“New freedom riders” form in the closest major city to plan opposition to the rise of the Sheriff and the gathering of the militias. “John Lewis Battalions” plan to “not cross the bridge.” They paint signs with “This Is Still America” on them and “The Punishment for Treason Is Death” and “No Amerikkka.”
Proud Boys meet the first group of protestors as their bus pulls into a Red Roof just across the county line. They have automatic weapons and baseball bats. The Proud Boys grab and drag the counterprotestors, beat them at gunpoint, and throw them back on the bus.
By the time the first new freedom riders arrive at a hospital, three are dead. The Sheriff shrugs off the deaths: “I think it’s common sense not to go where you’re not wanted.”
He refuses to take any actions against the Proud Boys. “Freedom of expression and freedom of association are bedrock American values,” he says.
Asked if he believes beating protestors at gunpoint is protected under the First Amendment, he smiles. “I think those boys expressed themselves rather well.”
The organizers of the new freedom riders cancel their planned protests. All stations begin covering the story from the ground twenty-four hours a day. The rebellion in the county is the only story.
The extreme left in the United States is weaker than the extreme right on every level. Nonetheless, left-wing interposition—refusal to recognize governmental authority—is real. The closest analogue to the Battle of the Bridge that I am imagining is CHAZ, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, established by progressive forces in Seattle during the Black Lives Matter protests.
The autonomous zone amounted to a collection of vague sensibilities—with candlelit shrines to George Floyd, community gardens, a designated smoking area, and a “no cop co-op” where protestors could supply themselves for free. CHAZ exposed the weakness of the far left, intellectually and materially. The group published a thirty-point list of demands that went well beyond simply abolishing the police: “We demand a retrial of all People in Color currently serving a prison sentence for violent crime, by a jury of their peers in their community” was on the list. No mainstream political Democrat took their side.
Without the police, the community couldn’t provide security for itself. Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer activists threatened the collective, and an executive order by the mayor of Seattle confirmed “an increase of 525%, 22 additional incidents, in-person-related crime in the area, to include two additional homicides, 6 additional robberies, and 16 additional aggravated assaults (to include 2 additional nonfatal shootings) between June 2nd and June 30th, 2020, compared to the same period of time in 2019.” CHAZ became an accidental study of the impotence of the Left: political incoherence and no real means of defense.
Left-wing radicalism matters mostly because it creates the conditions for right-wing radicalization. “It’s the interplay, the dance, between the extreme left and the extreme right that can become an escalating spiral,” Ramón Spaaij tells me. He’s a sociologist of violent extremism from Amsterdam who works with law enforcement agencies to determine the signs that point to the likelihood of terrorism. The action by one fringe leads to a reaction from the other, and so “they radicalize each other. It’s an interactive process.”
A political interposition in the United States and the subsequent political crisis is much more likely to come from the right. It’s not that the left is less angry or less threatened by its opponents. Rather, the left lacks the same consciousness of resistance; they have a far less developed fantasy of interposition. Antifa does exist, but it lacks any power or the means to establish power. Left-wing defiance of federal authority, when it comes, tends to be legalistic and political, and led by state officials—the subject of the fifth dispatch of this book. In the CSIS study of 893 terrorist incidents on US soil between January 1994 and May 2020, only 22 of the 3,086 deaths due to terrorism were caused by left-wing groups.
It won’t matter who the president is, or which party she belongs to, when the Sheriff takes his stand. She will need to respond. It doesn’t matter how conservative she might be; to represent the federal government, she will have to defend its authority. She has no choice in the history that she makes.
The FBI is incapable of responding: a police force, designed to combat criminality, cannot serve as a military force against insurgency. The Sheriff’s role has shifted from law enforcement to political resistance. But he remains an elected official and a law enforcement figure.
Also, the federal authorities aren’t able to trust any law enforcement agency. They have been infiltrated by the hard right already.
The hard right has strategically infiltrated law enforcement in the United States to such an extent that no police department or federal agency can be relied upon in a struggle against white supremacy. Connections between law enforcement and white supremacists or hard-right militias have been established in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. These connections number in the hundreds.
Michael German, a former FBI agent who worked undercover against domestic terrorists during the 1990s, knows that the white power sympathies within police departments hamper domestic terrorism cases. “The 2015 FBI counterterrorism guide instructs FBI agents, on white supremacist cases, to not put them on the terrorist watch list as agents normally would do,” he says. “Because the police could then look at the watch list and determine that they are their friends.” The watch lists are among the most effective technique of counterterrorism, but the FBI cannot use them.
German has seen the infiltration of white supremacy firsthand. “When I was doing this work, I met tons of people who were hard-core Nazis. They knew the history, they had a vision for how to bring National Socialism to the United States, they published newsletters, they wrote books, they went on the speaking circuits. When they would meet me, they would say, ‘Who are you here with?’ And I would point to these scruffy guys in the corner, and they would say, ‘Son, you gotta get away from those idiots. They’re going to get you arrested. You’re going to be dead to this movement. What you need to do, because you don’t have any tattoos, is put on a suit and we can run you for the school board.’ ” The white supremacists in the United States are not a marginal force; they are inside its institutions.
