American Doom

Today, I’m pleased to share a conversation on that I had recently with DeRay McKesson, one of the young civil rights leaders who was on the ground in Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown’s death. Since then, DeRay has gone on to become a best-selling author and political force for racial justice among many of his other successes. While we’ve disagreed on some things over the years — primarily what constitutes a justifiable use of fatal force by law enforcement — but one thing that we do agree on is that the issue of police violence remains a concerning one for Black Americans. One needs to look no further than the recent murder of Sonya Massey to confirm that. Ten years after “Hands up, don’t shoot” became the rallying cry of Ferguson, Massey had her own hands up when she was shot in the face by a sheriff’s deputy in Illinois who has now been indicted for murder. Instead of saying “don’t shoot,” Massey said, “I’m sorry.”

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It was a rumor. Let’s start with that. I don’t think it was done nefariously. I think the people who said it that day and in the days that followed truly believed it. It’s what they had been told, after all. Somewhere along the line — somewhere in this game of telephone that people like me try to get to the bottom of — maybe there was a lie. Maybe someone lied. Or, they just got things mixed up in the heat of the moment. They got it mixed up because someone they knew had died and his body was baking on the asphalt in the middle of the street with blood leaking from a bullet wound in his head.

The rumor was that Michael Brown had his hands up on this very day, 10 years ago today, in Ferguson, Missouri. He had his hands up and he said, “Don’t shoot,” the people said. That’s what started it all. Mike Brown, a kid no one had ever heard of, had his hands up and was saying “Don’t shoot” when a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed him on August 9, 2014. That’s where it begins. Or at least, that’s where it begins in a sense. Ferguson was a domino. There have been many more over the years.

“Hands up don’t shoot” is the beginning of a lot of things. As I sit here this morning, though, the thing that strikes me the most is that the falsehood of “Hands up, don’t shoot” is the beginning of our current political moment. No matter the event, no matter the truth of what happened on any given day, each side can claim their own version. Ferguson and Black Americans were rightfully incensed over the claim that Brown had had his hands up and was saying “don’t shoot.” But when it turned out not be true, much of white America — themselves already incensed and afraid after watching Ferguson burn —dismissed the entire movement for racial justice that Ferguson birthed.

White America took that mentality — these people lied about what happened, denigrated a good cop, and then burned their own town and they’ll do it to our’s next — and ran with it. They ran with it right into the waiting arms of Donald Trump, the “law and order” candidate. Then they kept running with it.

The truth can be complicated. The first thing you often hear about a news event like Ferguson is a chaotic and murky version of the actual truth. But white America would not forgive this falsehood of Ferguson. Already driven by racial anger at what it saw, white America took the idea that they were being lied to by people who were, in their view, anti-American, and began to apply to everything that has happened since. The impeachments of Donald Trump — fake, based on lies. The 2020 election. Lies, again. Stolen from them. George Floyd — he died because of a fentanyl overdose, not the knee on his neck.

In a way, it’s a shame that “Hand up, don’t shoot” turned out not to be true. If it had been, we might not be exactly where we are today. But something tells me that white America would have found another reason to drag us to our current state. There’s always a reason, it seems, for many Americans to want to usher us toward authoritarianism and backwards toward a past rooted in white supremacy.

I say this not because this is what I learned at some leftist Ivy League university. The education I’ve received that has led me to this conclusion has come from witnessing the events of the last 10 years with my own eyes. I’ve learned how and why we’ve ended up here by being on the streets of places like Ferguson and witnessing the aftermath firsthand. My education has been history itself.

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P.S. Thank you and welcome to all our new subscribers. At some point soon I hope to have time to write a little something about who I am, where I come from and what I’ve been doing over the course of my career. But for now, there’s too much work to do. So, the following will have to suffice for the moment. Here’s some stuff of mine you can read if you want to get to know me a little better. If you want to help support my work, you can subscribe to American Doom for as little as $5 a month. Paid subscribers can fill out this form and get a nice American Doom 2024 sticker to let everyone driving behind you know how cool and in-the-know you are. This publication, newsletter, whatever you want to call it, is just me and a colleague, so every little bit helps. I’m an independent journalist and your support helps keep it that way.  

* Wrigley Is a Temple, and Last Night Cubs Fans Went to Pray - Esquire

* Why Vegas is Already Gone - Medium

* Why I Love This City Where Americans Aren’t Always Welcome, a Love Letter to Juárez - Heated Mag

* Remembering the Life of Julián Cardona, The Bard of the Borderlands - Inside Hook

* The trauma inside all of us - American Doom

* Welcome to American Doom - American Doom

* To the unsung heroes out there, and to glimmers of hope - American Doom

* Something has been lost - American Doom

Today on the American Doom podcast I’m speaking with Katie Paul of the Tech Transparency Project (TTP). Katie has been looking into militia groups online over the past four years, and she’s found a lot of right-wing clamoring for political violence — some of which has ramped up in recent months as platforms like Facebook have taken their hands off the reins of content moderation. 

