Black Lives Matter and the Alt Right
Outside the Beltway, the country seemed to be at war with itself, too, but often literally so. Indeed, the most polarizing issue in the 2010s dealt with growing incidents of gun violence. On December 14, 2012, a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, resulted in the brutal deaths of twenty young children, mostly kindergarteners, as well as a half-dozen adults. Visibly shaken by the attacks, President Obama—who met personally with the grieving parents of the slain children—vowed to make gun control a “central issue” of his second term. “I will put everything I’ve got into this,” he announced. But he soon found that Republicans refused to act. “The Second Amendment is non-negotiable,” insisted Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas. “Let me be clear, I will fight any efforts to take our guns,” Representative Dan Benishek of Michigan echoed. “Not on my watch.” Frustrated with Congress’s refusal to act, Obama resigned himself to signing a number of executive orders designed to limit gun violence. Even this action was condemned. “Using executive action to attempt to poke holes in the Second Amendment is a power grab,” complained Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa.10
Leaders of the gun lobby, most notably Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, also pushed back. In a press conference a week after the shootings, LaPierre used the incident to argue that the nation actually needed more guns, not fewer. “How many more copycats are waiting in the wings?” he asked. “A dozen more killers, a hundred more?” Schools needed armed guards, he insisted, and individuals had to arm themselves as well. The plea worked. Gun sales spiked in the year after Sandy Hook, with manufacturers reporting 30–50 percent increases in their profits. Congress failed to act in any meaningful way on gun control, while several states actually relaxed existing gun laws, working on the theory that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” By the end of 2015, “open carry” laws allowing individuals to carry firearms in public were legal in forty-five states. These changes in the gun climate, with fewer restrictions on gun rights and fewer regulations on the access and display of weapons, were a staggering blow to Obama’s prestige. But they were, more importantly, a blow to the public’s confidence in the political system. Even with polls showing that large majorities of the public favored tighter gun control measures, the gun lobby proved to be more powerful.11
As private gun sales soared, another debate sprang up around public uses of force by law enforcement. On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old African American, was shot and killed inside a gated community in Sanford, Florida. Martin had been staying with relatives in the neighborhood and, on the night of the incident, was walking home from a nearby convenience store. A local neighborhood watch member named George Zimmerman, who had become increasingly agitated by reports of crime in the community, mistook Martin for a burglar and phoned 911. The police dispatcher told Zimmerman to stand down, but he nevertheless followed Martin and confronted him, sparking a struggle between the two. Though Martin was unarmed, Zimmerman drew his 9mm semiautomatic pistol and shot the teenager dead. Despite the circumstances of the shooting, Zimmerman claimed he was innocent, invoking the state’s recently added “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, which authorized deadly force if an individual believed he was in danger of bodily harm. Thanks to the law, Zimmerman was acquitted on charges of second-degree murder in July 2013.12
In response, activists on social media launched a new awareness campaign marked by the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. The BLM movement gained national attention, staging massive demonstrations and street protests in response to a new wave of African Americans who had died at the hands of police in suspect circumstances. The Martin incident had captured public attention, but there were countless more like it. In July 2014, for instance, Eric Garner died after members of the NYPD placed him in an illegal chokehold; cell phone video showed the forty-three-year-old, who was being detained for selling cigarettes illegally, repeatedly telling officers “I can’t breathe.” A month later in August, an unarmed eighteen-year-old African American teen named Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri; this time, video showed the teen’s body lying uncovered in the street for four hours after the shooting.13
Activists staged protests in Ferguson, demanding criminal prosecution of the officer who shot Brown and shouting “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!” Most of the protesters were peaceful, but a small group engaged in acts of arson and looting. The local police department, which, like many across the country, had been significantly militarized over the previous decade, responded with an overwhelming show of force, using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds. Ironically, the images of heavily armed and armored law enforcement officers squaring off against peaceful protesters only served to illustrate the very problem of police brutality that BLM sought to expose. At one point, CNN broadcast images of a police officer taunting protesters: “Bring it, all you fucking animals! Bring it!” Another Ferguson officer pointed his semiautomatic rifle at protesters, screaming “I will fucking kill you!” Even reporters, on scene to document the unrest, found themselves arrested in the massive police response. Nevertheless, they managed to spread news of the chaos through social media.14
