EIGHT

WHITE NATIONALISM, THE MILITIA MOVEMENT, AND TEA PARTY PATRIOTS

On Wednesday evening, June 17, 2015, perhaps the most historically symbolic, specifically targeted, and racially motivated U.S. mass shooting took place in Charleston, South Carolina. The site of the slaughter of nine people was a church. For evangelical Protestant congregations in the United States, Wednesday evening is prayer meeting and Bible reading in gatherings of the most dedicatedly faithful. But this was a very specific Protestant Church that was targeted, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church of Charleston—“Mother Emanuel”—the oldest historically Black church in North America, also a historical site of slave resistance, being the church co-founded by Denmark Vesey.

Denmark Vesey was born into slavery in 1767, but at age thirty-two in 1799, he won a lottery and purchased his freedom. He never was able to raise enough money to purchase the freedom of his wife and two sons. Vesey was literate and a skilled carpenter who operated his own business. In 1818, he co-founded Emanuel AME church, which quickly attracted nearly a thousand members. Vesey was free, and respected by his white clients and white clergymen. But Vesey also continued to identify and socialize with those who remained in bondage, including his own family. In 1819, as Congress debated whether slavery would be permitted in the new state of Missouri, Vesey may have had hope that the end of legalized slavery was on the horizon, but the decision went the other way, and the 1820 Missouri Constitution allowed white settlers to buy, sell, and own enslaved Africans. It is not known if this disappointment led Vesey to organize a revolt, or, more likely, it had been longer in the planning. The Haitian Revolution, 1791−1804, carried out by enslaved Africans, ended in national independence and the abolition of slavery, which struck fear in U.S. American slavers and inspiration in Black people—free and enslaved—throughout the hemisphere. Over a period of time, Vesey secretly organized enslaved and free Africans, borrowing from the Haitian revolution’s strategy. At the time of the planned revolt, 25,000 people lived in Charleston, only 11,000 of whom were white. Before the date set for the uprising—June 16, 1822—slavers learned about the plan and immediately mobilized all the armed white citizens, arresting Vesey and dozens of others. Vesey and five enslaved Africans were hanged on July 2, 1822. One of Vesey’s still-enslaved sons was arrested and deported to the Caribbean; his other enslaved son, Robert, survived to be emancipated during the Civil War and helped rebuild the war-damaged AME church his father had co-founded.

Later explaining that he sought to ignite a race war by his vile deed, twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof, who is white, arrived at the Wednesday prayer meeting and was welcomed by the twelve African-American attendees, including the nationally and internationally known and respected AME senior pastor, who was also a South Carolina state senator, Clementa C. Pinckney. After an hour of Bible study, Roof pulled out a Glock 41 and a .45 caliber pistol, both loaded with hollow-point bullets,1 reloading five times, killing all but three people present. He may have been expecting a larger attendance as he was carrying eight magazines filled with bullets. Roof fled the bloody scene and was later apprehended and arrested. The date Roof had chosen to hatch his plan was obviously premeditated—it was the 193rd anniversary of the Vesey-led revolt.

Images circulated on social media quickly made clear that Roof was a white nationalist. First there was his manifesto—loaded with slurs on African Americans, Jews, Latinos, and Asians—that claimed he had become “racially aware” following the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012. He said that while searching the web to learn about the case, he concluded that the killer, George Zimmerman, was right; what convinced him was the information he came upon at white nationalist websites and chat rooms. One picture on Roof’s website showed him wearing a jacket with two white nationalist symbols sewed into the fabric—the flag of the former apartheid South African state and the flag of the former white Rhodesia Republic (before it was overthrown by the Zimbabwe liberation movements in 1980). Roof even had a website registered under his name that he called “The Last Rhodesian.” What stood out for most of those who had never even heard of Rhodesia, was the picture of him posing with a pistol and a Confederate Battle Flag.

The widespread attention given to Roof’s Confederate affinity and espousal of white nationalism, which he had made no secret about, together with the growing presence of white nationalists during the following months at Donald J. Trump stadium rallies, thrust the topic of white supremacy out in the open nationwide. Such exposure drove home the fact that most of those who propagate white nationalism were not mentally ill, but rather ideologically driven, and way beyond the Confederate Battle Flag, the Lost Cause, or limited to the South, although those tropes remained integral to the anti-Black and anti-Mexican racism that are at the core of present-day white nationalism in the United States.

