‘Fissures and Cracks’: America’s Division, From 9/11 to the Rise of White Supremacy

In 2017, Janet Reitman was reporting a story for Rolling Stone. It was about two months after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and she was sitting in the living room of Walter and Chris Oneschuk, a couple whose 19-year-old son, Andrew, had just been killed. “He was a member of the Atomwoffen Division,” Reitman explains via Zoom. “They were a neo-Nazi group, and he had been murdered by another neo-Nazi kid that was in the group. It was a terrible story, and the parents were completely blindsided, as you can imagine. They kept saying to me, ‘I don’t understand how this happened to us.’ And then they also were like, ‘I don’t understand how this happened to America.’” 

Reitman had explored this question for years, often in articles for this magazine. She’d embedded in Iraq during the early days of the invasion, and just a few years earlier, had profiled a Chicago-area teen, Mariyam, who attempted to run away to Syria to become an ISIS wife. Reitman started to think about the parallels between Mariyam’s and Andrew’s stories — two disillusioned kids finding extremist communities online — and the very different ways authorities treated them. She realized that the dichotomy could be the basis for a book. But when she began tracing back their stories, she realized how much they’d been shaped by something that happened while they were still toddlers: 9/11. 

The Inheritance: A Tragedy in Five Acts, out Oct. 6 from Random House, is a series of vignettes, deeply reported profiles of regular Americans whose lives were upended by the war on terror. Though Andrew and Mariyam are in it, the book ended up having a much larger scope. “I wanted to write about people who were making their way through this new terrain, trying to understand what was happening to the country,” she says. “I wanted to do it not through policy, but through human beings — through people.” 

Andrew’s story starts before his birth, exploring the family he came into. Mariyam’s story comes through the perspective of her lawyer, Marlo Cadedu, a pioneering female defense attorney who was part of some of the most significant cases in the war on terror. Reitman includes chapters about Nathan Damingo, a white supremacist who helped define the modern far-right, Terry Albury, a former FBI agent who went to prison for leaking documents to the Intercept, and Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist behind the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing. 

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“It [became] clear to me, when I first began doing this research, that a lot of my theories on extremism were wrong. I was talking to a former FBI agent, a source of mine, who’s like, this isn’t some [new] phenomenon. This has been here, and it finds moments of weakness to emerge. That became a fascinating concept for me: The moments of weakness,” she says. “If you write a book about white supremacy, you’re telling a story that can easily be marginalized. You have to connect it to everything else. You have to give it context, so that it feels like it’s part of America, because it is part of America.”

What was it about the conversation with Walter and Chris Oneschuk that sparked the book? 
They were trying to understand what was happening in America. And so was I at that moment, because we were now about two months after Charlottesville. Charlottesville was a moment that was like, wait a minute. We have Nazis walking through the streets of a college town, holding tiki torches and shouting “blood and soil” and slogans like that. It was way beyond some tiny little neo-Nazi march. They looked like well-dressed, preppy, young, clean-cut young men, very angry, shouting these slogans. And I think it freaked a lot of people out. And then, of course, a woman gets killed. 

So I wanted to explore what had happened in America. I had been writing about extremism, and writing about the war on terror, and [I understood] that there was a connection between these two things. Sept. 11 completely upended this country, and it created an environment over many years that broke this country in a lot of ways. It created fissures and cracks and divisions, and when that happens, all this the negative stuff that has been suppressed — such as racism or antisemitism or other forms of extremism — can come to the surface and flourish, unpoliced. And that’s exactly what happened.

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If this is ultimately about how 9/11 splits the country, why start with Ruby Ridge, the 1992 standoff between the FBI and a family of white separatists in Idaho that ended in the death of three people? 
It starts with a woman, [Vicky Weaver], who is lying in her bathtub in Iowa when she hears the voice of God, who tells her it’s time. And she’s like, “What? What do you mean?” And she sees this vision of this isolated cabin on a mountain, surrounded by trees, and God is letting her know that something terrible is going to happen to this country, and they need to escape and silo themselves off somewhere that they’ll be safe. And she heeds the call.

I thought it was a good setup because I think that these years prior to the turn of the century were a period of time that were leading to some upheaval. We were going through a tremendous amount of technological and political and social change. There were lots of people who were becoming increasingly uncomfortable, but they weren’t necessarily people that were always visible. They could be written off very easily as crackpots or fringe characters, but they were reacting to a sense that the country was no longer recognizable to them. And over the next 30 years, that feeling spread across a very broad cross-section of Americans. Now, most of us can look at our country and say, this is a very different country than what it was when we were growing up.

I thought she was a bit of a harbinger. And I have to be honest, I’d always wanted to write about her. I had written a longer chapter about her, and so I shortened it and turned it into an introduction and an epilogue. 

