Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Extremist
Militias Recruiting in Fear of Clinton Winning Election, Activists Say
Jason Wilson
Tuesday, October 18, 2016
The Guardian
In the past
12 months, Jessica Campbell has had her car’s fuel line cut and its wheel nuts
loosened. Late last year, she had a GPS tracker surreptitiously attached to her
vehicle.
She is now
accustomed to being tailed by unfamiliar vehicles on Interstate 5 near her home
in Cottage Grove, just outside Eugene, Oregon. Strangers have regularly come
uninvited onto her property; someone even stripped the barbed wire on her fence
“just to send a message”. Online, she has repeatedly been threatened with rape
and death.
And last
week, when she showed up at the Canyon City community hall in Grant County, she
told me that someone shot at her and her entourage. They misread their GPS,
took a wrong turn and stopped to get their bearings when a crack rang out with
what Campbell thought was a .22 bullet whizzing by their vehicle.
Such
threats are part of the pushback her work has sparked in rural Oregon.
Campbell
co-directs the Rural Organizing Project, a not-for-profit group that sets out
to confront the right wing insurgency that has been bubbling away in parts of
rural Oregon and throughout the west. A political organizer since high school,
she now coordinates groups attempting to respond to divisive tactics from
right wing activists on immigration, race and public land ownership.
This
extremist surge received national media attention during the occupation of the
Malheur national wildlife refuge by the Bundy group, but it has continued to
rise alongside Trump, with his legitimization of white nationalist politics and
his apparent inspiration of insurrectionists across the country.
The Patriot
movement is an overarching description for a range of anti-government groups –
from organised militia groups to tax protesters and so-called “sovereign
citizens”. They have burgeoned during the Obama years and have carried out
actions, such as the occupation of a wildlife refuge to border patrols in
Arizona.
This year,
Patriot members have run for office in rural counties, and at least one militia
leader, Joseph Rice, attended the Republican national convention to cast his vote
for the Donald Trump. Some sheriffs, such as Glenn Palmer in Grant County, have
clear sympathies and links with the movement.
Elsewhere,
according to Campbell, Patriot sympathizers are moving into communities in
order to tip the electoral balance towards far-right candidates. She fears this
trend will continue long after a Trump defeat. “I’m seeing a lot of
paramilitary groups recruiting on the basis of a likely Hillary Clinton win,”
she said.
When Trump
started talking about rigged elections and how a Clinton win would show that
democracy was broken, “it was just amazing seeing how that resonated with
people – a sense of democracy being broken, feeling like the candidates don’t
represent them or anything they want to see happen in this country,” she added.
Campbell
would vastly prefer that Clinton wins but acknowledges that it may be like it
was “after Obama won, where there was a huge growth in Patriot movement
organizing. I’m worried that we are going to see the same thing.” The alleged
bomb plot by militia members in Kansas, timed for the day after the election,
shows the way in which those fears might be borne out.
The Rural
Organizing Project is not waiting idly for this tide to roll in. The group has
just finished a statewide tour in which they presented a report on the growth
of the Patriot movement, which they collaborated on with Political Research
Associates, a think tank that watches the far right.
Instead of
inviting people to view it online, Campbell and her colleagues went to eight
rural towns and delivered the main points in a series of lectures. The tour
finished late last week.
Each event
followed a pattern developed through long experience confronting those who
would prefer that progressive voices aren’t heard. At each stop, after Campbell’s
brief Powerpoint summary of Patriot movement organizing in Oregon, they invite
written comments that are then read out. In Bend, one question asked about the
impact of Patriot movement organizing on tourism; in Canyon City, people wanted
to know about the economic roots of the far-right insurgency. Small-group
discussions follow. The format is designed to de-escalate the tension that has
increasingly riven small-town politics in Oregon, and to minimize opportunities
for disruption.
Campbell
and her crew also travel with a highly visible security detail, partly made up
of Portland members of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party. Earlier
this year, attendees of a workshop were harassed in the car park outside the
event, and they decided that positive, protective steps were needed.
