White vigilante terror is older than the United States itself. The lawful use of violence by white citizens to establish political supremacy can be found throughout US history—from slavery and Indian killings to lynchings. Today, figures such as George Zimmerman, Kyle Rittenhouse, and most recently, Daniel Penny, carry on this shameful American tradition. And the far right can’t get enough of it. Spencer Ackerman joins The Marc Steiner Show to examine the right’s embrace of vigilante violence, which he recently wrote about for The Nation, and what it tells us about the future the far-right wants.
Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award–winning reporter, is the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. Since the dawn of the War on Terror, Ackerman has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere as a staff writer for outlets like Wired, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, and The New Republic. He writes a newsletter, Forever Wars, on Ghost; and is the co-author of the DC Comics miniseries Waller vs. Wildstorm.
Studio/Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. And this is another episode of The Rise of the Right. My guest today is Spencer Ackerman. He’s a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning journalist, author of the book Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. And today we’re talking to him about his article in The Nation, Why the Right Embraces Military Vigilantes. And Spencer, welcome. Good to have you back in The Real News.
Spencer Ackerman:
Thanks very much, Marc. Appreciate you having me.
Marc Steiner:
So now, at some point in the next month or so, I’m going to have to get your book, and I’m going to have to get you on to talk about the book. I’m really interested in reading that. I haven’t read it yet. But let’s talk about this. I mean, You mentioned several episodes that have happened in this country where military veterans have either murdered or attacked people in demonstrations. Two of the ones that we know about really well was Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely and Daniel Perry and Garrett Foster. So talk about, I mean, what all that says to you, and what do you think the dynamic is that is happening here with the right wing and the military?
Spencer Ackerman:
So this has some pretty longstanding roots. A very foundational text is Professor Kathleen Belew’s book, Bring the War Home, which is a really groundbreaking understanding of how at the same time that the new right, the new extreme right, I should say, was configuring itself for an era out of official power following the civil rights era, the war in Vietnam was both first coalescing and then coming to a close. And into this confluence came a new era of far right leaders with military experience and others who knew enough about the destabilizing experience of Vietnam that they could actively recruit among, not a substantial, but a disturbingly receptive subcomponent of the Vietnam veteran population that was ready to hear that they had been betrayed here by forces at home, powerful forces in the government, and here comes this newly coalescing right wing effort to explain it. And some of the wages of that were probably most importantly the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which a decorated Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, including 19 children.
We go through the era in which my work tends to focus on, the War on Terror, and we can see simultaneously two things happening that build off the observations that Kathleen Belew makes. First, you have this appetite of extreme hyper, viscerally-aggrieved patriotism that after 9/11 allows a tremendous amount of [inaudible 00:03:37] to be resurrected, or if you don’t want to say resurrected, moved within the annals of political respectability, as long as it’s focused supposedly against Muslims, as long as it’s focused against Iraqis, Afghans out in their countries that the United States invades and occupies and against immigrants transforming the immigration system, which is a tremendous concern of those on the far right who believe it is essentially population replacement to make the United States less White rather than a mechanism to make more Americans, as a tool of the War on Terror, as a securitized institution and apparatus designed to monitor people while they’re here and keep most of them out.
Then the second thing that happens during the War on Terror is that the War on Terror is a disaster, that the wars abroad are calamities, that chimeric false promises of victory don’t materialize, and there grows a tremendous appetite not limited by far to those who served in those wars for an explanation that still flats a sense of American exceptionalism that the United States was always sort of going to win because it is this force that rights the wrongs of the world. And that explanation comes through far right narratives that the war was betrayed from within by cowardly liberals and their allies within the military and the intelligence services that pretended that we weren’t in a great war for civilization and ultimately didn’t let the military pursue victory.
Now, it’s less important that none of these narratives have a plausible theory of what victory means than it does to speak to the immense cultivated feeling that the war on terror was not just a failure, which it was, but a betrayal, which it also was, but only from the perspective of the American military apparatus constraining itself from winning, not from looking at it from a holistic perspective that examined how the war reflected a political economy, that the war reflected various American social and historical currents that responded to 9/11 through constructing not just a war, but a giant surveillance enterprise, the constraint of freedoms of association, freedoms of speech and privacy to kind of move the United States into a direction where war became more permanent, became more of a sort of expected occurrence of the American condition.
