36. Good Talk #7: David Neiwert
A discussion with the author of the new book, The Age of Insurrection.
I’ll never forget my first flash-bang — lobbed from a riot-gear clad Portland Police officer. It was 2016, on a downtown street, and the device was hurled toward a crowd of protesters demonstrating the election of Donald Trump and the presence of far-right instigators in the Rose City. The stupid thing landed near me somewhere — could have been right at my feet for all I know. Flash-bangs are impishly-terrible creations, used to control crowds with a flash of white light and sound that makes you lose your bearings. It is desperately uncomfortable, especially in rapid succession. I had started stumbling and had to sit down on the pavement for a second. A man in glasses stood over me shouting “hey, are you okay?” as the police LRAD blared. I nodded, said I was, got up and started running in the other direction, away from where the flash bangs were coming from. That’s their point: to make you run.
I swore off live-tweeting protests then; I’d been looking at my stupid phone and hadn’t seen the police had gotten out the toys — things that could maim and disfigure, deployed at what seemed like the smallest provocation. It was around then when I lost my desire to do protest reporting; when I did the math, I rarely took home more than a couple hundred bucks for hours of work and possible injury. In 2020, I watched as reporters did that horrible work for 120 days; I had lost my stomach for it.
Everything in journalism changed for me in 2016 as I covered a dozen of these protests for The Washington Post, and the trial of the Bundys at the federal courthouse. It was the year my internal compass pointed toward extremism and the conflicts that arise from it, like it was my new true north. And I followed.
Pretty quickly, I found myself in the company of a small group of reporters in the Northwest who cover extremism as a beat. Some had been doing it for decades. Others were new to it, like me. One of those people was David Neiwert, an Idaho-bred Washington-state reporter who has written for newspapers in the Northwest since the 1970s, covering militias and the Aryan Nations. He was also a writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Daily Kos. He wrote his first book in 1999 about the Patriot Movement, and several others (including the excellent and sobering And Hell Followed With Her, about border militias).
Last night at Powell’s Bookstore, I had the opportunity to ask Neiwert as many questions as time permitted about four decades of extremism work, and his new book The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy. The book is like body armor for the mind of anyone who cares about democracy.
David agreed to let me record our conversation, and post it here as the latest in this series of “good talks” I’ve been publishing for awhile now. (Which, by the way, if there’s someone you’d like to see interviewed here, feel free to comment.)
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
LEAH SOTTILE:
I thought we would start by recognizing that this is your 10th book. In an age of strained attention spans. What keeps you so devoted to this medium?
DAVID NEIWERT:
Uh, it is the only one I can do. [laughs]. Yeah. I mean, I'm a writer. I devoted to the craft, and I still think that there's a permanent quality to the written word, the published word, that other media lack. I think writing lets you pass things on to future generations.
In your book you call extremism “an endless wellspring of human misery, social disruption, and frightening violence.” Forty years into covering this topic, why does the far right still hold your interest?
As you know, if you're a journalist, you are all about writing news stories, and news stories usually are about human tragedies, human dysfunction, when things go wrong, when bad things happen. I first started encountering neo-Nazis in the late seventies when the Aryan Nations moved into the northern Idaho Panhandle. And they were accompanied by this wave of criminality that washed over the Panhandle for the ensuing 10 years. When I was the editor of the Sandpoint Daily Bee in ’79 and ’80, I sat down with the publisher. This is when we were realizing that [Richard] Butler and company were setting up shop 40 miles south of us and how were we gonna cover it? We made what we thought was the astute decision not to cover it at all. [laughs]
We thought, ‘oh, they just want attention and we're not gonna give it to ‘em.' And of course, I still get this recommended to me as a course of action. ‘Why don't you just ignore ‘em?' Of course, this solution worked for all of about a year.
The whole region was so awash in criminality, and it culminated, I think in ’84 with the, the extremely violent rampage of The Order. It was gang of criminals, neo-Nazis, who were drawn to the Inland Northwest by the Aryan Nations who decided to set up a terrorist gang. They robbed, I think 23 or 24 banks and armored cars and assassinated a radio talk show host in Denver.
