Now Vanderboegh is warning his supporters to be prepared for “The Big Die Off”: “When a computer crashes, you simply discard it and obtain another. When political systems, nations or civilizations fail, they collapse in a welter of blood and carnage, usually ending in mountains of bodies, slavery and a long dark night of tyranny. This is referred to by people today who recognize the existential danger by the short-hand acronym of ‘TBDO’—‘The Big Die Off.’ This is not a video game. There are no do-overs. This is as real as it gets. Your system has experienced one or more fatal errors and must shut down at this time. Whether you survive The Big Die Off with anything left that is worth preserving is up to you.”9 As Vanderboegh’s home page warns, “All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.”
The Far Right Flirts with Secession
After speaking at an Austin Tea Party rally where the crowd repeatedly shouted, “Secede!”, Republican Governor Rick Perry was asked about renewed talk of Texas secession: “There’s a lot of different scenarios,” he said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that? Texas is a very unique place. . . . when we came to the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.”10
The folks from Fox News were carrying the Texas Tea Party live and couldn’t help but weigh in on Perry’s comments.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: You know, from here, Glenn, listening to Governor Perry last night and watching your crowd and listening to the things that are coming out of Texas—I don’t want to be too dramatic, but it almost seems like Texas is going to secede from the rest of the nation.
GLENN BECK: I mean, I don’t know—can we get this back here? [Points to a banner] This is on the jib back over here. This says “Texas independence” . . . And the reason is—correct me if I’m wrong—these people love America. They just think Texas does America best!11
Suddenly, somehow, the threat of secession is a sign of super-patriotism.
Just days before, Beck had been musing on-air about the same subject: “Does the individual have any rights anymore? Does the state have any rights anymore? And I know, because I’ve heard it, from all of the conservative historians and scholars, and everything else. But you can’t convince me that the founding fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede. The Constitution is not a suicide pact. And if a state says, I don’t want to go there, because that’s suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right. People have a right to not commit economic suicide. . . . I sign into this Union, and I can never get out, no matter what the government does? I can never get out? Well that leaves only one other option. That doesn’t seem like a good option.”12
You’d think the Civil War had cleared up any questions about the efficacy of the “other option” Beck is talking about—600,000 Americans died. But conservative activists keep circling back to the concept, something that would have presumably given them offense if it had been suggested one year before during the presidency of Texan George W. Bush.
Here’s Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight playing his newfound political role as a conservative pundit in an August interview with the Washington Times: “There’s a real question at stake now. Is President Obama creating a civil war in our own country?”13
Focus on the Family’s James Dobson offered a similar applause line at the Council for National Policy: “We are in greater danger right now I think than at any time since the Civil War. . . . What this country desperately needs in coming elections are . . . men and women who cherish liberty and are willing to give their very lives for it and will oppose the evil of liberalism.”14
The impulse occasionally gets dressed up as intellectualism, with a summer 2009 column in the American Thinker foreseeing “several regional republics” taking the place of the United States after a civil war inspired by the “overbearing, oppressive leviathan” created by Barack Obama.15
In anticipation of a civil war, the Oath Keepers include state sovereignty among its list of orders they will not obey: “In response to the obscene growth of federal power and to the absurdly totalitarian claimed powers of the Executive. . . . We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.”
And a new Idaho militia was established in 2009 by army veteran James Ambrose, who explained his decision along the same lines: “I formed it to defend Idaho if it wants to secede. If Idaho decides it no longer wants to be part of the United States, we back that decision.”16
So perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that when the Senate Health Care Bill was presented in October 2009, the Wingnut netroots were quick to pick up the civil war talk in postings on sites like Michelle Malkin’s HotAir:• “I don’t want to suggest violence, but I think this nation is headed towards a civil war if things don’t stop. The American people can’t take a whole lot more of this.”17
• “Maybe it is time the non Marxist states considered ‘opting out’ of the ‘union.’”
• “I’d sooner die a patriot, than a slave. And even if every one of us is killed . . . I will have considered it an honor to be dead amongst other like minded heroes. Secession and civil war are alternatives to this, and by god if those are the only options left . . . so be it, the democrats forced our hand.”18
Overheated echo-chamber chatter about secession and civil war might seem simply creepy if eight states hadn’t recently passed secession resolutions.
On April Fool’s Day 2009, the conservative Georgia State Senate passed a resolution by a vote of forty-three to one threatening to secede from the United States. It was a fool’s resolution, but it was not a joke.
It was the work of the Tenthers—advocates of reaffirming the Tenth Amendment. Under the innocuous-sounding banner of “Affirming states’ rights based on Jeffersonian principles,”19 the resolution resuscitated Confederate and segregation-era arguments about nullification—the right of states to nullify the Constitution and disband the United States if the president or federal government assumes powers not explicitly provided for.
