depending on context. Are those guys terrorists or freedom fighters? It depends what side you are on. Is that person male or female? Try asking them how they identify.
Many of the people I studied never graduated to shades of grey. Figuring out the context was too much work. They’d say things like, “How come black people can use the N word but I can’t?” Everything associated with white was good, and non-white was bad. Men were men and women were girls. Their leaders were infallible (until they weren’t) and anything outside their tiny subculture was perverted and corrupt. Stereotypes were absolute and they actively looked for anything to confirm them (“Did you hear about that black guy who raped the white girl?”) and ignored anything that invalidated the stereotype (like their own white criminality).
Numerous studies have backed this up. Feminist Patricia Hill Collins has long examined how dichotomous thinking fosters racism and the research supports the idea that people who see the world in black and white have a hard time empathizing with people they don’t see as members of their group. A 2012 study found this type of “low-effort thinking” pushed people towards the conservative end of the political spectrum. It’s just easier. John Wayne never worried about “nuance,” right?
Of course this is the hallmark of the Trump supporter who hates Obamacare but wants to keep the benefits gained under the Affordable Care Act. (Anything associated with Obama is “bad.”) In Trumpland, you are either with us or against us. America first! There’s no need for diplomacy when your arsenal is bigger than theirs. Trump was the guy who said the show Blackish was racist because you couldn’t have a show called Whiteish (which would be 98% of the shows on TV). And Ben Carson’s goofy comments about immigration and slavery are no different than Obama’s. Don’t ask me to look at the “context.”
On its surface, it seems moronic, but we all engage in some type of low-effort thinking. I still think anyone who plays for the New York Yankees must be care more about money than the game. Could I be wrong?
It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya!
That low-effort thinking paves the way for conspiracy theories. Nazis are the master of this. It all goes back to their hackneyed belief that events across the planet are controlled by a secret gang of Jewish rabbis. Why is circumcision the norm in the United States? Those rabbis want to lob off gentile foreskins to force the goyim into submission. They’ve got a million of these.
The conspiracy theory orders their world and simplifies it. A white student fails social studies? It’s because he or she is being forced a “multicultural curriculum meant to make whites feel guilty.” A white dude can’t find a girlfriend? It’s because the Zionist Occupation Government gets non-white women to die their hair blonde so you can’t tell who is truly “white.” (A Neo-Nazi once shot up a bunch of beauty parlors for this exact reason.) The theory explains literally EVERYTHING. No context or thinking required.
You have to think Joseph Goebbels would be proud of Donald Trump, the modern master of the alt-right conspiracy theory lifted straight from Alex Jones’ Infowars. From “Obama’s birth certificate” to “Obama tapped my phones!,” it’s an endlessly fact-free world and his supporters love it. The Mexican government is conspiring to send its rapists across the border and the “fake media” is conspiring to make him look bad. The definition of “fake news” has been repurposed to mean anything that’s not favorable coverage of his ego-driven administration, sending his loyal troops to get their information from “real news” sources, like Breitbart and the National Enquirer. Conspiracy theories about Muslims and refugees and Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s the dumbing down of America. Where have we seen this kind of cultural thinking before? Hint: You won’t find the answer at Breitbart.
Inside the bubble
All this leads to something we’ve been hearing a lot about lately, life under the dome. (And not the cancelled CBS show I was briefly addicted to.) Hate groups work a lot like cults. The flow of information inside the bubble confirms all biases and anything outside the bubble must be avoided, including that gay uncle and cousin who dated a black guy, as well as the classmate who went off to college and was brainwashed by the liberal Jewish (or Jewish liberal) education system. Under the dome their is complete accord – that everyone outside the dome sucks.
That echo chamber is a powerful force on social media where it’s easy to mute a noisy neighbor who has upsetting viewpoints. I’ll admit I’ve blocked a few Trumpies this past year, mainly because I don’t want to waste time arguing. I’m happy to engage, but anytime I see the word “libtard,” I just close my laptop and make a sandwich. That’s not a person who wants a reasoned conversation.
While there are echo chambers on both the right and left, research shows conservatives are more likely to seek out news sources that confirm their own political positions while liberals are more likely to seek out opposing views. (I always enjoy a quick dip in the Fox News crazy house.) Conservatives tend to be more distrustful of anything coming from outside their bubble. There’s little chance for an alternative perspective if your Trump-loving dad thinks the New York Times is “fake news” and would rather proclaim, “Ditto, Rush!”
