Mark Long: Dread Of ‘others’ Led To January 6 Attack – Waco Tribune-Herald

MARK LONG Guest columnist

On January 6, 2021, the gallows stood, gaunt and menacing, outside the nation’s Capitol. More than that, the crudely erected scaffold sent an unmistakable sign to those who could decode it. The gallows openly declared war on the fundamental democratic principle of free and fair elections and, indeed, on other Americans. But just how this came to be requires some historical background and the unpacking of a few key texts.

Here’s that story.

“America,” historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared, “has been another name for opportunity.” So it has been for many since Turner wrote that passage almost a century and a half ago. America has long stood as the shining promise on distant shores for millions of people around the globe — the “last, best hope of earth,” as Lincoln framed it in the darkest days of the Civil War.

But it has not been such for all. For while America, since its founding, has recognized the profound dignity of every person of whatever religious faith, of any ethnic group, of low birth or high, a counter-narrative has developed alongside that takes a different and darker view.

January 6, 2021, invoked that counter-narrative, a narrative that posits the decline of American greatness. It describes an “Other” which is really an entire range of enemies: the ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government), people of color, the mainstream media, “invaders” (i.e., migrants at the southern border), Democrats, RINOs and globalists. It calls for immediate and powerful action — to “tool up” in militia parlance. It offers a recurrent explanation for why violent action is essential. Outraged over the FBI siege and assault on the Branch Davidian compound 10 miles east of Waco in 1993 and roused in vengeance two years later to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, 19 of them children, ex-Army soldier and security guard Timothy McVeigh captured this particular militia mindset shortly before his execution in his ominous three-page letter, “Why I Bombed the Murrah Building.”

“I chose to bomb a federal building because … [it] was a retaliatory strike. … I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile … to put a check on government abuse of power … the federal juggernaut run amok.” And the glorious new day in this narrative? A restored, largely white, “law and order,” Christian nation.

Narrative of decline

This long-evolving narrative is not a recent innovation. It has deep roots. One of them, certainly, is Madison Grant’s 1916 “The Passing of the Great Race.” There, Grant essentializes the concept of “race,” tying it to both physiognomy and to specific moral and intellectual capabilities. The book offers a lament for the slow eclipse of the superior Nordic stock among Americans. In time, the book became an anti-immigrant cudgel, proving key in passing the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924. As Adam Serwer points out in his superb 2019 essay on white nationalism for The Atlantic, Grant breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the Act: “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our Nordic population being overrun by the lower races.”

More recent contributors include white supremacist and convicted felon David Lane, who warned in his prison writings in the 1990s that the “white remnant” now faced extinction by a “tidal wave of five billion coloreds.” Hence, in his infamous “Fourteen Words,” Lane declared, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Similarly, white nationalist Bob Whitaker, who worked in the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan administration, pioneered a rhetorical strategy to “flip the script.” This approach is reflected in the close of his 221-word “Mantra,” which generated the unifying slogan: “Anti-Racist is a Code Word for Anti-White.”

But in the canon of white nationalist texts that have contributed to the narrative of American decline, none is as important as William Luther Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries.” Published in 1978 under the byline Andrew Macdonald, the apocalyptic “Diaries” imagines a now dystopian America. Jews, in concert with blacks, the media and white liberal politicians, lead the government (throughout the text, “the System”), creating a “cosmopolitan racial goulash.” Under the provocatively named “Cohen Act,” the System has begun a massive weapons confiscation. Spurred by this event, a counter-movement called “the Organization” forms, carrying out guerrilla reprisals. The central figure of the novel, Earl Turner, maintains a diary that chronicles the history of the revolution that ensues. In time Turner becomes a member of the Order, the secret cadre that leads the Organization. It is noteworthy that Turner’s induction involves not only passing a “test of word and deed” to ensure utter loyalty to the Order but also the reading of a secret text, “the Book.” Reading the text alters Turner’s entire perception of the world.

For the first time I understand the deepest meaning of what we are doing. I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depend on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His Grand Design.

