In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Donald Trump suggested that Gavin Long, the man who shot six police officers in Baton Rouge, killing three, was inspired by “radical Islam.” Mediaite and others were quick to point out that Trump seemed to be confusing Islam and the Nation of Islam, the American sect headed by Louis Farrakhan. But that correction barely scratches the surface of Long’s apparent beliefs — which were much closer to those of Trump’s base than they’d care to admit.

Police reported that Long was carrying what they described as a membership card for the Washitaw Nation, an obscure black nationalist group. In all likelihood it was much more than a membership card; Washitaw groups have been known to issue their own passports, driver’s licenses and even license plates. Long reportedly was a former follower of the Nation of Islam, but the ties between the two groups are tenuous at best, and very old. The link, as I explained in an article for Cleveland Scene in 2004, is Moorish nationalism: “The Moorish movement has roots in the Moorish Science Temple, an Islam-influenced, African-American sect founded in 1913. Moorish Science is sometimes cited as a forerunner of the Nation of Islam; Elijah Muhammad is said to have been an early follower.

“… [T]he mid-to-late '90s saw the rise of Moorish nationalism, an offshoot that's more interested in politics than theology. Moorish nationals say that they are descendants of an empire that once covered much of the world, from Africa to North America, and that their history has been covered up by Europeans for centuries. [Mark Pitcavage, an Ohio historian with the Anti-Defamation League] believes the movement resulted from blacks familiar with Moorish Science coming into contact with the overwhelmingly white anti-government movement and melding the two.”

Pitcavage traces the white anti-government movement to Posse Comitatus, which in the 1960s put forth the notion that the federal government is illegitimate and that Americans could declare themselves sovereign, or outside government’s reach. Posse Comitatus spawned the Committee of the States, and membership overlapped with the racist and anit-Semitic Christian Identity movement. These groups were the forerunners of the various anti-government, patriot and white-supremacist groups that have gotten louder and prouder in the Trump era.

The
Cleveland Scene article focuses on some self-identified Moors who were eventually jailed in Ohio for fraud and
“paper terrorism” another old sovereign tactic. That’s the sort of thing Washitaw Nation members have primarily been known for among law enforcement agencies. But Long’s sudden turn to violence shouldn’t surprise anyone; observers of anti-government types have been warning for years that they are becoming bolder and more violent. In an
op-ed published last year in The New York Times , two researchers put numbers to the imbalance in acts of terror on U.S. soil:

Since 9/11, an average of nine American Muslims per year have been involved in an average of six terrorism-related plots against targets in the United States. Most were disrupted, but the 20 plots that were carried out accounted for 50 fatalities over the past 13 and a half years. In contrast, right-wing extremists averaged 337 attacks per year in the decade after 9/11, causing a total of 254 fatalities, according to a study by Arie Perliger, a professor at the United States Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. The toll has increased since the study was released in 2012.

At the time this was published, that death toll included 25 police officers.

Conservatives, who in the past have refuted and shut down government investigations of anti-government terrorism, will probably follow Trump’s lead and just keep repeating “radical Islam” like a mantra. But maybe the mainstream media will start connecting the right dots.

This article appears in Jul 14-21, 2016.