Ferguson remained a major flashpoint for the Black Lives Matter movement, but countless other incidents occurred in its aftermath. Some of these stood out due to distinguishing details, such as the notorious November 2014 death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy playing in a park, who was shot twice by Cleveland officers who mistook his toy pistol for a real gun. In the fallout from the shooting, the city settled a $6 million lawsuit with the Rice family; no charges were ever brought against the officers.15 While such incidents stood out in the public eye, activists were more disturbed by what seemed an increasingly steady drumbeat of African Americans killed by policemen. On April 2, 2015, Eric Harris was killed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by a sheriff’s deputy who mistook his pistol for a taser; video from police body cameras recorded the deputy’s shock: “I shot him! I’m sorry!” 16 Two days later, on April 4, Walter Scott was killed in North Charleston, South Carolina, by an officer who stopped Scott’s car for a broken taillight; the officer said he had fired his weapon because he feared for his life, but cell phone video showed him firing eight shots at Scott’s back as he fled.17 Eight days later, on April 12, Freddie Gray suffered a spine injury while in the custody of Baltimore police officers who had apprehended him for carrying a knife; he died a week later. Arresting officers insisted Gray’s injury stemmed from an accident incurred in transit, but once again cell phone videos provided by witnesses proved the story to be untrue.18 Ten days later, on April 22, William Chapman was killed in a Wal-Mart parking lot in Portsmouth, Virginia, by an off-duty cop who wrongly suspected the eighteen-year-old boy of being a shoplifter.19 The constant reports of incidents like these made the depth and degree of police brutality inescapable, so much so that BLM protests began to get results. In a notable departure from past norms, officers in all these April 2015 incidents were subjected to criminal investigations and, with the exception of the Gray case, convicted as well.20
These changes in the court of public opinion and the courts of law stemmed, in large part, from changes in technology. The proliferation of cell phone cameras and police body cameras gave unimpeachable accounts of circumstances surrounding many of the suspect deaths. In years past, as the Kerner Report revealed in 1968, these incidents had been common in African American communities, but there were rarely any records. With cell phone videos easily obtained and shared, however, reports of police brutality spread much more quickly and effectively. In previous eras, police officers had been able to rely on their professional reputation to convince courts that their version of a violent incident was the truth; ubiquitous video evidence now made that impossible. Moreover, as images and videos circulated on social media, they helped establish BLM as a mass movement. Organizers like Johnetta Elzie an
d DeRay McKesson had been drawn to Ferguson by social media images from the site of Michael Brown’s killing. In turn, they used outlets like Vine, Twitter, and Instagram to spread word about additional incidents and BLM counterprotests, using social media to speed the growth of a movement that, a half century before, would have taken months or years of grassroots organizing. Describing demonstrations across Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s death, a reporter noted that this “protest looked much like the ones that have characterized the growing movement against police violence. Bodies moved in the dark, but the faces—protesters and police officers alike—were lit up by the thin, lunar glow of cellphone screens.” 21
While new technologies such as cell phone cameras and social media outlets helped launch Black Lives Matter, they also propelled a countermovement by white supremacists. On June 17, 2015, a twenty-two-year-old white man named Dylann Roof armed himself with a semiautomatic Glock and eighty-eight hollow-point bullets, and then killed nine worshippers at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Roof’s radicalization to white supremacist politics had come years before. “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case,” he wrote in an online manifesto. “It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right,” Roof decided after reading a Wikipedia article about the case. “But more importantly, this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.” The search engine led Roof to the online world of the “Alt Right,” where white supremacist websites spread stories that portrayed white Americans as the nation’s real victims, subjected to the violence of black criminals and supplanted at work by immigrants. “I realized something was very wrong,” Roof concluded. “How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on white murders got ignored?” Convinced by his new online community that his fellow whites were suffering an epidemic of black violence, he set himself on the path to mass murder. “Somebody had to do something,” the unrepentant Roof told FBI agents after his arrest. “Because, you know, black people are killing white people every day, on the streets. And they rape white women, a hundred white women a day.” 22
Echoes of Roof’s online radicalization were heard elsewhere. In the summer of 2015, for instance, antiabortion activists released videos purporting to show officials at Planned Parenthood discussing plans to harvest and then sell both organs and fetal tissue from aborted fetuses. The videos sparked a new national controversy over abortion provisions, with accusations swirling that the organization was engaged in the sale of “baby parts.” (Further investigations in multiple states cleared Planned Parenthood of wrongdoing.) As the video circulated widely on social media, the issue took on increasingly heated tones. Suddenly, on November 27, 2015, Robert Dear Jr. opened fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people, including a police officer. During his arrest, the gunman, in apparent reference to the video, told officers: “no more baby parts.” 23
In many ways, the fault lines over these issues—abortion, race, police brutality, gun control—had long divided the American populace. But in the social media age, such divisions took on an exaggerated scope and tone. Incidents in one location were immediately nationalized, and sensationalized too. Videos of violence, purported to be committed by policemen or Planned Parenthood, spread quickly on the internet, resonating through echo chambers and finding audiences already primed for outrage. The short format of Twitter and Facebook, meanwhile, provided immediacy and intimacy for such incidents, but stripped away nuance along the way. Once again, technologies that had once promised to bring Americans together only served to drive them further apart.
