42. Spoiler
Did not expect to hear the name Lavoy Finicum while watching Fargo. Here we are.
I write to you today wearing my new-to-me Halloween shirt, which I found in the bowels of a dusty antique store last weekend and features one of the greatest characters from the slasher film genre: the pale, emotionless Michael Myers with a knife raised above his head. It should come as no surprise that I am a big fan of horror movies, and feel very strongly about the plots of those that are done well. The ones I find the most terrifying are usually the most subtle.1
The current season of the FX show Fargo is not horror, but is subtle and often severe, and I pity any audience taken in by all the cable-knit sweaters and doncha know niceties who might not realize that they are about to watch an insanely twisted horror-adjacent story.
Season five — the current season, starring Jon Hamm and Juno Temple — might be my favorite season so far.2 I had no idea it would deal directly with the Patriot Movement; I admit when that theme became clear in an early episode I was nervous this would turn into the kind of dangerous mythologizing Hollywood is so good at. But, unless something goes wrong in the final episode, I think the writers of the show did an amazing job with the subject matter.
If you’re concerned with SPOILERS, you might want to stop reading right here.
Fargo season five sees the great Jon Hamm putting that razor-sharp jawline to delightfully villainous use as he plays the part of Roy Tillman, a violent North Dakota constitutional sheriff who believes he is the arbiter of both the law and the word of God. Tillman is dead-set on kidnapping his ex-wife Nadine, played by Juno Temple, and forcing her back to his snowy North Dakota ranch: a place where he abused her until she escaped, changed her name and disappeared from him completely.
Let’s hit pause here. If you don’t speak Patriot Movement, like I do, let me be your interpreter for some of why this storyline is so interesting to me: someone whose hands have practically gone arthritic from typing so much about the movement Hamm’s character embodies.
Constitutional sheriffs exist in real life, and consider themselves a part of a movement of anti-government law enforcement officers who really do think they are the highest law of the land, with power eclipsing that of the federal government. When we talk about the Patriot movement in America, constitutional sheriffs are just one part of that swirling red, white and AR-15 milieu; the rest are anti-government militias, tax protesters and sovereign citizens who share a catalyzing belief that a corrupt New World Order has overtaken the federal government. It should surprise few of you that, for many, “New World Order” is code for Jews.
The anti-semitic and conspiratorial roots of constitutional sheriff-big go back to the 1970s, to the Posse Comitatus movement that stood for the very beliefs right there in their name. It’s Latin for “power of the county.”
Posse Comitatus was the brainchild of a California man named William Potter Gale, who was a vociferous anti-semite and believed that the federal government of the United States had been infiltrated. Here’s a bit from Daniel Levitas’ 2002 book The Terrorist Next Door:
“In his first article citing the Posse, Gale [listed] ‘a train of abuses’ menacing America: submission to the United Nations Charter, unlawful taxation for the support of foreign governments, enactment of a ‘communist-inspired’ income tax, and the passage of civil rights legislation. ‘[The] Sovereign States have failed to repudiate the unlawful acts of … the federal government,’ he declared. The county should be recognized as the seat of power for the people, and the sheriff is to be the ‘ONLY LEGAL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!’
The idea caught on. Posse chapters spread north from California, up through Oregon, Washington, and then far beyond.
Levitas again:
“The Posse’s base of support had always been predominantly rural, and in the late 1970s a devastating combination of high interest rates and low farm prices provided fertile ground for growth. Through newsletters, meetings, and hundreds of activists sprinkled across a dozen groups, Posse leaders broadcast their message to a growing audience of debt-ridden farmers, blaming an international Jewish banking conspiracy for the rash of foreclosures and business failures that ravaged the Midwest. The Posse’s fanciful interpretation of the monetary and legal system caught on among some members of the fledgling American Agriculture Movement, which mobilized tens of thousands of farmers during several years of vigorous protest, beginning in 1977. Meanwhile Gale and other Posse leaders crisscrossed the heartland, telling farmers to prepare for the coming battle of Armageddon.”
As the message spread, the meaning of the movement morphed and changed. Some continued to call themselves Posse Comitatus, others were a little bit less Latin and more to the point, calling themselves “Christian Patriots.” This showed that at the heart of their belief system was something dogmatic. New name or old name, believers “focused on contemporary hot-button issues, like high interest rates and debtors rights,” wrote Levitas, “yet remained fixated on age-old myths about Jewish plots for world domination and the inherent supremacy of white Anglo-Saxon culture.”
