First published in The Record, Oct. 31, 2020

In this battleground city, fear of election violence trumps reality

The extremist of Mountain Top walked into the empty restaurant at 3 p.m. This is the man accused of starting all the trouble. He invited looters and arsonists to town, some people say. On Facebook and in Mountain Peaks, a local newspaper, word spread that “able bodied” people ages 21 to 65 should prepare to fight this man, and get ready for “violence in the streets, mob rule” and “destruction of property.”

Lo, the activist arrived. His name is Thomas Beurmann. He is 18 years old, and white. He'd be taller than six 6 feet if he stood up straight, which he rarely does. He wore jeans, a pink buttoned-down shirt, and his brown hair in a frizzy pouf. Since June, Beurmann has tried to organize a little rally in Mountain Top for Black Lives Matter.

He failed. The school board wouldn’t allow a political rally at the high school. Township rules require event organizers to acquire $100,000 in liability insurance.

Beurmann works as a waiter. He doesn’t have funds to purchase a $100,000 insurance policy.

“The funniest thing about them being so scared of us is we that can’t get it to work,” Beurmann said of people who oppose his protest plans. “We’ve tried three times now, and it didn’t happen. I don’t know what they’re so scared of. Clearly we’re not that powerful.”

A season of anxiety

This is the season of political fear. Never in living memory has a presidential election elicited such anxiety about violence. And if political violence erupts, Wilkes-Barre might be a prime target. It's the seat of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, a longtime Democratic Party stronghold where a dramatic swing in Trump's favor in 2016 accounted for a portion of his 44,300 winning margin statewide. "

“I would have to agree that this is the most important swing state," said Thomas Baldino, a professor emeritus of political science at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre and a resident of Mountain Top, a nearby suburb. "I think people have every right to be concerned about violence. There’s going to be a lot of anger should Biden win. And a lot of people here have guns."

The biggest threat comes from white supremacists, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress in August. Meanwhile Trump repeatedly blames the Black Lives Matter movement for violent protests in American cities and has warned — without evidence — that voter fraud this year will cause "the greatest election disaster in history."

Different types of media have responded in different ways. Outlets that value facts — including the mainstream press — have emphasized reports by the FBI and cited reputable academics that right-wing terrorists pose the greatest threat.

“I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists,” Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf wrote in the agency’s October 2020 threat assessment.

Outlets catering to right-wing audiences have, in some cases, reported misleading forecasts of chaos.

Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, describes a “propaganda feedback loop” in which Fox News entertainers including Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity replay videos of violence, making isolated events seem widespread.

“By using riot porn to incite fear in white people, the right-wing media ecosystem converts the real pain experienced by Black Americans into fodder for deranged, paranoid fantasies that white vigilantes must take up the functions of the police,” Donovan wrote recently in MIT Technology Review.

Reality is far less exciting.

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, millions of Americans attended 7,305 protests in May and June, according to research by Erica Chenoweth of Harvard and Jeremy Pressman at the University of Connecticut, published in The Washington Post. link Injuries were reported at 2.3% of those events. Much of the violence was instigated by police, according to the report. Additional violence was caused by right-wing extremists and bystanders not connected to the protests; only a tiny portion was started by protesters.

“The places where people actually got hurt in Black Lives Matter protests were also invariably places where police forces had heard the misinformation about antifa, were on a hair trigger, and incited violence,” said Lara Putnam, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh who studies grassroots movements.

Even responsible journalists sometimes get carried away.

Coverage of armed right-wing groups too often relies on social media, not in-person interviews, which can overstate the actual threat, said John Temple, a journalism professor at West Virginia University whose latest book profiles militia leaders. Describing these armed groups as part of a "militia movement" is too simplistic, Temple said. Various groups on the right and far right are deeply fractured. They often compete for members, and disagree whether to attack the government, use violence, or be racist, according to a recent study.

“I see the tendency by journalists to mine the worst of the militia movement,” Temple said. Militias “I don’t mean this as all ‘Kumbaya.’ This is a serious thing. don’t share goals, there is no common strategy. A lot of these efforts are super disorganized.”

Imaginary threats drive real fear

True to its name, Mountain Top sits on a ridgeline at the western edge of the Pocono Mountains, a thousand feet above Wilkes-Barre. It’s a jumble of state wilderness, new subdivisions, old shacks in the woods, an industrial park, and ten townships and boroughs, all convening on a strip of banks and gas stations along state Route 309.

It was here on a recent Monday night that two white men sat in the basement of Kings Ristorante, a pizza place on 309. One man asked that only his first name, Jack, appear in the newspaper. The other declined to give a name.

These men organized the "Mountain Top Watch Militia," which in September “held a recruitment event in Mountain Top, half an hour outside Scranton, hometown home town of Presidential candidate Joe Biden,” according to a recent academic report.

Two problems with that. First, the event never happened.

Second, the men can’t agree whether it's a "militia" or not.

“Of course we’re going to train with guns and ammo!” said the man who declined to give his name. “What do you think you do at a militia training?”

“Well, it’s not a militia,” said Jack, who calls it a neighborhood watch. “What we’re talking about is CPR training, communications, gun safety.”

Whatever its name, the group started in September, when Jack bought an ad in Mountain Peaks asking people who “love American freedom” to “prepare for the unthinkable, which has already become a reality in many cities.” The ad announced a meeting at Kings on Tuesday, Sept. 29.