The events
are hosted by local progressive organising groups, and at the largest events,
such as the one in Canyon City in Grant County, 50 to 60 people showed up – a
large number in a county of about 7,000 residents. Although many who come
represent the active, progressive minority in small towns, resistance to the
militia movement has a way of binding people together who may disagree on a
range of issues. Campbell says that the Grant County group features people from
“across the political spectrum” who share a concern about who is directing
county politics.
These
numbers underscore something Campbell stresses: while media reports often
suggest that patriots and the far right are representative of community
opinion, they are frequently no more than a vocal minority. ROP’s presence
encourages those who disagree to the far right’s prescriptions to rise above
the intimidation they use to silence their opponents.
There were
clear signs that their strategy – which for now Campbell calls “an experiment”
– is working to empower locals, and even open up a dialogue with those who have
been drawn into the orbit of the far right.
In Canyon
City last January, Judy Schuette heard about the plans of militia members to
meet in Grant County and perhaps spread the occupation there. Schuette called
for a response and a public meeting on Facebook. On the floorboards of the
community hall, she recalls: “I didn’t know how many people would show up, and
we wound up with about 70 people.”
After being
formally organised in February, the group carried out several actions. They
visited Harney County to show support for a protest there, and attended
meetings of the county court, the local governing council, to protest
increasing militia and Patriot disruption of the body.
But ROP’s
tour doesn’t just let them put on another big public gathering. Activists also
get de-escalation training from the security detail and much-needed information
about how to fight and win a long-term campaign against the right wing insurgency
in their community.
“They’re
incredibly dedicated and brilliant. They’re mostly women who care about their
community. In Grant County and other counties where people are feeling that
their lives could be on the line if they don’t act now, that’s where people are
doing the best work.”
But
Campbell is clear-eyed about the roots of the problem, and her diagnosis cuts
through a lot of the armchair debate about where the resentment that underpins
right wing insurgency comes from. “In rural areas the conditions have been ripe
for a white nationalist populist movement. Especially in Oregon where we’re
facing demographic shifts in a lot of places, and the economy’s hurting so
badly, and we’ve had decades of scapegoating of people of colour as the reason why
our economies are so bad.”
In some
Oregon counties, as in other rural areas, libraries are shutting, and sheriff’s
departments can’t provide 911 dispatch after dark. Dwindling services lead to a
sense of abandonment. The right can easily step in and provide both a clear
political narrative to explain this, and a set of simple-seeming solutions.
“The
Patriot movement is attracting people who feel disenfranchised. It’s real out
here, where people feel like they have not been listened to at the state level,
and particularly by Democrats,” Campbell says.
The same
dynamic has been driving the election. “The appeal of both Donald Trump and
Bernie Sanders was that they didn’t feel like establishment figureheads. It
didn’t feel like they were going to uphold the status quo.”
Democrats,
who hold a rare trifecta of both state houses and the governorship, see no
point in outreach to deep red counties in the east and south of the state.
“It’s been pretty clear that rural Oregon has been written off. We’re often the
only game in town.”
The focus
of the tour might be the militia movement, but the real goal is addressing this
sense of lost political agency.
“Our goal
isn’t to take down the Patriot movement. It’s to build a rural Oregon where
people have some access to democracy and are able to create change and have an
impact on their communities.”
Helping
these communities to demand the resources they need to shut down rightwing
insurgencies means having a conversation with them, and not simply dismissing or
scapegoating them. It also requires bravery: if you confront the far right on
their own turf, you might be threatened, followed or shot at.
We haven’t
all been given as big a share of courage as Campbell, the rest of the ROP, and
local organizers have. But we can at least listen to what they have to say
about the origins of America’s right wing surge.
Source URL: https://portside.org/2016-10-18/extremist-militias-recruiting-fear-clinton-winning-election-activists-say
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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