The Militia of Montana was always kind of a low-tech operation. John Trochmann, the founder and chief guru, liked it that way. Their meetings were generally held in little community meeting halls, granges, schoolrooms, small venues with a few dozen people in attendance. Although it was the 1990s and computers with PowerPoint were still years away, Trochmann in any event preferred using old-style overhead projectors that used full-page transparencies, and he would shuffle through them one by one, laying out his case.1
The room was always darkened, and the glow from the projector below gave Trochmann’s face an ominous appearance, which fit well with the mood of his presentation.
Trochmann’s top page read: “Enemies, Foreign and Domestic: Part I—The Problem.” The next sheet was the cover of a military journal with a story about international armed forces cooperating under United Nations auspices, the illustration showing a number of nations’ flags, including the Stars and Stripes, all subordinately positioned beneath a UN flag.
So would begin a sojourn for the audience that approached two hours in length, as Trochmann trod through 190 pages of “documentation,” each page a strand in a web the bearded man spins, all pieces of a puzzle Trochmann claimed as proof of a conspiracy to destroy the United States. It was not uncommon to hear snoring from the frequently elderly audience. The message Trochmann was trying to convey seemed shocking enough, but the delivery often turned into a drone.
The New World Order, he told them, is a shadowy one-world-government group that conspires to put an end to the U.S. Constitution by subsuming it under the “Communist” United Nations. Conspirators included the president (then Bill Clinton), the speaker of the house, and most financial and political leaders around the world.
The nightmarish world government Trochmann envisioned would be a population-controlling totalitarian regime. Guns would be confiscated. Urban gangs like the Bloods and the Crips would be deployed to conduct house-to-house searches and round up resisters. Thousands of citizens would be shipped off to concentration camps and liquidated, all in the name of reducing the population.
The conspirators’ evil designs, he said, had already surfaced in significant ways:
“It’s going to end up like this,” Trochmann told his audiences. “The most mild and calm of scenarios will be: ‘Would you like to eat today? Give me your guns. Would you like your children back from school today? Give me your guns.’ That’s the mildest of versions you’ll see.”2
Trochmann toured the Pacific Northwest and the Inland West for much of the 1990s, delivering these talks in a fairly uniform fashion, traveling to places like Mount Vernon, Washington; Klamath Falls, Oregon; Orem, Utah; or Jordan, Montana—anywhere that had a base of active “Patriots” who would invite him to speak at their local community centers. He’d collect a nominal speaking fee and then sell books and survival gear and T-shirts at the tables set up around the speaking venue.
What was essential, however, was getting people to sign up for Militia of Montana (MOM) catalogs. Once he had them on his mailing list, he was able to sell even greater mounds of gear and goods through the catalogs themselves, which featured a buckskin-clad sniper firing from a treetop with an ancient rifle. It fit with Trochmann’s fantasy of a guerrilla resistance in the manner of old colonial-era combatants, duking it out with the federal government from their mountain retreats in the West, which he sold relentlessly to his readers.
Inside the catalogs, Trochmann’s first few pages were often devoted to the dozens of VHS videos he sold to his fellow Patriot movement true believers, featuring lectures given by himself and dozens of other leading movement figures, men such as Mark “from Michigan” Koernke, MOM spokesman Bob Fletcher, and even mainstream political figures like Representative Helen Chenoweth, the Idaho congresswoman who toured the far-right “Patriot” chicken-dinner circuit speaking on behalf of the “Sagebrush Rebellion” in the years before she first won election in 1994.
The following pages featured a full library of books, including a variety of “survival” manuals that suggested forming independent “sovereign” communities even before the apocalyptic downfall of society they all expected to happen soon. Some were simple army survival manuals. Other books detailed conspiracy theories, such as the claim that the Federal Reserve Bank was the nexus of the New World Order plot, or another detailing the satanic origins of Planned Parenthood, or the book devoted to Hillary Clinton’s witch’s coven. And at the back of the catalog were various kinds of survival gear, including gas masks and hazmat suits of dubious provenance, as well as food-preservation systems and other items designed to come in handy during an apocalypse.
I also encountered Trochmann’s beliefs in weather manipulation when I interviewed him in Montana at a little roadside log-cabin café. Federal conspirators, he assured me, had already put the mechanisms in place for the big coup. “Most of this Emergency Powers Act that we’ve been studying that they put together. . . . They have to have a replacement for war to get down to those levels and still retain the legitimacy of power. What might that be? Catastrophes to deal with? We know that electromagnetically, they control our weather now. There’s all kinds of documentation of that. We’ve got documentation right from the United Nations that say that people have to get a permit to change the weather somewhere.”3
On the big-screen TV behind us, pictures from a national broadcast showed a hurricane slamming into Florida, and an announcer displayed the storm’s path on a map.
Trochmann looked at the owner of the café, and they exchanged knowing glances. “See the hurricane?” Trochmann asked him. “Boy, that’s really late, isn’t it?” The owner nodded.
You mean, I asked, this is part of the weather-control pattern?
“Sure,” Trochmann said. “Naples, Florida, got hit at the same time Naples, Idaho, did.”
Coincidence, maybe?
“Yeah, right,” he said. “And I have another bridge for sale for you.”
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This kind of selective credulity—a willingness to believe the most insane, cockamamie nonsense if it fits with or, better yet, helped open another dimension on the nefarious nature of the conspiracy—became the trademark of the 1990s Patriot movement and how the world of conspiracy theories was transformed by it. Evidence—the real, factual, hard evidence that was the meat and potatoes of JFK and UFO conspiracy theories—was replaced with conjecture whose main value was not in its plausibility but in how it further deepened the universe of conspiracies. Over time, this conjecture grew ever wilder and ever less plausible.
However, the movement suffered a permanent and nearly fatal setback in April 1995 when a Gulf War veteran and avid Patriot named Tim McVeigh set off a truck bomb in front of the federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on the anniversary of the botched Waco raid, killing 168 people, including toddlers in a day-care center. The next summer, another Patriot terrorist, Eric Rudolph, set off a backpack bomb at the Atlanta Olympics then, as the FBI and investigators barked up numerous wrong trees, went on a bombing spree over the next two years that included a gay bar and two abortion providers.4
The militia movement before then had spread like wildfire through rural and exurban America. Trochmann’s operation was the best known and most prominent, and it sold the three-pack of conspiracies, ideology, and gear through its catalog as it circulated mailing lists around the United States. Militias were especially strong in the Midwest, around Michigan and Mark Koernke’s organizing, and they were readily adopted as a concept by enthusiasts of the neo-Confederate ideologies in the South and the nativist border-watching movement building slowly in the Southwest.5
But after 1995, it went into a steep decline, in large part because of its association with domestic terrorism. However, the new brand of conspiracism it engendered remained very much alive, thanks in large part to a singular Patriot movement adherent and former John Birch Society member with a little radio show out of Austin, Texas, named Alex Jones.
