“That’s about all I’ve got,” he said. “And a bunch of reading material Janet gave me, that I haven’t gotten to.”
“Where is it? Gimme,” she said. “I’ll read the good parts out loud.”
“Got an I-Pad?” he asked, as he pulled away from the curb.
“I’ll read on my phone,” she responded. He gave her his login information, and minutes later she was scrolling through his inbox.
“Uh, Mac? Have you checked your email lately?” she asked.
He thought about the answer to that. “Yesterday morning at work?”
He caught her pained expression out of the corner of his eye. “What? Yesterday was that hostage shooting case, then I talked to the wife, and then I went drinking with the boys from Special Projects. And I had to do the Facebook shit; Shorty tells me is important to keep up an online identity so I can figure out who this Sensei fucker is.”
She was laughing hard. “And this morning?”
He shrugged. “I wrote the story. And Janet and I talked and she sent me on this trip. Why? What did I miss?”
“I won’t open it,” she said, still laughing at him. “But there is a three-day-old email from your girlfriend, with a subject line that says Sunday dinner. You, my friend, are up shit creek. Three days?”
He grunted. He probably wouldn’t even be home by then, he thought. “I’ll deal with it later,” he mumbled. “Doubt we’ll be back by then anyway.”
She laughed some more, and then scrolled down to Janet’s reading list, and started clicking through things and settled in to read.
“It doesn’t bother you to read on that thing? In a car?”
“Nope,” she said cheerfully. “My parents were big on road trips. And the question ‘Are we there yet?’ And the whiny ‘I’m bored,” were not allowed. So, I learned to read in a moving car.”
He laughed. “Brothers and sisters?”
“Two brothers and a sister. I’m in the middle,” she answered. “Mac, this stuff is incredible. In 2005 the FBI issued a report about the rise in white extremists’ intentions to infiltrate the military and law enforcement. In 2005! Then in 2009, a DHS analyst wrote about the rise in white extremism. He said it was fueled by the economic downturn — was that what they called the Great Recession in bureaucrat language? — and the election of an African American president. Additionally, proposed gun regulations were also driving the increase.
“He blamed the rise in part on far-right rhetoric and conspiracy theorists. And wow, there was so much pushback, they retracted the report and gutted his office! Listen to this, from a Wire article a few years ago:
“In April 2009, he warned that the election of the first African-American president, combined with recession-era economic anxieties, could fuel a rise in far-right violence. "DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities," he wrote.
“That seems pretty obvious now,” Mac said.
“Yeah,” she said absently. “He wrote a book about it after he resigned — forced out really. Apparently, the report was leaked out on white supremacist sites, and then it filtered back to right-wing media who characterized it as an attack on all Americans who were skeptical of the federal government. A group called the Oath Keepers?”
“Yeah,” Mac said. “Them I know about. They recruit vets, cops, first responders. Far right bullshit, about needing to defend the Constitution from enemies, foreign and abroad. And they create the kind of paranoia we just saw. The founder, Rhoades? He’s a real piece of shit. And if he turned out to be this Sensei — it wouldn’t surprise me. Or MLK4Whites.”
“The Wire article says that in 2006, 40 members of Congress urged then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to launch a full-scale investigation and implement a zero-tolerance policy toward white supremacists in the military,” Angie said, skimming the article. “Listen to this: ‘Military extremists present an elevated threat to both their fellow service members and the public,’ U.S. Senator Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, wrote in a separate open letter to Rumsfeld. ‘We witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today's racist extremist may become tomorrow's domestic terrorist.’ Mac, that was seven years ago! Nobody’s done shit about it, have they?”
“Probably not,” Mac muttered, only half listening. Traffic was damned heavy. He frowned.
“Or this from Southern Poverty Law Center,” Angie said, “In 2008, a researcher into white supremacists infiltrating the military had this exchange with a guy in the military: "Us racists are actually getting into the military a lot now because if we don't, everyone who already is [in the military] will take pity on killing sand n———. Yes, I have killed women, yes, I have killed children and yes, I have killed older people. But the biggest reason I'm so proud of my kills is because by killing brown people at home, many white people will live to see a new dawn."
The researcher was getting his master’s at Columbia, she said, he published it as a book too. “Mac, people have known about this! He says the military needed soldiers, so they didn’t vet them as much. So now we have white supremacists with military training?”
She set her phone aside. “Mac they’ve known white supremacists were increasing, and that they’ve infiltrated military and police, and they’ve known it since 2005 or so. So why is there no alarm?”
“I know an FBI analyst who works this shit,” Mac said slowly. “She says it’s because it’s hard to distinguish the right-wing militias from Republican supporters. It’s a slippery slope, and as soon as someone starts down it, the right-wing media start yelling that they’re coming to take your guns. OK, she’s got a PhD and specializes in religious terrorism so she says it better, but that’s what it boils down to.”
“Did you see this when you were in?” she asked.
He considered that. Had he?
