Destabilized Saturday Edition #28
Militias and pancakes, water supply worries in South Texas, political vibe shift, it's okay to be 30!
[Quick note: with a 50-50 Senate, a nihilistic Republican Party, and a nutball like Manchin intimately involved, I’m choosing to wait until it passes to write about the apparently forthcoming climate bill. It will be a very big deal if it becomes law.]
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One of my key motivations in writing Destabilized, and also one of my biggest challenges, is trying to understand and communicate the relationships among the climate crisis, the internet media ecosystem, and highly polarized politics that now includes an influential fascist-adjacent movement. Each of these is a societal earthquake on its own, but it’s in their interactions where they generate historic levels of turbulence that promise/threaten to reshape America and the world.
The relationships are hard to describe succinctly because these three mega-phenomena are so vast, each one an umbrella category inclusive of dozens of dynamics, forces, and transformations. The best way to capture them may be with examples, and I was reminded of one today in a story by NBC News reporters Ben Collins and Chiara Sottile.
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According to NBC News, in Mariposa County, California this week a local militia, Echo Company, set-up a pancake-making operation in a centrally located parking lot. Wearing military-style fatigues, they served up free flapjacks to area residents wearied and worried by the nearby Oak fire, which as of Thursday had burned more than 20,000 acres and destroyed more than 100 structures. But there were more than pancakes on the menu. Echo Company also handed out cards with QR codes that redirect to their website.
(According to NBC News, Echo Company calls themselves “California State Militia” after being kicked out of a larger organization of the same name.)
Why are they handing out QR-code adorned business cards with pancakes? As Southern Poverty Law Center research analyst, Rachel Goldwasser, told NBC News:
“Although help is always needed in difficult times, it is incredibly important to remember that militias are providing it with an agenda. That agenda is to recruit members of the community, including victims, into their organizations …and radicalize people into holding grievances against the government.”
Militias taking advantage of weather disasters to attract attention and burnish their public reputation is an established tactic. Militia members showed up in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, intimidating protestors while claiming to be protecting businesses during demonstrations against police violence. Militias also set-up “checkpoints” on Oregon roads during the wildfires there in September 2020. Journalist Alissa Azar was stopped by one:
Here’s where the internet media ecosystem fits in the story. The reason establishing checkpoints during wildfires could enhance militias’ reputation was because of internet-spread fear-mongering about “Antifa” supposedly taking advantage of evacuations to engage in looting. There was no evidence this happened, but as the wildfires spread in Oregon, so did the rumors. From the New York Times:
Law enforcement officials across the state said they had been swamped with calls about social media misinformation and begged people to “STOP. SPREADING. RUMORS!” In the line of fire, the swirl of rumors actually helped goad some people into defying evacuation orders so they could stay and guard their homes.
In September 2020, the rumors rang true to many residents of this conservative rural area because right-wing media had spent months enthusiastically hyping instances of looting that occurred alongside the summer’s huge racial justice protests.1 Before that, in 2017, the Multnomah County Republican Party had voted to have the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters militias provide security, specifically to protect them from Antifa. In this context, with Oregon law enforcement otherwise dealing with the 2020 wildfires, militias stepped in to “maintain law and order” by stopping cars to deter mythical-but-feared Antifa looting.
Putting it all together, the climate crisis and the internet-powered information crisis are jointly fueling militias’ rise, worsening the democracy crisis. Climate change is driving up the number of weather disasters, which create opportunities for militias to recruit and blur lines with law enforcement, and the political coalition militias are part of, the Republican Party, opposes nearly all meaningful actions to slow it down. Extreme political polarization is inspiring voting restrictions in red states, worsening the democracy crisis and favoring election outcomes that will worsen the climate crisis. The information crisis will, at all stages, inject additional fear and confusion into an increasingly scary reality, a reliable recipe for authoritarianism.
It’s a volatile mix, as the story of the militia pancake breakfast helps illustrate.
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To solve our problems, we first have to be able to see them clearly, including the ways they interact with and exacerbate other problems. We need to decarbonize on every front as fast as possible, we need to develop larger and stronger mutual aid networks to supplant militias as sources of support in crises, we need to ruggedize our homes and infrastructure, and we need to make our communities resilient against extreme weather and disorder. And we need to support and love one another along the way.
This is what today’s generations are called to do. This is our charge.
My Work
Struggling to see what is right in front of us
The most interesting lesson of the housing market crash is this: it is difficult to see change coming when it represents a discontinuity with the past. This difficulty is so great, in fact, that despite indicators like rising mortgage default rates, and despite strong financial incentives to see the market objectively, most investors failed to see the housing crash coming.
…Even for those of us who know climate change is happening, understand its causes, and know its general trajectory, it is still hard to wrap our minds around the immense, sweeping implications of what’s coming.
Interesting Reads
How Six States Could Overturn the Election
To understand the stakes, and the motives of Republicans who brought the case, you need only one strategic fact of political arithmetic. Six swing states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina—are trending blue in presidential elections but ruled by gerrymandered Republican state legislatures.
Tweets of the Week
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
Joy, Progress, and Hope
