Ann Foster | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)
On March 5th, 2004, Martha Stewart was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. At the time, she was one of comparatively few female CEOs, and she was irrevocably tied to her company’s success: her smiling, serene, WASPy perfection thoroughly entwined with her company’s numerous ventures. When she first faced charges of insider trading, news media and the general population reacted with schadenfreude, or as one New York Times article coined it, blondenfreude: “the glee felt when a rich, powerful, and fair-haired business woman stumbles.” And stumble she did: In the wake of the scandal, Stewart voluntarily removed herself from most of her roles at the company, and as part of her sentencing she was barred from involvement with the empire for five years. Stewart re-joined the Board of Directors in 2011, but the company never truly bounced back from effects of the scandal.
It all started in 2012 in Miami, Florida when Rudy Eugene, high on bath salts, was shot dead on sight by police while attempting to consume Ronald Poppo’s face. Poppo barely survived, losing his nose and his eyeballs. What was it precisely that had started? As Logan Hill reports at the Washington Post Magazine, it was the Florida Man meme — a sometimes humorous, mostly pitiful, ongoing series of events in which Florida men are discovered in bizarre, often criminal circumstances. What the media coverage and the internet fails to report, however are the addiction and mental health issues that spark the strange behavior in the first place.
Since Florida Man was first defined on Twitter in 2013 as the “world’s worst superhero,” many men (and it’s almost always men) have assumed the mantle. He is a man of a thousand tattooed faces, a slapstick outlaw, an Internet-traffic gold mine, a cruel punchline, a beloved prankster, a human tragedy and, like some other love-hate American mascots, the subject of burgeoning controversy.
At its most comical, the Florida Man phenomenon encapsulates the wildness of both America and the Internet. At its most salacious, it’s a social-media update on the true-crime TV of “America’s Dumbest Criminals” and the gallows humor of tabloid headlines. At its most insensitive, Florida Man profits by punching down at the homeless, drug-addicted or mentally ill.
For Florida Man to evolve from the primordial swamp-gas of the Internet, the environmental conditions had to be just right. Florida is the third-most populous state, so it naturally has a lot of everything — good, bad and weird. The state’s sunshine laws, passed in 1967, make public records — mug shots, arrest reports, video evidence and 911 calls — available to anyone, with the ease of one-click shopping. Then there’s the state’s strange geography: swampland infested with alligators and pythons, the most sinkholes in the nation. As for law and order, the state counts about 2 million concealed weapons permits, 1.4 million felons, and “stand your ground” laws. Thanks to the temperate climate, there’s no offseason for criminals or pranksters or nudists. And, as local writers from Carl Hiaasen to Dave Barry to Lauren Groff have noted, the water table of weirdness is just naturally high in Florida. Strangeness seems to bubble to the surface.
👋 July 17 is 🗺️ Emoji Day! To 🎉 this ever-changing visual language that we use on our 📱 and 💻 and across social media, here are five 📖 recommendations — including a delightful post series on a blog about punctuation — on the history and evolution of the emoji. 😘
1. A Series on Emoji (Keith Houston, August 2018-January 2020, Shady Characters)
Don’t have time to read 10 posts? 😛 Adam Sternbergh’s 2014 New York magazine piece, “😊, You’re Speaking Emoji,” covers the emoji’s evolution.
It was into this text-only world that emoji’s first true ancestor was born. Comprising only a colon, a hyphen and a closing parenthesis, the emoticon, or :-), was perfectly designed to pierce the disinterested blankness of a crt monitor. Granted, so-called emoticons have been discovered in many pre-digital sources, such as seventeenth century poems:
Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, (smiling yet:)
Tear me to tatters, yet I’ll be
Patient in my necessity.
and transcriptions of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches:
…there is no precedent for your being here yourselves, (applause and laughter;) and I offer, in justification of myself and you, that I have found nothing in the Constitution against.
but these are almost certainly typographic missteps rather than intentional smileys. The consensus is that emoticons proper arrived in 1982 in response to a joke gone wrong on an electronic bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University.
Blagdon tracks the beginnings of this digital communication through the 👀 of Shigetaka Kurita, the 💡👨🏻 of emoji.
Windows 95 had just launched, and email was taking off in Japan alongside the pager boom. But Kurita says people had a hard time getting used to the new methods of communication. In Japanese, personal letters are long and verbose, full of seasonal greetings and honorific expressions that convey the sender’s goodwill to the recipient. The shorter, more casual nature of email lead to a breakdown in communication. “If someone says Wakarimashita you don’t know whether it’s a kind of warm, soft ‘I understand’ or a ‘yeah, I get it’ kind of cool, negative feeling,” says Kurita. “You don’t know what’s in the writer’s head.”
Face to face conversation, and even the telephone, let you gauge the other person’s mood from vocal cues, and more familiar, longer letters gave people important contextual information. Their absence from these new mediums meant that the promise of digital communication — being able to stay in closer touch with people — was being offset by this accompanying increase in miscommunication.
“So that’s when we thought, if we had something like emoji, we can probably do faces. We already had the experience with the heart symbol, so we thought it was possible.” ASCII art kaomoji were already around at the time, but they were a pain to enter on a cellphone since they were composed with multiple characters. Kurita was looking for a simpler solution.
Mann discusses her conflicted feelings around her use of emojis: she’s fascinated by their ability to encapsulate our emotions so succinctly, and that they are understood across 🇺🇸🇯🇵🇫🇷🇨🇳🇧🇷 and 👶🏻🧒🏻👩🏻👵🏻, but also 🤦🏻♀️ to rely so heavily on them.
And of course emojis are inherently silly, but that’s not in and of itself a bad thing. Silliness is not necessarily an indication of shallowness. In fact, I’d argue the opposite: A capacity for real silliness is usually born out of pain. We’re attracted to silliness because we need it. We need it because life isn’t easy.
Your mom is sick.
Your grandfather died.
You got laid off.
Your company folded.
Your rent went up.
Your husband left.
He didn’t call.
She didn’t call.
They never call.
All these things happen every day, to billions of people all over the world. And if a stupid cartoon of smiling poop makes you feel better, well, that’s:
Schwartzberg compiles an 👄 history on the origin and evolution of the beloved 💩 emoji, created in 🇯🇵 and brought to the 🇺🇸 by a team at Google.
Darick [Tong, Google 👨🏻💻 and 🇺🇸lead of its emoji project]: It struck me as a particularly flexible and effective emoji. It provides a way to say shit or crap in an email without explicitly typing the words, and it catches the reader’s attention in a way that smiley faces don’t. Most importantly, it always elicits a smile from the reader and the writer, which is ultimately the purest purpose of emoji: to add emotional expressiveness to written communication.
While it makes sense for emoji to cover the range of the human experience, Bogost ✍🏻 that “more specificity means less flexibility,” and that this visual language has shifted away from the abstract. More choices at our 📱fingertips changes the way we select and use emoji, viewing them more as 🖼️ rather than 💡. “Counterintuitively, all these emoji are less applicable because they contain more information.”
