KNOW NOW:
Can Civil Strife Create Civil War?
A Divided America
This is Michelle Browder detailing visceral violence of a divided United States. This is Montgomery, Alabama, where the early slave trade, white-on-black lynching, and mob attacks gained traction. The city is seasoned with landmarks like Browder’s Mother of Gynecology Park, a soaring set of armless females composed of found metals forged together. Fitted with bicycle parts, scissors, and chains, the assemblage memorializes savage exploration of enslaved women in the name of medicine. Museums and outdoor parks here address racism’s grittiness, from the granular to the seminal, much happening during the lifetime of the majority of Americans today.
Montgomery, the state capital, was also the Confederacy’s and an epicenter of pain and protest. Visitors here repeat the same refrains, shocking, savage, shameful, something every American should know as they pore over documents, listen to oral histories, and walk where violent extremism festered. Locals point to living trees where nooses once hung; squares where human flesh was auctioned off by the pound. Montgomery is one of many locales across the country where whites perpetrated atrocities against blacks. Is this impulse to tear up another race, another religion, another culture so remote, it’s part of the nation’s permanent past?
Hate-watchers here and nationwide say ongoing assaults on fair access to the ballot box portend difficult days ahead. Montgomery-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an early warning system monitoring US domestic unrest, tracking some 1,500 active white nationalist, supremacist, anti-government groups and militias in overdrive to influence or dominate the November 5th election. The Hartford, a leader in commercial insurance, today offers customers "civil unrest" coverage to protect their businesses given the growing prospect of political violence. Escalating beyond voter intimidation, election fraud narratives, ballot box tampering, and race baiting, dangerous hate mongers could push civil society into civil war.
The heightened risk prompted FBI and national security veterans to join forces with the Rand Corporation’s Brian Jenkins, the world class consultant for companies, kingdoms, countries and churches, who once directed research on political violence for the US Army Special Forces. His non-partisan group points to candidates themselves as the worst sowers of extremist violence, demonizing opponents and stirring up communities with lies that quickly become accepted as fact. "Political leaders are willing to dance on the edge of dangerous speech, play the rhetoric that borders on incitement, wink at violence,” the group wrote in an urgent dispatch to state, county and municipal governments “Addressing the Threat of Political Violence in the 2024 Elections.”
Among the signatories is Lauren C. Anderson who spent decades in FBI counterterrorism and national security advisory roles and today advises the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional overseers. She’s worried about “belief-based assaults on democracy” – verbal, oral, in person, individual, group – that debase, even try to erase those who think differently. Attacks come from across the political spectrum, she says. To create a survey for public consumption, the SPLC catalogs these extreme hate groups by their ideas.
Homegrown groups prey on differences among Americans, and Russia, Iran, China and North Korea deepen those divisions. Foreign abilities to penetrate the US media flow, its education system, and its governance put cyber and other national security agencies on high alert, prompting this unusual public service announcement, about “threat actors.” Anderson points to Generative AI as the most profound accelerator with its breathtaking saturation of “anti-messaging that compounds the lack of trust in our institutions and leaders…sentiments based on false information the intruders hope US voters take to the polls.”
The targets? The entire electorate, with a zoom on the largest, most vulnerable and pivotal demographic group in the November election: Latinos. Swept up in this AI-enhanced foreign and Christian Right interference, Latino social media influencers and church leaders have become ideological warriors themselves, meeting communities where they congregate, online or onsite. The Christian Right’s impact on the community-based Latino churches is as effective as it is ironic, with first generation immigrant pastors conflating MAGA with faith, sermonizing about closing the border and expelling migrants. QAnon conspiracy theories populate growing numbers of Latino platforms. Fear of the other, no matter how familiar, festers, and politically-motivated interests tap into it with ease.
Are concerns about civil war in the US far-fetched? “The nation’s threat level has never been higher,” Farah Pandith cautioned at the recent K/NOW Dialogue on the anatomy of violent extremism. Working under Democrat and Republican presidents, she analyzed Muslim demographics and ideologies. “We are in a time where hate is abundant” as youth become radicalized through digital media and hate is legitimized through some political leaders. “The polarization in our society becomes a target for bad actors to exploit and manipulate our democracy,” she says.
Back in Montgomery, nationally-acclaimed poet Jacqueline Allen Trimble orates a fusion of spoken word and personal narrative, delivering words that writer Randall Horton calls “love in a balled fist.” The Alabama State University professor and department chair prods us to learn our own histories. “People who read other people's stories tend to be more empathetic.” So many of the world’s troubles “are because reading has dropped off,” she says, as interest in others slumps and intolerance soars. “We’re banning books, we’re trying to limit curriculum, and if you cannot feel empathy for somebody who isn’t like you in any way, then you have lost the struggle to be a human being. That is our current struggle.”
A long line of black voter registration test tables at Montgomery’s Equal Justice Initiative show how inhumanity played out as recently as the 1960s. Each station is punctuated by a large jar of colorful jelly beans and a list of insulting, idiotic and impossible to answer questions designed to fail, including “how many jelly beans are in this jar?” and “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?”
Change is stubborn and slow. Only last year, the Supreme Court voted to end the gerrymandering that denied proper representation for black populations, predominantly rural descendants of slaves and sharecroppers. Despite this, registered voters have already been miscounted and misinformed about procedures and polls. The coming week will demonstrate whether the Supreme Court’s ruling worked; local and national advocates for the rule of law are tracking it. Part of the ever-evolving landscape of public monuments here and across the country, Michelle Browder says the pace of progress is slow, but she is persistent. She welcomes visitors to her gated park while she battles the nearby Alabama State House to remove its towering statue of I. Marion Sims. He is the “father of gynecology” who forced the enslaved women and girls here through repeated unanesthetized trial surgeries for his discoveries.
DO NOW:
Want to do something, anything to change the equation? Farah Pandith urges ordinary citizens to donate time, talent, even treasure toward local organizations doing bridge work in communities. Begin difficult conversations with those who harbor hateful beliefs, she adds, and stand up for people whose difference is under attack. For poetic current history, read Jacqueline Allen Trimble “How to Survive the Apocalypse.” Need to know what to do when confronted by, witnessing, or hearing about a hate crime? The Southern Poverty Law Center gives practical tips. Thinking about sharing a copy of "Addressing the Threat of Political Violence in the 2024 Elections” with colleagues? It’s a free “how to” meant for anyone involved in the election – from the poll workers to the secretaries of state certifying results. Learn how state and local governments can strengthen election processes. Interested in learning more about the election and Latino Americans? Look for PBS and NPR documentaries, along with primary actors. Curious about civic pushback? Here’s how Latino locals in Arizona fight disinformation.
Amy Kaslow