The United States of Paranoia (39 page)

• Here’s Paul Krugman in early 2011: “Last spring Politico.com
reported
on a surge in threats against members of Congress, which were already up by 300 percent. A number of the people making those threats had a history of mental illness—but something about the current state of America has been causing far more disturbed people than before to act out their illness by threatening, or actually engaging in, political violence.” Krugman declared that “toxic rhetoric” was the force compelling them to act out.
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Politico
did indeed report the 300 percent increase, though Krugman’s statement that threats were “already” rising implies that the number had continued to climb until his column appeared. In fact, the spike took place during the debate over Obama’s health care law, and there is no reason to assume that the level stayed that high after the bill was passed.
Politico
’s sources did not reveal how that figure compares with the data for the debates over other hotly contested legislation, leaving readers unsure whether that was an unusually large spike in death threats or if it was typical of what happens when a substantial segment of the population is strongly opposed to a bill that is likely to pass. The Capitol Police, alas, are as tight-lipped about such statistics as the Secret Service, and the agency refuses to release the comparable figures. The best we can do is search through past press accounts, which reveal, for example, that at least three representatives received death threats because of their votes for the North American Free Trade Agreement. But the information available that way is spotty at best.

• The Southern Poverty Law Center releases new reports each year listing different kinds of “extremist” groups. In 2010, for example, the SPLC’s Mark Potok announced that an “astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias)—a 244% jump.” If you worry about political violence, he warned, that growth “is cause for grave concern.”
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There are good reasons to believe that the Patriot milieu grew substantially in 2009, though the SPLC’s numbers aren’t as conclusive as they might initially seem. (If a group splinters into two or more pieces, that probably indicates that it’s getting weaker, but the faction fight will show up as growth if all you’re counting is the number of organizations on the ground.) The biggest problem with the SPLC list is that it lumps together a very varied set of organizations, blurring the boundary between people who might have sympathy for aggressive violence and people who would want no part of it. “Generally,” the center explains, the groups on its Patriot roster “define themselves as opposed to the ‘New World Order,’ engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines.”
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That covers a lot of ground. Using such a list to track the threat of right-wing terrorism is like tracking the threat of jihadist terrorism by counting the country’s mosques.

The SPLC acknowledges that not all the groups on its list “advocate or engage in violence or other criminal activities.”
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But its spokespeople regularly suggest that there’s a slippery slope at work. Potok, for example, told the
Las Vegas Review-Journal
that he wouldn’t accuse any member of the Oath Keepers, a group whose chapters take up fifty-three spots on the 2010 watch list, “of being Timothy McVeigh.” But the Oath Keepers are spreading paranoia, he continued, and “these kinds of conspiracy theories are what drive a small number of people to criminal violence.”
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The article didn’t mention the possibility that the Oath Keepers could pull people interested in those ideas
away
from criminal violence. The whole point of the Oath Keepers, after all, is to persuade the government’s agents to refuse to obey orders the group considers unconstitutional. That is a central tactic not of terrorism but of nonviolent civil resistance.

To see how misleading the SPLC number can be, consider the Hutaree, a Michigan-based sect raided in 2010 and accused of plotting a mass assassination of police officers. The defendants were ultimately acquitted of most charges, but let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they really were a violent threat.

In Robert Churchill’s typology of the militia movement, the Hutaree are extreme millenarians. There was no love lost between them and the area’s dominant militia, the constitutionalist Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia, which greeted the arrests by denouncing the Hutaree as a religious cult. One member of the SMVM, Mike Lackomar, even told
The Detroit News
that the Hutaree had called his militia to ask for assistance during the raids and had been rebuffed. “They are not part of our militia community,” he said.
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Skeptical readers may object that this is exactly what you’d expect an organization to do if its erstwhile allies are facing federal charges. (David Neiwert greeted Lackomar’s claim by declaring that the militiaman was “throwing the Hutaree folks under the bus.”)
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But we have independent confirmation of the tensions between Lackomar’s group and the Hutaree. Amy Cooter, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan, had been doing fieldwork in the state’s militia movement for about two years when the arrests happened. She had first heard of the Hutaree long before the arrests, when members of Lackomar’s organization had told her a “story about some crazy people who came to train with them once”; the visitors had handled themselves unsafely and were “told not to come back.” Cooter also noted that the SMVM, a secular group that included a convert to Islam, distrusted the “strong anti-Muslim sentiment” it detected in the Hutaree. Lackomar’s militia did “keep the lines of communication open” with the group, “but that was to keep an eye on them as much as anything else.”
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What did “keep an eye on them” mean? Both Lackomar and another militiaman, Lee Miracle, told
The Detroit News
that they had warned the FBI about the Hutaree more than a year before the arrests. Miracle said he urged the agency to check out the sect’s website, telling his contact, “See if they creep you out the way they creep me out.”
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The Hutaree and the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia both appeared on the SPLC’s list. In other words, the roster did not merely mix people who were potential terrorists with people who were not; it mixed people who were potential terrorists with people willing to call the cops on potential terrorists. That is the sort of distinction you miss when you treat the size of the list as a proxy for the likelihood of insurrectionary violence.