A brief induction ceremony follows for Turner and several others. Turner writes in his diary: “Now our lives truly belong only to the Order. Today I was, in a sense, born again. I know now that I will never again be able to look at the world or the people around me or my own life in quite the same way I did before.” As with any pivotal religious (or quasi-religious) text, the Book functions for Turner and the Order as a totalizing and categorical way of interpreting the world. In this pre-QAnon moment, Turner now knows, he sees. And having been admitted to the Order, having been “born again,” he must act.

‘Day of the rope’

Soon thereafter, Turner records the critical turning point in the several years long revolution, “the day of the rope.” He describes, in ghastly and bloody detail, the hanging of the men who “betrayed the race” and the women who “defiled the race” through “dysgenic breeding.” Years of brutal struggle will follow, but the day of the rope brings the change of fortunes necessary to insure the eventual worldwide triumph of the Organization.

What follows, with their victory, is the “New Era.” Turner himself will die a noted martyr in the revolution, but his efforts, a postscript notes, “helped greatly to assure that his [white] race would survive and prosper, that the Organization would achieve its worldwide political and military goals, and that the Order would spread its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come.”

The Day of the Rope. On April 19, 1995, this is the text that 26-year-old Timothy McVeigh carried with him when he drove toward the Murrah Federal Building to “put a check on government abuse of power.”

The Day of the Rope. This is what 20-year-old John Earnest cited in his 2019 manifesto just before he attacked a Jewish synagogue in Poway, California, killing a 60-year-old worshiper and wounding three others, including a heroic rabbi and an 8-year-old child. “Some of you have been waiting for The Day of the Rope for years,” Earnest wrote as he prepared his attack. “Well, The Day of the Rope is here right now — that is if you have the gnads to keep the ball rolling.” In his desire to kill Jews and Muslims, he also had set fire to an Escondido mosque.

For more than four years, Donald Trump implicitly and explicitly evoked strands of a violent narrative that were a century in the making. One can find references in his 2016 Republican National Convention acceptance speech where he juxtaposed an America in decline because of the media, globalism, violent illegal immigrants and liberal politicians who rigged the system alongside his assurance of a new day of safety, peace, law and order.

His inaugural address in January 2017 implicitly did the same when he spoke of stopping “American carnage” and making America great again. But January 6 proved to be the key moment when Trump operationalized the deadly narrative. From his description in his speech of late-night election returns for Biden as “explosions of bull—-,” to his closing appeal to “fight like hell,” Trump made clear that his audience faced the existential choice of “los[ing] the country” or “sav[ing] democracy.”

The Day of the Rope. On January 6, 2021, thousands marched on the U.S. Capitol, not as peaceful demonstrators or as “tourists” but as insurrectionists. All that followed that day should be read against the contours of the narrative of violence, long-developing, and especially with “The Turner Diaries” in mind. The calls for violence against political leaders, captured in journalist Luke Mogelson’s chilling video, especially the fevered cries to “Hang Pence!” and “Hang Pelosi!” The multiple assaults on Capitol police. The QAnon shaman’s strange and vaguely evangelical prayer in the Senate, including his gratitude to God “for filling this chamber with your white light and love, your white light of harmony” and “for allowing the United States of America to be reborn.” The repeated shouts of “Treason!” The symbolic destruction of media equipment. The cries to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The proliferation of the Gadsden flag, including one worn inside the Capitol by a Central Texas winemaker, complete with coiled timber rattler and the slogan “Don’t Tread on Me.” The broad narrative can account for all these, with one tragic exception: the pusillanimous capitulation of many in Congress.

By failing to fully recognize, then energetically investigate, the story that played out on January 6 is to ensure its continuation. And the haunting spectacle of a gallows erected on the mall, with the Capitol as its backdrop, is a tragic condemnation, one of both moral cowardice and sordid political calculation. It is also a sign of a revolution that most certainly has begun. The day of the rope has drawn near.

A former intelligence analyst and Middle East specialist, Mark Long was selected by the Air Force component of the National Security Agency as its candidate for the National Military Intelligence Award. His work has been published by the Department of Defense, the Kennedy School at Harvard, the University of Texas, the Special Operations Journal and others. He teaches in Baylor University’s Honors College where his research examines ideological similarities of ISIS and ethnonationalists.