This became clear as Trump installed white nationalists and military men as his closest advisers and cabinet appointees, and continued to hold rallies where he demonized Muslims and Mexicans. A new breed of white nationalists, self-identifying as “alt-right” and fed through online commercial operations like Breitbart News, began supporting insurgent “Trumpist” politicians to destabilize “establishment Republicans.”

Since the issue of Confederate statuary received nation-wide attention following the Charleston, South Carolina, massacre by a self-proclaimed Confederate-loving fascist, members of the alt-right joined forces with neo-Nazis, Lost Cause Confederate fetishists, including the KKK, to storm the University of Virginia campus in support of maintaining the prominent monument to Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general of Confederate Virginia. In the opening gesture of their “Unite the Right” weekend rally, they marched to the Robert E. Lee monument bearing tiki torches, chanting, “You will not replace us” and “One People, one nation, end immigration,” many giving the Nazi salute. University students, local anti-racist activists, and Black and white clergy who organized a huge presence to oppose the racist gather-ing were attacked by the intruders, and on Sunday, one of the self-identified fascists plowed his car at high speed into a group of locals demonstrating against the rally, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer, a well-loved member of the Charlottesville community. President Trump refused to hold the fascists accountable for the melee, injuries, and killing, saying “both sides” were to blame.2

A strong anti-fascist movement developed in the late 1980s and 1990s to oppose the resurgence of racist intolerance and fascist violence. The movement was already three decades old when it sprang to oppose the aggressive spread of pro-fascist forces coinciding with the rise of Donald Trump, former White House adviser Steve Bannon, and Trumpism.³

As suggested earlier, the rise and institutionalization of the Ronald Reagan political clique, first in California as governor, 1967–75, and then as U.S. president, 1981–1989, a major green light for the development of white supremacist groups, from marginal and obscure to mainstream, by the dawn of the twenty-first century. Reagan and his cronies and political descendants were masters of the device that came to be known as a “dog whistle,” using certain tropes and symbolic actions that telegraphed toxic white supremacy and anti-Black racism. As Reagan’s “free market” economic and anti-union policies, accompanied by rapid de-industrialization and job shrinkage, produced homelessness and insecurity of the most vulnerable, they also increasingly affected white workers, making them easy prey to the white nationalist and politicized evangelical groups that had their own narrative about the causes—big government (including mysterious black helicopters), secularization, banks (always implicating Jews), poverty programs (always identified with African Americans even though the majority of recipients were in fact white), and Mexican migrants and women taking their jobs.

One example that broadcast Reagan’s racist agenda took place three months before the 1980 presidential election, when Reagan chose the significant date of August 3 to give a campaign speech extolling “states rights” near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the Neshoba Country Fair in Neshoba County. There, on June 21, 1964, three organizers for the Congress of Racial Equality, one being a local African American, the other two northern Jewish young men—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—had been abducted by the local Ku Klux Klan with the cooperation of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia Police Department. Their bodies, riddled with bullets, were found buried in a dam near Philadelphia on August 3, 1964, sixteen years to the day before Reagan’s speech on states-rights, another trope for segregation. Donald Trump Jr., campaigning for his father in the 2016 presidential campaign, also spoke at the Neshoba Country Fair, speaking to a crowd of two thousand:4

[Trump Jr.] drew large applause . . . when he said he is an avid outdoorsman and competition shooter and believes strongly in Second Amendment rights. The crowd also waved flags at his speech, mostly American, but with at least one large rebel flag and a “Don’t Tread on Me” one. Trump Jr. before his speech was asked about the controversy at the Democratic National Convention over taking the Mississippi flag down because of its rebel canton. “I believe in tradition,” Trump Jr. said. “I don’t see a lot of the nonsense that’s been created about that. I understand how some people feel but. . . . There’s nothing wrong with some tradition.”5

Anti-Semitism was integral to anti-Black racism for the Klan and newer Christian terrorist groups such as Richard G. Butler’s Aryan Nations, which in 1976 began referring to the federal government as ZOG, that is, Zionist Occupation Government. These armed groups flourished and new ones sprouted, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the Posse Comitatus group claimed in 1985 that “our nation is now completely under the control of the International Invisible government of World Jewry.”⁶ The Reagan administration signaled a thumbs-up to this movement three months into his second term in May 1985; on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the president visited the Bitburg cemetery, where dozens of Nazi Waffen SS men were buried.

