A Death in Wichita (17 page)

In the last week of October 2008, I attended a rally for Barack Obama in downtown Denver, his final Colorado appearance before the presidential election. One hundred thousand people turned out to see him on a clear, chilly morning, but the candidate was more than twenty minutes late, giving me time to study the overflow crowd. Most people looked cheerful and optimistic about Obama’s chances of election, and relieved that the lengthy campaign was almost at an end. As we stood and waited in the hard-edged autumn sunshine, I thought back to early 2007, when Obama and his wife, Michelle, had appeared on
60 Minutes
and talked about his running for the White House. Michelle was asked about her fear of her husband being assassinated, and her concerns were visible in her body language and facial expressions. She was clearly worried that if he aspired to the highest office on earth, something tragic could happen to him and their family, not to mention the rest of the country. One could only guess at the private conversations the two of them must have had around this subject and the pressures on him not to run.

Obama himself was much cooler on the topic, as if he’d thought about his possible demise and then put it out of his mind. He couldn’t do what he hoped to do for himself or America if he were too consumed by violent scenarios, and he hadn’t come this far by letting dread limit his dreams. The interview ended, but had haunted me ever since. Watching him campaign throughout 2007 and 2008, I’d had mixed feelings about how he’d dealt with those who attacked him politically and labeled him a “Marxist” or a “racist” or called him other derogatory names. Sometimes, I wanted him to drop his politeness and give criticism back as harshly as he’d received it, but in the back of my mind was Michelle’s sense that he had enemies everywhere and might be surrounded by danger. Seeking the presidency in these circumstances was, to say the least, a delicate balance.

When Obama finally showed up that morning in Denver, tens of thousands of us were too far away to see him and the public address system was arranged so that his words collided and reverberated in the October sky, making them unintelligible. That didn’t matter. The feeling in the air, one of unity and hope, was more important, as if the country might be able to come together at last after this election and heal old wounds, focus on public issues instead of personality differences, and rally around a new young president. For half an hour on that Sunday morning, it was easy to forget that other Americans were attending rallies expressing their hatred of Obama by shouting, “Kill him! Kill him!” Or that two racist skinheads had just been taken into custody in Tennessee and charged with an alleged plot to murder more than a hundred black Americans—intending to behead some of them—and to assassinate Obama.

Three months later, during the inauguration ceremony in Washington, D.C., the nation’s positive feelings toward the president-elect were on full display, as hundreds of thousands of people had traveled across the country and were standing out in the bitter cold to celebrate the swearing-in of the first African-American president. The
New York Times
columnist Gail Collins giddily described the event as “Wood stock without the mud.” Regardless of where one stood politically, maybe reconciliation and congressional bipartisanship really could become a reality. The nation was ensnared in two long-running wars and its worst economic implosion in decades. Millions of people had lost their jobs and millions more would soon be out of work, setting off tremors of a total collapse and another Great Depression. For months, financial analysts had been laying out the many intricacies and complexities of the monetary crisis, while searching for solutions.

Bashing the U.S. government had long ago become a lucrative career on the country’s airwaves: anyone who relied on public money was dependent, weak, and unable to compete in the marketplace. Now citizens from Wall Street to Main Street, starting with the executives running the housing, auto, and banking industries, turned to the only place they could—the federal government—to help their companies, their families, and themselves. The feds, supported by both Republicans and Democrats, provided them with hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts, an imperfect solution to a perfect mess. Was this crisis enough to make Americans give up the “us versus them” mentality and work in unison for the greater good? Was it time for the United States, facing dire challenges from every angle, to start pulling itself together instead of apart? One striking answer came four days before the inauguration.

According to a 2001 article in
U.S. News and World Report
, the syndicated radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh had an eight-year radio contract worth $31.25 million a year. On July 2, 2008, Matt Drudge, the creator and editor of the Internet news service the
Drudge Report
, stated online that Limbaugh had signed a new contract extension through 2016, worth over $400 million, breaking all records for any broadcast medium. Six months later, on January 16, 2009, Limbaugh read a letter on his program about a request he’d just received from a national print media outlet. Could he could send them four hundred words on his hope for the Obama presidency?

“I don’t need four hundred words,” he said on the air. “I need four: I hope he fails…What is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here.”

(One year after public monies were provided to keep key American industries alive, an independent panel overseeing this process concluded that the program “can be credited with stopping an economic panic”).

Hearing Limbaugh call for Obama’s failure
before
he became president, with the country in the midst of a financial disaster and countless other challenges, evoked a feeling I had trouble identifying at first. Then it hit me: it was ten years ago and I was back at Columbine High School, watching parents and students kneel down in the mud and cry. We couldn’t make eye contact or say anything to one another, because the collective shame at the school was larger and deeper than words. The undeniable truth had finally caught up with us. We’d allowed something to fester and grow, and now we all got to face the consequences and the pain of that indifference or neglect.

But Rush and his media allies were just entertainers, weren’t they? What possible effect could all the name-calling have on the general population or the new president during a worldwide crisis? The radio talk show host Michael Savage called the president “a naked Marxist,” while Glenn Beck said that America was moving “towards a totalitarian state” and the country now reminded him of the “early days of Adolf Hitler.”

