You’ve seen the plot in plenty of movie Westerns: a peaceful town is besieged by outlaws, often working for some powerful interest, and struggles to overcome the threat. That is also the plot of Patrick Strickland’s The Marauders: Standing Up to Vigilantes in the American Borderlands, published today by Melville House. But this is no made-up story. The powerful interest is Trump and the white supremacist movement emboldened by him, the outlaws are several different militia and vigilante groups, and the town is Arivaca, Arizona, on the Mexican border.
Yes, after last week’s joyous, nostalgic visit with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen via Renegades: Born in the USA, I'm back in the horrors of our violent, fragmented, hate-fueled present reality.
The book opens cinematically, with the town‘s sole bar kicking militia members out, with signs posted saying the town didn’t want them around, and the various militias threatening, and posting of social media about how the town was a nexus of evil drug traffickers, human traffickers and child sexual exploiters. There are references to an incident nine years earlier, in which some right-wing militias had been involved in gunning a town resident and his nine-year-old daughter.
The tension is set, but you’ll have to be on edge for a while, wondering how this will turn out, because the book now takes a more journalistic approach. Strickland devotes the following chapter to an overview of anti-immigrant and white supremacist attitudes throughout U.S. history. Even Ben Franklin, generally one of the more revered founding fathers (though in fact he too owned slaves for most of his life), gets called out: he described German immigrants as “the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own nation”, and expressed fears that the white Protestant majority of the U.S. could be diluted, saying “The Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion, as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted.”
He covers the first anti-immigration laws in the US, in 1790 and 1795, violence against Irish Catholics in the early 19th Century, the heyday of the racist Know-Nothing Party, more spasms of anti-immigration laws later in the 19th Century. We learn of the vigilantes who patrolled the Mexican border in the 1850s, seeking to intercept escaped slaves seeking passage to Mexico. There are the Palmer Raids in the early 20th Century, arresting European and Russian immigrants on the suspicion of being Communists. We read of Madison Grant’s 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler later used as inspiration for Mein Kampf, and of the Klansmen who took to patrolling the Mexican border in the 1970s. In short, we learn how racist, anti-immigrant thoughts and actions have been an ever-present thread throughout US history.
An intervening chapter heightens the sense of dread by recounting in full the 2009 deadly incident when an action by a militia to secure financing by eliminating a family they saw as a rival drug dealer ended with the death of a father and daughter. The incident both divided and traumatized the residents of Arivaca, and set up the confrontation nine years later when the militias returned.
The book next focuses on some of the more notorious militia leaders, both their early activities and their rise to prominence in the Trump years, emboldened and energized by the racist rhetoric coming from the White House. As we learn of their past, we see them inexorably coming to focus on the town of Arivaca.
In 2018, town resident Rachel Krause, a supporter of humanitarian work to assist those crossing the border and a tenacious researcher of the social media postings of the militias, heard a commotion in front of her house. There she saw Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer, leader of the vigilante group Veterans on Patrol, in the street in front of her house. “Let’s be clear,” he shouted into his phone as he livestreamed, “this is Lewis Arthur outside Rachel Krauses’s house. Let every neighbor out here know that this piece of shit, Luciferian piece of shit, is aiding child traffickers.”
Krause went back into the house, sent her daughter off into another room, then reemerged with her phone in one hand and her nine-millimeter Sig Sauer pistol in the other.
“She is a fucking coward,” ranted Meyer. “Piece of shit, and here I stand on a public road to show you what this piece of shit is doing. Here she is: she can’t hide behind her computer no more, America….You’re on live video, Rachel….I’m gonna expose you. I ain’t here to hurt you. Why would I hurt you. Doesn’t do me no good. I’ll expose you; that’s how we hurt you.”
Around the same time, Tim Foley, head of another militia group, Arizona Border Recon, moved to Arivaca, right around the corner from where the deadly 2009 confrontation had taken place. The town bar, La Gitana, banned him. Many townspeople shunned him. Anti-militia signs went up along the main road. Another militia leader, Bryan Melchior of the Utah Gun Exchange, had rigged up an armored Bearcat vehicle with a big fake gun of top, and had taken to roaming the streets.
