Militia Plots: A Rare but Serious Threat

The news shocked many Americans. The FBI announced they had thwarted an armed rightwing extremist militia plot to capture local government officials and hold them hostage.

You may think I’m talking about the October arrests of more than a dozen Michigan militia henchmen who were planning to abduct Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for the heinous crime of trying to save Michiganders from the coronavirus.

You’d be wrong if you did.

What I described above was a 1934 plot to seize control of the San Diego, CA city hall by a rightwing militia of quasi-Christian zealots called the Silver Shirts. Founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley (right), a one-time presidential candidate, the Silver Legion of America was patterned after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts with the intention of establishing a “Christian Commonwealth” in America that would exclude all Jews and nonwhites.

The Silver Legion was a pro-fascist/Nazi group, one of several that existed in the U.S. in the 1930s. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.) The local contingent of Silver Shirts concocted a plan to overthrow San Diego’s city government when they heard rumors that a group of communists was making similar plans (they weren’t). Two Marines from Camp Pendleton uncovered the plot when they infiltrated the Legion while investigating a series of weapons thefts from local military units.

Militia coup attempts like those thwarted in San Diego and Michigan might seem rare, but they aren’t unknown, and they are no laughing matter. They pose a very real threat to American citizens and to our democracy.

 The first antigovernment militia coup was the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. Contrary to the belief of many radical gunowners that the Second Amendment was intended by our Founding Fathers to provide for the overthrow the government, the Whiskey Rebellion was quickly put down by a federal force led by then-President George Washington. (See: The Myths that Drive America’s Love of Guns.)

Anti-government militia plots have been the bane of American life, particularly since the 1990s. Several militia plots were uncovered during that decade. Members of a group called the North American Militia planned to bomb several targets in Michigan, including a federal building and an IRS building, and even discussed assassinating various government officials.

In 1997, members of a Missouri militia group planned a July 4 attack on Fort Hood, Texas, as the military base hosted an annual “Freedom Festival” attended by 50,000 men, women, and children. Fortunately, the FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol thwarted the plot. (See: The Militia Movement.) And in March 2011, the FBI charged nine members of an extremist militia group in Michigan with seditious conspiracy for plotting to attack law enforcement and spark an uprising against the government. (See: Domestic Terrorism: Focus on Militia Extremism.)

These rebellions were stopped or quickly suppressed before they started. But that doesn’t mean militia coups are not dangerous. In 1898, a white supremacist militia successfully overthrew the biracial city government of Wilmington, NC. There was no response to the deadly coup from local police, the state government, or Washington, DC. Its success is having unfortunate repercussions in today’s presidential politics, as Donald Trump keeps holding up that event as a model for future coups. (See:  The White Supremacist Coup that Trump Uses as a Template.)

Many Americans like to believe Timothy McVeigh’s April 19, 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 men, women, and children was the act of a “lone wolf” terrorist, Timothy McVeigh. In fact, in addition to McVeigh, three accomplices were also charged and tried for the crime. They had hoped the bombing would initiate an uprising that would take down the U.S. government. McVeigh was also a member of Christian Identity, a rightwing, white supremacist militia, which the FBI believed may have also been involved with the plot. (See: Were There More OKC Conspirators?: The Elohim City Connection.)

The last four years saw a rise in militia activity, thanks to the hateful and extremist rhetoric of Donald Trump. Armed militia members confronted peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors and marched to protest social distancing practices implemented by local governments in the wake of the coronavirus. Even before planning to abduct Gov. Whitmer, Michigan militia gunmen marched on the state capitol in an obvious threat to state lawmakers.

Not all rightwing coup plots were the work of militia movements. In 1933, a group of wealthy conservative bankers and financiers plotted to raise a private army and use it to overthrow the American government and establish a fascist dictatorship. Called The American Putsch and The Bankers Revolt, the plot was thwarted by the man they approached to lead their army. Smedley Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, played along with the conspirators and collected evidence for the FBI. One of the alleged conspirators was a wealthy, pro-Nazi financier named Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.)

Unlike George Washington riding forth to preserve the country and democracy during the Whiskey Rebellion, Donald Trump has done nothing to mitigate the threat from these rightwing extremist groups. On the contrary, Trump appointed self-avowed pro-fascist, white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller to his staff. He’s referred to white nationalist groups as “some good people” and told the Proud Boys to “stand by.” Trump has also called for armed militia members to act as “poll watchers” during the balloting. His failure to condemn these hate groups or their malicious plots only encourages them to continue their terrorist plots. More conspiracies will be on the horizon as long as this irresponsible president remains in power.