Recent calls to reform or to defund the police have focused on officers’ implicit bias or policing techniques. The protestors are, in a sense, too hopeful. Ordinary, everyday racism is much less a threat than activist white supremacists in positions of authority. At the protests in Oregon, law enforcement figures, from the Department of Homeland Security, from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, sometimes out of uniform, rounded up protestors. “If you look at how authoritarian regimes come into power, they tacitly authorize a group of political thugs to use violence against their political enemies,” German says. “That ends up with a lot of street violence, and the general public gets upset about the street violence and says, ‘Government, you have to do something about this street violence,’ and the government says, ‘Oh, my hands are tied, give me a broad enabling power and I will go after these thugs.’ And of course once that broad power is granted, it isn’t used to target the thugs. They either become a part of the official security apparatus or an auxiliary force.” Neither criminals nor government forces, the camouflaged agents from the Bureau of Prisons use lawless violence with authority. They exist in a state of impunity.
Anti-government patriots have used anger against Black Lives Matter effectively to build a base of support with law enforcement. “One of the best tactics was adopting the Blue Lives Matter patch. I’m flabbergasted that police fell for that, that they actually support these groups,” German says. “It would be one thing if they had uniformly decided not to target police anymore. But they haven’t. They’re still killing police. The police don’t seem to get it, that the people you’re coddling, you’re taking photographs with, are the same people who elsewhere kill.” The current state of American law enforcement reveals an extreme contradiction: the order it imposes is rife with the forces that provoke domestic terrorism.
The Military Times reported in a 2019 poll of 1,630 active-duty soldiers that 36 percent of active troops have seen evidence of “white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military,” a significant increase since 2018, when the number was 22 percent.
At first the President hopes that the governor of whatever state the county happened to be in would ask for assistance. She could then justify intervention through the Insurrection Act: “Whenever there is an insurrection in any State against its government, the President may, upon the request of its legislature or of its governor if the legislature cannot be convened, call into Federal service such of the militia of the other States, in the number requested by that State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to suppress the insurrection.”
The Governor wants nothing to do with the request; any support for federal authority against locals would jettison his chances for reelection. So the President has to enter the county on the basis of section 333 of Title 10 US Code, which allows a president to use armed forces in the homeland to suppress insurrection or domestic violence if it “(1) so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and that constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protections or (2) opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” She only briefly considers calling in the State Guard. It might look like the state was at war with itself.
The fifteen days the President grants for the peaceful dispersion of the militias comes and goes. The rebels continue their spectacle. They run streams of their rallies. They gleefully promote their ideologies on every available format. The President invokes precedent, the Reconstruction after the Civil War, Dwight Eisenhower calling troops into Little Rock, the LA riots. And when she calls in the military she doesn’t skimp. The Attorney General and the Department of Justice serve as leads, but the US Northern Command, the Fifth Army, units at Fort Bragg and Fort Stewart, as well as the Marines at Camp Lejeune will be under the command of the General.
The General comes from an old military family. He’s a West Point grad, a veteran of campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is active and cheerful. He runs with his troops. He can still do eighteen pull-ups. He has a law degree from Harvard, and this, above all, qualifies him to lead the first full-spectrum operation in the homeland. At night he reads Julius Caesar in the original Latin. All of this comes out in the GQ profile he allows to be written about him.
The General’s first priority is preventing any further militia incursions into the area. The chaos inevitable in any military campaign is vastly expanded by the novelty of a full spectrum operation in the homeland. The Sheriff is nowhere near as organized or tactically sophisticated as the Taliban or ISIS. But this time the enemy is American. The General’s problems will be legal, not tactical. Killing your own people is much more involved than killing foreigners. The conquest of the county requires an army of lawyers as well as an army of soldiers.
The US Army Operating Concept defines its role as protecting “US sovereignty, territories, domestic population and critical defense infrastructure against external threats and aggression or other threats as directed by the President.” So which is it? Is the army there to protect against “external threats”? Or is the category of “other threats” broad enough to include rebel militias? The General’s staff shares the consensus that the terms are so vague that no action, however small, should be taken against the insurrectionists without an explicit order by the President.
The President appoints a SCRAG (senior civilian representative of the Attorney General), since the procedures in the Insurrection Act mandate that the Department of Justice be the lead agency in cases of homeland pacification. The SCRAG has been temporarily reassigned from the Department of Justice. She went to Harvard with the President.
Nobody knows, from the President to the lowest grunt, whether the conflict is a police action or the overthrow of a hostile power. And the President’s public instruction to use the minimum force necessary further divides the military and the political fronts. If the conflict ends with a pile of corpses, the President will make clear to everybody that the General is the one to blame.
Two-tier authority cripples initial intelligence-gathering efforts. Executive Order 12333 from the Reagan administration explicitly decrees that the military is only allowed, in the case of US citizens, to gather enough information for situational awareness. A federal court has to authorize every individual wiretap, and while the judges work night and day, wiretaps for the residents of an entire county take time. No general, no professional soldier, will initiate combat without full situational awareness.
