A new American insurgency
Republicans and the right view Democrats and the left as an evil enemy that needs to be eliminated. But Democrats still want to play the same old game.
Note: If you’re wondering how I’m just gonna blast out a newsletter piece without addressing where the hell I’ve been for the last seven months, the bottom of this post is for you.
One night in October 2021, as I finished up my day’s work investigating election deniers across the country, I received a call from a Colorado number. I answered and soon found myself fielding questions about my work as a journalist. Not what I was working on or what questions I had for a story. This wasn’t a source or a government agency calling back. This was a man who wouldn’t give his name, and kept asking me a question that I at first didn’t understand: who else had I “blackmailed?” i He knew there were others, he said. In fact, my acts of intimidation were so egregious that a prosecutor had issued a subpoena that would grant law enforcement access to my emails and other communications. Under this secret subpoena, the man added, he had obtained the digital key to get inside my inbox, where he was gathering evidence about other acts of blackmail I’d committed over the years.
Of course, none of this was true. But as I sat there that night, answering questions and playing along in order to gather as much information as I could about the man harassing me — who read my home address to me to confirm it was correct, asked about my wife’s volunteer work for Democratic candidates based on years-old social media photos, and ensured he had the names of our dogs correct — it became more clear how this had all come to pass. I was being harassed and threatened because I had chosen to investigate election deniers in Georgia, specifically in one small town, and even more to the point, one man named Ben Johnson. Now, a convicted hacker, homophobic white supremacist, and serial cyberstalker, was on the other end of the phone, making sure he had all my information correct so he and his followers could hold me accountable for my supposed crimes.
“How do you know Ben Johnson?” I eventually asked the man, who by then I had gathered enough information on to determine was Joey Camp, a felon and online harassment specialist who is currently on the run in Central America for unexplained reasons. Camp demurred, claiming he didn’t know Johnson, the chair of the Spalding County Election Board who I had been investigating for his fringe beliefs in QAnon and election lies.
Camp’s harassment went on for a few weeks, posting pictures of me and my wife on the far-right social media network Gab, where his followers threatened and harassed me using Camp’s preferred moniker for his enemies: “faggot.” Eventually, Camp faded away, returning to his other campaigns of harassment supported by his followers in the far-right underworld of the Internet. But Johnson remained. He still sits on the election board, where he is joined by a handful of other men and women who believe in lies about the 2020 election and continue to implement policies based on them. They have suffered no consequences as a result of my reporting, which exposed them as election deniers who may have attempted to commit a crime in pursuit of evidence supporting the conspiracy theories in which they believe. They are part of a much larger ecosystem of everyday Americans who, not content to simply believe in conspiracy theories, are actively working to undermine democracy through legal, quasi-legal and sometimes violent means. These Americans are part of an ongoing insurrectionist and domestic terrorist movement that seeks to install politicians like Donald Trump in positions of power by any means necessary and for as long as can be arranged. They are often Christian nationalists and white supremacists who believe in a twisted vision of America ruled by a minority like themselves, no matter the democratic systems, checks and balances that stand in their way.
They are the new American insurgency and so far, not much has been done to stop them.
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The media has been doing its part to raise awareness of the most important aspect of this insurgency — the coming calamities of a second Trump administration. Axios has reported on Trump’s and Republicans’ plans to circumvent the constitution in order to pursue the most extreme and autocratic presidential administration in history, staffing it with some of the worst people in American politics. The Atlantic has laid out the democracy-crushing policies Trump is likely to pursue if he takes the White House next year, including everything from an unprecedented and draconian deportation plan for immigrants and possible use of the military to punish cities and states that disagree with the administration’s policies. NBC News, the Guardian and Rolling Stone have documented how the party’s most prominent election deniers are seeking to purge voter rolls and call into question the results of the 2024 election before it can even begin. On the campaign trail, Trump has been saying the quiet part out loud, just as he always has, defining his political foes as sub-humans worthy of extinction.
This is not politics as usual. When one side says the other needs to be eliminated from power — or simply eliminated — it’s not terribly helpful to say you are simply going to continue playing by the rules. Hell, Republicans aren’t even playing the same game. Unfortunately, that’s what continues to occur — Republicans are explicitly saying that they are pursuing an autocratic presidency that punishes everyone by the most loyal followers and in response, Democrats and many on the left are saying, “Boy, we had better win this election.” That’s not good enough.