And despite the best efforts of law enforcement, the next plot may not be stopped in time.

A Novel More Prescient Than Fiction

In 1935, American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis published a novel he meant to be a cautionary tale about the rise of an authoritarian government in the United States. But when read in today's political climate, the book seems less a work of fiction than a prescient foreboding of what was to come.

The basic plot of  It Can't Happen Here involves a pompous, blustering, populist politician who gets elected president running on a platform that is anti-woman, anti-Jew, and anti-black, by making promises he can never deliver on, by accusing the news media of spreading lies, and by proclaiming only he can cure the country's ills and "make it great again." Once he takes office, he begins issuing orders that by-pass the law-making powers of Congress and the legal review of the judiciary, and strips the rights of millions of people.

What sounds like a plot torn from today's headlines was actually written 80 years before the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

Sinclair's bitingly witty story holds so many parallels to the results of the 2016 election and its aftermath as to be unnerving. Written at a time when fascist governments were popping up throughout Europe, the book was inspired by the naïve belief of Americans at the time that what was happening across the Atlantic "can't happen here."

Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is a populist U.S. senator loosely based on the bombastic southern Senator Huey Long, whose quest for the presidency was ended by an assassin's bullet in 1935. Windrip curries the favor of Americans disgruntled over the economic blight of the Great Depression by claiming he would end unemployment, much as Trump promised to "bring jobs back" to America.

Men of Little Intellectual Curiosity

A man of little intellectual curiosity, Windrip claims his autobiography is the world's greatest book next to the Bible, the same claim made by an equally incurious Trump about his ghostwritten autobiography The Art of the Deal. Windrips' political base is a rag-tag group of agitators called The Minute Men, or MMs for short. Think of the MMs as a combination of the Tea Party radicals and Alt-Right white supremacists who helped put Trump into office.

Windrip runs for office, much as Trump did, with promises of taking power in Washington away from industrialists and bankers and giving it back to the little man. Once in power, however, Windrip begins appointing incompetent cronies to key government leadership roles.

Sound familiar? Trump, who promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington, filled his Cabinet with controversial D.C. insiders, family members, wealthy financiers, corporate CEOs, and lobbyists—most of whom were appointed to their offices without approval from Congress.

Almost immediately, Windrip by-passes Congress and begins issuing executive orders ending President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal social programs, stripping women of the right to vote, and Jews and blacks of their civil rights. He replaces key military leaders with buffoons from the Minutemen, and abolishes all regulations on businesses.

In the first few days of his administration, Trump used executive orders to strip regulations on banks, industry, and polluters; demanded the repeal of President Obama's Affordable Care Act; ordered the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (at least those who are non-Anglo); began caging Hispanic immigrant children, and removed the nation's top military and national security leaders from the National Security Council, replacing them with his Alt-Right strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon, a self-professed white nationalist, didn't last long, of course, and as of this writing he is facing federal criminal charges for fraud.

To consolidate power, Windrip sends handpicked "commissioners" to assume the leadership of local governments. The move is very similar to the Nazis use of gauleiters to take control of areas of Germany. Trump hasn't done that—yet—but several Republican governors have dispatched "emergency managers" to take over local government bodies in their states. (Two such emergency managers were charged with felonies for their roles in the Flint, Michigan drinking water fiasco.)

Windrip fails to make good on any of his campaign promises save one; he ends unemployment by sending the unemployed to labor camps. Workers from labor camps are provided to companies for a small fee. This, of course, means those companies lay off regular workers who, now unemployed, are sent to labor camps.

As one of his first acts, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order to withdraw federal prisoners from privately operated prisons, which have been criticized for bolstering their profits by outsourcing inmates as prison laborers.

Building Walls to Keep Us In

Windrip fulfills one of Trump's campaign promises when he strengthens border security to prevent illegal immigration out of the United States into Canada and Mexico. Walls, after all, keep people in as well as out. Trump has not succeeded in building his promised border wall, but his incompetence during the Covid-19 crisis forced the bulk of Europe to ban U.S. travelers from visiting their countries—essentially building a wall to keep us in. The only wall Trump succeeded in building so far is an "unscalable" wall around the White House grounds.