A skull (💀) almost never means that the speaker has a braincase in hand, Hamlet-like, but rather offers an ashen reaction or a lol, I’m dead sentiment. An emoji originally designed to signify an Eastern bow of greeting or politesse (🙇♂️) takes on the more abstract meaning of mild subjugation or psychic deflation in the West. Fire (🔥) could mean a campfire or house fire, but more often it suggests enthusiasm, ferocity, or even spice. Eggplant (🍆) could denote a nightshade, but more likely it suggests, well, something else. These and other meanings are possible because the emoji function primarily as ideograms.
But as emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded.
Part 3 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.
I.
I have seen LaVoy Finicum die and die and die.
Log onto YouTube and watch Finicum’s end, spliced, paused, and dissected by people who never knew him but who, too, have again and again watched it happen.
When Finicum was killed, law enforcement officers were acting on an opportunity to arrest the leaders of the weeks-long Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in Oregon. Finicum was one of just a few actual ranchers who joined the Bundys’ occupation. Ranching was Finicum’s dream — something he’d only started doing once he turned 50. He didn’t grow up a rancher, but he intended to die one.
In the final seconds of his life — on the very last day of his 54th year — Finicum proved to be even more of a true believer in the purpose of the occupation than the Bundys themselves.
That frigid late January day, an informant tipped the feds off that cars carrying the Bundys and other leaders would be traveling to Grant County, Oregon for a meeting with citizens and the area’s sheriff, who was allegedly sympathetic to the cause.
But the group never got to the meeting. Before they could arrive, members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and Oregon State Police SWAT team stopped the cars on a remote bend. Ammon Bundy followed law enforcement orders to get out of the car with his hands up, kneel on the ground, and crawl towards the officers. But Finicum refused to surrender.
Suddenly Finicum, who some viewed as a grandfatherly voice of reason back at the refuge, was yelling at the officers from his driver’s seat. He told them: “Back down or you kill me now.”
“Boys, you better realize we got people on the way,” Finicum yelled. “You want a bloodbath? It’s gonna be on your hands.”
In his back seat, the other occupants of the car — Ryan Bundy, a grandmother named Shawna Cox, and 18-year-old gospel singer Victoria Sharp — frantically tried to call people back at the refuge, but realized they’d been pulled over in an area with no cell service.
“I’m going to be laying down here on the ground with my blood on the street, or I’m going to see the sheriff,” Finicum yelled out the window. Finicum told the occupants of the car he would leave, try to get help. “You ready?” he asked.
“Well, where’s those guns?” Ryan Bundy responded, telling the other passengers to duck down.
“Gun it!” Cox said. “Gun it!”
Finicum slammed the accelerator. Driving at over 70 miles per hour, careening around a bend, the sound of bullets pecked at his truck. Up ahead, the FBI and Oregon State Police had blocked the road.
Finicum jerked the wheel — either to avoid hitting the road block, or to speed around it altogether. “Hang on!” he said. The truck crashed into deep banks of snow, sending up a white wave that made it look as if he’d plowed over an FBI agent. Finicum leaped from the truck, hands raised. All around him, officers yelled, “Get on the ground!”
This is all on the internet: Cox’s cell phone captured the conversation and fear in the truck, drone footage shot from above shows the lone white Dodge Ram pickup.
You can see the crash, see the driver’s door fly open. You can see Finicum hop out as he taunts at the police that they’re “gonna have to shoot me.” You can hear the three bullets — bang, bang, bang. Dead.
Every time I watch the video I think I’ll hear some new intonation, some missed revelation, and yet Finicum always dies the same. Three pops. He doesn’t jump or yelp. He simply crumples: a body tense and alive one second, a heavy sack of bones dropped to the ground for eternity the next. A puppet without a hand. Gravity stronger than spirit.
As Finicum stumbled in the snow, he yelled to the officers to shoot him before reaching multiple times toward his jacket. The overhead video captures that. Later, official reports said Finicum had a loaded 9 mm handgun in his inside jacket pocket. The shooting was ruled justified.
And yet now, three years later, a movement of people across America see his death another way entirely: As an assassination. An execution. A carefully-calculated hit on a lifelong member of the LDS church and short-time associate of the notorious Bundy family. Finicum is seen as a friend to men whose favorite part of the U.S. Constitution is the line about well-armed militias. The snowy road where he died is Finicum’s own Golgotha. The FBI roadblock is referred to, in some corners of the internet, as “the killstop.” Read more…
Laura Lippman | Longreads | July 2019 | 15 minutes (3,660 words)
1.
When I was in high school, I would walk to the Waldenbooks in the mall near my home and read novels while standing up. This was the 1970s, long before bookstores became places that encouraged people to sit, hang, browse. There were no armchairs in that narrow store on the second floor of Columbia Mall in Howard County, Maryland.
Reading while standing up felt like stealing, a pathetic thrill for this straight-A goody-goody. I had money — I babysat, I eventually worked at the Swiss Colony in the same mall. I could buy any volume I truly desired. But my stand-up reads were books too embarrassing to bring home. I remember only two.
One was TheGreengage Summer by Rumer Godden, a British novelist perhaps best known today for inspiring the name of Bruce Willis’s and Demi Moore’s oldest daughter. It now strikes me as a perfectly respectable book; I could have forked over $1.25 for it.
The other one was — I couldn’t begin to tell you the title. It was a slick psycho serial killer tale that began with a young couple parked on Lovers Lane, where they were attacked by a man with, if I recall correctly, a metal hook for one of his hands. He used his hook to slash the roof of the convertible, or maybe it was a knife, and as the metal blade (or the hook) pierced through the canvas, the beautiful, vain sorority girl — it was implicit that she deserved to die if only for her smugness — thought: “I should have had that slice of cheesecake at dinner.”
It has taken me more than 40 years, but the singular achievement of my life may be that if I am attacked by a serial killer on a deserted Lovers Lane, I almost certainly will have had dessert. Not cheesecake, because I don’t like cheesecake. Possibly some dark chocolate, preferably with nuts or caramel, or a scoop of Taharka ice cream, an outstanding Baltimore brand, or one of my own homemade blondies, from the Smitten Kitchen recipe.
Maybe a shot of tequila, an excellent digestif. Maybe tequila and a blondie.
But only if I want those things. Many nights, I’m not in the mood for anything sweet after dinner. Every day, one day at a time, one meal at a time, one hunger pang at a time, I ask myself what I really want. I then eat whatever it is.
It is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Read more…
Tom Maxwell | Longreads | March 2019 | 20 minutes (3,275 words)
On a blustery winter day in February 1970, Rolling Stone managing editor John Burksentered a New York apartment on East 37th street. “Inside his manager’s neo-turn-of-the-century apartment, on a sofa near the radiant fireplace, sat Jimi Hendrix, in a gentle, almost reticent frame of mind,”Burks wrote. “The light snow had begun to fall. You could see that through the narrow slits where the curtain allowed the merest sliver of daylight and streetscene to penetrate into the gloomy dark room.”
