A Klansman Predicted Online Extremism in 1983. What Came Next Is Worse.
my latest for tablet magazine.
For Tablet’s June print issue, I wrote about the strange afterlife of the “extremism industry” and why it’s still hunting Nazis from the 1990s while the actual threat has mutated into something much more disturbing. In light of recent violent events, they’ve made it free to read early. Here’s a preview:
The story of online extremism doesn’t start during GamerGate, or with Trump’s first ride down the escalator, but in 1992, in the Idaho panhandle. A former Texas klansman named Louis Beam republished an essay he had first circulated in 1983. He called it “Leaderless Resistance,” and his argument was simple: Formal far-right organizations are finished, because they are “easy prey for government infiltration.” What would survive the coming federal crackdown, Beam wrote, were lone wolves, held together by “organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets,” and—presciently—“computers.”
Beam followed his own advice.
In 1984, he had already launched the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, a dial-up bulletin board for white supremacists with a $5 password fee and a directory of “enemies” listing Anti-Defamation League regional offices. He understood perfectly well, eight years before the commercial internet as we know it existed, what networked computers could do for a decentralized movement. His essay closed with a line that inverted George H.W. Bush’s speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention, with its famous “thousand points of light”: Let the coming night, Beam wrote, be filled with “a thousand points of resistance.” His audience had already been producing serious violence for a decade.
The sociologist James Aho’s The Politics of Righteousness (1990) documents the scene Beam was writing for: the Aryan Nations compound at Hayden Lake, the annual Aryan Nations World congresses, organized by neo-Nazi (and that is the precise word he himself would use) Richard Girnt Butler, with their proposal to carve an “all-white homeland” out of five Pacific Northwest states, and the white separatist “activists” who took out ads in Shotgun News inviting readers to bring their guns and families to Idaho for the coming race war. Robert Mathews’ The Order, the most violent domestic terror cell of the 1980s, ran a roughly yearlong campaign of armored-car robberies and bombings, and eventually murdered the Denver radio host Alan Berg, before the FBI had fully mapped the group. These people were not anonymous shitposters or even what we sometimes call “LARPers.” They had a political project and ambitions that regularly included political violence. In other words, they were terrorists.
Later that year, with Ruby Ridge and Waco, the state had behaved the way Beam said it would. And then, a lone wolf emerged: Timothy McVeigh. Oklahoma City produced the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and a demand for civilian monitoring that an entire industry would form to supply.
Read on here.
HOUSEKEEPING
I’ve been running a lot of guest posts as I get closer to the finish line of pregnancy. Thank you to everyone who’s hung in there! And for those of you politely (or impatiently) asking when I’ll be back posting more myself — here’s a coupon as a peace offering:
ME AROUND THE WEB
My first piece in the Wall Street Journal is about tweens, what we lost when we lost dELia*s, and what purpose smartphones serve.
For Pirate Wires, I wrote about John Keel, ultra-terrestrials, and the ChatGPT Goblin scandal.
For The Dispatch, I reviewed GIRLS, as teased in an earlier default.blog post. TL;DR? I really enjoyed Girl on Girl, Toxic, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below, and Female Chauvinist Pigs. (And I recommend those as a starting point if you’re interested in “what happened.”)