Hateland

by Daryl Johnson

  These bizarre scams are also sometimes just a few degrees removed from violent extremism. The woman who argued the dog-licensing fee, Donna Lee Wray, had recently become the “common-law wife” of Jerry Kane, who traveled the country with his sixteen-year-old son, Joe, putting on seminars on how to avoid foreclosure.

  In May of 2010, the father and son were pulled over in Arkansas for their unusual Ohio license plate on their aging Plymouth Voyager. After arguing with a police officer on the shoulder of the road, Jerry shoved him into a roadside ditch. The younger Kane—who was home schooled, able to recite the Bill of Rights from memory, and, from the time he could walk, always carried a realistic-looking toy gun—emerged from the minivan and shot the officer in the chest with an AK-47. He then turned the gun on a second officer, who took shelter behind his SUV. The officer fired several shots but was outgunned.

  Joe Kane chased him down and put a bullet in the back of his head. The Kanes then fled, with Joe continuing to fire out the window at the dying officers. A couple of hours later, they were spotted at a nearby Walmart, where they wounded two more officers before being shot dead.

  Like so many extremists before him, Jerry Kane's life was almost a textbook example of progressive destabilization. He grew up in the blue-collar town of Springfield, Ohio. After graduating from high school, he made the first of several unsuccessful attempts to be elected City Commissioner. He later began work as a trucker and married a nurse named Hope. In 1993, Joe was born.

  There is no record of any extremist behavior on Jerry's part up until this moment. Then, in 1995, his daughter died of what was diagnosed as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The grieving father was outraged after being told by his lawyer that he had to allow an autopsy be carried out on his daughter. According to his lawyer, that's when Jerry Kane “started asking questions.”13

  Beginning in the early 2000s, Kane experienced other stressful events. In 2002, his property was foreclosed on. In 2003, he tried to buy a different property at a sheriff's auction with an IOU. The next year, his property was foreclosed on again. That same year he shot at a passing teenager with a BB gun and then complained to the sheriff about being sentenced to community service. In 2007, his wife died.

  With millions of Americans losing their houses in the mortgage collapse, Kane took his son Joe on the road to help with running foreclosure-scam seminars. Sovereign con artists also hosted mortgage and debt elimination seminars,14 during which attendees would pay a fee to gain insider knowledge about how to stall the foreclosure process, not pay interest on credit cards, or evade paying income and property taxes.

  Despite the collapsing economy, Kane was not as successful as other Sovereign Citizens running similar scams. In the days leading up to the shooting, Kane had only six attendees, combined, at his last two events. He had also become enraged by a traffic stop in New Mexico, which he called a “Nazi Checkpoint” on his internet radio show while promising revenge on the arresting officer. “I found out where he lives, his address, his wife's name.”15

  A couple of days later, the Ohio police officers had the misfortune of pulling over the angry man and his son. Kane's safety net had begun fraying long before. He'd long been exposed to extremist literature that portrayed law enforcement and the legal system as illegitimate and hostile entities. He'd gone through multiple stressful events and life-changing setbacks, including a failing business venture. He was carrying semi-automatic weapons. It was a perfect storm to push an extremist to violence.

  The spike in gun-related violence committed by extremists like Jerry Kane was, at least partially, enabled by the gun control environment that existed between 2008 and 2016. The early 1990s gun control measures that inflamed conspiratorial militia groups were the result of multiple, horrific mass shootings in the late 1980s and early 90s.

  On January 17, 1989, Patrick Purdy shot and killed five children and wounded thirty-two others on a school playground in Stockton, California. A year and a half later, George Hennard drove his Ford Ranger pickup truck through the front window of a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and began hunting down customers with two 9mm pistols, killing twenty-three people and wounding another twenty-seven. In July of 1993, Gian Luigi Ferri exited an elevator into a law office in San Francisco and opened fire, eventually killing eight people and wounding six.

