Shortly after January’s attempted coup in Washington, D.C., Leah Sottile, a long-time reporter on anti-government extremism (including this great piece on the history and co-opting of the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden flag) and host of the Bundyville podcast* about the Bundy family, the 2016 takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge, and related stories,
Did you see the woman from Texas who was identified at the capitol and is on pre-trial release, asked a judge if she could be allowed to attend a pre-paid "work-related bonding trip" to Mexico, and it was granted? You think that would happen if she was anything other than a rich white woman, regardless of how serious anyone else's assault on that building would have been? I'm pretty sure there are still Indians in jail in South Dakota for STOPPING TRAFFIC in protest of Trump's visit to the Black Hills last summer. This is the kind of thing that radicalizes me. I'm not sure if I'm homicidal or suicidal, but I get closer to both with each swing of the fucking pendulum.
I saw that today and my brain did that little skip-hop where it's like "this can't possibly be happening but you see this happen all the time so why be surprised?" And I read Nick Estes's piece about Nick Tilsen in High Country News last night, so it was like a double WTF. It makes me physically sick but that helps nobody so I try to think of what I can do to *change* this damn thing.
"Each swing of the pendulum" is an apt description. It definitely radicalizes me, I'm just not sure to what end yet.
Also just saw that Kyle Rittenhouse has ... gone missing? Because someone thought it was fine to let him out on bail? Do some people look at white people and see not a flawed and/or dangerous human but a vision of angels?
Thanks, so many good thoughts/themes here. I like the "waking up" part of stories, that is so true. I think the next week or so in Washington will help decide if the GOP (not really the GOP, really the Party of Trump) wakes up, or - I hate to say it more likely - continues on its destructive path.
Yes, not very hopeful after what happened today. But it seems like this is a very dynamic, somewhat chaotic situation. Hard to predict what is gonna happen next, but not sure it will get better. There seems to be a massive Party of Trump / GOP struggle.
Sometimes I hope there are struggles I can't see going on behind the scenes, but other times I think that there have been no struggles and that's why people like the Lincoln Project people left the party. It seems like unless and until the threat of major funding of campaigns is withheld, there's going to be no reckoning. (Also, get money out of politics!)
Yes! I have read (can't recall where :-( ) recently about the number of Repubs who have either switched or drop their party affiliation from voter registration. One thing I do not understand - why don't the Dems just let the kooks be kooks and count on that driving more people away from the GOP and to the Dems??
I think I saw that headline somewhere, like thousands in places like Colorado.
I guess part of it is that the kooks can actually do real damage (people like Boebert do not sound like safe people to work around), but also that a lot of conservatives can't stomach going to the Dems. Some of the social stances are a line too far for them, some of them will never believe that the economy is better off under most Dem policies, and some of them are carrying around a generation's worth of prejudiced assumptions (which none of us are immune from).
Thanks, as always, for your insights! There is always danger in letting lies get a toehold (witness how many people still *believe* the Election was stolemn) :-( :-(.
I'll just add that we, the culture in general, laugh at the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and Jose Padilla swinging around a bucket of uranium to mimic a centrifuge. At the same time, the FBI and TSA take it all seriously, and we all take off our shoes at the airport. So long as the people who are actually making the law enforcement decisions are taking the threat seriously, I don't think it matters very much what New Yorkers think of Whitefish, or people in Whitefish think of New York.
That's actually really heartening to remember, that there are people who take these things seriously.
Obviously what people in Whitefish think of New York is very important, but more important is what people in Glendive or Hot Springs think of New York ;)
I'd add that it's a sign of weakness, not strength, of the White Nationalist movement that its coalition includes believers in secret Jewish space lasers and the "Q Shaman." The coalition as currently formed can certainly lead to the deaths of handfuls of people, and lots of performance art. A take-over of the government requires something else entirely.
I probably said this last time, but it was the Q Shaman who saved democracy. Trump had set the thing in motion and was watching it play out, waiting to see if he could safely use the insurrection. Certainly that was the insurgents' plan: they were just a side show, and Trump himself was supposed to reveal the evidence/arrest the traitors/ declare martial law. That's why they didn't know what to do when he didn't do his part: because there wasn't anything to do.