Burks was brought in to provide the centerpiece for a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign: a feature story about the reforming of the original Jimi Hendrix Experience. The group, consisting of Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell (both of whom were white) had disbanded the previous autumn. Since then, the rock ‘n’ roll guitar virtuoso had busied himself by befriending other African Americans: Trumpeter Miles Davis, jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and (according to Burks) “living and jamming with an all-purpose crew of musicians — everything from older black gentlemen from the South who played blues guitar, to a band of avant garde jazz/space musicians under the general leadership of a flute player named Juma — and talking about coming up with something new.”
Part 2 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.
I.
Bill Keebler dumps a sugar packet into his coffee and calmly explains that the government is after him. They’re always watching him — constantly surveilling his every move, he says. He’s even at risk here, inside a Denny’s attached to a Flying J truck stop, about a half hour outside Salt Lake City.
He’s also pretty sure that Bundyville producer Ryan Haas and I are federal agents, posing as journalists. “I’m gonna be honest with you, it wouldn’t surprise me if both of you pulled out a badge,” he says.
Just after 4 p.m. on a frigid February day, Keebler, 60, shuffles toward the back corner table we’d staked out for the interview. He’s about a half hour late, uttering his deepest apologies for getting the time wrong. He’s never late, he says.
Keebler is a raspy-voiced Southerner with skin that looks brittle from working in the sun all his life as a horse wrangler, ranch hand, hunting outfitter, and construction worker. At Denny’s he’s wearing a sandstone-colored canvas work jacket, and his hair sprouts from underneath a khaki Oath Keepers hat, which covers a shiny bald spot on the top of his head. He smokes a lot. Drinks a lot of coffee.
On the phone a few days before, I told him that I’d read the court documents for his case and was surprised by what I saw. I wanted to hear his version of what happened in June 2016 on the day three years before when Keebler believed he was detonating a bomb at a building owned by the Bureau of Land Management, only to find that the bomb was a fake given to him by undercover FBI agents embedded in his militia group.
The bombing itself was shocking. But the part that surprised me at the time was that, despite having pleaded guilty, serving 25 months in jail, and being released on probation, most of his case was still under federal protective order. Keebler’s attorney told me he’s not allowed to say why. I’m at the Denny’s hoping Keebler might be willing to tell me anyway.
In reading about what happened that day in the desert with the bomb, I learned — through the few court documents available — that Keebler was close friends with LaVoy Finicum. He’s the rancher who was a leader at the Malheur occupation, in Oregon, and was shot and killed by authorities after fleeing from a traffic stop.
But before we can talk about that, we’ve got to calm him down. He nudges his head in the direction of a young waiter, walking in a loop around by our table. Under his breath, Keebler says, “We’re being watched.”
“Right now?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“By who?”
“A fed or an informant,” Keebler says.
Haas asks if he means the Denny’s server, who’s walking by to see if we need any refills on coffee. That’s the guy, Keebler says.
If there’s so much at risk, why meet us? Why tell your story?
“Because if I don’t it’s going to die with me,” he says. “I’ve been on borrowed time for years.” He says he survived cancer, a massive heart attack, and “four heart procedures, looking at a fifth.” That’s not to mention the other stuff — things much harder to believe but that Keebler swears up and down are real, like the federally organized hits on him by the gang MS-13 while he was behind bars.
So I assure him: I’m not a fed. Google me. And I tell him he’s in control of what he says. If I ask something he doesn’t want to answer, something he thinks might get him in trouble, he doesn’t need to respond. He agrees, and for three hours, Bill Keebler gives his side of what happened leading up to that day in the desert with the bomb — a version of the story in which he is the hero, the government is the enemy, and where America is so rapidly nearing its demise, he can almost taste it.
***
In the three years since the Bundys mobilized a force to take over the Malheur National Wildlife refuge in Oregon, the world has morphed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. For one thing, Donald Trump became the president of the United States. He has increased his attacks on media, stepping up from calling the very newspapers I write for “fake news,” to neglecting to hold the Saudi Arabian government accountable for putting into motion the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
In June 2019, Trump — in a meeting at the G20 Summit — laughed with Russian president Vladimir Putin about journalists. “Get rid of them,” he said. “Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia. We have that problem.” And Putin responded: “Yes, yes. We have it, too. It’s the same.” They both laughed.
Oft-cited research collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center has shown that since 1996, anti-government activity surged when Democratic presidents were in office. Militia groups that claimed to see proof of tyranny thrived in the 1990s — specifically when Vicki Weaver and her teenage son were killed during a standoff with federal agents at Ruby Ridge in 1992, and when the feds stormed into the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993.
In President Obama, the anti-government movement saw the embodiment of tyranny: someone upon whom they could project their worst fears. They called him a socialist globalist Muslim who, after ascending to the highest seat of power, would bring Sharia law upon the people. There was no proof or evidence to support this. But that didn’t matter to them.
Under Trump, suddenly, anti-government groups are pro-government. Nearly everything about Trump’s rhetoric — from questioning Obama’s nationality, to draining the swamp of elites, to building a border wall, to pushing for anti-Muslim legislation, to zealous nationalism — is lifted from the anti-government handbook.
“It blows my mind. The Patriot militia movement, anti-government movement — however you want to refer to them — under Obama was so concerned about tyranny and executive power … and yet they’ve been some of the most vocal advocates for Trump unilaterally grabbing and exerting executive branch power,” said Sam Jackson, an assistant professor in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany-SUNY. Jackson researches the militia movement — he wrote his dissertation on the Oath Keepers.
“If Obama had talked about declaring a national emergency … they would have been up in arms in a heartbeat,” he said.
So what gives? How do the anti-government go pro-government?
“It makes it really hard to take them at their word,” Jackson told me. “It really makes it seem like all of that was just rhetoric that they deployed in pursuit of other goals that perhaps they perceived would be less popular amongst the American public — whether that’s Islamophobia or anti-immigration or whatever else they’re really interested in. It seems like perhaps now they’re willing to talk about these other things more blatantly than they were in the past.”
***
Bill Keebler tells us he was born in Mississippi and grew up in Georgia the descendant of a long line of military veterans. During the Cold War in the early 1980s, Keebler says he enlisted in the Army and served in Aschaffenburg, Germany. There, he says, he was on the frontlines of the fight against communism. And it was also during this time — he claims — that he placed third in the 1984 World Championships in Kung Fu.
It’s clear that he’s not the guy he used to be — or at least that the person I’m seeing before me at Denny’s isn’t the fighter he is in his head. Keebler claims that, after winning that championship, he created his own style of martial arts, called “Jung Shin Wu Kung Fu” before a “board of masters,” but the Bundyville team wasn’t able to confirm this.
After years of working on farms and ranches, Keebler found himself in Utah — far, far from home — where he worked as a hunting outfitter, trained horses, and says he became a member of the Utah Oath Keepers. Around Tooele County, Utah, he was so well-known as an ardent prepper and varmint hunter that the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story on his coyote hunting skills. In one scene in the story, Keebler crouches in underbrush and wears camouflage that’s been drenched in coyote-urine scent.
