The United States of Paranoia

by Jesse Walker

  The first decade of the twenty-first century saw three particularly notable eruptions of elite paranoia. The first came with the reactions to the 9/11 attacks. The second was the response to Katrina, when powerful people’s fears both fed and were reinforced by the centralization and militarization of disaster relief. And the third began when Barack Obama became president, as commentators treated a group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement. As is often the case with paranoid perspectives, this connect-the-dots fantasy said more about the tellers’ anxieties than it did about any order actually emerging in the world.

  This third scare had been bubbling since the final months of the 2008 election, but it exploded after a summertime shoot-out at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

  On June 10, 2009, an elderly man entered the Holocaust museum, raised a rifle, and opened fire, killing a security guard named Stephen Tyrone Johns. Two other guards shot back, wounding the gunman before he could kill anyone else.

  The killer was soon identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, an eighty-eight-year-old neo-Nazi. Von Brunn acted alone, but there was no shortage of voices eager to spread the blame for his crime. Pundits quickly linked the murder, in a free-associative way, to the assassination ten days earlier of the Kansas abortionist George Tiller. This, we were told, was a “pattern” of “rising right-wing violence.”

  More imaginative pundits tried to tie the two slayings to a smattering of other crimes, from an April shoot-out in Pittsburgh that had killed three cops to a double murder at a Knoxville Unitarian church the year before. The longest such list, assembled by the blogger Sara Robinson, included a variety of incidents linked only by the fact that the criminals all hailed from one corner or another of the paranoid Right. One of the episodes involved a mentally disturbed anti-Semite who had stalked a former classmate for two years before killing her in May. “This is how terrorism begins,” Robinson warned.21

  Crime wave thus established, the analysts moved on to denounce the unindicted instigators. Those weren’t just killers, the narrative went; they were killers inflamed by demagogues. Bonnie Erbe of U.S. News & World Report pinned the museum guard’s death on “promoters of hate,” adding: “If yesterday’s Holocaust Museum slaying of security guard and national hero Stephen Tyrone Johns is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don’t know what is.”22 In The New York Times, the columnist Paul Krugman warned that “right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.”23 His Times colleague Bob Herbert wrote that he “can’t help feeling” that the crimes “were just the beginning and that worse is to come”—thanks in part to “the over-the-top rhetoric of the National Rifle Association.”24 Another Timesman, Frank Rich, announced that “homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs.” After the museum murder, Rich wrote, Glenn Beck “rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a ‘lone gunman nutjob.’ Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that ‘the pot in America is boiling,’ as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.”25

  When critics blamed prolife partisans for the death of George Tiller, there at least was a coherent connection between the pundits’ antiabortion rhetoric and the assassin’s target. Say what you will about Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but neither is known for railing against the Holocaust Museum. If Beck, to borrow Rich’s mixed metaphor, was cheering on a kettle, it wasn’t the kettle that produced James von Brunn.

  The attempt to draw those connections was a form of paranoia, just as much as the jittery responses to powdered coffee creamer and a kid’s homemade flashlight were. Like those earlier excitements, it found a home at the Department of Homeland Security. In 2009, DHS analyst Daryl Johnson produced a report on the threat of “rightwing extremism.” He seemed to cast a wide net. “Rightwing extremism in the United States,” he wrote, “can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”26

  The charitable reading of this passage is that it’s a sloppily phrased attempt to list the ideas that drive various right-wing extremists, not a declaration that anyone opposed to abortion or prone to “rejecting federal authority” is a threat.27 But even under that interpretation, the report is inexcusably vague. It focuses on extremism itself, not on violence, and there’s no reason to believe that its definition of “extremist” is limited to people with violent inclinations. (A DHS report on left-wing extremism cites such nonviolent groups as Crimethinc and the Ruckus Society.)28 In the words of Michael German, an FBI agent turned policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, the bulletin focuses “on ideas rather than crime.” One practical effect, he noted, is that the paper “cites an increase in ‘rhetoric’ yet doesn’t even mention reports that there was a dirty bomb found in an alleged white supremacist’s house in Maine last December. Learning what to look for in that situation might actually be useful to a cop. Threat reports that focus on ideology instead of criminal activity are threatening to civil liberties and a wholly ineffective use of federal security resources.”29