This is all in the course over the course of 1984. I think it was late December that they were finally cornered [by the FBI] up on Whidbey Island, Washington. Most of them surrendered, with the leader guy named Robbie Mathews — who used to send me letters to the editor at the Daily Bee, they were all in all caps of course — refused to come out. They lobbed a flare into the house and it burned down around him, and they found his body in the bathtub.
So by then it was pretty obvious that our solution was not gonna work. Not only that, it was when I started realizing that a lot of the nature of right wing extremists is that see silence, and this kind of refusal to pay attention to them, as tacit acceptance. As approval. I mean, the key obviously is to shine a spotlight on them and keep shining that spotlight on them. But as you know, there's a craft to doing this. You can't just do sort of standard he said/she said reporting with these guys. You have to provide context for the readers. You have to have make sure that the readers understand that the belief systems that these people adopt, and why it motivates them. And that was a big lesson for me.
By the nineties, I'd seen so much of this stuff. … The syndrome that I was seeing had really deep personal effects. These people were tearing their families apart, tearing their communities apart, and ultimately destroying their own lives. And I sometimes felt bad for them because even though they were terrible people doing terrible things, they were just terribly-misled people — people who had an unfortunate gullible quality where they ate up all these conspiracy theories and fell down these rabbit holes.
What's interesting is that what you're talking about is when this was fringe. The difference is that this has become mainstream. I think one thing I'm want to ask you about in terms of media coverage: obviously, not covering this movement isn't the way to go. But what about when everyone in media all of a sudden has to become an extremism reporter? For example, in 2020 here in Portland, we had people being thrown into the mix and and needing to cover everything that was happening on the streets in our town. So talk about that balance: why it's critical to have expertise and why not everything is worthy of coverage. Where is that balance?
There is a point where you're actually giving people oxygen that they would normally, normally not be available to them. They would eventually succumb, or return to normal maybe, or at least disappear and go away. This is particularly true for would be neo-Nazi organizers who've seen over the years. I wouldn't cover them when they were just talking online. It's mostly when they would start actually organizing things in the real world that I would cross that line.
Let me give an example. There's a video that went viral a few years ago that showed there was this neo-Nazi guy in a black leather jacket in Seattle who had a swastika armband on. He decided to ride the bus from Crown Hill down to the Pike Place Market area and strut around. And the video that went viral was of him being just decked by this Black man. You could see the Nazi going, ‘no, no, wait. You need to understand this —’ and BOOM he’s down on the ground. Well, I knew who this guy was because I had been alerted to his activities before this video was recorded. He had been talking online about organizing a big rally. And I didn't want to cover him. I didn't wanna give him any oxygen unless he start actually organized one. So I didn't report on him at all, and I never did wind up reporting on him because after he got punched and turned virally infamous online, he disappeared and stopped. So, you know, punching Nazis does work sometimes.
As I read your book, I was thinking about how in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, people had to physically get together. They had to see a notice on a bulletin board or hear about it from a friend, and show up to a militia meeting in person. But now billionaires have created platforms where people can meet. They've taken the legwork out of it. And then people showing up in places like Portland, where then we have police that engage in what you call 'selective passivity,’ they don't go after people who are committing crimes around these rallies. Or they might even agree with their views. So how are communities and individuals supposed to respond?
There are a couple things. One is that I do think a lot of people are not comfortable with the idea of organizing specifically to oppose neo-Nazis. That’s just kind of a scary proposition, frankly. People naturally shy away from it. I mean, I have trouble getting my wife to pay attention to it. It's a perfectly understandable, sort of normal human reaction. I do think that the starting point for all of this has to be democracy, which is really ultimately the shared value that most of us have. That we prefer democracy. We love living in democracy. We understand that democracy is the guarantor of our freedoms, and that replacing democracy means being ruled by an autocracy. And I don't think most people want to go down that road. So ultimately, I urge people to find ways to organize to defend their democracies. Democracy is under assault on a large number of fronts, including voting rights, as well as access to the ballots, access to information and particularly access to viable public discourse that isn't polluted by disinformation and conspiracies. Honestly, fighting extremism is a specialized field, and not everybody's cut out for it. For the average person, I say, get involved in fighting for your democracy.