Learning from ex-Nazis
The path out of the white supremacist world is often a very personal one. I’ve published about male racists connecting with females who impressed upon them the value of empathy and their own potential victim status as women. Frank Meeink, former racist skinhead leader, has written about how life routinely put people in his path who shattered all his stereotypes. One of my friends was involved in a notorious racist murder in Portland and her conversion started when she befriended her black cellmate and began listening to stories from outside her bubble.
Even the most hard-core Trump supporter has potential of moving to a radically different position. We’re already seeing scores of disillusioned Trump voters who see that they’ve been duped. If we can help move others out of the black/white thinking, away from the simplistic conspiracy theories, and out of their echo chamber, the possibilities are endless. They’ll reflect back on the days when they were chanting, “Build a wall!” and “Lock her up!” and shake their heads. Instead of pushing them further into a dark corner, we can walk them out to the light.
This piece is dedicated to my family and friends who voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016. It’s 2017 and the door is open.
I’m kinda old (I turned 53 this week), so forgive me if I appear a bit jaded by the current state of corrupt politics. You see, I came of (political) age in the Watergate era so I know exactly how this Trump mess is gonna end.
When Richard Nixon won reelection on November 7, 1972, I was an 8-year-old third grader at Atherton Elementary in Dekalb County, Georgia. Please do not tell anyone this, but I supported Republican Nixon over Democrat George McGovern. The truth is Nixon’s nose reminded me of Bob Hope’s. That’s all it took. I was unaware that the “White House Plumbers” had already broken into the Watergate Hotel and begun their crime spree under the guidance of Tricky Dick and his funky beak. In those days Republicans couldn’t get the Russians to break into Democratic National Committee files. They had to do it themselves. (Ah, those were the days.)
By the following spring, the Senate Watergate hearings were being broadcast live on all three networks. (That’s all we had, folks!) I was 9 and, instead of running wild through the Georgia pines, I was glued to the boob tube, fascinated at the collapse of the highest power in the land, John Dean’s cover-up-cracking testimony, the president of the United States asserting “I am not a crook,” missing minutes of secret Oval Office recordings, and the whistle blowing of black security guard Frank Willis. (John Lennon was glued too and even showed up, with Yoko, to witness the hearings on June 27, 1973.) It was as if my beloved country was breaking in half and trust in authority was evaporating. When Vice President Spiro Agnew (who hated the news media before it was fashionalbe) resigned on October 10, 1973, I was just a fourth grader, but I knew Nixon would appoint a vice president who would later pardon him. My first Latin was “Quid pro quo.”
The following spring, hearings for the impeachment of the president began. That summer I finally made it to Washington DC and had the honor of taking a crap in Nixon’s White House. Soon after that historic dump, before congress could finalize the ugly task of impeachment, on August 8, 1974, the President of the United States of America resigned. His recently appointed VP, (now President) Gerald Ford pardoned him. I freakin’ told you so. Nixon rode off to the Orange County sunset with one last victory sign but the nation was forever broken. He was a crook. And now aren’t they all?
Much has been written about how the Baby Boom cohort lost its idealism because of Watergate. That the Woodstock generation caved in to self-serving narcissism and nostalgia paving the way for the Reagan “revolution” in 1980. If you can’t trust the President, who can you trust, Dad? But it affected more than baby boomers. Us little Gen X kids grew up believing that absolute power corrupted absolutely. Whether it was Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal or Congress impeaching Bill Clinton for lying about a blow job. They’re all a bunch crooks. Why bother to even vote? What’s on the TV?
That’s why the relatively scandal free eight-years of Obama was such breath of fresh air. Is it possible that our elected officials might be capable of not disappointing us on each corner of the calendar? His kids didn’t even get wasted. One time Amy Carter came in to the record store I worked at in Stone Mountain and bought two tapes, Janis Joplin and The Clash. “My dad hates this shit,” she said. The Obamas gave us a weird sense of hope.
Then here comes Trump, probably the most corrupt president in American history. He’s still doing business deals and hiding God knows what in his tax returns, his advisors are winking at Neo-Nazis and Russian dictators, and his spokeswoman is hawking his daughter’s fake bourgeois clothes (made in China) on live TV. It’s like the White House has been turned into a giant dumpster fire. Meanwhile, Americans, desperate to hold on to their healthcare and not blow billions of taxpayer dollars on Trump’s vanity wall and a new nuclear arms race, are secretly hoping Justin Trudeau will quietly annex the Lower 48. Save us, JT!
