Texas is what modern civil war looks like | Will Bunch Newsletter

The world watched the coronation of a new king this weekend: King James Harden III, with the “three” in honor of the game-winning dagger that the 76ers point guard plunged into the back of the Boston Celtics in overtime on Sunday. Meanwhile, across the pond, England wasted millions on a ceremony that seemed largely derived from Monty Python, summed up by the protest sign: “He’s just some guy.”

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📮 I received a surprisingly robust response to last week’s question about whether President Biden should negotiate with House Republicans over raising the debt ceiling, and it was nearly unanimous: Heck, no. Wrote reader Diana McNamara of Delaware County: “Biden should tell the GOP to [bleep] all the way off, they raised the debt ceiling 3 times for [The Former Guy], with no problems, increased our national debt by lowering taxes for the wealthiest with no problems from the GOP so yeah. NO.” Anne Brennan agreed: “I do not think Biden should negotiate with extortionists.”

This week’s question: In the spirit of my AM-radio rantings (below), who’s a 2020s musical artist who brings it with the intensity of the 1960s/’70s heyday for pop, rock, and soul? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

Texas — our second-largest state in both population and land mass, southern anchor of the continental United States — has become a war zone, if not exactly the one that GOP Gov. Greg Abbott is spending billions to create.

As lines of armed National Guard soldiers dressed in full camouflage marched onto military planes behind him, Abbott held an airport news conference on Monday to sound like a wartime commander-in-chief in announcing a new “Texas Tactical Border Force” that he’s deploying to “hot spots” along the state’s long border with Mexico, where the number of refugees escaping crime and poverty in Central America has been surging.

But Abbott’s Churchillian shtick ended when journalists were mostly shouted down and blocked from asking the governor about the real front line in the Lone State State — a weekend of unthinkable carnage in which men consumed by rage and delusion mowed down 16 innocent civilians with an AR-15 and a Range Rover, shocking acts of terrorism that were recorded on videos that stunned and horrified the nation.

The actual Texas “hot spot” that Abbott should have been worrying about was a giant outlet mall hundreds of miles north of the border, in the Dallas suburb of Allen. There, a man armed with that now-ubiquitous military-style assault rifle, his body tattooed with Nazi swastikas and the emblem for a “Right Wing Death Squad,” turned his hate symbols into reality in a bloody Saturday morning assault on moms and dads and their little kids. The brief killing spree that turned a mall into a jungle combat zone claimed eight lives.

Less than 24 hours later, Texas’ asymmetrical civil war did come to the border, if not in the way envisioned by Abbott’s childish war games. In the far-southern outpost of Brownsville, Venezuelan-born migrants waiting at a bus shelter on a Sunday morning later told reporters they were confronted by the driver of the large Range Rover who shouted expletives at them before turning around, running a red light and plowing into the crowd without hitting the brakes.

One witness told the Washington Post that the driver, wrestled to the ground as he tried to flee on foot, was shouting: “You are invading my property, get out of my property you … migrants.” On the ground behind him lay eight more dead bodies, and another 10 people maimed or otherwise injured to cap a gruesome weekend of violence.

A couple of days later, there is a lot we still don’t know about the two incidents. In Brownsville, police have yet to officially rule that the vehicle carnage was “intentional,” despite the certainty of those who witnessed it. In Allen, investigators don’t know the exact reason why the 33-year-old man dressed for combat opened fire on the shoppers, but it doesn’t require Sherlock Holmes to make sense of the voluminous clues a mass killer left on social media, where he attacked Asians and Jews, celebrated Adolf Hitler, and seemed to warn of a “race war.”

Abbott, when asked in TV interviews over the weekend about the latest in a spate of mass shootings in the state — many of which have occurred after he become governor in 2015 and crafted the laxest gun laws in America — insisted the actual problem that needs to be addressed is a mental-health crisis. Placing aside the brazen hypocrisy of that statement — Abbott recently slashed more than $200 million in state funding for mental health, largely to pay for his tin soldiers on the southern border — I don’t believe the governor is correct. In their statements and in their online postings, both Texas killers seemed to know exactly what they were doing.

As America’s political divide grows increasingly angry and bitter, there’s been a surge in discussion over whether the nation is drifting toward its second civil war. More than 40% of us think “a civil war” is likely within the next decade, and the majority of folks who don’t foresee that probably are envisioning a Gettysburg-type battlefield of troops from Oklahoma in starched grey uniforms invading California — which indeed probably is not in our immediate future.

But some experts argue that the next U.S. civil war won’t look anything like the last one, that we would see these asymmetrical acts of extreme terrorism by militia-style groups or even violent “lone wolves,” perpetrated against the groups they perceive as their enemy. That conflict, in other words, would look like this weekend in Texas: a civil war that’s already here.

There’s a perfect description of this in Sarah Jones’ recent review of Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow, in which the author traveled America to argue that we are indeed in a slow-motion civil war. She explains: “States do not face one another on the battlefield; there is no rebel government. Instead, the battlefield is everywhere, and the combatants have, in a sense, already seceded from the United States. That the secession occurred in their minds makes it no less real. They are armed, and they are backed, too, by power and money.”

We need to understand in 2023 that an outlet mall peddling Gap Factory jeans and T-shirts is our Antietam, and that an attack on Venezuelan migrants waiting for a bus is our Bull Run, and that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Again.

Much has been made this week by right-wing trolls of the fact that both killers in Texas — the Allen mall shooter Mauricio Garcia, and the Brownville motorist George Alvarez — are Latino, as if their Hispanic surnames prove they cannot be part of a white supremacist far right, and that the violence instead is evidence of their alleged “invasion” from the south. But the reality is that today’s Latinos in America, much like Italian or Irish immigrants of yesteryear, see a pathway toward “whiteness” that can grow toxic.