In 2011, he was running a hunting outfitting business called Critter Gitter Outfitters and often posted photos on social media of his excursions into the wild. In one, a muscled, tanned Keebler poses with a baby deer he’d rescued.
Keebler spends a lot of time on the internet — has for years. Online, Keebler makes lots of dad jokes and even more jokes where a woman’s demise is the punchline. In one video he shared on his Facebook page, a blond woman in a white robe pleads with her husband until he hands her the keys of a black SUV with an oversize bow on the hood. When she starts the car, it explodes, the man smiles, and the words Merry Christmas, Bitch fill the screen.
By 2013, Facebook had become a place for Keebler to vent about Obama — “I call him O-bummer,” he told me during one phone call — where he openly shared his belief in an encyclopedic number of conspiracy theories. “FEMA camps are everywhere, Muslims and illegals are taking over, Obama is the biggest Traitor this country has ever known, No Jobs, 16 trillion in [debt] and no relief in sight,” he wrote one February morning. “Anyone protesting Obama is assassinated and turned into a monster by our own media.”
None of this is true — his sources are websites that are notorious for generating fake content. His words dipped in and out of coherence, in and out of overt racism. “Our jobs have all gone over seas to other country’s as they get Fat off our money and we send them aid, weapons and anything else they desire for free. Jets, food what ever they want because we OWE it to them somehow,” he wrote in one such post. “I have been patient, tolerant and offended too much for any more. I am an American, have lived as I will die as my ancestors did, As A FREE MAN. I speak fucking English and you can press 1 and kiss my ass ya muslim, communist Jackasses! If this offends you then I have succeeded in my intentions.”
He signed off on another post: “Stay safe, armed to the teeth, prepared and with God. Bill Keebler.”
Later that month, he wrote that “Someday SOON chit is gonna happen and this country will l;iterally EXPLODE, and when it does it will be a very messy situation… soon BOOM, we will explode. Hope you are prepared.”
Keebler hunting coyotes in 2011. (AP Photo/Al Hartmann – The Salt Lake Tribune)
By spring 2014, Keebler seemed to have a new personality altogether. He wrote near-constantly about what to do when SHTF (prepper-speak for “shit hits the fan”). He signed his posts “th3hunt3r.” He breathed in false information about the Bureau of Land Management killing endangered species and exhaled posts about the hypocrisy of not letting Cliven Bundy graze his cattle.
Much has been written about the algorithms employed by sites like YouTube, which keeps users on the site — generating more and more advertising dollars — by directing them toward more extreme content. Reporters and analysts often reflect on how this affects young people. But the algorithmic drive toward extreme content has taken hold with a much older generation, too, with guys like Keebler. Online, they can fantasize about who they’ll be when the end finally comes. They water their ignorance and hatred at an online trough with others who think just like them.
In April 2014, Keebler sprung into action after seeing a video on Facebook of a confrontation between Bureau of Land Management agents and protesters who’d assembled at the Bundys’ side — that video I mentioned way back at the beginning of this story, of Ammon Bundy being tased in the midst of a chaotic confrontation. Keebler loaded up his camper and drove several hours south to Bunkerville, Nevada, where he says he set up a mess hall and provided supplies.
“Well, I made it to the ranch, all is well, getting settled in, been intersting so far, and I aint shot no one, YET! lol” he wrote on his Facebook page on April 10 after he arrived.
Once there, Keebler solicited money online to help pay for supplies. He claims he kept hot tempers under control.
“I stopped some people wanted to shoot people,” he says to me at the truck stop. “One of them got mad about it and put a gun in my face. He wanted to start the war. … He said, ‘I’m gonna fire a shot just to get it started.’ … Things were that close. Volatile.”
Keebler also takes credit for ejecting Jerad and Amanda Miller — who would go on to murder two police officers in Las Vegas and die in the midst of a shoot-out with officers inside a Walmart. He claims that if it wasn’t for him, Bundy Ranch would have been a bloodbath. Less than a year later — according to Keebler’s defense attorney’s presentencing memo — an undercover FBI agent was embedded in Keebler’s own militia and then began to regularly talk about stepping into action, about blowing up federal agents and federal properties, and scouting a mosque as a potential target alongside Keebler.
And yet, Keebler never kicked that guy out.
II.
After the militias assisted in preventing the BLM from seizing the Bundy family’s cattle, Keebler left feeling excited about the movement. He lived on Bundy Ranch for about two weeks. “To me it was one of the biggest events in this country … short of the Boston Tea Party,” he says. “It was a wake-up call.”
“After the standoff and everything, we had momentum,” he says, offering his mug to the waiter for a refill. “It started because Cliven Bundy, but we started a movement that had the potential to be tenfold what it was.”
When he came back home to Utah, he quit the Oath Keepers. He proudly recounts a story about trading heated words at Bunkerville with the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Keebler claims he asked whether Rhodes would accept “radical Islamic Muslims” into the group; Rhodes said the Oath Keepers doesn’t discriminate. Back at home, he started his own militia: Patriots Defense Force (PDF).
At the height of its membership, PDF had just seven members including Keebler. They held “field training exercises” where they’d shoot targets. They’d talk about raising “backyard meat rabbits” and chickens, and living off-grid. Mostly, they were a bunch of preppers.
But before PDF was even formed — even had a name — the FBI began to monitor him, according to court documents submitted by Keebler’s defense team. They began immediately upon his return home from Bundy Ranch. The Bureau eventually embedded three confidential informants in his militia and three undercover agents, including two men who went by the names Brad Miller and Jake Davis. Miller and Davis — people Keebler believed to be other God-loving Patriots — were sworn into PDF in May 2015. Excluding Keebler, the FBI agents, and informants, there were — at most — three members of PDF.
According to the defense, one informant was paid $60,000 for his undercover work inside the militia. The stories the FBI agents gave to Keebler must have seemed like he found a gold mine: Davis told stories of his expertise in hand-to-hand combat; Miller positioned himself as an expert in mining and explosives. Another FBI agent played the part of a successful business guy interested in funding a militia.
Unlike all the other times Keebler imagined the government conspiring to snoop on him, this time they actually were — but he was so focused on the “deep state” that he didn’t seem to notice what was happening right in front of his face.
As the FBI surveilled Keebler, he frequently spoke about martial law. “Under marshal [sic] law, Mr. Keebler expected the federal government to turn against the people…” His attorney wrote in his sentencing memo, “He envisioned house-to-house gun confiscations and the government putting ‘undesirable’ and ‘unsalvageable’ people in FEMA camps.”
By fall 2015, Keebler was meeting with LaVoy Finicum. Finicum, too, had been excited by what he had encountered at Bundy Ranch: a group of citizens who believed in Cliven Bundy’s conspiracy theories about the federal government coming to get him.
Finicum, after seeing Cliven Bundy successfully get away with shirking his grazing costs, had recently violated the terms of his own BLM grazing permit — accruing fines for grazing his cattle out of season. Finicum spoke to Keebler about fortifying his property in case of a situation likeBundy Ranch — or maybe even Ruby Ridge or Waco.
