There’s a point in the Netflix series Manhunt: Deadly Games when ATF agent, explosives expert and good-ol-boy Earl Embry says of Richard Jewell—the man falsely accused of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing by the FBI and the media—that he was an easy target.
“Fat. Southern. Poor.” Played by Arliss Howard, Embry drawls. “He’s presumed guilty ‘cause he’s a bubba. Yeah, well … Hey, I’m a bubba.”
During the media feeding frenzy following the bombing, a newspaper posts the libelous headline “The Bubba Bomber” over Jewell’s picture. A subplot in Deadly Games involves the North Carolina Regulators militia that might as well be called bubba anarchism. Welcome to this installment of American Exceptionalism: Extremist Edition.
The FBI smeared Richard Jewell for the Olympic Park bombing and never cleared his name. Eric Rudolph committed it on the sly, then went on to bomb two abortion clinics and the Otherside Lounge, a lesbian bar in Atlanta, Georgia, taking credit for these three bombings after fleeing to the Nantahala National Forest near Murphy, North Carolina. Described as one of the most remote places in the country by Manhunt, the Nantahala is 500,000+ acres of forested wilderness, deep ravines, compact foliage and over 30,000 caves. The wilderness and surrounding area is home to militias, survivalists, sovereign citizens and other people wishing to escape the Federal government, including the North Carolina Regulators. The Regulators militia trace their lineage to Colonial times when they fought against the British during the War of Independence. According to the Manhunt storyline, the Regulators then fought against the Continental Army, turning against George Washington when he became a Federalist.
Not quite true.
The gun toting, anti-abortion, homophobic milieu of the Regulator militia is portrayed sympathetically and lovingly, especially when compared to the invading army of FBI agents trying to capture the fugitive Rudolph by unsuccessfully occupying the town of Murphy and the surrounding Nantahala wilderness. Yes, the Regulators are an all white, all male paramilitary organization, but they are depicted as defiantly resisting the Federal government by practicing a well-armed decentralized direct democracy that engages in civil disobedience and direct action. They hold regular council meetings when any member can speak and decisions are made democratically. And when the Regulator’s leader, Big John, realizes they’re being played by Rudolph and contemplates working with the Feds to hunt him down, other militia members threaten to depose him using the militia’s own rules and regulations.
But is this fictionalized portrayal of American realities actually bubba anarchism? Antifascist researchers Spencer Sunshine (“Decentralization & The U.S. Far Right”) and Matthew Lyons (“Some Thoughts On Fascism and The Current Moment”) both imply there’s an American fascist exceptionalism when it comes to the US far right’s embrace of decentralization, in contrast to traditional Fascist totalitarian centralism. Devolving American white ethnonationalism down to county, municipal, and individual levels means recognizing the possibility of an ethno-pluralism where decentralized racial nationalist enclaves can exist side by side. “These ethno-pluralist views can facilitate a politics that, on the surface at least, is not in conflict with the demands of oppressed groups,” according to Spencer Sunshine, who grants it’s an “ethnic or racial pluralism that is opposed to multicultural and cosmopolitan societies.” Matthew Lyons contends that “[m]any of today’s fascists actually advocate breaking up political entities into smaller units, and exercising totalizing control [authoritarianism] through small-scale institutions such as local government, church congregations, or the patriarchal family.” I’ve scoffed that what such far right extremists want is “libertarianism now, fascism later.” But what if this is a genuine ultra right populism that is decentralized in form yet fascist in content? A unique decentralized American fascism? America seems to be full of exceptional exceptions.
“Ayn Rand is just a bad writer,” Karl Hess said after acknowledging her influence on him. “A misogynistic, solipsistic writer. Emma Goldman is actually the source of the best in Ayn Rand.”
Sitting in the large auditorium at Moorpark College, California circa 1970, he was scheduled to give a lecture on anarchism. But only me and three other people showed up, and for the life of me I can’t remember how I heard about the talk in the days before email, the internet and social media. Karl Hess—Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter who was rumored to have coined the phrase “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”—had turned left anarchist and industrial worker skilled in welding in 1965. From 1965 to 1971 he worked with anarchist capitalist Murray Rothbard in an attempt to unite left and right libertarianism. He got involved in the appropriate technology and back-to-the-land movements, moved to rural West Virginia, and became a survivalist. Hess eventually returned to the rightwing fold and joined the Libertarian Party in 1986.