Jones first cut his radio chops doing Art Bell–style broadcasts focusing on theories about the Waco raid, which he naturally declared to be evidence of a looming police state. After the Oklahoma City bombing, he shifted gears into fresh territory, promoting the claim—first suggested to me by John Trochmann when I called him up the day after the bombing, even before McVeigh’s arrest—that McVeigh’s act had been a “false flag” operation designed to give the government an opportunity to crack down on the Patriot movement.6
Jones continued to run with this theory, along with a number of others, mostly regarding the United Nations and its programs for the next several years. What he actually specialized in was regurgitating Trochmann’s old theories: first it was the FEMA concentration camps (which Jones still promotes to this day), and then he picked up Trochmann’s HAARP weather-manipulation theories and ran with those; again, he still trots these out from time to time.
Most of all, he tuned in to a number of Bircherite theories about the health industry and cancer cures, along the lines of the old laetrile claims but now updated to reflect new trends in cancer treatment and understanding of consumer demands. These included theories about the introduction of toxins into the atmosphere from jet contrails (renamed “chemtrails”) deliberately tainted by government conspirators with carcinogens and other body-altering chemicals.7 Some of these, according to one of Jones’s later theories, are turning frogs gay.8
As the 1990s drew to a close, he and many others on the far-right conspiracy fringe began pumping apocalyptic fears about the coming year 2000, primarily focused on a supposed bug inherent in all software that would result in massive data corruption at the stroke of midnight December 31, 1999.
This “Y2K bug” was a real thing, and software companies around the world scrambled to fix it. But in the meantime, a plenitude of theories—mostly along the lines that the fixes would fail and all of America’s banking and electrical infrastructure would fail and the world would shortly erupt in the flames of mass chaos—began proliferating, particularly on the Internet. Helping lead that charge, of course, was Alex Jones.
As the clock wound down toward New Year’s Eve, Jones’s broadcast became increasingly frenetic, not to mention driven by patently (and proven) false information, all seemingly aimed at drumming up a fever pitch of hysteria.9 The chief demon in all this, the leader of the New World Order, according to Jones, was none other than Russian president Vladimir Putin:
Cash machines are failing in Britain and now other European countries. They’re finding large amounts of explosives in France. Vladimir Putin, who is known as Vladimir the Ruthless, using all his profanity on national TV, you name it. We won’t read the profanity here but we’ve got it—this person is on an unbelievable power trip and resembles a demon. He is a creature of the IMF and the World Bank and International Communism. He is a former KGB head and this information is vital, ladies and gentleman.
We’re seeing the New World Order really come out in full force. More wars than have been in the past fifty years are going on right now. The war in Chechnya is raging in Rosney with reports of hundreds to thousands dying.
Twenty to forty thousand civilians trapped in the city. Russian hinds are being shot down, tanks are being blown to bits. Massive grad unguided rocket attacks are being launched from the city indiscriminately right now. Air and artillery bombardments as well. It’s absolutely out of control, it is pandemic, ladies and gentlemen.
That wasn’t all. The whole FEMA camps thing was coming true, he told his audience.
The occupational government in Washington, D.C., has set up a huge $50 million command bunker hooked into all the FEMA boxes that can take over all the shortwave broadcast and commercial AM and FM stations, as well as television broadcast stations. And we hope they do not activate that, ladies and gentlemen.
Police and military are on high alert, running around, looking for supposed boogie men and terrorists under every rock. Military are highly visible now. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there are trains of military equipment moving into Austin. Two nights ago, on Wednesday night, Fox News reported that the airport will be used as a massive holding facility for troublemakers or rioters here in Austin—that has no history of riots.10
Not a word of this, of course, was true. And on January 1, 2000, everyone woke up and went to work and brushed their teeth and their electricity was fine and the traffic signals were fine and their bank accounts were fine and everything mostly went along as normal, since the software companies had done as promised and fixed the bug.
Meanwhile, the people who had listened to Alex Jones and John Trochmann and the multitude of Patriot cohorts and had followed their advice to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse by salting away stores of beans and rice and water and other foods (especially the expired canned military rations that Trochmann specialized in) were left wondering what the hell to do with them now.
The reputation of Jones and his “Prison Planet” radio operation—soon to be renamed “Infowars”—lingered in a kind of twilight zone until September 11, 2001, when the worst terrorist attack on American soil in history was perpetrated in New York and Washington, D.C., and more than three thousand Americans were killed, which also opened up a brand new dimension for the world of conspiracy theorists.11
Jones, naturally, was among the first to leap into the breach, claiming that it was all a false flag, perhaps perpetrated by Israeli intelligence, perhaps by the Bush administration itself—who knew?—but they, Jones and his army of followers, had to investigate! Within hours—and before the dust from the collapsing twin towers had even settled—the theories about the secret perpetrators of the attacks began to mount and swell into a mind-boggling pile-on.12
Over the next several years, Jones became the leading peddler of theories generated by what they called the “9/11 Truth Movement,” but who became known best by their short handle, Truthers. Initially the ranks of the movement were filled with a large number of far-left conspiracists who wanted to blame the Bush administration for the attacks, but these voices over time were minimized and drowned out by the Infowars and other far-right conspiracists who blamed the New World Order, for whom Bush and his White House were merely pawns.13
As time went on, the theories became more elaborate: There were no planes that crashed into the Pentagon; that was an illusion the conspirators created to cover for the bomb that actually was dropped on the place. The towers in New York couldn’t have collapsed because the melting point of steel is much higher than burning jet fuel could have created. Over time, as they multiplied and turned inward upon themselves, often feeding a frenzy of competition among the theorists, the name “Truther” became the essence of ridiculousness.14
Certainly, mainstream conservatives—despite taking on a starkly authoritarian strain to their rhetoric as well during the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq, particularly—maintained a deep divide from conspiracy theorists like Jones, since Infowars’ biggest target at the time was George W. Bush. Infowars’ audience kept building during these years to numbers in the multimillions. But pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly—the real voices of the conservative establishment—made their loathing of the Alex Joneses of the world unquestionably clear during the Bush years. It took the candidacy, and then the presidency, of a black man to change all that.
In the meantime, the nativist elements of the American Right, many of them with deep connections to those same mainstream Republicans, were busy building their own alternative universe of conspiracy theories about immigration down on the American borderlands. This world, too, involved militias, mixed along with classic nativist rhetoric about an “invasion.”
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The idea of a citizens’ border watch grew out of the longtime embrace by the radical right of vigilante violence, à la the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, the very first such operation was organized in 1977 by David Duke and Tom Metzger, both longtime figures in the Klan of the 1970s and beyond.15
They called it “Klan Border Watch,” and all it really amounted to was a photo opportunity featuring a couple of carfuls of white men in Klan robes driving around the border crossing at San Ysidro, California, and Duke vowing that vast numbers of men now would begin patrolling entire stretches of the border under his command. No such force existed, of course, and no one heard about Duke’s outfit again, though Metzger continued running racist stunts along the border for decades afterward.16
The concept gained new life in the 1990s with the rise of the small cell militia concept as part of a larger “leaderless resistance” against the federal government. The main progenitor of the concept was a California man named Glenn Spencer, who ran an outfit called American Patrol that claimed Latinos wanted to reclaim the U.S. Southwest for Mexico as part of Reconquista—that is, to revive the legacy of Spanish conquerors.17
The whole thing, of course, was an elaborate conspiracy theory spun, as so many such fantasies are, out of a thin thread of factual truth woven with reams of fabricated nonsense: A small claque of Hispanic radicals in the 1960s had suggested creating a new Latino homeland they called “Aztlan” and even made maps outlining their dreams, which then faded mostly into the mists of history until Glenn Spencer discovered them and began trotting them out to his fellow nativists as proof that all these Latino immigrants represented a conspiracy to invade the United States surreptitiously and then take it down at a given signal. (Japanese immigrants of the 1920s certainly were familiar with these kinds of suggestions.)
