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right-wing terrorism
Trump’s Terrifying Pardons: Egocentric, Incompetent Leadership Provokes Panic
Individuals eager to overturn democratic institutions stand sanctioned, if not emboldened, to commit another violent insurrection.
Jan 30, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders rattled nerves, elevating the tension levels of many Americans. On his first day in office, he pardoned the January 6 rioters, withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, transferred 1,500 military personnel to the southern border, and began mass deportations. Each of his leadership behaviors rings their own unique alarms. But in the interest of brevity, I’ll explore only the impact of the pardons.
Trump promised to screen those prosecuted for the seriousness of those January 6 crimes—at least during the weeks prior to taking office. Nonetheless, on his fateful first day, Trump issued blanket pardons for all of the approximately 1,600 individuals involved in the insurrection. One-third of those cases involved “assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement.” Trump wiped the insurrection’s criminality clean, issuing “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to those prosecuted; he also commuted the sentences of those already serving prison time. A few cases involved brutal violence, and several others sedition.
Examination of even a small sampling of these cases explains why anxiety erupted, how rage fuels it, and how general fearfulness can be expected to surge over time. Consider these examples, starting with the ones who committed violent acts.
Trump rendered the January 6 event a non-event. The insurrection (almost) vanishes from history.
Daniel Rodriguez received a three-year sentence for deploying an “electroshock weapon” against a policeman and then “plunging it into the officer’s neck.” William Lewis received the same amount of jail time for spraying “streams of Wasp and Hornet Killer spray at multiple police officers.” Israel Easterday received a 30-month sentence for blasting an officer “in the face with pepper spray at point-blank range,” after which the officer “collapsed and temporarily lost consciousness.” The brutality of these crimes is self-evident.
Regarding prosecutions for sedition, former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio received a 22-year prison sentence for orchestrating his far-right extremist group’s attack on the Capitol. It topped the 18-year sentence handed out for Oath Keeper’s founder Stewart Rhodes. One-time Proud Boys leader Ethan Nordean also received an 18-year sentence. The leader of the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, Kelly Megs, was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Details of their guilt in directly planning to overturn the U.S. government can be found in publicly available court documents.
Perhaps the clearest example of sedition occurred when the Southern states seceded from the United States in 1861, sparking the Civil War. Sedition, the crime of illegally inciting people to rebel against a government, is rarely prosecuted. The last significant case of sedition involved socialist leader Eugene V. Debs who, during World War I, urged resistance to the draft and obstructed military recruitment. He was convicted of sedition in 1918, receiving a 10-year sentence. The fact that four of the January 6 insurrectionists were convicted of sedition is remarkable. But, now, and again, those convictions—for literally attempting to topple our government—are moot.
Most presidents issue pardons at the end of their terms, not at the beginning. They deliver them for reasons related to the public good, not for their self-interests. For the first time in U.S. history, Trump pardoned these individuals on his first day and for his personal gain. The pardons reinforce the fictional narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him—a belief Trump (allegedly) holds despite the absence of a shred of tangible evidence. More importantly, they show how Trump’s egotism overshadows his regard for the rule of law.
Americans’ levels of anxiety heightened, in reaction to these pardons, for several reasons. The perpetrators of the January 6 violence, not only freed but newly empowered, may go on to harm others. Several have already threatened those who testified against them, including injured Capitol police officers. Some promise retribution. Who cannot help but feel fearful of the release of violent criminals in any context?
Those convicted of sedition, and many of those who committed violence, show no remorse. Some feel proud, considering their actions necessary. Because of the pardons or commutations, the perpetrators can retain weapons they own or purchase new ones. Will their freedom lead directly to other forms of violence? Might Trump’s pardons inspire other would-be violent criminals? These are all nerve-wracking questions.
Trump’s executive order also negates the time spent by prosecutors, defense attorneys, bailiffs, and jurors involved in these cases, blatantly disrespecting them. Given that nearly 2,000 cases were filed, it is likely that 40,000 or more persons served in the justice process. Their hundreds of thousands of hours of work, time spent away from the families, and the stress involved in processing these cases ends up a total waste. Dispiriting is too mild a word. Trump shows a breathtaking lack of understanding of what justice means.
On an entirely different level, the pardons and commutations threaten the foundations of governmental order. All indictments, prosecutions, and sentences, for charges ranging from trespassing to seditious conspiracy, have been nullified. Trump rendered the January 6 event a non-event. The insurrection (almost) vanishes from history. And now armed individuals intent on overturning the U.S. government, and those lying in wait for the opportunity, remain a lingering risk. Individual loyalties to Trump could change in a hot second. Individuals eager to overturn democratic institutions stand sanctioned, if not emboldened, to commit another violent insurrection.
Trump’s executive orders impact the American psyche in still other ways. We Americans, or citizens of any country, rely on government to provide a basic sense of physical and emotional stability. Along with ensuring access to clean water and air, food, education, and medical care, governments provide citizens with law enforcement and judicial systems. The fairness of these systems warrant constant evaluation, but not through their destruction. Trump opened fault lines in these basic structures, eliciting distrust. Whether conscious of them or not, Americans feel these losses. Will we be safe from harm, or from another attempt to bring the government down? Will other institutions be threatened? While I was finalizing this essay, Trump issued a directive freezing spending on all forms of federal assistance.
Finally, many individuals (like me) are enraged at Trump’s release of individuals who the justice system indicted, tried, and imprisoned. Anger that lacks an adaptive channel of expression may cause any number of psychophysiological problems. It becomes suppressed (conscious) and repressed (unconscious). Americans can expect to experience symptoms ranging from headaches and muscle pain to panic attacks and depression.
Events like these pardons and commutations, or the federal funding freeze, seep into our collective psyches, our unconscious minds. They impact Trump’s supporters, most of whom will feel concern about his impulsivity despite their backing his election. In a statement made in his first day in office, Trump declared, “We’re going to do things that people will be shocked at.” One week in, and he has indeed delivered shocks.
Trump continues to make disquieting speeches and to issue orders. He acts impulsively. Many of his directives, like nominating unfit individuals for cabinet level positions or removing security details for his former advisors, show a reckless disregard for the American public. Trump is motivated by power and revenge, not by empathy and care. He displays precisely the opposite qualities of a competent leader. Simple logic argues that Americans’ anxiety levels will be on the rise.
Thus far, Americans mostly remain apathetic, as I discussed in a recent essay. However, one wonders when the angst and the anger fueling much of it will rise to the surface. When, and if, it does, oppositional movements will likely emerge. Quite possibly, there will be mass demonstrations. These will further test Trump’s judgment. Will he heed their calls, or will he turn the military against American citizens? What if the military refuses? Could there be a military coup? Then, real panic would arise. The international financial markets would crash. Even glancing fantasies of such scenarios raise blood pressures, validating that Trump’s first days in office are truly creating a pandemic of fear.
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The Third Manifesto: A Tale of Two Terrorists
The FBI now apparently decides, not only what is or isn’t “terrorism,” but what is or isn’t evil. Why? Because its power and autonomy grow when the public is fearful of “the Other.”
Jan 21, 2025
On New Years’ Eve, two men reportedly committed public acts of violence: a mass murder in New Orleans and an explosion in Las Vegas. Both alleged perpetrators served in the military. Both had troubled personal lives. Both issued makeshift “manifestos”; one through video recordings, the other through emails and social media. And both fit the federal government’s definition of a “terrorist.” But one was white and seemingly Christian by background; the other was Black and Muslim. Therein hangs a tale.
The discourse regarding these two men can be read as a “third manifesto”—a subtle but fiercely ideological statement from a cabal of overlapping interests seeking to manipulate public opinion.
