The United States of Paranoia (38 page)

Meanwhile, mission creep was setting in. By the time the Senate conducted its investigation, many centers had adopted an “all-crime, all-hazards” philosophy that shifted their focus away from stopping terrorism and onto a broader spectrum of threats.

In itself, this was arguably a wiser use of public resources. Terrorism is rare, after all, and the practical effects of a terrorist attack can be functionally identical to the practical effects of a natural or technological disaster. Unfortunately, when fusion centers looked past terrorism, they were less concerned with such collective hazards than with drug and immigration offenses.

In the words of the disaster researcher Kathleen Tierney, all-hazards planning—a staple of traditional emergency management—asks institutions to “focus generically on tasks that must be performed regardless of event type, and then plan for specific contingencies, guided by risk-based assessments of what could happen.” The DHS was rhetorically committed to the all-hazards idea, but in practice it was oriented toward more specific threats; and since the department had absorbed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, those threats took priority in places with worries far larger than terrorist conspiracies. Under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 8, Tierney wrote, communities that once had assessed their own risks and vulnerabilities were “required to develop plans and programs for dealing with fifteen different scenarios, thirteen of which involve terrorism, [weapons of mass destruction], and epidemics.” Worse still, “as we saw so vividly in Hurricane Katrina, the government’s stance is that the public in disaster-ravaged communities mainly represents a problem to be managed—by force, if necessary—and a danger to uniformed responders.”
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The sociologists who study disasters are wary about using the word
panic
. In real-world disasters, as we noted in chapter 3, genuine panic is rare and spontaneous social cooperation is the norm. But in 2008, the Rutgers sociologists Lee Clarke and Caron Chess suggested that events like Katrina can spark something they called an
elite panic
. When the hurricane hit New Orleans, there were rumors that dozens of dead bodies were stacked in the convention center where refugees had taken shelter, that men were firing weapons at the helicopters coming to rescue them, that roving bands of rapists were assaulting people willy-nilly, that survivors of the storm had turned to cannibalism.
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“Misinformed about conditions on the ground and overly fearful of the loss of property,” Clarke and Chess wrote, “officials turned resources away from rescue in New Orleans. Elites responding after Katrina were disconnected from non-elites and obviously fearful of them. Further, their actions and inactions created greater danger for others.”
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Panic
may or may not be the appropriate word here. But
paranoia
is a term that fits. The effects of the elites’ fears were far greater than the effects of, say, the grassroots rumors that the authorities had deliberately blown up New Orleans’ levees to drive out black residents, even if the latter idea was more likely to be invoked in discussions of public paranoia during the disaster.

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw three particularly notable eruptions of elite paranoia. The first came with the reactions to the 9/11 attacks. The second was the response to Katrina, when powerful people’s fears both fed and were reinforced by the centralization and militarization of disaster relief. And the third began when Barack Obama became president, as commentators treated a group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement. As is often the case with paranoid perspectives, this connect-the-dots fantasy said more about the tellers’ anxieties than it did about any order actually emerging in the world.

This third scare had been bubbling since the final months of the 2008 election, but it exploded after a summertime shoot-out at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

On June 10, 2009, an elderly man entered the Holocaust museum, raised a rifle, and opened fire, killing a security guard named Stephen Tyrone Johns. Two other guards shot back, wounding the gunman before he could kill anyone else.

The killer was soon identified as James Wenneker von Brunn, an eighty-eight-year-old neo-Nazi. Von Brunn acted alone, but there was no shortage of voices eager to spread the blame for his crime. Pundits quickly linked the murder, in a free-associative way, to the assassination ten days earlier of the Kansas abortionist George
Tiller
. This, we were told, was a “pattern” of “rising right-wing violence.”

More imaginative pundits tried to tie the two slayings to a smattering of other crimes, from an April shoot-out in Pittsburgh that had killed three cops to a double murder at a Knoxville Unitarian church the year before. The longest such list, assembled by the blogger Sara Robinson, included a variety of incidents linked only by the fact that the criminals all hailed from one corner or another of the paranoid Right. One of the episodes involved a mentally disturbed anti-Semite who had stalked a former classmate for two years before killing her in May. “This is how terrorism begins,” Robinson warned.
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Crime wave thus established, the analysts moved on to denounce the unindicted instigators. Those weren’t just killers, the narrative went; they were killers inflamed by demagogues. Bonnie Erbe of
U.S. News & World Report
pinned the museum guard’s death on “promoters of hate,” adding: “If yesterday’s Holocaust Museum slaying of security guard and national hero Stephen Tyrone Johns is not a clarion call for banning hate speech, I don’t know what is.”
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In
The New York Times
, the columnist Paul Krugman warned that “right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.”
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His
Times
colleague Bob Herbert wrote that he “can’t help feeling” that the crimes “were just the beginning and that worse is to come”—thanks in part to “the over-the-top rhetoric of the National Rifle Association.”
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Another
Times
man, Frank Rich, announced that “homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs.” After the museum murder, Rich wrote, Glenn Beck “rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a ‘lone gunman nutjob.’ Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that ‘the pot in America is boiling,’ as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.”
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When critics blamed prolife partisans for the death of George Tiller, there at least was a coherent connection between the pundits’ antiabortion rhetoric and the assassin’s target. Say what you will about Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, but neither is known for railing against the Holocaust Museum. If Beck, to borrow Rich’s mixed metaphor, was cheering on a kettle, it wasn’t the kettle that produced James von Brunn.