In 1999, Spencer put it like this: “The consul general says Mexico is reconquering California. A Mexican intellectual suggests that anyone who doesn’t like Mexicans should leave California. What else do you need to hear? RECONQUISTA IS REAL. . . . EVERY ILLEGAL ALIEN IN OUR NATION MUST BE DEPORTED IMMEDIATELY. . . . IF WE CAN BOMB THE TV STATION IN BELGRADE [in the former Yugoslavia] WE CAN SHUT DOWN [U.S. Spanish-language stations] TELEMUNDO AND UNIVISION.”18
Around the same time, Spencer’s Voices of Citizens Together (VCT) released a video titled Bonds of Our Nation hawking this conspiracy theory: a Mexican invasion is racing across America “like wildfire,” Spencer told his viewers, lamenting that there were now drugs in Iowa and gang takeovers in Nevada, not to mention “traitors” in the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church, and among the “corporate globalists,” which many Patriots were now using as the euphemism for the New World Order.19
The video is a litany of vile racist tropes dating back to the nineteenth century: these immigrants—Latinos from south of the border this time—were bringing crime, drugs, squalor, and “immigration via the birth canal,” threatening to overwhelm white people and decent American civilization with their impure filth, their disease, their stupidity, their laziness. Mexicans, he warned, are a “cultural cancer” from which Western civilization “must be rescued.” They are threatening the birthright left by the white colonists who “earned the right to stewardship of the land.”
And this invasion, he claimed, was not any accident. It was a well-planned conspiracy to bring America to its knees. Working in league with Communist Latino activists and their allies in America, Spencer claimed, Mexico was secretly deploying a little-known but highly effective stratagem “to defeat America.” Spencer claimed these conspirators had already succeeded in seizing control of California.
Spencer named this conspiracy the “Plan de Aztlan.”
“Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest,” the video’s narrator says, then warns that a “hostile force on our border” engaging in “demographic war” against the United States threatens to overwhelm whites with sheer numbers: “Mexico is moving to capture the American Southwest.”
Spencer sent every member of Congress a copy of this videotape and had it delivered to a number of congressmembers by Betina McCann, the fiancée of his friend neo-Nazi Steven Barry.20
“If the Border Patrol had done its job, using the technology that is available to us, we could stop these people,” Spencer said in an appearance on the Donahue show. “This is an invasion of the United States!”21
Spencer moved his operations to Arizona in the early 2000s and renamed it American Border Patrol. That was when things started to take off for him and his border-militia concept. Taking Spencer’s cue, Casey Nethercott, another Arizona resident, started a border-watch operation called Ranch Rescue. They developed legal problems in short order.
Nethercott, who had done prison time in California for assault in the 1990s, and some of his fellow Ranch Rescue members in 2003 assaulted two Salvadoran migrants who had crossed the border on foot and wound up on a ranch where the nativist border watchers operated. The migrants were held at gunpoint, and one of them was pistol-whipped and attacked by a Rottweiler. With the assistance of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the migrants sued their attackers and won a $1 million civil judgment against Ranch Rescue.22
A California schoolteacher who had migrated to the Arizona desert town of Tombstone, finding employment as an actor in the daily reenactment of the gun-fight at the OK Corral in the town’s tourist center, decided to join the action. In 2002 he announced he too was organizing a border militia, hoping to stop illegal border crossings in the area south of Tombstone. His name was Chris Simcox, and initially he named his outfit the Tombstone Militia, but after a while he adopted a more media-friendly name: Minuteman Civil Defense Corps.
What really motivated Simcox, he was eager to tell you, was border security: his belief that more 9/11-style terrorists were secretly sneaking over our borders with Mexico because, as anyone could see, it’s actually very easy to do so if you don’t mind hiking for dozens, if not hundreds, of miles in open searing desert. He believed “globalists” were conspiring with government officials to leave the door open for this Trojan horse disguised as immigrant workers.23
What was also clear was both Simcox’s overweening paranoia, as well as the potential for real violence that ran as an undercurrent in everything he did. Simcox was insistent that immigrants were providing cover for terrorists crossing the border.
“It is frightening to think that just one terrorist hiding among thousands of illegal immigrants who come across the border each day could easily carry chemical, biological or even nuclear materials into the U.S.,” Simcox told a reporter in 2005. “At this point, it’s not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when.’”
Naturally, translating this paranoia into government action was the entire purpose of his organization. “While officials are talking, Minutemen are acting,” Simcox pronounced. “They need to put our money where their mouth is, and start doing something about our borders.”
Simcox’s paranoia also made him volatile: “Take heed of our weapons because we’re going to defend our borders by any means necessary,” he told an audience in 2003. “There’s something very fishy going on at the border. The Mexican army is driving American vehicles—but carrying Chinese weapons. I have personally seen what I can only believe to be Chinese troops.”24
This became the cornerstone of the right-wing belief—eventually mainstreamed by the Republican Party—that national security is utterly dependent on immigration police and that border crossers represent a significant potential terror threat.
For Simcox and the Minutemen, the rubric of reason for the “citizen border watches” they organized all revolved around “national security”—at least when the TV cameras were on. When they were off, it was a different story: Minutemen border watchers were fond of explaining in private to people they thought were fellow participants that the best solution to stopping “the invasion” (as they liked to call it) of Latino immigrants they hoped to catch in the act was to start shooting one or two of them.
One of them even explained it on camera to a documentarian once: “No, we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the problem. . . . After two or three Mexicans are shot, they’ll stop crossing the border. And they’ll take their cows home, too.”25
In 2004, a California nativist named Jim Gilchrist heard Simcox being interviewed on a right-wing radio program and got the idea to make the border watch a national callout that would last for a month on the border. He contacted Simcox and the Minuteman project was started.26
It all came together in a big media event in April 2005 that really only lasted about a week but drew tons of national TV coverage in the border area south of Tombstone. About the third week into what was supposed to be a month-long affair, everyone had pulled out. Simcox and Gilchrist, it turned out, hated each other and barely were able to maintain a façade for the first couple of weeks. Near the end of it, the Minutemen founders announced they were splitting into two separate organizations.27
There was always an obvious problem with the claim that the Minutemen were about “border security”: if that was their chief concern, then why weren’t they focusing their efforts on the three thousand–plus miles of border the country shares with Canada? After all, when it comes to terrorists crossing our borders with intent to bomb—not merely entering the United States via airport with false papers, as the 9/11 plotters did—the only known case fitting that description was on the Canadian border: in 1999, when “Millennial Bomber” Ahmed Ressam was caught in Port Angeles, Washington, with a carful of bomb-making material and plans for striking Los Angeles in hand. The Ressam case is particularly instructive, because it revealed that—in contrast to Mexico, where no al-Qaeda cells have been known to exist—there exists an established network of Islamist operatives in Canada.28
Simcox, of course, had an answer for that: within a year of the Minuteman Project’s national debut, he would be organizing citizen watches along the Canadian border, as well, most notably in Washington State near the crossing at Blaine. That didn’t turn out too well, either.29
It was, first of all, a mere smokescreen, as reporters found when they ventured out to the Canada border watches. No one was out to catch terrorists sneaking over the border (which, after all, comprised only a six-foot-wide ditch in some places); they were there to catch reporters who would dutifully repeat their “border security” schtick—which in turn became the common way for nativists to describe their chief concern when it came to immigration. It sounded innocuous and devoid of ethnic xenophobia, when it was in truth neither.30
Because if you spent any time with these Canada border watchers, you pretty quickly ascertained that what had them agitated was not skilled white Canadian laborers sneaking over the border through the ports (which is actually fairly common) but Latino immigrants sneaking over the Mexico border. Those were the “illegal immigrants” they were out demonstrating against.