The Acts
Shamsud-Din Jabbar reportedly stated that the Bourbon Street attack, which left a horrifying toll of dead and injured, was motivated by extremism. “I joined ISIS,” Jabbar reportedly said. For that reason, Jabbar’s alleged crimes match the FBI’s definition of “international terrorism”:
Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations...
Matthew Livelsberger allegedly exploded a Tesla truck outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas, injuring seven people. His weapon was a “moving vehicle improvised explosive device” (MVIED). Thankfully, no one was killed, but they certainly could have been.
Since Livelsberger provided a political motive for his action, it matches the FBI’s definition of what it calls “domestic terrorism”:
Violent, criminal acts… to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
And yet, only one of these two men was called a terrorist in the media.
Two Terrorists
Here are two New York Times “human interest” headlines about Jabbar:
- ‘I Joined ISIS’: The New Orleans Attacker’s Secret Radicalization
- ‘No Terrorist to Me’: Relatives and Friends Saw Few Signs Before Attack
Both articles take it as a given that Jabbar is a terrorist.
Here are two Times headlines about Livelsberger:
- Soldier in Tesla Blast Had PTSD and Feared U.S. ‘Collapse,’ Officials Say
- Soldier’s Struggles Began Long Before Las Vegas Blast, Nurse Says
The contrast couldn’t be plainer. The human-interest angle on Jabbar is, “What made him a terrorist?” For Livelsberger it’s, “What suffering caused him to do such a thing?”
“Secret Radicalization”
The subheader for the Times’ “secret radicalization” article cites “Jabbar’s growing discontent with American society and increasing isolation even within his local Muslim community.” (Italics mine.) One relative told the Times that Jabbar and his brothers lived largely secular lives. “I don’t think I ever heard the word Allah said,” the relative said.
The word “even” is doing a lot of work here, suggesting that Jabbar’s pathology is linked to his Muslim-ness. But the article describes Jabbar as an “outcast” among “fellow believers.”
Nobody the Times interviewed had ever seen him praying in congregation, even after he reportedly became radical. That raises a question: How Muslim was Jabbar, exactly? Congregational prayer is obligatory for practicing Muslims. Its absence should have raised a question: Was he really motived by his religious beliefs, as they suggest? Or, was he driven by something else, like stress, mental illness, or other factors—the forces that the media used to explain Livelsberger’s actions?
Financial crimes kill. But that kind of terror doesn’t get much headline coverage,
“Increasing isolation, even in the Muslim community,” they wrote. It’s not clear, however, how much he even belonged to that community.
Coverage of Jabbar hints at other motives, if you look hard enough. CNN reports that Jabbar’s videos expressed rage over his recent divorce. He had financial woes, declaring in court that he couldn’t keep up his mortgage payments. He reportedly said he’d planned to kill his family before deciding to stage an attack in ISIS’ name instead. That sounds less like ideology and more like pathology.
It also seems like a relatively recent development. A friend of Jabbar’s told The Associated Press:
I did anti-terrorism in the military. And if any red flags would have popped off, I would have caught them and I would have contacted the proper authorities.
It is confirmed that Jabbar belonged to at least one criminal organization. He was a former employee of Deloitte, the international finance and consulting conglomerate. Deloitte has paid more than a quarter-billion dollars ($283,797,673) for government-contracting, financial fraud, and employment-related offenses since the year 2000.
Financial stress causes physical harm to millions of Americans every year. People with money problems are up to 20 times likelier to attempt suicide.
Financial crimes kill. But that kind of terror doesn’t get much headline coverage.
The Hero
Livelsberger got the benefit of doubt that was denied to Jabbar. Law enforcement set the tone, as when the local sheriff told reporters:
Am I comfortable calling it a suicide mission? I’m comfortable calling it a suicide, with a bombing that occurred immediately thereafter.
The next day, FBI Special Agent In Charge Spencer Evans explicitly denied that Livelsberger’s act was political. Rather, Evans said, the explosion “ultimately appears to be a tragic case of suicide involving a heavily decorated combat veteran who was struggling with PTSD and other issues.”
That’s nothing short of bizarre. The FBI already had communications from Livelsberger calling for an armed uprising against the United States government. They included explicit instructions for a violent right-wing revolt:
- “Military and vets move on D.C. starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.”
- “Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of thousands.”
- “Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is complete.”
- “Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to avoid collapse.”
But law enforcement chose the message: Livelsberger was a suffering hero, not a terrorist. Contrast that with its treatment of Jabbar, who a senior FBI official said was “100% inspired” by ISIS. “This was an act of terrorism,” he said. “It was premeditated and an evil act.”
The FBI now apparently decides, not only what is or isn’t “terrorism,” but what is or isn’t evil. Why? Because its power and autonomy grow when the public is fearful of “the Other”—a definition that, in today’s society, matches Jabbar’s profile but not Livelsberger’s.
The media follow its lead, but why? To appease government sources, especially under a new administration? Because they don’t dare describe right-wing violence as “terrorism”? Because the “hero” angle makes better copy? Because America idolizes its highly-trained killers? Because Livelsberger was white and not Muslim?
Perhaps it was all of the above.
The Third Manifesto
“I have joined ISIS,” Jabbar reportedly said. “Purge,” ”fight,” “ “by any means necessary,” Livelsberger reportedly said. If Jabbar was “secretly radicalized,” so was Livelsberger.
Matthew Livelsberger served in Afghanistan under traumatizing circumstances. He deserved the best care his nation could provide. Know who else served in Afghanistan? Shamsud-Din Jabbar. Don’t feel badly if you didn’t know; it hasn’t gotten much coverage.
Were these men terrorists, damaged souls, or both?
The fact that both alleged perpetrators were ex-military is important. Service in the United States military is the single greatest predictor of extremist, mass-casualty violence.
Not mental illness. Not “Islamism.” Not previous criminal history. U.S. military service is the greatest predictor—and it’s getting worse.
That’s something we’re really not supposed to think about. But we should—not to judge or condemn those who serve, but to understand them, to provide better care, and to minimize the chance of more violence in the future.
“Terrorism” is an ideologically freighted word. If we must use it, we must be consistent. Its selective application here serves as an invisible “manifesto,” one that’s scrawled across our public discourse in invisible ink. It declares that Muslims are the enemy while White right-wing extremists are safe, comfortable, “us.”
Were these men terrorists, damaged souls, or both? I’m not wise enough to judge. But I do know that a just society would judge them fairly, and that a free society needs an honest media—one that provides its citizens with more information and less manipulation.
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Know the Names of Kissinger’s Victims
The death of Henry Kissinger allows us to remember that his 3 to 4 million victims are not just amorphous entities but individuals who had names, families, lives, hopes, and dreams.
Dec 05, 2023
Historian Greg Grandin, in his 2015 biography of Henry Kissinger, estimated that Kissinger’s policies were responsible for 3 to 4 million deaths around the world—from Vietnam to Pakistan, to Indonesia, to Chile, to southern Africa, to the Middle East. Grandin’s damning indictment against the former U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state is powerful and overwhelming.
But large numbers like 3 to 4 million mask the very real pain, terror, and tragedy suffered by those individuals and their families. Look at the cases of Charles Horman, Frank Teruggi, and Ronni Moffit. All three were Americans killed by the Kissinger-Nixon backed Chilean military junta that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Horman and Teruggi were journalists in Chile in 1973 when the coup happened. They were taken to the infamous National Stadium in Santiago where they were executed along with thousands of Chileans. Their story was painfully yet meaningfully represented in the 1982 film Missing with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek.
My wish would be that anyone who praises Kissinger or cites his “accomplishments” must also acknowledge his victims and know some of their names.