The resolution had been co-sponsored by some of the most senior members of the state legislature, including the senate majority leader and president pro-tem. Among the areas enumerated in the Georgia resolution were “Further infringements on the right to keep and bear arms including prohibitions of type or quantity of arms or ammunition”—in other words, a reinstatement of the federal assault weapons ban could trigger Georgia to secede from the union. It also reserved to Georgia the right to judge “how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged without lessening their useful freedom.” The Taliban might have approved.
The strangeness of the Tenthers was put into context by Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman: “The resolution they sponsored is part of a radical right-wing national movement. . . . And while the Georgia resolution is legally meaningless and was passed without debate or even knowledge of most senators, it has had an impact. It has been hailed by, among others, those fighting the conspiracy to create a single North American country, by the Confederate States Militia, by the John Birch Society, and the League of the South, which still pines for the cause of an ‘independent South’ and believes that ‘Southern society is radically different from the society impressed upon it by an alien occupier.’”20
In its commitment to conservative secession, the League of the South not only echoes the usual Wingnut talking points about “national socialism: coming to a town near you” but offers books connecting Lincoln to Marx and Hitler as a “Band of Brothers.”21 It’s the same grouping President Obama is often placed alongside at the Tea Party rallies. Other strains of the neo-Confederate movement find themselves a home in the Hatriot movement, advancing the pseudo-Constitutionalist idea of “Fourteenth Amendme
nt Citizens”—aka African-Americans—who, because their rights were granted by the U.S. government after the Civil War, do not fall under natural law as described by the Declaration of Independence and are therefore lesser citizens than natural-born whites. It’s an arcane example of the lengths to which white supremacists will go to defend bigotry as being sanctioned by the Bible or the Founding Fathers. But I digress.
The Gone with the Wind state wasn’t the only one to sign up for the Tenth Amendment insanity. Similar resolutions passed in Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Idaho, Louisiana and Alaska—all states won by McCain-Palin in 2008. And Sarah Palin, whose husband was a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party for ten years, was one of the few governors to put her signature on the bill, before resigning in the summer of 2009.
Populist conservative appeals, anti-federal government impulses and threats of secession are nothing new, but they take on special resonance with a black president in a bad economy.
Hatriot History, Media and Murder
America has seen militarized right-wing radical groups in the past, playing off the same fears: a tyrannical federal government, a surrender of sovereignty and seizure of all guns.
Survivalist groups like the Minutemen began developing a “patriotic resistance” movement patterned after colonial militias in the early 1960s, doing wilderness military drills, hoarding weapons and ammunition to prepare for a Soviet invasion in advance of what they said was a plan to “confiscate all private fire-arms by the end of 1965.”22 Its founder, Robert Bolivar DePugh, briefly tried to form a political party, dubbed the Patriot Party, but his plans for political influence were undone when he was arrested for a plot to blow up the Redmond, Washington, City Hall and surrounding power plants, before robbing local banks.23 Arrests of affiliated Minutemen groups found half-baked plans for a cyanide attack on the United Nations24 and extensive weapons caches including bombs, mortars, machine guns and more than one million rounds of ammunition.25
Major General Edwin Walker became a hero to mid-century right-wing militants when he resigned from the military after coming under criticism for distributing John Birch Society literature to troops. The decorated World War II and Korean War combat veteran then led protests against James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi. His rallying cry presaged Wingnut and Hatriot claims today, calling for “a national protest against the conspiracy from within. Rally to the cause of freedom in righteous indignation, violent vocal protest, and bitter silence under the flag of Mississippi at the use of Federal troops . . . This is the conspiracy of the crucifixion by anti-Christ conspirators of the Supreme Court in their denial of prayer and their betrayal of a nation.”26 Two people were killed and six federal marshals were shot in the fifteen hours of riots that followed. (Walker would later be arrested twice for public lewdness in Dallas park bathrooms.)27
The rash of right-wing extremist groups from the explicitly military to overheated anti-communist compelled former President Eisenhower to speak out on the subject in the early 1960s: “I don’t think the United States needs super-patriots,” Ike gently scolded. “We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don’t need these people [who pretend to be] more patriotic than you or anybody else.”28 President Kennedy also weighed in, warning of “armed bands of civilian guerrillas that are more likely to supply local vigilantes than national vigilance.”29
In the ensuing two decades, anti-government left-wing extremist groups dominated headlines, but there were outbursts of far-right violence such as the 1979 massacre in Greensboro, North Carolina, in which KKK and American Nazi Party members shot and killed five leftist protesters, including members of the Communist Workers Party. The recession of the late 1970s and early ’80s saw the rise of the Posse Comitatus groups, which claimed that the highest government authority lay with county officials like sheriffs and that there had been a “subtle subversion” of the U.S. Constitution that reflected a “criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice, disfranchise citizens and liquidate the Constitutional Republic of these United States.”30 By the the 1990s, America experienced the rise of the anti-government patriot militia movement, paramilitary groups featuring a mix of white pride and Christian identity politics, fueled by anger at the Bill Clinton-led federal government after deaths at Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The destruction of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was the culmination of years of escalation, and subsequent scrutiny reduced the militia’s momentum. But the Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked seventy-five plots, attacks and murders from far-right militia types in the years since Oklahoma City.31
In total, there were 845 acts of domestic terrorism from far-right and affiliated white supremacist groups between 1954 and 2004, including shootings, bombing and arson.32 The record shows this is not a benign movement of patriots, but a dangerous strain of extremism with both a rap sheet and a body count.
