You Down With NVE?
Yeah, you know me! Advocating for the targets of an ill-defined, lavishly-funded, brand spanking new police state.
My first week back in NYC after two weeks of hiding my head in Maine, I was catching up on the news and slipping into hopelessness, when I found myself casting back to that old iconic prop of cartoon mayhem, the “anarchist bomb.”
You know the one I mean. That glossy black sphere you’d see in “Spy Vs. Spy,” “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” or any number of post-war animated shorts. Somewhere between grapefruit- and basketball-sized, its fuse projecting from a squat cylinder. Whether branded anarchist or Bolshevik, this felt like a retro, artisanal, fun incendiary device. An explosive from a more innocent age, perhaps on the same spectrum as cherry bomb, before pipe bombs, IEDs, and bunker busters.
So while watching yet another abuse of power and yet another attack on powerless Americans, I had this childish fantasy of dispensing with all the reasoned criticism of the semi-organized mob called “MAGA,” and just sauntering over to the bullies’ table, producing one of those black sizzling orbs from my overcoat pocket, and, as they shout homophobic insults, responding thusly: “Moi? [fizzzz] Catch!”
It turns out this government might be a step ahead of me.
Last April, the Kash Patel-led FBI and Bondi-directed Justice Department snuck another MAGA-styled reality inversion into federal law enforcement, officially retasking the fight against domestic terrorism (which they’d prefer not to acknowledge is mostly far-right and white supremacist) to a new set of targets: “Nihilistic Violent Extremists.”
Get it?
A savvy update to “antifa” and “radical left,” the term NVE paints all likely enemies of American fascism as ill-defined ideological villains — like those arty German thugs in The Big Lebowski, who try to terrify others by sheer dint of their philosophy: “Vee believe in nussing!”
But as hard as this can be to remember, Kash Patel isn’t trying to be funny.
Two days ago, Ken Klippenstein shared a more recent report that the nonprofit Property of the People had obtained from the Army Threat Integration Center a warning titled, “Nihilistic Violent Extremist Chat Group Would Likely Result in the Construction of a Viable Explosive Device.”
Which you can imagine applying to the first three paragraphs of this very post.
How many other Americans might fall under this capacious newfangled definition of terrorist, motivated by “hatred of humanity or society,” two things defined ever more narrowly by the frankly nihilist members of this administration? Especially as its members openly plot to steal the next election?
Who you calling an NVE?
When you hear Pete Hegseth bray about restoring a Confederate statue that had been removed from Arlington National Cemetery, because “unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it,” there’s cause to wonder wtf he means. And to point him towards some NVE’s from the history he claims to honor. From the side of the Civil War that supposedly won.
Take John Brown: violent, extremist, leading a doomed and thus probably nihilistic raid at Harper’s Ferry? After he was sentenced to death, Brown admitted to everything the prosecution had accused him of but spoke a truth we still can’t quite digest: “Had I so interfered [on] behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great,” he told the courtroom, “it would have been all right.”
It would’ve been. It probably would be today. Violently interfering on behalf of the rich and powerful makes you Border Czar. Doing it on behalf of the poor and powerless is the stuff of NVEs.
How about Brown’s sympathizers, rabble-rousers like Henry David Thoreau?
Watching Brown’s trial from woke stronghold of Massachusetts, Thoreau wrote a vicious attack on not just slavery’s supporters but on fellow liberals consuming Brown’s doomed mission and trial as mere content: fodder for gossip, blogs, and Substack posts.
“I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers,” Thoreau writes, like he’s talking about CBS. “They do not believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth?”
Am I crazy to a hear critiques of the discourse around Greta Thunberg or Luigi Mangione in Thoreau’s assessment: “A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we hear people and parties declaring, ‘I didn't do it, nor countenance him to do it, in any conceivable way. It can’t be fairly inferred from my past career.’”
Am I nuts to hear debates about whether Gaza is a genocide, or whether the Republican party is looking, talking, and acting like fascist hoodlums in Thoreaus’s excoriation of right-minded useless spectators, chattering about a nihilistic violent extremist whose cause would be picked up by half the country in just two years?
Martin Luther King Jr. among others would echo Thoreau’s special disdain for white moderates here, but let’s confine ourselves to discourse from just before the war Hegseth is keen to honor.