When you have Proud Boys turning up at Portland school board meetings to denounce the school board … get involved and fight that stuff. It isn't just neo-fascists. It isn't just neo-Nazis. It’s Christian nationalists. Hell, its supposedly mainstream Republicans who are supporting this kind of autocracy. If you've listened to any of Trump's speeches recently you know what I'm talking about. … So, we ought to think about that and we ought to fight.
I don't know about you, but I really hate the prediction game that a lot of people like to play in extremism. But having said that, I do think of anyone is in the position to make predictions, t’s probably you.
I did predict the Insurrection, by the way. It's in my book Red Pill, Blue Pill. I've got a passage that basically says this is what's gonna happen soon.
So we should be listening to you.
Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes I'm wrong. You know, I'm like anybody else.
So say a *certain* person goes to prison. What happens to the far right without Donald Trump?
Oh, it doesn't go away. What happened with Trump is that he took preexisting conditions and amplified them — put them on steroids — and gave them the power to actually gain traction in the real world in a way that they hadn't had before. … We've always had these fascist elements in the country. Honestly, this stuff's actually not new. It goes back to at least the 1920s Klan.
“Hitler's whole idea for Lebensraum was based on the Native American genocide. The Nuremberg Laws were based on Jim Crow laws. The Brown Shirts: the inspiration for them was the Klan. So, you know, these are threads that run through course of our history and our culture.”
European fascists drew a lot of their ideas from the United States, from America, certainly, you know, I mean, Hitler's whole idea for Lebensraum was based on the Native American genocide. The Nuremberg Laws were based on Jim Crow laws. The Brown Shirts: the inspiration for them was the Klan. So, you know, these are threads that run through course of our history and our culture. But we've never had them coalesce into an actual political force previously, mainly because the proto-fascist elements in America really lacked that one thing that all successful fascist movements have: that's the charismatic leader. Because they're so profoundly authoritarian that what they all need to have. Boy, when I saw Trump come along, I got worried.
The fear was obviously well grounded because we saw that he was attracting large numbers of these extremist elements into his support. A lot of it was his nativist appeal about immigrants and the wall. But a lot of it was also just his personal autocratic style. We saw the alt-right Neo-Nazis, the white nationalists, the Patriot militia men and the Alex Jones conspiracy theorists were all just flocking to support him. Sarah Posner and I wrote a piece for Mother Jones magazine that we published in October of 2016 warning that this is what was happening with Trump. And unfortunately, the week before that, Hillary Clinton had made her remarks about 'basket of deplorables.’ So our story was really largely ignored, and the warning that it contained was largely ignored.
A Mother Jones piece like that — there are a lot of people who wouldn't consider the things that you were saying because of the publication, or because they thought, ‘well, here's this liberal take.’ How much is the media to blame for castigating writers like you as Chicken Little’s saying ‘the sky's falling?’
I think it's kind of a symbiosis. I think the thing that's really screwed the media up and has caused a lot of the problems with failures of coverage over the last 30 years has been the Rush Limbaugh-inspired attacks on ‘liberal media bias,’ which was then amplified by Fox News and then just became a stock talking point. It doesn't help that media have also become corporate-owned. So this was a message that was very much favored by the corporate owners of the newsrooms I was working for. There became this embedded allergic, fearful response to the possibility that they might be accused of liberal media bias. It was pretty hilarious to me because I grew up Republican in Southern Idaho. Come on. Spare me people. [laughs]
Fifth generation Idahoan, right?
Yeah. To me it was always just common sense that, you know, neo-Nazis are bad for all of us. It doesn't take a genius to figure this stuff out. Beginning in the nineties, when I started reporting on militias and things like that, I got a lot of pushback from editors. And my fellow journalists said, ‘these guys are just fringe. They're not really a problem.’ And I’d say, ‘yeah, you're right. They’re smaller fringe, but if they are allowed to continue to fester, it's gonna become a big problem.’ And that's where we are today.