Her work is a troubling signifier of bad times to come, something that readers of this newsletter are very familiar with. In one video Katie shared with American Doom, what looks like hundreds of armed men gathered for a field training exercise. The caption for the video reads “Now is the time to join a MF’n Militia. Not a political party.” And just in case you were at all unclear on the group’s intent, the video further proclaims that “We came into this world screaming covered in blood and will be leaving the same way. No Retreat No Surrender.”

So that’s what some right-wing Americans are doing in preparation for November’s election. Luckily, folks like Paul are doing the crucial work of raising alarm about groups like the ones she tracks for TTP. We can only hope that law enforcement is doing the same. 

In this episode of the American Doom podcast, Katie and I discuss what the groups she’s tracking want, what they’re planning to do if they don’t get it, and just how many of them there are who make their presence known online. It’s impossible to know the true number of Americans who are planning for political violence if they don’t get their way in November, but Katie is just about the only person I know trying to figure that out.

Listen to this episode of the American Doom podcast here, or on Apple or Spotify podcasts, and subscribe to our newsletter for as little as $5 a month to support our work exposing election deniers, right-wing extremists and other threats to democracy.

My guest today on the American Doom podcast is Steven Monacelli, a writer and journalist in Texas who focuses on right-wing extremism there. Steven and I first met in May of 2021 when I travelled back to Dallas — where I lived for a couple of years while covering immigration and the border — to attend a QAnon conference. The event was actually called, quite ridiculously, the “For God & Country Patriot Roundup” and was held in a sad county fair-looking barn-turned event center on the edge of Dallas’ ever-depressing commercial district.

The event gained infamy when disgraced general and election denial movement leader Mike Flynn said he liked the idea of a Myanmar-style coup in the United States. Video I took of the comments went briefly viral, and Flynn’s reputation was further degraded into the dregs of American political life, where he now spends all of his time grifting on conspiracies in the name of Donald Trump.

Then, as now, Steven was covering far-right extremism in Texas. He’s something of an expert on the matter, and you can keep up here with Steven’s prolific work at the many publications he writes for, and follow him on Twitter — until he gets permanently banned for his ball-busting reporting on Elon Musk.

In this episode of the American Doom podcast, Steven and I discuss some of the bizarre Christian nationalist groups looking to further infiltrate all levels of government in order to impose their vision of a biblical nation upon all the rest of us. Not that there’s anything wrong with the idea of a Godly government or anything, I just don’t think a lot of parts of the Bible should be taken literally — and many of the folks Steven writes about absolutely do. They include a group touting itself as the “Remnant Alliance,” which is part of broader right-wing efforts to take over school board and, you know, ban books, for Christianity on people, oppress minorities and LGBTQ students, etc.

Listen to this episode of the American Doom podcast here, or on Apple or Spotify podcasts, and subscribe to our newsletter for as little as $5 a month to support our work exposing election deniers, right-wing extremists and other threats to democracy.

Dalton Mattus was arrested a little more than two weeks ago for possessing a pair of handmade pipe bombs. Police found more at his home. What hasn’t been reported in the local press is that Mattus posted prolifically about every right-wing, anti-government conspiracy imaginable. He is a symbol both of the online radicalization toward right-wing extremism that pervades the United States, and the threats of violence that right-wing extremists pose. In this episode of the American Doom podcast, I discuss Mattus’ case with Bree Zender, my partner here at AD, who helped research Mattus’ posting for our collaboration with Rolling Stone. You can watch a video of our discussion below.

Last week I wrote about the wars to come, in which I describe what I think will be the natural — and possibly violent! — right-wing reaction to recent campus protests. That prediction, if you want to call it that, is based on my experience covering unrest over the last decade. Throughout much of that time, I was in conflict scenarios writing and reporting for my longtime editor, Justin Miller. Much of that work came when Miller was an editor at the Daily Beast. Now, he’s at New York magazine, where he’s recently dusted off his pen for a piece he actually wrote and didn’t just edit. I say just edit, because for all our years together, I still don’t really understand what editors do. Kidding. Miller has made my work better since our very first story together, back on the tear gas-choked street in Ferguson. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

It’s a big day here at American Doom, where I’m excited to share the first episode of the podcast version of this newsletter. Today, I’m speaking with my old pal Alex Wroblewski, a photojournalist who I first worked with back in 2014. We did a story together for VICE back then, and since then have crossed paths at protests and riots across the country. He’ll be covering Trump’s rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday, so I wanted to catch up with him on some of the madness of this election cycle.