I’m sure from Hess’s perspective, it was all just anarchism. No need to split hairs. For someone like me who kept tabs on his career, he was extremist, pragmatic and quintessentially American. I don’t subscribe to linear political spectrums, or circles where left and right tendencies meet at opposite authoritarian and libertarian poles. And constructing politics as a horseshoe doesn’t help. Karl Hess engaged in serial extremism, moving from right to left and then back right again. With A Common Sense Strategy for Survivalists and his quixotic 1992 run for governor of West Virginia, Hess arguably reimagined the rightwing politics of bubba anarchism. There was no mystic libertarian fusion, no matter his advocacy that left and right anarchism work together however.
As for Deadly Games, the producers concoct a plausible storyline, drawn from speculation rampant at the time, that the FBI approached the Regulators with evidence that Rudolph had also constructed the Olympic Park bomb—a weapon of mass murder—to tarnish his rightwing Christian hero cred for the abortion clinics and lesbian bar bombings. To prove, in fact, that Rudolph was not ideologically or religiously driven but rather motivated by a god complex desire to kill large numbers of innocent people and law enforcement personnel. The Regulator militia turns against Rudolph and the last episodes of this Manhunt series swoons over scene after scene of FBI and Regulator troops commingled, rank in rank, combing the Nantahala to ferret out Rudolph. This Fed/militia working together kumbaya moment is also pure fantasy.
I’m tempted to ask whether there’s something in the water that accounts for America’s exceptional political craziness. I understand that culture has an outsized effect on character formation, although I’m dubious about the idea of a national character. I remember never feeling more American in my sense of humor, friendlessness and informality than when I was traveling abroad and homesick. But when I was studying the Articles of Confederation—the first national government the US had before the Constitution—as a graduate student, I realized America was more committed to decentralism than I’d originally thought.
Frederick Engels wrote that: “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon.” Revolutionary anarchism during the Spanish civil was rabidly anti-clerical, slaughtering priests and burning down churches as lingering instruments of feudal oppression. In my estimation, form rarely trumps content. The patriarchal, homophobic, racist content of the fascist American far right certainly supersedes their anarchistic organizational forms. Does Spanish anarchism’s vehemently atheistic, anti-religious content, with its resulting brutally authoritarian consequences, nullify its admirably decentralized structures and revolutionary governance?
As for Karl Hess, the balance sheet is decidedly mixed. During his left anarchist phase, Hess was a defender of the Black Panther Party and avid supporter of the New Left. He joined and worked in organizations like SDS and the IWW. During the same period however he worked to build bridges between left and right anarchists with Murray Rothbard—a profoundly nasty anarchist capitalist who defended property rights over liberty and presaged the alt right in his vicious racism, misogyny and homophobia—voicing nary a criticism of this piece of shit. Hess didn’t descend into vile fascist scapegoating during his final survivalist/libertarian phase, but that’s small comfort to those who appreciated his legacy. I often think that Karl Hess’s left anarchism was simply an aberration, well-intentioned but a detour from his overall rightwing trajectory.
Manhunt is intended to be an ongoing anthology series, the first season being Unabomber. Theodore Kaczynski’s anti-technology, anti-civilization rant became the cornerstone for both rightwing green primitivism and post left anarchism, and both Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph were high profile bombers eventually tracked down and captured by Janet Reno’s FBI under Louis Freeh. The acting and production values in both Unabomber and Deadly Games are excellent, although I dispute some of the history and historical interpretations in both. One nifty touch is in the last episode of Deadly Games, we see Eric Rudolph entering ADX Florence Supermax prison to serve a life sentence where he takes the cell across the hall from Ted Kaczynski.
SOURCES:
“On Authority” by Frederick Engels
Dear America and Mostly on the Edge autobiographies by Karl Hess
“Some Thoughts On Fascism and The Current Moment” by Matthew Lyons
“Decentralization & The U.S. Far Right” by Spencer Sunshine (unpublished)
Manhunt: Deadly Games by Spectrum Originals on Netflix
Buy my book, 1% Free, here.
1 Comment
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
What's Left? 
All of your content is just amazing 🙂