“Border security” was just a verbal façade pasted over the real source of these nativists’ anxieties. It was a coded phrase for the underlying intention: “Keep out the brown people.”
Strikingly, this rhetoric gradually became embedded both in conservative rhetoric and later, under a Donald Trump administration, into official government policy. Republican politicians during the tenure of President Barack Obama refused to advance comprehensive immigration reform—the only sensible long-term solution to the problem—on the dubious grounds that such reform needs to wait until after the border is fully and completely secured. It’s a familiar saw: “We need to secure the border before we can pass reform.”
Moreover, it will at best put only a dent in the problem. That’s because about 40 percent of all undocumented immigrants come here legally to begin with, through various kinds of visas, and then simply never leave. Another significant percentage of them arrives through human smuggling operations that are not deterred by fences.31
As Representative Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, told a Forbes reporter: “Simply stated, a fence is a 14th century solution to a 21st century problem.”32
Moreover, insisting on emplacing “border security” before providing a sane and legal path to citizenship for millions of immigrants is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse. Border security is realistic only when one’s borders are not overwhelmed, and it can’t be achieved until the conditions that overwhelmed the Mexico border—particularly the trade policies that damaged the Mexican economy and drove millions of people out of work there, along with antiquated immigration laws and policies ill-suited for a modern nation competing in a twenty-first-century global economy—are brought under control.
Current immigration laws and policies, however, are both chaotic and manifestly inadequate, and that’s because the toxic brand of politics practiced by the Minutemen led inevitably to the failure of the existing system. The border-militia movement itself also foundered, split in the years after the big 2005 Arizona demonstration by its own innate toxicity, amid egotistical turf wars and accusations of financial fraud and mismanagement. It finally crumbled apart after a movement leader named Shawna Forde (who first joined during those Canada border watches) led a home-invasion robbery on the Arizona border that resulted in the murders of an Arivaca man and his nine-year-old daughter in 2009.33 Other Minutemen and border watchers have, since then, been embroiled in even more criminality and mayhem, including another murderous rampage in 2012 in which a neo-Nazi border-watch leader in Arizona gunned down his girlfriend and her family.34
Perhaps the final fitting coda for the whole Minutemen episode came in 2015, when Chris Simcox himself was arrested and eventually convicted on multiple counts of child molestation involving young girls under the age of ten, one of them being his own daughter. So much for keeping American families safe.35
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It didn’t take long for the white supremacists to come crawling out of the woodwork after Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency in February 2007. By June, a Ku Klux Klan leader named Railston Loy (he went by “Ray Larsen”) warned that the black senator from Illinois was a likely target for assassination: “Well, I’m not going to have to worry about him, because somebody else down South is going to take him out,” he said. “If that man is elected president, he’ll be shot sure as hell.”36
Neither Obama nor the rest of the country took those warnings much to heart, and he was indeed elected president a year or so later. As his candidacy had gained momentum, however, so did a kind of parallel reaction among far-right conspiracists, who—failing any actual successful plots against Obama—turned to their old standby weapon: conspiracy theories.
Both the Internet and right-wing media—particularly Fox News—became riddled with the spurious claims about Obama that had been circulating well before he had even announced his candidacy, including charges dating back to 2004 that he was secretly a Muslim. Not only did these old smears resurface, new ones were generated partially from them: accusations that Obama was actually a black radical, beholden to an extremist black Chicago pastor named Jeremiah Wright, got full airings not just on Fox News but on CNN and every other mainstream network. Eventually, it became clear there was no truth there.37
To the eternal frustration of the people generating them, that proved true of pretty much every other conspiracy theory cooked up during the 2008 campaign to prove Barack Obama a crook or a fraud or a radical Muslim. For a while, theorists claimed that Michelle Obama had used the word “whitey” in a talk that was taped—though no such tape ever surfaced.38 A photoshopped image that was nonetheless widely believed and distributed made Barack into a cigarette-smoking Black Panther. He was rumored to have refused to say the pledge or to wear an American flag pin, none of it true.39
It was during these years that Alex Jones’s Infowars operation—which was control room central for the conspiracy-theorist world—came into its own as an online media giant. In 2011, it was estimated that, with the website’s ten million monthly viewers, its reach exceeded that of established firms like The Economist and Newsweek, not to mention that the reach of his radio show now outdid both Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.40
The spread of anti-Obama conspiracism was bolstered by the arrival on the cultural scene of the Tea Party: an ostensibly “grassroots” conservative resistance to the Obama administration that, for its first six months or so of existence, was actually propped up by a combination of right-wing corporate organizing funds and extremely heavy promotion on Fox News and other right-wing media, which led to mainstream news organizations dutifully following suit. Initially Tea Party gatherings helped the right gum up the works on health-care reform (with, predictably, such conspiratorial claims as Sarah Palin’s accusation that Democrats were planning to create “death panels” to decide who lived and who died), but once that effort failed and Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act was passed, the corporate money withered away, and the TV interest dried up, too. The Tea Party notion of an organized resistance to the Democratic presidency—already festooned with “Don’t Tread on Me” banners lifted straight from the Patriot movement of the 1990s—became a more genuinely grassroots movement, spreading into the rural areas, away from the TV cameras, where the far right was already well organized.41
Within a year or so, the Tea Party had evolved into a new, even more reactionary phenomenon: the revival of “Patriot” militia movement ideas.42 Outside groups such as the Oath Keepers—who recruit veterans and law enforcement officers into an organization built around conspiratorial claims about imminent government takeovers and gun confiscations—and the “Three Percenters,” who see themselves as the vanguard of a “second American Revolution,” attached themselves to the Tea Party at its national gatherings and brought a disturbing militant edge to the events.43
After being largely dormant during the George W. Bush years, the Patriot militia movement began to reemerge even before Obama took office: after hitting a post-9/11 low of 131 militia groups counted by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2007, they suddenly returned to life in 2009 with 512, ultimately reaching an all-time high of 1,360 such antigovernment groups in 2012.44
So even after Obama was inaugurated as president, the conspiracism didn’t slow down—and actually became worse. The belief that Obama was secretly a Muslim simmered among Republicans quietly during the next eight years, gaining popularity especially among the party’s evangelical Christian bloc. By the end of his tenure in 2016, some 70 percent of Republicans believed it.
