Undercover in the red zone

It is so hot that the only time to walk or exercise is very early in the morning, and in fact, the garage where I keep my elliptical is still overheated even then. So, the other day I opted for a walk around the neighborhood of grid streets. And within a few blocks, I felt like an undercover operative in a strange dystopian country.

The area where I live in Northeastern Oregon is in a kind of limbo when it comes to politics. The local area is solidly in the red. Seventy-five percent voted for Trump the first time, and I think that even slightly increased the second time around.

And yet it’s Oregon. So, it’s easy to forget. We get all the bennies of living in a blue state—legal marijuana, extra health care, housing assistance for homeless families, trans-inclusive norms for public employees, etc. As a result, there is an increasingly vocal faction among the majority conservatives who want to break away from Oregon and join Idaho.

Creative Commons image by Juli of Flickr.com

And even living in a red county, the people I hang out with are mostly fairly moderate. The local farmer’s market required masks, even outdoors, all last year, and literary events put on by the local state university are brashly woke. But walking around a low-income neighborhood feels like going to another country, except it is one with A LOT of American flags.

There are also a lot of suped-up trucks with unreasonably tall tires, rusty vans and wrecks without wheels of any height outside many houses. By 6:30 am there were two different houses on two different blocks broadcasting far right talk radio from big speakers, so that the entire street was literally forced to listen.

“So, we are supposed to believe… supposed to believe… that these rapists and murders crossing the border… rapists and murders… they’re really apparently just innocent people who accidentally got lost on the way to the border checkpoint. That’s what we’re supposed to believe. The libtards are chuckling into their cigars, expecting we’ll just swallow that.” One of them blares with an odd, repetitive cadence over the sleepy sun-drenched eves and gardens, vaguely reminiscent of a fired up preacher.

The other was more on topic for a preacher and no less hateful. “If they want to, if a woman wants to, and I’m telling you I have good reason to know this. If they want they can keep from getting pregnant. But they don’t want that, do they? They want these abortions, because they’re being paid, paid to get pregnant, by those… those… I can’t call them humans… that wouldn’t really be correct… those women are paid by them for the bodies…”

That one makes me quicken my steps. I shudder. The hate for women dripping from the second voice, even more strident than the first, makes me grateful for my mostly quiet meth-using nearer neighbors. But my route brings me back in range of the first loudspeaker.

“We will defend our borders! That’s a fact! Those who say we shouldn’t. Well, you know what they are! Do I need to say the words? I don’t think so. But you know it. You know our second amendment rights are the only thing holding back the caravans and keeping a rein on those who hate our country from within…”

I don’t know what stations or podcasts these come from, but I grew up here and I do know about rural “conservatives.” I can even hold down a conversation and get along fairly well with most of them—by selectively not hearing certain things. But those snippets of talk radio were so far beyond what I grew up with, I know they would have been unintelligible to me a few months ago.

But I’ve been undercover, so I get most of the references.

You see, a year ago, when I first came back to the US from living in the Czech Republic for more than half my life, I got a new phone number from Verizon. And I had the misfortune to get a number that had recently been abandoned by someone else, someone who was not a particularly good citizen. For the first few months, I had debt collectors and school offices calling me, alleging that I owed money and was being investigated for neglect. After some hemming and hawing I managed to get them to accept that I am not who they think I am.

My mysterious alter-ego may have lived in Oregon once, which would be how she got an Oregon area code. But she moved to Arizona. And there, she commenced to run up debts and flake on doctor’s appointments—from what I’ve gathered. She also didn’t talk to some of her in-laws for at least a year, since they contracted me recently and were astounded that this was no longer her phone number.

Worse than that, she had signed up for a bunch political mass texts—all Republican. As soon as the election season started to heat up in Arizona, I started getting texts—first one a day, then two, then several every day. From groups claiming to support candidates for state or US senate seats or for governor and from supposed public opinion pollsters.

I got calls too, mainly from those wanting to ask questions about things like, “What would make you angrier, teachers mentioning same sex relationships in school or public officials memorializing what they say is racial injustice in our country’s past?”