The appearance of the Q Shaman, and others, dispelled Trump's fascination with, and interest in leading the thing. If the only people on TV were athletic men in full tactical gear, he'd have felt differently about it, and who knows what he might have gotten various federal agents to do.
It probably still wouldn't have worked, because the election wasn't close enough.
In the longer haul, we really have to do the same kind of thing we do with Al Qaeda and its wannabees. Infiltrate and arrest. But keep in view a sense of proportionality. Weaver and Koresh may have been nuts, and there may have been legitimate law enforcement objectives in arresting them, but deaths of innocents at the hands of the state doesn't (and shouldn't) end well. [Obviously there is a racial dimension to this, but the proper corrective isn't that deaths of innocent white people should be shrugged off, but that the deaths of innocent people of color should not be shrugged off.]
Those are great points, Charley (and yes, I absolutely agree with that last observation -- one of the things that frustrated me at the beginning of the pandemic was how people compared the death rate to car crashes; to me the correct response to that is that the 40,000 or so per year dying due to car crashes should *also* be unacceptable). And obviously a proportional response is so important, as is infiltration to actually figure out what's going on in these networks.
I do think the ways we tell these stories can help create missteps. Not so much "tell the wrong story and suddenly you've got a coup" but tell stories badly and misrepresent people, and voters start disengaging and people stop practicing citizenship because they figure either a) everything is buggered so why bother, or b) someone is taking care of things somewhere and we don't need to worry about it. I mean, there's a reason Fox et. al. have been so effective--they've managed to persuade their viewers to worry about *everything,* even things that don't exist, and that worry and anger has managed to create very real problems and elect very real people.
I hadn't even heard about the Jewish space lasers until late last week. That iteration of anti-semitism was a new one on me! But I bet I know people who are happy to believe it's real.
The thing about secret Jewish space lasers is that this is offered as an alternative to the scientific consensus on global climate change. All the scientists are lying! It's a cabal with space lasers!
Or both, with a little bit of late-night raging ;)
So building lasers and somehow sending them into space and keeping them stable enough to aim where desired in order to imitate climate change is somehow less of a stretch than greenhouse gases leading to higher temperatures and/or more extreme weather patterns? Got it.
Thank you, Antonia. This is spot on in every way and is necessary writing. Thank you.
Thanks for reading, Greg. Always good to know you're out there doing the good work :)
Did you see the woman from Texas who was identified at the capitol and is on pre-trial release, asked a judge if she could be allowed to attend a pre-paid "work-related bonding trip" to Mexico, and it was granted? You think that would happen if she was anything other than a rich white woman, regardless of how serious anyone else's assault on that building would have been? I'm pretty sure there are still Indians in jail in South Dakota for STOPPING TRAFFIC in protest of Trump's visit to the Black Hills last summer. This is the kind of thing that radicalizes me. I'm not sure if I'm homicidal or suicidal, but I get closer to both with each swing of the fucking pendulum.
I saw that today and my brain did that little skip-hop where it's like "this can't possibly be happening but you see this happen all the time so why be surprised?" And I read Nick Estes's piece about Nick Tilsen in High Country News last night, so it was like a double WTF. It makes me physically sick but that helps nobody so I try to think of what I can do to *change* this damn thing.
"Each swing of the pendulum" is an apt description. It definitely radicalizes me, I'm just not sure to what end yet.
Also just saw that Kyle Rittenhouse has ... gone missing? Because someone thought it was fine to let him out on bail? Do some people look at white people and see not a flawed and/or dangerous human but a vision of angels?
Thanks, so many good thoughts/themes here. I like the "waking up" part of stories, that is so true. I think the next week or so in Washington will help decide if the GOP (not really the GOP, really the Party of Trump) wakes up, or - I hate to say it more likely - continues on its destructive path.
It's not looking very hopeful. The question I guess is how many suffer for their ambitions.
Yes, not very hopeful after what happened today. But it seems like this is a very dynamic, somewhat chaotic situation. Hard to predict what is gonna happen next, but not sure it will get better. There seems to be a massive Party of Trump / GOP struggle.
Sometimes I hope there are struggles I can't see going on behind the scenes, but other times I think that there have been no struggles and that's why people like the Lincoln Project people left the party. It seems like unless and until the threat of major funding of campaigns is withheld, there's going to be no reckoning. (Also, get money out of politics!)
