If you work at a news outlet long enough, you really come to embrace anniversaries. An anniversary is a good page-filler, but it’s also a good way to get readers to think about the things that have changed since a notable event unfolded. We see it every year on September 11, of course: meditations on how the world changed since the attacks happened, how that tragedy shaped policy and culture. I’m no fan of nostalgia, but I do think reflecting back on our pasts — personal, collective — is integral to understanding how we got where we are. To consider history, but not dwell on it.
This month is the three-year anniversary of this newsletter. Three years ago this month, I wrote the first edition: a project that was born during the pandemic from so much isolation, and literally being trapped inside by wildfire smoke. During all of our months indoors, I became interested in putting more effort into honing my skills as an essayist, and thought, why not give myself a challenge to write more essays on my own? Why not navigate around the barriers of trying to sell an essay to an editor in some faraway place, and just start writing them on my own? Is that crazy? To want to put more of my writing out into the world, and ask fewer people for permission to do so?
Of course, much of the past three years in this space has been taken up by essays, but what I’ve tried to also do is provide both new pieces of writing and supplemental addendums to the journalism I create (you’ll see a version of that below). B
It’s interesting to look back at 36 months of material, and see what I was thinking about, and what we were all talking about. How fearful we all were in 2020. How sad. How I always seem to be waiting on people to pay me money for the work I’ve done. How angry I was, and so many of us were, in the aftermath of January 6.
In the past three years I wrote a book, two different podcasts, and more articles than I care to count. I continue to be fascinated by writing in all its myriad forms, and talked about that with some of my favorite songwriters, audio journalists, fiction writers, reporters, Western freelancers and longtime extremism reporters.
I discussed identity: who gets to claim a place as their own, who gets to own the story of the land. I got back to the courtroom, to report on a trial, and it turned my brain to mush.
I recap this all to thank each of you for being here. I didn’t know what I was getting into with this newsletter when I started it, but every month you have made me glad that I gave it a shot. It has pushed me creatively, and it is something I look forward to each month. I hope you feel the same about reading it.
Maybe you’re new here, and you like what you see. Go ahead and — as the kids on YouTube say — smash that paid subscription button below. For the next month only, I’m offering a 20 percent discount on year-long subscriptions, which you can take advantage of by clicking the button.
Last week, a story I worked on for most of this spring finally dropped in the latest edition of High Country News. It’s about Oregon’s latest secessionist movement: called Greater Idaho.
Much has been written about Greater Idaho being an effort of frustrated rural people; that narrative has mostly been eaten up by helicopter journalists who are not Oregonians, or westerners. What you’ll find in the story that I wrote are voices of a lot of rural Oregonians and Idahoans whose frustration is only compounded by Greater Idaho. They’re freaked out by how much it echoes past secession plans floated in the Pacific Northwest by hate leaders and white nationalists.
Part of what surprised me about the reporting that’s been done on Greater Idaho was that the history of these secessionist plans are so recent. This area was colonized not that long ago, and the stories of states like Oregon, Washington, Idaho… they’re not hard to access.
But I can’t blame reporters for not knowing what they don’t know. It is probably unique to me that I am constantly reminded in my work that the Pacific Northwest has been a place coveted by white nationalists who want to create their own Christian utopia.
During my reporting I discovered a particularly terrifying quote that the KKK leader Robert Miles said from the lectern at the Aryan Nations in 1986, during the annual Aryan World Congress. At that conference, the idea of carving out the Northwest as a white haven was a topic of focus, and Miles said one key part of the plan was to get mainstream reporters to talk about it. "So we get condemned by most people," he said to the crowd. "But if one in a thousand viewers says, ‘Hey, right on, what a neat idea—let's turn the Pacific Northwest into an Aryan homeland.’ That's 10,000 new supporters— more money, more noise, more likelihood we'll win. Television is just playing right into our hands."
Playing right into our hands.
That’s what non-discerning, too-fast media coverage does. It plays into the hands of the people behind these movements. It is what happens when you take people’s words at face value. It’s what happens when you are a big city reporter who flies into a rural place thinking surely you understand it. In reality, you’ve just been had.