“At the Bundy’s we got there after the fact. If we knew it was coming, we could be there prepared,” Keebler says. Finicum was expecting the same. He’d stopped paying his grazing fees after going to Bundy Ranch and assumed the BLM would come get him, too. “We were going to stop them from taking the cattle,” he says. “Now I don’t mean ambush assault and kill and shoot. None of that crap.”
Keebler walks Haas and I through the plan: When the BLM came in, apparently the group planned to dig out the road the agents came in on with a backhoe — making it impossible for them to leave. Miller pushed for the group to instead explode the road, he says. Keebler said that was crazy, and the two traded words over it.
The group, without Finicum, drove toward Mt. Trumbull, where the government says Keebler got his first view of a building owned by the BLM — the remote property that, months later, he aimed to destroy with a bomb.
Over the course of our interview, Keebler mentioned several arguments with Miller. But he always let him stay.
If he was so extreme, such a loose cannon, I had to wonder, why keep him?
Because Miller, Keebler says, paid for gas to go to Arizona to meet with Finicum, and Keebler alleges, even to Washington State for a secret ceremony in which he was inducted into a Coalition of Western States militia by Washington state representative Matt Shea. Read more…
Climate change isn’t a future condition for many Californians. Right now, coastal residents sweep water from their garages. San Francisco tourists slosh through seawater at the Embarcadero. Condemned houses perch above crumbling cliffs in Pacifica, and a solitary sidewalk runs past the space where apartments once stood. So what will the most populous state in the U.S. do to protect the communities, train tracks, and roads that line its coast? For The Los Angeles Times, journalist Rosanna Xia goes deep into this enormous, developing crisis, mapping specific points from Del Mar to Pacifica to understand what’s at stake, and to listen to residents debate what to do. People talk about building bigger seawalls and building beaches with new sand, but each strategy has its limitations and undesirable consequences.
Then there’s what scientists and economists and number-crunching consultants call “managed retreat”: Move back, relocate, essentially cede the land to nature. These words alone have roiled the few cities bold enough to utter them. Mayors have been ousted, planning documents rewritten, campaigns waged over the very thought of turning prime real estate back into dunes and beaches.
Retreat is as un-American as it gets, neighborhood groups declared. To win, California must defend.
But at what cost? Should California become one long wall of concrete against the ocean? Will there still be sandy beaches or surf breaks to cherish in the future, oceanfront homes left to dream about? More than $150 billion in property could be at risk of flooding by 2100 — the economic damage far more devastating than the state’s worst earthquakes and wildfires. Salt marshes, home to shorebirds and endangered species, face extinction. In Southern California alone, two-thirds of beaches could vanish.
The state has both no time and too much time to act, spiraling into paralyzing battles over the why, who, when and how. It’s not too late for Californians to lead the way and plan ahead for sea level rise, experts say, if only there is the will to accept the bigger picture.
Returning after mudslides and wildfire. Rebuilding in flood zones. The human urge to outmatch nature is age-old. We scoff at the fabled frog that boiled to death in a pot of slowly warming water — but refuse to confront the reality of the sea as it pushes deeper into our cities.
“I crossed the ocean and then the island for you,” Sancho said when he found me at the bar in Rincon, his white teeth shining like the keys of a piano. His small blue backpack was slung over his shoulder. He pushed back his long dread-locks and kissed me. “And it wasn’t easy,” he continued. “I had to take the ferry and then the wah-wah, and finally hitch a ride to Rincon. So here I am.”
“Here you are,” I said and smiled. We stood on the deck of the small noisy bar. The band had just taken a break, and my friend Tracy was inside talking to the guitarist.
“You called me, and I knew I had to come,” he added.
“How did you know I’d be at the Tamboo bar?” I asked.
“I knew,” he said and smiled. “This is the place to be.”
“And I’m always in the place to be,” I joked.
“You are,” he said with a seriousness that made me laugh harder.
I felt giddy at the idea of a man crossing an ocean and then an island for me, even as small as Puerto Rico was. We walked from the deck and into the sand, and under the palms watched the waves roll, crash, foam, and retreat onto the beach. I carried my sandals. The night filled with the sounds of crickets and coquis, the tiny singing frogs, and the smells of salt and the sweet decay of seaweed. Each wave shined blue-green, the crashing causing the bioluminescence, the same flash we’d seen while kayaking in the bay a few days earlier in the “Bio Bay” of Vieques.A blue-green glow zippered across the sand with each wave, the foam a patchwork of neon.
That’s when Sancho kissed me, and his broad mouth and soft lips took me by surprise, even though I’d been waiting two days, or maybe my lifetime, for a kiss to happen like that, on the edge of an island, between two palms, under a sky canvassed with stars. My toes splayed out onto the sand, the ground below me, shifting. Read more…
Part 1 of 5 of Bundyville: The Remnant, season two of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB. Catch up on season one of Bundyville here.
I.
When the house around the corner exploded, Richard Katschke and his wife, Karen, were reading scripture. The retired pair looked up from the pages and froze. In another room, a plastic light cover clattered to the floor.
It was a warm Wednesday. Mid-July 2016, about 8 p.m. Outside, a boy rode his bike near South Fifth Street. A man started a lawn mower.
The Katschkes were seated on a brown leather couch in a room they’d added onto their Panaca, Nevada, house years earlier for Richard’s elderly mother — both he and Karen called her “Mom.” She lived there until the Katschkes made her more comfortable at the nearby hospital in her final days, where a quiet nurse would rub her feet with cream and stay by her side, watching the old woman’s eyes for a sign she was ready to be with God.
The Katschkes never imagined that nurse, 59-year-old Glenn Jones, would, in the last seconds of his life, commit a bombing around the corner from their house — a cataclysmic event that would send a family screaming from their home seconds before it exploded and, even now, three years later, would still have no official explanation from federal authorities.
Glen Wadsworth was the last person to see Jones alive. He was pushing a lawn mower across the grass at his childhood home. Inside, his elderly father sat in front of the television.
Ever since Wadsworth was a teenager, he mowed the lawn the exact same way: pushing and pulling the machine from front yard to side yard to back. But for a reason he still can’t quite understand, that July evening he pushed and pulled a different way than ever before: front, back, side.
Wadsworth — a tall man with straight teeth and neatly combed hair who serves as a member of the local volunteer fire department — looked up from his mower to see Jones back a car up to the gray house next door, where Joshua and Tiffany Cluff lived with their three daughters. Jones parked, got out of the car, and waved to Wadsworth. Wadsworth waved back and continued mowing. He didn’t know Jones, but thought he looked familiar from when the Cluffs built the gray house and friends chipped in on the work.
Wadsworth didn’t see or hear Tiffany and her girls run out of the house, screaming into the telephone.
“911, What is your emergency?” the operator said.
“I … Someone … somebody showed up at my house with a bomb,” Tiffany Cluff panted into her neighbor’s phone. “He’s going to blow my house up.”
“Ma’am. Ma’am. Take a breath for me, OK? I can barely understand ya. What is happening?”
“We’re running away from my house,” Tiffany, hysterical, choked on her words. “I grabbed my kids and I ran.”
