Arie Perliger - American Zealots: Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism

In the morning hours of August 5, 2012, the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was crowded, filled mostly with children and young mothers engaged in preparations for the Langar, a traditional Sikh communal meal that was to be held later that day. Paramjit Kaur was one of them. While her kids were already grown (her youngest was eighteen years old), she did not want to miss the opportunity to join her community and help in the preparations. Around 10 a.m., while Paramjit was praying with her sister inside the temple, they both suddenly heard gunshots. Paramjit and her sister stood, hoping to find a safe place to hide, and a bullet hit Paramjit in the back, inflicting fatal injuries.

The shooter was Wade Michael Page, a forty-year-old man from the nearby town of Cudahy, Wisconsin, who, upon his arrival at the temple, started firing at its inhabitants using his Springfield XD(M) 9-millimeter automatic pistol, which he had purchased several days earlier. During his shooting spree, he killed Paramjit and five male worshipers. When, around 10:25 a.m., the first police officers arrived and engaged with Wade, he was able to return fire and injure one of them before being shot in the stomach. He then aimed his pistol at his head and committed suicide.

The subsequent investigation by law enforcement linked Page to various far-right associations, mainly from the skinhead subculture and the white power music scene. Pages life story reflects that he was not a conventional lone wolf but a representative of a broad and influential subculture that spans various facets of American society.

Just a few weeks after the attack in Oak Creek, in an unrelated incident, law enforcement discovered that several soldiers from Fort Stewart, a military base in Georgia, were part of a militia that had been involved in the killing of at least two people and was actively stockpiling weapons and explosives to give the government back to the people.

During the final days of summer 2012, I was closely following these events. Beyond my long-term professional interest in political violence, I was in the final stages of a two-year study that sought to decipher the current landscape of far-right violence in the United States. Whereas most of the information on these events was made public at an infuriatingly slow pace, as is usually the case when law enforcement agencies are reluctant to release information before the completion of a criminal investigation, media outlets and policy makers wasted no time in warning us about another wave of far-right violence, expressing various opinions and ideas regarding the root causes and nature of this phenomenon. Many such discussions also reflected and promulgated common misconceptions and fallacies that dominate the popular discourse about the American violent far right, such as an inability to distinguish among its various components, a lack of understanding of its ideological tenets, and the tendency to ignore that the violent far right had always been present in American society. If anything, the level of far-right violence had been rising steadily for the last two decades.