At first, I just deleted and blocked the texts. But they were undeterred. It seems that even when communicating with those who signed up for their propaganda, Republican campaigns know it is better to regularly switch numbers to make sure they can keep hammering, in case someone decides they don’t want their messages anymore.

Finally, I started reading some of them—in a vain attempt to figure out how to unsubscribe and slow the flood.

Kari Lake, who secured the Republican nomination for Arizona governor on Aug 2, promised to “keep human sexuality out of our schools” and repeated claims that Trump won the 2020 election.

Abe Hamadeh’s campaign sent me a picture of him grinning while standing slightly behind and below Donald Trump. He promised that he would “secure the border and the elections” as attorney general of Arizona before winning the primary by a wide margin.

Someone named Mary, who claimed to be a Republican volunteer, sent me messages about Rep. Joel John and how much the NRA loves him. He lost the Republican primary Aug. 2. The NRA’s endorsement apparently wasn’t enough.

The thing that struck me about the texts wasn’t that they were for Republicans or had conservative politics. By and large, the messages looked like they were coming out of late night comedy mocking caricatures of uneducated Republicans. They all claim to be the most “loyal to our President Trump.” All mentioned something about the border wall and some explicitly stated that they want to “keep foreigners out of our state.” Several mentioned putting women “back in the kitchen to improve family life.”

A year ago, if you had told me that Republicans really consciously hold these kinds of racist, sexist and downright fascist views, I would have said you were exaggerating and that while many rural Republicans are taken in by confusing messages, they really are basically kind people who have just had little experience beyond their small towns.

At the same time, I wouldn’t have been able to effectively track what those two talk radio shows were on about. But after months of being subjected to real-live, paid-for and premeditated Republican propaganda, I am unwillingly well-versed.

As the Republican primary results for Arizona came in on Aug. 2, the last text was particularly chilling. “Our 2nd Amendment rights keep radical politicians in check. That's why we are proud to endorse Paul Gosar for US Congress!” Just in case someone didn’t catch the connotations of that, the text elaborated below. It’s “the radical Left in Congress” who “2nd Amendment rights” keep “in check.”

This official Republican party congratulation text for Paul Gosar essentially hints that the guns of the far right are the only thing holding back progressive members of Congress. And this was right smack in the middle of the hearings about the events of Jan 6, 2021. Not only is a coup the way these guys roll politically, but they’ll tell their supporters in the most official and trackable way that it isn’t just acceptable to think about using guns to intimidate members of Congress, it’s the “only thing” that will do that.

Unfortunately, what makes an undercover agent useful is someone to report to and some way to use the information. In my case, while I know that a lot of people underestimate the vicious craziness of the mainstream Republican base at this point, there is apparently nothing to be done. Even political candidates inciting followers to threaten or murder elected members of Congress is no longer something law enforcement cares about, or there’s been so much of it that it’s just the same old thing.

The strident anger of progressives sometimes grates at me when I’m living in my bubble. And I still don’t know that it’s the best approach, but this is the other side and there isn’t much in between or outside the box, these days.

I hope for all of our sake that we can find our way back to working together, because times are getting harder for everyone and it only looks like the times are going to get harder.

Reality check: There but for a last-minute cancellation go I

Last week twenty-six-year-old Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking a classified document to the press.

The document in question--the nature of which was tellingly left out of the official criminal case against her and out of most media coverage--was a report on an NSA investigation into specific actions of the Russian government aimed at influencing the 2016 election in the United States.

Let's get one thing straight right off the bat here. Russia and the United States have been meddling in each other's elections for half a century--at the very least. This is not earth-shattering news to people in intelligence and media circles. 

The thing about this particular document is that the report was warranted, but it was being suppressed. Essentially, you have a report saying that the Russians hacked into voting systems to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump, who then won and has since fired or threatened to fire multiple persons involved in investigations of the meddling. 

So, this young woman is going to prison for leaking a report that was being suppressed for clearly corrupt and unethical reasons. It was a timely and necessary warning of danger to the nation. 