For this story, and many of the stories I do, I read books. Radical, I know, to read a book in our age of endless scrolling. My shelves are overflowing with books I return to time and time again for my research, my own little library of extremism. I buy a lot of books, and many of them get traded back to Powell’s when they don’t contribute something new to the knowledge base of extremism. But these ones are well-worn reference guides for me.
In the past, people have asked me for recommendations of books that have informed my knowledge of extremism in the United States. I thought I would recommend a few here. (In my dream world, I’ve thought of creating a course where these are used as texts, but I haven’t had the time to figure out how to do that.)
This is no way a complete list, but these are the books that have helped time and time again in my reporting, and that I think could be of use to other reporters, as the extremism beat becomes more popular.
One thing that you will notice is that this genre of reporting has been largely done by white men. I could write for days about the importance of diverse voices in media and why on the extremism beat, that’s more important than ever. We’ll table that conversation for another day.
The Terrorist Next Door: The Militia Movement and the Radical Right, by Daniel Levitas (2002)
For anyone interested in how the Patriot movement came to be, this is required reading. It’s a dense tome, but all the details are there: Posse Comitatus, tax protesters, the John Birch Society. Levitas captures it all. Not exactly a beach read, but one you’ll consult again and again.
The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism, by James Aho (1990)
Aho is a retired Idaho sociologist who has been an unbelievable source for me, particularly with When the Moon Turns to Blood, which occurred in his neck of the woods. This is a sociology text that captures a vibe that was around in the late 1980s, but he also provides a fascinating first-person look at the ways extremists braided together their ideas of government, religion and race to create in the state.
Every Knee Shall Bow, or Ruby Ridge, by Jess Walter (1995)
Spokane writer Jess Walter is one of my favorite writers, and most people know his fictional stories. Did you know he also started his career as a journalist at the Spokesman-Review? In 1992, after blood was spilled on the Weaver family’s mountain property, he was the first reporter to get interviews with the family, and he put that into a book. It is cinematic, and such an incredible read. This book changed everything for me.
Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer (2004)
Krakauer’s book shined a bright light on the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sects that splintered away from the mainline Mormon church, and set up communities of their own in northern Arizona. This book is not perfect — is any book perfect? But it was extremely formative for me in understanding the ways that people will manipulate people’s definition of God to further their own lives. If you haven’t read it, you’re in for it.
American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing, by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck (2001)
Before Georgia Catt and I put together our podcast, Two Minutes Past Nine, this book was fundamental in widening my understanding of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s radicalization. It is a sad story, and it will make you very angry. It is told by a pair of local reporters from New York, who interviewed McVeigh at length in prison. We interviewed Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck for the podcast, and both took time away from their reporting on COVID outbreaks. They wrote this book, and they kept up the work of reporting. This book was published in 2001. The lessons this story holds are absolutely relevant today.
Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph and the Legacy of American Terror, by Maryanne Vollers (2006)
I place this book by Montana writer Maryanne Vollers up there with Jess Walter’s book on Ruby Ridge. It is immaculately reported, and written like a movie. Before I read this, I really thought I knew who Eric Rudolph was. He’s best known as the bomber of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Did you know he was also a prolific bomber of abortion clinics and LGBTQ+ establishments in the area? That his motivation for bombing the Olympics had to do with… abortion?
How the Millennium Comes Violently: From Jonestown to Heaven’s Gate, by Catherine Wessinger (2000)
This book is for people who want to understand the legacies of Waco, Jonestown, Aum Shinrikyo and the Montana Freemen, among others, through the lens of a religious studies scholar who specializes in writing about millenarian groups. Catherine Wessinger is brilliant and patient in her writing, never resorting to hyperbole. And she’s been a wealth of information for me in the past three years, as my work takes a turn toward a more religious direction.
You're absolutely an inspiration, Leah. I'm so grateful for all that you write and do!
Happy newsletter birthday, Leah! You're a mighty inspiration to so many of us. ✊🏽