“So,” I mused, “he wanted a taste of forbidden fruit?”
“überforbidden,” said Miranda. “Like, forbidden to the second or third power—not just an African American, but a male African American. In drag. That’s some world-class sinning, by his standards.” Her brow furrowed slightly. “So all this vitriol is just overcompensation for his own dark, forbidden desires?”
Laurie shrugged. “We’ll never know. Hell, maybe Miller himself doesn’t even know. Guys like him don’t strike me as particularly self-aware, you know?”
Miranda made a face. “So Miller’s on death row for shooting Christians he mistook for Jews. Any of his fine, upstanding friends look capable of this?”
Laurie frowned. “Our Intelligence Project tracks a lot of extremists. Many of them have called, at one time or another, for the slaughter of blacks and Jews. But my guess is, it’s probably not a leader—not somebody with a high profile—who did this. More likely, somebody inspired by that kind of incendiary talk. Maybe somebody who wants to impress the leadership. Somebody who wants to prove himself, get into the club, score points by committing a killing. There’s multiple groups and ideologies that could fit with your case. But a lot of the groups have links to, or spun off from, one particularly influential hate group.”
She fiddled with the computer again, and the projector displayed a picture of a bespectacled white man in his fifties or sixties, photographed midsentence, his mouth slightly open, his index finger pointing to emphasize whatever he was saying. Despite what appeared to be an angry expression on his face, the man looked slightly nerdy, even to me—a grocery-store manager or McDonald’s supervisor—but behind him was a large Nazi flag. “This cheery fellow, James Wickstrom, is a leader of what’s called the Christian Identity movement,” Laurie said. “Christian Identity, or Identity, hard-liners despise blacks and other people of color. They consider them subhuman, and call ’em ‘mud people.’ But they hate Jews even worse.”
“Why?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “You want psychology, or theology? The Identity crazies believe the Jews were created when Eve had sex with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Wickstrom—”
“Excuse me,” Miranda interrupted, “but I misheard something there. The Jews were created when Eve what?”
“Had sex with the serpent. In the Garden of Eden. Cain—the ‘first Jew,’ according to these folks—wasn’t the son of Adam and Eve, according to Identity hard-liners, but the son of Eve and the snake.”
“But . . .” I paused, baffled about how to even frame a question about this bizarre twist on both biology and the creation story.
“Don’t try to find any logic to it,” she said. “There isn’t any. Aryans are God’s true Chosen People, say the Identity faithful, so they keep kosher, sort of. They don’t eat pork, don’t eat shellfish. They observe Jewish holidays.”
“So they’re trying to be the very people they despise?” I persisted. “That makes no sense.”
“Like I said, don’t look for logic. But they think the Jews—the evil Jews, mind you, not the good Aryan true Jews—are using the blacks to destroy whites. And they think that Armageddon will be a race war, one in which all blacks and Jews will finally be exterminated. This guy here—Wickstrom—has said he’d love to see every Jew fed through a wood chipper.”
“Ewww,” said Miranda.
“He’s got a lot of vitriolic soul mates,” Laurie went on. “You know the book called The Turner Diaries?” I noticed Miranda nodding, but I shook my head. “It’s a racist novel about right-wing militias overthrowing the U.S. government. It’s become a sort of bible for the militia types. Tim McVeigh had pages from this in his car—with his favorite passages highlighted—when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City. Point is, that book was written by one of the founders of the Christian Identity movement.”
I held out my hands, palms up. “Where in the teachings of Christ—the guy who said ‘love your enemies’ and ‘turn the other cheek’—do these folks find a rationale for murdering innocent people?”
“I keep telling you, it’s not about logic, Dr. Brockton. Christian Identity is to mainstream Christianity as ISIS is to mainstream Islam,” she said. “It’s a tiny splinter group that co-opts the name and twists the message. People’ve been killing in the name of God—one God or another—ever since the dawn of religion.”
“Reminds me of that Greek philosopher from way back,” I said, “who talked about how we created God in our own image. Or images. Including our angry, hate-filled image.”
Laurie nodded. “Most of these haters are just big talkers. Unfortunately, some of them do walk the walk. They call themselves ‘Phineas Priests.’ A couple years ago—”