At the same time, Reagan, as he had promised while campaigning, was intent on destroying the Soviet Union and all perceived communist governments or movements, communism also being attributed to Jews. This meant ramping up the possibility of nuclear war and led to mammoth increases in the Defense Department budget, all of which went to private Defense Department contractors and weapons manufacturers. Not only was military spending increased, but so too was militarization of the culture, as the Reagan-Bush administrations sought to destroy what they called the “Vietnam syndrome” of anti-war sentiment. There were also “dirty wars,” clandestine operations with Reagan’s “freedom fighters” against, among others around the globe, the governments of Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola, and Mozambique, and support for the apartheid regime in South Africa in fighting the liberation movements there and in Namibia. The largest CIA operation was in Afghanistan, where the Reagan administration armed Muslim fundamentalist jihadists with portable shoulder-to-air missiles and other weaponry to overthrow the elected government there, because of its friendly relations with its neighbor, the Soviet Union. This eight-year proxy war ended with Soviet withdrawal, leaving Afghanistan smashed, with millions of refugees and various warlords competing for power. It also led to the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, an action the Central Intelligence Agency immediately identified as “blowback” from those jihadists the United States had armed and empowered. Of course, the Reagan administration escalated the ongoing counterinsurgency and boycott of Cuba. While most Latin Americans were living under or escaping from brutal military and authoritarian regimes installed or sustained by the United States, peoples in the Caribbean and Central America had ousted such governments in Nicaragua and Grenada in 1979, while the Socialist government of Michael Manley had won elections in Jamaica, all of which Reagan promised to reverse if elected. The Reagan administration also sent military advisers and mercenaries to support death-squad regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala in the attempt to wipe out leftist guerrillas, mass mobilizations, and political formations in those countries. Despite a sizable and widespread anti-war movement, the Reagan-Bush administrations realized their objectives, capped by the 1989 invasion and regime change in Panama and the 1991 invasion of Iraq.

But it was the Contra war against the leftist Sandinista (FSLN) government of Nicaragua that allowed a kind of populist “Wild West” scenario to develop, which brought the evangelical movement that had begun in the 1970s to own a war. While campaigning for president, Reagan had vowed to overthrow the “communistic” Sandinistas, and by the end of 1981, incursions by CIA-trained commandos into Nicaraguan territory had begun. The Reagan administration used the military-ruled friendly country of Honduras as the platform for training and arming several factions of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans, principally the ousted Somoza’s National Guard members. Under the leadership of evangelical celebrity preachers such as Pat Robertson, white evangelicals created a minor Christian Crusade that lasted for most of the 1980s, until the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1989. The evangelicals delivered not only humanitarian assistance and Bibles, but also military surplus weapons—U.S. mercenaries and missionaries crawled all over the borderlands of Honduras and Nicaragua and mobilized their congregants at home. Militarization of U.S. culture was a rich setting for the organization of armed groups in the United States, loaded with conspiracy theories, a primary one being that liberals wanted to violate their sacred rights and confiscate their guns.

In Against the Fascist Creep,7 writer and activist Alexander Reid Ross traces the genealogy of the racist groups that descended from several sources during the Reagan era and gained momentum and followers in the 1990s with the advent of the Internet and social media, forming a key constituency of the Republican Party, and creating some cross-over affinity with a number of leftist and anarchist groups. Ross seeks to trace why and how “fascism”—under which rubric he includes white supremacists, anti-government militias, and other right-wing groups—“creeps into the mainstream and radical subcultures.” Ross is also concerned that some left-leaning and particularly anarchist and libertarian individuals and groups incorporate right-wing populist ideas, often without realizing their source.⁸