The Constitutional Sheriff thing got a fresh surge of energy in 2011 when Richard Mack, a former sheriff from Graham County, Arizona, founded the Constitutional Sheriff and Peace Officers’ Association (CSPOA)3 to get more sheriffs nationwide onboard with the Patriot Movement cause. Mack was also a member of the Oath Keepers4 at the time, too. Here’s a video of him from the Bundy Ranch standoff in 2014, in which Oath Keepers and other militiamen obstructed federal officers from the Bureau of Land Management from impounding Cliven Bundy’s cattle:
I just want to reiterate what Mack said in that clip: “We were actually strategizing to put all the women up at the front. If they’re going to start shooting, it’s gonna be women that will be televised all across the world getting shot by these rogue federal officers.”
This speaks to a point I want to make here about why a wife-beating constitutional sheriff being at the heart of the plot of Fargo is so on point and so unique in terms of what Hollywood has produced on this topic. There is an inherent toxic masculinity at the heart of constitutional sheriffs — I’m a man and I’m the law, I’m the truth, I’m appointed by God. It is terrifying in its non-negotiability. How can you talk a man down if he believes that his power is bestowed upon him by God?
Jon Hamm’s character is so enraged at the escape of his wife, and her ability to live a life on her own terms, because it is an affront to everything he believes: that he’s in charge, that the world bends to the will of a man, and no one else. By escaping, she has taken a chip out of his crown. The facade has cracked. He’s desperately clinging to power.
In real life, Richard Mack’s admission on television that the kitted-out tough guys at Bundy Ranch were going to use the bodies of women as human shields speaks to the inherent cowardliness of this movement, too. and directly to the male supremacy that acts as its foundation. That’s what we see reflected so well in Fargo.5
The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism provides this definition:
“We define a male supremacist system as a cultural, political, economic, and social system, in which cisgender men disproportionately control status, power, and resources, and women, trans men, and non-binary people are subordinated. Such systems are underpinned by an ideology of male supremacism, the belief in cisgender men’s superiority and right to dominate and control others. While male supremacism also intersects with other axes of oppression, such as racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and heterosexism, it motivates and undergirds the types of events described above. Male supremacism manifests in various ways, including physical and sexual violence, militarism, and exertion of control over women’s, trans men’s, and non-binary people’s bodies.
Male supremacism is an underlying ideology that simultaneously draws from and contributes to both religious and secular misogynist movements, which form part of the “alt-right” but also attract men (and some women) who claim to be on the left. While male supremacism has a long history, the origins of its recent manifestation as an increasingly organized and growing social movement lies in the response to real, though insufficient, political gains of women, including stronger laws against sexual harassment, violence, and discrimination.”
Sounds like far-right extremism, yes. But it also sounds like so much of the argument over who gets rights these days. Read that definition of male supremacism, then think about the ways the Montana Legislature passed a slate of anti-trans bills this year, and the way they tried to silence Rep. Zooey Zephyr. Read it again, and think about Roe v. Wade being overturned, how Idaho stopped tracking maternal mortality rates. Read once more, and think about what happens anytime women try to speak up.
When male supremacy parrots as the law, that’s bad for … everyone. Once you have that definition in your mind, the arguments flying around in the political arena start to make more sense.
As I’ve been watching this season play out across the fictional snowscape, my extremism reporter mind couldn’t help but think back to the story of North Dakota’s Gordon Kahl, one of the oldest martyrs of the far-right.
Here’s a tidbit from my 2020 New York Times Magazine story:
“In the three-decade life span of modern right-wing militias, they have amassed something of a canon of martyrs. There’s the story of Gordon Kahl, a highly decorated World War II veteran and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist who refused to pay his taxes. When law enforcement tried to serve him a warrant in 1983, he and his son killed two U.S. Marshals, before Kahl went on the run for four months and was killed in a shootout in Arkansas — but not before killing another law-enforcement officer.”
