Whether real or the stuff of fantasy, plot to kidnap governor is no joke

One of the routine arguments by the pro-gun crowd is that the Second Amendment gives them the right to own firearms to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. But what happens when those guns are used to try to topple the government?

Federal and state officials in Michigan announced the arrests Thursday of more than a dozen people on charges related to two alleged plots, one to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and try her for treason, and the other an alleged scheme to attack the Michigan state Capitol with the aim of killing police and other first responders.

Yeah, wacky. But this is where we are. Note that guntoting demonstrators barged into the Capitol in April during protests over stay-home orders that enraged many on the far right.

Those were the same demonstrators that President Trump egged on, tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” as the armed group intimidated legislators from their perch in the balcony gallery. Then later, Trump urged Whitmer to make a deal with the armed protesters, tweeting that “Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry.”

Those “very good people” were not to be confused, of course, with the “very fine people” Trump earlier said were among the armed white nationalists who took part in the 2017 Charlottesville, Virginia, rally that led to the death of a woman protesting the hate-mongers.

And whatever happened to the notion that governments don’t negotiate with terrorists?

Right-wing groups and “lone wolves” are not new to Michigan. Timothy J. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including children at a daycare center, in 1995.

McVeigh, an Army veteran from near Buffalo, New York, was executed for the crime. His accomplice, Terry Nichols, of Lapeer, Michigan, is serving a sentence of life without parole.

Both men had peripheral connections with the selfstyled Michigan Militia, and were motivated to attack the federal building in retaliation for federal law enforcement actions against right-wing extremists at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and at a cabin in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in the 1990s.

Michigan also was home to Robert Miles, a self-styled minister in the racist Christian Identity church movement who also was part of the Aryan Nations movement that sought to create a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest, and a former head of the Ku Klux Klan in Michigan (he served time for firebombing school buses during a desegregation fight in Flint, Michigan).

So, yeah, there’s some history there.

Whether these plots were real, or fantastical inventions by the defendants, is unclear. And the federal government doesn’t have a very good record in these things. A decade ago the government charged nine members of the self-styled Hutaree Christian militia group with plotting a violent revolt, including assassinating a law enforcement officer then bombing the funeral.

But the cases fell apart at trial, and the defendants were convicted only on a range of weapons and related charges. Members of the Hutaree were arrested in March 2010 following an undercover operation by the FBI. Like the charges announced Thursday, that case centered on recordings made by two paid FBI informants.

So who knows how this will turn out?

But even if the accused are guilty of nothing more than sharing violent fantasies about kidnapping a governor, holding an extrajudicial trial on charges of treason and attacking a state capitol building, it’s a mark of these treacherous times. (c) 2020 Los Angeles

Times

Ididn’t know.” Those were the first words my friend, a white guy named Dave, spoke to me the day after the first episode of “Roots,” which depicted the capture and enslavement of an African boy named Kunta Kinte. This was 43 years ago.

So you can perhaps imagine my frustration last year when the HBO miniseries “Watchmen” debuted with an episode depicting the Tulsa massacre of 1921 in which white mobs razed a thriving African-American neighborhood, killing dozens of people. White readers reached out to me, shocked and amazed.

“I didn’t know,” they said.

I don’t blame them for not knowing any more than I did Dave. You cannot know what you have not been taught.

But the not knowing is not accidental, either.

Which brings us to William Jackson Harper, a black actor best known as the ethics nerd Chidi Anagonye on the NBC sitcom, “The Good Place,” and a disturbing experience he shared last week on social media. It seems he had been invited by a charity — Arts In The Armed Forces — to choose a film for cadets to watch and then moderate a Zoom discussion of its themes. From a list of films he provided, they picked “Malcolm X.”

Then they unpicked it. Harper says that, two days before the event, he was told two of the cadet academies would not participate for fear of violating Donald

Trump’s recent so-called “Executive Order On Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” As Harper wrote, it “requires that federal and military institutions refrain from training material that promote a ‘pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people, simply on account of their race or sex, are oppressors.’ ”

That may sound good, even noble, but it’s a load of fertilizer in a satin sack. Because the aim — and, as this incident indicates, the effect — of the order is really to discourage discussion of tough and touchy issues of race and gender. No “The Feminine Mystique.” No “Roots.” And no “Malcolm X.”

You have to marvel at the lengths to which this country will go to protect itself — to protect white people — from uncomfortable truths of race. In 2010, Arizona passed a law banning ethnic studies. In 2014, a school board member in Colorado proposed a policy that would wipe out Black history classes. Last year, a Bronx educator was accused of banning Black history. Now, there’s this.

And the reason is obvious. Jesus said, “The truth shall make you free,” but very often where race is concerned, the truth shall make you angry. Or disappointed. Or ashamed. So instead of truth, we are offered a version of history calibrated for the comfort of those white people unsettled by truth, one that does not ask them to look too deeply or question too much.

In order to force compliance, people in authority are increasingly willing to use policy and law. That’s the wall Harper ran up against.

Which tells you how dangerous they consider this truth to be. To understand it is to understand America in a fundamentally different way, to see what you never saw before, hear what you never heard before, ask what you never asked before.

In effect, Trump imposed his own moral and intellectual cowardice upon those cadets. Those are traits too much in evidence these days where race is concerned and they will serve us poorly in a nation growing more diverse by the hour. Yes, America’s racial truths are a threat to smug self satisfaction, facile patriotism and easy myths. Some think that makes them too dangerous to know.

Actually, it makes them too dangerous not to.