"Ronni Moffit was a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C, who was riding in a car with her husband Michael Moffit and the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Sheridan Circle when their car exploded. It was determined that a bomb was planted by agents of the Chilean secret police most likely under orders from junta leader General Augusto Pinochet.
The record indicates that Kissinger told Pinochet in a phone conversation in June of 1976 that his regime was a victim of leftist propaganda on human rights:
In the United States as you know we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.
A few months later, Moffit and Letelier were murdered. Letelier’s lower torso was blown away and his legs had been severed. Moffit’s larynx and carotid artery were slashed by a piece of shrapnel and she drowned in her own blood.
Most Americans today don’t know about these murders or the names of the three victims mentioned above. After all, it was almost 50 years ago and people have become inured to the many atrocities committed at home and abroad since then. The death of Henry Kissinger allows us to remember that his 3 to 4 million victims are not just amorphous entities but individuals who had names, families, lives, hopes, and dreams. They did not deserve to die miserable deaths.
My wish would be that anyone who praises Kissinger or cites his “accomplishments” must also acknowledge his victims and know some of their names. In particular, American media figures, politicians, and prognosticators should know who Charles Horman, Frank Teruggi, and Ronni Moffit were, how they died, and who was responsible for their deaths. Their families, friends, and descendants certainly know and deserve to have their pain and loss acknowledged.
Henry Kissinger never had to answer for his crimes or face his victims’ families. There is nothing we can do about this now that he is dead. But we can at least insure that his crimes and misdeeds are never forgotten.
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A Quashed Obama-Era Report on Right-Wing Extremism Could Have Saved Lives
The Obama administration bowed its head to the Republican mob and neutered its own ability to combat domestic terrorism, helping to bring the country to where it is today.
Aug 30, 2023
A few days ago, a white supremacist murdered three innocent Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville. Like the shooter in Buffalo and Dylann Roof in Charleston, he had a manifesto that espoused white nationalist talking points and conspiracy theories. The prevalence of racist attacks in recent years underscores the alarming rise of right-wing domestic terrorism in the United States. The problem I want to address is: Who at the highest levels of government is to blame for this?
In this instance, you can place much of the blame at the feet of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has made it his mission to erase the country’s history of anti-Black violence in his state’s education system. The Biden administration could surely utilize the bully pulpit more to attack domestic terror (after all, their FBI director, Chris Wray, has stressed that one of the greatest threats to U.S. democracy is right-wing extremism). And of course, you cannot talk about the surge in right-wing terror without discussing Donald Trump, who famously refused to denounce white supremacy. But an overlooked source of the problem is that the Obama administration kowtowed to Republican lawmakers and talking heads as soon as they criticized a 2009 report sounding the alarm about the threat of right-wing extremism.
The prescient report angered a slew of House Republicans who called for Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano to be fired. Then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) described the report as including “about two-thirds of Americans, who, you know, who might go to church, who may have served in the military, who may be involved in community activities.” (As an aside, imagine what Boehner must think of himself a decade later describing actual terrorists as church-going community leaders. It is darkly amusing.). After the backlash from Republicans, the Napolitano-led DHS rescinded the report and the department dedicated to tracking domestic terrorism was, as The New York Times described, “essentially disbanded.”
Let’s not mince words here: The Obama administration caved to GOP pressure. And because of not wanting to anger Republicans, over a decade later, that analyst’s fears have materialized.
Yes, that’s right, the Obama administration continued to give Republicans exactly what they wanted by peeling back much of its work on countering political violence. DHS cut the number of personnel studying domestic terrorism unrelated to Islam, canceled state and local law enforcement briefings, and held onto almost a dozen reports on extremist groups. There was some talk in the administration about the potential harm it would do to turn a blind eye to those groups. And yet, that’s precisely what the White House did, deferring to Republicans and ultimately contributing to this dangerous moment in history.
Let’s not mince words here: The Obama administration caved to GOP pressure. And because of not wanting to anger Republicans, over a decade later, that analyst’s fears have materialized. Rather than ignoring the cries from House Republicans as well as conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh—who claimed that “there is not one instance they can cite as evidence where any of these right-wing groups have done anything”—the Obama administration bowed its head to the mob and neutered its own ability to combat domestic terrorism.
The results of that ill-advised decision? In the 14 years since the report was released and then quashed, right-wing groups have increased the size of their ranks and unleashed violence against marginalized individuals with growing frequency. In addition, they have increased their presence in the nation’s military and policing institutions. Far-right extremists’ infiltration of the armed forces and law enforcement now poses an internal threat to the state’s security apparatus.
A Washington Post analysis explains that since 2015, right-wing extremists have been involved in 267 domestic terrorist plots or attacks, resulting in 91 fatalities. The Post shows that a majority of those deaths were caused by white supremacists who targeted Jewish people, Black people, immigrants, and those who identify as LGBTQIA+. Republicans in 2009 fully mobilized themselves against the DHS’ foresighted report warning of the mounting potential for reactionary violence. In the face of that pressure, the Obama administration rescinded the report and then largely ignored the threat of right-wing terror.
The Biden administration has an opportunity to rectify this problem. As the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Sherrilyn Ifill pointed out in the wake of the killing in Jacksonville this past weekend, the administration could declare white supremacist violence a national emergency. With nothing more than the president’s signature, the administration would be able to direct federal resources to combat the threat posed by far-right extremists. Congress can end a national emergency, but imagine the sheer backlash congressional Republicans would face for attempting to force a vote to eliminate an effort to correct a problem… they quite literally created.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the tragic shooting of three innocent Black people in Jacksonville. Again, Ron DeSantis’ crusade against minorities in his state and the Trump administration deserve the lion’s share (full stop). But the DHS’ silenced report from 2009 could have saved lives. People would still be here, white nationalists would likely not be marching in the streets, and we would have actual protocols in place to fight against this form of domestic terrorism. However, that is not the world we live in. We are here and now we must learn our lesson about what happens when well-meaning people lack sufficient political spine to fight with the malignant cancer known as right-wing extremism.
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How Can the Government Combat Extremism in the Military?
I worry about how much more extreme and violent this country has become in this century of failed wars.
Jul 17, 2023
In April, when Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman with a top-secret clearance, was arrested for posting a trove of classified documents about the Russia-Ukraine war online, the question most often asked was: How did such a young, inexperienced, low-level technician have access to such sensitive material? What I wanted to know was: How did he ever get accepted into the Air Force in the first place?
Teixeira seems to have leaked that secret information for online bragging rights rather than ideological reasons, so his transgression probably wouldn’t have fallen under the military’s newly reinforced regulations on extremist activities. After he was indicted, however, perturbing details about his behavior emerged, including his online searches for violent extremist events, an outsized interest in guns, and social media posts that an FBI affidavit called “troubling” and I’d call creepy.
Ideological zealotry is disruptive wherever it takes root, even if it never erupts into violence, but it’s particularly chilling inside the military. After all, servicemembers have access to weapons and the training to use them. Even more significant, a kind of quid pro quo exists between the military and civilians. Trust is paramount within the military, and every service member is supposed to abide by a code of ethics, as well as by the Constitution, to which all of them swear an oath.
In theory, a democratic civil society invests its military with the authority to use force in its name in exchange for the principled conduct of its members.
In theory, a democratic civil society invests its military with the authority to use force in its name in exchange for the principled conduct of its members. Military service is supposed to be a higher calling and soldiers better (or at least better behaving) people. So when active-duty personnel or veterans use violence against the system they’re sworn to protect, the sting of betrayal is especially sharp.
Whoops!