Kahl’s radicalization led him into violence. That’s a commonality among martyrs of the Patriot Movement — or better, maybe, not to call them martyrs but men swept up toxic fever dreams, who are fooled into thinking if they really go all-in on the male-dominant fiction in which they are entitled to the most, and step on others to get it, they become more free. Liberated, even.6
I’ve written so much about another right-wing martyr over the years: Robert “Lavoy” Finicum. Click the link if you want to know the whole story; I’m too tired to go into it. This week, on that penultimate Fargo episode, there he was. Lavoy on Jon Hamm’s lips. As the feds surround his property a la Bundy Ranch, Hamm’s character says into a livestream: “All patriots respond. I have a military ambush inbound, and this is America’s sheriff issuing a call to arms. They’re coming for me the way they came for Ammon and Lavoy. And don’t be fooled. After they murder me, they’re coming for you next.”
Joe and I had to pause it and sit there for a second, staring at each other, wondering what it all meant. Ten years since the Bundy Ranch standoff. Eight years since Malheur. Now that’s all pop culture. A Cliven Bundy/Richard Mack combo character is fictionalized on television. Ammon Bundy and Lavoy Finicum are the saints he invokes to say his end could be coming soon.
In real life, Ammon is on the lam somewhere, not paying his bills. In real life, Lavoy is memorialized on the side of a highway in Oregon, and a rural bend of road is named after him in Cane Beds, Arizona.
Ammon is very much alive, having duped so many people into sacrificing themselves for his anti-government cause, never paying as direly as his supporters have.
Lavoy died yelling at the feds to “go ahead and shoot me.” He was the man who believed profoundly in the fiction the Bundys sold him — that ranchers were oppressed and deserved more, that a man has to be willing to die for what he believes. I think about Lavoy sometimes, with all his grandchildren, and think he’d be pretty happy if he was around. So many people loved him — that’s the truth regardless of what you think of what he stood for. I think about how he thought he knew what the future would be, but really, none of us do.
I think Ammon Bundy might watch that episode of Fargo and pat himself on the back. I think Cliven might and wonder, what the heck, why didn’t I get a shout out? Lavoy Finicum’s family — people who loved him so much — might watch it and feel their wounds ripped open again.
Fargo is not a show with a stalking monster like Michael Myers, unfeelingly chasing his screaming victims. It’s the scarier kind of horror: subtle, yes, but also a mirror reflecting a truism about human nature, and our society, right back at us.7 We can look away, peer through our fingers all we want.
Still, it will be there when you open your eyes.
Couple of quick notes:
If you’re interested in learning much, much more about the movement of Constitutional Sheriffs in America, a subscription to Jessica Pishko’s newsletter, called “Posse Comitatus,” would be a good subscribe.
Portland book pals: on Friday, Feb. 9, come on out to Powell’s Books, where I’ll be in conversation with Montana writer Betsy Gaines Quammen, discussing her new book True West. Betsy also wrote a book all about the Bundys and public lands, called American Zion, so you know we will have about 1.65 million things to discuss.
Might as well remind you that When the Moon Turns to Blood is out in paperback, just in case you’ve got a Powell’s gift card to spend?
Yes, I do have a recommendation: I think one of my favorites I’ve seen recently is the 1971 film The Mephisto Waltz, starring Alan Alda and Jacqueline Bisset. Definite Rosemary’s Baby vibes. I found it at Movie Madness in Portland, but it might be streaming.
Though, let’s be real, no character in all five seasons holds a candle to V.M. Varga, played by David Thewlis.
Mack is also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; I think we can all agree he gives off big-time White Horse vibes.
Last year, an NBC affiliate released this investigation about how Texas has embraced the constitutional sheriff ideology in a big way, and that Mack had trained officers from more than 80 departments.
Might want to bookmark this before election season: Political Research Associates has a good map that tracks constitutional sheriffs. Read up on the people spouting this ideology near you.
“Liberation” was the promise of the 1930s fascist group The Silver Shirts, who stitched a red “L” onto the breasts of their uniforms. Guess what, only men could join and it liberated no one, but did help send its founder to prison. I have much more to say about the Silver Shirts in upcoming projects, so that’s all for now on that.
Bundyville. One day, maybe it won’t be relevant.
Leah, I so appreciate your perspective. Your subtle comparison of Ammon and LaVoy. Getting at Cliven’s narcissism. No one else brings this depth. Thank you.
I'm also captivated by the Nordic, kilt-clad avenging arch-angel, who seems to be impervious to the threats of violence from the sheriff, and seems to be every bit as violent. Where would you fit him in your comparisons with the many dramas created by the white male supremacist movement.
I think Fargo is some of the most important "fiction" out there today. Every aspiring right-wing local politician out there should watch it as a cautionary tale.