Adam J. Dewey/NurPhoto via AP
Militiamen and women listen to speeches at the annual Constitution Day/Second Amendment rally held at the Michigan State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan, September 17, 2020.
The news that six Michigan militia members have been arrested for planning to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the state’s Democratic governor, whose COVID precautions upset manly Trumpians, caused me to flash back to a 1996 campaign event I was covering for the L.A. Weekly. I was spending the better part of a week on the trail with Pat Buchanan, the proto-Trumpian, Putin-loving nativist, racist, and paleo-fascist (during his boyhood, his family supported Franco’s overthrow of Spain’s elected government), who was running an inflammatory Republican primary campaign against Bob Dole for the party’s presidential nomination. As Goldwater heralded Reagan, so Buchanan heralded Trump.
The event that still stands in memory took place one afternoon in a venerable auditorium in Bay City, Michigan. Like all of Pat’s events, the attendees were not only all white but quite a number of them showed up in military fatigues, eager to show that they’d enlisted in Buchanan’s culture war. One fatigue-wearer was so eager to demonstrate his zeal that he stood at attention, in the front row of the auditorium’s balcony seats, for the entirety of Pat’s speech, behind the American flag that he’d draped over the railing.
And like all of Pat’s events, this one featured largely generic obscenities that some in the crowd hurled at the traveling press when we entered the hall.
Virtually no elected officials supported Buchanan’s candidacy, so the drill at Bay City, as at the other stops, was to have the campaign’s county chairman (they were invariably male) introduce the campaign’s state chairman (ditto), who’d proceed to introduce Pat. Such introductions were generally pro forma, but not the one in Bay City, where the county chairman had a gaunt, haunted look, much like a half-lit John Carradine in some 1940s horror movie. That impression grew stronger as he began to speak.
“The problem is socialism,” he began—only, he said it in German. Then, he quickly translated it into English.
No one in the crowd blanched—the redder the meat, the better. Indeed, they whooped and hollered their approval, though there was one group, besides the press, that grew concerned. Buchanan’s traveling staff was a bunch of frat boys from right-wing colleges for whom such events had become so routine they had long since stopped paying any attention to what anyone was saying. The German introduction shook them up, however. Their heads swiveled, they rushed to consult one another, they furiously whispered into each other’s ears. What if that guy did a Heil-You-Know-Who salute? What if he led the crowd in a chorus of “Deutschland Uber Alles”? Did anyone have a hook to drag him offstage?
After a few more nerve-wracking minutes of ranting against the socialist threat—which Republican front-runner Dole obviously personified—the county chairman finally relinquished the stage. The frat boys heaved sighs of relief and went looking for whatever beer provisions were handy. The guy in the balcony remained at attention.
Which is one reason why today’s news of violent right-wing extremism in Michigan didn’t come as a total surprise to me.