In a photo of Teixeira in a neat dress uniform that accompanied media reports, he’s a bright-eyed kid with stick-out ears and a sweet half-smile. He looks young and promising, the kind of guy people offer thanks to when they see him in uniform at an airport. In reality, however, everything else about him was a red flag.
The Washington Post found videos and chat logs that suggested he was getting ready for a race war. Former classmates told CNN that he had been obsessed with guns and war. He was suspended from high school for comments he made about Molotov cocktails. His first application for a gun license was denied, but he kept trying and was eventually approved, over time amassing a trove of handguns, rifles, shotguns, high-capacity weapons, and a gas mask, which he kept in a gun locker about two feet from his bed.
Granted, some of this activity didn’t begin until he enlisted in 2019 and no one’s advocating that military recruiters make bedroom checks. Still, recruits are supposed to go through a careful vetting process. Family, friends, teachers, and classmates may be interviewed to assess a recruit’s character and fitness. Such background checks are designed to detect things like racist tattoos, drug use, gang affiliation, or arrest records, but are inevitably limited in what they can discover about young people without much life experience, including the teenage gamers the Air Force woos for their up-to-the-minute technical skills who may not prove to be the most level-headed crew—people, in fact, like Jack Teixeira.
The vetting of service members for handling the top-secret or sensitive-compartmentalized-information security clearances he received in 2022 is supposed to be particularly thorough.
In his case in particular, the vetting of service members for handling the top-secret or sensitive-compartmentalized-information security clearances he received in 2022 is supposed to be particularly thorough. I was first faced with this reality when a government agent showed up at my door, flashed a badge, and asked me about a neighbor applying for a clearance. He inquired all too casually about whether I had noticed anything telling, like lots of liquor bottles in his trash. (That left me wondering how many people check their neighbor’s garbage.)
Teixeira’s posts of classified material taken from the computers of the intelligence unit at the Cape Cod air base where he was stationed first appeared on Thug Shaker Central, a small, obscure chat group which appealed largely to teenage boys through adolescent humor, a fetishistic love of guns, and extreme bigotry. It was hosted on the gamer-centric platform Discord. At first, he posted transcribed documents, then began photographing hundreds more in his parents’ kitchen and started uploading copies of them filled with secret materials on the U.S., its allies, and its enemies. Someone at Thug Shaker began sharing those posts more widely and they made their way to Russian Telegram channels, Twitter, and beyond—and Teixeira was in big trouble.
Since he seems to have made no effort to hide who he was, no one could call him the world’s smartest criminal. He made it all too easy for the FBI to track him down. By then, Air Force officials had already admonished him for making suspicious searches of classified intelligence networks, but allowed him to stay in his job. That’s where the Justice Department charged him with the retention and transmission of classified information under the Espionage Act of 1917, which had already caught in its maw journalists, dissidents, whistleblowers (including Daniel Ellsberg, who, to the end of his life, wanted to challenge the act in court on First Amendment grounds), and most recently, another hoarder of classified documents, former President Donald Trump.
In June, Teixeira pleaded not guilty on six counts, each carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. Probably just as happy to let the civilians handle it, the Air Force removed the intelligence division from his unit, but it hasn’t yet brought charges against him.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin ordered a policy and procedure review to assess how bad Pentagon security really was. The results, made public on July 5, gave the military a passing grade but, with a firm grasp of the obvious, recommended more careful monitoring of the online activities of personnel with security clearances.
Small Numbers, Outsized Impact
Rhetoric and regulations addressing extremism in the military date back to at least 1969 and have been tinkered with since, usually in response to hard-to-ignore events like the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan in 2009. In reaction to the material Chelsea Manning (who was anything but an extremist) leaked to WikiLeaks to reveal human-rights abuses connected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Department of Defense created a counter-insider threat program around 2014. Six years later, the Army revised its policies for the first time to face the potential role of social media in extremist activities.
Tracking and reporting on extremism in the military has not been without controversy, which tended to be of the let’s-not-air-our-dirty-laundry-in-public variety. In 1986 when, for instance, the Southern Poverty Law Center informed the Department of Defense (DoD) that active-duty Marines were participating in the Ku Klux Klan, the Pentagon responded that the “DoD does not prohibit personnel from joining such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan.” (It still doesn’t name or ban specific organizations in its regulations.) And when, in 2009, a Department of Homeland Security assessment warned of right-wing extremists recruiting veterans, conservative politicians and veterans groups killed the report which, they claimed, was insulting to veterans.
Then came the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A striking number of participants proved to have military connections or histories—13.4% to 17.5% of those charged, depending on who’s counting—and the Pentagon could no longer ignore the problem. Defense Secretary Austin ordered an unprecedented, day-long stand-down to educate all military personnel on extremist activity and then created the Countering Extremist Activity Working Group, or CEAWG, to come up with a plan for dealing with that anything-but-new reality.
The New York Times estimated that active-duty military personnel and veterans accounted for at least 25% of antigovernment militias.
It’s not possible to pin down the true scope of the phenomenon, but the Center for Strategic and International Studies found active-duty and reserve personnel were linked to seven of the 110 terrorist attacks and plots the FBI investigated in 2020. That same year, The New York Times estimated that active-duty military personnel and veterans accounted for at least 25% of antigovernment militias. In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League identified 117 active-duty service personnel and 11 reservists on a leaked membership list from the Oath Keepers, the far-right antigovernment militia prominently involved in January 6 events. CEAWG, on the other hand, claimed that, in 2021, there were fewer than 100 substantiated cases of military personnel involved in officially prohibited extremist activity in the past year.
While such reckonings suggest that just a small number of servicemembers are actively involved in extremist violence, even a relative few should be concerning for obvious reasons.
Report, Revise, Reconsider
Opportunities to identify and prevent extremism arise at three junctures: during recruitment, throughout the active-duty years, and in the discharge process when those transitioning back to civilian life may be especially susceptible to promises of camaraderie and ready action from extremist groups. As 2021 ended, the Pentagon’s working group reported that it had addressed such vulnerabilities by standardizing questionnaires, clarifying definitions, and—that old bureaucratic fallback—commissioning a new study.
The revised rules included a long list of banned “extremist activities” and a long definition of what constitutes “active participation.” In addition to the obvious—violence, plans to overthrow the government, and the leaking of sensitive information—prohibited acts include liking, sharing, or retweeting online content that supports extremist activities or encouraging DoD personnel to disobey lawful orders with the intention of disrupting military activities.
Active participation includes organizing, leading, or simply attending a meeting of an extremist group and distributing its literature on or off base. Commanders may declare places off-limits where “counseling, encouraging, or inciting Service members to refuse to perform duty or to desert” occurs. That also sounds like it could apply to gatherings of antiwar groups like Veterans for Peace, where supporting war resisters is part of their mission. And therein lies the rub.
Anti-extremism may prove but one more victim of anti-diversity and, even without that, if money is a measure of commitment, the military’s commitment to fighting extremism is looking lukewarm at best.
As in the past, the updates focus on activity, rather than speech, which is a good thing, but figuring out how to suppress extremism without turning into the thought police is challenging, particularly in light of the prominence of social media and the impossibility of monitoring everyone’s online activity. The result: regulations that are both too vague and too restrictive and a recipe for implementing the rules unfairly.
In military culture, reporting is often equated with snitching and retaliation is common. Since it’s not practicable to draw bright lines between what’s allowed and what isn’t, that determination rests ultimately (and sometimes ominously) with commanders. The regulations urge them to balance First Amendment rights with “good order and discipline and national security.” In reality, however, such decisions too often fall prey to bias, distrust, self-interest, racial disparities, and a history of bad faith.
