Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America

The Oklahoma City bombing was met with intense public revulsion, especially because 19 of the 168 victims were children in the facility’s daycare center. The public’s shock was even greater when the culprit was revealed to be a clean-cut (and white) Army veteran from upstate New York. However, public interest in the case tended to center around McVeigh the individual, obscuring his extensive connections with the white power movement. McVeigh was executed in June 2001, and in September 2001, Osama bin Laden decisively replaced him as the face of evil in America.

The so-called Global War on Terror conspicuously left out domestic, white power terrorists from its list of targets. Ironically, the War on Terror did a great deal to fuel the sentiments the white power movement thrived on, especially a suspicion of foreigners and frustration with a government that failed to eradicate an enemy it had represented as an existential threat. Meanwhile, a large swath of veterans were struggling to find meaning in their sacrifices while making the often-difficult transition to civilian life. These trends accelerated with the campaign and then election of Barack Obama, whose foreign (especially Muslim) family background and harsh critiques of Bush-era policies created a widespread impression that he was a Manchurian Candidate, a tool of foreign powers plotting to destroy the country from within. Such ideas were hardly the exclusive provenance of a radical fringe, as well-known television personality Donald Trump bolstered the “birther” conspiracy theory, which held that Obama was born in Kenya, was Muslim, and that his origins had been covered up by terrorists for whom Obama was either an unwitting dupe or a top agent.

When Trump himself entered the White House in 2017, white supremacy represented the most common cause of violent attacks on US soil, but that same year the number of incidents skyrocketed. The most notorious of these was the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Protesting the imminent removal of a Robert E. Lee statue, a collection of Klan, neo-Nazi, and neo-Confederate activists stormed into the city and brawled with counter-protestors until one neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd and killed a young woman. Scores of attacks followed, including the massacre of a Pittsburg synagogue by a man who blamed the congregants for an imminent “invasion” of undocumented immigrants, as well as a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, also targeting immigrants. The disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the protests following the murder of George Floyd fed into conspiracy theories of a scheming government and violent hordes of non-white peoples. Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and refusal to accept the results drove this conspiratorial mindset into overdrive, culminating in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.