Make America Great Again
The deepening sense of division in the nation would only worsen with the presidential campaign of 2016. On one side of the partisan divide, Democrats rallied around Hillary Clinton, who had lost out to Obama in the 2008 primaries but then went on to join his administration as secretary of state. Vice President Joe Biden had opted not to run, but Clinton nevertheless found herself facing a surprisingly spirited challenge by the socialist independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Though he formally caucused with Democrats in the Senate, Sanders maintained his independence and used it now to criticize the party and the electoral system writ large. Powerful economic interests had “rigged” American politics, he charged in the primary campaign, maintaining an outsized influence through campaign contributions and corporate lobbying. The Democratic Party, which had traditionally stood as a counterweight against corporate interests, had steadily been co-opted, he charged. Singling out Clinton’s habit of making high-priced speeches to Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Sanders portrayed her as a tool of big business. Meanwhile, the Vermont senator made a powerful case for leftist policies, calling for the party to return to its roots by championing greater government assistance in health care, college education, and jobs. His candidacy found strong support across the nation, as progressive activists rallied around his unapologetic case for the Left. In the end, however, Clinton’s long-standing ties to Democratic Party leaders, delegates, and other key constituencies helped her win out.24
Though the Left had been significantly energized by the primary campaign, much of that passion dissipated when Sanders failed to win the nomination. His supporters charged that the Democratic National Committee had unfairly sided with Clinton as the safer choice and had effectively “disfranchised” independent voters with closed primaries that only allowed registered Democrats to participate. “A lot of people have a feeling that the corruption and the rigged primary system are horrible,” a California canvasser noted. “With the voters we were talking to, there was a strong sense that party politics isn’t working.” Seeing the disappointing end to their primary campaign as confirmation of Sanders’s claims that the system was “rigged,” many refused to take further part in party politics. “That’s one of the places this supposed movement falls short,” noted Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos website and a longtime activist on the left, “lots of people who don’t want to be sullied from all the supposed corruption in the party but refusing to do the hard work of taking over a party from the inside.” Unwilling to change the Democratic Party from the inside, these disaffected voters had no real alternative outside of it. Unlike the world of media, which had been radically fragmented over the previous few decades—with the “big three” television networks competing with hundreds of alternatives on cable and talk radio and the traditional handful of major newspapers challenged on the internet from across the spectrum—the world of politics was still stubbornly rooted in the “big two” political parties. Increasingly, neither party was very popular. In May 2016, for instance, the Democratic Party had a 48 percent favorability rating, and the Republican Party an even lower 36 percent. But thanks to a combination of institutional advantages and inertia, they maintained the same stranglehold on national politics they had held since the mid-nineteenth century.25
In contrast to the tight Democratic duel between Clinton and Sanders, Republicans amassed the largest number of presidential primary contenders in the history of American politics. The crowded GOP field soon included seventeen major candidates, including four US senators (Ted Cruz of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Marco Rubio of Florida) as well as several then-current or former governors (such as Jeb Bush of Florida, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of Ohio, Rick Perry of Texas, and Scott Walker of Wisconsin). Although several seemed to be formidable candidates with years of experience, many soon proved to be severely flawed as campaigners and, in many respects, out of touch with the direction of politics.
Against this crowded field of traditional politicians, New York businessman Donald Trump stood out. Skilled at self-promotion, the flashy real estate mogul had made himself into a celebrity during the 1980s and 1990s. His frequent appearances on the shock-jock radio
programs of Don Imus and Howard Stern, as well as his constant presence in the pages of tabloids and celebrity magazines, transformed the Trump name into a familiar brand. By the mid-2000s, however, that name had been tarnished after six bankruptcy filings (including on major projects such as the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York) and several high-profile business flops (including Trump Airlines, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Ice, Trump Casinos, Trump Mortgage, Trump magazine, and Trump: The Game).26
As Trump struggled with these setbacks, he received an invitation from reality television producer Mark Burnett to serve as the host for a new program. Trump was initially dismissive, arguing that reality TV was simply “for the bottom-feeders of society.” But he was eventually won over by Burnett’s pitch for The Apprentice, a show that would present a polished image of Trump as the embodiment of business success. Burnett loved Trump as a character. Though he was struggling financially at this point in his career, Trump still presented himself as a brash, take-no-prisoners businessman who knew how to make decisions. After being promised that everything would be taped in Trump Tower, Trump saw the light: “My jet’s going to be in every episode,” he realized. “The Taj is going to be featured. Even if it doesn’t get ratings, it’s still going to be great for my brand.” The show launched on NBC in January 2004, with the New York mogul serving as host for the next fourteen seasons. “For millions of Americans, this became their image of Trump: in the boardroom, in control, firing people who didn’t measure up to his standard,” noted one profile. “Trump lived in grand style, flew in a Trump-emblazoned jet or helicopter, and traveled from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.” 27
Fault Lines Page 41