Like from that other NVE, Frederick Douglass. For years, this formerly enslaved intellectual was a proponent of fighting slavery with non-violence, until events around 1860 convinced him to change up. A year after John Brown’s execution, Douglass gave a speech that had me flashing back to a recent visit to South Africa, where I got to know a 50-something Afrikaner who’d been a cop during Apartheid, and who told me how on a youthful visit to London he felt this visceral outrage on the sidewalk when a Black pedestrian didn’t step off the curb as he approached. Douglass describes this reality distortion field perfectly:
You meet a man on the sidewalk in the morning and you give him the way. He thanks you for it. You meet him again and you give him the way and he may thank you for it, but with a little less emphasis than at first. Meet him again and give him the way and he almost forgets to thank you for it. Meet him again and give him the way and he comes to think that you are conscious either of your inferiority or of his superiority and he begins to claim the inside of the walk as his right. This is human nature. This is the nature of the slaveholders.
I’m not saying MAGA members are slave holders, but they do seem prone to this kind of “human nature.” In their media bubbles, with full control of the government, confidently asserting their right to retain this power by any means necessary, these people are decreasingly able to recognize the humanity of those outside their camp. To paraphrase Douglass, something must be done to make them feel the injustice of their course.
Maybe they should meet some NVEs. Maybe they should be blown up.
Figuratively. Rhetorically.
I’m a Libra, the lamest astrological sign in the entire zodiac — so lame it’s the sole inanimate object. From my scant knowledge of this stuff, the sign’s reputed personal characteristics align all too closely with those of the bourgeois American liberal: diplomatic, tactful, fair-minded, harmony-loving, and — let’s just say it — limp, centrist, paralyzed, people pleasing, unable to take one’s own side in a debate.
All of which probably makes it hard for me to advocate for NVEs. I don't know exactly how to carve out clearly antisocial, monomaniacal, deranged mass murderers, like Ted Kaczynski or the guy who shot up a Midtown office building because he blamed the NFL for the traumatic brain injury he got playing football in high school. Or indeed the 1,500 violent criminals who attacked the Capitol and got released back into society by a nihilist who decided their views are not extreme.
Or quite what to make of an historic NVE like Lucy Parsons, the famous labor crusader, whose husband Albert was among those executed after an 1886 riot during a factory strike in Haymarket Square, where someone in the crowd tossed a bomb at the cops, triggering gunfire that left a dozen odd people dead.
This was the actual, unreconstructed object from whence my cartoon-shaped adolescent fantasies derive: small, round, homemade, made by an actual anarchist. And while neither Lucy Parsons nor her husband had any real role in this violence, their newspaper The Alarm was the most incendiary of all radical newspapers at the time. And Parsons herself wrote one of its most incendiary articles, “A Word to the Tramps,” which ends with the merry sign off “Learn the use of explosives!”
But even this tract, violent and extremist, can’t be called nihilistic.
Parson’s closing exhortation comes after a 1,000-word outpouring of sympathy for the lost and dispossessed of Chicago, at the dawn of the incredibly violent labor struggles that over the next 40 years would be painfully resolved through the rise of labor power and the New Deal (which, of course, MAGA is now doggedly working to dismantle).
After the trial, Parsons remained a crusader for workers for the rest of her long life. And even in her incendiary article, her violent exhortation flows from a counsel against despair. To the suicidal, she writes: “halt before you commit this last tragic act in the drama of your simple existence. Stop! Is there nothing you can do to ensure those whom you are about to orphan against a like fate?”
With 450 days to a midterm election that Republicans are openly trying to steal, which a third of the country, including our parents, uncles, and colleagues seem to be just fine with, it’s easy to get depressed. It’s easy to wonder whether your ostensible “side” is any better.
After all, some of the incendiary lines quoted above sound a lot like the scripture-citing, Minuteman-cosplaying, post-Tea Party verbiage of MAGA frontmen, whose party may not be so different from the elites-captured one across the aisle.
But right now, they’re pretty easy to tell apart.
One side doesn’t put billions into a new police state while attacking law, science, education, journalism, democracy, and having to lie about almost everything, all the time.
The other side? It just needs to get blown up. Rhetorically. Doing so might even lift your mood.
In fact, Thoreau recognized that the brave acts of righteous people are a uniquely effective form of suicide prevention, writing of John Brown and his doomed comrades:
These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It is the best news that America has ever heard. It has already quickened the feeble pulse of the North, and infused more and more generous blood into her veins and heart, than any number of years of what is called commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man who was lately contemplating suicide has now something to live for!
I don’t know about you, but I feel a bit better already.
I’ll be back much sooner this time. Thanks for being with me.