It is imperative that authorities, from the Biden administration on down, hold Trump and his cohorts accountable under the laws they have quite clearly and repeatedly broken. Against Trump himself, The federal election case in D.C., the Fulton County D.A.’s election interference case in Georgia, the federal classified documents case in Florida, and the tax fraud case in New York are a start. Against some of the Americans who sought to overturn the 2020 election, prosecutions of hundreds of the January 6 rioters as well as fake electors in some states is another step in the right direction. But so much more needs to be done. Citizens, voting rights advocates and attorneys should be filing ethics and other complaints against people like Ben Johnson and other election deniers who sit in local positions of power. (Johnson is appointed to his position by local Republicans and can’t be voted out.) Lawsuits like the one that resulted in a state judge in New Mexico removing insurrectionist Cuoy Griffin from office under a clause of the Fourteenth Amendment should be filed to remove more insurrectionists from office.
The problem isn’t just Trump. It’s that there is an entire movement that includes people like Camp and other potentially violent people who are unstable, should not have access to firearms and should probably be sitting in a jail cell. They continue to threaten public officials over election lies, but law enforcement is hampered from prosecuting 90 percent of those threats under free speech protections. The violent threats of the insurgency are shielded by the very constitutional rights they would so quickly do away with to punish their own perceived political enemies.
All of this is why it’s so crucial that Trump stand trial and, ideally, be convicted and be sitting in a jail cell himself before the election. If Trump wins and carries out the plans of vengeance he is describing on a weekly basis, history will look back on this failure to successfully prosecute the many and obvious crimes — past, present and future — carried out by Trump, members of Congress and thousands of Americans as a catastrophic failure to prevent the rise of this country’s first dictator.
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We are, for the moment, engaged in something that seems much more dangerous than left versus right politics. Call it a slow-rolling insurrection, or a cold civil war that results in occasional flare-ups in the form of right-wing terror attacks, like every single politically motivated killing that occurred in 2022, from Buffalo to Colorado Springs and more. I’ve started to think of what we’re witnessing as an insurgency movement. As uncomfortable as it is to think of so many of our fellow Americans being part of this insurgency, that’s simply where we are. We desperately want to believe that this is all just a temporary madness that will pass when Trump is gone because the truth is too disturbing to bear: that our fellow Americans, when presented with a truth they don’t want to believe, whether it’s that the 2020 election wasn’t fraudulent, or that America is becoming a more progressive and diverse country, will resort to violence and intimidation to get their way.
That’s how I ended up with a cyberstalker looking up my address and sharing it with his racist, homophobic and fascist followers. That’s the minimum of what the other side is willing to do. The worst they’re willing to do shows up on the nightly news broadcast and all over your social media feeds when one of them decides to pull off another shooting attack. All we have to be willing to do is call them out on it, demand law enforcement take the threat of this insurgency seriously, and accept the disturbing fact that our fellow citizens view us as the enemy.
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P.S. Well, I’m finally back. From what, you ask? Writing my book, for one. It’s called If I am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened and will be published by the University of Georgia Press next year. I describe it as a memoir of violence, politics and American doom — so it covers all the fun stuff I’ve reported on in my decade (AND RUNNING) career in journalism, from all the way back in Peoria, across the country at protests and riots, down to the border, into the halls of Congress and, now, as a writer in the Savannah documenting what increasingly looks like a modern American insurgency in a New Jim Crow South. The book also deals with my descent into alcoholism, which I’m in recovery from, and which cannot be separated from the stressful and traumatic work of journalism. Today, I celebrated a year and a half of sobriety. You can celebrate with me by sharing this newsletter with someone you love (or hate, really, I don’t care), signing up for a paid subscription, or posting this piece on whatever social media platform you prefer these days. I hate them all equally.
In the coming months there will be many more stories here. I’m currently investigating Black land loss for the Guardian and continue to look into election deniers’ efforts in Georgia and elsewhere. Let me tell you that they are doing everything they can to call 2024 into question. Essentially, they’re trying to overturn the election right now. So, things are bad and are bound to get worse, which means there can be no better time for my return to this newsletter. I hope you’ll come along with me as I enter my second decade as a freelance journalist, this one stone cold sober.
P.P.S. I don’t even remember where that first photo is from but it’s hilarious and depressing, which is sort of the combination of the two things I love the most. The screenshot about liberals worshiping the devil and using COVID to kill Christians is from today on Facebook. Fun! The last photo is from the final days of writing my book on Tybee Island, which still has wholesome elections. Ah, the good old days.