Alabama, a joint protest in Montgomery by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and the League of the South took place a week after Bentley removed the flag from the statehouse. William Flowers, vice chairman of the Georgia LoS, told the gathering, “We are pushing now to reach out and grab the hearts and minds of fellow Southerners to pull them in to believing that the politicians have betrayed them because it is true. They do not represent your interests. They have stabbed you in the back.”
By the second weekend of July, more than seventy protests had been organized in eight states formerly in the Confederacy, drawing more than 10,000 participants. One rally, in Ocala, Florida, featured an eight-mile procession with more than 1,500 cars. These events quickly became recruitment magnets for groups eager to defend the flag and all that it represented.
James Edwards, host of the far-right radio show the Political Cesspool, charged that “our societal overseers” hated the South and the “symbol of our unique identity before the murders that took place in Charleston occurred.” He accused these new “overseers” of “exploiting the tragedy in order to launch an attempt to completely eradicate the Confederate flag and any memory of the righteous cause for which it stood.” The “righteous cause” included the defense of white supremacy. It was a reiteration of the beliefs that had lain behind the displays of the Confederate flag since the defeat in the Civil War.
The Klan became publicly involved in the campaign to remove the remains of Confederate war hero (and Ku Klux Klan founding father) from their Memphis monument. Thom Robb, head of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, offered via press release to move the general’s statue and remains to Robb’s Christian Revival Center near Harrison, Arkansas.
In Alabama, a nominally mainstream “heritage” group called the Alabama Flaggers congregated at the statehouse to protest the flag’s removal there and extended an open invitation to League of the South members to attend. The Flaggers posted on Facebook: “We are rallying for the Secession from the United States of America. Bring your … secession flags [and] your secession signs.”
The backlash soon spilled out of the South. Pro-Confederate flag rallies were held in such disparate locations as Phoenix, Spokane, and Warsaw, Indiana. By late August, there had been more than 200 such rallies, and by December the total had reached 356. The attendance was generally sparse, but it was often loud, with an ugly tone of anti-black and anti–civil rights animus.
On July 14, when President Obama traveled to Durant, Oklahoma, to speak to students at the high school, he was met by a cluster of protesters who were angry about the Confederate flag prohibitions.
“We’re not gonna stand down from our heritage. You know, this flag’s not racist. And I know a lot of people think it is, but it’s really not. It’s just a Southern thing, that’s it,” Trey Johnson told TV reporters. He had driven three hours from Texas to join the protest.
Things turned frightening in the Atlanta suburb of Douglasville on July 25. A family of African Americans was celebrating a child’s birthday when a convoy of trucks bearing Confederate flags began trolling past, drawing the ire of several people at the party, who yelled at them to leave. At that point, more than seven pickup trucks circled and then parked in the field in front of their home, the passengers yelling racial epithets and threatening the families.
“One had a gun, saying he was gonna kill the niggers,” the party’s hostess, Melissa Alford, told a reporter. “Then one of them said, ‘Gimme the gun, I’ll shoot them niggers.’”
It was all caught on video. Later that fall fifteen people were indicted for making terrorist threats and engaging in “criminal street activity.” Most of those indicted were members of a Georgia group, Respect the Flag.
Melissa Alford said, “If they want to make a statement that these flags mean something to them, I’m OK with that. But … you can’t go around just blatantly terrorizing people.”
Actually, it was just getting started.
The movie Trainwreck is a mildly raunchy sex comedy, starring the comedienne Amy Schumer, that was doing boffo box office in the summer of 2015. But it was also coming in for its share of criticism. The National Review’s film critic, Armond White, ripped the film for promoting sexual immorality and feminism. “Schumer disguises a noxious cultural agenda as personal fiat,” he wrote. “She’s a comedy demagogue who okays modern misbehavior yet blatantly revels in PC notions about feminism, abortion, and other hot-button topics.”
A young writer for Fox News chimed in: “As a young woman, yes, even younger than Schumer, all this attention and praise for raunchy behavior bothers me.”
Those were all people who had bigger audiences than John Russell Houser, fifty-nine, with a history of bipolar disorder and other mental-health issues. Originally from Georgia and most recently from Alabama, he had moved to Lafayette, Louisiana, in early July and taken up residence at a Motel 6 near the freeway.
In his room, he scribbled his “random” thoughts about the moral state of America in his journal:
America is a filth farm. America is no longer America, i.e., all liberal political measures are approved without a vote of the people. These are the measures that lack logic, morality, or financial responsibility. It is this that boils the blood of the citizens, [and] which causes them to dig in their heals. If you have not stood against filth, you are now a soft target.
If the founders of this nation could have seen what the US would become, they would say, “Let us destroy it.”
America is in the middle of celebrating filth, and as such they are the enemy. Those who have not stood are equally culpable.
Soft targets are everywhere.
I have hidden nothing and have hated the US for at least 30 years. It will soon be every man for himself. A global rearrangement comes soon.
America is in the business of
1—making whores and prostitutes of girls and women.
2—making niggers of black people
3—breaking up families that could have survived in a society of decency
4—making sexual deviants (homosexuals) of normal people
5—censoring people who love what is normal
6—creating division amongst people that could have lived in harmony based on logic (affirmative action)
America as a whole is now the enemy. All soft targets included.
Nowhere in the US is it safe.
Houser had a long online history of similar ravings. Most of his postings indicate his obsession with “the power of the lone wolf,” a reference to terrorist attacks carried out by solo operators unconnected to any organization. It is a modality favored by far-right extremists. In 2005 he registered to attend a conference led by the former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke, and later praised Duke in his online comments. He also had a penchant for praising Adolf Hitler, penning lines such as “Hitler is loved for the results of his pragmatism.”
Like Jim David Adkisson, Honser also loved to hate on liberals: “Liberals are in the last stage of killing the golden goose, moral people who pay their bills, most notably, the white MAN.”
Once settled in Louisiana, Houser appears to have tried scoping out his “soft target”—the Grand 16 movie theater