  The wave of high-profile mass shootings quickly galvanized action in Washington, DC. Four months after the shooting in San Francisco, the long-stalled Brady Bill, which required a five-day waiting period for gun purchases, became law. The following year's get-tough crime bill included an assault weapons provision that banned nineteen types of semi-automatics. Although the bill passed with significantly less support from Republicans than Democrats, two former Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, both publicly supported a ban on semi-automatic weapons. The bills also had the support of most Americans.

  Though the National Rifle Association (NRA) opposed both laws, Timothy McVeigh resigned from the group because he felt they weren't militant enough. McVeigh, who didn't need a single gun to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City, may have been pleased when, a week after the bombings, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre refused to disavow an earlier fundraising letter describing government officials as “armed terrorists dressed in Ninja black…jack-booted thugs armed to the teeth who break down doors, open fire with automatic weapons and kill law-abiding citizens.”16 But LaPierre's theatrics also met strong bipartisan criticism, including former president George H. W. Bush resigning from his life membership to the NRA.

  As the wave of gun control tightened up requirements for sales, Attorney General Janet Reno said, “This is an expression not only that people want these guns off the streets, but that the whole attitude toward guns, that America's love affair with guns, is coming to an end.”17 She was wrong. The anti-gun control forces had lost the battle of the early 1990s; by 2016, they were clearly winning the war.

  Two years after the assault weapons ban went into effect, a 1996 Gallup poll showed that 57 percent of Americans said they supported laws that would make it “illegal to manufacture, sell or possess semi-automatic weapons known as assault rifles.” But, beginning in 2000, support for these measures went into free fall. In 2004, when the provisions of the assault-weapons ban expired, there was little political will to renew them. By 2007, more people opposed than supported a ban on assault rifles. By 2016, 61 percent opposed such legislation while only 36 percent supported it, a 21 percent drop in support over twenty years.

  This massive turnaround reflected several things. First, the attacks of 9/11 and subsequent terror episodes made Americans more paranoid about their personal safety. Second, the NRA had been very successful in fighting tooth and nail against any new federal gun control measures as well as loosening a number of states’ laws regarding open and/or concealed carrying of weapons in public places. A longer-term trend was the broader change in the relationship between Americans and how they used guns. For most of the twentieth century, guns were most linked to hunting and sport shooting. But since the 1970s, the number of hunters in America has gone into steep decline. In 1977, 32 percent of Americans lived in a house with at least one hunter. By 2015, that number was more than halved.18 Nonetheless, guns kept selling at a rapid rate. This was largely because people no longer thought of guns as hunting or sport-shooting weapons: 67 percent now say their major reason for owning a gun is protection.19

  Perhaps strangely, by 2015, the number of people with at least one gun in their house was at an all-time low as well. Gun sales have kept pace only because those fewer Americans who bought guns, mostly white males, owned far more guns per person. They weren't hunters so much as hoarders. This change in market dynamics created an economic imperative for companies and lobbying groups to make people feel vulnerable to attack, either by criminals, terrorists, or even a tyrannical government bent on destroying the Second Amendment. The sales pitch for weapons was paranoia, a tactic that fit neatl
y into the hyperactive media environment. And, despite these low numbers of gun ownership, most Americans agreed that assault weapons should be legal as a defensive option.

  This new relationship between Americans and gun control was painfully apparent in the different response to the huge numbers of high-profile mass shootings between 2008 and 2016. In 2009 alone, eleven people were shot and killed in Geneva County, Georgia, and fourteen each in Fort Hood, Texas, and Binghamton, New York. In 2012, ten people were killed in Aurora, Colorado, while twenty-eight, mostly elementary school children, were slaughtered in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

  In the early 1990s, three shootings with lower body counts had played a critical role in convincing politicians to pass significant gun control. Americans supported this legislation, because they thought fewer guns would make them safer. By 2012, the logic had been reversed. A significant number of people now thought that more guns would make them safer. As a result, shootings did not lead to gun control, but they were very effective at making people buy more guns.