Yes! I have read (can't recall where :-( ) recently about the number of Repubs who have either switched or drop their party affiliation from voter registration. One thing I do not understand - why don't the Dems just let the kooks be kooks and count on that driving more people away from the GOP and to the Dems??
I think I saw that headline somewhere, like thousands in places like Colorado.
I guess part of it is that the kooks can actually do real damage (people like Boebert do not sound like safe people to work around), but also that a lot of conservatives can't stomach going to the Dems. Some of the social stances are a line too far for them, some of them will never believe that the economy is better off under most Dem policies, and some of them are carrying around a generation's worth of prejudiced assumptions (which none of us are immune from).
Thanks, as always, for your insights! There is always danger in letting lies get a toehold (witness how many people still *believe* the Election was stolemn) :-( :-(.
Very important work. Great.
:)
I'll just add that we, the culture in general, laugh at the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and Jose Padilla swinging around a bucket of uranium to mimic a centrifuge. At the same time, the FBI and TSA take it all seriously, and we all take off our shoes at the airport. So long as the people who are actually making the law enforcement decisions are taking the threat seriously, I don't think it matters very much what New Yorkers think of Whitefish, or people in Whitefish think of New York.
That's actually really heartening to remember, that there are people who take these things seriously.
Obviously what people in Whitefish think of New York is very important, but more important is what people in Glendive or Hot Springs think of New York ;)
I agree with all of this.
I'd add that it's a sign of weakness, not strength, of the White Nationalist movement that its coalition includes believers in secret Jewish space lasers and the "Q Shaman." The coalition as currently formed can certainly lead to the deaths of handfuls of people, and lots of performance art. A take-over of the government requires something else entirely.
I probably said this last time, but it was the Q Shaman who saved democracy. Trump had set the thing in motion and was watching it play out, waiting to see if he could safely use the insurrection. Certainly that was the insurgents' plan: they were just a side show, and Trump himself was supposed to reveal the evidence/arrest the traitors/ declare martial law. That's why they didn't know what to do when he didn't do his part: because there wasn't anything to do.
The appearance of the Q Shaman, and others, dispelled Trump's fascination with, and interest in leading the thing. If the only people on TV were athletic men in full tactical gear, he'd have felt differently about it, and who knows what he might have gotten various federal agents to do.
It probably still wouldn't have worked, because the election wasn't close enough.
In the longer haul, we really have to do the same kind of thing we do with Al Qaeda and its wannabees. Infiltrate and arrest. But keep in view a sense of proportionality. Weaver and Koresh may have been nuts, and there may have been legitimate law enforcement objectives in arresting them, but deaths of innocents at the hands of the state doesn't (and shouldn't) end well. [Obviously there is a racial dimension to this, but the proper corrective isn't that deaths of innocent white people should be shrugged off, but that the deaths of innocent people of color should not be shrugged off.]
Those are great points, Charley (and yes, I absolutely agree with that last observation -- one of the things that frustrated me at the beginning of the pandemic was how people compared the death rate to car crashes; to me the correct response to that is that the 40,000 or so per year dying due to car crashes should *also* be unacceptable). And obviously a proportional response is so important, as is infiltration to actually figure out what's going on in these networks.
I do think the ways we tell these stories can help create missteps. Not so much "tell the wrong story and suddenly you've got a coup" but tell stories badly and misrepresent people, and voters start disengaging and people stop practicing citizenship because they figure either a) everything is buggered so why bother, or b) someone is taking care of things somewhere and we don't need to worry about it. I mean, there's a reason Fox et. al. have been so effective--they've managed to persuade their viewers to worry about *everything,* even things that don't exist, and that worry and anger has managed to create very real problems and elect very real people.
I hadn't even heard about the Jewish space lasers until late last week. That iteration of anti-semitism was a new one on me! But I bet I know people who are happy to believe it's real.
The thing about secret Jewish space lasers is that this is offered as an alternative to the scientific consensus on global climate change. All the scientists are lying! It's a cabal with space lasers!
It's either laugh or cry.
Or both, with a little bit of late-night raging ;)
So building lasers and somehow sending them into space and keeping them stable enough to aim where desired in order to imitate climate change is somehow less of a stretch than greenhouse gases leading to higher temperatures and/or more extreme weather patterns? Got it.