Wright Township Police Chief Royce Engler asked Jack to postpone the event, he said, fearing it would escalate tensions in town. Jack agreed to hold off. After all, Mountain Top is a safe place. Fairview, Rice and Wright, the area’s three largest townships, have a combined population of 13,689. Together they experienced nine violent crimes and 106 property crimes in 2016, the latest year for which FBI data is available by township.

“We’re a sleepy little town,” Baldino said. “There’s just not much going on.”

But Jack and his friend say they have reasons to feel nervous. First are all the videos they see on Fox News.

“I’m looking around the country and I’m seeing the violence, I’m seeing the beatings,” Jack said. “And they’ve actually announced that they want to take this to every corner of the country, to every city, every suburban area.”

When asked about the numerous academic studies and news reports that find the overwhelming majority of protests have been peaceful, the men said they didn’t believe it, and added that it didn’t matter.

“You know people have been killed, right?” the unnamed man said. “It’s not a statistics game. It’s an absolute game. I don’t want it happening anywhere.”

The other reason to organize is local. Each man fears people driving from Wilkes-Barre to riot in Mountain Top.

“The local paper, Mountain Peaks, they received threatening phone calls and emails,” Jack said. “The police chiefs had received threatening phone calls from their sources, or their snitches or whatever, in Wilkes-Barre, that they were going to have a large Black Lives Matter movement up here.”

Neither statement could be proved.

“I’m surprised he told you that,” said Engler, the township police chief. “None of my officers received any threats, and I didn’t hear any threats of violence.”

The population in Mountain Top is 91% white, according to the U.S. Census. Wilkes-Barre is also majority white, but about 14% of the city’s residents are Black.

“I did not receive any threats,” said Maryellen Aton, publisher of Mountain Peaks. “There’s a racial element to it. When people in Mountain Top say, ‘they’re coming up from Wilkes-Barre,’ they mean Black people.”

Since their newspaper ad attracted so much unexpected attention, the armed Mountain Top organizers said they now recruit members by word of mouth. The goal isn't to attack Black people, they said.

"We’re not a white supremacist organization," Jack's friend said. "We just want to defend our homes if we are attacked. It’s the American way. You defend yourself from oppression."

This is a fiction. No one is coming up the hill to oppress the residents of Mountain Top. But the fear is real.

“It could be gone in an instant,” said the unnamed man. “Somebody comes with a torch to our porch, that’s it. Our life is gone. Our life savings. Everything is gone, OK?”

No one to fear

Few people who know Thomas Beurmann fear him.

“As much as I would like to see change, it doesn’t even seem that Mountain Top is open to it,” said Beurmann, tucking a loose wave of hair behind his right ear. “Maybe it’s better to fight somewhere else.”

If armed white people in Mountain Top fear anyone, perhaps it’s Sharee Clark, a fact she finds ridiculous. Clark grew up in New York City, and lived for years in Alabama.

But the worst racism of her life occurred 45 minutes after she moved to Wilkes-Barre.

Just off the Greyhound bus in 2013, she asked a police officer for directions. The cop, mistaking her for another Black woman with dreadlocks, accused Clark of having local warrants for her arrest. The officer realized his mistake, but didn’t apologize.

“He said, ‘You might want to cut those dreadlocks. You’ve got a twin running around here. You know you guys all look alike,’” said Clark, 40. “That was my first experience living here.”

Clark quickly learned the local landscape. In Wilkes-Barre she found a good-paying job. For just $550 a month, she rented a nice apartment for herself and her four children.

In some suburbs, she found hostility from mostly white residents.

“Some towns you’re told not even to go in. One of them is Mountain Top,” she said. “There are just some places I don't feel comfortable going.”

Clark abstained from politics for most of her life. She voted for the first time in 2016 because she didn’t like Donald Trump’s racist descriptions of Latinos as rapists and murderers. And she didn’t become an activist until after George Floyd’s death, when she formed a group called Freedom Fighters.

The decision to avoid the name "Black Lives Matter" was intentional.

"There’s a lot of propaganda around Black Lives Matter," said Clark. "We didn’t want to be connected to the stigma."

She’s participated in about 25 protests. All were peaceful.

“People say we’re going to destroy our town,” said Clark. “I live here, too. I work here. I pay taxes here. Why would we want to destroy that?”

Politics quickly consumed her life. She works two full-time jobs, one in customer service, the other as a canvasser, registering people to vote. Planning protests consumed more time.

At a little rally in Meshoppen, 40 miles from Wilkes-Barre, counter-protesters stood with rifles, she said. Some spat on her. It was terrifying.

“They were extremely aggressive. It was pure, unadulterated hate,” Clark said. “I was trembling the entire time. I never experienced this before.”

A few weeks ago, Clark was diagnosed with high blood pressure and diabetes. Her doctor advised her to slow down. Now she attends fewer rallies.

Still, Clark misses weekends.

“On Saturdays and Sundays I want to be doing barbecues with my family," she said. “I don’t want to be protesting for rights that are my birthright as a citizen of this country."

It was not to be. By noon on a recent Wednesday, Clark was checking the time on her phone. She was late for her second job. Her plan: Work 15 hours straight, collapse into bed, wake up, do it again.

Clark has four children to raise, and rent to pay. She has no time to drive up to Mountain Top, and no desire. Some people up there fear her. If Clark is being honest, she fears them, too.

“Peoples’ perception is their truth,” Clark said, pulling on her jacket to walk outside. “Whether it’s reality or not is completely irrelevant.”