Unfortunately, I feel like this hasn't changed. I remember when I was trying to pitch the stories that became Bundyville, they were rejected 10 times. And I'll never forget an editor in New York saying, ‘the Bundys are over.’ And I'm like, ‘I am telling you they are not over.’
I had a really hell of a hard time selling this book to any publishers in New York, because they were all going, ‘it's gonna be yesterday's news.’ So God bless Melville House for recognizing that it was a real issue.
I want to talk about hero narratives. You write about how by calling themselves patriots, the far right is always kind of in the position of the hero. I think we're seeing that right now with Tim Ballard's movie on Operation Underground Railroad — what’s it called?
[DRAMATIC VOICE] Sound of Freedom.
Sound of Freedom, right, which is grossing $85 million while pushing a Q Anon narrative. So tell me a little bit more about the popularity of hero narratives. What do you think that reveals about America, and what we need and desire?
Boy. Well, sometimes I contemplate the reality that superhero movies for the last 20 years have been the most popular genre in films. I also think about Umberto Ecco’s warning in his essay, “Ur-Fascism,” that in every fascist society, everyone is educated to be a hero. And this is true.
“…In every fascist society, everyone is educated to be a hero. And this is true.”
There's a terrific book called This Thing of Darkness by James Aho — he was really looking at Ruby Ridge and right wing extremists in northern Idaho. He's a sociologist, and he was getting into the psychology of it. The heroic myth is just really central to right wing extremism. It’s really part of what they tell themselves about why they're doing what they're doing, why they’re taking the course that they're taking, because they have this powerful need to be heroic themselves.
They see themselves as the central characters in the action. And so they have to be heroic. Well, part of the whole hero mythos is that every hero needs an enemy. And so much of their energy is devoted towards concocting enemies, devising enemies. … Really central to the energy and project of right-wing extremism is constantly generating fresh enemies for them to attack. For many, many years it's been Jews, and then it became communists. In the 1990s it was the government and the New World Order who was gonna be sending black helicopters to put us all in concentration camps. And then beginning in the early 2000s it was immigrants. And it has just been an ongoing succession. More recently the boogeyman was Antifa.
Now we're at groomers, right?
Yes. Well, it became critical race theory for a while.
Oh, yeah. Right.
And now it's the LGBTQ community who is the concocted enemy of the radical right. Unfortunately, the general public is susceptible to a lot of these kinds of appeals, and it gives them traction that they shouldn't otherwise have.
Is there a problem of masculinity here?
Oh, yeah. [laughs] They got big pickups. Misogyny is a huge part of this too. The masculine insecurities and the misogyny are really powerfully intertwined. Again, this become an authoritarian, autocratic thing … ultimately, these are people who want the world to conform to what their idea of the world should be like. And they try to force everything in the world to fit into their pigeon holes, and when it doesn't, they start breaking the pigeon holes. It is a sign of insecurity. The best example of what I can think is the way they deal with transgender people. Transgender people are so utterly harmless that they shouldn't be an existential threat to anyone. But extremists treat them as being this really profoundly demonic attack on morays and society. People are just are trying to find their own way of existing in the world — they believe that you shouldn't be able to do that. You need to fit into their pigeon holes. And of course, that's not how the world works, right? So inevitably it breaks down,
More and more in covering the far right I see an exasperation in the response — that people are getting frustrated. They’re sick of this. I want to ask you if you think about non-violence? And do you think that that is an ideal? Or do you think that that's something that in this situation we're talking about breaks down? And then people eventually break?
I’m a pretty firm advocate of pursuing as nonviolent a course as possible, and only using violence in self-defense. I do think that violence begets violence and feeds that feedback loop. … I don't think peaceful, ‘can we all get along’ type responses are helpful either, because they just interpret that as utter weakness that they can bulldoze. I think you have to play hardball with them. When they get violent, stick up for yourselves, defend your community, defend the people you love, do what you have to do to defend them. But don't go seeking it either.
It's a hard thing. So many people I'm sure here have seen how in Portland there were people who said, ‘okay, we wanna come out and have peaceful protests.’ And then when that didn't work, there was an increasingly exasperated response. Then all of a sudden Portland gets maligned as burning, on fire.
