Another backlash kicked off following Micah Johnson's deadly 2016 attack on Dallas police officers. Later that year, BLM and President Obama were sued by an African American police sergeant from Dallas named Demetrick Pennie, accusing them of inciting “their supporters and others to engage in threats of and attacks to cause serious bodily injury or death upon police officers and other law enforcement persons.”3
The claim was a stretch, at best, as the courts eventually would determine, but it did ask the bigger question about relationship between this cycle of protests and counter-protests, extremism, and violence. Black Lives Matter, #bluelivesmatter, and the media ecosystem in which these groups were situated were certainly related to the extremism and even violence that developed around issues they publicized. They just weren't, by themselves, responsible for any one person's radicalization. The same can be said of another world-changing communications technology that developed around 2008.
The violence following the 1992 Rodney King verdict was, in a sense, the result of technology: a man named George Holliday filmed the beating of King from his nearby balcony, sent the footage to a local television station, and it was eventually broadcast around the world. Because Holliday happened to have a video camera on hand, millions of Americans were already convinced of the officers’ guilt even before the trial began. When the officers were found not guilty, the sense of disbelief and anger was magnified a thousand fold by the seemingly incontrovertible video evidence.
Fifteen years later, in 2007, Apple introduced the first iPhone, completely changing the cell phone market. Within a few years, most phones were touchscreens, had full-capacity web browsers, and were powered by an expanding number of apps. They also featured increasingly powerful cameras, and as smartphones became ubiquitous, people began reflexively reaching for their phones to photograph their kids’ recital, funny cat antics, and concerts. Sovereign Citizens were early adapters at using cell phones to monitor police activity, recording events like traffic stops as early as 2008. But after Trayvon Martin's killing kicked off #blacklivesmatter, filming police activity became a nearly reflexive impulse for millions of Americans.
Not only did smartphones guarantee that everyone had a camera, they also allowed people to immediately upload the footage to Facebook or YouTube. In the 1960s, the Black Panthers had monitored local police by following them with guns. More recently, the militant Black Riders Liberation Party's website updated that approach, promoting using phones instead of guns for its “Watch A Pig” program.
The result of this new technology was that, from at least 2014 onward, a steady stream of video was injected into the racially charged, partisan, and overheated media ecosystem. Over just ten months of 2014 and 2015, cell phone footage showed at least six fatal police shootings, all them widely shared across media platforms.
Combined with footage from police dashboard cameras and the relatively new body cams that some officers were required to wear, public confidence in the police tied a low, with just 52 percent of Americans saying they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in law enforcement. Over the previous twenty-two years, that level was matched only in 1993, the year of the Waco standoff and one year after Ruby Ridge.
This widely broadcast narrative of racially motivated police shootings combined with readily available footage certainly seems to have played a role in Micah Johnson's radicalization. At a vulnerable moment following his disgraced return from Afghanistan, an enormous amount of media attention was being focused on the issue of police violence primarily against young black men. Johnson also viewed incitement to violence on the Facebook page of the African American Defense League, whose leader called for the murder of police officers around the country as payback for the shooting deaths of African Americans.
But social media wasn't just about flooding inboxes and Twitter threads with the latest events. It was also an incendiary archive. Leading up to the 1992 acquittal of the police officers involved, the beating of Rodney King had been shown on television news multiple times. For years after the riots, it only sporadically appeared in documentaries. But by 2014, YouTube hosted a video of the beating, which Micah reportedly watched incessantly in the months leading up to his shooting rampage.
Micah's extremist actions were part of a broader movement. In 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported that there were 113 Black Separatist groups. A year later, that number had shot up to 180, the highest in decades.4 Again, it's hard to imagine that extremist black groups, which had not represented such a threat since the late 1970s, would have achieved such rapid growth without the cell footage of police shootings of African Americans bouncing around the internet. Not coincidentally, the 2015 spike came following a year of protests in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.
On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African American, was involved in a scuffle with Darren Wilson, a white police officer sitting in his SUV. Wilson fired a shot. Brown ran down the street. Wilson jumped out in pursuit and shot Brown multiple times, killing him.
People, many of them African American, quickly gathered on the street where Brown's body lay. It was a hot summer day in soon-to-be-famous Ferguson, an area with a history of deep hostilities between the black community and police force. It was also two years after the Trayvon Martin shooting had launched #blacklivesmatter and ignited an online debate and offline protests of police killings of African Americans. Street action was nearly inevitable, but few people could have anticipated how extraordinary it would be.
The following night was set aside for peaceful marches and a candlelight vigil for mourners and protestors of Brown's death, but 150 St. Louis County police officers showed up nonetheless, with riot gear and militarized vehicles. Later on, looters broke into stores and burned down buildings.
The next day, August 11, a few protestors threw rocks at police. The police fired back at protestors with tear gas and nonlethal bean bag rounds. The following evening saw SWAT teams, smoke bombs, flash grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas deployed. These three events, peaceful protests, destructive looting, and a heavy-handed police response, would remain constants for months.