Eventually, as Windrip consolidates his power, he does away with all political parties except the new Corporatist Party, whose members are called Corpos. The country is now ruled by and for corporations and wealthy oligarchs, the very definition of fascism as defined by the father of fascism, Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Trump stuffed his Cabinet with wealthy and mostly incompetent corporate donors. His economic policies have benefited major corporations at the expense of American workers. His trade war with China did nothing to hurt that country while devastating a large part of the American agricultural sector. Even before the pandemic, Trump's job numbers were plunging despite burgeoning corporate profits.

Lewis narrates his story through the disbelieving eyes of Doremus Jessup, a middle-aged newspaperman who cannot believe his fellow citizens don't see the slow creep of growing totalitarianism in the country. When MMs begin to terrorize the citizenry, people assume they are just a small minority of rabble-rousers. Even when Windrip establishes concentration camps to house his enemies, many in the country simply cannot believe the United States is falling victim to corporate fascism. They continue to believe "it can't happen here." By the time they realize it has happened here, it is too late.

Trump has praised white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and QAnon conspiracy theorists. He ordered federal police and troops to attack peaceful demonstrators so he could be photographed holding a Bible outside a Washington church. His followers have attacked synagogues and mosques, and gunned down cops. Federal agents clad in unmarked military uniforms kidnapped peaceful protesters in Portland, Ore., threw them into unmarked vehicles, and held them without just cause. Alt-Right armed militia are being allowed to patrol American streets. One of those "minutemen," a 17-year-old teenager with an illegal weapons, is now accused of murdering two people.

And still too many Americans refuse to see this country's slide into authoritarianism. They still believe "it can't happen here."

Lewis's inspiration for this book was simply the time in which it was written. In the 1930s, the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. Ninety percent of the country's wealth was owned by only three percent of the population. (Today, after 30 years of Reaganomics, only one percent of Americans own the bulk of the nation's wealth).

Dissatisfaction over the slow economic recovery spawned several populist movements, many of them pro-fascist. In 1932, a group of wealthy conservatives attempted a coup to overthrow the government and establish a fascist government. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History on this blog.)

Lewis doesn't spare any political movement in this book. He views any strongly held belief system, political or religious, as potentially authoritarian. All it takes is a populace too wrapped up in their own lives to not recognize what's happening about them, or not caring what's happening as long as it doesn't happen to them.

There is no happy ending to this book. There is no great uprising of patriots; many of those who most loudly proclaimed their patriotism in the beginning of the book end up in the MMs or working for Windrip, just as the Republican Party—which initially opposed Trump's candidacy—is now his greatest enabler.

 Far more than Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale  all Americans should be reading—and heeding—today.

Ayn Rand's Corrosive Influence on American Politics

The three and a half years he’s been in the White House, Donald Trump has shown himself to be a greedy, self-involved, narcissistic, sociopath. At the same time, Republican leadership in the U.S. Senate to be of like mind with Trump. It’s not difficult to understand why; their brand of political conservatism is, at its heart, sociopathic.

But the true inspiration behind their hard-edged conservatism is neither Pinochet nor Friedman, but a mediocre, early 20th century novelist and self-proclaimed philosopher named Ayn Rand. Rand’s brand of social Objectivism has been the center of extreme right philosophy. GOP Senator Rand Paul, along with his former Republican congressman father, Ron Paul, are hard-core adherents to Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Her belief system was also behind the Tea Party movement.

Her novel, The Fountainhead, is one of the few books Trump said he enjoyed reading. When he became president, Trump proclaimed he would appoint Rand acolytes to cabinet posts. One of those, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told the Washington Post, “One of the very first serious books I read when I was growing up was Atlas Shrugged, and it really had an impact on me.” Pompeo is said to be currently facing multiple internal corruption probes.

The problem is, Ayn Rand’s philosophy and writing are sociopathic.

The Russian-born Rand has been poisoning the minds of self-absorbed adolescents for decades with her philosophy of the individual as the center of the universe. That philosophy holds well with high schoolers who truly believe the universe revolves around them. Most people say adieu to Rand and her rants as they mature. Those that don’t become sociopaths— as Rand was herself.

The terrorist-hero of The
Fountain was based on a
real-life psychopathic killer.

Had she ever laid herself on a psychiatrist’s couch, Rand no doubt would have been diagnosed as sociopathic. Throughout her life, Rand—like the heroes in her best-known books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—believed whatever was good for her was right. She once wrote the basis of her philosophy stemmed from her childhood in post-Revolution Russia when her parents refused to buy her a dress she wanted or give her a cup of tea like the grown-ups were drinking. She believed if she wanted something, she should have it. It is said she once took money that her family needed for food to buy tickets to the theater.