I covered about 17 or 18 of these Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer, Three Percenter events on the West Coast, and quite a few of them here in Portland. I would say what I saw happening in Portland was particularly like this. The first really big event was Joey Gibson's June 5th, 2017 rally downtown, five days after the MAX stabbing. Basically when the town begged him not to hold this rally. They came out anyway and did it. I mean, Stewart Rhodes was there, Baked Alaska was there, one of the co-founders of the Proud Boys was there. They were there and part of it. And plus there was a ton of neo-Nazis mixing in the crowd. Being a Southern Poverty Law Center writer at the time, I knew who a lot of these guys were. [Patriot Prayer] kept saying, ‘we don't want any Nazis. We don't want any white nationalists in our midst.’ But they're there! And I could just see them.
But at that June 5th event there was a huge crowd out [protesting] them. It was unions. There was DSA. A very large Portland community response that was really widespread. And even then, at the end of that, the Portland Police Bureau wound up kettling protestors. So I was really troubled by that. But I was also really pleased.
I was very much influenced and inspired by a guy who passed away in [2002] named Father Bill Wassmuth. He formed the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. In fact, he's the guy who basically talked me into making extremism a beat back in ’95 after Oklahoma City. What he specialized in was getting the faith community and the Chamber of Commerce. This is what he did in Coeur d'Alene. He got the the churches and the Chamber of Commerce and the labor unions and all the people from the community to come out and oppose these neo-Nazis.
So when I saw this really broad-based response in Portland for the June 2017 event, I was really pretty encouraged. And then at the next time Gibson held one again, just a month and a half later in August, the only people who came up to oppose him were anti-fascists. And that trend continued for the next two years — the only people I saw out there in the streets standing up and saying no to these guys were anti-fascists. It felt to me that the mainstream community had more or less outsourced the hard work of opposing these guys to anti-fascists for whom they've frequently actually expressed nothing but contempt. I have my own issues with Antifascists, but by God at least, they were out there in the streets standing up to these guys. The people in the community weren't doing that. A lot of that did have to do with the way the media handled it, particularly the mainstream Portland media, both the TV stations and The Oregonian — I felt that they were really not explaining to the Portland audience what was actually going on.
What I was seeing going on was that these extremists were organizing bus loads of violent thugs from the exurbs and suburbs and rural areas to come driving into downtown Portland, eager and prepared for violence, who then proceeded to attack the citizens of Portland and the people who lived here in order to muddy the city's name in order to create scenes of violence that they could then use for promoting this narrative about the supposed “violent left.” The whole point of that narrative was to justify their own violence. And not only were they doing that, but they were doing so with the tacit acceptance of the Portland Police Bureau, who did not defend this community, but rather enabled people to attack it.
Do you remember when all these communities like Coeur d'Alene and Klamath Falls and Forks were supposed to be under attack from Antifa buses?
The bus loads of Antifa that never manifested?
Yeah. Of course, if such a thing had ever happened, they would've all been come under serious attack from the locals in the community as well as the local police. But that didn't happen in these cities because in a lot of cases, the police were more sympathetic to the people from the outside, or bought, bought into that there maybe were buses.
I thought that it was particularly chilling in Coeur d'Alene where you had this small community that so vehemently resisted the Aryan Nations back in the day. And then right down Sherman Avenue you had person after person with an AR-15 saying, ‘we're here to get rid of the buses full of Antifa.’ It felt like a really sad dystopian twist on the good that they had done there.
It kind of came to even further fruition last summer at the Pride in the Park event in Coeur d'Alene, when a group of 31 neo-fascists from the group Patriot Front showed up with the intent of causing a horrible disruption at the Pride event. I was there covering that all day. And even before the Patriot Front guys showed up, there had been people from Matt Shea’s organization bearing AR-15s and wandering around the edge of the crowd, basically intimidating and silently threatening everybody at the event that day. I was just thinking how Bill Wassmuth would be whirling in his grave with the thought of this.
THANK YOU for mentioning Christian nationalism. I am weary of trying to get people to take this particular threat seriously, but living in the midst of it can't and won't stop.
Can never thank both of you enough for the work you do. Great interview.