It doesn’t seem like much of a question if Trump will get impeached but when. And will there be enough dirt to get creepy Mike Pence out, too? I think any sane American would gladly take Paul Ryan as president over this incompetent gang of shysters who are making our country less secure every day they are allowed to control the executive branch. (Is it too macabre to imagine Trump, Pence, and Steve Bannon being crushed to death in a tragic golf cart rollover?) I remember when I was a kid some conspiracy nuts thought the Soviet Union was somehow mixed up in the Watergate scandal. There’s an awful lot more evidence that Russia has its claws all over this administration. But the formerly Russian-hating right could care less. Maybe it’s because Russia is white. Now about those Mexicans and Muslims…
For those of us who grew up in the time of Watergate, it’s easy to get jaded. Why not turn off the political noise and become whatever the 2010s version of a yuppie is? But we saw what that got us in 1980, and for millions of Americans who didn’t have stock in IBM, it was pretty ugly. So let’s stay focused and drive the rats from the people’s house before they destroy it and let’s replace them with something beautiful. How about a vegetable garden?
I don’t think I’ve ever seen people so angry at a year, a manmade block of twelve months, like it was some independent actor. “2016 kicked my ass!” Granted, 2016 was the year that took away Carrie Fisher and gave us President-Elect Donald “Pussy Grabber” Trump, but it’s not the damn year’s fault. We’re all glad it’s over, but there’s little hope that 2017 is gonna be any better as America suffers the results of the greatest con in history and deals with even more cultural icon deaths. (Can I get $20 on Hugh Hefner by Valentines Day?)
On the home front, it was a wonderful year as I watched our daughter Cozy go from a toddling toddler to an articulate 2-year-old who is happy to argue that Mickey and Minnie Mouse are really the same person/mouse and knows the proper usage of no, nope, and “No way, Mommy.” She can also sing “Hey Jude” all the way through. (Well, at least the good bits.) It’s been an insane year watching her transition from “baby” to “person.” A highlight of each day has been picking up Andrea from her job at the law firm and relaying what amazing feat she’s accomplished that day. Yesterday she put on a dress by herself and then put a little Santa figure on a spinning turntable and screamed, “Help, Daddy!” over and over again. Poor Santa.
This blog has been a great way to chart both her development and the development of the world she is growing up in. I’ve been able to bounce back from macro to micro on a weekly basis. From her potty training to the terrorist attack in Brussels, it’s all been here, warm and fuzzy moments and moments of shear horror. Of the 54 posts in 2016, the most popular (over 9,200 reads) and discussed (30 comments) was one of my several pieces on rape culture, entitled Why we can’t have good things: Men and rape culture (June 2). My favorite piece was actually written by Andrea, a powerful guest essay on her border crossing, that was latter published in the collection, A Journey of Words.
Donald Trump’s name was in the title of seven blogposts but, in a way, his tiny fingers were in all of them as he is the figurehead of the cultural backlash that our Cozy must live in. If Russian Stooge Trump (or Crooked Trump, either works) makes it to the end of his first term, Cozy will be six-years-old and we’ll be hoping there will still be public schools to send her to. Let’s hope there’s still a United States, as well.
There has been plenty of commentary on Cozy’s gendered (or non-gendered) development, as well as commentary on shows we watched while she was asleep or at her abuela’s (The Walking Dead, The Good Wife, Stranger Things, etc.). A little bit about sports, Sigmund Freud, and maybe not enough about why saying “all lives matter” makes you sound racist.
Who knows were 2017 will take us. It feels like the Trump trolls, Trump billionaires, and Trump generals want to roll America back to a dark time where the freedom of anyone who wasn’t a straight white cis-gendered Christian male was just a far off dream. But I think they underestimate our will to defend what we’ve won and fight on every single front, including on-line. My sincere hope is that Donald will realize this job is a bit harder than he hoped and go back to his tacky gold castle after a few months of trying to understand how the Constitution actually works.
In the meantime, we will be raising our daughter to stand strong against the next generation of pussy grabbers that Trump has been fostering. We will travel, write, make art, and continue to rage against those in power who rage for the machine. And maybe dad will take a great job somewhere on earth to help move the wheels of justice in the right direction.
Here are the Watching the Wheels posts of 2016. Thank you for letting me share these thoughts with you.
Watching the Wheels 