Interview: Dr. Amy Cooter
Dr. Amy Cooter is a Senior Research Fellow at CTEC who focuses on anti-government extremism and a Board Member with the Accelerationism Research Consortium. She has studied a range of groups who use a nostalgic understanding of the past to justify their actions. Her primary expertise is on U.S. domestic militias, and groups of armed individuals who see it as their civic duty to uphold the Constitution the way they believe it should be interpreted. She has published articles in outlets like Scientific American, The Conversation and Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism and has a book forthcoming with Taylor & Francis about nationalism and nostalgia in militias. Amy has testified before the U.S. Congress about her research, and regularly consults with academics, journalists, and law enforcement around the globe. You may find her quoted in such outlets as NPR, Rolling Stone, FiveThirtyEight, and The Washington Post. Amy has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Michigan and B.A. in sociology and psychology from Vanderbilt University.
The following interview was conducted by Meghan Conroy and has been edited for length and clarity.
A lot of your work grapples with the concept of “weaponized nostalgia” – can you explain how that framework can help us better understand the beliefs and objectives of US militia groups?
Yeah, so I think everybody generally knows what nostalgia is. It is where we have these warm, fuzzy feelings toward the past – or at least an imagined past – that we are kind of attached to for whatever reason. But when I talk about nostalgia being weaponized, it's really this idea that we have some idealized version of the past that is almost used against other people in the present day. So when we use it to either recruit people based on ongoing fears – say about the economy or about immigrants or about other things – that maybe aren’t really the source of the true concern that these folks are feeling. Also, sometimes with the even more extreme groups, we'll see people reference the past where white men had explicit dominant economic power and some people really overtly want to tap into those things and talk about that as being the golden era. And then, even more in a truly weaponized form, try to go after other groups that don't fit into that mold.
How can this glorification of this kind of mythologized past – especially as it relates to white men – be used to cultivate a desire for societal collapse?
When we’re talking about groups on the more extreme end of the spectrum, people can reference that idealized past as something that we must urgently get back to. So people who really see us as being in a moment of societal collapse, or at least cultural collapse, say that this is our model that we should be striving toward. Or they’ll say this is our motivating factor, even if they think the outcome should look a little bit different. And so they use that version of the past to effectively try to tantalize other people into joining their movement. In some cases, they try to use that as an excuse for attacking other groups, or as a justification for exclusionary policies, or even recently, for rejecting the legitimacy of elections.
The mythmaking and perceived victimhood you’ve described – these are fundamental tenets of fascism. How do we get policymakers, practitioners, and academics to call this movement what it is?
It is tough because in some cases, I think that there are people who can get wrapped up in these movements without really truly understanding how they’re contributing to fascism. To be clear, the movement – this effort as a whole – is undeniably fascist. But by virtue of these appeals to the past, by virtue of appeals to American identity, that coded language creates an opportunity where some people can get drawn into it without realizing the full implications of what they’re actually doing. And I think in some cases, it’s important to keep that in mind because depending on what action we’re talking about, what people we’re talking about, people may be at different steps along that pathway towards buying into fascism or contributing to violent outcomes. And if we're talking about somebody who’s maybe not quite sipped that Kool-Aid, there might be more room for intervention than people who are really more consciously pushing that effort.
You mentioned coded language, which evolves as the broader discourse within the broader far right evolves. Have you seen an evolution in the coded language used by militia groups, especially as it relates to weaponized nostalgia? Or would you say it’s pretty consistent in terms of the words and the phrasing that these actors use?
I think every single group has evolved – I think that they have to in order to stay current and attractive to new potential members. In the 90s, for example, black helicopters and the New World Order were almost synonymous within certain elements of the militia world. We don't really hear that anymore. There are a few people who throw those terms around, but honestly not so much. However, some of the same ideas are still very much present. And it’s just kind of been rebranded under the QAnon ideology talking about global governments in a slightly different way or slightly different terminology. But it’s still getting at that core notion that there’s this big, elite, powerful cabal that’s controlling average, everyday citizens. It's not entirely clear how or why, but it’s bad, right? And people are supposed to be very concerned and do something about that.
So let’s shift gears from specific narratives to the militia movement more broadly. Since the January 6th attack on the Capitol, we’ve seen a lot of hot takes about the militia movement. Are there any misconceptions you’ve seen that have the potential to undermine our attempts to combat this threat?
I think the biggest one, honestly, is that all militia groups and all militia members are a) all the exact same and b) that they’re necessarily white supremacists. I think those are both problematic interpretations because, in my observations, it’s just not factually true. And I think that if we’re coming at this from a scientific perspective, we should really aim for both accuracy and nuance when we’re studying the world, no matter what our topic is. I think these misconceptions also mean that we miss opportunities for potential intervention, we miss opportunities for applying our real-world limited resources toward the most dangerous groups and toward the biggest issues, and also that we misunderstand that these ideas are really quite common.
That last point is something that I've tried to argue for a really long time – well before 2021. Most of the time, militia members’ ideas aren't all that extreme in terms of being outliers from society as a whole. Militia members are just a little bit louder about their ideas than the average person who believes the same things. If we frame this movement as just one thing, or just as “extremism,” it makes it really difficult to understand the full potential for those ideas to influence our political landscape. I think that's one reason that people were so caught off-guard, not necessarily just by January 6th, but by various other things during the Trump administration that kind of led up to that event. They didn't really want to believe how common some of these ideas are in our society. And I think we continue along that path at our peril.
Is there anything else you’ve been working on that you’d like to highlight?
I'm attempting to get my next project off the ground, which is trying to understand a little bit more about how former and current service members are recruited to extremism and exploited by extremist organizations. This project will focus not just on militia groups, but on extremism as a whole. We have some insights into this but a lot of it is anecdotal or based on surveys; we have some big picture counts but we don't really understand how common it is or what the mechanisms look like. I'm trying to start an interview-based study, of course with an eye toward accelerationism and how different threads of extremism have drawn on military techniques.