Life on a Fault Line
AP
An American Powder Keg
In Alamance County, North Carolina, the nation’s future and past collide — often in terrifying fashion?
Rolling Stone | November 3, 2020
Megan Squire took her place at a busy intersection near the campus of Elon University, the small liberal arts college in central North Carolina where she and her husband teach. A soft-spoken data scientist with pale freckled skin and long red hair, Squire specializes in tracking and exposing right-wing extremist networks online, and is something of a celebrity in the small community of people who spend their days monitoring militias and hate groups. She also happens to live in a place where the white supremacists and neo-Confederates she follows online are, in a broad sense, her neighbors. Now, Squire picked up her handwritten “Black Lives Matter” sign, hit “Record” on her iPhone, and waited.
A few miles away, a convoy of several hundred cars and trucks lined up two and three across on the banked track of the Ace Speedway in the town of Altamahaw. Fixed to the back of almost every vehicle like rooster tails were flags: American flags and Trump 2020: “No More Bullshit” flags, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and Blue Lives Matter flags, Trump-as-Rambo flags, Betsy Ross colonial flags, Confederate flags, and at least one American flag bearing the logo of the violent Three Percenter militia movement.
It was a cold, clear Saturday morning in late September. One by one, a smattering of local Republican candidates delivered brief remarks out on the racetrack’s finish line about their bids for school board and county commission, judgeships and state legislative seats and a nearby U.S. congressional district. The last person to speak was a man named Gary Williamson. Bearded and broad-shouldered with a baseball cap pulled low, Williamson wasn’t running for any office, but he was as well-known as any of the politicians on hand. Williamson runs Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County, or ACTBAC (pronounced “act back”), one of the most ardent defenders of Confederate monuments across North Carolina. Here, the fuzzy border between the GOP and the neo-Confederate movement wasn’t a border at all but an open bear hug.
Microphone in hand, Williamson urged everyone in attendance to vote the Republican ticket, top to bottom. “We’re one of the last true conservative counties in the state,” he said. “And we’re gonna keep it that way.” Just before the convoy rolled out, he urged his compatriots to keep their cool and “do it the right way.” “When you see them, don’t let them provoke you,” he said.
A short while later, Megan Squire saw the convoy approaching and raised her Black Lives Matter sign. One by one, as the cars and trucks rolled past, the vitriol and hate flowed freely:
“Fuck black lives!”
“Go back to your home, c–t!”
“White power!”
After the convoy was seemingly over, Tony Crider, who is married to Squire, grabbed his camera and headed for the town center in Graham, the seat of Alamance County. He had gotten a tip that some local neo-Confederates were meeting there, rallying around the Confederate monument outside the county courthouse. An astrophysics professor at Elon, Crider fills his spare time by photographing political demonstrations and extremist rallies. More than any single news organization, he has been one of the most obsessive documentarians of the rising tide of white supremacy and neo-Confederacy in the Southeast since the election of Donald Trump.
The convoy arrived, and Crider began shooting photos. In one, a thin woman smokes a cigarette while carrying two Confederate flags, one on each shoulder like rifles. In a pair of photos, a paunchy white guy makes a white-power hand gesture and holds a Black Lives Matter sign changed to read “Crack Lives Matter.” In another, a local law-enforcement officer has a friendly chat with ACTBAC’s Gary Williamson, who had shown up on his motorcycle.
The strangest photo of all, though, was of a woman in a mask with a fake black penis and testicles attached to the front. The woman points the penis in the direction of someone out of the frame. Her blue T-shirt says on the back, “Donald Trump: Finally someone with balls.” The image is repulsive and grotesque and racist, but also incomprehensible. What point does this woman think she’s making, Crider wondered.
Squire had by then packed up her sign, uploaded a few videos to Twitter, and headed home. As she turned onto her street, she saw a red truck up ahead with a row of Trump flags on it. She recognized it from the convoy that day. Now it was parked across the street from their house.