Then there’s the issue of paying for the extra work the rules require. The only relevant funding seems to be a puny $13.5 million for the insider-threat program. Meanwhile, the Pentagon budget that recently exited the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee makes it a “conservative priority” to defund the position of Deputy Inspector General for Diversity and Inclusion and Extremism in the Military. So anti-extremism may prove but one more victim of anti-diversity and, even without that, if money is a measure of commitment, the military’s commitment to fighting extremism is looking lukewarm at best.
Consistently Inconsistent
Recently, the Center for New American Security, a D.C.-based think tank, damned the military’s efforts to address domestic violent extremism historically as being all too often “reactionary, sporadic, and inconsistent” when it comes to recognizing the problem to be solved, or even admitting there is one. Though harsh, it’s not an unfair assessment.
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security research center at the University of Maryland, analyzed an extensive database of extremist activity in the U.S. called PIRUS and found that 628 Americans with military backgrounds were involved in such criminal activity from 1990 to March 2023. Almost all of them were male veterans, with Marines showing up in disproportionately large numbers (as they did among the January 6 arrestees). A slight majority of the cases considered involved violence and a large majority involved white supremacist militias. And here’s an intriguing fact that probably won’t surprise anyone who’s followed the U.S. military’s dismal war record in this century: Extremists with a military background were less successful in carrying out violent attacks than those without it.
Indeed, the extremist threat appears to be growing. A chart in a research brief looking at PIRUS data shows little blips for extremist cases in most years until the past six, including not only the (hopefully) unrepeatable 2021, but the years on either side of it.
Almost 18% of the veterans surveyed who agree with one of four cited extremist ideologies also support violence as a means of political change.
Activities that rise to the level of criminal conduct, however, tell only part of the story.
The RAND Corporation interviewed a large, demographically representative sample of veterans—mostly older, white, middle-class men who joined the military before 9/11—to assess sympathy for extremist organizations and ideas. The researchers found no evidence that veterans support violent extremist groups or their ideologies more than the rest of the American public does.
If you find that reassuring, however, think again. After all, according to the 2022 Yahoo! News/YouGov poll Rand used for comparison, a little more than a third of the U.S. population agrees with the Great Replacement Theory that “[a] group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views.” Am I supposed to be comforted because only about 5% fewer veterans think that?
Then there’s the finding that almost 18% of the veterans surveyed who agree with one of four cited extremist ideologies also support violence as a means of political change. That finding is scary, too, because extremist groups can take advantage of such veterans’ support for political violence to recruit them for their often all-too-violent purposes.
All of this leaves me very uneasy, both about what is being done and what should or even could be done. I worry about how much more extreme and violent this country has become in this century of failed wars. And I worry about anti-extremism policies sliding into prosecuting—and persecuting—people for disfavored beliefs, while immediate danger glides in from some unexpected source—like a 21-year-old techie, who, for reasons no one anticipated, pulled off one hell of a breach of national security right under the military’s nose.
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The Grim Lesson India Offers the US
Right-wing violence is on the rise in the world’s two largest democracies.
May 25, 2023
Are you worried about the rising political power of violent white nationalists in America? Well, you’ve got plenty of company, including U.S. national security and counterterrorism officials. And we’re worried, too—worried enough, in fact, to feel that it’s time to take a look at the experience of India, where Hindu supremacist dogma has increasingly been enforced through violent means. While there are striking parallels between both countries, India appears to have ventured further down the road of far-right violence. Its experience could potentially offer Americans some valuable, if grim, lessons.
As a start, let’s look at two recent incidents, one in India and the other in the United States.
Laws passed in most Indian states against the killing of cattle have served as a common pretext for the violent enforcement of Hindu beliefs. Recently, for example, three men were arrested on charges of abducting and murdering Junaid and Nasir, two Muslim men transporting cattle through the northern state of Haryana. They first beat Junaid to death, then strangled Nasir. Both bodies were incinerated in a car left at the side of the road. That attack was linked to paramilitary gangs known as gao rakshaks (cow protectors) who, in these last years, have been on a rampage of violence in northern India, though similar horrors have recently been recorded further south in Maharashtra, home to India’s largest city, Mumbai.
In the United States, too, violent hatred is both on the rise and being all too perversely celebrated on the right. Within three days of being charged with involuntary manslaughter, Daniel Penny, the U.S. Marine veteran who made national news by choking to death Jordan Neely, a homeless, mentally ill Black man on a New York City subway car, raised a whopping $2.7 million from the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. Charged with manslaughter, he’s already been dubbed a “subway Superman” by Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, while his fellow Floridian, Governor Ron DeSantis, tweeted that to “stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda” we all must “stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny.”
Sadly enough, those episodes, occurring half a globe apart, are just two data points in surges of violent extremism sweeping both India and the United States. That trend first took off in India in 2014 with the election victory of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), making him prime minister. In the United States, it hit big time with the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president. But such mayhem—and the broad approval of political violence by Hindu supremacists there and white supremacists here—has only grown in the years since.
Those incidents also illustrate one crucial difference between far-right violence in India and the United States. Whereas the surge of Hindu-supremacist violence has become a nationally organized collective effort, most American white-supremacist violence is still being committed by individuals acting alone.
In the U.S., we’ve experienced a growing outbreak of hate shootings in which the victims simply find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time (and all too often of the wrong color), even as a longer-term trend of mass killings committed by racially motivated and ever better armed “lone wolves” rises. Notably, among those solo actors, Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, and a host of others have reaped lavish praise from leading Trumpublican politicians, including that MAGA kingpin The Donald himself. (He, in fact, invited Rittenhouse to Mar-a-Lago in 2021.) And 2023 is already on track to set a record for mass shootings, while hate crimes in general rose to more than 200 per week in 2021, the last year for which the FBI has complete data. The vast majority of those crimes were committed by unaffiliated individuals.
In India, by contrast, hate violence is often highly organized. The cattle vigilantes recently arrested in Haryana, for example, were affiliated with Bajrang Dal, the youth wing of Vishnu Hindu Parishad (the World Hindu Council), which, in turn, is an offshoot of a vast Hindu nationalist paramilitary organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
The RSS movement was launched in 1925 with one mission: to make India (then still a British colony) a Hindu Rashtra—that is, a “Hindu Nation.” Its approach was inspired by the fascist movements of a century ago in Italy and Germany. Today, it has a membership of five to six million and holds daily meetings in more than 36,000 different locations across India. Worse yet, the ruling BJP party, with Modi at its head, is an offshoot of RSS.
In 2002, Modi was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat when horrific communal violence took almost 2,000 lives, mostly Muslim, in a political and social earthquake that helped kick off the current wave of Hindu nationalism. In 2014, on the strength of the Hindu nationalist bona fides he’d earned 12 years earlier, he became prime minister and soon all hell broke loose.
Cows and Bulls**t
In a majority of India’s states today, cow slaughter is designated a crime and put in the same category with rape, murder, or sedition. As Harsh Mander, who has organized against communal and religiously inspired violence, explains in his book Partitions of the Heart, “The campaign today that claims to defend [the cow] has nothing to do with love of any kind.” It is instead “another highly emotive symbol to beat down India’s minorities into submission and fear.”
Laws against cattle slaughter and beef consumption lay largely dormant until 2014. Now, they are being enforced ever more violently by Hindu supremacist vigilantes. Those laws, in fact, have provided a much-needed pretext for extreme violence. As Tej Parikh noted recently in the Asia-Pacific magazine The Diplomat, “Two Muslim women were raped in Mewat [in Haryana state] in early September [2022], after their attackers had accused them of eating beef.” And to put those acts in the context of this moment, he added that “the maximum sentence for a convicted rapist in Haryana is three years less than for a cow slaughtering offense.”