The town called a meeting, and 70 people showed up. They made plans to track and document the militia’s online hate speech, to lobby local businesses to blackball them, to put pressure on law enforcement to rein in the militias, and to display antimilitia signs even more prominently around town. In response, the militias began calling out the town in ever more menacing terms on their social media, demonizing the residents and riling up their supporters into a frenzy of hate.
And then….
Well, and then, not so much. Life goes on, and, somewhat surprisingly, the town of Arivaca is hardly mentioned at all in the last hundred or so pages of The Marauders. The book isn’t a movie after all. If you want a climactic scene of the town against the outlaws, The Magnificent Seven is available to stream.
Instead, Strickland widens his view to take in the entire nation in the years leading up to the 2020 election. He follows the militias as they roam the borderlands in many states, stirring up trouble everywhere. He follows the militia leaders, boosted by Trump’s rhetoric, as they are invited to speak at political rallies and conferences nationwide, spewing their hateful views and lunatic QAnon theories. He spotlights militia and white supremacist violence around the country. We relive the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue anti-Semitic massacre in Pittsburgh, where eleven worshipers were slain. We revisit Patrick Crusius targeting Mexicans in the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, in which he gunned down 23 people. We see Cecilia Fulbright crashing her car into two others in Texas, believing she is chasing down child traffickers. We see the plot in Michigan to kidnap governor Democratic Gretchen Whitmer. And he takes us to Washington DC and the seditionist mob storming the Capitol on January 6th, 2020.
The sobering truth, the book seems to say, is that we are all the townspeople of Arivaca, every one of us wherever we live. The white supremacists taunt every one of us as being ‘Luciferian pieces of shit’, and the threat of violence that those beliefs can instigate is only a step from the shadows away. It is up to each of us to stand up to the hate.
Book News
This Week’s New Hardcover Releases
I also post a comment of the week’s new releases of interest to the BIPOC community, usually in the Tuesday Black Kos diary. Here is today’s list.
- The First Kennedys: The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty, by Neal Thompson. Based on genealogical breakthroughs and previously unreleased records, this is the first book to explore the inspiring story of the poor Irish refugee couple who escaped famine, created a life together in a city hostile to Irish, immigrants, and Catholics, and launched the Kennedy dynasty in America.
- The Revenge of Power: How Autocrats Are Reinventing Politics for the 21st Century, by Moisés Naím. An unusually comprehensive armada of facts about the international drift over the past two decades toward authoritarian leaders, whether old-style dictators like Kim Jong Un or nominally elected presidents like Vladimir Putin.
- The Man Who Tasted Words: A Neurologist Explores the Strange and Startling World of Our Senses, by Dr. Guy Leschziner. The author leads readers through the senses and how, through them, our brain understands or misunderstands the world around us. And what does the book you’re reading now taste like?
- Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything, by Kelly Weill. When faced with a complicated world out of our control, humans have always sought patterns to explain the inexplicable. We meet historical figures like the nineteenth-century grifter who first popularized the theory, as well as the many modern-day Flat Earthers Weill herself gets to know, from moms on vacation to determined creationists to neo-Nazi rappers. We discover what, and who, converts people to Flat Earth belief, and what happens inside the rabbit hole.
- The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann, by Ananyo Bhattacharya. The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann.
- Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India's Freedom, by Ramachandra Guha. The little-known story of seven foreigners—four British, two American, and one Irish, four men, three women—who joined the movement fighting for India’s freedom from British colonial rule.
- Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan. It won six Oscars and has been hailed as the greatest action film ever, but it is a miracle Mad Max: Fury Road ever made it to the screen… or that anybody survived the production. The story of this modern classic spanned nearly two decades of wild obstacles as visionary director George Miller tried to mount one of the most difficult shoots in Hollywood history.
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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