This belief was also burnished by what became the eventual centerpiece of the web of conspiracy theories built around Obama’s presidency: the “birther” theory, which arose from the bogus claim that the birth certificate the candidate had presented to both federal officials and later to the press proving his birth in the state of Hawaii in 1961 to an American mother was somehow inadequate (even though it was the same form any other candidate from Hawaii would present as proof of birth on American soil, a constitutional requirement). They claimed it was merely the “short form,” and began demanding to see the “long form.”45
Underlying the birther theory was similarly spurious information suggesting that Obama had actually been born in Kenya (his father’s homeland) or that he had forsaken his American citizenship while attending school in Indonesia as a boy (also false). Yet despite each of these theories being sequentially disproven, the legend lived on, along with demands that Obama reveal his true, long-form birth certificate. The signs demanding this document were commonly seen at Tea Party gatherings.
Into this breach stepped Donald Trump.
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Trump really had only peripheral contact with the sketchy world of conspiracy theories before 2011, but as with everything else the publicity-hungry tycoon did, he leapt aboard the birther conspiracy bandwagon that year with remarkable gusto. With little previous reference to interest in the subject—but a March poll showing him leading among potential Republican candidates—that April, he told reporters he had “looked into” the questions about Obama’s birth certificate and that he now believed “there is a big possibility” the president was in violation of the Constitution.46
“I’d like to have him show his birth certificate,” he said. “And to be honest with you, I hope he can.”
When there was a backlash to the remarks, he doubled down and began talking about sending investigators to Hawaii to “look into it.” It made him a hot guest on all the TV news talk shows, and he disingenuously proceeded as though there was no racial component to his challenge of the president’s credentials, in spite of the claims about Obama’s previously presented birth certificate being entirely spurious.
It became such a hot topic, both on network talk shows and on the Internet, that President Obama—who at the time was working furiously to get a budget resolution passed through the House—requested Hawaii officials to release his “long form” certificate, which showed exactly the same information as the short version but with some more details, including the hospital in Honolulu where he was born.
Of course, this was not enough for the conspiracists. It never is enough. In a matter of hours, Alex Jones and his cohorts were publishing claims that the long form, too, was in fact entirely bogus. Within days, their verdict had spread through most of the hard-core Obama-hating right, and it became accepted wisdom. Trump, meanwhile, harrumphed—after being humiliated by Obama at the White House Correspondents dinner a few days following the long form’s release—that he still “wasn’t sure” that it was real. Within a week or so, he too was claiming it was bogus.47
What few people realized at the time, however, was that in addition to the kooky conspiracist right all leaping aboard the birther bandwagon, they were simultaneously being joined by most of the extremists on the racist radical right, particularly white nationalists and neo-Nazis. These racist elements, as time went along, became some of the most ardent and virulent promoters of the theories, particularly at racist forums like Stormfront, as well as emerging open message boards like 4chan and Reddit, where open white nationalists could post at will without fear of censorship. And it was in these realms that the movement that became known as the alt-right was born.
Trump ultimately chose not to run for president in 2011 and more or less lay low for the next three years, occasionally popping up to promote his friend Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s bizarre Arizona-to-Hawaii “investigation” of Obama’s birth certificate, as Arpaio kept insisting he had proven the long form a hoax, which of course he never actually had.48
Nonetheless, Trump’s name kept turning up high in polls speculating about possible presidential candidates in 2015, and when he announced his candidacy in June of that year, he did it with his usual race-baiting gusto: denouncing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and vowing to deport them all, he almost immediately attracted the support of the nativist anti-immigrant factions, as well as many of the white nationalists who had attached themselves to that movement. Indeed, nearly every SPLC-designated hate group (there were about twenty of them) that supported Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign actually announced their fervid support for his candidacy within a month after he had announced, in August 2015, his initial, draconian deport-all-twelve-million-undocumented immigration policy (its language was later softened for general-election consumption).49
Conspiracism was reaching a fever pitch that summer, too, with Alex Jones playing no small role. The hysteria over Jade Helm reached its height in mid-July that year, and it seemed to just fit with the mood of the times.
Certainly, Trump’s campaign positively bubbled with conspiracism: Hillary Clinton, his nemesis, was portrayed as part of an “elite” who hated the white voters Trump cultivated, and he frequently referenced conspiracies to “rig the election.” At one point, he appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars program and embraced him verbally: “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” Trump told him.50
As the election rolled along, Jones’s conspiratorial fanaticism reached extraordinary levels. Late that summer, he went on a rant claiming that Clinton and Obama were, in fact, demons from hell, quite literally. He told his audience that they reeked of sulphur and that others couldn’t stand to be around them. Hillary, in particular, inspired his visceral, purple-faced loathing.
“That’s a frickin’ demon!” he screamed. “We’re gonna have President Linda Blair, people, and I’m not gonna go along with it!” He looked like the veins in his neck were going to burst.51
Near the election’s end, conspiracists poring over a raft of stolen emails from Clinton campaign official John Podesta’s computer and released in late October by Wikileaks discovered what they claimed were clues of an elaborate child kidnapping-and-sex ring being run by a powerful cadre attached to the Democratic Party and Clinton, as well as Obama. According to these alleged clues, this global pedophilia ring—which purportedly traded stolen children and transported them around the world so that powerful people could have sex with them and then dispose of them afterward—was run by Hillary and her evil cohorts out of a dungeon that happened to be located in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C., called Comet Ping Pong.52
This became known as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and it spread like wildfire among the Hillary-hating right, despite the fact that she had lost the election and was no longer a serious political threat to them.
Naturally, there was no dungeon at Comet Ping Pong, nor even a basement, as a gunman from North Carolina who insisted he was only there with his semiautomatic rifle to “personally investigate” the restaurant during lunch hour one day in December 2016 discovered when he blasted several rounds into a locked door in hope of finding it. It turned out to be a broom closet. The man was arrested.53
This certainly did not stop the theory from spreading. Indeed, each round of evidence that the theory and claims of a global pedophilia ring are utter fictions, fantastic concoctions of right-wingers’ fevered (and projection-prone) imaginations, only produced another round of theories and further doubling down on the belief, spread largely through media, of the pedophilia ring’s existence.
Indeed, it was only beginning. Pretty soon, the QAnon “Storm” would make Pizzagate look like tiddlywinks.
________
In an online universe where conspiracy theories not only sprout like kudzu but attract bigger audiences the more outrageous and strange they grow, it was probably inevitable that an uber-theory like “the Storm” would become an overnight sensation.
Part Pizzagate, part New World Order, and part hyper-partisan wishful thinking by defenders of Donald Trump, the Storm is a sprawling meta-conspiracy, with actors ranging from Hillary Clinton to model Chrissy Teigen, in which everything you know about the current investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion with the Trump campaign is upside down.54
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in this alternative universe, is in fact preparing to indict hundreds of Democrats (including Clinton, Barack Obama, and financier George Soros) and Hollywood celebrities for their roles in a massive worldwide pedophilia ring operated by “globalists” who are conspiring to destroy Trump—and that the president himself is masterminding this “countercoup.”
“What we have come up with is a possible coup,” explained conspiracy theorist David Zublick in a late-November video, “not against Donald Trump, but by Donald Trump, working with Robert Mueller to bring down the Clintons, the Democrat Party, and the entire U.S. government involved in pedophilia and child sex trafficking.”