In February 2009, as the Obamas were settling into the White House, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, issued its latest
Intelligence Report
, detailing the current growth of hate groups in the United States, whose numbers had increased by more than 50 percent since 2000 and were expanding once again. The SPLC attributed this rise to fears about nonwhite immigration, but underscored that the election of a black man to the Oval Office was another major factor. The continuing economic meltdown was a third cause, because many blamed this on racial minorities and undocumented Latino immigrants. When the study came out, it initially got little attention, especially compared to the ongoing statements of Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. On March 3, Beck appeared on Fox TV’s
Fox and Friends
and said that he wanted to dispel reports that under the Obama presidency the Federal Emergency Management Administration was building secret concentration camps for Americans.

“We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination,” Beck said on the air. “I have to tell you, I am doing a story tonight, that I wanted to debunk these FEMA camps. I’m tired of hearing about them…Well we’ve now for several days been doing research on them—I can’t debunk them! And we’re going to carry the story tonight…”

In December 2008, a month after the presidential election, Amber Cummings, who shot her husband to death in Belfast, Maine, told authorities that James Cummings was “very upset” with Obama’s recent win. He’d been in touch with white supremacist groups and had talked about building a “dirty bomb” filled with deadly radioactive materials. When searching Cummings’s home, police found components for making that bomb and an application to the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, filled out by the dead man. His wife, who served no jail time for the shooting, explained that for years he’d subjected her to mental, physical, and sexual abuse. The day after Obama’s inauguration, Keith Luke, a white man in Brockton, Massachusetts, allegedly murdered two black people and planned to kill as many Jews as he could on that same night. Police said he’d been reading white supremacist Web sites, fearful that the Caucasian race was facing genocide.

On March 24, Private First Class Nicholas Daniel Hanke and Kody Brittingham, a former lance corporal now out of the Marine Corps, were charged with making threats against President Obama. In early April, a gunman in Pittsburgh, Richard Poplawski, allegedly killed three police officers. Internet postings by Poplawski showed that he was motivated by racist and anti-Semitic ideology—believing that Zionists were running the world. The postings also revealed anti-government conspiracy theories and the belief that President Obama would pass restrictive gun laws. A New Mexico elementary school teacher, sixty-one-year-old Ellen Wood, was strangled to death as her alleged assailants shouted anti-Semitic slurs at her.

Hate crimes had risen slightly in 2008, with 7,783 incidents and 9,691 victims, including individuals, businesses, and institutions. While statistics were not yet available for early 2009, the violence reported since the election of Barack Obama had generated concern within the Department of Homeland Security. Three days after the tragedy in Pittsburgh, the DHS issued a report entitled, “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” The DHS document reflected many of the conclusions of the Southern Poverty Law Center two months earlier, warning of the dangers of right-wing extremists in the U.S. military and other groups who might “attempt to recruit and radicalize returning [military] veterans…

“The consequences of a prolonged economic downturn—including real estate foreclosures, unemployment, and an inability to obtain credit—could create a fertile recruiting environment for rightwing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past…

“Rightwing extremists have capitalized on the election of the first African American president, and are focusing their efforts to recruit new members, mobilize existing supporters, and broaden their scope and appeal through propaganda…The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.”

The DHS document was met with indignation and outrage from GOP politicians and right-wing pundits, who saw it as an attack on conservatives and veterans. The outcry was so strong that Secretary Janet Napolitano felt compelled to apologize to veterans’ organizations, but that wasn’t enough for some. The Republican Party chairman, Michael Steele, called the report the “height of insult” and the televangelist and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson said that it “shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question.”

Two weeks after the report was released, Joshua Cartwright allegedly shot to death two Okaloosa County, Florida, sheriff’s deputies who’d responded to a domestic disturbance call. Authorities said that Cartwright was interested in militia groups, and his wife told police that he was “severely disturbed” by Obama’s election.

In the mid-1980s, when Morris Dees was running the Southern Poverty Law Center, he’d been on a hit list put together by the Order in the buildup to killing Alan Berg. Unlike Berg, Dees had survived. In 2009, after the SPLC released its new report, I called Mark Potok, who now headed the organization. With the election of President Obama, he said, the country had entered a cycle that reminded him of the early Clinton administration years, with the inferno at Waco and the prelude to the Oklahoma City bombing.

“In the mid-1990s, the militia movement got bigger and bigger, then peaked in about 1996,” Potok said. “Besides Oklahoma City, there were forty or fifty other major domestic terror plots out there that didn’t happen. They wanted to blow up a natural gas refinery outside of Fort Worth and kill thirty thousand people. All this caused a real crackdown by law enforcement, who began arresting militia members on weapons violations and giving them seven- or eight-year sentences. That had a real effect and the movement eventually ran out of steam.

“It started to pick back up again after 2000 over the immigration issue. During the next few years, we saw two to three hundred new groups emerge, with people going down to the Mexican border and patrolling it with their own weapons. We don’t list these as hate groups, but then the actual hate groups also started talking about immigration, not race. They went whole hog on immigration, saying that it was going to destroy America. In 2000, we had 602 hate groups. By 2008, we had 926.

“We saw seven or eight straight years of hate-group growth driven by immigration, until early 2009. With the falling economy and the rise of Obama, new issues came into play. David Duke [the ‘white nationalist’ and former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, former Republican Louisiana state representative, and former presidential candidate] wrote an essay before the election. He said that if Obama won, this would be a visual aid to wake up white America. On November 5, 2008, the day after the presidential election, some white supremacist Web sites crashed from all the activity and concern. Then Obama comes into office and all the racial violence starts. What we have here is a perfect storm for these hate groups to grow. The enemy in the White House has a black face and that brings together a lot of different aspects of the movement. They can all agree on at least one thing—the country’s going to hell in a handbasket and the black guy is leading us there.