As Mander has pointed out, such beef bans are a tool for subjugating Muslims, Dalits (formerly referred to pejoratively as “untouchables”), Christians, and Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) to Hindu rule. Strange as it may sound, an American analogy could be the criminalization of abortion. In one country, cattle, in the other, human fetuses are being used as right-wing implements to oppress, socially control, and reassert supremacy over significant sections of our respective populations.
In one country, cattle, in the other, human fetuses are being used as right-wing implements to oppress, socially control, and reassert supremacy over significant sections of our respective populations.
As in the U.S., violence against women is rampant in India and perpetrators are often treated with remarkable leniency. Consider Sandip, Ramu, Lavkush, and Ravi, four upper-caste Hindus who, in 2020, tortured, gang-raped, and killed a 19-year-old Dalit girl in the middle of a pearl millet field in the state of Uttar Pradesh. This March, a court found Sandip alone guilty—and only of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder.” The other three men were acquitted.
In the Hindu supremacist context, the phrase ghar wapsi (which literally means “homecoming”) refers to forcibly converting people from Islam or Christianity to Hinduism. In a recent typical case, a BJP politician, the state secretary of Chhattisgarh in northeastern India, home to many low-caste Hindus and tribal peoples, coerced more than 1,100 Christians into undergoing a ghar wapsi ceremony.
Hindu supremacists regularly use confinement and violence to secure such conversions. For instance, two women have filed a complaint against priests at a yoga center in the state of Kerala where they were held captive in an effort to do so. “I was forced to do work as housemaid including cleaning and preparing dishes for 65 inmates,” one of them swore in her affidavit. A priest, she wrote, “threatened that they would kill Isaac [her Muslim husband] if I went back to him.” The other woman told the court, “People at the [yoga] center asked me to leave [her Muslim husband] Hameed. When I resisted, they slapped my face, kicked my lower abdomen, and stuffed cloth in my mouth to prevent me from screaming.”
Hindu nationalists are also raising alarms over “love jihad,” a false conspiracy theory that claims Muslim men are out to charm Hindu women into wedlock, conversion, and the production of Muslim babies. A recently released propaganda film, The Kerala Story, purports to show how 32,000 women from that state were converted to Islam and recruited by Islamic State terrorists. No matter that none of that ever happened, “love jihad” rhetoric, including the portrayal of Muslim men as “deceitful, sexual monsters,” is being embraced even by white supremacists in the United States, according to Zeinab Farokhi, a professor at Toronto University.
East Meets West, West Meets Caste
Washington and New Delhi recently announced that Prime Minister Modi will be making a state visit to the U.S. in June. During that visit, notes the Indian outlet The Wire, “Modi is likely to visit New York for Yoga Day on June 21.”
Indeed, he will, for that annual yoga event was Modi’s brainchild. In 2014, he proposed that an International Day of Yoga be celebrated at the summer solstice and the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution to that effect. An avid yoga practitioner, Modi then wrote, “Yoga embodies unity of mind and body, thought and action… a holistic approach [that] is valuable to our health and well-being.” These days, maybe Modi should take a little more time for yoga, which might allow him to gain a more holistic understanding of the hate and cruelty now rippling through Indian society. (Substitute Donald Trump for Modi doing yoga, if you want a little grim humor right now.)
Today, there are an estimated 4.3 million South Asian-Americans living in the U.S., including people from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. A report released by a caste-abolitionist group, Equality Labs, entitled “Caste in the United States,” found that even in America, “many South Asians who identify as being from the ‘lower’ castes… tend to hide their caste,” because they fear that “they and their families could be rejected from South Asian cultural and religious spaces, lose professional and social networks, or even face bullying, abuse, and violence.”
Too many upper-caste Indians and white Americans think of themselves as the only ones worthy of enjoying the spoils of the Earth.
Recently, however, a few rays of light have pierced the political gloom. In February, Seattle became the first city in the U.S. to prohibit caste discrimination and (joke, joke) yoga had nothing to do with it. The ban passed because of the hard work and solidarity of local activists, along with socialist Seattle city council member Kshama Sawant who proposed it. Then, on May 11, casteism was banished from an entire state, the nation’s largest, when the California senate passed a bill to that effect.
To add another positive note, the very next day, Modi’s BJP was trounced by the Congress Party in elections to the legislative assembly of Karnataka, a crucial state in Indian politics. When the BJP won it five years ago, it was considered a key step in that party’s rise to national dominance. Now, those of us in favor of genuine democracy and not right-wing terror in both countries can only hope that the Karnataka defeat is a harbinger of BJP’s decline (just as we hope that neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis can take the White House in 2024).
But even small victories don’t come without pushback from Hindu-nationalist expatriates and RSS/BJP “intellectuals” in India, as is true with Trumpists in America. Unsurprisingly enough, they condemned the new caste measures in the U.S., declaring them “Hinduphobic” (just as white right-wingers here chant “All Lives Matter” in the context of police violence and to mock the Black Lives Matter movement). But, asks the political theorist Kancha Ilailah Shepherd, “How can the practice of caste discrimination… be tackled without local laws or institutional rules?”
Too many upper-caste Indians and white Americans think of themselves as the only ones worthy of enjoying the spoils of the Earth. They want it all and are ready to get it by exploiting, not to say violating, non-upper-caste bodies in India and non-white ones in the U.S., along with cows and fetuses, using religion as a tool in both cases. The bodies of Dalits, Muslims, Christians, the people of occupied Kashmir, liberals, journalists, historians, climate and human rights activists, educators, Blacks, Indigenous people, women, LGBTQ people—all of them are fodder for the violent right-wing in both countries.
In the sludge of such destructive exceptionalism, there can be felt a sense of uncertainty, a potential for both of our societies to break down completely. Sadly, yoga and vegetarianism do not encapsulate life in India; upper-caste exceptionalism does. Similarly, “peace and love,” not to speak of democracy, hardly define life in America anymore for a growing set of Trumpublicans. For them, white exceptionalism does and, worse yet, these days it goes all too well armed with that best-selling weapon of this moment, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Honestly, there needs to be a deeper discussion of all of this before it’s too late.
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Brazil Ramps Up Security for Lula Inauguration Amid Concerns Over Right-Wing 'Terrorists'
"The fight against terrorists and rioters will be intensified," said Brazil's incoming justice minister. "Democracy has won and will win."
Dec 28, 2022
With Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva set to be inaugurated on Sunday, the country's authorities are ramping up security measures amid fears that supporters of defeated far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro will attempt to cause chaos and possibly launch a violent attack on the ceremony.
Such concerns grew over the weekend after Brazil's capital police arrested a man who planted a bomb near Brasilia's airport, close to where Lula was staying.
"On December 24, Brasilia police said they had foiled a bomb plot, arresting a man with ties to a group of pro-Bolsonaro election deniers camped outside the army headquarters, who have been urging the military to overturn Lula's victory," Reuters reported Tuesday. "George Washington Sousa, who confessed to making the device and plotting with other camp-dwellers to detonate it, said he had hoped that the bomb would 'provoke a military intervention... to prevent the installation of communism in Brazil.'"
A day after Sousa's arrest, Brazil's incoming justice minister took to Twitter to assure the public that efforts are underway to guarantee the inauguration is peaceful.
"All procedures will be reassessed, with a view to strengthening security," Flávio Dino tweeted. "And the fight against terrorists and rioters will be intensified. Democracy has won and will win."
To secure the inauguration and head off any potential violence, "100% of the police forces" of Brasilia will be mobilized to "ensure the safety not only of the president, but also of foreign delegations and the public," Dino told reporters Tuesday.