  After the failure of any significant gun control legislation—even measures with broad public support—to be passed in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, a kind of fatalism set in among many supporters of gun control. Thus, between 2013 and 2016, as a total of eighty-nine people died in just four mass shootings spread around the country—a military facility in Washington, DC, a community college in Oregon, an office party in San Bernardino, California, and a nightclub in Orlando, Florida—not only did no gun control legislation not get passed, but large amounts of weapons and ammo were sold.

  Another result of this shift in public perception was the social normalization of semi-automatics. Micah Johnson and Muhammad Abdulazeez, non-hunters who lived in relatively safe, middle class suburban neighborhoods, had no obvious need for military-grade weapons. In another time or place, they would have been more likely to face social resistance or scrutiny for owning the weapons—their parents may even have refused to allow the guns in their house. But, by 2015, semi-automatics were just another toy for adults.

  Another marker of the acceptance of paramilitary culture came in 2012, when the prepper movement got, not one, but two TV shows. National Geographic premiered Doomsday Preppers, while the Discovery Channel launched Doomsday Bunkers. The premise of Preppers was simple: the show follows various people as they explain why and how they are preparing for an apocalypse.

  In Doomsday Preppers, which ran for two seasons, the proud preppers show off their solar panels, the “bug-out” vehicles in which they will escape, secret stashes of food, and huge arsenals of weapons and ammo. The stars of the show generally explain that they are spending so much money and free time teaching their kids to shoot semi-automatics and prepare sea cucumbers as a post-apocalyptic protein source for one reason: to protect their families. But there is also a sense that prepping is really Dad's—they are mostly men—obsessive, paranoid hobby. Eventually prepping, the fear of apocalypse, leads to not just a conviction but a perverse desire for their worst predictions to come true. Preppers need to abbreviate Shit Hits The Fan (SHTF) because they discuss it both constantly and with a sense of knowing inevitability.

  As a review in the New York Times said, these obsessive hobbies can be interesting at first, but the amusement gives way “to annoyance at how offensively anti-life these shows are, full of contempt for humankind.”20 Many preppers are also convinced that, when the SHTF, they will have to kill untold numbers of unprepared, starving hordes.

  The movement also had high-profile sponsorship in the form of Fox News host Glenn Beck who, beginning in 2010, pitched “gourmet-quality” freeze-dried Food Insurance survivalist kits. In the ad copy, Beck echoes the paranoid tone of preppers: “[P]repare yourself for what we all hope won't happen, but probably will, if you're not prepared.”21

  The prepper movement runs across the ideological spectrum, but they are all motivated by fear of a cataclysmic event that will destroy, or at least massively disrupt, civilization. The event could be environmental devastation, the failure of the electric grid, or a crackdown on dissent by a United Nations-sanctioned one-world government. Preppers share much in common with the live-off-the-earth survivalist movement that emerged in 1970s, while often combining religious fervor and a wide variety of conspiracy theories.

  While the show doesn't broadcast racist or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, one episode featured a man named Tyler Smith who aggressively promised that, when the SHTF, he would assault all his neighbors and steal their supplies. “We are the marauders,” he said. “We are your worst nightmare. And we are coming.”22 It turned out that Smith, a felon, was not allowed to own his weapons and was arrested by local police after the show was filmed.

  Although the episode with Smith was mothballed after his arrest, Doomsday Preppers makes no judgment about the extremist paranoia extolled passionately by its subjects. Instead, the production values, breathless narration, and ominous music are designed to maximize Americans’ paranoia. The show also gives preppers a regular mainstream platform to spread an ideology—living off-the-grid with enough weapons to keep everyone else away—that neatly overlaps with violent Sovereign Citizens and anti-government militias.