Why not include her as one of the characters throughout?
Because she has a very finite story, and she dies in 1992. And I had Timothy McVeigh, who I thought was more representative of the themes of the rest of the book than Ruby Ridge. 

Vicky I just liked. This is a woman who’s having a premonition that she needs to go and hide, she needs to go and separate herself from all the bad stuff. And I feel like that’s what everybody’s been doing. We’re hiding ourselves, we’re siloing ourselves off into our technological bubbles, or into our little bunkers, or we’ve moved out of the cities into all these places elsewhere, and we’re all separated from each other. I think in some ways, her story is prescient. And then the way the government dealt with them, which was to just demolish them, is also kind of prescient. 

Tell me about picking the other main characters. 
Andrew and Mariyam were operating in tandem. At the same [time] Andrew was radicalizing, talking to his group of extremists in his bedroom, she was talking to her group of extremists in her bedroom, and they were both making plans to run away to their respective extremist paradises around the same time.

I thought, this is so interesting because of what happened to her versus what happened to him. Nothing happened to him initially, and she was arrested and could have spent a number of years in jail had she not had a very good lawyer. The dichotomy between the white supremacist type, and the Muslim, ISIS-supporting type, and the way that these two types of extremists were treated by the government, was the idea for the original book. But books evolve.

I realized Marlo Cadeddu, who was Mariyam’s attorney, had this fascinating story herself, of being a lawyer who had lost the Holy Land case, which was this huge terrorist case that sent a group of Palestinian American businessmen, who were accused of inadvertently funding Hamas, to prison for many, many years. She won an acquittal, and about 20 minutes after winning this acquittal, the judge polled the jury, and one juror changed her mind. So, they had to call a mistrial, and the government refiled, and then in the next trial, everybody was found guilty. 

She almost quit the practice of law and was talked out of it by several of her colleagues, who were like, we need you, we need fighters in this business. And then in 2014, when Mariyam and her two brothers were arrested, she got a call from a lawyer who needed a female lawyer for this client. [Cadeddu] had a security clearance, and she’d done these kinds of cases, and so she decided to take Mariyam’s case. Her whole mission in taking on that case was to do it differently than the other case. She understood that she was going to have to play a different game. It was not going to be about figuring out the best defense. It was about figuring out a way to humanize her and turn her into a sympathetic, real person, not a caricature of an ISIS bride. 

And so, the story that we did [at Rolling Stone] was, in a way, part of that. They cooperated with us, and allowed us some access that we may not have had otherwise. And my whole goal in writing that story was to try to explain the American kids that were gravitating towards ISIS.

What did you find? What was the America inspiring this? 
After Sept. 11, the country reorganized itself around security and safety. All of a sudden, people had to begin to think in those terms. The days had threat warnings that were color coded: Today is a high day. Today is an average-risk day. The kind of security protocols that we go through at the airports now, that had been nonexistent before. And some of our laws began to change. Everything was restructured in service to this one goal, which was to protect our country from another terrorist attack and to seek revenge on those people who had attacked us. So, the whole country became reorganized around these principles, and they played out in all kinds of ways. I happened to be reporting on stories that all echoed that same basic concept.

Was one of the reasons we had this rise of white supremacist groups because the FBI was so focused post-2001 on fighting “terror”?
After 9/11, they became increasingly an intelligence-focused agency. There are laws against gathering intelligence on American citizens, but they were able to gather intelligence on [those] who believed in an ideology that was foreign, because we were at war with Al Qaeda, with ISIS. And the investigative capacity of the FBI during this period expanded tremendously, and it focused on specifically this one task. Domestic terrorism, which had never been a priority, became like dead weight. 

Emily Oneschuk, the sister of Andrew, feared her brother was radicalizing as a white supremacist and as a potential school-shooter type. She told the FBI what was going on, and [she says] they said, “Well, we can’t really do anything for you unless your brother kills somebody, or hurts somebody, or makes a very specific kind of a threat, but he hasn’t gotten to that place yet.” Mariyam was online talking to who-knows-who about her fantasy of running away to ISIS and becoming the wife of a handsome fighter, and she had FBI agents all over [her and her brothers], tracking their calls, following their movements.

Is that just racism? 
It’s more than just racism. It’s policy. We created a policy after 9/11, a national project against terrorism, which meant Muslim terrorism. Which meant anybody anywhere in this country — or in the world — who could be traced to a group or an individual who could potentially injure the United States or an ally, they became a target of ours. Domestically, Americans were told to see something, say something — to be constantly on alert, to be suspicious of their neighbors, and they were phoning in reports of their neighbors. People were calling the FBI tip line after Sept. 11, reporting people that to them looked a little strange, and they were always Muslim. It was like a nationalized racist project. And once you allow that genie out of the bottle, it just grows. 

Why did you choose to include the story of Nathan Domingo, a Marine veteran who became a leading voice of the white supremecist movement in the mid-2010s? 
I’d wanted to write about him for a long time. Back in 2009, there was a Department of Homeland Security report that predicted a rise in far-right extremism. Part of it was due to returning vets, who were very alienated and were suffering from untreated PTSD and were ripe targets for recruitment by white supremacist groups that look for people with these kinds of skills. 

Nathan was a perfect example of that type of person. He came from a military family, believed in America, liked guns, didn’t really have much else going on. He really wanted to be a professional skateboarder, but that was not going to happen. College was not going to happen, either. So, he joins the Marines and he ships off to Iraq. And he, like everybody else, thinks they’re going to either avenge 9/11, or to at least bring democracy to Iraq. Over a few tours, he’s quickly disabused of these ideas. He has several very traumatic experiences, comes home, and has a lot of damage that is not treated. 

That resonated for me because the war on terror did a tremendous amount of damage to people, and those people have suffered in silence. Suicides are through the roof among veterans. The VA was overloaded. Vets were struggling, and they became ripe for people with their own agendas to take advantage, to exploit them. Which is what happened to Nathan. He became a white supremacist in prison, comes out of prison, finds his way to the internet. Social media is just starting, so all of a sudden he’s plugging into these far-right chat rooms. 

At the same time that Andrew Oneschuk is getting into this stuff, Nathan Domingo is getting into this stuff. He’s not a 4chan guy, he’s not even really a Daily Stormer guy. He considers himself more intellectual, and he wants to have an intellectual conversation about identity. He winds up aligning himself, ultimately, with [white supremacist leader] Richard Spencer and some members of the more organized white nationalist movement who are looking for a way to sell their ideas to younger men. And Nathan is this good-looking, 30-ish, well-spoken Marine. And he became, for a very short time, a very influential white nationalist leader. But what he sent out into the world is, in my mind, the most dangerous form of white nationalism that there is — far more dangerous than the Atomwaffen Division. When you hear J.D. Vance talk about being a ”heritage” American, that is Nathan Domingo. He was the one who came up with, “You will not replace us.” He came up with the whole look and image of the Charlottesville marchers. He branded white supremacy for the American conservative mainstream. But all of that racism, and all of that messaging, is rooted in his trauma, and his complete alienation from America and American values that grew out of the war on terror.

Domingo has become a less prominent figure in the community, but he’s still very much online.  Were you able to talk to him?
I never interviewed him for this book. He’s the only character I did not interview. I tried and tried and tried, and he refused. I interviewed everybody around him — it was a huge write around. Luckily, he had been very active on social media and media in general, so there was a ton of information that you could get on the guy, and I had access to his psychological reports and all these other things. But he’s a somewhat unreliable narrator of his own life. He created an image, a persona about himself.

The original idea for the book was that it was going to focus more on the evolution of white supremacy, and the various warnings that the government had made about white supremacy, and Nathan was the person that the government had been warning about. 

The book is vignettes of people’s lives without much connective tissue. There’s no introduction where you explain what you’re going to say, or epilogue where you tie things up. Why leave the reader with just these human stories?
Because this is how we process our lives. We process our lives by our experiences. Over the past 25 or so years, this country has unraveled in a lot of ways. That does not happen in a linear fashion. When things begin to fall apart, they fall out all over the place, and they get swirled into a vacuum of shards. And your job as a writer is to put some order onto those pieces, but not necessarily to draw some giant conclusion about them. 

I hate imposing my ideas on anybody because I feel like, in this weird way, that’s not my job. If I’m going to write about you, this is about you. I’m going to tell your life in as much detail as I can possibly tell it and through that, you should get a very clear idea of how I come down on this stuff without me drumming you over the head with it. 

What do you hope the reader takes away?
The ending of the book should leave people with a feeling of like, wow, if I turn on the news, I’m seeing people on our streets [being rounded] up, immigrants who have not committed any crime and are disappearing, [deported] to places in the world they’ve never been. I mean that is as un-American as I can imagine. And the Ruby Ridge situation, at the time, struck all these people as un-American. Why are you invading this little community, and using that force against people that haven’t really committed any crime, and now you have a 200-plus federal force there. What is this saying about the America that we are?

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I don’t want to tell the reader how they should think. I wanted them to decide how to think. I mean, there’s a guy in this book that’s a neo-Nazi leader, and some people came away from the book feeling sympathy for him, and I think that’s great. Because they’re people.