For decades the white power movement has tricked the U.S. into letting them organize without holding them responsible for their actions.
One guy stockpiles a bunch of weapons. He makes a plan. Then he writes a manifesto. And then, when the time is right, he goes out to kill a bunch of people.
We shouldn’t expect to make sense of this. In a certain way, it doesn’t make sense. It does sound a bit crazy.
And it does sound crazy. Because we have taken to thinking of these moments as isolated incidents.
One guy.
One plan.
Many dead.
We don’t see our mistake, even as the next “crazy person” executes the same plan. A plan thousands are looking to execute. It’s like we’re in the shower: shampoo, wash, repeat. When are we supposed to stop? Eventually, we have to, right?
Rather than find clarity in the context, we try to develop an understanding of this new context. We ask ourselves: why are there now so many “crazy people”?
We’re also familiar with how conversations switch to autopilot.
gun control, mental health, violent entertainment, ad nauseam…
We keep failing to understand the context of so many of these “isolated incidents.” Few of them are truly isolated.
Many are connected. Not just by violent pathology, but to a particular ideology: white power.
the white power movement
When we talk about white power, we are not referring to garden variety racists. The white power movement likes to hide in the tangle of racists like a clownfish in a sea anemone. Getting confused for harmless people with bigoted opinions is the point.
The white power movement, born of the cocktail of disillusioned Vietnam vets, white supremacy, and the conspiratorial justification to use violence, has long sought something more than to “win in the marketplace of ideas.”
To make a whites-only America by race war would require organizing. They need a critical mass of people to go along with these plans. And they’ll need a vehicle for getting their results.
And there’s the rub.
The plan is to pretend they aren’t organized.
For the disillusioned and conspiracy-minded who have watched the FBI destroy organizations and seen the CIA lead coups in foreign countries, they understand why a top-down movement is vulnerable. Being organized around a hierarchical structure would paint a target on the leader’s head. And losing the leader would threaten the whole movement.
Three decades ago, the noted white supremacist, Louis Beam, Jr. developed a new strategy called “Leaderless Resistance.” The plan was to create a structure without structure. They would create a decentralized authority and disperse it to quasi-independent cells all over the country.
If this idea sounds familiar, it is. This is the post-Vietnam playbook of guerrilla warfare used by both domestic and foreign terrorists all over the world.
For thirty years, the white power movement has used this strategy to thread the legal needle. They want to possess all the benefits of being an organized group while claiming there is no group.
In practice, this quickly convinced us that a bunch of random crazy people do a bunch of crazy things for no discernible crazy reason. And we buy it.
The plausible deniability problem
As a liberal society, the leaderless resistance strategy gives us two deniability problems: one is legal and the other is social.
In recent decades, the courts narrowed its interpretation of the law. This is has played right into the white power movement’s strategy. Trying to associate a domestic act of terror with the white power movement is proving extremely difficult.
Even the clear connections between Timothy McVeigh and white power groups proved a seemingly impossible legal task. He was tried and convicted as a lone actor.
We should not confuse this pessimistic approach for an absolute, however. The courts had no trouble prosecuting al Qaeda members in our courts.
We must not allow this bit of legal trickery to enable the white power movement to get away with murder.
This is their idea
Oh, and if you needed the gut punch to actually pay attention, there’s this. The white power movement gave this myth to the media. They even gave us the “lone wolf” phrase.
Every time we use it, we offer plausible deniability to this murderous movement. We obscure the movement’s interconnectedness from each other. We let them hide in plain sight.
These are members of an organized movement. They possess a common ideology, intentionally disseminate it, and finance and direct their converts to kill other people. They may not have a hierarchical structure, but they are organized.
Social deniability
Beam attempted to create an organization without a hierarchy to avoid legal prosecution. His hope, however, was that it would also have social deniability. He believed that if he could grow the movement more organically, it would lead to a cultural revolution.
For the most part, it was an idea ahead of its time. In the 1980s, pamphleteering wasn’t easy.
Then came the internet.
The white power movement has been at the vanguard of using the internet to radicalize disaffected young white men since the early ‘90s message board era. The threat of allowing other people to trap our kids in white supremacist ideology is quickly becoming our greatest internal threat.
But it isn’t the technology we should blame. The internet didn’t make white supremacy. It didn’t create the white power movement. It is merely a means of organizing.
The Myth
The problem with the myth of the lone wolf is that it traps our culture in a false conviction. So that every action is independent and every person lives isolated. So then we can do nothing that our culture is being held hostage from us by a few.
It is like the threat of the filibuster where one person in the senate can seem to prevent 99 others from even bringing a bill to the floor. So many don’t even try. We are doing the same with white power ideology and organizing.
They have convinced us to avoid associations.
So we claim “free speech” entitles them to spew hate speech. Never mind that it isn’t “opinion.” Or that the radicalizing of our youth doesn’t just “happen” to them. Like “Poof! You are now racists willing to kill your neighbors! How did that happen? Must be the interwebs.”
There are people spreading this ideology of violence. They are responsible.
The fact that the white power movement gets us tangled up in racism, free speech, human rights, and personal responsibility should reveal the level to which they organize to realize their goals. It is proof of their guilt, not of our fated sense of powerlessness.
The White Power Movement is organized. We must hold them responsible for their actions.
The white power movement invests a great deal of time, money, and community organizing around the idea that they cannot be held responsible for their actions. They want you to believe that their advocacy of mass murder has no relation to the people they are cultivating.
This movement has already convinced thousands of people to organize their lives around white supremacy; to serve in government and shape their communities around white supremacy.
They have convinced hundreds of white men and women to kill hundreds of neighbors to incite a race war.
They fund and distribute weapons and explosives.
And they have convinced hundreds of millions of people that they bear no responsibility for murders they orchestrate and finance.
They’ve sold us the myth of the lone wolf. And we don’t dare tell ourselves we’ve been had.