  The growing public acceptance of paramilitary weapons effectively lowered the social cost of owning, or even stockpiling, assault rifles. But these mainstream shows, along with Fox News celebrities’ plugs for prepping, drove a dramatic normalization of paranoid paramilitary culture that was unimaginable in the rest of the developed world. The media attention further encouraged the Patriot and militia groups, which had been training in the woods for a chance to confront “enemies, foreign or domestic,” to move in from the fringes of society.

  On February 26, 2012, a twenty-nine-year-old Neighborhood Watch volunteer named George Zimmerman called the police in Sanford, Florida, to report a suspicious person walking through the Retreat at the Twin Lakes neighborhood.

  When police arrived minutes later, Trayvon Martin—a seventeen-year-old African American—was lying face down in the grass, having been shot in the chest by Zimmerman. Martin had died almost immediately. Zimmerman, bleeding from his nose and head, was handcuffed and taken to the police station where he was questioned. Five hours later, the police determined that there was no evidence to refute Zimmerman's claim that he had acted in self-defense and released him.

  Two days later, Martin's father, a resident of the neighborhood where his son was shot, identified photographs of Trayvon after filing a missing person report. He retained an attorney, but either unsatisfied with, or simply not trusting, the Sanford police department to handle the case appropriately, Martin's father also hired a publicist on March 5. Two days later, the shooting received its first national coverage via Reuters. By March 8, the story was exploding into the hyperactive and politicized media ecosystem that had emerged over the past few years.

  Left-leaning outlets like the Young Turks and Huffington Post were among the first high-profile broadcasters of the events, questioning why Zimmerman had gone free. The next day, mainstream media followed as ABC World News featured the story. Hashtags related to the shooting began trending on Twitter, with many people angrily demanding that Zimmerman be prosecuted. As it grew, through both social and traditional media, the shooting became the first story of 2012 to eclipse the ongoing presidential race.

  Under the pressure of intense media coverage, Zimmerman was eventually charged with second-degree murder. During an April 27, 2013, interview, Zimmerman's lawyer, Mark O'Mara, said, “I think if I could do away with all media, including all social media, I would not have an involvement in a criminal case.”1 The Martin family lawyer, Benjamin Crump, marveled at the impact of social media in bringing the case to court: “We didn't engage social media,” he said. “It's almost as if social media engaged us.”2

  The prosecution of George Zimmerman is just one example of the chain reactions set off by reports of a teenager killed in disputed circumstances after a scuffle
, a story that likely would have never punctured the nation's consciousness a decade earlier. Instead, the Trayvon Martin case became a near perfect example of how the hyperactive, outrage-culture that had begun to typify social media could set off chain reactions throughout social media and into the offline world.

  For example, the event inspired #blacklivesmatter, a hashtag that became a mainly leaderless national movement. In the years following the Martin shooting, Black Lives Matter (BLM) had continued to use social media to organize high-profile public protests against police shootings of African Americans.

  By 2014, Black Lives Matter had faced some criticism for its tactics and claims about racially charged police killings. But, after two on-duty police officers were killed in New York City, a flood of right-wing outrage was unleashed. The perpetrator had apparently killed the officers in retaliation for the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police. For some, BLM was somehow complicit in the killing. The rejoinder hashtag #bluelivesmatter began trending.

  The Trayvon effect was not done yet. In fact, it was the online debate following the Trayvon Martin shooting that had prompted Dylann Roof to search Google for “Black on white crime.” That search landed him at the website of the white supremacist Council of Concerned Citizens, a moment he said changed his life forever—and presumably played a critical role as an external factor of radicalization.

  After his 2015 shooting of nine African American parishioners, online pictures of Roof posing with the Confederate flag were widely circulated. The seemingly unavoidable conclusion that the Confederate flag had some symbolic meaning to Roof led the South Carolina legislature to remove the flag flying above the state capitol. This action in turn jumpstarted the removal of other Confederate statues and symbols across the South. In response, groups including white supremacists began protesting the removal of historical artifacts, sometimes violently.