{"id":52523,"date":"2020-10-12T17:28:04","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T21:28:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=52523"},"modified":"2020-10-12T17:28:04","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T21:28:04","slug":"yes-its-a-serious-threat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, it’s a serious threat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Vanderbilt sociologist Amy Cooter has been studying right-wing \u201cmilitia\u201d movements for a long time, up close, so she has some helpful insights about the angry white men behind the recent terrorism plot in Michigan, \u201cLessons from embedding with the Michigan militia \u2013 5 questions answered about the group allegedly plotting to kidnap a\u00a0governor<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear that \u201cplotting to kidnap a governor\u201d is really what these guys were about. As Cooter notes, they regarded Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as a \u201ctyrant\u201d due to the (not-at-all \u201ctyrannical\u201d) measures Michigan\u2019s government took to contain the spread of a deadly pandemic. No one has ever regarded kidnapping as an appropriate response to \u201ctyranny.\u201d Especially not a bunch of riled up, radicalized white supremacist gang members who like to go around quoting John Wilkes Booth\u2019s \u201csic semper tyrannis.\u201d Booth never thought about trying to kidnap<\/em> Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Oklahoma City National Memorial (Wikimedia photo by Dustin M. Ramsey)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What these heavily armed racist bozos were fantasizing about was not a kidnapping plot including ransom or any other kind of hostage-taking demands. They only spoke of \u201ckidnapping\u201d because they wanted to hold a kangaroo-court trial before executing the governor. They wanted to kill<\/em> her, to kill a whole bunch of police officers and elected officials, and to ignite a civil war. That was their fantasy and, to the extent that this group was capable of planning, that was their \u201cplan.\u201d<\/p>\n

The horrifying scale of that fantasy leads Cooter to consider the question \u201cWere they a serious threat?\u201d<\/p>\n

As a specialist on Michigan militias, I\u2019ve been asked several times since the news broke whether this group posed a real threat, in terms of being likely to act on its plan and kidnap or harm Gov. Whitmer.<\/p>\n

Members of other militia groups in the state reported to me after the arrests that they do not believe these men were \u201csmart enough\u201d to pull off anything like this.<\/p>\n

I heard similar comments about the suspected weaknesses of Hutaree members a decade ago. In 2010, nine members of that group, another Michigan militia, were arrested on federal charges that they\u00a0planned a series of events to kill large numbers of police officers. Those charges were ultimately dismissed by a federal judge who said\u00a0all they were doing was talking, though a few of the group were convicted of more minor charges involving weapons possession.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I understand what people are getting at with this question, but it\u2019s still not a helpful question. Their plot was seriously threatening, and thus requires being taken seriously regardless of whether or not they had the skills or the smarts to execute it exactly as they imagined.<\/p>\n

Think of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The Columbine shooters were a pair of much younger and less capable angry white supremacists whose grandiose scheme was far beyond anything they might have been \u201cseriously\u201d capable of carrying out, yet that plan still ended with 15 dead and thousands more traumatized. Their master plan involved blowing up roads and bridges, killing scores of police, and, ultimately, crashing a plane filled with explosives in New York City<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, they were not \u201csmart enough to pull off anything like that,\u201d but the basic gist of their plan \u2014 get a lot of guns and use them to kill a lot of people \u2014 wasn\u2019t something that required any level of smarts. That same basic \u201cplan\u201d was the main element of the scheme that these Michigan militia members are accused of plotting. It doesn\u2019t matter whether or not they were \u201csmart enough to pull it off,\u201d what matters is that they were dumb enough to try.<\/p>\n

The link above is to an old CNN report on the journals kept by 18-year-old Harris, which were found after he and Klebold killed 12 fellow students, a teacher, and then themselves in their Colorado high school. \u201cThe journals were found in Harris\u2019 bedroom by police following the [then] deadliest school shooting in U.S. history,\u201d the report says. \u201cSeveral parents of the students killed at Columbine believe if these journals had been found before April 1999, the attack could have been prevented.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s likely true. The attack likely could have been prevented, because those journals described a \u201cserious threat.\u201d The fact that Harris\u2019 journals included \u201cnumerous misspellings\u201d and rambling grammatical errors did not, in any way, lessen the seriousness of that threat. A seething, irrational human time-bomb of inchoate hatred may pose a different kind of threat than one posed by an evil genius criminal mastermind, but not a less dangerous or less \u201cserious\u201d one.<\/p>\n

The same is true for the haphazard scheme plotted by the white supremacist terrorists of the Michigan \u201cmilitia.\u201d Just because they weren\u2019t remotely capable of succeeding in their plan to overthrow the state government to establish an independent nation of white \u201csovereign citizens\u201d doesn\u2019t mean they weren\u2019t capable of killing a whole lot people in their efforts to do so. They had a huge stockpile of guns, and it doesn\u2019t take a criminal mastermind to pull a trigger.<\/p>\n

As historian Kathleen Belew says in her piece for <\/a>The Washington Post<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0\u201cThis isn\u2019t just a one-off event or the work of a few mad actors \u2014 it\u2019s part of a rising tide of white power activity, one that poses an imminent danger to American democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

White supremacist terrorism is a tinderbox and we\u2019ve now got a president flicking matches at it. It\u2019s a serious threat that serious people should take seriously.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just because the white supremacist terrorists in Michigan weren’t remotely capable of succeeding in their plan to overthrow the state government doesn’t mean they weren’t capable of killing a whole lot people in their efforts to do so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[69,129,158,240],"class_list":["post-52523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-antigovernment","tag-history","tag-racism","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nYes, it's a serious threat<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Just because the white supremacist terrorists in Michigan weren't remotely capable of succeeding in their plan to overthrow the state government doesn't mean they weren't capable of killing a whole lot people in their efforts to do so.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yes, it's a serious threat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Just because the white supremacist terrorists in Michigan weren't remotely capable of succeeding in their plan to overthrow the state government doesn't mean they weren't capable of killing a whole lot people in their efforts to do so.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"slacktivist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-10-12T21:28:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2020\/10\/OKCity.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Fred Clark\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/\",\"name\":\"Yes, it's a serious threat\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-10-12T21:28:04+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-10-12T21:28:04+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#\/schema\/person\/32666545e535b697afb93d9848dcfc47\"},\"description\":\"Just because the white supremacist terrorists in Michigan weren't remotely capable of succeeding in their plan to overthrow the state government doesn't mean they weren't capable of killing a whole lot people in their efforts to do so.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2020\/10\/12\/yes-its-a-serious-threat\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Yes, it’s a serious threat\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/\",\"name\":\"slacktivist\",\"description\":\""Test everything; 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}