The campaign of George Wallace (the former segregationist governor of Alabama) for president in 1968 mobilized many of the elements that would effect the radicalization of the N.R.A. as well as racist groups flourishing in the 1970s, especially a revived Ku Klux Klan. However, Louis Beam, the head of the Texas Klan, began promoting the ideology of “leaderless resistance,” which was adopted by the Posse Comitatus. One of first visible actions based on that ideology took place in Arkansas in 1983, when tax resister and Posse Comitatus member Gordon Kahl refused to be served with a subpoena and instead started a gunfight, killing two marshals. He was pursued and shot dead by police, but became a martyr to the burgeoning movement. One of Beam’s protégés in the Aryan Nations group, Robert Mathews, emulated the leaderless secret-cell concept in organizing a new white nationalist group, “The Order.” The group raised millions of dollars by counterfeiting money and robbing banks and armored cars, using the proceeds to establish a network of safe houses all over the country and to fund other white nationalist groups. The Order collapsed with Matthews’s death at the hands of the FBI after The Order, in 1984, assassinated Denver talk show host Alan Berg, who debated right-wing callers. The others involved in the network were rounded up and imprisoned, with one of their number, David Lane, becoming a celebrated white nationalist prisoner, his “14 Words” becoming sacred to neo-Nazis and other white nationalists. Those words are: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The Feds put Beam and other leaders on trial and implicated still more, but only three were charged, and they were acquitted by jury trial.9

The Order was short-lived but inspiring to a later group calling themselves “Patriots,” a movement that began the organization of what they called “sovereign citizens.” Aryan Nation supporter Randy Weaver became the most famous of this movement. Weaver came from an evangelical Iowa farm family and was a Vietnam-era veteran stationed at Ft. Bragg for three years. Honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, he married in 1971 and enrolled at University of Northern Iowa to study criminal justice, hoping to become a FBI agent. He soon dropped out and took a job in the local John Deere factory. His wife, Vicki, raised evangelical, became increasingly fanatical in her belief in the impending end of the world.

In the early 1980s, the Weaver family bought a small, undeveloped property in a remote area of Idaho (near the town of Naples and the Ruby River), built a cabin, and home-schooled their children. In 1985, after attending some meetings of Aryan Nations, the couple was visited by the FBI and the Secret Service; they denied any affiliation. The FBI decided to try to recruit Weaver as an informer, a scheme that went awry with overlapping federal agencies working at odds with each other, and ended in Weaver being charged with possessing illegal weapons in January 1991. With some confusion in trial dates and Weaver not showing up, federal marshals attempted to arrest him at his remote home, where for ten days in August 1992, he and his family holed up and held off FBI snipers and some four hundred armed federal authorities. Vicki was shot and killed holding their ten-month-old baby; their fourteen-year-old son was shot and killed, as was the family dog; one federal marshal was also killed, and a wounded Randy Weaver surrendered, ending the siege. During the ten days, a crowd of assorted white nationalists and skinheads gathered outside the perimeter to support the Weavers, one prominent individual being Bo Gritz, the most highly decorated Green Beret in the Vietnam War, the real-life figure behind the Rambo character that Hollywood cashed in on and milked dry. Gritz was close to David Duke and a member of Willis Carto’s Populist Party. Alexander Reid Ross writes: “Gritz was a symbol of veterans for whom, like the Freikorps [in Germany], the war had not ended. They believed that Vietnam had been lost due to the protesting hippies and corrupt political class who sold out Middle America. The Right had to defeat the enemy at home—the feds and the hippies—to put America to rights, reversing the changes of the civil rights movement and returning the U.S. to its former glory.”10

Thanks to government overreach by several different uncoordinated, even competing, agencies in pursing Weaver and the botched siege that killed three members of the family all of this playing out on television the image of the right-wing movement took on an aura of victimization by big government. Much public and press questioning ensued. Government investigations determined that the rules of engagement employed in the confrontation were unconstitutional. Weaver’s lawsuit against the government was settled in his favor. A sympathetic book and television movie followed, as well a number of ballads, one by the progressive bluegrass musician-composer, Peter Rowan. His “Ruby Ridge” single and the album containing it soared on radio stations’ and country and other music charts in 1996, and could be heard played by local musicians unrelated to white nationalism.

Patriot militias sprouted around the country advocating for the citizenry to arm itself and resist federal authorities, accelerating with the federal siege of the Branch Dravidian compound in Waco from February 28, 1993, when the ATF raided and killed five of the members, through April 19, 1993, at which time the compound went up in flames, killing seventy-six people inside, with only nine escaping the fire. One young man, a disgruntled veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, looking for a way to direct his anger at the federal government, was present outside the perimeter of the compound when it burned. Exactly two years later, on April 19, 1995, this man, Timothy McVeigh, parked a truck full of homemade fertilizer explosives in front of the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City. For the Patriot movement, which McVeigh by then identified with, April 19 is a sacred date, the anniversary of the famous 1775 ride of Paul Revere.

