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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633887688 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Prometheus Books |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2021 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 1,090,842 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
Introduction - The Secret Extremists
On July 7, 2016, a twenty-five-year-old African American man with a neatly trimmed beard called out to his mom, “I’m going into Dallas. There’s a march tonight.”
“What kind of march?”
“Two days ago the cops shot a black man down in Louisiana. They killed another one yesterday up in Minneapolis. They got it on video. Mom — you gotta watch the news.”
Just stay out of trouble, baby.”
“I will.”
With that, Micah Johnson walked out the front door of the suburban house in Mesquite, Texas, where he was raised and still lived with his mother, Delphine, and his younger sister. Johnson worked from home as well, providing care to his learning-disabled younger brother through a local social services agency. He played basketball at the school down the street and was described by his neighborhood friends as “chill.” He had no criminal record and was not a member of any violent groups.
To the casual observer, there was little that set Johnson apart — politically or otherwise — from tens of thousands of other young African American men. And there was certainly no reason for Delphine to suspect that this was the last conversation she would have with her son.
Johnson headed into Dallas, driving west on I-30, and parked his Chevy SUV on Lamar Street, a block from Dealey Plaza, where John Kennedy was assassinated. By 8:58 pm, as the peaceful march was winding down, he had dressed in tactical gear, armed himself with a Saiga AK-47 and a Glock 19 handgun, and begun firing at police.
After the shooting, an army buddy of Johnson’s said, “I loved him to death, but that guy was not really a good soldier.” But the veteran had been training hard recently to make up for his deficiencies. While attacking the cops, he used advanced tactics, shooting and moving, luring officers in one direction with gunfire, then flanking them on the opposite side. By the time the police cornered him on the second floor of a community college, Johnson had killed five of them and wounded another nine.
During negotiations, Johnson taunted the cops, sang and laughed. Eventually, the police decided to deliver a bomb to Johnson with a mobile robotic unit that was normally used to dispose of explosives. As soon as the robot rolled into the area where Johnson had holed up, the bomb detonated, killing him instantly.
Johnson’s mass shooting and suicide was a tragedy. But it was also an odd sort of murder mystery: The perpetrator was easily caught, but no one recognized him as the person who committed those hateful crimes. Micah Johnson’s friends, family, and acquaintances were left with a burning question: What possessed this sensitive young man to go down such a dark antisocial path?
It turned out this was not an isolated case. Something similar had happened in a suburb of Chattannooga, Tennessee almost exactly a year earlier. Tall, friendly, handsome and athletic, twenty-four-year-old Muhammad Abdulazeez had been a champion wrestler and a good student at Red Bank High School. He’d gone on to earn an engineering degree from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and worked at a company that made cabling for the telecommunications industries. He lived at his parents’ home in Colonial Shores, a suburb with large, well-tended yards, where his neighbors knew him as polite. Like Johnson, Abdulazeez had no criminal record and didn’t belong to gangs or other violent groups.
Outside of work, his interests were unremarkable for a male in his twenties: fast cars, mixed martial arts, and guns. Abdulazeez joked that he was a “Muslim Redneck.” He’d taught his friend James Petty how to shoot an AR-15 in the Tennessee woods, but lots of Americans owned assault rifles.
Like many other people in their twenties, Abdulazeez sometimes partied too hard. On the morning of July 16, 2015, he woke up with a horrible hangover and lay in bed, texting back and forth with a friend while he nursed his headache. Then, around ten that morning, he walked out to his rented Ford Mustang, tore out of Colonial Shores and across the Tennessee River towards central Chattanooga.
Ten minutes later, Abdulazeez turned into the parking lot of a strip mall and pulled up outside a U.S. Army recruiting station next to a Cricket Wireless store. Armed with an AK-47, a Saiga 12 shotgun, and a 9mm handgun, Abdulazeez fired a few dozen rounds at the station but didn’t kill anyone. Just before the police arrived, he sped off to a nearby U.S. Navy Reserve center, rammed through the security gate, and jumped out with his weapons. He sprayed bullets as he charged through a reception building and out into the parking lot, killing five people. When Abdulazeez ran back into the building, he was fatally shot by police.
The incident was eerily similar to Johnson’s. A seemingly normal middle-class young man drove out of his suburban neighborhood for the last time, armed with a cache of military-grade weapons and determined to kill as many of a specific group of people as possible. Back in Colonial Shores, the reaction to Muhammad Abdulazeez’s mass shooting was also the same as Johnson’s: Nobody saw it coming.
It didn’t stop there, though. There had been another such incident in South Carolina just a month earlier. On the morning of June 17, 2015, a black sedan drove on the backroads outside of Columbia, South Carolina headed for the local swimming hole. Inside, twenty-one-year-old Joe Meek, his girlfriend, Lindsey, and little brother, Jacob, were already in their swimsuits, ready to escape the humid air by jumping into Lake Murray. At the wheel was Joe’s old middle-school friend, Dylann Roof, who had recently gotten back in touch via Facebook. Sometimes Roof stayed with the three of them in Meek’s mom’s trailer, set back in the woods off Platt Springs Road.