The attempt to draw those connections was a form of paranoia, just as much as the jittery responses to powdered coffee creamer and a kid’s homemade flashlight were. Like those earlier excitements, it found a home at the Department of Homeland Security. In 2009, DHS analyst Daryl Johnson produced a report on the threat of “rightwing extremism.” He seemed to cast a wide net. “Rightwing extremism in the United States,” he wrote, “can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.”
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The charitable reading of this passage is that it’s a sloppily phrased attempt to list the ideas that drive various right-wing extremists, not a declaration that
anyone
opposed to abortion or prone to “rejecting federal authority” is a threat.
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But even under that interpretation, the report is inexcusably vague. It focuses on extremism itself, not on violence, and there’s no reason to believe that its definition of “extremist” is limited to people with violent inclinations. (A DHS report on
left-wing
extremism cites such nonviolent groups as Crimethinc and the Ruckus Society.)
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In the words of Michael German, an FBI agent turned policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, the bulletin focuses “on ideas rather than crime.” One practical effect, he noted, is that the paper “cites an increase in ‘rhetoric’ yet doesn’t even mention reports that there was a dirty bomb found in an alleged white supremacist’s house in Maine last December. Learning what to look for in that situation might actually be useful to a cop. Threat reports that focus on ideology instead of criminal activity are threatening to civil liberties and a wholly ineffective use of federal security resources.”
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Like the liberals who voted to recharter the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938 only to find the same tool used against the Left a decade later, conservatives who supported the spying apparatus erected during the War on Terror found that it could be deployed in more ways than they’d anticipated. Republican leaders protested Daryl Johnson’s report loudly, and the consequences were quick: The DHS adopted a civil liberties and privacy review process, and it reduced its staff devoted to the domestic Right. Johnson, who soon left the agency, later claimed that his team was “left floundering day-to-day without any meaningful work to do”
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as higher-ups retreated in the face of criticism.

It was a substantial victory for civil libertarians, but it’s important not to overstate how far it went. The review process didn’t end the production of inappropriate fusion center reports, though it did largely prevent them from being published. Johnson may have left the federal Homeland Security bureaucracy, but he stayed in the homeland security business, running a consulting company called DT Analytics that contracts with police departments, fusion centers, and other institutions. And in the press, the new Brown Scare continued to flourish, as incidents were uncritically presented as evidence that political rhetoric was inciting political violence.

In September 2009, when a Kentucky census worker named Bill Sparkman was found bound and lifeless with the word
FED
on his chest, the
Huffington Post
’s Allison Kilkenny called the death “the kind of violent event that emerges from a culture of paranoia and unsubstantiated attacks.”
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Under the headline “Send the Body to Glenn Beck,”
True/Slant
’s Rick Ungar wondered whether “the time has come for the FCC to consider exactly what constitutes screaming fire over the publicly owned airwaves.”
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Two months later, police concluded that the death had been a suicide. Sparkman, they reported, had staged it to look like a murder for insurance reasons.

When a software engineer named Joe Stack flew a plane into an Austin IRS office in early 2010, pundits reached for the same narrative. Stack’s personal manifesto did not, in fact, fit into any conventional political category; it revealed a mix of left-wing resentments, right-wing resentments, and painfully specific resentments from Stack’s own life. Yet the prominent blogger Josh Marshall, highlighting the pilot’s reference to “Mr. Big Brother IRS man,” greeted the document with the headline “Ideas Have Consequences,” as though no American would resent the tax man if it weren’t for the GOP’s antitax rhetoric.
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Several statistics circulated through the press that seemed to suggest a crisis. On closer examination, they revealed something less:

• On August 28, 2009, CNN’s Rick Sanchez reported that a source close to the Secret Service “confirmed to me today that threats on the life of the president of the United States have now risen by as much as 400 percent since his inauguration,” going “far beyond anything the Secret Service has seen with any other president.”
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In the ensuing weeks, the number was widely repeated in other press outlets. It was also widely challenged, and Sanchez eventually backed down from his report.

The statistic had come from Ronald Kessler’s book
In the President’s Secret Service
, published a few weeks before the Sanchez broadcast.
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In early 2010, I asked Malcolm Wiley, a Secret Service spokesman, about the claim. He wouldn’t give out the correct figures, but he denied that Kessler’s number was correct. According to Wiley, there was a period while Obama was still a candidate when he had received more threats than the sitting president. “But since he became president, that has leveled off,” he continued. “The number of threats he has received has been consistent with the number received by Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and others.”
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Secret Service director Mark Sullivan offered a similar assessment to the House Homeland Security Committee in late 2009, testifying that “threats are not up.”
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• After Joe Stack flew his plane into an IRS building, the press reported that threats against employees of the Internal Revenue Service had
increased
21.5 percent from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2009. In that case, the claim was accurate: As a Treasury official told
The Wall Street Journal
in early 2010, there had been a “steady, upward trend” in such threats.
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But the trend had started in 2006, when a Republican was in the White House and the loudest angry rhetoric about internal revenue involved tax cuts, not tax hikes.

In the absence of more detailed data, it isn’t obvious what factors fueled the increase. But when someone decides to assault an IRS employee, one government official told me, it’s “usually a personal event that’s a catalyst.”
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