The Patriot movement’s antigovernment ideology, along with a reverence for private property rights and, of course, the Second Amendment, melded well with the rise of institutionalized libertarianism in the early 1970s, including the founding of the Cato Institute by Charles Koch of the Koch Brothers with their petro-industries fortune and Murray Rothbard, who touted anarchist-capitalism and espoused anti-imperialist and pro-revolutionary views usually identified with the left. Citizens for a Sound Economy was founded in 1984, with Republican U.S. congressman from Texas Ron Paul, a libertarian, as chairman. This organization was the prototype for the later Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity that spawned the Tea Party demonstrations at the beginning of the Obama administration, in time electing members of Congress and by the end of the Obama presidency, dominating the House of Representatives. In the mix was the rise of Silicon Valley libertarianism, loaded with cash.11

The 1970s and 1980s also saw the birth and development of the environmental movement at local, national, and international levels. While often at odds with the mainly white and well-endowed environmental organization, the Native American movement had long fought for their land, water, and treaty rights in the West. In some places, such as Nevada, a coalition of some environmentalists, some ranchers, and the Shoshone and Paiute Indigenous communities took on the federal Bureau of Land Management and other federal agencies controlling the vast public lands in the West that had been taken in wars against the Native peoples in the late nineteenth century and after. At the same time, the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” made up of mining, timber, and recreational industries, along with loggers and mill workers, and populated by an array of libertarians, populists, and conservatives, came to be called the “Wise Use” movement, demanding that all federally held lands be turned over to the states and privatized. They had little success until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, and appointed one of their number to be Secretary of the Interior, James G. Watt. In addition to fighting to crush the environmental movement, “Wise Use” adherents targeted were the Native American communal holdings under U.S. trust protection, the reservations. A visceral hatred for Mexicans migrating over the southern border was integral to this movement, with its strong white nationalist roots. During the first decade of the new millennium, hard-core white supremacist groups formed militias the “Minutemen” along the Mexican border. Armed anarchists opposed them.12

While the “Wise Use” movement, and the later Tea Party movement, presented as grass-roots movements, in reality the driving force and funding came from oil industry megacorporations such as Amoco, British Petroleum, Chevron, and ExxonMobil as well as other giants—Dupont, Yamaha, General Electric, General Motors—and well-endowed organizations including the American Farm Bureau, National Cattlemen’s Association, National Rifle Association, Cato Institute, Koch Industries, among many others.13

The FBI, during the George W. Bush administration, issued a highly redacted unclassified report titled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement” that warned of a concerted, decades-long attempt by white supremacists to infiltrate police forces. The report states, “The term ‘ghost skins’ has gained currency among white supremacists to describe those who avoid overt displays of their beliefs to blend into society and covertly advance white supremacist causes.”¹⁴ Professor of law and former military police captain Samuel V. Jones, writing about the continual police shootings of young Black men, argued that the incidents should be investigated in light of the FBI report: “Several key events preceded the report. A federal court found that members of a Los Angeles sheriffs department formed a Neo Nazi gang and habitually terrorized the black community. Later, the Chicago police department fired Jon Burge, a detective with reputed ties to the Ku Klux Klan. . . . Thereafter, the Mayor of Cleveland discovered that many of the city police locker rooms were infested with ‘White Power’ graffiti. Years later, a Texas sheriff department discovered that two of its deputies were recruiters for the Klan.” Professor Jones noted that the steep rise in white nationalist groups between 2008 and 2014 grew from 149 to nearly a thousand, which paralleled the rise in police shootings of Black men.¹⁵