And in such an atmosphere, volatility is incredibly high, as you saw with the disproportionate representation of veterans within the January 6th insurrection, for instance. Similarly, with the large presence of military veterans in right wing militias, like the Oath Keepers in particular. The Oath Keepers’ founder, Stewart Rhodes, who was just convicted to serve 18 years in prison for seditious conspiracy, is himself a military veteran. But what I think is really different about this moment as opposed to perhaps the one after Oklahoma City, although we can parse some of these differences, is that now on the right there is a much broader infrastructure, politically respectable and even perhaps ascendant that views of far right vigilantism, particularly when combined with military service, as something to be valued, as something to be celebrated, provided that it’s applied against the right targets, non-White and left wing people in the United States, calls for greater equality, calls to dismantle capitalism.
And that is where I think we can see a kind of, if not necessarily unique feature of this era, certainly a distinct and characterizing one. And I’m glad you mentioned Garrett Foster, the person that Daniel Perry killed in Texas, because what’s so conspicuous to me about that is that Garrett Foster was himself an Air Force veteran, and he showed up to a Black Lives Matter protest availing himself of Texas’s famous open carry laws within AK-47 to defend his community, which included his non-White wife. And when Foster was acting not dissimilarly to a manner in which the far right insisted it was able to act, which is to say to display firearms even, if it weren’t at the stage of leveling weapons, at a protest, then Foster’s life was forfeit and his veteran status, which has been the basis of so much conspicuous public respect since 9/11 was nullified and obviated by this impending push for a pardon pursued by Texas Governor Abbott.
Marc Steiner:
Abbott, yeah. So let me try to parse some of these things out here, because it’s a very complex thing. It’s always straightforward as well. I mean, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about after reading your article and talking to other people about this particular issue is that, not that I’m calling for us to reinstate the draft… I had enough of that in the 1960s with Vietnam, but part of the reality is that over the last 50, 60 years, we have created almost a professional armed services that has recruited, consciously and by just the reality of who responds to them, a right wing inside the armed services that comes out, are armed and trained and dangerous. And we’re seeing it happen all over the place. January the 6th was a piece of it. The murders that you talk about in your article were both part of that, the overall sense of the vigilantism, the lynch mob mentality, which is acceptable if you’re going to stop certain people from destroying our country. So it seems to me that what you describe in the article sets off a conversation about the very real danger that our future faces with trained armed veterans who are on the far right. I mean, that to me was part of the subtext of everything I read that you wrote, that was kept popping in my head, the danger that we actually face with that reality.
Spencer Ackerman:
Yeah. And similarly, it ought to prompt an understanding that, while not every, and certainly not even most, veterans are going to be radicalized in this way, that there is a continuum in American foreign policy, in America’s kind of unique relationship between its military and its economy, whereby the accumulated force of over 100 years of the United States deciding that it can go forth into the world militarily to sort out governments that it dislikes, economic popular movements that it feels threatened by and that threatens resource extraction by so many of its captains of industry, and then I think what you’re referring to, the rise of both the United States as a global military power after the second World War and the according growth of the military industrial complex that unites the military and what it does overseas with a tremendous amount of the American economy funds a tremendous amount of the American economy, higher education in particular. Technical higher education is very much shaped by military spending.
All of those forces that help make the United States a kind of permanent military intervener on the world stage are very hard to separate from currents that America faces at home that are informed by American history of White supremacy and of settler colonialism. And these trends feed upon one another. It is something that James Madison recognized at the founding of this country when he wrote in the Federalist, that no nation can keep its freedom within an atmosphere of constant perpetual war. That is something that is kind of the harder underlying structural problem beneath a lot of these recent outbursts of far right military veteran, not all of the military veteran, but a disturbing number of the military veteran, vigilantism and insurrectionism. And it is something that the military over the past several decades, and including unfortunately after January 6th, has found the better part of valor to be to not confront. The current military policies, even after January 6th, look toward stopping… And this is a term you’ll find in the policy documents repeatedly… active participation in what is euphemistically called extremist activities. What that means is that basically you can be a member of a White supremacist or other far right organization, including the Oath Keepers, but if you go do Oath Keepers’ stuff on behalf of the Oath Keepers, that’s when you cross the line into being potentially dischargeable.
And that is a further step than the military has taken in decades past. But nevertheless, it reflects a compromise with allowing tacitly a certain number of members of far right organizations, members of White supremacists organizations and those who seek to advance White supremacist and far right political agendas within the military, or at the very least a fear of alienating recruits, turning away people at a time of what the military considers low recruitment, certainly what many Republicans in Congress also consider to be a dangerously low recruitment environment, because of these tendencies within certain portions of the recruiting base. And that’s where it becomes dangerous when [inaudible 00:15:41] Tommy Tuberville from Mississippi says that he doesn’t know what the military is talking about with White nationalists in the military, and he says, “I call them Americans.” He’s doing what those on the right like to say to those on the left of virtue signaling. He’s winking and nodding and saying that he has the back of those White nationalists within the military, that he is going to make sure that the policies that I think perhaps you or I and some of your listenership might consider to be insufficient to deal with this problem inside the military, that even those have to be rolled back, those have to be stopped, those have to have congressional opposition toward.