• By early 2013, the fear of right-wing violence was no longer as intense as it had been three years earlier. But it received another burst of attention when the press discovered a paper by Arie Perliger, the director of terrorism studies at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. Perliger’s study stated that the number of violent right-wing incidents reported each year—everything from vandalism to mass murder—had risen more than 400 percent since the early 1990s.

Perliger’s data did indeed show such an increase, though he also included an important caveat. The “quality of, and accessibility to, data on hate crimes and far right violence has improved during the last two decades,” he noted, so “we need to take this into consideration when interpreting findings relating to fluctuations in levels of violence.”
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In other words, it’s not clear to what extent the apparent growth from 1990 to 2011 reveals a real increase in activity and to what extent it just means our measurements are becoming more accurate.

But if it’s unwise to use Perliger’s numbers to compare the present with twenty years ago, you needn’t be as cautious if you narrow your focus to a briefer period of time. And if you do that, you see something remarkable:

In 2009 and 2010—the period when the “rising right-wing violence” narrative was ubiquitous in the media—the number of violent right-wing incidents was actually declining. Let me repeat that: As pundits were issuing frantic warnings about the great beast stirring in the fever swamps, the number of attacks was going down.

Instead, the bulk of the increase took place under Bush, not Obama, with a peak during the 2007–2008 election season. Perliger argued that this is part of a broader pattern in which “presidential election years and the preceding year are characterized by an increase of far-right violence,” and he suggested that the increase in 2011 might represent the same cycle repeating itself.
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What happens if you take out the white supremacists, the antiabortion killers, and so on, and just stick to the people Perliger called the “anti-federalist movement”—militias, sovereign citizens, and others opposed to the concentration of power in Washington? Then his data did show a brief spike in 2010. Usually, he reported, there are about one to four violent incidents involving antifederalists each year. In 2010, the number jumped to thirteen. The next year, it dropped back down to two. Contrast those figures with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s warnings that the number of patriot groups has been growing since 2008, and you’ll see another reason not to treat the SPLC’s count as a proxy for the threat of political violence.

The backdrop to all this fear of the right was the rise of the Tea Party movement, a surge in conservative and libertarian activism against new federal interventions in the economy. Some Tea Partiers were prone to conspiracy theories of their own, from the claim that Obama’s health care bill would establish “death panels” to the familiar charge that FEMA was preparing internment camps. Discussions of the movement frequently highlighted such theories, often arguing that they proved the Right had “gone crazy” since the Democrats had retaken the White House.

On the face of it, that was an odd argument to make. When George W. Bush was in office, there was no shortage of conspiracy theories on the right; it’s just that they tended to be aimed at foreigners, Muslims, and the left-wing opposition rather than the White House. On the paramilitary right, the social space once occupied by the government-fearing militia movement was filled in Bushtime by the illegal immigrant–fearing Minuteman movement, which organized patrols of the U.S.-Mexico border. (This is not the same group as the anti-Communist Minutemen of the 1960s.) As the Tea Party movement rose, the faction-prone Minutemen continued to fracture and the militias began to grow again.
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Broadly speaking, the grassroots Right of 2009 was more libertarian than the grassroots Right of five years earlier, so its conspiracy theories were more likely to involve the Enemy Above. But it is far from clear that the Right was more prone to conspiracy theories in general. It merely pointed many of those theories in a different direction.

That said, the most notable right-wing conspiracy theory of the period was not particularly libertarian. I refer to the idea that Barack Obama and his allies are covering up the true circumstances of the president’s birth. The exact details of the story vary from theorist to theorist, but the usual payoff is that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and therefore is ineligible for the presidency.

By mid-2009 the birthers, as they became known, threatened to replace the truthers as the media’s favorite emblem of political paranoia.
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The radio and TV hosts Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck gave their thesis a sympathetic hearing, and in July, ten House Republicans cosponsored a birther-backed bill that would require prospective presidential candidates to release their birth certificates before running. The obsession didn’t diminish until the president released his original long-form birth certificate in April 2011, and even then the story still circulated among some die-hard clue hunters.

At least three significant motives ran through the birther milieu, each inflaming different (though sometimes overlapping) groups.

Wishing for a magic bullet
. This is the most obvious motivation: the search for a bolt of lightning that would end Obama’s career without the pain of political persuasion. Birtherism was born not in the GOP but during the 2008 Democratic primaries, when Hillary Clinton’s supporters started wishing for a miracle that would remove her chief rival for the nomination. After Clinton left the race, the theory continued to attract new believers, but suddenly they hailed from the right, because that’s where Obama’s new foes were to be found. First came the political need, then came the belief. If you went to a birther convention in 2009, one pair of sentences you would almost certainly not hear was “I strongly support Obama’s ideas about economic stimulus and health care reform. It’s just too bad he’s ineligible to be president.”

Fear of foreign influence
. For many birthers, Obama’s origins were bound up with a general suspicion of the foreign. It’s no surprise that the highest-profile media figure to give their arguments a friendly venue was Lou Dobbs, at the time a fiercely protectionist and anti-immigrant voice. Discussing Obama’s birth certificate on his radio show, Dobbs declared that he was “starting to think we have a, we have a document issue. You suppose he’s un— No, I won’t even use the word
undocumented
. It wouldn’t be right.”
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