Hateland

by Daryl Johnson

  After several negotiations with the Hammonds, their lawyer declined the Bundys’ offers of assistance. Ammon Bundy and his supporters then requested that the county sheriff, whom they regarded the supreme law of the land, protect the Hammonds from federal officials. Sheriff David Ward refused.

  The group also tried to establish a local “Committee of Safety,” modeled after the colonial-era shadow governments that were designed to usurp power from British officials. In their minds, of course, they were now the oppressed colonials fighting the British, represented by the current American government. These committees didn't get much traction with locals, either.

  The group continued to make attempts to rally the public to their side, but at least some militia members began taking a different tack all together. In December 2015, police and residents of Burns reported multiple episodes of harassment, including being followed by SUVs and trucks with out-of-town license plates. These people included likely targets of militia ire such as a pastor who had been a vocal opponent of their tactics, the wife of a BLM employee, the teenage son of a policeman, and the parents of Sheriff Ward.

  Ward's wife also set up cameras at the end of their driveway to record the unfamiliar trucks that regularly pulled in and sat there for from ten to forty minutes. Ward himself said he received death threats after refusing the Bundys’ request to protect the Hammonds from federal officials.

  After this harassment was reported, a conspiratorial counter-narrative began on the internet, positing that the intimidation tactics were carried out not by militia members but by FBI agents posing as them in a classic false flag operation to discredit the militias.9

  One other ominous sign that preceded the occupation was a book recently self-published on Amazon by LaVoy Finicum, a fifty-four-year-old rancher and foster parent from Arizona, who became the primary spokesman for the occupiers. His novel, Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom, which was part Turner Diaries and part Doomsday Preppers, followed the Bonham family after a nuclear attack destroys civilization. In the midst of murder, rape, and cannibalism, the well-prepared Bonhams use their extensively described arsenal of guns to fight off their starving neighbors, as well as government officials intent on taking their weapons and forcing them to share their stockpiled food with the larger community.

  On December 30, with tensions building, employees at the wildlife refuge were dismissed early and told not to come back until instructed. Multiple people, including at least one Bureau of Land Management employee, left town. On December 31, militia member Jon Ritzheimer took to YouTube to claim he was “100 percent willing to lay down my life to fight against tyranny in this country.”10 The militia members moved into the refuge on January 2, 2016, but the town had felt occupied for weeks, and a violent, apocalyptic ethos was pervasive.

  Over the next few weeks, various local, state, and federal law enforcement officers took up positions around the refuge but allowed occupiers free passage in and out. Finicum and others basked in the international media attention but did not gain any more local support. The 3%ers of Idaho arrived to set up a “security perimeter” but were asked to leave by Ammon Bundy. A Sovereign Citizen-style “grand jury” was created to charge government officials with crimes, while both the Harney County judge and Sheriff Ward asked the occupiers to leave. Photographs show occupiers toting assault rifles and other weapons.

  On January 15, 2016, Rhodes weighed in on the situation via the Oath Keepers’ website. Although he had distanced his group from the occupation from the beginning, he still urged military and law enforcement not to take part in any Waco-style aggressive action.

  “Your brothers in heaven are watching,” he wrote. “Do the right thing. Stand down, and refuse to obey evil, ghoulish sociopaths who salivate at the prospect of watching Americans die on camera.” Failure to do so, he warned, could lead to “a conflagration so great, it cannot be stopped, leading to a bloody, brutal civil war.”11

  On January 26, law enforcement took the opportunity to arrest all the leadership, including both Bundy sons, while they were traveling to meet with a sympathetic sheriff in a neighboring county. LaVoy Finicum was shot and killed during the operation.

  By February 10, just four out of the dozens of occupiers remained. As part of their prolonged series of negotiations with the FBI, the group requested to speak with a supportive Nevada assemblywoman named Michele Fiore. The legislator flew into Portland and, during the four hour drive to the refuge, talked with the occupiers on an open YouTube livestream while up to sixty thousand members of the public listened in.

  In a show of delusional chutzpah, Cliven Bundy flew into Portland that same night to support the remaining occupiers. He was promptly arrested at the airport for events related to the 2014 Bundy standoff.

  That same night, a YouTube video was posted by two of the remaining occupiers, Sandy and Sean Anderson, as they sat in their tent. They were calm but also displayed a remarkable sense of entitlement and disregard for the law. The Andersons, who had traveled from out of state to join a heavily armed occupation of federal territory and refused to leave after being served notice by both the sheriff and county judge, complained about their “false imprisonment” at what they had named “Camp Finicum.”12 They were also upset that, during negotiations, the FBI wouldn't agree to drop all charges against them.

  That same day, Sean Anderson also posted a disorienting video in which he was outside, holding an assault rifle, glancing around and quickly yelling down at his phone.

  “Media's been ordered to leave! That means they're coming to kill us!” he said. After glancing around, Anderson added, “There are no laws in the United States now. This is a free-for-all Armageddon.”