In just a few short weeks in early 2018, the theory grew from a handful of posts on fringe Internet chat forums to become the overwhelming obsession of nearly every conspiracy theorist in the business, notably Alex Jones and his Infowars operation, as well as social media figures such as Liz Crokin. In addition to being a constant focus of discussion on Infowars, dozens of YouTube videos and thousands of Twitter posts exploring various facets of the conspiracy and presenting the usual dubious “evidence” to “prove” it have shown up on the Internet.
The origins of “the Storm” lie in Trump’s cryptic remarks on October 6, saying that a gathering of military leaders represented “the calm before the storm.” When asked what he meant, Trump responded: “You’ll see.”55
Three weeks later, as New York Magazine’s Paris Martineau reported, an anonymous poster on the Internet message board 4chan—one of the main organizing and recruitment forums for the alt-right—who claimed he had high-level “Q” national security clearance began publishing a series of cryptic messages that he claimed were “intel drops” intended to start informing the public through such channels about what was really happening inside the White House and what Trump really meant by his odd remarks.56
According to “QAnon,” Trump’s remark was a reference to the indictments handed down by Mueller in late October, ostensibly related to his investigation of the Trump campaign and its alleged collusion with Russian intelligence. Most news reports about those indictments, reported to number in the hundreds, presumed that they were related to criminal behavior around the campaign.
Not so, said QAnon, who claimed that Trump was never really under investigation. Instead, those indictments were all being directed at a massive conspiracy involving a global pedophilia ring operated by high-level Democrats and other “globalists” who were simultaneously part of a plot to overthrow Trump’s presidency with a “deep state” coup.
This is the same pedophilia ring that was the focus of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. However, in the new expanded version of the theory, the pedophilia ring had gone global, drawing in alleged participants from all around the nation and occurring in locations ranging from Hollywood to Europe. (One version of the pedophilia theory entertained by Jones claimed that the child victims secretly were being shipped to a colony on Mars.)57
QAnon and the conspiracy theorists who piled on at 4chan, 8chan, and on Twitter claimed that contrary to the running story in mainstream media, this pedophilia ring is the real focus of Mueller’s investigation. The general conclusion, spread through the #qanon hashtag on social media, was that a wave of arrests—including Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Soros, Senator John McCain, and a number of leading Hollywood figures and Democrats was about to happen.
However, there was a credibility problem for QAnon early on, since he posted in early November a scenario in which hundreds of arrests and massive social turmoil were about to be unleashed within a matter of days. “Rest assured, the safety and well-being of every man, woman, and child of this country is being exhausted in full,” he wrote. “However, the atmosphere within the country will unfortunately be divided as so many have fallen for the corrupt and evil narrative that has long been broadcast. We will be initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this time in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news) to all citizens.”
November came and went, of course, without any such event. But that didn’t dampen the enthusiasm among QAnon’s increasingly rabid horde of fans.
These apparently included a significant portion of radical right social media users, as indicated by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hate Tracker, which monitors the spread of extremist ideologies and claims on Twitter. The #qanon hashtag began trending in late November and steadily grew during the ensuing weeks. By early January, it began regularly trending upward.58
“The Storm” reflects in many regards the need for right-wing conspiracists to constantly push the envelope of public discourse by proposing increasingly outrageous and arcane theories just to distinguish themselves in an ever-more-crowded field, especially on social media and YouTube. People who run such conspiracy mills, particularly Jones, have built their careers around attracting attention by pushing expansively unhinged and groundless claims.
However, the #qanon phenomenon in the context of 2018 and beyond also suggested that the spread of conspiracy theories was (and still is) being inflamed to the point of hypertrophy, largely through the growth of social media as a presence in people’s daily lives. The surprising rapidity at which “the Storm” spread among shockingly gullible people is testament to the extent to which such claims gain real life and become widely believed.
The hashtag’s rise on social media in late December 2017, probably not coincidentally, happened at about the time that Alex Jones adopted the QAnon theories and claimed them as his own: “A lot of what QAnon has said, I had already gotten separately from my White House sources, my Pentagon sources, my CIA sources,” he told his audience on December 24.
He went on:
We are seeing a slick countercoup to the globalists that they are calling a coup, because the criminals that have hijacked the country, and all their little minions that have bet on it, were wrong. They failed. . . .
They’re calling it a coup because it’s justice. It’s the crimes they’ve committed—the Uranium One, the pedophilia, the money laundering, all of it, and the executive order Trump signed to seize money connected to trafficking in people, women and children and slaves, and money connected to drug dealing, and all of the stuff . . . and they’re all having to step down right now, and that’s just the beginning.
So “the Storm” is real. That’s our storm of justice and resistance and standing up.59
Infowars correspondent Jerome Corsi—the longtime conspiracy maven responsible for many of the nonsensical claims about Obama’s birth certificate as well as a host of other similarly flimsy theories—chimed in shortly with an “intelligence analysis” of QAnon’s posts, from which he concluded that the anonymous poster was “legitimate,” that is, someone genuinely working from within the White House with real knowledge of inside information.60
“The Storm is upon us,” Corsi told an interviewer, continuing:
2018 will be the year of the counterattack that Donald Trump is going to wage against the deep state. This is going to be a battle of enormous proportions which will determine whether or not the American republic as a constitutional republic sustains or does not. Depending upon Donald Trump’s success or failure, we will have a coup d’état which will replace the Constitution with a globalist, socialist state.
This is a battle of classic heroic proportions, which is going to be waged on the intelligence front and the average American person would be unaware of it had there not been an entity like QAnon who had come forward from a knowledgeable position to start dropping the clues, the breadcrumbs, as he says, that will lead people to the research they need to do and the understanding they need to achieve to see how our intelligence agencies, our justice system, the FBI have been corrupted and how dangerous this is. The republic is hanging by a thread and it’s now going to be Donald Trump’s unique opportunity to save it and I don’t think there is anybody better that I can think of in the political landscape to be on the scene than Donald Trump.
Sprinkled in and subsumed under the rubric of “Storm” theories were a number of strangely associated theories, such as one positing that the Las Vegas shooter was actually an inside job carried out by Saudi-sponsored false flag terrorists or another claiming that the dossier compiled by a British intelligence agent on the Russian activity was a complete fabrication bought and paid for by Obama and Clinton. Within the 4chan and 8chan communities, a debate arose over whether children were being raped as part of a satanic conspiracy or a CIA blackmail scheme.
In many regards, however, the Trump countercoup component of the “Storm” was almost secondary to the overarching conspiracy theory that has been fueling much of the passion and animus accompanying its spread on social media—namely, the uber-Pizzagate belief that there is a massive conspiracy afoot in America to abduct, rape, and murder hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children to satiate the appetites of a satanic cabal operating at the highest levels of government.
Jones described the evil nature of this cabal to his audience in December:
They literally created an army of people they can control who wanted to have sex with children and be evil, and who they could destroy at any time. And what’s even sicker is the people above that aren’t even into raping kids. They just want to kill kids. The lesser vampires just want to feed off their energy and rape them. These people want to kill them.