People look at the baby-faced pictures of this pretty young woman and some say she's a traitor who broke the necessary code of secrecy she swore to. Others see a hero who put her life on the line to protect her country and is now willing to pay the price, even if it is unjust. 

I just see a young woman who could so easily have been me. And my stomach seizes up. 

May 1998

The phone on my dorm-room desk rang. When I answered a man's voice was on the line. He gave a name but it went right out of my head when he said the next words "from the CIA."

A thrill of adrenaline shot through me and intensified as he continued to speak. Yes, it was that CIA and he specifically wanted to talk to me, a senior in linguistics at a small university in the Midwest known for only one thing of note--having been a quiet training ground for intelligence operatives during the Cold War. 

I'd heard the stories from our old professor, a former CIA agent himself. The students in our tiny Old Church Slavonic classes loved it when he tossed the xeroxed grammar pages, lit a cigarette and proclaimed that today he'd tell stories about adventures in the old Soviet Union instead. 

But that was all in fun. This was the late 90's, and no one knew that the Cold War was over better than we did. 

And yet, the CIA was calling me. 

Creative Commons image by Jamie of Flickr.com

I wasn't fooled the year before when our professors told us we would now be studying Arabic in the Slavic linguistics department and it would be marked down vaguely as "a Slavic language" on our transcripts.

I snickered with my fellow students. Oh, how secret it all was. 

None of us was planning to work for intelligence or national security agencies as far as I knew. Least of all me. 

I was politically progressive, a scholarship kid from the backwoods of Eastern Oregon. I planned to go into journalism, travel Eastern Europe and write gritty magazine stories about social justice and war. I didn't care that such jobs don't pay. I was in it for the adventure.

And a discussion with a CIA recruiter was just that to my twenty-two-year-old self--an adventure. 

So, I'll admit that I led him on a little. He wanted to meet me at a Chicago job fair I had signed up for because Reuters was scheduled to be there. Thinking it might be an interesting experience, I agreed to stop by the CIA booth--though it was hilarious news to me that they had such a thing. 

The next day the DIA called. 

The Defense Intelligence Agency is a less famous cousin of the CIA. Most lay people don't realize it but there are more than a dozen US intelligence agencies. 

A few days after that Reuters cancelled. 

The trip to Chicago for the job fair would cost me about $70 and as I mentioned I was a scholarship kid. Before I came to that university four years earlier I hadn't even held that much money in my hand at one time. So, fun as it might have been, without a real reason to go, I cancelled too.

And the CIA--and the DIA--called again... and again. By this time the adrenaline was no longer fun. There was some gentle recruiting pressure. They each offered to pay for my trip. I'd heard of people being trapped by recruiters back home, where several of my peers had taken the military route out of poverty. 

My tune changed abruptly and I told them simply and in no uncertain terms that I wasn't interested and that I was going into journalism.

In one last-ditch effort the CIA recruiter said, "We have plenty of journalists working for us."

My hand was shaking. Yes, I knew they did even then.

And I would come to bitterly resent that fact when I did become an international journalist. Once I was kicked off of a bus on a remote and freezing mountain road in South America because someone suspected I might be just such a CIA agent mascarading as a journalist and a reporter friend was killed in Afghanistan on similar suspicion. 

I didn't go to Chicago and while I did learn to get along quite well with some intelligence people as sources once i was an reporter with a wide variety of contacts, I never went down that road.

2018

But Reality Winner did. She too was a thinker and a linguistics student. I can't know her reasons but her published comments lead me to believe that national security work wasn't always her plan. In media interviews her family sounds hauntingly like mine. 

Even her name, which may sound odd to many people, reminds me of my roots. My middle name is Meadowlark. One brother is Forest and the other is Skye. We had that kind of parents too. 

And I know one thing without a doubt. If I had taken that road and if I had come across such clearly damning evidence of corruption and crime threatening the very bedrock of our democracy, I certainly hope I would have done something about it. 

It could so easily have been me in those fetters and it could easily have been my mother holding back tears on the news.