The Wildest West

I'm sure I've been radicalized and brainwashed by a leftist-socialist-environmentalist media sphere, but Leah Sottile's sequel to Bundyville-- this "season" of podcasts and articles is subtitled The Remnant-- is once again an exceptional and compelling portrait of religious/anti-government/apocalypse/white-supremacist/conspiracy-theorist/hyper-patriotic/gun-toting militia folks that is so outside my purview it seems like science-fiction; this fits right into Tara Boyle's world of Educated . . . a much wilder West than most of us liberal Easterners can imagine-- and while the piece starts with an explosion in Panaca, Nevada and eventually finds itself in the "American Redoubt— the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming"-- the real home of this piece is the internet, where fact-free-fringe-theories and conspiracies persuade and propagate . . . a place that our President panders to . . . and while Sottile finally meditates on the intractable paradox:

how much tolerance do you afford the intolerant?

she also hears from rational people who believe that the government does have too much power, that after 9/11 the fear of terrorism allowed federal and local law enforcement to ramp up violence and surveillance on suspects and that this is a cycle that will only be met with more violence-- Sottile and I both think the answer may be sunlight, we have to just keep shining a bright logical light on all these fringe-apocalypse-fundamentalist-religious-conspiratorial extremists and their words and logic until they shrivel and decay, we've got to talk it out and keep talking, the government needs to be up front about what it's doing and what is happening, and we have to understand that there's going to be some explosions along the way and some radical extremism, which is part of the cost of having a country with a strong First Amendment, checks and balances in the government, and a sometimes too-powerful federal presence . . . that presence can drive people, especially people ready to be radicalized, out to the fringe-- events like Waco, and the shooting of LaVoy Finnicum and the Ruby Ridge siege; for me, it was absolutely shocking to hear folks proposing an all-white, all-Christian 51st state where the chosen could live out their days training and praying, waiting for the end-of-times . . . but maybe I'm too sheltered, living here in a tame, intellectual, multi-cultural town in central New Jersey, and I need a dose of the real American West, which is wilder than ever; Sottile brings up the fact that, of late, right-wing extremists have accounted for the bulk of the terrorism in the United States, and The Atlantic breaks it down:

"From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists . . . in other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists . . . but they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms."