A Substitute For Violence: My Conversion Away from Right-Wing Extremism

In the spring of 2008, at the age of 30-years old, I was considering for the first time in my life a formal college education. For 10 years I worked in Information Technology with only training from a technical institute. After working in technical support for a nationally known leader in Tax Preparation, I moved on to support a regional healthcare provider, and finally in 2008 I was working in the Corporate Headquarters of a major women’s clothing retailer. By this time I had built an impressive resume however, I was not prepared for the change that a formal education would provide. It was also around this time that I had become very extreme in my political beliefs. The Presidential Election of 2008 was polarizing for me and by January 2009, I turned towards right-wing extremism. It would not be until my university education turned full-time that I would substitute right-wing extremism for education.

November of 2008, President Barack Obama won the Presidential Election and the loss to conservatives for me was a great defeat. Externally I voiced bipartisan support for our new president; internally I felt that justice was robbed when my candidate lost the election. At the time, I was an “issue voter” in strong support of the Second Amendment. In the months following the 2008 Democratic victory, I was exposed to an increased amount of right-wing propaganda on the internet: approaching gun confiscations, FEMA prison camps, a police state, etc. In the midst of all of this propaganda, I wrote an essay which came to be called “The Alarm & Muster” during the last weeks of January 2009. “If and when that time comes when our ‘certain unalienable rights’ are… infringed upon,” I wrote, “the time for protests, letters, petitions, and advocacy groups have passed” (Fernandez 2009, 4). In the wake of this and other charged rhetoric, I was deluged with support and what started as a personal charged essay which was circulated across the internet, and an interest group was born.

By that summer, the essay I had written turned into a national organization named after the writing: The Alarm & Muster. By the fall of that same year, thousands of likeminded people had joined the body and leadership structures were created. Members joined from all 50 states with others coming from Canada and Europe. Many of them voiced the same concerns I had in my essay and together believed in much of the same talking points: that a gun confiscation was approaching, political authority was being abused by our elected officials, and a violent civilian resistance was necessary if required for restoration. At the Alarm & Muster’s peak, I was engulfed in its activities daily, national attention followed, and I would soon enter dangerous territory in right-wing extremism.

After its first year, The Alarm & Muster experienced an exciting time. One of its members had put together a political rally in northern Virginia for the sole purpose of monopolizing on Virginia’s friendly Second Amendment laws; namely the right to openly carry a firearm. The rally was widely a success with many individuals delivering politically charged speeches accompanied with attendees wearing firearms in plain view. As successful as the rally was however, the Alarm & Muster had entered a dangerous area. In the months that followed the rally, national media outlets smeared my name in addition to those of other speakers at the event. Members within the Alarm & Muster were reaching out to violent reactionary bodies and were requesting my meeting with them. The right-wing extremist community in general was also growing restless with the political situation in the United States. It was also around this time that my wife requested that I continue with my schooling but at a full-time pace. After my wife’s request, accompanied with the dangerous direction in which the Alarm & Muster was approaching, I resigned as its leader and turned all of my energies towards my formal education. I had 2 years of part-time schooling completed and in August 2010 I left full-time professional work to enter Coastal Carolina University as a full-time student.

Since entering school full-time, my thinking has been greatly reformed from what it was nearly 2 years ago. In 2008, when President Obama won the election, I saw it as a decrease in my personal power; my candidate had lost and justice had been robbed in my opinion. Hannah Arendt (1970) noted that, “Every decrease in power is an open invitation to violence-if only because those who… feel it slipping from their hands… have always found it difficult to resist the temptation to substitute violence for it” (Kindle Edition, Section III). I was young in my political comprehension and as such turned towards the only alternative I understood, violence; or in this case, right-wing extremism. Since then I have read several works of Emerson (1841) and Thoreau (1854), Plato and Hobbes, and even current day political science writers such as Ezra F. Vogel (2011) and George Rabinowitz (1989). Arendt (1970) wrote that “Violence is still with us because no substitute has yet appeared” (Kindle Edition, Section I). But I believe violence is still with us not because there is no substitute as Arendt states however, but because people have not yet discovered what that substitute for them is; for me, it has been education. As a growing student of political science, I have learned about the processes of the American political system which do work and consequently have abandoned the primal reasoning also used by the beast.

“The specific distinction between man and beast is now, strictly speaking, no longer reason but science, the knowledge of these standards and the techniques applying them. According to this view, man acts irrationally and like a beast if he refuses to listen to the scientists or is ignorant of their latest findings” (Arendt 1970, Kindle Edition, Section III). When an animal feels its power is threatened, it does not have the means to communicate for redress. It merely acts on its own reason and in many instances will act violently. I was ignorant of the political system and therefore listened to the only reason I knew at the time and acted as Arendt stated: irrationally. I felt power slipping from my hands and I was willing to preserve it violently. Yet in itself “violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it” (Section II).

When the Presidential Election of 2008 was complete, I had felt that I had lost more than just an election; I felt as if power was being taken from my hands. At the time, I had very little formal education and as such responded the only way I knew how: violently. My advocacy of violent measures to restore something that in reality did not happen was irrational. Yet it was the gentle persuasion of my wife’s call to enter full-time university education that transformed my thinking and converted me away from right-wing extremism. Now the days of radical behavior become ever more distant with each passing semester as I prepare for Law School. Should you notice that I no longer keep pace with my companions of yesterday, perhaps it is because I am marching to the tune “of a different drummer” (Thoreau 1882, 502).

References

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Orlando: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1970. Kindle Edition.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” In Essays: First Series, 258-282. 1841.

Fernandez, Thomas M. “The Alarm & Muster: The Modern-day Call-Tree for Emergency Preparation.” Unpublished Essay, January 2009. http://www.lenaburgs.net/Alarm%20&%20Muster%20-%20Thomas%20M.%20Fernandez.pdf (accessed December 19, 2011).

Rabinowitz, George, and Stuart Elaine Macdonald. “A Directional Theory of Issue Voting.” The American Political Science Review 83, no. 1 (1989): 93-121.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Volume 2. University of Michigan: Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1882.

Vogel, Ezra F. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.