Over the next few days, national media also began covering the story, turning it into another hotly contested discussion on race and policing. A CNN cameraman filmed an officer yelling, “Bring it, you fucking animals. Bring it.” On the night of August 13, reporters for the Washington Post and Huffington Post were roughly arrested in a McDonald's. An Al-Jazeera America journalist was tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets, and had his camera taken apart by a SWAT team. Protestors threw Molotov cocktails; police fired more tear gas and smoke bombs.
On August 14, after criticism over the militarized police tactics by Missouri senator Claire McCaskill and governor Jay Nixon, the chief of St. Louis County police handed over leadership duties to the head of the Missouri State Highway Police, who was African American. Relationships between police and protestors seemed to improve initially, but the unrest continued for months with curfews, occasional protests, counter-protests, looting, and arrests.
Once again, the new media ecosystem played a central role in fanning the flames of unrest. When riots broke out after the 1968 King assassination, there were relatively few news sources. As a result, the vast majority of Americans saw the same footage on network television and read the same articles from wire services or national newspapers. By contrast, the Ferguson protests played out around the country on 4chan forums, YouTube channels, Facebook pages, the Twitterverse, and cable news talk shows. What's more, in 2014, audiences could pick the coverage of events that best reflected their politics and existing biases.
For example, a story about a neighboring Glendale police officer who had posted to Facebook, “These protesters should have been put down like a rabid dog the first night,” and “Where is a Muslim with a backpack when you need them”5 was pushed by left-leaning news organizations like the New York Daily News and Russia Today.
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bsp; Likewise, coverage of Ray Albers, an officer who pointed his assault rifle at Ferguson protestors while they were livestreaming, said “I will fucking kill you,” and then, in response to requests to identify himself, responded, “Go fuck yourself,” was most evident on liberal sites Gawker and New York magazine. The internet's insatiable appetite for polarizing and offensive humor churned out a popular meme called “officergofuckyourself.”
On the other side of the spectrum, an FBI sting operation near Ferguson that captured two members of the New Black Panther Party planning to set off bombs to kill law enforcement officials was peddled most effectively by Breitbart and WorldNetDaily,6 both of which count far-right extremists among their readership. Depending on their appetite, Americans could choose to have the Ferguson protests portrayed as rife with police abuse or a locus for violent Black Nationalism. But the most alarming extremist story to come out of Ferguson was not African American militants but an overwhelmingly white and heavily armed group.
On the night of November 25, 2014, website designer Greg Hildebrand stepped out of his shower and noticed a man standing on the next rooftop over. He quickly reached for a towel before pushing up the window.
“Hey, can I help you?” Hildebrand asked.1
The man, who was wearing military gear and armed with an assault rifle, told Hildebrand that he was “security.” The previous night, a grand jury had decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown. Rioting had ensued, and several businesses on Hildebrand's street had been broken into and vandalized.2
What the armed man on the roof didn't announce was that he was one of the Oath Keepers. Following the previous night's looting, the group had put out a nationwide call for members to converge on Ferguson to help protect businesses and keep the peace.
A few days later, after concerns raised by local officials, media, and protestors, the police ordered the Oath Keepers to stand down on the basis of an ordinance regulating paid security guards. After arguing, the Oath Keepers complied but then—fully armed—joined the protest criticizing the St. Louis County police chief. A few days later, the group's leaders decided that the ordinance didn't apply to them.
“Once we read the statute, we laughed at it,” said Sam Andrews, a local leader of the Oath Keepers. “Then, the next night, we were there.”3 Although unhappy with the militia's decision, the police capitulated, and the Oath Keepers stayed on the roofs.
In interviews, the group claimed to be apolitical and not to tolerate racism. But a 2012 speech given by St. Louis County cop Dan Brown to local Oath Keepers suggests politics that weren't conducive to even-handed security work. In a YouTube video of the speech, Brown said that he retired early from the military because he wouldn't take orders from an “undocumented president,” that the government will put kids in indoctrination camps, and that, as soon as Muslims “exceed you in numbers,” they will kill you. The video, in which Brown also boasted of his blood thirst, led to the officer's suspension.4 It was hard to say if his speech was a greater indictment of the police force or the Oath Keepers.
Many protestors also felt that the presence of white men in combat gear with multiple high-powered weapons in the midst of a largely African American protesters raised tensions. But, for other residents, the Oath Keepers’ bid to take on the role of police force was welcome.
Even before the protests, the local police's credibility among many African American residents was low. The police had already made military gear commonplace on the streets of Ferguson. Even worse, their heavy-handed response had been widely seen as ineffective. According to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story, many people who lived and worked near the businesses where Oath Keepers stood watch, both African American and white, were glad the militia members were there.5
In the 1990s, plenty of white, rural Americans might have trusted a local militia more than federal authority. In 2014, a militia replacing the police in an overwhelmingly African American, urban environment were tolerated by authorities and welcomed by at least some residents. The relatively successful venture in new territory would only encourage the conspiratorial, anti-government militia to continue mainstreaming its practices of supplementing or replacing police functions.