In the back, Jacob Meek dropped his Big Gulp, spilling ice on Roof ’s black backpack.
“Watch it!” yelled Roof. “There are magazines in there.”
“Pornos?” joked Meek, as he brushed the ice off.
“No, man. Not pornos.”
They pulled up at the lake a few minutes later, and everyone except the driver hopped out.
Roof told them he was going to check out Jurassic World. He was a ravenous consumer of movies, including Titanic, which he’d watched repeatedly. Roof was also studious, spending a lot of time writing and online at the library. Again, he had no known affilliations with violent groups. Roof said that he would meet up with his friends again back at Joe’s mom’s trailer unless he went to his own mom’s house.
At 8:00 pm, surveillance cameras showed Roof walking into an African-American church in central Charleston, South Carolina, about two hours from Columbia. For about 45 minutes, he sat down in a Bible study circle with a dozen parishioners. As everyone joined hands together and closed their eyes to pray, Roof pulled out a Glock .45 caliber handgun from his fanny pack and began methodically shooting the other people in the room while yelling racial epithets. He stood over some of the fallen victims, shooting them repeatedly as they helplessly lay on the floor. After killing nine people, Roof tried to shoot himself in the head, but realized he was out of ammo and fled the scene.
In the space of thirteen months, three relatively normal young men had killed a total of nineteen people. They hadn’t known their victims, or stolen anything. There were neither precipitating arguments nor evidence of gang affiliation or drug use. They didn’t fit the profile of serial killers. And, in each case, the family and friends were at a loss to explain why they had committed their crime. What was causing this epidemic?
The official answer was to label the young men “violent extremists”. But this answer created more questions. For example, if extremists are, by definition, outside the borders of mainstream society, how do we explain Abdulazeez’s wrestling coach describing him as “All American” and “one of the nicest kids we trained”? Or his friend saying he was “very positive about people”? Or his neighbors, in what the New York Times called his “movie-set version of American suburbia”, remembering him as a friendly young man who jumped into front-yard wiffle ball games? This was an extremist? He sounded more like a double agent.
Johnson had perpetrated the deadliest terror attack on police since 9/11. But how did his hatred of law enforcement square with the young man who had joined the Junior ROTC in high school, hoping one day to serve his country? Or with the fact that he had been vocal about his mainstream Christian faith while stationed in Afghanistan? How does Johnson, being described by an army friend as “goofy” or his mother’s claiming he was so sensitive that he got upset when their car hit a squirrel, fit into the profile of an extremist who gunned down five cops? In what way did his apparently racially-motivated violence intersect with the young man who went next door to buy Girl Scout cookies from his white neighbors? The descriptions of Johnson by the people who knew him best did not square with someone on the fringes of American society.
Roof ’s attack was racially-motivated but, to the people who knew him best, little had suggested that such a violent turn was imminent. He had grown up with black and biracial classmates, some of whom came over for middle school sleepovers. At the time of his shooting, a surprisingly large percentage of Roof’s Facebook friends were African-American. Roof had reportedly expressed admiration for Rev. Martin Luther King after watching a documentary on him. Both his mother and father claim they raised him to respect all people and that he’d never showed any aversion to being around people of other races. In a note written the day of the shooting, Roof himself wrote that “I was not raised in a racist home or environment.”
Most confounding, just a week before the shooting, Roof and his friend Joe had invited over Joe’s African-American neighbor, Christon Scrivin, to party with pot, cocaine and cheap vodka. Scrivin later claimed that Roof “never said anything racist, never treated me any different” adding that Roof “had no intention of harming those people in that church.”
It was undeniable that the men had committed acts of extreme violence. But, up to that point, they had flown under the radar, well inside the boundaries of mainstream America. Were they a new breed of extremist Manchurian candidate? And what was meant by extremism, at any rate?
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Secret Extremists 7
Part I What is Extremism?
Chapter 1 We Want the Broken Toys 15
Chapter 2 A Radical Echo, Ignored 27
Part II The Air Hate Breathes
Chapter 3 The Greatest Thing to Ever Happen to Hate 47
Chapter 4 The Social Network's Negative Mirror 59
Chapter 5 4chan and the Rise of Anti-Social Media 73
Chapter 6 Attention Hijacking 87
Chapter 7 Deadly Fictions 99
Chapter 8 False Flags and the End of Facts 109
Part III Return of the Repressed
Chapter 9 Panthers, Patriots, Police, and Sovereigns 121
Chapter 10 Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Strange Bedfellows 135
Chapter 11 The Trayvon Effect 149
Chapter 12 "A Free-for-All Armageddon" 157
Chapter 13 White Love 165
Chapter 14 Mainstream-ism 175
Part IV Uncivil War
Chapter 15 The Troll King 187
Chapter 16 Anti-All 197
Chapter 17 The State of the Union 205
Chapter 18 Know Thy Enemy 213
Chapter 19 Love Thy Neighbor 229
Notes 245
Index 275