After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent in June 2022, eliminating women’s reproductive rights under the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, 21 states now ban abortion or restrict the procedure, with 10 of those states having no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
Many of those same states under Republican party control have legislated statewide book bans, censored the teaching of America’s slave era history, criminalized teachers who discuss LGBTQ issues in the classroom and erased all references to climate change from state law.
Since Donald Trump incited the Jan. 6th violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the nation has witnessed a resurgence of legal vigilantism in extremist-led red states. The new book, “Vigilante Nation: How State-Sponsored Terror Threatens Our Democracy,” written by David Noll, professor of law at Rutgers University and UCLA professor of law Jon Michaels, documents the overlapping networks of right-wing lawyers, politicians, plutocrats and white Christian nationalist preachers that have resurrected state-supported vigilantism. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Vigilante Nation co-author David Noll, who examines the MAGA Republican strategy to roll back civil, political and privacy rights and subvert American democracy.
DAVID NOLL: You know, our book argues that MAGA politicians and lawyers have cultivated a network of vigilantes to help them secure political power and enforce an illiberal cultural agenda. And the network extends from everyone — from individuals who are getting books banned to parents who police which bathrooms high school kids use to armed militia men who appeared at ballot drop boxes in 2022 and are likely going to show up on Election Day this year.
And, you know, our thesis is that particularly since the Jan. 6 insurrection, there has been an effort to legalize vigilante activity and give it the cover of law. When you say vigilante, people tend to think of private actors like the Klan or if you’re thinking about Hollywood movies, you know, figures like Batman and the pop culture image of vigilante as somebody who operates completely independently of the state with no legal authority.
But when you dig into U.S. history, there’s this alternative tradition of vigilantes that are operating with more or less explicit support from the state. And that goes back to Jim Crow and to before that to the way that the slave laws were enforced. And what we’re arguing in the book is that some of these new policies have brought back that tradition of vigilantism, of private actors who are working hand in glove with the state to enforce these really restrictive policies.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, thank you, David, for defining that for us. Now, I wondered if you would give us some examples of the state sponsored vigilantism in the present day. You talk about, for instance, awarding bounties to anyone who provides information on women seeking an abortion in Texas, which is illegal, or crossing state lines. We also have examples of students being encouraged to turn in the names of teachers who are talking in class about the history of slavery or the persecution of the LGBTQ community.
That’s illegal, for instance, in the state of Florida. There’s a longer list than that. So I wondered if you just kind of talk about this modern day vigilantism and the real world, what we are concerned about, in this book.
DAVID NOLL: Yeah. For sure. We spent a lot of time looking at laws that states were passed in, particularly states that had, sort of a MAGA-dominated legislature as well as a MAGA-friendly governor. And we broke down these policies supporting vigilantes into four different categories. You mentioned Texas SB 8, which is Texas is notorious bounty hunter regime, which uses private parties to go after abortion providers and even people who help somebody obtain an abortion.
We call that courthouse vigilantism, because it’s taking sort of the machinery of civil litigation and using it to send a message that vigilantes should go out, and in that case, go after abortion providers. You know, another category of policies that we’re seeing is what we call dissenter vigilantism. This really took off during Covid, when figures like Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin invited parents to flout public health rules that had been set by public health authorities.
And sort of the legal trick there is to take what we used to think of as the right to opt out, you know, say you didn’t want your kid to engage in to take lessons in sex ed, you know, that used to be, you know, that goes to the library. A lot of lessons were being taught. And dissenter vigilantism gives those dissenters the ability to effectively set policy for the entire community.
So where we really see this is book bans, where sometimes, you know, under some of those regimes that states are enacting just a single objection can result in books being removed from libraries and an entire school district, or even in some cases, an entire state.
In addition to that, we have category of laws that we call street vigilantism. That’s probably the most intuitive form of vigilantism. It includes things like laws that immunize drivers for running over racial justice protesters, laws that expand the right to carry weapons in public places and, of course, pardons of individuals who commit crimes and are convicted of them, but then are pardoned, usually by a governor when they’re going after perceived political enemies.
Then finally, we talk about electoral vigilantism, which is particularly relevant today, which is, you know, the use of all of these kinds of vigilantism to control who votes and the way that votes are counted.
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