  Like the liberals who voted to recharter the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938 only to find the same tool used against the Left a decade later, conservatives who supported the spying apparatus erected during the War on Terror found that it could be deployed in more ways than they’d anticipated. Republican leaders protested Daryl Johnson’s report loudly, and the consequences were quick: The DHS adopted a civil liberties and privacy review process, and it reduced its staff devoted to the domestic Right. Johnson, who soon left the agency, later claimed that his team was “left floundering day-to-day without any meaningful work to do”30 as higher-ups retreated in the face of criticism.

  It was a substantial victory for civil libertarians, but it’s important not to overstate how far it went. The review process didn’t end the production of inappropriate fusion center reports, though it did largely prevent them from being published. Johnson may have left the federal Homeland Security bureaucracy, but he stayed in the homeland security business, running a consulting company called DT Analytics that contracts with police departments, fusion centers, and other institutions. And in the press, the new Brown Scare continued to flourish, as incidents were uncritically presented as evidence that political rhetoric was inciting political violence.

  In September 2009, when a Kentucky census worker named Bill Sparkman was found bound and lifeless with the word FED on his chest, the Huffington Post’s Allison Kilkenny called the death “the kind of violent event that emerges from a culture of paranoia and unsubstantiated attacks.”31 Under the headline “Send the Body to Glenn Beck,” True/Slant’s Rick Ungar wondered whether “the time has come for the FCC to consider exactly what constitutes screaming fire over the publicly owned airwaves.”32 Two months later, police concluded that the death had been a suicide. Sparkman, they reported, had staged it to look like a murder for insurance reasons.

  When a software engineer named Joe Stack flew a plane into an Austin IRS office in early 2010, pundits reached for the same narrative. Stack’s personal manifesto did not, in fact, fit into any conventional political category; it revealed a mix of left-wing resentments, right-wing resentments, and painfully specific resentments from Stack’s own life. Yet the prominent blogger Josh Marshall, highlighting the pilot’s reference to “Mr. Big Brother IRS man,” greeted the document with the headline “Ideas Have Consequences,” as though no American would resent the tax man if it weren’t for the GOP’s antitax rhetoric.33

  Several statistics circulated through the press that seemed to suggest a crisis. On closer examinati
on, they revealed something less:

  • On August 28, 2009, CNN’s Rick Sanchez reported that a source close to the Secret Service “confirmed to me today that threats on the life of the president of the United States have now risen by as much as 400 percent since his inauguration,” going “far beyond anything the Secret Service has seen with any other president.”34 In the ensuing weeks, the number was widely repeated in other press outlets. It was also widely challenged, and Sanchez eventually backed down from his report.

  The statistic had come from Ronald Kessler’s book In the President’s Secret Service, published a few weeks before the Sanchez broadcast.35 In early 2010, I asked Malcolm Wiley, a Secret Service spokesman, about the claim. He wouldn’t give out the correct figures, but he denied that Kessler’s number was correct. According to Wiley, there was a period while Obama was still a candidate when he had received more threats than the sitting president. “But since he became president, that has leveled off,” he continued. “The number of threats he has received has been consistent with the number received by Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and others.”36 Secret Service director Mark Sullivan offered a similar assessment to the House Homeland Security Committee in late 2009, testifying that “threats are not up.”37

  • After Joe Stack flew his plane into an IRS building, the press reported that threats against employees of the Internal Revenue Service had increased 21.5 percent from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2009. In that case, the claim was accurate: As a Treasury official told The Wall Street Journal in early 2010, there had been a “steady, upward trend” in such threats.38 But the trend had started in 2006, when a Republican was in the White House and the loudest angry rhetoric about internal revenue involved tax cuts, not tax hikes.

  In the absence of more detailed data, it isn’t obvious what factors fueled the increase. But when someone decides to assault an IRS employee, one government official told me, it’s “usually a personal event that’s a catalyst.”39

  • 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.40

  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.”41

  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.”42 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.”43 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.”44 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.45

  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.”)46 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.”47

  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.”48

  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 terror
ists 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.”49 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.