Rand was so enamored with the idea of the unfettered self, she developed an infatuation with the notorious psychopathic serial killer, William Edward Hickman. In 1928, Hickman kidnapped his last victim, a 12-year-old girl, and held her for ransom. When the girl’s father paid the ransom, Hickman dumped the girl’s eviscerated and dismembered body in the street. At the time, it was considered one of the greatest crimes of the century.

Psychopathic 'Superman'

Ayn Rand felt otherwise.

In her notebooks, Rand wrote admiringly of Hickman. “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote. She added, using words eerily prescient of what the Nazis would be saying a few years hence, that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’”

Hickman, who was executed in 1928, became the model for Rand’s Fountainhead hero, Howard Roark, a self-absorbed architect who wins a woman’s devotion by raping her, and ends up committing an act of terrorism—blowing up the Fountainhead building—because he didn’t get his way.

Howard Roark, like his real-life model, was one sick puppy.

Rand’s self-proclaimed Objectivism philosophy basically says man makes his own reality. Whatever he determines to be, is. Evidence of how wide-spread this narcissistic philosophy is among the extreme right of the Republican Party was seen when Karl Rove, then chief advisor to President George Bush, told journalist Ron Susskind, “we create our own reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities.”

Former GOP House speaker Paul Ryan, also an Ayn Rand fan, carried that same philosophy to the podium at the 2012 Republican Convention when, as Mitt Romney’s running mate, he delivered a diatribe on the Obama administration that was so separated from reality that even Fox News criticized its lies.

Kindred Spirits

Ryan, in fact, has a lot in common with Rand. Like her, Ryan likes to bite the hand that fed him. Ryan, youngest son of an upper middle-class family, received Social Security survivors’ benefits after his attorney father died of a heart attack. Since his family didn’t need those benefits to survive on, Ryan stuffed them away and used them to pay for his college education. Later he advocated doing away with Social Security for those who do need it.

Ryan's home in Wisconsin was declared a national historic site, meaning the Ryan family receives a taxpayer subsidy to maintain it. Since graduating from college, Ryan drew a government paycheck, first as a congressional aid, then as a congressman. Now retired from Congress, Ryan continues to collect a government pension and tax-payer subsidized health care.

Ayn Rand, too, took advantage of a government-sponsored education in the Soviet Union, and then turned against the system as soon as it no longer benefited her. She was the beneficiary of many government programs in the United States, as well. When her first play abruptly closed in 1938, the Works Progress Administration took it on a nationwide tour and paid Rand a weekly salary. In her old age, Rand regularly criticized those living on Social Security, even though she was receiving Social Security benefits under a married name.

Like Trump, Ayn Rand was an amoral, narcissistic, sociopath, and her poisoned pen continues taint American political thought and corrupt American political morals.

_____________________

UPDATE (July 8, 2020): Like the woman whose juvenile rhetoric they advocate, the Ayn Rand Institute admitted on July 7 that it had received up to $1 million in forgivable loans from the Paycheck Protection Program approved by Congress to help businesses during the Covid-19 crisis. The institute, which continues Rand's criticism of government welfare of any kind, used twisted logic to rationalized why it took the bailout. Apparently it isn't enough for the institute to keep Rand's childish philosophy of greed and selfishness alive, they also follow her hypocrisy, too.

 

For further reading:

Trump Administration Embraces Ayn Rand's Disdain for the Masses

US Republican leaders love Ayn Rand

The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman

‘We Took PPP Funds and Would Do It Again’

In sign of the times, Ayn Rand Institute approved for PPP loan

American Fascists: A Forgotten History

As many American cities burned in the wake of the police killing of an unarmed black man, videos taken by news crews and private citizens revealed a part of America that has been hidden—or more accurately, ignored—for decades. But since the election of Donald Trump, Americans brandishing swastikas and raising their arms in the Nazi salute have become almost a daily sight. Many patriotic Americas have asked who are they and where did they come from?

The appearance of these cretins doesn’t surprise me. Fascism, in its various forms has been part of the American underbelly for the better part of a century. The 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of fascism not only in Europe, but in the United States as well.

Members of the German American Bund parade
 through Camp Norland in New Jersey. (Source: National
Archives)

Throughout Thirties brown-shirted and jackbooted thugs of the German American Bund—essentially the Nazi Party affiliate in the U.S.—marched proudly through American streets, spreading their religion of hate and racism. There were Nazi enclaves in the woods for training, and summer camps for the children of American Nazis. In 1939, 22,000 Bund members held a massive rally in New York's Madison Square Garden. The Bund also affiliated with America’s first terrorist group, the Klu Klux Klan.

