A few items of grim interest over the past weeks have some suggesting that the radical right may be on the rise again. While the evidence for this may be overstated, there does seem to be a case to be made that the radical right may be metastasizing into a new, more violent type of movement that fuses organized criminality with racist ideology.
Evidence for this comes from a series of violent attacks on law enforcement scattered across at least two states. First is the dramatic slaying of the executive director of Colorado prisons, Tom Clements, who was gunned down just this March. A suspect in the shooting, a man by the name of Evan Ebel, who was killed in a shootout with Texas police a few days after the murder, is thought to have ties to a white-supremacist gang known as the 211 Crew. The gang, which operates out of several Colorado prisons, is being looked into by investigators for a possible connection to the Clements murder.
More recently in Texas, a county district attorney and his wife were gunned down a few weeks after the county’s assistant district attorney was also killed. Police there are now, like in the Clements case in Colorado, also exploring the possibility that another White-supremacist gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas could be involved. Fear of the ABT is such that a federal prosecutor in Texas looking into the gang’s criminal activities has withdrawn from a racketeering investigation targeting the Brotherhood – citing a lack of security and fear of ABT retaliation as the cause.
That these slayings might be part of a larger, planned campaign against law enforcement is a distinct possibility. Months earlier, for instance, reports show police intelligence had picked up on orders given by imprisoned ABT leadership to inflict “mass casualties or death” on law enforcement officials charged with investigating Brotherhood activities. Given that the ABT has about 2,600 members currently residing in Texas prisons, with an unknown number outside, and has killed nearly 100 people and carried out 10 kidnappings since their founding in the early 1980s – this was deemed a credible threat.
The radical right rise again
While some experts are critical of the idea that the ABT, or any White-supremacist gang, is behind these murders, three other trends in addition to these recent slayings are also suggestive of a reawakened radical right. The first is the huge rise in the number of radical and far-right groups existing in the country since 2008, when Barack Obama was catapulted into office and the U.S. economy fell apart due to a financial crisis on Wall Street.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a watchdog group that keeps track of such organizations, the number of anti-government “Patriot” groups reached an all-time high of 1,350 in 2012 while the number of racist “hate” groups – such as the Ku Klux Klan – came in at 1,007. Most are concentrated in the American South, California, Washington State, the industrial Midwest, New York, and Pennsylvania. Thus, the radical far-right has grown tremendously over the past few years, and federal officials gave warning as far back in 2009 that such groups may engage in violence in the years ahead.
Second, White-supremacist prison gangs have become an increasingly important part of the radical right due to their organizational strength, willingness to use savage amounts of violence, and connections to a larger criminal underground that enriches them via drug trafficking and other organized criminal activities.
Indeed, whereas as most radical right groups are relatively small, poor, disorganized and prone to infighting and police infiltration, White-supremacist prison gangs have the relative benefit of having a large number of loyal men at their disposal who are habituated to violence and acting covertly so as to avoid police. While primarily an organized criminal outfit more concerned with making money than instituting a race war, White supremacy nonetheless provides a unifying ideology that is strengthened by the common experience of being in prison. The ABT are thus criminals first and racists second – which ironically make them far more intimidating and effective operatives when they do engage in right-wing political violence.
A new kind of right-wing extremism?
Third, Mexican cartels have provided a model for how brutal amounts of violence effectively directed against the state can secure for gangs wealth, power and control over large geographical areas. It does not take a genius to figure out that similar tactics could accomplish the same thing on this side of the border. If, as some believe, cartel operatives have begun operating in the U.S. directly, then the potential for such cross-border pollination of best criminal practices is quite real and represents an extraordinarily dangerous development.
This is because White supremacist gangs like the ABT, which have thousands of loyal, dedicated foot soldiers, might make natural partners for Mexican cartels seeking allies in the United States. Furthermore, organizations like the ABT provide a strong nucleus for evolving U.S. gangs to become much more like their Mexican peers going forward. What may be occurring then is something new in the U.S. experience with both the radical right and organized crime – their effective fusion into a single entity in the form of prison-based, white-supremacist gangs.
In other words, the United States could be seeing the birthing pangs of its own indigenous narco-guerillas of the type which have, for decades, wreaked havoc throughout Latin America. All this is speculation of course, but the recent wave of killings that have targeted law enforcement is profoundly unsettling precisely because they are so unusual.
Assassinations like this don’t happen here – they occur elsewhere in places Americans only learn about by watching TV. Complacency, therefore, is the fertile ground that gives breathing room to gangs like the ABT to evolve into new, more dangerous forms right under our noses.
Furthermore, neo-Nazis and White supremacists have for a long time been seen as something so out on the fringe of American life that they have been the butt of jokes for years. Anyone who has seen the Blues Brothers force a platoon of jackbooted Illinois brownshirts off a bridge and into a river can’t help but not take them seriously – record of violence or not. They come off as buffoons, not real threats to the body politic. Similarly, Klansmen and their ilk may have terrorized minorities for decades, but today the common perception is that they, like Illinois Nazis, are equally ridiculous curiosities to be laughed at and despised, not feared for any danger they might pose.
Terrorists are White, too
Reinforcing this belief is the notion that terrorists and terrorism cannot be White or nominally Christian. Whites or Christians who use terroristic violence are mere criminals – individuals whose actions do not reflect on Whites or Christians as a whole. Indeed, White terrorists, as opposed to terrorists from other ethnic background or cultural traditions, are often described as “crazed,” “insane,” or “demented” – products of faulty minds and not products of a system or representative of more widely held beliefs. This makes us as a society focus far more attention on non-Whites and non-Christians as security concerns even though, up until the 9-11 attacks, it was a White, anti-government radical who was responsible for the largest terrorist attack in American history – the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995.
So, for most Americans, the possibility that a home-grown prison gang could possibly be more threatening to our security and way of life than Islamist groups operating halfway around the world seems fantastical. Such an idea falls into the clearly silly realm of trucks full of fertilizer or hijacked commercial airliners being turned into weapons of war and used against American cities. The only thing more outlandish might be the idea that a maniac could mow down a room full of first-graders. Such things can’t possibly happen, right?
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’s editorial policy.