Forty-four percent of military veterans own firearms, and military service is the strongest predictor of gun ownership, according to a survey conducted in 2015.16 White nationalists also proliferate in all branches of the U.S. military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps. “They call it ‘rahowa,’” said T.J. Leyden, “short for racial holy war—and they are preparing for it by joining the ranks of the world’s fighting machine, the U.S. military. White supremacists, neo-Nazis and skinhead groups encourage followers to enlist in the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow what some call the ZOG—the Zionist Occupation Government. Get in, get trained and get out to brace for the coming race war.”¹⁷ Leyden served in the Marine Corps from 1988 to 1991 while a member of a white supremacist skinhead group, and has since renounced his former politics. He told Reuters, “I went into the Marine Corps for one specific reason: I would learn how to shoot,” so as to take his military skills back to train other proponents of white power.¹⁸ Military authorities make the “few bad apples” argument when queried about the issue, but Leyden claimed that he was very open about his beliefs, including having two-inch Gestapo lighting bolts tattooed about his collar and displaying a Nazi swastika on his locker. The military can also grant what it calls a “moral waiver” to allow felons or other ineligible recruits to join. Such recruits grew from close to 17 percent in 2003 to nearly 20 percent in 2006, according to Pentagon data. Military spokespersons claim that the waiver does not allow racists to join, but their vetting of applicants for white power affiliations is ineffectual. The situation worsened with the endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after the new millennium.

For his 2012 book Irregular Army, British investigative journalist Matt Kennard carried out extensive interviews with veterans who held extremist views, as well as with leaders of white nationalist groups who encouraged their followers to gain military training for a race war that they planned to provoke. Kennard quotes a 2005 U.S. Department of Defense report: “The Military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism. If individuals can perform satisfactorily, without making their extremist opinions overt . . . they are likely to be able to complete their contracts.”19

Although white nationalist groups such as the John Birch Society and White Citizens Councils were founded in the 1950s in response to the Civil Rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan had never lost its white populist support in the South or in industrial urban areas of the North and West. The early Civil Rights movement was strongly committed to nonviolent direct action, which was very effective in garnering widespread exposure in the South, nationally, and internationally. However, in North Carolina, the president of a local Monroe chapter of the NAACP, Robert Williams, who had succeeded in desegregating the local public library and swimming pool in Monroe, called for self-defense against white violence and terrorism. Williams and his partner, Mable Williams, organized the local Black community and formed an armed self-defense group, the Monroe Black Armed Guard. When the couple received death threats and were hit with trumped-up kidnapping charges, they fled to Cuba, where Williams wrote his classic book Negroes with Guns.²⁰ Similarly, in 1964, Black Civil Rights organizers in Louisiana formed the Deacons of Defense and Justice to provide armed self-defense from the police and the Klan.21 However, it was not until the 1966 appearance of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, that bearing arms emerged as strategic alternative to the nonviolent resistance of the Civil Rights movement.

In response to chronic police violence and abuse in Black communities, Huey Newton conceived of the Black Panthers as a way to monitor police and protect African Americans with armed citizen patrols. California did not restrict the carrying of loaded long guns if the weapon was visible and legally acquired. Very quickly, the California state legislature, backed by the new governor, Ronald Reagan, began working on legislation to outlaw open carry. On May 2, 1967, when the bill was being debated, more than twenty Black Panther women and men, armed with loaded rifles and shotguns, marched up the Capitol lawn and into the Assembly Chamber. They were disarmed and later arrested. At the police station, Bobby Seale read a statement: “The Black Panther party for self-defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”²² Not only in California, but around the country, states legislated gun regulations.

During the next few years, the Black Panther Party became a national organization with its own newspaper. As local chapters emerged to organize and serve Black communities across the country, federal and state authorities coordinated efforts to target, disrupt, and destroy the organization, and in some cases, engage in assassination, as in the coordinated killing of charismatic Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. The National Rifle Association also became increasingly political during this period. One of the clearest responses to the fears instilled in white people by what came to be termed “urban violence” was the 1972 creation of the National Neighborhood Watch Program, overseen by the National Sheriffs’ Association.23 As Caroline Light observes in Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense, “The selective logic of armed citizenship exists interdependently with larger assumptions about criminality. . . . Select law-abiding civilians take on the responsibilities of law enforcement, protecting themselves while policing others…The call for ordinary citizens to serve as quasi-police protectors for their communities assumes that citizens patrolling their neighborhoods are able to differentiate between dangerous criminals and the law-abiding citizens they are tasked to protect, yet the grim reality is that they often make this distinction through the prism of widespread social biases.”²⁴

This was the case with George Zimmerman, acting on behalf of his Neighborhood Watch program in Sanford, Florida, in February 2012, when he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was on his way to his father’s home in that very neighborhood. Florida, like many states, had introduced a “stand your ground” law, so the police who came to the scene simply let Zimmerman go after questioning him. Thanks to public outcry, Zimmerman was charged, but he was found not guilty by a jury of six women, all white except for one of mixed Latina heritage.