Today’s Hatriots are potentially even more dangerous because of their ability to recruit and radicalize more people via the Internet. Their job is made easier by Wingnut media heroes and even members of Congress who give comfort to their conspiracy theories.
Alex Jones’s syndicated radio show and his Web sites Prison Planet and Info Wars are a clearing house of conspiracy theories from 9/11 to the New World Order—and a home to unhinged Hatriots eager for “information” they can’t get elsewhere. A self-described paleo-conservative and “aggressive constitutionalist,” Jones is so far right he’s left, establishing himself at the vanguard of fright-wing politics.
“The answer to 1984 is 1776!” is a typical battle cry that endears him to the Hatriots. During the presidency of George W. Bush, Jones eagerly advanced the idea that the Bush administration and bankers were behind the destruction of the World Trade Center (with companion DVDs for sale). Now that Obama is in office, a whole new cottage industry of hate has opened up: He’s selling semi-slick productions with titles like The Fall of the Republic and The Obama Deception, which are passed on like Grateful Dead bootlegs among the Hatriot underground. The pitch is always apocalypse, telling viewers “The last vestiges of our free republic are being swept away . . . the destiny of humanity is in our hands.” The common ground is opposition to the federal storm troopers he sees as trying to impose one-world government on the few remaining patriots left. When Pittsburgh police engaged in modest riot control measures at a 2009 G-20 summit, Jones was ready to climb the ramparts, referring to the police as “complete enemies of America. . . . Our military’s been taken over. . . . This is the end of our country. . . . They’d love to kill 10,000 Americans. . . .The republic is falling right now.”33
Given his full-throated embrace of the crazy (always presented as a search for the truth), what’s really troubling is that members of Congress go on Jones’s radio show. Ron Paul is a frequent guest. Texas Republican Louie Gohmert chose the venue to say: “This socialist health care . . . is going to absolutely kill senior citizens. They’ll put them on lists and force them to die early”34 Florida Democrat Alan Grayson used the opportunity to call an aide to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke a “K-Street whore.” Going on Jones’s radio show isn’t just a serious lapse of judgment, it seems to inspire serious lapses in judgment as well.
There is a trickle-down effect to hardworking people who identify with the message of anger and anxiety. The Oath Keeper-affiliated Nevada deli owner Billy Glassberg describes Alex Jones as his “hero”: “He stands for the Constitution, for America and sovereignty. Regardless of whether you want to know something or not, you’ve got to investigate the truth. There’s no more right and there’s no more left. It’s all about Americans and Globalists. That’s it. And it was Globalists behind 9/11.”35
His diner, Brooklyn Billy’s, stands less than a mile from the Las Vegas Strip in sight of the Mandalay Bay Casino in the corner of an office park. Next to the sign in the window that boasts “the best pastrami west of New York” anothe
r reads “free speech zone.” On the walls are posters of Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Al Pacino in Scarface bearing the slogan “Who I trust? I trust me.” Framed on the opposite wall is a yellowing New York Daily News cover dated November 23, 1963. The headline blares “President Shot Dead.” On the glass of the frame, Billy has written, “Killed by the N.W.O.”—i.e., the New World Order. Billy is friendly, unassuming. His mother works the register while he makes the sandwiches in back, listening to Alex Jones’s radio show blaring out of the speakers.
Billy believes that “Obama should be tried for treason.” But it’s not personal. “He’s a puppet in the New World Order. He picked up the ball where Bush left it. . . . As far as the Republican and Democratic Party, Parties, it’s two sides of the same coin. They’re all owned by the same bankers, whether it’s the Rothschilds or the Morgans or the Rockefellers. . . . They put a black face on the New World Order because they know things are getting intense. They know people are starting to figure it out.”
Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America Page 19