“He said he was going to kill you?”
“He said he was going to blow the house up.”
“OK, all right, take a couple breaths for me,” the dispatcher said. “Are you away from the home?”
“Ye—”
Tiffany couldn’t even finish the word “yes” before the sound of a bomb exploding and the heart-stopping screaming of three little girls flattened any other noise coming through the receiver.
“Oh my god!” she screamed. “He just blew my house up!”
Down the street, Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee — one of Glen Wadsworth’s oldest friends — was out in his yard with his dog when the blast shook his ribcage.
Lee smiles a lot for a cop — a wide, friendly grin under a thick mustache and a flat-top haircut. And in Panaca, he wears a lot of hats: He’s the sheriff, but he’s also the chief of the volunteer fire department and the county coroner. By July 2016, he’d been in law enforcement for nearly 30 years, and he knew that in Panaca, loud noises are often easily explained: a sonic boom from a military aircraft flying low around Nellis Air Force Base or the Nevada Test and Training Range.
But this was different. Normal noises don’t shake you from the inside. The sheriff yanked his dog into the house, grabbed the keys to his patrol rig, and sprinted back out again. He paused, trying to understand why, all around him, it sounded like a hailstorm was falling from the clear blue sky: “I knew something wasn’t right.”
Wadsworth was still mowing. He didn’t hear Jones shoot himself as he sat in the front seat of the car. Maybe the mower drowned out the sharp pop of the gun, or maybe he’d just fired so many gunshots of his own across the dry desert that he had conditioned himself not to flinch at the sound. But when he looked up from his mower and saw the house next door on fire, he sprinted toward it, believing the family was inside. He ran toward the house, but at the front door, it was as if he ran right smack into the palm of an invisible hand. “It was just like a wall. I just couldn’t.”
Another explosion sounded on the 911 call.
Sheriff Lee could see a mushroom cloud billowing when he looked down South Fifth Street. He assumed it had to be a fire, a gas explosion, an exploded transformer. A bomb? Here? In Panaca? Never crossed his mind.
The windows of the Wadsworth home exploded inward and a hunk of Jones’s car rocketed straight toward the old man sitting in his chair, landing just short at his feet. Glen Wadsworth, somehow, wasn’t hit by a thing.
The chipping house next door to the Cluff home inched sideways on its foundation. A chunk of shrapnel careened toward the boy on his bike, hitting him so hard in the shoulder that it knocked him to the ground, but miraculously, only left a small bruise.
The two explosions sent hot metal shrapnel flying upward, curving in long arcs over the remote desert town. A half mile away, debris rained on the high school. The football team, outside doing drills, dropped to the ground. Daggers of shrapnel stabbed into the sides of nearby houses. One piece punched through the roof of a garage, piercing the hood of the car parked inside.
In a town where nothing ever happens, a town where there are no secrets, suddenly there was mayhem.
“It was Glenn Jones,” Tiffany Cluff cried to the 911 dispatcher. “He said he was going to kill himself and blow up our house.”
As Sheriff Lee drove closer, he could see the destroyed house: It looked like a giant had mashed the house with colossal fists and twisted a car into a grotesque tangle of metal, leaving a deep crater in the pavement.
“Cars blow up like that in a movie,” Lee said. “They don’t normally blow up like that.”
Neighbors who’d gathered at the corner of Fifth and Hansen waved the sheriff down. “Stop! Stop!” he remembers them shouting as he pulled up to the scene. “You’re running over body parts!”
Sure enough, there on the ground lay a pair of legs.
It would be 14 hours before investigators would find the rest of Glenn Jones. His torso had flown out of sight, high into a neighbor’s tree.
Though the investigation was transferred to the hands of federal authorities, Sheriff Lee — in another of his roles, as county coroner — inspected the top half of the body when it was fished down from the branches. He was surprised to see two tattoos on the chest.
One clearly read DNR — medical code for “do not resuscitate.” The other was a phone number for the man whose house he had just exploded: Joshua Cluff.
***
A gravelly town on the sinful side of the Utah-Nevada border, the desert outpost of Panaca was established in the 1860s by Mormon pioneers whose legacies live on in the few street names here and in the last names of the people who still call this place home.
Today, Panaca is like a peninsula of Utah: the only town in Nevada that is dry, and one of just two in the state where gambling is prohibited. If you want a beer, you’ll have to drive 15 miles to Caliente — pronounced around these parts as “Cal-yen-ee” — to get one, at a smoky bar along a peeling downtown strip. Panaca, Caliente — they’re what you picture when you think of a Western town: At night, tumbleweeds blow down the middle of empty streets, coming to rest against a hardware store with deer heads and bobcat pelts on display in the window.
It’s a place where you know your neighbor, and you know that really knowing him means understanding what’s your business and what isn’t.
On Thursday, July 14, 2016, the day after the bombing, shrapnel lines a previously quiet street in Panaca, Nevada. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP)
Most Panacans worship together at an LDS church right smack in the center of town. A single market sells snacks and produce. The streets are pocked and rough. Chickens hustle busily in some yards, horses graze in others. Here and there, piles of junk look like they’ve been battered by desert winds for decades. Next to the high school, a massive mint-green rock formation called Court Rock bubbles skyward, named for the way young folks traditionally have “courted” there; on my visit, a condom wrapper stomped into the silty mud at the rock’s foot suggested that’s still the case.
A sign displaying the Ten Commandments guards the town, as if its presence will keep the Devil out. Panaca may have a Nevada zip code, but Lord knows it’s God’s country.
Panaca is the birthplace of John Yeates Barlow, one of the most influential leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a group that still practices polygamy. LDS folks here are adamant that they would never want to be confused for FLDS, but most don’t mind having them as neighbors.
Mormonism, after all, is what built Panaca, and polygamists historically have had a place in Lincoln County. In the mid-2000s, essentially with the blessing of the FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs, a group that operated a 3,000-acre ranch more than 40 miles north of the town. The Caliente-Panaca area was a special place for Jeffs: At the Caliente Hot Springs Motel, Jeffs reportedly held underage wedding ceremonies at a moment’s notice.
When the FLDS farm sprung up, Sheriff Lee said the group was clear that they didn’t want the police in their business. So he drove up to introduce himself, shook their hands, and assured them they could call if they needed help. They were “good, good people,” he said, who were living under the direction of Jeffs: “A bad guy. A bad man.” (After a conviction on charges of felony rape was reversed by the Utah Supreme Court, Jeffs was sentenced by a Texas court to life in prison for sexually assaulting two followers — age 12 and 15 — in what his church deemed a “spiritual marriage.”)
Living here means looking the other way sometimes. Picking your battles. More than one Panacan told me they wouldn’t want to speculate about why a bombing occurred in their town, but then offered an opinion anyway: A lot of people here think the bomb was simply a loud, messy expression of a workplace grievance between Glenn Jones and Joshua Cluff.