Bolsonaro spent the months leading up to Brazil's October presidential election spreading lies about voter fraud and ginning up his right-wing supporters, who responded to the president's loss with fury and violence. Earlier this month, Bolsonaro loyalists attempted to invade Brasilia's police headquarters, an incident that drew comparisons to the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the United States.
While he has allowed the transition process to move forward, Bolsonaro has yet to publicly admit his defeat to Lula. In late November, Bolsonaro formally contested his loss—a challenge that Brazil's electoral court swiftly rejected.
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Donald Trump: The Mobster-in-Chief
Will the November election be decided in the streets?
Sep 29, 2020
The white mobs didn't care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity.
It was the prelude to what civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson would ultimately call Red Summer. The "red" referred to the blood that ran in the streets. The "summer" actually referred to the months from April to October 1919, when violence against African Americans peaked in this country.
In reality, though, that Red Summer stretched across six long years, beginning in East St. Louis in 1917 and ending with the destruction of the predominantly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. During that time, white mobs killed thousands of Blacks in 26 cities, including Chicago, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In 1921, in a slaughter that has been well documented, white citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroyed the country's wealthiest African American community ("Black Wall Street," as it was then known), burning down more than 1,000 houses as well as churches, schools, and even a hospital.
During this period of violence, the mobs sometimes cooperated with the authorities. Just as often, however, they ignored the police, even breaking through jail walls with sledgehammers to gain access to Black detainees whom they executed in unspeakable ways. In Tulsa, for example, that campaign of murder and mayhem began only after the local sheriff refused to hand over a Black teenager accused of sexual assault.
Although white America repressed the memories of Red Summer for many decades, that shameful chapter of our history has gained renewed scrutiny in this era of Black Lives Matter. The Tulsa massacre, for instance, features prominently in the recent Watchmen series on HBO and several documentaries are in the works for its centennial anniversary in 2021. Other recent documentaries have chronicled killings that took place in the immediate aftermath of World War I in Elaine, Arkansas, and Knoxville, Tennessee.
But memories of that Red Summer are resurfacing for another, more ominous reason.
White mobs have once again moved out of the shadows and into the limelight during this Trump moment. Militia movements and right-wing extremists are starting to turn out in force to intimidate racial justice and anti-Trump demonstrators. Predominantly white and often explicitly racist, these groups now regularly use social media to threaten their adversaries. This election season, they're gearing up to defend their president with an astonishing degree of support from Republican Party regulars.
According to a January 2020 survey by political scientist Larry Bartels, most Republicans believe "the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it." More than 40% agree that "a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands." In a recent essay on his survey's findings, Bartels concludes that ethnic antagonism "has a substantial negative effect on Republicans' commitment to democracy."
As the 2020 election nears, that party is also desperately trying to flip the script by using fear of "their mobs" and "Antifa terrorists" to drive its base to the polls. "We have a Marxist mob perpetrate historic levels of violence & disorder in major American cities," tweeted Florida Senator Marco Rubio in response to the Democratic National Convention in August. Not to be outdone, the president promptly said: "I'm the only thing standing between the American dream and total anarchy, madness, and chaos."
Of course, this country has no such Marxist mobs. The only real groups of vigilantes with a demonstrated history of violence and the guns to back up their threats congregate on the far right. The white supremacist Atomwaffen Division, for instance, has been linked to at least five killings since 2017. In late May and early June, members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois conducted two ambushes of police officers and security personnel, killing two of them and injuring three more. Over the summer, as far-right organizations spread the meme "All Lives Splatter" around the internet, dozens of right-wingers drove vehicles of every sort into crowds of Black Lives Matter protesters.
The prospect of far-right vigilantes or "militias" heading into the streets to contest the results of the November election has even mainstream institutions worried. "Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90% between January 1 and May 8, 2020," reports the centrist think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. "If President Trump loses the election, some extremists may use violence because they believe--however incorrectly--that there was fraud or that the election of Democratic candidate Joe Biden will undermine their extremist objectives."
As the violence of Red Summer demonstrated, such acts were once a mainstay of American life. Indeed, the not-so-hidden history of this country has featured periodic explosions of mob violence. Racial justice activists rightly call for the radical reform of police departments. As November approaches, however, uniformed representatives of the state are hardly the only perpetrators of racist violence. Beware the white mobs, militias, and posses that are desperate to establish their own brand of justice.
Mob History
When Donald Trump paints a picture of lawlessness sweeping through the United States, he's effectively accusing the institutions of government of not doing their jobs. In a September 2nd memo, the Trump administration laid out its charges:
"For the past few months, several State and local governments have contributed to the violence and destruction in their jurisdictions by failing to enforce the law, disempowering and significantly defunding their police departments, and refusing to accept offers of Federal law enforcement assistance."
As president, Donald Trump has refused to take responsibility for anything, not the more than 200,000 Covid-19 deaths in the United States, not the pandemic-induced economic collapse, and certainly not the racial injustices that prompted this summer's wave of protests. Simultaneously above the law and outside it, the president consistently portrays himself as a populist leader who must battle the elite and its "deep state." With conspiracy-tinged tirades about Democrat-run cities failing to enforce the law, he has already symbolically put himself at the head of a mob--for this is just how such groups justified their extra-legal actions throughout our history.
The right-wing racists who currently bear arms in defense of the president are part of a long tradition of Americans resorting to vigilantism when they believe the law is not protecting their interests. Whether it was the displacement and massacre of Native Americans, the horrors that slaveowners inflicted on African Americans, the wave of lynching that followed Reconstruction, the bloodletting of Red Summer around World War I, the murders conducted by the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist organizations, or even everyday resistance to federal policies like school desegregation, gangs of Americans have repeatedly taken the law into their own hands on behalf of white supremacy.
To be sure, mobs are hardly responsible for all the racist ills of this country. America has always been a place of institutional racism and violence. Slavery, after all, was legal until 1865. The U.S. government and its military did the bulk of the dispossessing of Native Americans. Police departments cooperated early on with the Ku Klux Klan and today's police officers continue to kill a disproportionate number of African Americans. Mobs have eagerly cooperated with state institutions on the basis of shared racism. But they have also stood at the ready to enforce the dictates of white supremacy even when the police and other guardians of order treat everyone equally before the law.
The mob has occupied an unusually prominent place in our history because Americans have cultivated a unique hostility toward the state and its institutions that goes back to the early years of the Republic. As historian Michael Pfeifer notes in his groundbreaking book, The Roots of Rough Justice, the violent libertarianism associated with the American Revolution and the subsequent lack of a strong, centralized state gave rise to mob violence that gathered force before the Civil War. He writes,
"Antebellum advocates of vigilantism in the Midwest, South, and West drew on Anglo-American and American revolutionary traditions of community violence that suggested that citizens might reclaim the functions of government when legal institutions could not provide sufficient protections to persons or their property."
Those mobs didn't necessarily think of themselves as anti-democratic. Rather, they imagined that they were improving on democracy. As Pfeifer points out, many of the vigilante outfits that targeted minorities practiced democratic procedures of a sort. Some adopted bylaws and even elected their own leaders. They held mock trials and votes on what punishments to mete out: hanging or burning alive.
Such mobs functioned both as a parallel military and, to a certain extent, a parallel state.
The two, in fact, went hand in hand. German sociologist Max Weber famously defined the state as possessing a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, but that was the German tradition. In the United States, particularly during its first 150 years, the state only aspired to possess such a monopoly.