  A few seconds later, he repeated the Oath Keepers’ claim that law enforcement officers that don't abide by oath are “the enemy.” He signed off by yelling, “If they stop you from getting here, kill them.”13

  Thomas Robb's route to the upper echelons of white supremacy initially followed a well-worn playbook. His parents’ politics leaned far right, and he had followed suit. Robb read the anti-Semitic newspaper Common Sense as a teenager and joined the conspiratorial and maniacally anti-Communist John Birch Society in high school. He later graduated from a theological institute based on Christian Identity, the racist religious philosophy that believes whites are the true Hebrews and Jews are the spawn of Satan.

  In 1979, Robb joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and settled in Arkansas to raise his family. He climbed rapidly through the ranks and was named grand wizard in the early 1980s. At one point in the 1990s, his group's trial membership included Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.1

  But as the US economy boomed in the second half of the 1990s, membership across the various Klan groups went into steady decline. To boost membership, Robb figured the Klan, which called up images of backwoods bigots, needed a radical rebrand, so he set his group on a new course: a kinder, gentler KKK.

  Robb's plan to attract a broader swath of the population included playing down some of the Klan's most iconic practices. Robb told members to keep their robes in the closet. The terrifying cross burnings were to be limited and called “cross lightings,” reputedly an old Scottish tradition. Perhaps most ambitiously, he wanted his members to stop using the “n-word” in public.2

  When author Jon Ronson caught up with Robb in 2000, on the eve of the KKK's annual National Congress in rural Arkansas, he found this early era of a more inclusive Klan awkward at best.

  Following a series of speeches and workshops designed to maximize Klan members’ individual potential—led by his daughter-in-law, Anna—Robb used his keynote address to drive home his new direction. He walked onto stage and held up a poster that said: “GET OUT NIGGER!” This, Robb said, is stupid. Instead of scaring people, Robb explained, the Klan needs to be seen as “knights in shining armor on the white horses.”3

  Not surprisingly, some hardline Klan leaders were underwhelmed by Robb's unorthodox behavior and
his exhortations to Klansmen to get in touch with their feelings. A rumor began that, in order to soften the group's image, Robb had even publicly kissed a black baby.

  For his part, Ronson was unconvinced of Robb's new tactic. The Klansman wanted to have his own television show “like David Letterman,” but Ronson thought, “Just being entertaining probably won't be enough. If Thom wants to become the voice of the Ku Klux Klan again, he's got to learn how to say the ‘N word’ entertainingly.”4

  But Robb stuck to his guns. After roughly twenty men had stepped forward during the ceremony for new members—the one night of the year when KKKers were still allowed to wear their robes—Robb asked the initiates: “Do we hate negroes?”

  “No,” repeated the new Klansmen. “We just love white people.”

  Robb's new direction was indeed promoting a certain kind of “white love.” But it was a love born of the fear that if white people didn't stick together, their race would be wiped out within a generation or two.

  The Klan had always portrayed itself as embattled. Its original purpose, immediately following defeat in the Civil War, was to push back against Northern occupation and newly emancipated African Americans, whose voting power had given control of Southern state governments to Republicans. The Klan responded with campaigns of terror and violence directed at the former slaves.

  During the first few decades of the twentieth century, Klan membership was driven by propaganda—the film The Birth of a Nation idealized the hate group's origins—as well as paranoia about increased immigration, particularly from Catholic countries. KKK membership in the United States peaked at an estimated five million in 1925, roughly 4 percent of the country's total population.

  In the decades immediately ahead, the Great Depression and a second world war heaped greater worries on the nation's plate, but the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s helped revive the Klan as a bulwark against a reputedly invasive federal government and outside agitators.

  Robb's “new” direction of the early 2000s played off that same tried-and-true tactic: scaring whites into believing they were again under siege. But, during the 2000s, a unique set of political events, rapidly changing demographics, and the emergence of immigration as a divisive issue converged to create an excellent environment for Robb to put this plan in motion.

  In 1970, the number of foreign-born US residents bottomed out at 5 percent of the total population—a century-long low—before beginning a steady march upward. By 2000, the number of foreign-born residents was approaching the level of the early 1930s, at about 11 percent, and climbing. By 2008, it was within a few percentage points of the twentieth-century peak.

  However, the emotional impact of immigration was compounded in the Southern and rural states that surrounded Robb, areas where the KKK received a disproportionate amount of its support. The last time immigration levels had been this high, the overwhelming majority of immigrants had settled in big cities, where they created ethnic neighborhoods that included Chinese, Italians, Greeks, and Irish.

  In the 2000s, the big states that already had established immigrant populations, like New York, Texas, and California, continued to get the largest number of new arrivals. But, largely drawn by labor-intensive agricultural work, a sizeable number of new immigrants headed for Southern and rural states. As a result, even small overall increases in immigrants made a much bigger relative impact. Between 2000 and 2012, for example, the foreign-born population of South Carolina shot up 87 percent—the single biggest percentage increase of any state. Alabama came in second, while Robb's home state of Arkansas was fifth with a dramatic 75 percent change.5

  Over the 1990s and 2000s, South Carolina and Arkansas remained over 95 percent white or black, near historic levels, but the perception of immigrant-driven change was huge. In small towns near immigration employment hubs like meat-packing plants, residents saw Mexican restaurants and stores open for the first time. At the same time, kids who initially spoke only Spanish were enrolling in schools, something unheard of just two decades previously.