Jones, for years, did live in Panaca, and worked under Joshua Cluff as a nurse at the Grover C. Dils Medical Center in Caliente — just across the highway from the Caliente Hot Springs. Records from the Nevada State Board of Nursing show Jones’s license was revoked after he failed to “document administration or waste” of three separate doses of morphine in a two-month span. Messages left for Grover C. Dils Medical Center staff for this story went unreturned, but in 2016 one administrator told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that Jones left his job there voluntarily and on good terms. Even so, some Panacans think maybe Jones blamed Cluff, and that’s enough explanation for why he bombed him. Sheriff Lee is skeptical of the whole workplace grievance theory. “I don’t think that was a major reason for the bombing,” Lee said.
After leaving his nursing job, Jones moved several hours south to a blue-and-white-striped mobile home in the Zuni Village RV Park in Kingman, Arizona. His camper, parked in Space #69, was at the center of the park, surrounded by homes with mostly graying retired folks.
Upon entering Jones’s RV the day after the explosion in Panaca, bomb technicians found multiple devices, several of which were “fully functional,” one officer wrote in his report. A neighbor told police they’d seen him carrying a large artillery shell into his RV, but Jones was known to buy items like it in the area, restoring and reselling them to other collectors. So most people didn’t bat an eye.
But police accounts paint a picture of a trailer brimming with bomb-making materials: metal containers, fuses, power tools, smokeless powder. Ammo cans were stacked under his dining room table. Even his shower had projectiles inside.
On a nightstand, investigators found three spiral-bound notebooks each with Jones’s name written on the front. Inside one, he had drawn diagrams for a bomb, which gave investigators reason to believe the devices were originally intended for a different target.
“The entries indicated that Glenn Jones had been approached [by] a subject identified as ‘Josh’ who offered to pay him to construct an explosive device,” wrote one detective.
“The intended target of the device was identified on one page as ‘Forth of July BLM Field Office,’” the detective continued. “The journal entries indicate that there was a falling out between Jones and ‘Josh,’ and that Jones instead decided to target ‘Josh’ with his explosive device, or ‘bomb.’
“Jones went on to document that ‘Josh’ is the cousin of LaVoy Finicum and seemed to indicate this was a possible motive for the planned attack on the BLM Field Office.”
In his office, up the road from Panaca in the town of Pioche, Nevada, Sheriff Lee keeps a large chunk of the bomb — one of the pieces the FBI didn’t seize. Just touching a finger to its razor-sharp edges is enough to draw blood. “These bombs were actually bomb artillery shells made to make shrapnel,” he said, “made to kill people.”
Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval and Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee outside the destroyed Cluff home on July 15, 2016. (Brett Le Blanc/Las Vegas Review-Journal via AP.)
****
At the heart of what little is known about the events in Panaca was the handwritten documentation left behind by the bomber. It makes clear that Jones had an interest in Finicum — one of the central figures in the so-called Patriot movement, a collection of anti-government groups that includes the conspiratorial militia-types and sovereign citizens who flocked to the anti-government standoffs and way of thinking popularized by the Bundy family. Finicum was only ever in the movement at the end of his life, but he became a martyr for it in his death in January 2016, when he was shot and killed by law enforcement. He was fleeing a traffic stop in Oregon during which authorities intended to arrest the leaders of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation.
The car Jones blew up in Panaca was a rental. When police entered the dark green 2007 Saturn Ion that Jones owned, parked in an Avis rental car parking lot, inside they found out more about Jones and Cluff. There was a 2014 contract for a land purchase with both of their names on it and an agreement for Jones to pay Cluff $50,000.
Two years before the bombing, Jones also deposited $9,000 into an interest-bearing bank account that would mature in one year and, ultimately, be payable at the time of his death to one person: Cluff.
Much like in the rest of the U.S., people in Panaca don’t talk much about domestic terrorism these days. They likely have a better reason to talk about it than other Americans, but Panacans explain the bombing away — that what’s important to remember is that some gesture of holy providence saved them that day.
At the town’s only bed and breakfast, the mother of the kid on the bike — the only person to be hit by shrapnel — served me pancakes and eggs in the morning and mentioned she thinks “angels of our ancestors” were watching over the town that day the bomb went off.
Panacans believe their collective faith in God bent the trajectories of shrapnel to miss Wadsworth and his father. That faith kept shards of glass out of eyes, harnessed flames and surging power lines, and kept the Cluff family alive.
If God saved this town, why think about the bad parts of the story anymore — even if there’s never been an official explanation for what happened? Besides, could domestic terrorism really happen in a place like this, where everyone knows everyone else, where every house is a home?
People laugh darkly about the bombing now: The way, a few days later, a lady caught her dog gnawing on an unfamiliar bone and realized his snack was actually human. The way people still find odd remnants and assume they’re pieces of shrapnel. The way dozens of birds, for weeks, pecked away at some of the Chinese elm trees where Jones’s body parts landed.
Every spring, when Richard Katchske plants a line of flowers along his fence, he digs out twisted nobs of shrapnel from the dirt. Katchske showed me a piece, holding a brownish-black gnarl in his palm. I could have it if I wanted. I declined.
“It’ll be a legacy I pass on to my kids,” he laughed.
II.
Last year, when Bundyville came out, I felt satisfied that I’d found the answers I’d come looking for about the Bundy family and the Patriot movement, and I felt I had a sense of their place in America’s long-standing anti-government movement.
The Bundys created flash points members of those movements could rally around: Their very public confrontation in 2014 near their Bunkerville, Nevada, ranch was borne out of long-simmering discontent with how federal agencies have treated rural people in the American West. In the case of the Bundy family, that was combined with specific gripes about how Mormon pioneers, who tried to flee America in the 1800s to create a new homeland, were treated. Then, in the 1950s, those same people in Nevada, Arizona, and Utah were showered with nuclear fallout without any warning from the government. But the 2014 standoff was also based on a conspiracy theory being pushed by the Bundys: that the feds couldn’t actually own land, and that the Bundys were entitled to graze cattle on public land for free.
So by 2014, when Bureau of Land Management agents came to collect on long-unpaid federal grazing fees — racked up by the family patriarch, Cliven Bundy, as his cattle lived on public land without a BLM permit — the family combined forces with anti-government militia groups willing to point guns at those officials. And it worked. They kept their cows. The Patriot movement declared victory. The feds turned tail.
Then, in 2016, when two of Bundy’s sons, Ammon and Ryan, helped lead the 41-day armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, it was the sequel to Bundy Ranch. Anti-government groups looking to stick a finger (or a gun barrel) in the government’s eye convened in one location, as if to dare the feds to chase them out. They talked about Waco and Ruby Ridge. They said they were ranchers upset over grazing prices and the arrest and conviction of Dwight and Steven Hammond, two Oregon cattlemen who’d gone to prison for setting fire to federal land. But really, it was an event that brought out kitted-up militia guys and kitted-up guys who wanted to look like militia guys, sovereign citizens, jaded veterans, Islamophobes, white supremacists, and fringe politicians out in force.
One of the few actual ranchers who did come to the Bundys’ side at Malheur was Finicum: a 54-year-old Arizona rancher who assumed a leadership role at the Oregon occupation and was killed there. But in his death, the Patriot movement got a new martyr.