Intelligence gathering is hampered by the fact that the SCRAG and the Senior Federal Law Enforcement Officer fail to agree on the legal conditions for placing a name on the list of high-value targets. The staff cannot liaise with local law enforcement, since local law enforcement is the enemy. The General can’t cooperate with state officials because they’re security risks. No one is able to say where the loyalty of a state policeman stands when it comes to the Sheriff. Department of Defense Directive 5240.1, under “Operations Related to Civil Disturbance,” states: “Upon specific prior authorization of the Secretary of Defense or his designee, information may be acquired that is essential to meet operational requirements flowing from the mission as to the Department of Defense to assist civil authorities in dealing with civil disturbances. Such authorization will only be granted when there is a distinct threat of a civil disturbance exceeding the law enforcement capabilities of State and local authorities.” The SCRAG, who hasn’t served in the military, interprets the phrase “essential to meet operational requirements” literally. The disagreement is more than legalistic. The insurgents need to be treated scrupulously under the Constitution. Any failure to uphold their rights justifies their claim that the government is illegitimate.
The General anticipates the legal and tactical difficulties with relative ease. He is unprepared for celebrity and its difficulties. The Sheriff turns him into a villain of illegitimacy, a Benedict Arnold, a monster of overreach. The conservative media accuses him of being under foreign influence. He sees his face distorted and his name made synonymous with the satanic. The General has to engage on the level of image manipulation, where neither he nor his staff have expertise. The struggle takes place under conditions of greater scrutiny than any US military operation in history.
Information operations are the great weakness of the American military: control over the subtle but all-powerful narratives that give governments legitimacy have always eluded even the most brilliant American soldiers. Four-star general John Galvin, back in 1986, described the military mind as “uncomfortable with warfare’s societal dimension.” Every general who has written a new COIN (counterinsurgency) operating manual or reported on the reasons for the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Petraeus and McChrystal, have mentioned the same weakness in understanding the interplay of culture and conflict. Military leaders are, by nature, technicians rather than humanists. They are deliberately not politicians. So is it any wonder that they don’t understand politics? “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” General McChrystal said in 2010 after the offensive into Marjah. His government in a box rolled back out less than a year later. The Joint Chiefs of Staff’s failure to address the informational nature of conflict in the twenty-first century is another example of the oldest crisis in warfare. The generals are always preparing for the last war.
The MISO (military information support operations) officer is more important, the General quickly realizes, than anyone in the IPB (intelligence preparation of the battlefield) process or any of the engineering officers. His MISO officer is responsible for all show-of-force operations and media interventions during the conflict. He is also in more or less complete opposition to the SCRAG, who refuses to suspend any civil liberties pertaining to the First Amendment. After a titanic legal struggle with the Supreme Court, in the teeth of the Civil War, Lincoln was only able to suspend habeas corpus by way of a specific bill passed by Congress, and even that extreme measure required the procedural sleight of hand for which Lincoln was so famous. The nub of the problem, then as now, is inherent in facing enemies who are fellow citizens, entitled to rights.
The Sunday morning talk shows second-guess the General before he orders a single shot fired. Military experts argue that the months of delay cost the initiative, which cost lives. Legal experts argue that the proper agencies to deal with the insurrection are the FBI and the DHS, not the Northern Command. Fox News—firmly on the side of the Sheriff from the beginning—insinuates that the delay means that military command lacks confidence that American troops will fire on American citizens. The conspiracy channels churn through theories, from the General plotting with the rebels to overthrow the President to an alien presence in the county with superior technology the Fifth Army cannot defeat.
The Sheriff’s defiance is electric. His daily pronouncements from the bridge sometimes attract 100 million views. Videos of the Sheriff doing push-ups, or taking off his distinctive Stetson hat to reveal his bald head, go viral instantly. Liberal Facebook is rife with elaborate comparisons of the Sheriff’s career to Mussolini’s and Benedict Arnold’s. Kanye West appears at a Paris fashion week event wearing a Stetson. “They’re afraid!” the Sheriff shouts in one of his daily appearances at the bridge. “They know they’re going to take it on the chin.” He alternates between supreme confidence and an apocalyptic vision of his own self-sacrifice. He is either strutting or weeping. “Not every man is born to die in his bed,” he declares, his face streaming with tears. “And not every generation is going to escape the end times. We stand for freedom! Men who die for freedom!”
The Sheriff’s celebrity has military consequences. Each contingent of anti-government patriots has their own media stream. They spread a vast inflammatory web of misinformation across the United States. By June, 36 percent of Americans believe that the General is a Chinese operative. A Rasmussen Reports poll finds that only 48 percent of US citizens agree with the statement “The US military should operate in the homeland during incidents of insurrection.” A white nationalist in California, inspired by the resistance, firebombs the Wilshire Boulevard synagogue in Los Angeles and massacres the fleeing congregation with a legally purchased AR-15. “The federal government lit a fire,” the Sheriff declares. “They think they can keep that fire here but fire is fire. You can’t keep it from spreading. It’s spreading all over this country.” The Sheriff’s popularity rises to the level where mainstream conservatives, even if they won’t praise him, won’t attack him, either.