When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white nationalists, many of whom identified as neo-Nazis, along with advocates for “free-market” privatization, geared up to block all social welfare initiatives promised by the Democratic candidate, as well as any policy the Democrats proposed for the following eight years. In 2007, Wall Street housing stocks and mortgage loan institutions had collapsed and unemployment was soaring, mainly among lower-income working-class families. Many of them often people of color could no longer keep up with mortgage payments while unemployed, and lost their homes. Rather than softening the blow with mortgage assistance (bailing out the homeowners), President Obama bailed out the banks and Wall Street. This initial action added fuel to the igniting Tea Party movement. In 2004, the privatization kings David and Charles Koch transformed their lobbying organization into two nonprofits, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, which became the funding engines and strategy makers for the massive gatherings and demonstrations of righteously angry people drawn into the politics of white nationalism and immigrant (Mexican) hatred. Most important, they also financed electoral campaigns that resulted in the Republican takeover of Congress in 2010.

The election of an African American as president of the United States and commander in chief of its Armed Forces seemed the apocalyptic prophecy of the influential late William Pierce, whose organization National Alliance was one of the most ideologically extreme. Pierce was born in Atlanta; he held a doctorate in physics and was a tenured professor at Oregon State University in 1965, when he became an angry opponent of the Civil Rights movement and the emerging counterculture. He supported George Wallace’s presidential campaign and found affinity with neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who was assassinated in 1967. Pierce then founded his own organization, which became the National Alliance, built with young white men who had supported Wallace. He started a white supremacist publishing house, National Vanguard Books, and put out audio records with hate messages.

Pierce self-published his infamous novel The Turner Diaries in 1978, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald; it was later reprinted and kept in print by Barricade Books.25 The book became and remains required reading for white nationalists; Timothy McVeigh had a copy of it in the car he was driving when apprehended by the police soon after the Oklahoma City bombing. The first lines of the novel read, “September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking—and nothing but talking—we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words.” The story begins when the federal government enforces the “Cohen Act” and raids homes to confiscate all civilian firearms. Turner and his group go underground to overthrow the government, which is controlled by African Americans, with crafty Jews getting them elected and giving them marching orders. This government not only confiscates guns, but also imposes repressive measures under the banner of anti-racism, such as annulling all laws against rape, as these laws are considered racist; making it a hate crime for white people to defend themselves from attacks by people of color; and forcing all citizens to carry passports to move around. Turner witnesses an anti-racist rally in which white people are pulled in and beaten, sometimes killed. The Organization prevails in war, taking regions of the country to operate from, igniting civil war that includes the use of nuclear weapons, by which the Organization destroys New York and Israel. The Soviet Union is destroyed by nuclear war, and then country after country falls apart as anti-Jewish riots destroy their governments. In the novel, people are reading Turner’s 1991 diaries in the year 2099: The Organization has conquered the whole world; in Africa, all Black people have been killed; and the continent of Asia has been rendered uninhabitable by radioactive fallout from nuclear bombs. In the United States all people of color were hunted down and killed, and a white nation and white world exists at the end of the twenty-first century.26

And it started with the government taking away their guns. So, when young Dylann Roof attempted to start a “race war,” he was tapping into the common fear shared by white nationalists, the loss of white supremacy. What was everyday reality during the century of frontier wars from the founding of the United States to the 7th Cavalry massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, was re-enacted and performed as theater by Roof, but with live ammunition. Liberal and conservative intellectuals and politicians insist that individuals like Roof and the groups they belong to are marginal, but white supremacists are acting and speaking openly in support of the very roots of United States nationalism, embedded in the institutional structure of the country from the Constitution itself, which includes the Second Amendment, to the “lost cause” of the Confederacy to save the institution of slavery and the continued colonization of Native lands. Their words, rhetoric, and desired future differ little from those of the free market fundamentalists and constitutional originalists who actually control the federal institutions and many of the state governments. White nationalists are the irregular forces—the volunteer militias—of the actually existing political-economic order. They are provided for in the Second Amendment.