Then there was Liz Crokin, the onetime gossip columnist turned “investigative reporter” who writes for TownHall.com and has a large following on social media, in large part due to her long-running claims that pedophilia is rampant in America. She not only believes that QAnon is a legitimate inside information source, but that it actually is Trump himself, perhaps with the help of key aide Stephen Miller.61
She told an interviewer that she thought the president and his team had been doing “intel drops” at 4chan and 8chan and on social media as a way of red-pilling members of the public to soften the inevitable shock that will accompany the wave of arrests that’s coming:
Now, I believe Q is President Trump, working possibly with Stephen Miller, to drop this information behind the scenes to get a campaign going, to red-pill people as to what is going on with the Storm, and their takedown of the Deep State, which includes the Deep State pedophile scene. I’ve been telling people for a very long time the stuff that goes on with these elitists, these occult elitists, who literally are raping, sacrificing children, drinking blood, like eating babies literally. It’s too hard for an average person that has no idea that any of this is going on to take it in all at once.
So there’s been a very orchestrated effort behind the scenes by President Trump and his administration to slowly wake up the public as to what, that (A), this goes on, that it’s real, and (B), that they’re taking down these people. When there are mass arrests, and there are names like Hillary Clinton that pop up, or thrown in prison for sex trafficking, there’s not mass hysteria. People will realize, “Oh my gosh, maybe this is real,” or like, this isn’t just some kind of coup or whatever, this is real and this is really going on.62
Crokin was nothing if not indiscriminate in accusing people of participating in the pedophilia conspiracy, notably including well-known entertainment figures. In late December 2017, she tangled on Twitter with supermodel Chrissy Teigen and her husband, the Grammy-winning singer John Legend, claiming that pictures Teigen posted of her children indicated they were participants in the Pizzagate ring.
Teigen responded with a tweet indicating she was “disturbed” by Crokin’s accusation. “Chrissy you run in circle with people who rape, torture & traffic kids. This is a fact, I expose sex trafficking for a living,” responded Crokin.
Teigen replied angrily: “YOU POSTED MY DAUGHTER AND HAVE 50,000 PEOPLE ACCUSING ME OF BEING IN A PEDO RING. I don’t care HOW you backtrack or WHAT you deleted. I have it ALL. I’m the last person you are f***ing with. You are DONE with me and my family. You are going to court.”
Legend chimed in: “You need to take my family’s name out of your mouth before you get sued.”63
In the QAnon universe, the conspiracies kept building and building over time, especially as the person or people behind the Q persona posted at 8chan. So did the bizarre fanaticism of the theory’s true believers.
A later iteration of the theories revolved around the mysterious jail suicide of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a friend of both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump (and many other celebrities and political figures) who was accused by multiple women of overseeing a massive sex-trafficking operation involving mostly underage girls, as well as personally assaulting a long list of these girls. Epstein, awaiting trial in New York, was found dead in his cell in July 2019, and the official verdict declared that he had hung himself.
Many people were skeptical of this conclusion (one poll found that less than a third of Americans believed Epstein killed himself),64 but conspiracy theorists—particularly those convinced that Bill Clinton had a track record of murdering his political enemies and liabilities—went completely wild. This was especially the case for the QAnon theorists for whom the Clintons were central villains in their narrative; the possibility that Trump might have been responsible was not part of the discussion.
In short order, one of the most popular memes that first circulated in QAnon social media circles—the simple assertion, “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself”—spread quickly into the mainstream, where it was circulated through the likes of Fox News and Republican congressmen who shared it with the public.65
To no one’s great surprise, the unhinging effect common to far-right conspiracy theories began manifesting itself in the real world. An out-of-work Marine veteran named Matthew P. Wright—armed with an AR-15 rifle, a handgun, multiple magazines of ammunition, and a flash-bang device—drove his homemade armored vehicle to the middle of the Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge leading to the Hoover Dam one day in July 2018 and successfully blocked traffic for ninety minutes, complete with an armed standoff with law enforcement, at the end of which Wright was apprehended unharmed.66
It shortly emerged that the whole event had been inspired by Q. Locked up in Mojave County, Arizona, Wright composed a series of letters to President Trump and other elected officials that all signed off with the secret Q insiders motto, “Where We Go One We Go All.” His letter to Trump referenced another Q belief—namely, the “Great Awakening,” which was just another signifier for the “Storm” that Q believers still anxiously awaited.67
QAnon signs appeared on bumper stickers and on signs in people’s yards. They would appear at Donald Trump’s periodic rallies at various locales around the country, with followers wearing large “Q” signs and T-shirts adorned with variations on “#WWG1WGA.”
Trump would even appear to acknowledge the QAnon believers from time to time—giving them the “thumbs-up” at his rallies, while Press Secretary Sarah Sanders denied any support. However, inside their own universe, QAnoners had become fully convinced that Trump in fact was secretly linked to Q, and he sent them all kinds of secret signals—gestures and phrases Trump would use, seemingly odd coincidences in his public appearances—as absolute proof that not only was Trump in on the plot-within-the-plot, but that indeed his invisible hand could be found in almost any and every news event, White House–related or not.
A well-known QAnon YouTuber named Michael Lionel Lebron one day posted a photo of himself in the Oval Office with President Trump and his wife, with just the script: “There are simply no words to explicate this profound honor.” Lebron assured his followers that the president definitely knew about the QAnon conspiracy, though he later claimed that they didn’t explicitly talk about it. No one could explain how or why he was in the Oval Office—which would have required clearance by senior staff—in the first place.68
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Conspiracy theories not only crept into the Oval Office during Trump’s tenure, at times they appeared to rule the place, long after birtherism withered into the nothingness from which it was born. And if the Jade Helm incident had demonstrated how conspiracy theories can affect and alter policies and official behavior, the Trump administration’s conduct demonstrated what happens when the entire executive branch is in their thrall.
In August 2017, the magazine Foreign Policy published a memo by a man named Rich Higgins, who served on the staff of Trump’s National Security Council. It was titled simply “POTUS and Political Warfare,” and it opened with the assertion that the president was actually engaged in a conflict with nefarious cultural Marxists in a conspiracy.
This is not politics as usual but rather political warfare at an unprecedented level that is openly engaged in the direct targeting of a seated president through manipulation of the news cycle. It must be recognized on its own terms so that immediate action can be taken. At its core, these campaigns run on multiple lines of effort, serve as the non-violent line of effort of a wider movement, and execute political warfare agendas that reflect cultural Marxist outcomes. The campaigns operate through narratives. Because the hard left is aligned with Islamist organizations at local (ANTI FA working with Muslim Brotherhood doing business as MSA and CAIR), national (ACLU and BLM working with CAIR and MPAC) and international levels (OIC working with OSCE and the UN), recognition should be given to the fact that they seamlessly interoperate at the narrative level as well. In candidate Trump, the opposition saw a threat to the “politically correct” enforcement narratives they’ve meticulously laid in over the past few decades. In President Trump, they see a latent threat to continue that effort to ruinous effect and their retaliatory response reflects this fear.69
It even had an explanation for the president’s various personal scandals, including an audiotape in which he talked about grabbing women “by the pussy,” as well as a payoff to a porn star who says they had sex while Trump’s third wife Melania was pregnant:
Responding to relentless personal assaults on his character, candidate Trump identified the players and the strategy: “The establishment and their media enablers will control over this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.”—President Trump, Oct 2016
Culturally conditioned to limit responses to such attacks as yet another round in the on-going drone from diversity and multicultural malcontents, these broadsides are discounted as political correctness run amuck. However, political correctness is a weapon against reason and critical thinking. This weapon functions as the enforcement mechanism of diversity narratives that seek to implement cultural Marxism. Candidate Trump’s rhetoric in the campaign not only cut through the Marxist narrative, he did so in ways that were viscerally comprehensible to a voting bloc that then made candidate Trump the president; making that bloc self-aware in the process. President Trump is either the candidate he ran as, or he is nothing. Recognizing in candidate Trump an existential threat to cultural Marxist memes that dominate the prevailing cultural narrative, those that benefit recognize the threat he poses and seek his destruction. For this cabal, Trump must be destroyed. Far from politics as usual, this is a political warfare effort that seeks the destruction of a sitting president. Since Trump took office, the situation has intensified to crisis level proportions. For those engaged in the effort, especially those from within the “deep state” or permanent government apparatus, this raises clear Title 18 (legal) concerns.