Instead, a rough form of frontier justice often prevailed. Before and just after the American Revolution, even whites were its targets, but increasingly its victims were people of color. Slave owners, slave patrols, and ad hoc mobs dispensed justice throughout antebellum America and the tradition of "Judge Lynch" continued long after the abolition of slavery. The pushing of the frontier westward involved not only the Army's killing of Native Americans but extrajudicial violence by bands of settlers. Historian Benjamin Madley estimates that the Native population in California declined by more than 80% between 1846 and 1873, with as many as 16,000 killings in 370-plus massacres. This "winning" of the West also involved the widespread lynching of Latinos.
The "Right" to Bear Arms
Mobs were able to dispense frontier justice not only thanks to a strong libertarian tradition and a weak state, but also because of the widespread availability of guns. Coming out of the Civil War, this country developed a distinct gun culture sustained by a surge in firearm production. Gun prices fell and so guns fell into the hands of more and more citizens.
Mobs used firearms in the infamous Draft Riot in New York in 1863, which ended up targeting the city's Black community, and in New Orleans in 1866 when enraged whites attacked a meeting of Republicans determined to extend civil rights protections to African Americans. In their drive westward, settlers favored Winchester rifles with magazines that could fire 15 rounds, giving them a staggering advantage over the people they were displacing. Early gun control laws seldom prevented whites from acquiring firearms because they were mainly designed to keep guns out of the hands of Blacks and other racial minorities.
Even today, widespread gun ownership distinguishes the United States from every other country. Approximately 40% of American households own one or more firearms, a figure that has remained remarkably consistent for the last 50 years. If you look at guns per capita, the United States ranks number one in the world at 120 firearms per 100 civilians. The next country on the list, war-torn Yemen, comes in a distant second with 52 per hundred. With more guns than people within its borders, it's no wonder that the federal government has often struggled to maintain its monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force.
Gun enthusiasts have erroneously enlisted the Constitution to justify this extreme democracy of firepower. To guard against tyrannical federal behavior, the Second Amendment of the Constitution preserved the right of state militias to bear arms. However, organizations like the National Rifle Association have campaigned for years to reinterpret that amendment as giving any individual the right to bear arms.
That has, in turn, provided ammunition for both the "castle doctrine" (the right to use armed force to defend one's own home) and "stand your ground" laws (the right to use force in "self-defense"). Armed extremist groups now imagine themselves as nothing less than the Second Amendment's "well-regulated Militia" with a constitutionally given "right" to own weapons and defend themselves against the federal government (or anyone else they disapprove of).
Improbably enough, for the last four years, the head of the federal government has become one of their chief supporters.
Donald Trump: Leader of the Pack
Long before becoming president, Donald Trump was already acting as if he were the head of a lynch mob. In 1989, he published full-page ads in the New York Times and three other local papers calling for New York City to reinstate the death penalty in response to a brutal gang rape in Central Park. He swore that the city was then "ruled by the law of the streets" and that "muggers and murderers... should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes."
It was language distinctly reminiscent of white mobs bitter about the failure of local law enforcement to execute Blacks accused of crimes. Like many of their predecessors, the accused Black and Latino teenagers were, in the end, found to be quite innocent of the crime. After a long legal struggle, the Central Park Five (as they came to be known) were released from prison. Trump has never apologized for his campaign to kill innocent people.
When he ran for president, he quickly moved beyond mere "law and order" rhetoric. In his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump deliberately cultivated a following among armed extremists. At a rally in North Carolina, for instance, he warned of what might happen to the Supreme Court if Hillary Clinton were to win.
"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks," he lamented. Then he added in his typically confused and elliptical manner of speaking: "Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don't know." He was, in other words, suggesting that followers with guns could do something about Clinton's choices by shooting her or her judicial picks.
Throughout that campaign season, he regularly retweeted white supremacist claims and memes. At the time, it was estimated that more than 60% of the accounts he was retweeting had links to white supremacists. At his rallies, he encouraged his supporters to get "rough" with protesters.
As president, he's continued to side with the mob. He infamously refused to denounce neo-Nazis gathering in Charlottesville in August 2017, applauded the armed demonstrators who demanded the reopening of the economy in the pandemic spring of 2020, and defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August.
Trump has stood up for the Confederate flag, Confederate statues, and keeping the names of Confederate generals on U.S. military bases. In a recent speech denouncing school curricula that teach about slavery and other unsavory aspects of our history, he pledged to erect a statue of a slaveowner in a project he's been promoting--building a National Garden of American Heroes park. The current administration has cultivated direct links to white nationalists through disgraced figures like Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, as well as current advisers like Stephen Miller.
In his reelection bid, Trump pointedly held his first pandemic rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he excoriated Democrats who "want to take away your guns through the repeal of your Second Amendment" and "left-wing radicals [who] burn down buildings, loot businesses, destroy private property, injure hundreds of dedicated police officers." In a literal whitewashing of history, he made no mention of the White mobs that had looted businesses and destroyed property in that very city in 1921.
Trump's exhortations to his followers over the heads of state and local officials appeal to the mob belief that citizens must reclaim the functions of government, if necessary through force. Right-wing militias explicitly embrace that history. The "Three Percenters," a militia movement that emerged in 2008 after the election of Barack Obama, purports to protect Americans from tyrannical government. Their name derives from the inaccurate belief that only 3% of Americans took up arms to fight the British empire in the eighteenth century.
Of course, three percent of Americans are not now members of such militias and White nationalist movements, but their numbers are on the rise. White nationalist groups increased from 100 in 2017 to 155 in 2019. The several hundred militia groups now in existence probably have a total of 15,000 to 20,000 members, including an increasing number of veterans with combat experience. Far from a homogeneous force, some are focused on patrolling the southern border and targeting the undocumented. Others are obsessed with resisting the federal government, even in a few cases opposing Trump's various power grabs.
West Virginia University professor John Temple argues, in fact, that not all right-wing militias hold extremist views. "I have listened to many hours of 'patriot' conversations that didn't sound all that different from what you would hear during a typical evening on Fox News," he writes. "Many seemed to have joined the cause for social reasons, or because they liked guns, or because they wanted to be part of something they saw as historic and grandiose--not because their views were far more radical than those of typical right-leaning Americans."
This is not exactly reassuring, since the politics of right-leaning, Fox News-watching Americans have grown more extreme. With nearly half of the Republicans surveyed by Larry Bartels prepared to take the law into their own hands, Trump has nearly succeeded in transforming his party into a mob of vigilantes.
Don't be fooled into thinking that the president is a law-and-order candidate. He flourishes in chaos and routinely flouts the law. By siding with right-wing militias and their ilk, he daily undermines the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.
The debate over defunding the police must be seen in this context. In a country awash in guns and grassroots racism, with a major party flirting with mob violence, getting rid of police departments would be akin to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire of uncontained extremism. Sure, local law enforcement needs major reforms, massive civic oversight, and right-sized budgets. Police departments must be purged of white nationalists and neo-Nazis. The Pentagon has to stop supplying the cops with military-grade weaponry.
But remember: the police can be reformed. What was once an all-white force now better reflects America's diversity. The mob, by definition, is not subject to reforms or any oversight whatsoever.
This is no time to permit the return of frontier justice administered by white mobs and a lawless president, especially with a critical election looming. Mob violence has often accompanied elections in the past, with rival factions fighting over the results, as in the street battles of 1874 in New Orleans between Republican integrationists and racist Democrats. Like nineteenth-century Louisiana, the struggle this November is not just about Democrats versus Republicans. It's about the rule of law versus racist vigilantism.
White supremacy is not going to give up its hold on power without a fight. If you thought you'd seen real American carnage in Trump's four years in office, prepare yourself for the chaotic aftermath of the November election. The mob is itching to take the law into its own hands one more time on behalf of its very own mobster-in-chief.
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