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.
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.
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.
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.]
Thank you, Antonia. This is spot on in every way and is necessary writing. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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.]