  As this new “immigrant invasion” began unsettling white residents, Robb saw a prime opportunity to boost Klan membership. Simultaneously, certain sectors of the establishment media were handing Robb and other right-wing extremists a critical force multiplier.

  In the first few years of the new millennium, however, immigration was on the back burner when it came to high-profile issues. Not that some people weren't trying. Colorado GOP representative Tom Tancredo worked hard to focus attention on the rising number of immigrants in the United States, but he was mostly a voice in the wilderness. The overwhelming focus was on the War on Terror. Just as important, there was a general bipartisan consensus on immigration. In the age of wedge politics, an issue that wasn't divisive was much less valuable—both to the major parties and cable news networks.

  In a 2002 Washington Times opinion piece, Tancredo attempted to up the ante by tying immigration to the dominant issue of the day: terrorism. He warned that, after the next terror attack, a failure to pass tough immigration laws would leave national politicians with blood on their hands. The morning his article ran, Tancredo got a call on his cell phone while driving to the Capitol. He pulled over and got a tongue-lashing from GOP strategist Karl Rove who—unhappy he had conflated the two issues—told Tancredo “never to darken the door”6 of the White House again. Despite the scolding, Tancredo held firm, and over the next few years, immigration become a divisive, and thus more politically useful, issue.

  In 2001, when Gallup asked Americans how often they personally worried about illegal immigration, 52 percent answered either “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 47 percent answered that they thought about the issue “only a little” or “not at all.” By 2006, the worriers had reached 72 percent—up 20 percent. While American attitudes on immigration have always been complex, the Gallup poll made clear that, in a period dominated by terrorism, multiple ongoing wars, low unemployment, and a booming stock market, immigration was still a growing point of concern for many Americans.

  The 2006 debate over comprehensive immigration reform was a clear catalyst for this abrupt shift in attitude. That year, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill that combined increased security for the US southern border with a path to citizenship for long-time undocumented residents of the US. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives passed a bill—supported by Republicans and opposed by most Democrats—that focused almost exclusively on immigration as a national security issue, with stricter enforcement and harsher punishments for immigrants in the United States illegally.

  Because of their incompatibility, neither bill became law. But the failure marked a massive split in the way Democrats and Republicans viewed immigrants. According to a PEW research poll, in 2002, virtually the same number of Democrats and Republicans said that immigrants strengthened the country. Those numbers began diverging in 2006, and by 2010, only 29 percent of voters who identified as Republican said immigrants strengthened the country versus 48 percent of Democrats.7 The gap has continued to widen even more dramatically since.

  Once immigration became politicized, it was seized on by cable news, which exploited the issue in ways that played right into Thomas Robb's agenda. Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin incorrectly reported that a broad range of Latino activists were demanding that the southwestern third of the United States—or “Aztlan”—be returned to Mexico. Her sketchy analysis also appeared in a Washington Times article. Even worse, the Times article supported the massively exaggerated claim with a quote from a representative of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a staunchly anti-immigration group with links to white supremacists.

  On November 26, 2007, right-wing populist Patrick Buchanan appeared on Fox host Sean Hannity's show to discuss his latest book about the dangers of immigration. During the interview, Hannity validated the unfounded claim that immigrants crossing the United States’ borders constituted the “greatest invasion in history.”

 
At the same time came widespread media coverage of Census Bureau reports detailing the actual, rapid growth of the Hispanic population of the country. These same reports confirmed that whites would no longer be a majority in the United States by around mid-century, an event of apocalyptic proportions for white supremacists.

  While immigration's rise in visibility during the 2000s wasn't enough for Tancredo to get much traction in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries, it worked perfectly for rebranding extremists like Robb. He wasn't worried about passing complex immigration bills or running for office. The establishment media's fearmongering over the issue stirred racial fear and economic anxiety. Robb could easily conjure up the specter of brown-skinned immigrant hordes overrunning white civilization. And he could do it without once using pejorative terms for African Americans.

  By 2008, the increasingly high-profile and heated rhetoric around immigration created an environment in which, as the SPLC's Mark Potok explained, “hate groups have been able to grow remarkably quickly.” By 2010, the number of KKK groups had surpassed the highest levels of the 1990s. In fact, immigration was a big enough winner that it fueled some of the most successful actions of other extremist right-wing groups in the early 2000s. Patriot groups, whose numbers bottomed out during the Bush presidency, rallied members to run militia patrols on the Mexican border.

  Immigration fears, in turn, were part of much bigger project for rebranding the far right by portraying white Christian Americans as group under attack on multiple fronts.