Hateland Read online

  Published 2019 by Prometheus Books

  Hateland: A Long, Hard Look at America's Extremist Heart. Copyright © 2019 by Daryl Johnson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Johnson, Daryl, 1969- author.

  Title: Hateland : a long, hard look at America's extremist heart / by Daryl Johnson.

  Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, 2019. | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018061153 (print) | LCCN 2019009020 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633885172 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633885165 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Radicalism—United States. | Domestic terrorism—United States. | Political violence—United States. | Political culture—United States. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Violence in Society. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / Terrorism.

  Classification: LCC HN90.R3 (ebook) | LCC HN90.R3 J63 2019 (print) | DDC 303.48/4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061153

  Printed in the United States of America

  Introduction: The Secret Extremists

  PART I: WHAT IS EXTREMISM?

  Chapter One: We Want the Broken Toys

  Chapter Two: A Radical Echo, Ignored

  PART II: THE AIR HATE BREATHES

  Chapter Three: The Greatest Thing to Ever Happen to Hate

  Chapter Four: The Social Network's Negative Mirror

  Chapter Five: 4chan and the Rise of Anti-Social Media

  Chapter Six: Attention Hijacking

  Chapter Seven: Deadly Fictions

  Chapter Eight: False Flags and the End of Facts

  PART III: RETURN OF THE REPRESSED

  Chapter Nine: Panthers, Patriots, Police, and Sovereigns

  Chapter Ten: Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Strange Bedfellows

  Chapter Eleven: The Trayvon Effect

  Chapter Twelve: “A Free-for-All Armageddon”

  Chapter Thirteen: White Love

  Chapter Fourteen: Mainstream-ism

  PART IV: UNCIVIL WAR

  Chapter Fifteen: The Troll King

  Chapter Sixteen: Anti-All

  Chapter Seventeen: The State of the Union

  Chapter Eighteen: Know Thy Enemy

  Chapter Nineteen: Love Thy Neighbor

  Notes

  Index

  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.”1

  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 p.m., 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.”2 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 Johnson 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 Chattanooga, 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 at 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.”3 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 toward central Chattanooga.

  Ten minutes
later, Abdulazeez turned into the parking lot of a strip mall and pulled up outside a US 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 US 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, police fatally shot him.

  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 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.”4

  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 affiliations 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 p.m., surveillance cameras showed Roof walking into an African American church in central Charleston, South Carolina, about two hours from Columbia. For about forty-five 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. 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”?5 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 whiffle ball games?6 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 did Johnson, described by an army friend as “goofy” or by his mother as so sensitive that he got upset when their car hit a squirrel, fit into the profile of an extremist who gunned down five cops?7 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 the 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 claimed 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.”8

  Most confounding, just a week before the shooting, Roof and his friend Joe had invited over Joe's African American neighbor, Christon Scriven, to party with pot, cocaine, and cheap vodka. Scriven 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.”9

  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?

  Despite their relatively mainstream, middle class existence, Micah Johnson, Muhammad Abdulazeez, and Dylann Roof were closer to extremism than most people suspected. This was not, however, because of some previously unknown revelation about their lives, but simply because everybody is. The idea that there is a firm barrier between any one person and an alternate, extremist version of them is a misconception. There is no us and them. It is an uncomfortable reality, but understanding that one fact is critical to understanding how extremism operates.

  Radicalization, meaning the process by which any “normal” person becomes an “extremist,” is complex, but it has two primary components. The first elements are internal, the backgrounds, individual traits, and psychology that make up personalities. Within everybody, an internal battle exists between destabilizing factors, like drug abuse or anger, and grounding inhibitors, such as strong personal relationships or patience. Imagine this ongoing conflict as a kind of personal safety net. Destabilizers, such as ignorance, bias, stubbornness, rebellion, alienation, grievance, and isolation, fray and weaken the net. Curiosity about other belief systems resulting from destabilizing influences can also cause deterioration. Inhibitors—careers, faith, family ties, education, and social networks—increase the net's thickness, strength, and flexibility.

  Everyone moves through an unpredictable world, but each navigates it with different equipment. Faced with, say, the stress of losing a house or job or the trauma of losing a loved one, everyone reacts differently. Some people become angry, others depressed, while still others hold themselves together much better. In general terms, the more grounding inhibitors that exist, the stronger the network support and the better the chance of dealing with stress healthily. The weaker the net, the more likely people are to seek revenge, sink into depression, commit suicide—or be sucked into an extremist universe.

  The second element of the radicalization process is exposure to external radicalizing forces, such as leaders, ideologies, conspiracy theories, social groups, propaganda, and personal relationships. There's nothing resembling an exact calculus on how the process pla
ys out but, generally speaking, people with weakened safety nets who come into contact with extremist rhetoric and ideology are most likely to accept or latch onto extremist ideas. This is the initial step in the radicalization process.

  Simply by being human in a world full of extremist ideologies and theories, everyone is possibly capable of radicalization, the process of becoming what we call an “extremist.” As the 1993 documentary Skinheads USA: Soldiers of Hate so forcefully reveals, the genius of William E. Davidson, better known as Bill Riccio, was to lure in boys whose safety nets were already tattered.

  An infamous former Klan leader, Riccio was best known for bringing the neo-Nazi movement that flourished during the 1980s in the inland Pacific Northwest to the South. He set up his WAR house, short for White Aryan Resistance, on a compound tucked away in the woods southeast of Birmingham, Alabama. It served as a crash pad, clubhouse, and recruitment center for teenage boys eager to escape their own lives. Skinheads USA portrays these boys shouting “Sieg Heil!” while watching a hardcore band and giddily shaving each other's heads in the bathroom. Late at night, they ruminate drunkenly on a 1930s Nazi propaganda video: “Everyone had jobs,” one kid explains to the camera. “Our government had to fuck it up…I really wish [Hitler] had won.”1

  WAR house may seem like a summer camp for malcontents, but it soon became clear why these boys ended up as Riccio's acolytes. Many came from broken homes, places where they were physically and emotionally abused. Few excelled at school; many had dropped out. Some of the teenagers had been in trouble with the law. Drug and alcohol addiction were common. When Riccio tells the camera, “We want the broken toys,”2 it's nonclinical language describing kids with active destabilizers—anger, ignorance, crisis, alienation, isolation—and often virtually no grounding inhibitors, including family ties, faith, education, future goals, and social networks.

  At WAR house, the boys found the community they desperately needed, but it was intertwined with a vicious extremist ideology. So, they began down the path of radicalization, not because they had a strong desire to resurrect Hitler's agenda in 1990s Alabama, but it was impossible for them to separate the rewards of the social network without Riccio's rhetoric. Being a neo-Nazi skinhead was, in fact, what bound them. At WAR house, “White Power” was a greeting and space filler in conversations. Throughout Skinheads USA, the boys have almost nothing to hold on to, other than the ideology that Riccio has offered.