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Friday, July 02, 2021

Call Me Ishmael: The Hunt for White Supremacists

You want to write a piece about the threat from white supremacists, remembering that Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress that violence incited by white supremacists poses “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas agreed. According to Biden administration officials, the threat is greater than from any foreign nation, including—and this is frightening—Donald Trump’s longstanding co-conspirator, Russia! 

So you go to Google and type in “The Oath Keepers” because you’ve discovered it is one of the three major white supremacist groups in the country. Nothing comes up. 

So you click on the second page of the Google search even though you know—because, well, you’re quite sophisticated—that the percentage of searchers who bother to click the second search page is in the single digits, and you’ve heard the joke that the second page of a search is the best place to hide a dead body. 

But you don’t find “The Oath Keepers” on the second page, either. Neither do you find it on the third page, a land where few people have ever ventured.