Marc Steiner:
So I’m curious as to how deep you think your analysis says this goes. When you look at the Daniel Penny, Daniel Perry, people can say, “Oh no, these are just aberrations. This is something that just occurred.” But to me, in terms of other people I’ve talked to, and when you look at the percentage of people of color who are in the army as opposed to the percentage of people of color who are in combat units, that it pretends something a lot more dangerous bubbling under the surface that we are really unaware of, because you still have this depth of respect for people who serve in the military in this country. It’s just almost universal at some level. But what you’ve described, others have described, especially you described in your work, is this kind of growth of the right wing inside the military. Two questions for you. A… Which is not necessarily at the hearty article, but I think you’re one of the people who can answer this question… what is the response to that, when the Tuberville’s go, “Oh, they’re just good Americans”? And how do you begin to address it?
I made an illusion earlier to the draft. I mean, the army of the 1960s and 70, the army of my era when I was young, was racially mixed everywhere. It was not just full of right wingers because they had to draft, [inaudible 00:17:47] was in it, or you ran away to Canada or whatever. But we have a very different world we’re in now. So I wonder what you think the response to that should be, could be and how you get there.
Spencer Ackerman:
Well, I think it seems pretty intuitive that if you’re a member of a far right street gang or other entity that supports a White supremacist or anti-democratic far right agenda, you shouldn’t be able to be a member of the United States Armed Forces, that that should be screened out at the point of recruitment, that throughout someone’s military service there needs to be attention, not just from their immediate chain of command, because their immediate chain of command will be focused on a mission, not trying to get fewer people within the organization to contribute to that mission, but from their superiors in the chain of command as well. I recognize that this is not an unproblematic thing.
What I can imagine kind of happening, the dumb and insufficient way of dealing it that will probably arise, given that the relevant Pentagon policies talk about the insider threat programs that they have in place to kind of screen people out who might be a danger to good order and discipline, I imagine that those in the age of generative AI will increasingly become automated and certain aspects of what you say or who you associate with probably more importantly will feed algorithmic recommendations of who is and who is not a member of such an organization, when in fact what there’s no substitute for and what a machine is very bad at is examining relevant context. That really requires a sea change inside the military to recognize that membership in one of these organizations or adherence to several of these agendas doesn’t just carry a danger of suppressing someone’s free speech because someone else is offended by more mainstream right wing beliefs, but instead is a danger, not just to the people within their unit, but to the people that they’re supposedly sworn to protect.
One of the things that sort of crystallizes this for me is that years before the Oklahoma City bombing, when Timothy McVeigh was a soldier in the army, he wore in his barracks… And this is according to biography that he himself cooperated with… a shirt that said White Power on it, and he got it from a trial membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Now, there are always, after a lot of these incidents come to the for, assurances from the military that this time it’s going to be a serious crackdown, and they seem not to [inaudible 00:21:13]. So I think what you also probably need as necessary is sustained political oversight, sustained government oversight from the relevant oversight bodies in Congress and within the executive branch. However, you have increasingly a permission structure that is coming from precisely those institutions, especially in Congress that gives precisely the opposite countervailing pressure, like what Tuberville is saying, that if the military goes too far in suppressing membership inheritance and so forth to far right extremist, White supremacist agendas… I don’t really like extremist as a term because it’s euphemistic. I think what we mean is violent.
Marc Steiner:
What you mean is what? Violent?
Spencer Ackerman:
Violent, that someone who is willing to commit violence on behalf of this agenda is the person that you are worried about. But permission structures are really important, like they are in every other aspect of life. When they’re telling you that in fact someone champions you politically out in Congress or in higher levels of the military, we should add in the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and so forth, then you are more likely to view such bureaucratic box-checking exercises as the military has set in place to screen you out as irrelevant or not something that will ultimately constrain you from your activities. So really a wicked problem, but one that has to start with the recognition that the military carries… Certainly not for everyone. Most people who serve in the military do not go along with this. A tremendous number of people who serve in the military do so not only because of patriotism, but because it’s the best economic opportunity available to them. So I don’t think we should paint with such a broad brush here, but nevertheless, this is a major recurrent and I would argue structural problem that has to start from the perspective that the military runs a great risk of incubating people who want to end American democracy, certainly want to stop a tremendous number of Americans from enjoying basic civil rights and basic freedoms.