Last year, I thought I knew what that meant, how this concept of “Bundyville,” to me, was a state of mind. You believe whatever you want about the world, even if you know very well it isn’t true — as if by thinking this way you will manifest it into existence. And that felt like a way of understanding the deep divides in America right now.
But then, something I didn’t expect happened.
After we released Bundyville, these conspiracy theories I’d heard about in the Patriot movement — ones that were always there, but never central to my reporting on the Bundy family — started popping into the headlines more and more. The Guardian reported that investigators, upon looking into motivations for why Stephen Paddock committed a deadly shooting spree in Las Vegas, encountered stories of his supposed sovereign citizen ideology and a purported belief that FEMA runs concentration camps meant to round up Americans.
Then, in March 2019, a Florida man named Cesar Sayoc Jr. pleaded guilty to mailing 16 explosives to a dozen prominent Democrats and billionaire investor George Soros. Within the Patriot movement, talk about Soros — who has been the target of conspiratorial rhetoric by Trump — was something I’d heard more than once. But now the President of the United States was known for floating conspiracies about Soros. Last fall, he told reporters he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the caravan of migrants approaching the southern border were paid to come to the U.S. He added, “a lot of people say” the migrants were funded by Soros.
Back in 2016, when I covered the Oregon Standoff trial, I spent a lot of time talking to Patriot Movement supporters outside the courthouse. Our conversations, often, would feel normal until, quite suddenly, they’d take a hard turn; conversations about federal overreach would turn to conspiracies about the so-called New World Order, shadowy cabals of “globalist” leaders, implementation of sharia law, and supposed terrorist training camps in the U.S. They told me about Agenda 21 — a United Nations plan of action, which they believed would use sustainable development to redistribute wealth and turn the U.S. into a communist state. They talked about Uranium One, a conspiracy in which Hillary Clinton supposedly sold uranium to Russia in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation.
I wrote them all down, but then threw those notepads into a blue Rubbermaid bin in my office and mostly forgot about them.
But those conspiracy theories kept resurfacing. The day after Sayoc was arrested, another conspiracy theorist was in the news: An antisemite named Robert Bowers, who’d been posting to a social media site largely populated by racists, and stands accused of opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue, murdering 11 and injuring 7 — motivated by his apparent belief that Jews are “children of Satan” and were to blame for any problems in the United States.
I’d heard things like this before, too, when learning about how Christian Identity — some followers of which believe that Jews are the spawn of Eve and Satan — drove people to form the Posse Comitatus movement, which considered the northwestern United States as a possible outpost for an all-white nation. People like that have found a home, too, within the Patriot movement.
When I asked Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, about conspiracist thinking, he offered that a conspiracy theory develops as a way of fitting in with someone’s worldview. Or it can explain a dramatic event with an equally dramatic theory. He uses President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — and more than 50 years of conspiracy theories about what occurred that day — as an example of how the psychology functions. “It’s a psychological thing where what actually happened is simply too simple for someone to be satisfied with,” he said. “The idea that one person killed the president is just not satisfactory to some people. For such a big event like that they seek an equally big and complex explanation.”
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Pitcavage sees conspiracy theories as the beating heart of the anti-government movement: “All the main movements in the Patriot movement are dominated by conspiracy theories.”
Suddenly, these ideas I’d scribbled down a few years ago were becoming a key conversation in America, and they gave me a sense of what the fringe edge of the far right was willing to believe. So when the president floated half-baked stories to push his agenda, they were willing to hop on board.
As steam built during the government shutdown in the winter of 2019 around President Trump’s plan to build a border wall along the southern edge of the United States, I felt like I was watching a Patriot movement passion project come to fruition. Trump, by then, was justifying the wall’s construction by telling tall tales that cartels were sending drugs over the border and terrorists were streaming into the country. Even Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican representative from Texas called bullshit.
One of the Bundys seemed to be talking relative sense on this topic. Throughout the past few years I’ve heard the family continually explain their unsubstantiated interpretation of the United States Constitution — and now Ammon Bundy, of all people, was telling his acolytes that Trump’s rhetoric about “the wall” wasn’t real. He called for compassion for people fleeing persecution, poverty, and fear. Trump, he said, “has basically called them all criminals,” and Bundy urged his followers to see that the president was peddling conspiracies.
Ammon Bundy in a video posted to Facebook in 2018, which made some internet commenters joke that he was becoming “woke.”
“What about individuals? What about those who have come for reasons of need for their families?” Bundy asked in a Facebook video. “The fathers, the mothers, and the children that come here and are willing to go through the process to apply for asylum so they can come into this country and benefit from not having to be oppressed continually?” Bundy scoffed that anyone could actually believe migrants had been paid by George Soros.
Some of his followers were outraged. Chatter went around online about Ammon Bundy being “woke.” My head spun. I called Ammon Bundy at his Idaho home as news outlets were breathlessly reporting that Cliven Bundy’s most well-known son had left the militia movement. I, too, was interested. Here he was, dividing himself from a group of people from which he’d so clearly benefited. Suddenly, the most anti-government of his followers needed to choose who to believe: Bundy, a man who had twice led them in confrontations with the feds, or the commander in chief himself, the literal embodiment of the government. Many chose the president. Even if what Trump was saying wasn’t based in reality, he was pushing an anti-immigration stance they could get behind.
Maybe Ammon Bundy realized that and saw it was a good time to bow out. His family was free. The Hammonds — the other ranchers at the center of the Bundy-led Malheur standoff — got a pardon from Trump last summer. Anti–public lands figures cycled in and out of the Department of the Interior. Bundy’s brother, Ryan, ran and lost his bid for Nevada governor, but otherwise, things were coming up Bundy.
Over the phone, Ammon claimed never to have been in the militia movement, and he told me people with fringe ideas have always been the minority of those who come to his family’s side. “Ninety-eight percent probably or better are people that are very peaceful people,” he said. “At Malheur, we considered ourselves to be on the people’s land, and who am I to say [militias] could come or couldn’t come? That makes it difficult to police yourselves.”
So I asked him: OK, what’s next?
“I had a reporter a few months ago come to my house and he said, ‘I hear you’re building a 100-man army. No! It couldn’t be farther from the truth,” he said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what I would do with an army.’”
Would he make a “hard stand” again?
“I certainly would if there was an individual or family that I felt would benefit from it. But heavens no,” he said without hesitation. He said he’s “not afraid to do what’s right,” but that as far as another standoff is concerned: “I have no desire, I don’t believe that is where change will be made.”Maybe the Bundys are only anti-government when it’s convenient for them. But — and this sounds crazy even to me — I have to hand it to Ammon Bundy for trying to talk some sense into a historically itchy movement, to use his position to call for calm and normalcy.
And that’s why I realized we had to make more Bundyville. We are living in Bundyville. The truth is not winning. The center is not holding. The anti-government is now pro-president. And as I continued to report on the stories that make up this series, blood kept being spilled around the world in the name of conspiracies. In Pittsburgh, in New Zealand, in Southern California. Read more…
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