They Weren't Alone.

Even before the Bund, there was the Fascist League of North America, an umbrella group composed primarily of Italian-American supporters of Italy's dictator Benito Mussolini, considered by many to be the father of modern fascism. Mussolini coined the word fascism, comparing the rule of government by corporations for corporations to a fascine, in which weak sticks bound together create a strong foundation.

The Silver Legion of America, also known as the Silver Shirts due to their uniforms' silver camp shirts, at one time boasted at least 15,000 members. They owned a militarized compound in the hills surrounding Los Angeles in which they expected Adolf Hitler to stay after the Nazis took over the U.S. In 1936, their leader, William Dudley Pelley, ran for president on a third-party ticket.

The German-American Businessmen's Association, commonly called the DAWA (the German acronym for the Deutsch Amerikanischer Wirtschaft Auscbuss), focused primarily on ruining Jewish-owned businesses. Instead using the physical brutality the Nazis in Germany did on Kristallnacht in 1938, the American DAWA used boycotts to destroy Jewish businesses.

Closely allied with these groups—particularly the Bund—was the Christian Front which, despite calling itself Christian nevertheless sowed violence throughout New York. The Front denounced Jews and other non-Christians, and praised Hitler and Spain's fascist dictator Francisco Franco.

Included Members of Congress

It would be easy to dismiss these groups as simply a fanatical political fringe, but the bloody fingers of fascism reached deep into 1930s American politics. Many members of Congress—mostly Republican but also some conservative Democrats—openly supported in speeches these American fascist groups as well as the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe. In 1942, mystery novelist Rex Stout published The Illustrious Dunderheads, a collection of pro-fascist speeches given by conservative American politicians during the 1930s.

There were some American fascists who chose action over words. In 1933, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, was approached by two men representing wealthy and conservative American bankers and industrialists. The men explained they had been sent to Europe to study fascism and how best to bring it to the United States. Their backers decided a coup was the best idea, and they wanted Butler to lead it.

Butler played along and gathered evidence for the FBI and a subsequent Congressional investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Known by many names—The Business Plot, the Wall Street Plot, and The American Putsch—the plot was largely swept under the Capitol's rug, since so many well-known millionaires (and political contributors) were apparently involved.

In 2007, the BBC reported Prescott Bush, father, and grandfather of two American presidents, was one of those wealthy financiers involved in the American Putsch. Bush was a well-known supporter of Hitler's rise to power and was prosecuted for continuing to do business with the Nazis even after Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941.

Forgotten History

In the aftermath of WWII, many wanted to forget the exuberance with which they embraced fascism in the 1930s. The rise of the Soviet Union as the next great enemy gave many conservatives what they needed to distract Americans from the recent past. The McCarthy Era with its numerous and unsubstantiated claims of "commies everywhere" was simply a means of making voters forget the sins of the conservative right prior to the war.

Since WWII, American fascism had lain hidden in the political shadows. Certainly, over the decades, overt images of it—neo-Nazis, KKK, and so on—were occasionally seen in the media. But there also was a latent vestige of fascism that shunned the term "fascist" but cheered the concept of "nationalism"—one of the markers of fascist thought—and its memes like "American exceptionalism." Sinclair Lewis predicted this in his book, It Can't Happen Here, when he wrote: "[T]he worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”

Decades ago, American writer George Santayana warned us, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

As seen at the top of this blog, those words are the motto of this site. And they are good words to live by.

References and further reading:

German American Bund: http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/american-nazi-organization-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/

Fascist League of North: America: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2050-411X.1977.tb00427.x/epdf

Silver Legion: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116684/Hitlers-Los-Angeles-bunker-planned-run-Nazi-empire-war.html

German-American Businessmen's Association (DAWA): http://archive.jta.org/1934/05/13/archive/jewish-merchants-in-yorkville-ruined-as-dawa-presses-war

Christian Front: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F04EEDF1E3EE23ABC4A51DFB766838B659EDE&legacy=true

Illustrious Dunderheads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261112-the-illustrious-dunderheads

House Committee report on the American Putsch:

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC1.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC2.pdf;

http://www.claytoncramer.com/primary/other/HUAC3.pdf.