Marc Steiner:
So just to conclude here, I mean, I think that, I mean, when you look at people like the Daniel Perry and Daniel Penny and what they did, Timothy McVeigh, there are those who would look at the combat units in the United States Armed Services to say this is not necessarily an aberration. They may be at the extreme end of this, but it’s not an aberration in terms of who’s serving and what that means for the future. I mean, the lifers, in my experience, have always been relatively conservative men and women, lifers in the armed services, right?
Spencer Ackerman:
Yeah, for sure. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of my career reporting on such people, embedding with them and so forth. And that’s not who we’re talking about here.
Marc Steiner:
Right. So the danger is that the instances you write about, the instances we’ve experienced, or at least read about in the press, maybe appears aberrations, but they talk to something much deeper. And when you have a Congress that is in control in part by the right wing, the idea of those investigations actually taking place are-
Spencer Ackerman:
There’s a fox in hen houses-
Marc Steiner:
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, exactly.
Spencer Ackerman:
Impact, I think you’re talking about. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, there’s no shortcut to this. There’s no shortcut to recognizing how deep these roots run, both in the US military, but also in broader American history and American society, which will inevitably find a political outlet. This is a holistic problem. We are on, I think, the cusp of a recognition that American democracy, such as it is… I think to talk about political democracy without economic democracy is to really talk about oligarchism electorally. But nevertheless, what democracy of the United States currently enjoys is under extreme threat from within, not always by the people who attend a January 6th insurrection, but certainly by those who sound the call for a January 6th insurrection. And what keeps me up at night is the possibility… And this is kind of different than the vigilantism we’re talking about, but it sort of speaks to your broader question of how this is kind greater outlet than just considering these extreme marginal cases. What happens when the infrastructure of both election denial and attempts to change who gets to recognize the winner of a state’s presidential contest break down along party lines and you get a circumstance where two different people claim to be the president, each saying that the other is a constitutional usurper and each saying that themselves is the proper duly elected constitutional president of the United States, in such a circumstance, who does the military obey?
Marc Steiner:
Right. Who?
Spencer Ackerman:
There’s no easy answer-
Marc Steiner:
There’s no easy answer.
Spencer Ackerman:
To that question deliberately because the circumstances are such that you can’t really answer that question in a hypothetical. The point of posing it is to suggest that we may not be as far away from that circumstance as we might think. And in order to confront it, we need to ask some really, really hard questions about the role of the United States military in American society, about the role of the United States military and its conception of safeguarding democracy and what that could possibly mean if we get a political system that bifurcates in the event of a disputed presidential outcome. January 6th and the 2020 election were farcical. You could really see, not just the extent of improvising among the Trumpist camp, but also some of the guardrails, particularly in the judicial system, still holding, that people, even when they were judges appointed by Trump, weren’t willing to go along with the fictions that the Trump campaign was putting out. The next circumstance in the next go around, maybe not immediately for 2024, but still with this tinder on the kind of forest bed of American democracy, it may not be so clearcut the next time.
Marc Steiner:
Well, Spencer Ackerman, I wish we had a great deal of more time because we’ve gotten some real depth here, but also kind of just scratched the surface on another level. There’s so much here that really can affect the future of our country, our children’s future, and there’s some real danger signs, which I think you pointed out and are pointing out in all of your work. So I look for more conversations together and gathering other folks in to really probe this in some depth. And I really appreciate the work you do because that’s what you do with your work. So Spencer, thanks so much for being here today on the Marc Steiner Show at The Real News. It means a lot. It was great conversation, and I appreciate your work.
Spencer Ackerman:
Thank you very much, Marc. I should also probably add, because The Nation will want me to add, that I’m a columnist for The Nation magazine.
Marc Steiner:
Yes, I was going to say at the end, but you said it right now. I’ll say it again. Thank you, Spencer, so much.
Spencer Ackerman:
Thanks very much, Marc.
Marc Steiner:
So I hope you enjoyed the conversation today with Spencer Ackerman, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist who has a column in The Nation. This article came out in The Nation, and we’ll attach that here on our website, Why the Right Embraces Military-Veteran Vigilantes. And his book is Reign of Terror, how the 9//11 Era Destabilized America and produced Trump, all Worth kind of taking a look at. And I want to thank our crew here today, without whom none of this would be happening, David Hebden, behind the glass with Cameron Granadino, and Kayla Rivara for making all this happen. And I’m Marc Steiner here for the Marc Steiner Show and The Real News Network. Thanks for joining us. Take care and keep on listening.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