“It has been this way for whiteness for a long time, because whiteness is a *socially constructed category*, by which I mean it is invented and enforced by people in a social formation,” the brilliant author Kathleen Belew, our leading authority on modern “white power” movements, posted Monday on Twitter. The outlet mall shooter who went online to spew venom and superiority against Asians killed three members of a Korean-American family, leaving a 6-year-old orphan, as well as a recent arrival from India.

In targeting immigrant families with an AR-15 or screaming gibberish about being invaded, the civil warriors of Texas are echoing what they hear from major news media like Fox News, which devoted much airtime on Monday to depicting long lines of refugees at the border with Mexico as, indeed, “an invasion.” They are amplifying the rhetoric from leaders of the Republican Party like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene or Donald Trump, who is getting an hour of priceless airtime on CNN Wednesday to promote his politics of hatred.

Of course, killers like the one in Allen — reportedly discharged from the Army after just three months over mental-health issues — and in Brownsville, with a lengthy arrest record, are unhinged on some level. But such people are the foot soldiers of what is known as stochastic terrorism — when political bigwigs spout rhetoric so violent it is all but certain to inspire lethal action among the masses, in a way they believe they can wash their hands of the inevitable blood. But we know better.

If Greg Abbott is determined to be a field general, there are many actual ways that he and his fellow travelers in the GOP can end a civil war before it spirals out of control. Keeping military weapons of war away from civilians overheated by “invasion” rhetoric would be a start. And spending $200 million more on mental health, instead of $200 million less, would be a good idea, too — even if that means picking your toy soldiers off the board. When 16 lives are lost in one weekend, it’s way past time to work for a ceasefire.

Question: How in holy [heck] does Donald Trump get a normal town hall on @CNN this week? WHY? — Via @robinjslick (@noah_zoey) on Twitter

Answer: Great question — one that I’d already been thinking about a lot since I learned that CNN would be hosting the GOP frontrunner on Wednesday night. My initial, gut reaction was probably the same as yours: Why, once again, give a massive megaphone to the clarion voice of American fascism, who led an attempted coup against the U.S. government (among other sins)? But the thing is: It’s too late to put Trump back in the bottle, and he’s winning another nomination with a front-porch campaign where he’s rarely challenged. Frequent exposure for Trump — in the form of those daily coronavirus briefings — is what cost him the election in 2020. So let’s pray that CNN asks some tough questions, and see if the 76-year-old POTUS 45 can handle being challenged by someone who (hopefully) is not a sycophant.

AM radio is like the newspaper of sound — a format that dominated in the mid-20th century in a way that would be completely unfathomable to anyone born after 1990. You had to be there to understand how screaming DJs, a tight rotation of Top-40 hits, and ads for tanning lotion and acne cures dominated — in a static-y mono (ask your dad what that is) that was all but doomed once FM (”no static at all...”) stereo and then the infinite choices of a plugged-in iPhone came along. Today, even the non-music formats that kept AM alive into the 21st century — right-wing talk radio, 24/7 sports, or “all news all the time” — are mostly moving to the FM dial, as highly rated KYW (news) and WIP (sports) have done here in Philadelphia. Nowadays, when I occasionally check to see if WPHT’s (AM 1210) Dom Giordano is ranting about the Philly mayor’s race, the formerly powerful station that once aired the Phillies is often barely audible in Delaware County.

Inevitably, just as some cities like Birmingham are seeing their former newspapers go all digital, some automakers have decided recently to not even bother having an AM band on their new car radios. My Inquirer colleague Jason Nark reported this week that electric-vehicle carmakers such as Tesla eliminated AM because of interference issues, while Ford is now dropping the frequency from all of its new vehicles. Nark’s angle was about worries from rural Pennsylvania needing AM’s longer-distance signals to stay connected, but to me the death of AM radio — its youthful baby boom energy and the unforgettable music those stations made popular in the 1960s and ‘70s — is more a cultural loss.

Except ... long live AM radio, because in recent years I’ve learned that the internet technology we’ve rightly blamed for destroying the golden age of Top 40 has also saved it, Clearasil ads and all. The raves for Quentin Tarantino featuring real snippets of LA’s legendary KHJ in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood inspired aficionados to create a YouTube channel where you can listen to hours of The Real Don Steele or Charlie Tuna, including the epic 45s they spun. Likewise, on the app Mixcloud, users like Retro Radio Joe or RadioMaven77 — veteran radio engineers or just fans — dig up and post long-lost hours of New York’s WABC or WFIL here in Philly. For a boomer like me, there’s no better way to escape today’s grim reality than connecting your iPhone to KHJ blaring “Satisfaction” or ads for Coppertone, as the Blue Route becomes the 405 and 2023 becomes 1965. The true glory of AM radio is still alive ... if you know where to look.

It’s easy to forget now how much the travails of Penn State — the Jerry Sandusky scandal, the collateral damage to Joe Paterno, the insanity of school administrators who looked the other way, and the students who rioted when Paterno was fired — dominated the news around these parts during the 2010s. On May 9, 2016, while some guy named Donald Trump was cruising to the GOP presidential nomination, I threw a fit over how little the commonwealth’s flagship university wished to acknowledge the lasting harm done by the affair, after then-president Eric Barron reacted to new disclosures about university wrongdoing with a Trump-style blame-the-media rant. You can read my fury in the piece headlined, “5 years after Sandusky, Penn State has learned nothing. Zilch. Nada.”