Prescott Bush and the American Putsch:

 https://timeline.com/business-plot-overthrow-fdr-9a59a012c32a

Cops are Being Targeted, but Not by Whom They Think

Once again, a nonviolent black man has died at the hands of police officers. As Minneapolis burns in the wake of the death of George Floyd, who was being arrested for allegedly passing a forged $20 check, the question arises again—are white cops targeting people of color?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be yes. In whole numbers, the number of white men versus black men killed by police officers per year is largely comparable. But when looked at in terms population ratios, black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement; for black women that number is 1.4 times more likely. According to a Rutgers University study, 1-in-1,000 African American boys and men will be killed by police in their lifetime; for white boys and men, the rate is 39 out of 100,000.

Contentious History

But why? Historically, law enforcement has had a contentious relationship with Black Americans going back to the antebellum South when constables, sheriff’s, and state militia were responsible for hunting down escaped slaves. In the postbellum South, those same figures of authority were often the night riders of the Klu Klux Klan. Southern cops were also charged with enforcing the South’s notorious Jim Crow laws.

But that was then; this is now. So, are police officers today more likely to shoot African Americans because people of that race kill more cops than Caucasians? According to FBI statistics, of 556 persons charged in cop killings between 2004 and 2013, 289 were white, 243 were black, and the rest were Asian/Pacific Islanders or Native Americans. Again, in whole numbers, there is statistically no difference in the number of white and black cop killers. Yet, according to the Census Bureau, African Americans comprise only 13.4 percent of the American population. So, police could say they are more fearful of encounters with black suspects than white suspects, hence the outcome of those encounters are more likely to be violent.

Gunning for Cops

Yet, because America’s gun culture is largely a white phenomenon, Caucasian suspects are more likely to be armed, and heavily armed at that. And some of those armed whites are out gunning for cops.

According to a study by ThinkProgress, 33 officers shot between 2007 and 2017 were targeted by far-right extremists, including white supremacists and anti-government sovereign citizens. Statistics compiled by the Anti-Defamation League showed right-wing extremists killed 51 police officers between 1990 and 2018. Left-wing extremists, including black nationalists, killed 11.

These statistics and incidents do not include the dozens of alt-right extremists who, over the past two decades, planned attacks on local police and federal agents but were arrested before the attacks could be executed.

In June, police in Northern California arrested an active duty Air Force airman on charges of

Suspected alt-right extremist Steven Carrillo 
was charged with ambushing Santa Cruz 
sheriff's deputies.

ambushing and killing a Santa Cruz sheriff's deputy and wounding other. Steven Carrillo is also suspected in other recent attacks on local and federal law enforcement officers. Carrillo is suspected of having right-wing extremist belief based on statements on his social media. When arrested he was in possession of a semiautomatic rifle and home-made bombs.

Voting for Their Own Killers?

 Generally, law enforcement officers tend to be conservative and vote as such. But these officers may be supporting the very people targeting them for death.

In December 2019, Washington State Rep. Matt Shea, a Republican, was accused by his own state legislature of secretly taking part in the 2016 six-week Malheur National Wildlife Refuge standoff between law enforcement agencies and members of the so-called “Patriot Movement.” Shea was accused of planning the deadly standoff as well as two other violent incidents over a three-year period.

The Patriot Movement is a notorious coalition of hard-right extremist groups including neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, anti-government sovereign statists, and armed militias. It’s members are responsible for most of the two decades of attacks on police mentioned earlier. Two members of the movement, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people including many children.

These are the same people Donald Trump referred to as “some fine people” following the 2017 white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, VA.

Shea Not Alone

Shea is not alone in the GOP in his support of the movement. According to Political Research Associates, numerous members of Oregon’s state legislature are either members or supporters of the Patriot Movement. So are many local law enforcement officials, meaning some day cops may be killing cops. In May 2019, the Arizona Republic reported that the Patriot Movement was pushing for more influence in the state’s GOP.

The Patriot Movement has gained renewed momentum from the current pandemic, using stay-at-home orders and business closures as a cause célèbre for their anti-government rhetoric. The corona crisis has also given these terrorists a new weapon. According to a March 2020 FBI intelligence report, white extremists who contract the virus are being encourage to spread it among the population by using spray bottles filled with their bodily fluids. Their primary targets? Jews and police officers.

Look, I have a law enforcement background from the military. Being a cop is hard, dangerous, and sometimes unrewarding work. But if I were a police officer today, I’d be less nervous about dealing with a black guy than I would a white guy. Especially if the white guy had a spray bottle.