After their successes in Ferguson, the Oath Keepers were quick to provide armed resistance for what they saw as infringements on Americans’ constitutional rights around the country. In April, they joined other militias at Cliven Bundy's ranch near Bunkerville, Nevada. Bundy had been grazing his cattle on six hundred thousand acres of federal land for decades without paying associated fees. After a prolonged legal battle, a federal judge issued an order for Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to seize Bundy's cattle until he paid the fees, which had grown to over a million dollars.
Bundy was a “Mormon Constitutionalist,” a right-wing extremist belief system that combines prophecies of Christ's return, America's divine founding, and God's role in inspiring both the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. As for the fees the government demanded, Bundy believed that Mormon pioneers had worked the land before the BLM existed and that, ultimately, God had created the federal land in question. Additionally, he thought the federal government was unable to exercise enforcement powers in the state of Nevada. As a result, Bundy thought, the government had no basis to charges fees for land use.
This unyielding ideological disconnect—not dissimilar to the one that backgrounded the events in Waco, Texas, over twenty years earlier—was the backdrop for the events of April 5, 2014. A combination of roughly two hundred armed Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service officers began rounding up Bundy's cattle, estimated at five hundred to nine hundred head. The federal officials were quickly met with resistance by the Bundy family and some supporters, many of whom were also armed.
The tussle between armed militias and the “gathers” looking for cattle across a rocky red desert was full of drama, like a scene from some particularly chaotic Western. But as was usual by now, the scene was chopped up and condensed into singularly divisive talking points through the distorted media coverage, which tended toward the right. The showdown was soon covered regularly on Fox. By April 9, Cliven Bundy was being interviewed for Sean Hannity's program.
A cell phone video of one of Bundy's sons being shot with a Taser after kicking a federal agent's dog went viral on YouTube, provoking outrage and rallying supporters to the Bundy ranch. On April 8, Nevada governor Brian Sandoval claimed that the operation was trampling constitutional rights. Nevada senator Dean Heller echoed his concerns, and both men's comments were hyped up in a right-wing media discourse.
The following Saturday, April 12, saw a bizarre test of the Sovereign Citizen claim that the county sheriff is the highest law officer in the land. Cliven Bundy ordered Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie to disarm federal agents near his ranch. Gillespie, who had been quietly trying to defuse the situation, stared straight ahead without responding.
But while beliefs in alternative legal systems had no impact, the hundreds of militia supporters, including Oath Keepers and 3%ers, who had rallied for Bundy did. Nearly all were heavily armed. Some had taken up strategic positions, such as a nearby highway overpass, their rifles out and aimed at federal agents. Seeing the possibility of an even worse Waco-style bloodbath, the federal agents backed down, returned the cattle, and abandoned their efforts to collect Bundy's long overdue grazing fees.
For a brief minute, Bundy, a man who avoided paying over twenty years of grazing fees to the government through the threat of violence, was a folk hero to right-wing figures like Texas congressman Ron Paul. Fox's Sean Hannity celebrated while also pedaling dissident Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack's baseless conspiracy theory that the weekend defeat was a false flag and the federal government was still planning to raid Bundy's ranch.
When Harry Reid, Nevada's senior senator and the ranking Democrat in Congress, called Cliven Bundy a “domestic terrorist,” Senator Heller shot back that he regarded them as “patriots.”
Bundy supporters wore “domestic terrorist” name tags to a party honoring their victory.6 The whole event, including partisan political coverage and an embrace of illegal and anti-government rhetoric by elected officials, was becoming distressingly normal.
Bundy hero-worship died off soon thereafter when he made comments about how African Americans might have been better off under slavery. His militias also angered some local residents of Bunkerville after setting up checkpoints with armed men regulating who was allowed in and out of the town. But the complete victory over the federal government further emboldened the Oath Keepers and other militias.
In early September of 2015, a viral video showed a gay couple being refused marriage licenses by Kim Davis, a Rowan County clerk in Kentucky. That story quickly exploded from social media to mainstream nightly news broadcasts.7 Davis, who claimed “God's law” prevented her from following a Supreme Court decision legalizing same sex marriage, was briefly arrested by federal marshals.
Soon thereafter, Stewart Rhodes jumped into the debate, saying that the Oath Keepers would travel to Kentucky with their guns to protect Davis. Rhodes even threatened the judge who ordered Davis arrested, saying he “needs to be put on notice that his behavior is not going to be accepted.”8 Soon thereafter, though, Rhodes's offer to form an Oath Keeper security guard for Davis was declined by her legal team.
The next major militia action, the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in western Oregon, did not have the official blessing of the Oath Keepers or 3%ers. It was, however, 100 percent inspired by them. The events during the standoff were widely reported, but its beginning and ending provide the best insight into the growing entitlement felt by these groups.
In November 2015, Cliven Bundy's sons, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, began using social media to publicize the plight of two ranchers in western Oregon who were facing jail time for burning federal land. Heartened by their success at staring down the BLM and Forest Service the previous year, the Bundy brothers put out a call for “patriots” to rally around the Oregon ranchers, Dwight and Steve Hammond. During the fall of 2015, anti-government militia members began moving into Harney County, Oregon, with Ammon Bundy arriving in December. Although the occupiers’ initial idea was to rally local support for their cause, it didn't go as expected.
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