According to Higgins, those threatened by Trump include “‘deep state’ actors, globalists, bankers, Islamists, and establishment Republicans.” Among the people whom he considered disloyal to Trump, he named National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, his boss. Higgins was promptly given a pink slip.70
This, it shortly emerged, thoroughly infuriated Trump, who had gushed over the memo when it was given to him. A month later, he was “still furious” about the firing. The incident clearly indicated that the president, too, subscribed to the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory.71
Moreover, the paranoiac and conspiratorial view of its author was clearly pervasive throughout the Oval Office in nearly every policy initiative Trump pursued. Nowhere was that more true than with the raging debate over immigration.
From the start, accompanying the nativist rhetoric with which he had announced his candidacy in 2015 and continuing through both the campaign and his tenure as president, Trump’s view of immigration was straight out of the Minutemen’s paranoid playbook: the border’s porousness was a threat to national security, because terrorists were secretly crossing into the United States there, and the immigrants were just a cover for them and they were destroying the culture anyway.
However, the Minutemen’s grand plan to build a fence on the border (remember, that had been a scam, too) was not grand enough for Trump. No, his plan had to bigger. Better. He would build a wall! And indeed, “the Wall” became one of the centerpieces of Trump’s campaign, the chant “Build the Wall!” ringing loudly at all his campaign rallies.
Once in office, not only did he pursue policies that emphasized the dehumanized view of immigrants inherent to conspiracy theories, which produced a family-separation policy that put large numbers of children in wire cages at detention centers, but eventually Trump publicly embraced conspiracy theories about the people coming to the American border.
So in October, with midterm elections just a few weeks away and the polls (accurately) looking grim for Republican chances of retaining the House of Representatives, Trump turned back to his tried-and-true formula that he believed won the election in 2016: fearmongering over immigration.72
And this time, it came with a conspiracy-theory twist.
On October 16, Trump tweeted out the alarm: “The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!” It was just one of many the president posted that day on the subject and in the days following, as well.73
He had been spurred to action by a Fox News segment that had run that morning about a caravan of migrants, several hundred strong, from Central American nations who planned to seek asylum in the United States and were gradually making their way northward. Though nearly all of these refugees in fact were fleeing violence in their homelands and many likely would qualify for asylum in normal circumstances, Trump—with powerful assists from right-wing media, particularly Fox—persistently portrayed their gradual approach as an imminent existential threat to the United States.
The most hysterical pundit was Fox Business’s Lou Dobbs, who trumpeted false information about the caravan nightly on his program for most of the month.74 He hosted a guest named Chris Farrell, from a far-right Beltway organization called Judicial Watch, who solemnly informed Dobbs with great certainty that the caravan was being “orchestrated by the Soros-occupied State Department.”
A guest on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show opined: “These individuals are not immigrants—these are people that are invading our country.” Another chimed in that they sought “the destruction of American society and culture.”75 Even on CNN, the same rhetoric ruled: right-wing commentator Matt Schlapp got aggressive while interrogating host Alisyn Camerota: “Who’s paying for the caravan? Alisyn, who’s paying for the caravan?” Then he answered his own question: “Because of the liberal judges and other people that intercede, including George Soros, we have too much chaos at our southern border.”76
At one point, Trump retweeted a video, first posted by Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, purportedly showing caravan participants receiving money that was being handed out in bundles. Gaetz speculated in his original post that the money might have come from George Soros. Trump asked: “Can you believe this, and what Democrats are allowing to be done to our Country?”77
________
A still taken from another Fox News video that seemed to show a Star of David sticker on the back of the cab of a truck hauling food for the caravan migrants also made the rounds quite a bit. It was particularly popular on the dark corners of social media, on white nationalist and neo-Nazi message boards where it was displayed widely as proof that the Jews were secretly behind the caravan. It was everywhere on Gab, which had become the social medium of choice for white nationalists and other bigots after being kicked off Twitter.78
One of the people who spread this photo was a forty-six-year-old white Pittsburgh-area man and heavy Gab user named Robert Bowers. At one time he had been a relatively normal employee at a local bakery, but he had drifted for years after leaving the job in 2002, taking up work as a long-haul trucker and finding odd jobs here and there. His neighbors at his apartment in Baldwin Borough said they hardly ever saw him.
His computer and social media records, though, showed that Bowers had developed an interest in the deeply bigoted Christian Identity movement, which preaches that white people are the true children of Israel, that today’s Jews are actually demonic imitators descended from Satan, and that nonwhite people like blacks, Asians, and Latinos are soulless “mud people” whose humanity is of secondary value at best. He burnished these ideas with conspiracy theories and other far-right propaganda at message boards like 4chan, the Daily Stormer, and Stormfront.
On Gab, his anti-Semitic rants were visceral and angry. And as the month of October went on and the caravan dominated the news, his rhetoric grew threatening.
He reposted a message that Western civilization is “headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.” A Jewish relief organization called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society became the focus of Bower’s ire: “You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us?” he posted in a comment directed at HIAS.
Bowers also facetiously thanked HIAS for a post listing groups that had supported one of the organization’s refugee benefits. “We appreciate the list of friends you have provided,” he wrote.
On Saturday, October 27, he published a final post. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in.”79
One of the Jewish congregations on that earlier HIAS fundraising list met at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, located in the same Squirrel Hill borough that once was known around the world as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. After filing his post, Bowers got in his car and drove the thirty minutes or so it took to get to Tree of Life.
He had a Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and three pistols with him. He got out of his car and entered the synagogue. There were about seventy-five people inside beginning their morning Shabbat service. He opened fire with the AR-15 but, over the course of the next ten minutes or so, wound up using all four of his weapons.
The first people he killed were two elderly Jewish men who had turned to greet him; others were in their seats as he walked toward the front. The room cleared quickly, leaving only a scattered few targets, so he began shooting at people making last-second dashes out of the room.
Police arrived about ten minutes after he opened fire. Bowers then opened fire on the police, engaged them in a standoff for about thirty minutes, and surrendered.80
There were eleven dead, most of them elderly, and six people were injured, four requiring surgery. Bowers now awaits trial in Pittsburgh.
Over at 4chan, where a number of users on the /pol/ board remembered Bowers from his time spent there, the popular view was that the attacks were “accidentally red-pilling” people. Others denied the attack, claiming it was a false flag done by Jews to gain sympathy and that somehow Bowers had fallen prey to their machinations. They created a hashtag for him: #HeroRobertBowers.81